Doomsday Warrior 03 - The Last American (2 page)

THE RUSSIANS:
The United Socialist States of America is run by the red-faced, heavy-drinking General Zhabnov, headquartered in the White House, Washington, D.C., now called New Lenin. A bureaucrat, careful but not cunning, and a libertine, Zhabnov spends his days eating and his nights in bed with young American girls rounded up by the KGB. Zhabnov has been appointed supreme president of the United States for a ten-year period, largely because he is the nephew of the Russian premier, Vassily. General Zhabnov rules America as his personal fiefdom. The only rules he must obey are (1) no uprisings and (2) seventy-five percent of the crops grown by the enslaved American workers must be sent to Russia. General Zhabnov believes that the situation in the United States is stable, that there are no American resistance forces to speak of other than a few scattered groups that raid convoys from time to time. He sees his stay here as a happy interlude away from the power struggles back in the Kremlin.
Colonel Killov is the head of the KGB in the United States headquartered in Denver, Colorado. He is a ruthlessly ambitious man whose goal it is to someday be premier of the world. Thin, almost skeletal, with a long face, sunken cheekbones and thin lips that spit words, Killov’s operatives are everywhere in the country: in the fortresses, in the Russian officer ranks, and lately he has even managed to infiltrate an American-born agent into the highest levels of the resistance. Colonel Killov believes General Zhabnov to be a fool. Killov knows that the American forces are growing stronger daily and forming a nationwide alliance to fight together. The calm days of the last century are about to end.
From Moscow, Premier Vassily rules the world. Never has one man ruled so much territory. From the bottom of Africa to Siberia, from Paraguay to Canada, Russian armies are everywhere. A constant flow of supplies and medical goods are needed to keep the vast occupying armies alive. Russia herself did not do badly in the war. Only twenty-four American missiles reached the Soviet Union and ten of these were pushed off course or exploded by ground-to-air missiles. The rest of the United States strike was knocked out of the skies by Russian killer satellites that shot down beams of pure energy and picked them off like clay pigeons.
Vassily is besieged on all sides by problems. His great empire is threatening to break up. Everywhere there are rebel attacks on Russian troops. In Europe, in Africa, in India, especially in America. The forces of the resistance troops were growing larger and more sophisticated in their operations. Vassily is a highly intelligent, well-read man. He has devoured history books on other great leaders and the problems they faced. “Great men have problems that no one but another great man could understand,” he lectures his underlings. Advisers tell him to send in more forces and quickly crush the insurgents. But Vassily believes that to be a tremendous waste of manpower. If it goes on like this he may use neutron bombs again. Not a big strike, but perhaps in a single night, yes, in one hour, they could target the fifty main trouble spots in the world. Order must be maintained. For Vassily knew his history. One thing that had been true since the dawn of time: wherever there had been a great empire there had come a time when it began to crumble.

One

T
here’s something about staring up into the gnashing jaws of a twelve-legged, four-hundred-pound, hairy, red Blood Spider that can put a man to saying his prayers. Even a man like Ted Rockson, the Doomsday Warrior, who lay flat on his back as dozens of the scuttling creatures, screeching high-pitched batlike shrieks to guide them came plummeting down from the rock ceiling of the underground cavern Rock and his expeditionary team had been exploring. The spiders lowered themselves on strands of shimmering, nearly transparent webbing a good 3 inches thick that they extruded from slimy openings on each side of their large jaws. One of the immense carnivores, cave spiders mutated into oversized monsters after a hundred years of atomic radiation, came flying down from above, landing only twenty feet from Rockson. It fell onto Spencer, the mapman of the expedition. The screaming freefighter’s face and upper body disappeared beneath the undulating blood-red legs, and Rock heard a snap as the creature bit off the head of its victim. Spencer’s legs jerked violently once and then he sank stone still and dead.

Rockson rolled over and over like a spinning log, cutting his arms and back on the jagged mica-flecked rocks that lined the cave floor like razor blades. A Blood Spider dropped on the ground at the exact spot he had just been lying and ripped its spikelike jaws into the hard rock, snapping one of the yard-long mandibles in half. It swung around, letting out a shrill screech of anger, and then saw its prey rolling away. It scuttled quickly over, multiple eyes fixing on Rockson from each side of the demonic, red, hairy face of the thing, if it could be a face at all.

Why the hell did they have to come into
this
cave to do their materials reclamation, anyway? He and eight other freefighters from Century City had been on an exploratory mission searching for old machinery, parts, half-rusted engines that were rumored to be buried underground in what had once been an industrial park before it was hit by a ten-megaton kiss. Parts were scarce. The scientists and technicians of Century City could perform miracles given just minute amounts of materials to work with. Still, there was a limit even they reached in the stretchability of metals, bearings, solvents, magnets.

Constant expeditions were carried out by freefighter scouting parties in search of leftovers from the old days, invariably buried under mounds of rubble.

The expeditionary force had found the entrance to this cave after traveling nearly seventy-five miles south of their home base of Century City, a journey of nearly six days through the treacherous mountain trails of the Rockies—not to mention the Grizz Bears, the horned rattlesnakes, Russian drone spy planes constantly flying by with their buglike buzz searching for rebels—plus the usual assortment of toothy, spiny, and clawed dangers that always were on the attack in the postwar world of America, 2089
A.D.
The party had found strong readings of metal, in high-density formations, indicative of heavy machinery. Rockson’s sixth sense, sharpened to a fine point after years of survival in the worst terrains, told him that there was trouble, big trouble, waiting inside. But the high quantities and quality of the metal being picked up by their Magnometers was too powerful a lure to resist, and the party had voted to head inside.

Once they were inside a few hundred feet, the cave floor began slanting slightly as the stone walls took on a slightly luminescent quality—glowing a light green. They walked, slipping and sliding through the damp ground, as musty brown water oozed down the walls and in little rivulets on both sides of the dirt pathway deeper into the bottomless earth.

Then—a sound like monkeys chattering in the trees—shrill screeches that hurt the eardrums. Only there were no trees, and these weren’t monkeys. Rockson came out of his roll across the cutting cave floor, and into a half crouch, his shotgun pistol in his right hand. The Blood Spider that had dropped down from the bedrock ceiling at nearly forty miles per hour turned and saw its momentarily elusive dinner. Rockson’s gaze met its greenish glowing eyes set on each side of that ugly red face, its twisted antenna, the opening and closing mandibles sharp as twin scythes, and the jaws set just above the stomach, rows of brown teeth dripping in waiting appetite as digestive salivas poured forth from its mouth. Rock had seen prettier things in his time.

Rock’s gaze met the spider’s without fear. The two creatures from unfathomably different worlds stared at one another for a split second as if studying each other. Then the Blood Spider charged, all twelve legs moving frantically, like some sort of armored locomotive on stilts, as it came straight at the pink food some fifteen feet away. The Doomsday Warrior pulled the trigger of his .12 gauge death dealer, and it roared with a metallic anger. An x-shaped pattern of synthlead emerged from the muzzle of the nearly foot-long shotgun pistol. The blast caught the Blood Spider squarely in the meatiest part of its grotesque body. The shriveled, batlike face was shattered instantaneously into spider meat. The thing stopped dead in its tracks, looking somewhat confused, its eye dangling from long veiny threads halfway out of the sockets. Then the twelve legs gave out as if the air was being let out of them, and the nearly quarter-ton of mutation fell to the damp cave floor with a loud, slurping thud.

Rockson heard screams everywhere around him. The other members of the expedition weren’t doing quite as well. Most of them were not fighters but technicians who had been brought along so as to be able to recognize and bring back the choicest bits of twentieth-century machine parts that were found. They were experts in reconditioning the past engines of the world, in making elaborate weapons and medical devices from nothing more than a few springs, an old battery, and some wire—but they weren’t fighters. Half of them had never been out of Century City for more than hours at a time in their entire lives. Only Rockson and Detroit, the squat black cannonball of a man who accompanied Rockson on nearly all his missions, were combat men.

The Doomsday Warrior wished he had his Liberator automatic rifle, but it was strapped to his hybrid horse nearly an hour away, tethered at the mouth of the deep cavern. His shotgun pistol and mutant reflexes would have to do. Several of the scientific party were already dead. Blood Spiders stood contentedly slurping down the bloody pieces of what had been men—a head in one’s mouth, a head and shoulder in another’s. Rockson let loose a blast directly into the jaws of each of the sucking creatures. They jerked violently away from their meals and went into a frenzied dance of death. Across the nearly hundred-yard-wide cavern, lit only with the barest of an amber glow emanating from the rock itself that surrounded them, Detroit Green was giving some Blood Spiders a run for their money. Detroit was always armed with twin bandoliers of hand grenades wrapped around his broad chest, and now he was pulling off two at a time, holding them and heaving them at his attackers at the last possible second. Again and again he blasted the spiders back to the nightmarish hell that had created them in the first place. At least Rock didn’t have to worry about one man. More shots!

He turned to the right as he heard a heart-stopping scream. Pierce, the archeologist, was nearly covered by one of the flesh-eating monstrosities, his arm disappearing inside the meat-grinding jaws. A foul-smelling brown saliva mix true of the guts and blood of the already dead men and spiders created a vomitous odor. Rock ran over to the man, unnoticed by the spider, which was chewing the meat off the bone of Pierce’s arm. The Doomsday Warrior pushed the muzzle of the shotgun pistol right up into the thing’s jaw and pulled the trigger. The creature lifted nearly a foot in the air, like a marionette yanked suddenly by its operator, and released the half-chewed arm of the scientist. Rock pulled the man away and leaned him up against an outcropping of stone. The poor bastard was already going into shock. Rock knew the symptoms well—white face, trembling lips, eyes staring off into infinity as if preparing to meet their maker. The arm was badly mangled, bits of white bone and tendon hanging out like a rag doll chewed up by the family dog. But there was nothing he could do right now. There wasn’t time to tend to the wounded, he didn’t know, if they were going to get out at all. He reloaded the seven-shot pistol in seconds, slamming shells from the ammo belt into place. Then he dove back into the thick of it.

The Blood Spiders were still descending from above. How many of the goddamned things could there be? They were so large, Rockson thought, it didn’t seem possible that that many could live up on the roof of the foul cave. He quickly scanned the hanging threads that dangled and shook as the spiders slid down them like commandos at a training camp. For such big and apparently ungainly creatures they were weirdly graceful, their twelve legs gripping the silk webbing and shooting down nearly three hundred feet from the top. Rock set the pistol on close-pattern shot and began firing straight up in the air, trying to blast the carnivores before they could reach the ground. Each shot knocked one of the squirming hairy red mutations from its strand, and the air was filled with high-pitched squeals of pain as they dropped. Rockson had eliminated six more of the things when his sixth sense told him to spin to the right. He moved without knowing why and felt himself suddenly caught by the fabric of his shirt by the mandibles of one of the Blood Spiders sneaking up from behind. The damn thing had him! For all the strength of his six-foot-three two-hundred-fourty pound frame of purest chiseled iron, the Doomsday Warrior couldn’t break free. The Spider reached forward with two hairy legs and wrapped them around Rockson’s calf, pulling him to the ground. His arm had become jammed under him, the shotgun pistol wedged between his chest and the dank cave floor. The Blood Spider lowered itself down on top of him, and the Doomsday Warrior could see dark, dripping jaws filled with what looked like a thousand fingernail-sized teeth, a threshing machine for flesh coming down at him. A long, needlelike protruberance came out of the ugly mouth and pierced Rock at the shoulder. He felt the instantaneous stinging acidity of the poison. Great! The thing didn’t want just to eat him, it had to poison him first. He could feel his shoulder burn as if branded with a white-hot iron. Then his upper arm began growing numb as the poison spread.

The Blood Spider shifted its weight for a second to get a better balance to eat. That was all Rock needed. With the weight of the creature off him even for a millisecond he was able to swing the hand with the .12 gauge pistol up and into the guts of the horror now only inches from his chest where it was preparing to rip out his heart. He pulled the trigger and felt the satisfying jerk in his hand as the metal death tool spat out a storm of shot into the face and mouth of his would-be eater. The spider stopped in its tracks, blinked its eyes a few times as if puzzled, and then fell in a bloody heap on top of Rock.