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  AMERICA WILL RISE AGAIN!

  Ravaged by the nuclear devastation of World War III, America is now a brutalized Russian colony. But led by a unique soldier of survival, Ted Rockson, a loose federation of secret American Free Cities rises up to fight the hated conquerer!

  Rockson’s name soon becomes the rallying cry of a people desperate to throw off the shackles of tyranny. Their ultimate freedom, though, depends on Rockson finding a weapon capable of defeating the Russian Empire.

  When a remarkable destructive device is rumored to be somewhere deep inside a radioactive hot zone, Rockson’s desperate mission is to find it. Russian patrols and the twisted hell of this savagely mutilated world become impossible obstacles, but Rockson will not give up, will not turn back, will not be defeated. The reason is simple.

  He’s been bred by the holocaust to be the . . .

  DOOMSDAY

  WARRIOR

  AT THE EDGE OF DEATH

  Rockson rolled down the hill as quick as he could move, oblivious to the sharp-edged rocks gashing his flesh. The ground where he had just been was ripped apart by Russian machine-gun fire. He flew down the hill with animal speed, sliding, dodging, a bundle of pure energy. But it didn’t help him. Two Red choppers suddenly swooped down on him through the smoke and peppered the hill with a blizzard of slugs, digging trenches in straight, deadly lines. Rockson tore to the side and kept heading for cover—until he heard the whoosh of an air-to-ground missile fired by one of the choppers. He knew that sound well. He had heard it a hundred times before. It meant someone was going to die . . .

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  475 Park Avenue South

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  ISBN: 0-8217-1356-6

  Copyright © 1984 by Ryder Stacy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  First printing: May 1984

  Printed in the United States of America

  Prologue

  2089 A.D. Ted Rockson alias “Rock” is “The Doomsday Warrior.” He fights back against the Russian invaders who now control post-World War III America—a land decimated by nuclear missiles from Russia’s first strike.

  One hundred years after the massive Soviet surprise nuclear attack much of the United States is still radioactive and impassible. The world now has twenty percent less oxygen, strange and constantly shifting weather patterns, freezing nights and scorching days, purple clouds, storms of black snow. In the United States, regions of land have been torn by chasms, landslides and earthquakes. Mutated animals roam the plains and mountains. Killer dogs, weighing up to two hundred pounds, with dagger-sharp teeth, hunt in hungry packs. Bloodthirsty rats, two to three feet long, move in bands of thousands across the terrain at night, devouring all that is in their path.

  And there are tales of the mysterious “Glowers,” who the Russian occupying troops speak of in frightened whispers—radioactive humans who live only in the hottest zones, who glow like a blue flame and whose touch kills instantly. These and even more terrible dangers await Rock as he makes his way across the new America.

  Driving stolen Russian vehicles or riding his hybrid horse, shorter and stronger than horses of the past and more resistant to radiation, Rock, armed with his rapid-fire .12 gauge shotgun pistols and the “Liberator” automatic rifle with infrared scope, helps the “Freefighters” of the free American towns and villages fight the Russian occupiers. Rock’s only two goals are to throw the Soviet murderers out of the United States, returning America to its great glory and freedom of the past, and to find and kill the squad of Russian KGB officers who murdered his family, torturing them, raping his mother and sisters when he was a child. Hidden beneath a floorboard he had memorized the faces of all ten of the elite Death Squad who committed the atrocities. One by one he will hunt them down and kill them.

  Ted Rockson’s trail weaves swiftly across the land, the mountains, the hidden free cities, the vast hot zones, as he conquers all that gets in his way in the strange, terrifying world of America 2089 A.D.

  TIME: It is one hundred years in the future. An all-out nuclear war has killed two-thirds of the world’s population. The Russians, who were able to get off many more of their missiles in a first strike, were victorious over the United States. Now, in control of virtually the entire world except for China, they ruthlessly rule the People’s World Socialist Republics.

  PLACE: Atomic bombs exploded all over the planet, but primarily in the United States. The United States lost one hundred million people within one hour of the attack. Another seventy-five million died within a year. The Russians immediately moved in with massive transports of troops and weapons and quickly took control of much of the country. They built forty fortresses in vital parts of the United States, huge military complexes from which they sent out search-and-destroy units of tanks, helicopters and radiation-suited troops to extinguish the still-burning embers of resistance.

  The Russians use the American citizens as slave labor, forcing them to grow crops and work in factories. The Russian high command lives in luxury, the officers having taken the best housing in the remaining cities. The American workers must make do in shabby shanty towns around the fortress complexes. Thirty-five million Americans are directly under the Red rule. Sullen and docile, they carry out their Russian masters’ orders, but underneath they hate them. They pray for the day when the legendary Ted Rockson, “The Ultimate American,” will come with the Freefighters of the hidden cities and release them from their bondage.

  ENVIRONMENT: The great number of bombs set off altered the Earth’s axis. The polar caps began melting and the forested regions turned to desert. As the world slowly warmed, the higher amount of CO2 in the air created a greenhouse effect. Lakes, rivers and streams had dried up in many places. Ecology had been almost dealt a deathblow from the war. Ninety percent of the Earth’s species of plants and animals were now extinct.

  The East Coast of the United States is still extremely radioactive. Vast, bare plains stretch hundreds of miles in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania on which nothing grows. At the edges of these hot zones are forests of mutated bushes and trees covered with thorns and rock-hard bark. Parts of the Midwest were spared as the Russians had plans for eventually using the farmland to grow crops for their own clamoring masses back home. But the soil is nevertheless too radioactive for anything but weeds. American slave labor has been taken out by the truckload to work, turning the soil in the medium hot zones—meaning death within a year from handling the rocks and topsoil still hot enough to send a Geiger counter needle off the edge.

  The Far West was hit hard. Colorado was spared mostly because of bad aim but further on, in Utah, Nevada and California, there has been heavy damage. The area is now a misty, unknown land. Nothing is thought to even live there. Volcanos and earthquakes have become common and much of the Northwest has been turned into a nightmare of craters, some miles wide.

  The South was hit in a haphazard fashion as if the Russians hadn’t quite known what to strike. Some states—New Mexico, Georgia—were almost untouched; others—Florida, Texas—had been blasted to bits. Large parts of Florida are gone. Where Orlando and Tampa once stood is now a great jagged, hydrogen-bomb-created canal, stretching hundreds of miles across the interior, filled with red, muddy water.

  Slowly, life tries to force its way back onto the surface of the ripped and savaged land. Many forests have expanded over the last century in areas that weren’t hit. Great parts of the United States are now thick with brush and trees, and resemble the country the way it was in the
1800s. In other places the deserts cover the earth for four, five hundred miles in every direction—unrelenting, broiling, snake-filled and cactus-dotted obstacles that stand between other living parts of the country.

  THE HIDDEN FREE CITIES: Nearly seventy-five towns have sprung up over the last hundred years, hidden in caves, mountains and deep wooded valleys. Located at the edges of hot zones which the Russian troops are reluctant to enter, these towns, known as Free Cities, are made up of armed resistance fighters. Each city consists of anywhere from a thousand to forty thousand people. They are fiercely democratic, using town meetings to discuss and vote on all issues.

  The Free Americans, who have been bred out in the country, away from the Russian-dominated “clean” areas, have, through natural selection, become ten times more resistant to radiation than their ancestors. They are bred tough, with weak children placed out in the twenty-below-zero nights. If the child lives he is allowed to develop. If not, he is just as well put out of his misery now.

  Ted Rockson fights out of Century City—one of the more advanced Free Cities, and the manufacturer of the Liberator automatic rifle, used by freefighters everywhere. They attack Russian convoys and blow up bridges. But they plan for the day when they can begin their all-out assault on the enslavers.

  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

  “Should I blow the charge?” Berger, the explosives man asked, his meaty, weathered hands resting on the detonation plunger. A wire ran from the bottom of the gray metal box, a thousand feet downhill through rocks and trees to a narrow, steel girder bridge way below. The North Colorado River Bridge, as it had once been called, was now wired with two hundred pounds of plastique slapped on in two and three pound mounds to the tops of all the supporting girders. A squad of heavy Russian tanks approached from the other side of the bridge, sending up clouds of dust above the parched, rutted road.

  “No, wait!” Ted Rockson, the commander of the twenty-man excursion force of Freefighters said firmly. “We want the bridge filled with their heavy stuff before we blow. Patience, my friend, patience and then . . .” His icy eyes, one violet, one aquamarine, glistened with steel rage. Rockson hoisted his Liberator over his shoulder and walked to a large, flat boulder at the edge of the steep slope that dropped down the mountain to the bridge. With a powerful leap he jumped five feet up to the boulder’s edge and, getting a handgrip, pulled himself quickly up. He stayed low, not breaking the horizon for Russian binoculars, took his own glasses out, then elbowed up to the edge of the oval-shaped, yellow boulder. The Freefighters sat hidden behind him amidst the rocks. They wore gray camouflage outfits, mountain boots with cleats, T-shirts and flak vests already drenched with sweat. The twenty-man attack force rested in the shadows created by the rocks, hiding from the noonday sun which beat down like the searing flames of a blast furnace.

  It had been overcast for weeks, but today, when clouds would be a blessing, of course, they had vanished. The sky was clear, with only that strange, purplish tint high in the atmosphere hinting that anything was amiss with the world, that the heavens were radioactive. The Freefighters adjusted their weapons, .9mm Liberator automatic rifles, and made sure no dirt was clogging the barrels. During the four-day journey they had made to get here, anything could have crawled in there. They squirmed uncomfortably in their flak vests, silently blasting the Century City rule that required flaks on all attack missions, and looked up impatiently at Rockson perched on the boulder wondering just when in hell he would signal the attack. The mortarmen stacked rows of shells ten to a pile and calculated the trajectory to the opposite bank. Thirty feet to their left, two machine guns had been mounted, their .50mm muzzles painted brown to avoid any flashes of light that would signal the forward Russian scouts.

  Rockson peered motionlessly through his 20x binocs. He watched the tanks moving through a blanket of choking dust onto the ancient girder bridge, built in prewar days. Watched the foot soldiers running alongside the steel killing machines. Watched the entire structure tremble and vibrate in protest as the first of the lumbering K-55s roared on. Rock watched and waited. He was calm, ready for the action that would begin momentarily. He had been doing this for a long time—killing Russians. Since he was a boy. It was nasty work, but not as nasty as the bastards had been to America. The killing would stop when their occupation forces left. It was simple. It was their choice: to stay and die, or leave and live. He focused his binoculars on the command tank which was just approaching the ramp to the bridge, and fine focused the beat-up lenses on the officer who directed the tank from the turret. He was arrogant, with his thin lips, his gold-braided collar, and that look of smug self-confidence that all the Russian officers had. Good, let them think there is no danger, Rock thought, ducking down, as he saw the commander lift his own glasses. So much the easier for us.

  The column of twenty Russian K-55 tanks, almost forty feet long, with their huge turrets and .150mm cannons poking f
orward like dark arms of death, rumbled down the rusty road, the Fifth Sector Highway the Russians called it. The tanks moved slowly, spaced about fifty feet apart. They were surrounded by combat troops in full battle gear and radiation suits. The troops held onto the sides of the battlewagons, letting themselves be pulled along at about ten mph. Their thick anti-rad protective gear and heavy K-200 rifles weighed them down, making movement difficult. But there was no complaining. Not in the Russian Army.

  Colonel Antonovich stood in the hatchway of the lead tank peering nervously around at the surrounding hills and mountains. He looked for the slightest trace of metal glinting, of reflection, of a face disappearing behind a rock. This was the perfect spot for an ambush, when they were all bunched together close to move quickly across the narrow bridge. Below the colonel, in the guts of the foot-thick, steel-plated K-55, the six men of the crew were at their battle stations, ready for anything. The tank—equipped with .150mm cannon, twin .55mm machine guns, flame thrower and anti-tank missiles—could take out just about anything . . . if it could see it. That was the rub. If the Americans would fight like men, the colonel thought bitterly, the battle would soon be over. But they wouldn’t. It was always hit and run. Kill one soldier here, take out one tank there. They were like mosquitos, stinging, biting. But mosquitos drew blood. He felt a shiver run down his spine, even as his flesh sweated in the thick, rubberized canvas anti-rad suit.

  There! What was that? Antonovich swung his field glasses quickly up. A flash on a peak about eight hundred feet away. He licked his lips nervously, preparing to shout out the command to fire. No, there, it was just a quartz formation reflecting the brilliant yellow-orange sun. Damn, he was getting too nervous. If they had fired up there, it could have caused an avalanche of rock to fall on the other end of the bridge. His superiors would love that. Blocking the only crossing for a hundred miles that would safely hold a tank or a supply truck.