Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit Read online

  The hiss died out in her throat and her lips settled back down as she realized she had lost her cool.

  “I am not used to people talking back to me,” she sneered at him. “Especially not men.”

  “Why have you taken us prisoner?” Rock demanded, feeling around with his hands which were wedged alongside of him, to see if there was any way out. There wasn’t. “Why have you drugged us? What the hell is going on here?”

  “Strong words,” she laughed as the other two seemed amused by Rockson’s assertiveness. “Considering the fact that we’ve got you tied up as tight as a wasp in a spider’s food sack. In fact, that’s just what you’re in here for—for your information.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Rockson snarled, getting a sudden queasy feeling in his stomach, and that was on top of the already sickening whirlpool that was spinning around inside his intestines.

  “You are our food, man. That’s what we use the male of the human species for—food. We didn’t tell you the other fact about our diner, which has been so successful all these years. It is a trap. A trap which those who enter—never leave. You see, we are the Vampyres—blood drinkers. We evolved into our present form about seventy-five years ago, the second generation after the bombs fell. And we found, or our grandmothers found, that they had a good thing going—luring men into this diner—then taking their bodily fluids. So we’ve kept up the old homestead. Works pretty well. Don’t you think?”

  “You’re sick,” Rock spat out at her, wanting to tear the mutant killer bitch limb from limb.

  “No, not sick—hungry,” she laughed, and that seemed to really get the other two going as well. After a few giggles they continued to put blood-type-classifying collars around the rest of the team. A few struggled, but none of them could do a thing. He saw that most of the other men were starting to come out of the drug now. All but the whiz kids were stirring.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Rock snapped, “Putting these collars around our necks. We’re not dogs.”

  “No, you’re not,” she laughed, “we don’t feed on dogs. They’re all radioactive around these parts. You’re not. We already checked. In fact you are all some of the lowest-rad readings we’ve ever had. Y’all been hiding out in a cave for the last hundred years?”

  One of them started to speak up but Chen silenced him with an evil eye. Any loose words here could lead to danger to Century City itself. There was no way of knowing how powerful or far-ranging these Vampyre women were.

  “We’re giving you these collars,” she went on, “because each one designates exactly what blood type you are, blood grouping and negative and positive RH factors. We have to know all this, you see, because certain of us can only drink certain types of blood.”

  The men’s faces were even paler than they had already been. Even Rock’s face was heading toward sheet hue.

  “The drug we gave you will be out of your system in another few hours. And this refrigeration room will keep you cool and tasty. And then—we shall take our due. For now—we are cataloguing you. You’ve been a very fortunate find for us—so many of you. All such big strong healthy men. And even three mutant O-factor pluses among you. You’ve made our day. Praise be to the blood.”

  “Praise be to the blood,” the other two echoed back, bowing slightly toward her. She was beautiful in a hideous sort of way. Her cheekbones were high, and somehow like a hawk’s, eyes big and doelike, even if they had slits for pupils, nostrils flaring. She could have been on the cover of Vogue, had there been such things anymore, except for those demonic yellow eyes that seemed to burn like evil stars within her skull. And the teeth—which with so much male meat nearby exciting the women—kept showing themselves through Zeran’s pulled-up lips. All the women were doing it, exposing their fangs and making weird deep, almost mewing sounds from within their chests. Rock expected bites would follow, but soon they had finished their tagging of every man in the room and walked out the door.

  “Do get angry and want to kill us more than anything in this universe,” Zeran said as she paused at the door of the refrigeration room for a moment. “It oxygenates the blood, makes it ever so tasty.” Then she slammed the door behind with the thunderous smack of what sounded like the very doors of hell closing shut in their faces.

  Twelve

  The men were terrified. And Rockson couldn’t blame them. He wasn’t feeling his greatest either. The two whiz kids took it pretty well when they came out of their stupors. Of course none of the men had the heart to tell them that they were on the diner’s dinner menu. Probably as the hors d’oeuvres.

  They all struggled furiously within the sticky nets hung up on the wall of the rapidly cooling refrigeration room, until exhausted. But couldn’t for the life of them get free. The Vampyres knew their nets well. They were, after all, as Zeran had said, an established family business for over seventy-five years. U-ETE-HERE. U-GET-ETEN—HERE the sign should have warned.

  It wasn’t that the men still didn’t have their weapons—pistols, knives—but that they couldn’t move. Rock’s own shotpistol was strapped to his hip. The Vampyres hadn’t even bothered to strip them. For within the netting not one of them could move even an inch. It was as if they were wrapped up like Egyptian mummies and then glued in place. Even their fingers couldn’t flex back and forth more than a half-inch or so without snagging in the tightly pulled nets which encompassed them.

  “Rock, what do—do you suggest?” one of the terrified strike team, a new man, asked.

  “I—don’t—know,” Rock replied slowly, so they could hardly hear him. For the first time in his life he felt absolutely helpless. Usually there was some way out, some chink in the enemy’s armor. But he wasn’t finding it this time.

  “Chen—any luck on any of your super-secret ninja escape techniques?” Rock yelled out across the room. And even in the midst of their fear and terror, nervous laughter came from the men. For a second the weight of their fate hanging like a guillotine over their heads lifted a few inches.

  “I’m trying something, Rock, believe it or not,” the Chinese-American replied. “But it’s slow going, damn slow. It’s a vibration technique I learned from an old Chinese—one of the last of his breed. Super-fast dragon breath, making the whole body actually vibrate quite strongly if done properly.”

  “Terrific.”

  “I’m getting some very slow sliding of my right hand up along my side—but I mean slow, Rock. I’ve gotten maybe a half-inch in the last half-hour. I don’t know.” Even he didn’t sound optimistic, which wasn’t the man’s way. They had clearly fallen into the fucking frying pan. The Vampyres didn’t take any chances with their prey—drugs, nets, glue . . . They weren’t going to give their guests the slightest crack to slide through.

  Their nerves began to grow frazzled as the hours dragged on and the light seeping in from the daylight outside slowly began fading away. Dinner would be soon. They could feel it in their own stomachs. Only they were on the fucking menu.

  When the door suddenly flew open with a loud noise, half of the men gasped audibly. This time there were about a half-dozen of the pale vampire women and they were carrying three steel barrels, like draft beer had probably once been served in, into the place. Two of the women hauled each one, without difficulty. They were stronger than they looked. They set them down inside the room and looked around at the prisoners.

  “Numbers 4, 8, and 13,” Zeran read out from a piece of paper in her hand. Immediately the numbered men were somehow easily net-detached, grabbed, and taken one at a time across the room to another wall which was empty. They were hoisted up with rope pulleys, until they were hanging upside down, heads about three feet above the floor. It was Hanson, the geologist and armaments expert, Simmons, one of the spaceship repairmen, and Harkers, a combat soldier who had been out over a dozen times with Rockson.

  “Rock, Rock,” they yelled over at him as they were all hoisted up in place. Rock felt tears coming to his eyes. He knew without know
ing what was coming next.

  “I’m with you, guys,” Rockson shouted over as the women surrounded the three hanging victims and took out some nasty-looking spikes attached to long plastic tubes. “Hang in there.” But the words were worse than stupid, they were meaningless, For even as he and the other men watched in abject horror, the women, two working at each hanging man, slammed the large syringe needles, a good six inches long and nearly a half-inch wide at the sharp tips, right into the pulsing arteries in the throat of each man. They screamed like banshees and Rock wanted to tear his face away, but couldn’t, feeling he had to at least bear witness to their pain.

  The blood from the upside-down suspended men’s necks pumped down through the hollow spikes, down the plastic tubes the Vampyre women had attached to them and right into the beer kegs set on the floor. Such a simple operation. So neat and organized. No moving parts, no mechanical pumps. Just let the human body pump its own lifeblood out. One quart, two . . . it wouldn’t stop.

  And it was shooting out fast, like a broken dam. Rock could see the red liquid moving rapidly through the plastic. Within just a minute the victims’ tortured screams grew softer, their struggles less violent within the netting. With the lights on, Rock could see—even from the twenty feet or so separating him from the grisly blood-letting operation across the room—their faces growing paler and paler as the substance that gave them color was taken out from them. The vampire women watched this operation as coldly as someone who was siphoning gas from one tank to another.

  A gush of blood suddenly spilled from one of the tubes as it sprang a leak, splashing down onto the floor. But fast as a whip, Zeran ripped out a roll of gray tape left over from the last century, still sticky after all these years. She wrapped it around the tube, stopping the leak; it flowed evenly again.

  Catching Rockson’s eye so they were locked in the same will-to-will combat, Zeran got down on one knee and reached down with her hand onto the steel floor. She dipped her finger into the red liquid and then lifted it up to her mouth. She licked it off, so it colored her pale blue-gray lips red, and smiled at him.

  “It’s good. Very good. Would you like some?” She walked over to him and held out the finger with the red on it near his lips. Rockson felt what little was still left in his stomach from the day before start to rise up. But she pulled back quick and put the whole finger in her mouth licking it clean so it came out pale white again.

  “No, I don’t wish to share with you, with any of you. We will take—you will give.” She turned and walked back to the blood-letters who had apparently pretty much done their business. The three men were dead, their faces white as snow, their arms and thighs no longer shaking, no longer trying to free themselves. They were free. From this radioactive hell called Earth anyway.

  “Shit,” Rockson muttered under his voice, saying it over and over again like some kind of insane cursing prayer to the sick gods who allowed this to happen.

  “Now, we need a live one,” Zeran said, walking up and down the row. “How about this one?” She stopped in front of McCaughlin, whose usual ruddy countenance went pale as the fluorescent flesh of the moon.

  “No, not me! I’ve got five diseases, three of them fatal,” the big Scotsman sputtered out as his net shook wildly from sheer body momentum. “I don’t taste good. I know, I licked some blood from a wound once—and I threw up. I taste like shit. I swear.”

  Rockson would have smiled if it wasn’t so horrible. The other men dying had made his heart feel like it was a stone falling to the bottom of a lake. But seeing McCaughlin, that jolly bear of a man, who had saved his ass more times than he could count, being taken off was another matter altogether. The crew-cut, dapper ladies’ man was like family.

  They cut him down and indignity of indignities strapped McCaughlin onto a wheelbarrow-like vehicle which suddenly appeared from a hidden closet in one of the walls.

  The other men all screamed out invectives and threats out of sheer rage at the vampire women which again only seemed to amuse them. It all amused them. They felt so in control, obviously, and clearly reveled in having such power over the trapped men.

  Even Archer howled out in long drawn-out vowels for them to stop. LEEETTTT FAAAATTMMAAAAN GGGOOOOOO,” he howled. And, “MEEEEE RIIIIPPPPP,” presumably referring to his intense desire to rip every one of the blood drinkers into shreds. The near-mute was being quite expansive in his verbosity for this special occasion.

  “Yes, he’ll be just right,” Zeran said, patting the fat stomach as McCaughlin squirmed on his back atop the wheelbarrow as more women wearing the hideous human flesh vests and pants, even boots dyed dark out of the man meat, carried their barrels.

  She waited until her whole entourage had exited the room with their loads of blood, and McCaughlin, And then Zeran paused at the door looking back at the rows of glaring hate-filled eyes. She seemed to bathe in the murderous intent like a bather in ocean waters. The emotions of men, especially negative ones, seemed to give her some sort of kick, a charge like a drug.

  “Ta-ta, boys, don’t stay up too late. Your blood needs its rest.” Then she slammed the door behind her as tight as the lid closing on a coffin.

  Thirteen

  Vladymyr Kasinkovsk was hunched over a computer inside his laboratory. It was late in the Siberian city of Varskaville, one of the Soviet Army’s main science cities. Scientific research had for the most part stopped in Russia as it had in the rest of the world. But Premier Vassily had always been firm about one thing, had always made sure that one particular scientific priority was taken care of—the maintenance of the Soviet Killer Satellites that soared tens of thousands of miles above the earth. What was left of them anyway.

  Once there had been hundreds of them, but many had been fired or blown up during the great war a century earlier. And then Ted Rockson, the Doomsday Warrior, had managed to take out the main control center right in Moscow, when he had been, stupidly enough, brought there as a prisoner years before. The amount of damage that one man had caused was remarkable! But it had given work and prestige to Vladymyr. He had been just a junior scientist on one of many bureaucratic teams back then, investigating nothing, with no equipment, in dingy back rooms. But he had happened to major in Satellite Control and Orbital Repair Physics while in university. Had learned in fact from the last man in the Soviet scientific hierarchy who really knew about such things.

  All of which had been laughed at at the time by his colleagues, who were going into what they believed to be far more success-oriented fields such as Genetic Mutation Engineering and Mind Control on mass scales. But now they weren’t laughing. No, not at all. Rockson’s smashing of the Sat-control center had been disaster for the hierarchy, but a golden opportunity for him.

  Vladymyr sat back in his thick leather chair and surveyed his large office, the picture window that looked out over the whole city, steel towers and concrete spires. He had done well, hadn’t he? Somehow the last few years had been at such a frantic pace, especially the last year when he had been moved into command here, he hadn’t taken a breather.

  But now—he just sat back and exhaled and felt the sheer power of his position, the reward for so many sleepless nights working over his lab table, his bank of computers. Now it was all coming around. The new house, the highest on the banks of the Volga, his wife’s fur coats that she could wear to parties and mingle with the wives of some of the top officials in Russia. She was even sleeping with him again.

  Vladymyr was Premier Vassily’s pet, he knew that. He knew how to butter ‘the Grandfather’ up, when he presented his reports each month. For Vassily wanted them directly from his mouth, his hands. The Premier-of-All-the-Russias knew, better than anyone perhaps, what getting important information stuck in the bureaucracy of Russian science apparatchiks would mean. Garbled information, lost notes, alterations in data for political reasons. The Premier wouldn’t know what the hell was going on. So he demanded the truth about the restoration of Sat-control from Vladymyr—and he rew
arded it highly.

  But even as Vladymyr’s eyes took in the prestige of his wood-paneled office, the wide desk with the most advanced computers the Reds still had working, he felt his guts start to tighten up again. It could all be lost as easily as a mule stumbling down the side of a too steep salt mine cliff. And he knew the cliffs were very steep all around him. Vassily wanted progress—and fast. Wanted the destroyed satellite-and-missile control center in Moscow, if not repaired, at least set up in basic function again, so that whatever remained up there in orbit still functioning—and controllable—would be taken control of.

  The Premier was slightly mad, Vladymyr had no questions about that—for what he had proposed at their last meeting was nothing less than loony. Having a laser beam from one of the satellites shoot down from orbit and ignite a torch that would be held in the hand of a statue of him fifty-feet high that would be at the next Moscow May Day Military Parade! The Premier believed such a powerful show of high tech force would send out a message to all the world, to his enemies, both subjects and rebels—that Premier Vassily, in spite of his age and many infirmities, was still in iron control. And could kill from space if he chose to. It was a mad idea. Yet, if he did not carry it out, Vladymyr would lose everything.

  Suddenly he forgot about appreciating his station—there wasn’t time for that now. Maybe there never would be. He stared hard back into the figures, rows of moving numbers, and diagrams of orbital flow that ran across his screen like green roaches.

  He had managed to tap into two of the still functioning laser sats control centers. But getting the systems of remote control to work was turning out to be a bitch. After a century of bombardment with cosmic rays, none of the engines were quite functioning the way they should, not to mention all the electromagnetic junk that had been sent out when the nukes flew a century before. Vladymyr had to work everything ass-backwards, figuring out what commands made the sats perform which actions. He was slowly getting some responses—but whether or not he would make the May Day deadline was something he didn’t want to think too long about.