Doomsday Warrior 05 - America’s Last Declaration

  AMERICAN COUNTERATTACK!

  One hundred years after the apocalypse of World War III, the U.S. fights for freedom against the hated Soviet occupation force. Willing to pay the ultimate price to regain their nuclear-shattered homeland, The Freefighters flock to join the remarkable soldier of survival, Ted Rockson, who has promised to lead them out of slavery—and into a new world of freedom.

  But to the Russians, the Americans are mere rabble, to be crushed by a savage show of force. From their worldwide empire they import a vast 600,000 man horde of goose-stepping Nazi-like German soldiers to do their bloody bidding. And when the battle is joined, Rockson must somehow rally his hopelessly outnumbered rebels for one desperate counter-attack that will either be the glory—or the death—of the . . .

  DOOMSDAY

  WARRIOR

  NAZI ATTACK!

  Rockson unleashed six more volleys from his pistol, sending four of the neo-Nazis straight to hell. He ducked down as they returned fire, and then took off from behind the protection of the boulder toward the cannon. It wasn’t that far, but when fifteen crack shots are firing with everything they have at you, it seems like a million miles off. Bullets dug in everywhere around him, knifing into the dirt and rocks at his feet in little explosions of powder. He felt a sharp pain in his right calf, but was able to keep running.

  “Get him!” Gunter screamed, rising from the ground and spraying his full magazine of 7.2mm slugs. “He is the leader. Kill him and you will be rich forever.” The Wolfpack Squad rose as a man and let loose with a hurricane of firepower, the air whistling with trails of screaming white-hot bullets . . .

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  475 Park Avenue South

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  ISBN: 0-8217-1608-5

  Copyright © 1985 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: June 1985

  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 expan
ded 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

  They fell from the sky like wounded birds, twisting, spinning out of control. Wingless, their arms and legs swung wildly in the cold air. The two men dangled from billowing black parachutes that ballooned out above them. They gripped the straps that led up from their shoulder harnesses for dear life as they watched the world below come shooting up at them like a bullet.

  There were only seconds before impact and Ted Rockson and Archer, the giant near-mute member of the Rock team, dropped ever closer . . . to their doom. The MIG jet they had stolen and escaped from Moscow in spun wildly past them, plummeting straight down. But it wasn’t their quick descent that made their hearts beat faster and their eyes open wide—it was the immense iceberg-dotted lake that they were about to plunge into. Lake Superior, according to the maps in the MIG. It had seemed so welcoming, so comforting just minutes before as the two freefighters realized they were home—or nearly. But now as they prepared to splash into its frigid waters, having misjudged their drop angle and been blown by the North Wind, it changed every second into an enemy that was about to kill them.

  All their attempts at altering the course of the falling chutes were in vain as the constant cold stream of air from the arctic wind slammed them down toward the dark blue water.

  “Hold on, man, we’re going in,” Rock yelled to Archer who was about forty feet away and twenty feet above him. They hit the water hard, sending up great splashes of the frigid liquid around them. Parachutes slow descent, they don’t stop it, and with the additional helping hand of the downdraft they were slammed into the lake like spears, going under nearly twenty feet into the murky depths. Rockson opened his eyes but could see nothing in the dark water, though the cold, near-freezing water burned his eyes as if it were alcohol. He knew he had only seconds before the parachute would fill and drag him down to the bone-littered bottom. Holding his breath tightly in his lungs he tried to unhitch the metal clasps around his chest. His mutant body had among other things given him the ability to hold his breath for nearly three minutes, so he knew he had time—if he didn’t panic. Yards away in the near impenetrable gray water he could sense Archer struggling furiously to rip the harness off his body.

  “Slow down—keep calm,” Rock sent off in a telepathic burst to the giant of a man. His PSI abilities, developed by the Glowers, worked with them—but were not reliable on a human. He prayed that Archer would receive. The Doomsday Warrior at last got the chute clasp undone and eased out of the confining straps. He shot up toward the surface, lit with the flashing beacon of daylight, and broke the water, opening his mouth wide to take in the life-giving air. He waited a few seconds for Archer to appear, as he pulled the parachute into a tight bundle and wrapped his belt around the bottom of it, creating a six-foot balloon of air. Archer’s chute still bobbed on the surface some twenty yards away, moving up and down furiously as if it had hooked some immense fish.

  “Damn,” Rock muttered, letting go of his makeshift life raft. He filled his lungs to their bursting point and dove back into the depths. He quickly found Archer, still tearing at the harness as if it were some jellyfish trying to swallow him. The bear of a freefighter was already sucking in water through his wide opened mouth. There was still time if . . .

  The Doomsday Warrior swam straight down and over to the near-mute and motioned for him to relax and stop his frantic strugglings. But in his desperate panic Archer, who feared nothing on this earth except confinement, was panic-stricken to the poi
nt of hysteria. Rock knew there was only one thing to do. He made a spear hand with his fingers and drove the stiff tip into the edge of Archer’s throat, just below the ear. The iron-hard punch hit into the thick flesh like a striking piranha, knocking the man out cold.

  “Sorry about that, big fella,” Rock thought as a pair of rainbow-colored fish nearly three-feet long with bands of red and purple streaming across their rippling scales swam by. “But I’m sure you’ll forgive me later.” He tread water just in front of the unconscious freefighter and quickly undid the parachute straps around the beer-barrel-sized chest. Rock grabbed hold of a big clump of the thick hair of the ex-mountain man and pulled with all his might, dragging Archer up from his watery imprisonment. Had Archer already sucked in too much water Rockson could never have done it. But there was obviously enough air left in the freefighter’s lungs to make him buoyant.

  The Doomsday Warrior broke the surface and sucked in the frigid air greedily. He yanked with all his strength and Archer’s blue-tinged face came out of the water line. Rock swam the few yards to his parachute raft, which seemed to be holding the air he had sealed into it, and dragged the near-mute onto the edge of the floating black nylon. Seeing the big chest remain still, Rock, holding with one hand to the raft, swung down and over with his other arm, slamming into Archer’s back like a baseball bat. The bear of a man sucked in a horribly raspy breath and then coughed violently, spitting up scummy water. He breathed in quickly about twenty times and then his heart and lungs seemed to get in gear as he opened his earth-brown eyes.

  The last thing he remembered was Rockson punching him under the water. And as if the thought to strike back had been suspended between brain and hand, Archer’s ham-sized fist rose to strike back. Rock blocked it with his free hand and yelled across to Archer as the parachute-raft bobbed more violently beneath them, stirred up by the changing tide of the nearly thirty-mile-wide lake. Waves four-feet high swept over them, heading toward the sandy shore some two miles off.