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  AMERICA’S LAST HOPE!

  When America is brought to its knees by Russia’s nuclear sneak attack, it’s Ted Rockson, the Doomsday Warrior, who rallies the scattered Free Cities to rise up and fight the Soviet invaders. While the land of the brave is not yet the land of the free, at least Rockson rekindles the fires of hope—until the new American Revolution suffers a crippling blow when he’s captured by the Reds and dragged off in chains to Moscow.

  Half a world away from his loyal troops, Rockson is trapped in the evil center of a world gone mad. Inside the walls of the Kremlin, surrounded by KGB agents, there is no running and no escape. He has only one choice: to die in the name of freedom, fighting for a cause known as America—as he wages a one-man war that could only be fought by the . . .

  DOOMSDAY

  WARRIOR

  RED PRISONER

  “Come on,” Rockson yelled at his big friend, Archer. “Fast!” The two men took off across the open field like jackrabbits pursued by a fox. They had gone about thirty feet when the Doomsday Warrior heard a sound. From above? They both dove to the ground as a large rope net dropped down from the trees.

  The net hit Archer, tangling his arms and legs. He fell over on his side, roaring like a wild beast. Rock felt the net fall over his back, and he shot forward wriggling, avoiding entanglement. He reached the edge of it and came to his knees, pulling his .12 gauge shotpistol up ready to fire.

  “Please don’t try that,” a cold voice said. Rock looked behind him. A Russian officer, a captain with a big red star on his brown cap, was holding a .9mm Special Service revolver aimed right between Rock’s blue and violet eyes. On each side of the officer were nearly ten regulars, their Kalashnikovs pointed at the crouching American.

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  475 Park Avenue South

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  ISBN: 0-8217-1556-9

  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: March 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 wa
y 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

  Something shifted. Deep within the earth, a rumbling and grinding of massive grids of rock hundreds of miles long, pushed against one another, cracking. Something bubbled and boiled like a thing alive. It was the poison of a hundred years, the black rotting radioactive liquids that had seeped into the soil through a million cracks and collected hundreds of miles down in a dark sea of death. It was an underground ocean of stench and decay and rot, of glowing molecules with names like strontium 90, titanium 140 and krypton 85—all of them as virulent as the day they had been created red hot from the fires of the H-Bombs going off everywhere like the fourth of July a century before. It was a sea of slime and putrescence that writhed in a radioactive frenzy spitting forth clouds of toxic gas, reaching out with pseudopods, of the purest blackness.

  The earth around the living lake of death shook and trembled violently, moving and quivering on every side of the dark sea. It was as if the earth could no longer stand the radioactivity; as if trying to free itself of the poisons, the earth opened up a funnel to the surface of the planet, cracking a thousand-foot-long chasm through its rocky skin. The sea of slime shot toward the surface as if propelled like lava from an erupting volcano as the crack in the earth opened nearly a mile wide, ripping the cactus-dotted prairie like a piece of paper. Black liquid swept out over the parched wastelands by the millions of gallons, the waves of darkness piled high atop one another roaring off in every direction.

  The Black Sea shot across the countryside, engulfing, killing every living thing it found. They sank beneath its thirty-foot high wall of noxious slime, instantly drowning or burned to a blistery death by the super high rads contained within. The Ocean of Death swept up everything in its path: Groves of trees disappeared, snapped away like twigs, groundhogs, lizards, rainbirds, giant-horned buffalo all tore for their lives as they heard and saw the poisonous tidal wave approaching. Soon the prairie was alive with a flood of animals that ran just ahead of the River of Darkness. Running as fast as their padded, clawed, or hooved feet could carry them. Each of them knew somewhere in its primitive brain that death was just behind them. That a misstep or fall would mean the end. A wave of life fleeing a wave of death.

  Two

  The fangs of the sabre-toothed mountain lion sparkled like chromium ice picks, glistening with saliva in the rays of the setting pink sun. The creature’s eyes, narrow and red as blood, were fixed straight ahead on the human who stood in its way. The meanest-looking mountain cat Ted Rockson had ever seen: black spots the size of silver dollars and claws like meathooks came slinking toward him, growling a deep guttural sound that caught in the cat’s throat, as if afraid to go past the foot-long curved ivory teeth on each side of its opened jaw.

  “Easy boy,” Rockson said, stepping slowly backward and to the side. He sensed that the creature was not after him but just wanted to get by. Behind Rock, Charles Langford, his daughter Kim, and Mountain Man Ed, all six feet eight inches of him, stood frozen, their hearts slamming in their chests. The golden-haired mountain lion edged forward. Rockson let his arm drop slowly down to his holster as he placed his thick-veined, sun-darkened hand around the reassuring butt of his .12 gauge shotgun pistol. But he wouldn’t kill the thing unless he had to. The sabre-toothed lion, Maximus Felinus, as named by Dr. Schecter’s science crew back in Century City, was one of a true new species, created from the omnipresent x-rays, gamma rays,
and beta rays, eternal by-products of the H-bombs that had fallen onto America by the thousands. Mutated chromosomes, genetic patterns twisted and rearranged into new forms of life—like the cute killer pussycat that stood in front of them.

  The mountain cat took a final wary look at Rockson and his crew, growled loudly, opening its jaws to their nearly two-and-a-half-foot extension, then just as quickly tore past them into the low bushland ahead. Rock let his grip on the shotpistol relax. The others breathed a sigh of relief as he turned.

  “Rock, what is it about you?” Kim asked, teasing him. “Wherever you go—cats, hogs, rats, something seems to want to attack you.”

  “I’ve got what they call a magnetic personality.” Rock smiled back, his violet and aquamarine eyes dancing with energy. “Everything just loves me.” Kim looked over at his broad muscled physique, and a chill coursed through her body as she remembered their nights together in the Glower’s village just days before.

  Mountain Ed, his buckskin jacket flapping, his three immense antiquated hunting rifles slung over his shoulder, slapping against his back, walked several yards ahead and poked at a bloody animal carcass lying next to some thickly thorned bushes. He carefully avoided the three-inch-long blue barbs of the vegetation just waiting for something to brush against it so it could inject itself and its poison into their flesh.

  “That kitty left his dinner, Rock,” Mt. Ed snorted, pointing down at a partially consumed young male elk. Rock came over and looked. Only the skull had been cracked open, snapped to pieces inside the powerful jaws of the killer cat. Brain still oozed from one side of the head, cracked like a coconut.