Doomsday Warrior 16 - American Overthrow

  FREEDOM’S HAZARD

  In the nuclear-ravaged 21st century, liberty still thrives in free cities under the ground of a wasted America—until Pattonville, second largest of these bastions of freedom, is seized by the power-crazed General Hanover. Using a newly developed lethal gas, Hanover holds the city captive in a dark and brutal reign of terror.

  But word has reached the one man who can save democracy for America: Ted Rockson, the Doomsday Warrior. Together with his brave team of freedom fighters, Rockson races across the ruined landscape. Their destination is Pattonville, but before they can liberate the city, Rockson and his “Rock Team” must overcome the mad dictator’s ferocious guard force. Pitted in mortal combat against mighty men and vicious beasts alike, Rockson knows he must win—before Hanover captures every free city in the nation!

  DOOMSDAY

  WARRIOR

  CAVERN OF DEATH

  “Holy mother—” Rockson muttered as he led the Freefighters into the large underground cavern with glowing stalactites of immense size hanging down from the high ceiling. He saw movement behind one of the pillars of black lava.

  “Company!” he yelled and reached for his shotpistol. The figures began running toward them shrieking wild guttural cries. They were covered with black lava-like scales. Their weapons were primitive, but Rockson knew a lot of things could kill a man.

  Somehow the band of Freefighters had stumbled into a colony of volcanic beings. And from the way they were closing in, stabbing their polished obsidian spears in the air and screaming incantations in a strange language, Rockson wasn’t at all optimistic about his life expectancy over the next few seconds . . .

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  475 Park Avenue South

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  ISBN: 0-8217-2740-0

  Copyright © 1989 by Ryder Syvertsen

  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: August 1989

  Printed in the United States of America

  One

  Factory Worker No. 1,278 woke early from terrible dreams. Even as he came out of the dark void of night he felt his body shivering, terribly cold, stiff with the night breezes which swept across the floor of the barracks where he and a hundred others of Pattonville’s slave workers lay huddled on a concrete floor. Only burlap bags or the equivalent in plasti-paper covered them, and those covers were like paper. He hurt. Bad. Every part of him ached and groaned, every joint was stiff as a piece of frigid iron. But iron with nerves, with senses; iron that groaned.

  He rolled over, which elicited a sharp groan from his mouth as his shoulder dug into the hard cement floor, sending a torrent of pain through him. He had hurt his upper left arm the day before in the factory where his job was to roll heavy steel canisters on hand pulled wagons to a loading dock.

  No. 1,278 remembered that he had hurt it bad. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to work now. Maybe they would . . .

  Would what? A tremor of fear swept through his stomach. He knew that others had disappeared when they had been hurt. Worker No. 3,789, whom he had been friends with in the old days, before General Hanover had taken over in Pattonville. He had hurt his leg and couldn’t walk. And when No. 1,278 woke one morning, his only “friend” was gone. When he asked about him, the guard smacked him hard with the butt of his rifle. And that had been that. There were no questions asked in Pattonville, not any more.

  He leaned his head up against the pitted wall behind him and one eye opened slightly, gazing out onto the mass of bodies lying huddled on pieces of cardboard, old coats, anything else they had managed to siphon off from the detritus of the city. Snores and groans, heavy breathings, and an occasional curse as someone rolled onto someone else’s face or body were all that broke the silence. The place stank. None of them had bathed for many weeks, months. A rat scampered between the prone bodies searching for food. It was dangerous for the creature, No. 1,278 knew. For if any of the other factory workers saw it and got a hand on the rat, it would be eaten quickly enough, that was for damned sure. No. 1,278 didn’t eat rats. The creature must have been terribly hungry itself to risk coming out onto the cement sleeping barracks floor. It clearly didn’t realize that there was no food to be had in here. And even in the midst of his own pain and mind-numbing cold, No. 1,278 felt a twinge of pity for the dark scampering creature. And for a moment felt that they were the same. A rat and a man, both hungry, desperate. United in a bond of deprivation.

  He tried to clear his mind. The identification with the rat somehow shocked him out of his mental stupefication. Where was he exactly? Who was he? Had he just been No. 1,278 for a few months. Since it had all changed. Since General Hanover had taken over the Free City of Pattonville. His name? His real name, his human name. What the hell was it?

  George, that was it. George Mocker, Hacker. No . . . Halston. That was it. George Halston. He was George Halston. A sudden flash of anger bit through the physical torments of his body and he welcomed it for its momentary relief of the pain.

  He had been a baker once. The city had been a wonderful place to live. Yes, it came back to him suddenly, in a flood of memory and desire which he hadn’t even known existed. He had a wife. Where was she? God, she had been beautiful, with long auburn hair, and green eyes that sparkled like, like . . . The images failed him as she disappeared. Tears came to his eyes and spread down both bearded cheeks, freezing the skin beneath in the sub-zero air. But he welcomed that pain as well. He felt himself awakening from what felt like a thousand-year sleep. And suddenly he was inundated with a rush of images from his past. The two rooms they had shared, a cat, picnicking on the cliff overlooking the city, making love . . .

  There was a loud commotion and shouts as two men punched and kicked at each other on the far side of the fifty-by-twenty-foot sleeping chamber. God only knew what they were fighting over. There were fights down here all the time. How could there not be, Halston mused bitterly, with the men squeezed together like rats, fed almost nothing, lying on the cold concrete night after night. Sometimes one man killed another with a stolen piece of filed-down metal, a piece of broken glass. They were not allowed to possess real weapons, weren’t allowed to possess much of anything for that matter, beyond their hole-bottomed shoes and gray work clothes which were never changed.

  No. 1,278 heard crunching sounds like bones being broken and then a sharp scream. Then the fighting sounds died down again. The whole floor of sleepers stirred, but only for a few moments. They were used to it.

  No. 1,278 shifted to his other side, his shoulder starting to ache too much on the right side. He let his gaze rest without really focusing on the far door, a wide rectangle that led to the outer passage that ran down the center of Pattonville. Already there were stirrings outside, men walking by heading to the early shifts at the factories. Soon it would be his turn, he knew, perhaps another five or ten or twenty minutes. He tried to slip back into the memories of the past, tried to remember what had been. It was very hard, this pain of remembering. The contrast of the beauty of then, and the ugliness of now was too intense.

  He knew they had given them all a gas that was sprayed over them from time to time. It dulled their mental faculties, made them hardly more than children intellectually, made them—him—slaves.

  He struggled through the fog, knowing that it was important that he remember. Remember that he had been a man, instead of a work-drone, a slug, a worm, like he was now. He felt a sudden movement down his skull and then across his
cheek, and reached up with a flash of motion. He grabbed it and gripped it hard between his fingers, though it was hard to move them, as they were stiff and inflexible from the cold. A centipede. He had caught one several weeks before and eaten it. It had been fat. But the pincers had bitten his tongue as he chewed, and his mouth had swelled up so he couldn’t even drink water for two days. Still it was meat, food, a big one, nearly three inches long, perhaps half an inch wide. He didn’t even feel revulsion this time, his stomach was too empty, and the stomach always rules men when starvation sets in. They had even been known to tear their own flesh off and chew away when the gnawing pains set in.

  He held it in the middle as the ugly hundred-legged bug squirmed wildly like a worm on a hook, its long snapping jaws closing on air as it tried to get him. No. 1,278 let a flicker of a smile cross his face. This time he wouldn’t be bitten. As dumb as he was, he was smarter than an ugly bug. He sat up against the wall and reached inside the half torn pocket of his thick work-clothes and took out his own weapon, a sliver of glass eight inches long. Holding the centipede down on the concrete with one hand he quickly beheaded it with the other and then popped the thing into his mouth, the leg still wriggling as if it didn’t even know it had lost its mind. Three bites and it was gone.

  It tasted good, tasted meaty and real, unlike the watery gruel they were served at lunch and dinner in the factory. He felt a slight surge of strength seep into him and more memories came back.

  Memories of how the general had taken over the free-city in a coup, how he had ordered the systematic breaking down of families and the assigning of men and women to different factories around the city. The pain in his mind was overwhelming as he remembered what he had been—and how much he had lost.

  Suddenly there was a slamming at the front door and eight guards holding submachine guns stormed in, kicking and butting the men awake.

  “Rise up scum, time for work. Move, move.” They rushed through the place as the sleeping factory drones moved fast, even out of deep sleep. They knew the treatment that dawdlers got. Quickly they stumbled to their feet, snarling at one another as they lurched into long lines. They were shepherded out the door, guards on each side, and headed down the main thoroughfare toward the gas factory five hundred yards off.

  “Not you, scum,” the rear guard said as No. 1,278 emerged nearly last. “You come with me today.”

  “What—what’s wrong?” No. 1,278 asked nervously. Not that he wanted to go to the factory, he hated it, but he had never been taken off from the work crew, singled out. He didn’t like it.

  “Shut up, pig,” the guard, a large, beefy fellow snarled, slamming the butt of the submachine gun into his ribs. “There are no questions allowed, you know that.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” No. 1,278 managed to mumble as he pulled back just enough to avoid the full force of the blow. The guard marched him against the factory traffic toward the east side of the city. That was toward where the generals who ruled, and where the scientists who made the gas and other terrible weapons were located. As terrible as his life was, No. 1,278 felt fear, and didn’t want to go. Something was wrong, he could feel it in the core of his stomach and was afraid that he would vomit up the centipede meal that had been breakfast.

  “Here, in here,” the guard said gruffly as they came to a steel-sided building. Inside, more guards were at every turn, all of them with olive green, high-lapeled uniforms with the round circle with a lightning bolt through it. That was the symbol of General Hanover’s elite troops. He was marched up and down one hall after another, until at last they came to a white tiled room with showers. Here, two more guards grabbed him roughly and tore his clothes off, throwing him into one of the shower stalls, and letting the hot water cascade down over him. It was too hot, but at least it got rid of the freezing cold that had numbed him for days. He welcomed it, feeling his joints loosen up a little.

  When they determined that he was clean enough for whatever purposes they had in mind, they pulled him back out again. He was marched stark naked through the tiled room and into another one. They thrust him inside with such force that he flew forward and fell right onto the floor. His face hit hard, as he didn’t have the balance or reflexes that he had once had. And several teeth shattered out of his mouth, sliding across the floor like lopsided marbles. When he looked up, once his brain cleared from the sudden jarring pain, No. 1,278 saw that he was in a circular-shaped room with smooth metallic walls—perhaps thirty feet in diameter and twenty feet high. And when he glanced up he saw men looking down at him through a thick glass partition.

  “Ah, you are here,” a voice boomed over a hidden speaker. “Welcome, welcome.” No. 1,278 rose slowly to his knees and then upright, forgetting in his increasing terror that he was naked. The men looked down at him with amused expressions on their faces. He knew that one of them was General Hanover himself. He remembered him, had seen the blond bushy-eyebrowed young man riding down the street on a jeep after the coup d’etat. There were a good dozen officers on the other side of the partition along with some white-smocked scientists. All were apparently amused by the naked bug below them. They laughed, pointing down at him.

  “You are most fortunate, No. 1,278,” the general spoke again and his voice thundered through the room, hurting No. 1,278’s ears. “You are going to be given the honor of testing our newest gas, Cytogen. It’s really quite an amazing arrangement of atoms into a molecule that— Oh, but I’m boring you, I’m sure,” the general reflected. “At any rate, you will be remembered for your sacrifice, your name inscribed in the annals of our honored dead.”

  “Your honored de—” No. 1,278 muttered back, not quite getting the full impact of the words.

  “Begin,” Hanover said, turning and nodding to a bearded white-smocked man. The scientist reached forward and pressed a button. Suddenly No. 1,278 heard a hissing sound. He knew right away what it was—gas. He looked around desperately like a trapped animal, as he smelled an acrid odor. It was invisible, but he knew it was coming out of a duct on the curved wall.

  Suddenly No. 1,278 felt a pain shoot through his lungs and his eyes that made any pain he had ever felt in his life seem like a feather. He gasped deeply, which only seared his lungs further, and let out a terrible scream. His skin seemed to be on fire, every part of him. He glanced down to see his flesh peeling up, bubbling red, and spitting out drops. He felt a pressure inside him, as if he were being filled with air, a balloon being overblown. The instant before he exploded out in all directions, his eyes and face and rib-cage erupting in a gush of blood and steaming flesh, No. 1,278 knew he was a dead man. And then he was, splattered all over the inside of the “testing” chamber.

  “Too slow,” General Hanover said, looking up from his watch at the head scientist, Parsons. “That took almost twelve seconds. I want it in three. There can’t be any time for our enemies to fire back at us, to defend themselves in any way. Speed it up, and if you can—get rid of all that blood and junk that’s all over the room. It will dirty up everything and vastly complicate our clean-up activities when we begin taking over the other Free Cities.”

  With that, General Hanover turned and exited from the viewing chamber, his top officers walking quickly behind him, talking excitedly about the ferocity of the gas.

  Two

  “Rock, look out!” Detroit Green screamed. A reptilian horned and scaled creature that looked like it had stepped out of the Marquis De Sade’s nightmares launched itself from the darkness of the cave Ted Rockson had just begun to enter. The Doomsday Warrior, whose attention had been on some scuttling sounds above him, barely had time to hear the warning and see the monstrous shape as big as a grizzly but a thousand times uglier come flying at him like a living missile.

  “Shit,” he spat as he dropped instinctively to the hard ground, his mutant-reflexes taking over faster than his mind could even process the information. He could smell the thing, dank and sour, almost skunk-like, and could feel the claws whistling over his head as he dug
his face into the bat-dropping-strewn ground. One of the claws, long and curved, slashed right along his back as the creature flew overhead. Rockson felt a stream of fire course up his backbone. He hugged the ground, not daring to move as the thing soared by, its long green tail flopping down on his head as it cleared Rockson and came down some three yards ahead. It turned and searched for the prey it had so closely missed and let out a roar that made birds fly from their perches a mile off.

  But Rockson was already in motion. He wasn’t about to wait for the thing to get a second look at the menu and make it’s choice: one Ted Rockson, appetizer.

  “To the right,” Detroit screamed, not able to get a bead on the immense carnivore as Rockson was between him and the beast. Even as Detroit yelled, Rock was rolling over and over like a log as he reached down for his shotpistol. And the reptile thing, whatever the hell it was, was coming fast, its long claws slamming down into the dirt just behind him, trying to catch hold of something soft. Rockson heard the burp of a Liberator submachine gun on full autofire as Detroit suddenly saw an opening on the creature’s flank. Rock saw the stream of slugs rip right into the thing’s side, slugs that would have taken out a grizzly from such close range. But it didn’t seem to particularly notice the slugs, beyond scrunching up its demon face as if an annoying gnat had lodged in its ear.

  But it did buy Rockson just the split second he needed to come to his feet and get out of the thing’s way. He rushed to the right as the nightmare charged forward again, once more missing its prey. It let out another roar of frustration. It clearly wasn’t used to having to actually pursue anything. It rarely took more than a second or two for the monstrosity to get lunch, Rock figured. He turned on the run and let loose with one shot after another from his .12 gauge shotpistol. The big handgun jerked back in his fingers as if he was holding a mule’s back-leg. One, two, three shots thundered out in the cold afternoon air, under the pinkish sun staring down through high green clouds.