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  DEATH TO TYRANTS!

  World War III was finally fought—and America lost! But now, one hundred years after the Russian conquest of the U.S.A., the scattered Free Cities are about to unite and form a new nation with one goal: to forever drive the hated Soviets from America’s shores. And there’s only one man who can spearhead this second War of Independence: the famed soldier of survival, Ted Rockson.

  The sinister KGB, however, is planning to destroy the fledgling rebellion by incinerating its leadership in one fell nuclear swoop. But Rockson’s fought too many pitched battles against the Russians and the deadly mutant life forms in the radioactive hot zones not to sense the danger. Somehow he must survive and, when he does, he will raise his fist in defiance against the enemies of freedom—for he is the . . .

  DOOMSDAY

  WARRIOR

  DEATH FROM THE SKY!

  There were at least thirty of the Red force overhead. They were swooping down on Rockson and his mountain man companion on parakites, using the updrafts from the desert floor to keep them aloft . . . and using .55mm shells to keep Rockson and his friend pinned down.

  Rockson glanced over at the mountain man and saw a trickle of blood dripping down his long black beard.

  “Ed, you’re hit,” Rock yelled. The mountain man put a hand up to his face—it came back wet.

  It was only a flesh wound—Ed would survive, Rock thought, feeling the throbbing pain of his own shoulder wound. They had been taking the Reds out—but it wasn’t good enough. Even if just one Russian slug got them for every ten they handed out, they’d still be dead by the time it was all over. But Rockson wasn’t ready to die. Not yet!

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  475 Park Avenue South

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  ISBN: 0-8217-1489-9

  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: December 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 ex
panded 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

  There’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.

  Th
en—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.