Doomsday Warrior 08 - American Glory Page 8

  “But I give them food, shelter. More food than all my predecessors put together. I have tried to stop unnecessary brutality, torture.”

  “It is not enough, Great One. Men need more than just a roof and a loaf of bread. They need—freedom.”

  “I cannot, I cannot,” Vassily groaned as if in great pain. “You don’t understand, no one understands. I have been put in charge of a great factory and must keep it moving. Keep its gears meshing together, keep its products, its food, churning out, keep the barbarians at bay so that they don’t batter down the walls. If I were to give up the controls of the factory—it would stop, the machines would crumble, there would be only anarchy everywhere. The entire planet hurt mortally as it is by the radioactive result of the great war, would revert to the days of caveman, snarling and grabbing for the few bits of raw meat. Man was not meant to be free. He has never been able to use freedom properly. No, Rahallah, man was meant to be ruled, he longs to be ruled, by one empire, to be told what to do. And this is why I cannot hand back, scatter the reins of power. It would be like handing the reins to a wild horse—it would just wander freely, eating grass, sleeping in the snow until it froze to death. Man needs to be enslaved, faithful servant—it is but a question of who the master shall be.”

  “Then be prepared, Excellency,” Rahallah went on, knowing that he might anger the premier, but knowing as well that his was the only voice of reason, of sanity, of peace that the premier ever got to hear, “for more and more upheavals. This is just the beginning. For once men taste even the smallest bite of freedom, like the wolf and its first lick of blood, they long for more. Must have more above all else. It is within your destiny to strengthen that freedom, to make the world strong enough to fight Killov and future Killovs, of whom there will always be more. Then you can die, Grandfather, in peace—knowing you have done the right thing and that the torch of life burns brighter. You can die smiling, Grandfather—it is still within your power.”

  “My head, my head, it hurts,” Vassily cried out, slumping back in his wheelchair, his face turning white, blue veins sticking out like webbing around the crinkled face. “Please, no more words, not tonight. They cut like blades, they hurt.”

  “Grandfather, grandfather,” Rahallah whispered sadly, shaking his head from side to side. The man was going to pieces. He slowly wheeled the premier back through the wide glass doors to his bedroom and lifted him like a ragdoll from the chair, depositing him as tenderly as a father a child in the center of the soft down feather bed.

  “Yes, sleep. Thank you, Faithful One. Go now, eat. Leave me. Let this old man drift into blackness where there is no thought, where I can hide from the grins of the skulls that circle me like vultures above carrion. Let me sleep, Rahallah, and do not wake me unless the earth is about to be destroyed.”

  “Yes, Grandfather,” the black servant answered, backing off from the world’s leader and shutting the door to the main hall softly behind him.

  “No one, absolutely no one but me is to disturb him,” Rahallah ordered the two Elite Guards who stood in front of the doorway, armed with submachine guns and body plates.

  “Sir!” both of them barked back, clicking their boots together sharply. They hated having to take commands from the black man, but until Vassily died, the African slave was the second most powerful man in the world. After Vassily died, the man would be dog-meat!

  Rahallah headed down the hall to his room, shutting the door and locking it behind him as prying eyes were everywhere. Dark forces seemed to fill the air like the thick pressure before a rainstorm.

  Rahallah, the Son-of-the-Plains-Lion, stripped off the tuxedo, the clothing of the white man, until he stood naked in the center of his luxurious carpeted room. He walked to the closet and pulled out a large burlap bag filled to the bursting point, and extracted the sacred ceremonial clothes one by one and put them on. The leopard-skin loincloth, then the witch doctor’s hat, his father’s legacy, passed through the generations along with all the magical lore of the Imbagi tribe of Kenya. With hands as slow and careful as a bomb expert defusing a thousand-pounder, Rahallah placed the triangular hat made of a lion’s mane on his head. Then he put a necklace made of the lion’s teeth—shining like a hundred magic tusks—around his neck. He took a tiny bag of powder and walked out to his own private terrace where no one could see him and knelt down on the cold stone.

  The snow coated him quickly with a sugary frosting, but he felt nothing. Neither pleasure nor pain. He took a pinch of the brown dust from the medicine bag and built a little pile of the crumbling substance just in front of his knees. With a small flint striker he ignited it while murmuring a chant, and the powder caught, burning instantly white hot but without flame. A powerful odor of the African sacred herb filled his nostrils as the smoke wafted up, surrounding his head. He reached into the burlap bag for the final things he needed and pulled out a stick with numerous weathered ivory skulls of small plains creatures hanging down from it, bumping together as he moved. Rahallah raised his arms to the sky, opening them wide, shaking the skull-stick.

  “Oh Gods of the Plain, Gods of the Fire,

  Hear my voice as Prince of the Lions,

  Reach to me all the way from the Serengeti, from the Rift Valley.

  Fill the mind of the Grandfather with peace, with freedom.

  Only your powers can stop the darkness from falling.

  Hear me! Hear me! Hear me! Or I will desert you,

  And I am your only believer!

  Rahallah didn’t pray for help—he demanded it, shaking the skull-stick at the writhing gray clouds above, which continued to send down curtains of the fluffy thick flakes of snow. The whiteness quickly covered him, so that only his arms and mouth, which continued to move in ritual motion, were visible. Through the long night he vocalized the ancient words, the secret harmonies to call up the gods of Africa, to make them rise right up through the parched earth of the plains, make them fly down from the icy perches of Mt. Kilimanjaro. For the way things were going—no human was going to save the rad-sickened planet. Only the ancient gods, if they cared any longer.

  Eight

  “I love your nails,” Rona smirked sarcastically from atop her loping ’brid to Kim, who rode just yards away. “You must tell me who does them.”

  “No one does them,” the president’s blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter smiled back icily. “They’re beautiful naturally—just like every other part of me. But I hear you’re having a lot of trouble with your own ‘natural’ attributes—things starting to sag and wrinkle. I know a plastic surgeon in a cave outside of Topeka who can do wonders with—well, anyone—even you.”

  “How kind,” Rona said, forcing down the bile rising in her stomach once again, repressing the urge to smash the smaller woman in the face with a nose-crushing karate blow. “I see he’s done wonders for you. No beauty, of course—but then look what he had to work with. But cute—yes, quite cute. From a sow’s ear into—”

  Rockson rode several yards ahead of the bickering pair, trying to keep his ears locked closed so he wouldn’t have to listen. They had both demanded to be taken with the Doomsday Warrior on the mission. One, maybe—but Rock knew that there was no way in hell he was going to be able to argue both of them out of it, so he simply surrendered. But by the first few hours out it was clear that a continuous stream of highly acidic conversation between the two was going to be the order of the day.

  After the gathered military delegates back in Century City had voted to follow Rockson’s plan, the fortresses to be attacked were assigned to different cities—pretty much according to their manpower, their armaments, their ability to take on a particular-sized Russian fort. Century City’s top battle strategists gave suggestions to those who were willing to listen on the best mode of attack and the time was set. Fourteen days. They would return to their towns and cities and assemble every bit of man and woman power they could. At the same hour in fourteen days, the free forces would strike across America in a coordinated at
tack. And like D-Day almost 150 years ago—everything was riding on it.

  Rockson led a smaller elite unit of Century City’s forces, his own team of Chen, Detroit, Archer, and McCaughlin and ten other hand-picked men. And of course, Kim and Rona, who were giving the rest of the team their fair share of laughs. They would link up with the much larger—nearly 5,000-man—Century City army at Fort Minsk. It was the largest of the midwest fortresses, the central headquarters of military operations for the entire KGB takeover, and if their intel reports were correct—the place that Killov had fled to after miraculously surviving the Octagon’s explosion in Washington. Rockson felt the takeover of Minsk was essential to the success of the war. If they could take out the brain—the arms, the legs would fail. If not . . . But failure was not something Ted Rockson dwelled on. If he did, he would have given up long ago and crawled back into the radioactive dirt. For everything is impossible until you do it.

  “Tell me,” Kim said, not even deigning to look at her opponent in love, “how did you get that red hair? Mecco-root?”

  “Darling—it’s all my own—as is everything you see,” Rona replied with an absurd little laugh. “It’s a pity there’s so little to see on you.”

  “Men just love little packages, dear,” Kim retorted, throwing a hand over her mouth in a little yawn as if the entire proceeding was getting most tedious. “It makes them feel so manly. With you, I would think it would be more along the lines of a wrestling match or a weight-lifting competition—and I’m sure you would do very well.”

  Paces ahead, Rockson didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Men always said they liked that kind of problem—two beautiful women in love with you at the same time. But in reality, it was a different matter. For they spent so much time arguing, there was no energy left for him. But at least they weren’t pulling at each other’s hair and scratching at one another’s eyes.

  He loved them both, each in a different way, each bringing up a whole different range of emotions. He had been Rona’s only lover for years. Though she knew that he slept with others along the road from time to time, she had never made an issue of it. A man is a man is a man. As long as no little hussy from Century City made a stab at her man. And none dared—not against the 5'10", 140 pounds of pure muscle and fighting ability of Rona Wallender, Descended from a famous circus-trapeze family, Rona had been trained as a child in gymnastics and acrobatics, working as a performer in her father’s traveling show—secretly an intelligence-gathering operation for the Freefighters. When her father was captured and executed, Rona had managed to escape and made her way to Century City. The rest was history She and Rockson had hooked up, and . . . Until Kim showed up, she had been his woman.

  The two women were as different from one another as the sun and the moon. Green-eyed Rona—tall, strong, strikingly deep tanned, long-legged, with a face of chiseled beauty, and a mane of flaming red hair that cascaded down her back like a waterfall. She was a star-patterned mutant, too—like Rockson. Strong, tough as nails, resistant to radiation and a host of diseases. And in bed she had taken Rockson to heights of passion even he hadn’t dreamed existed.

  Kim was everything Rona was not—petite at 5'2", blonde, alabaster-complexion, a little on the shy side. She was the all-American girl and, had she lived a hundred years before, would surely have been a model, with a near-perfect look of a certain type of girl who existed only here in the USA. It wasn’t really that she was striking in any way, and if her features were looked at one at a time—ivory skin with a few freckles, blue-green eyes, almost pug nose—she wouldn’t have seemed all that special. But somehow when they were all put together as a face—there was a remarkable open soft beauty that Rockson had found irresistible.

  The Doomsday Warrior decided to just sit back in the saddle and enjoy it. At least he wouldn’t have to choose between the two—not while they were both hammering away at each other’s psyches like two boxers jabbing, constantly jabbing, looking for the slightest weakness so they could come in for the knockout blow.

  “How do you take care of yourself when you’re on your own?” Rona asked Kim with mock concern. “I mean, when there are no men around for you to be protected by?”

  “Oh, haven’t I shown you my arsenal?” Kim laughed. “I’m loaded for bear, darling.” She flung open her velcron-layered field jacket to reveal two pearl-handled .45’s strapped to her waist, a set of throwing knives ready for quick draw, and a snub-nosed magna/aluminum Ingram with a 30-slug clip. “When there’s trouble—it’s usually the men who come to me,” the petite blonde said coolly. And so it went, the rest of the team silent, as they all rode along in single file. Only the barbs of the young women passed back and forth like little platters of poison punctuated the air. Each thought: When we bed down, I will be with him.

  They rode for hours into the evening and then the night, which grew dark as heavy storm clouds migrated by above heading east to deposit their straining loads. Rock decided to camp about midnight, sensing that Snorter, his ’brid, was beginning to falter. And if that giant among mutant horses was feeling tired, the others were surely ready to drop.

  He held his right hand straight up and cried out, “Rest stop—six hours!” The 15 man, 2 woman team headed the ’brids about fifty yards over to a grove of jungle-leaved willow trees, their nuke-mutated hanging branches forming a protective canopy from the elements and from prying Red spy drones in the morning sky—although since the KGB had attempted its coup, Rockson realized that he had seen not one of the cigar-shaped unmanned camera-rockets flying by. Out of the worst of occurrences came useful results.

  The ’brids were given their nylon bags filled with high-protein oats and then allowed to graze on tender morsels nearby while the men set up their sleeping bags and undid their tents, just in case the pack of thunderheads riding miles above their heads should decide to spill out their guts of rain water. McCaughlin quickly set up his mini-kitchen, pulling supplies, pots, and pans down from his two pack ’brids. Using smokeless, low-light flame pellets, he cooked up a meal of rabbit and carrot stew, whose odors had every Freefighter in camp lined up with plate in hand before the tough meat had had time to soften.

  “Just wait, pull your belts tighter around your stomachs,” the big-bellied Scottish fighter/chef said, waving a long stainless-steel ladle at them. “You eat rabbit before it’s tender as a chicken and you won’t be getting much sleep tonight. Not with said rabbit trying to jump through your intestinal tract and back up to its burrow.”

  At last the food was ready and the Freefighters sat around in a circle eating, swapping crude insults, although the level of the joking didn’t slip quite to the usual depths since there were “ladies” present. Thankfully, Kim and Rona kept quiet as they ate, realizing that everyone had probably had about enough for the day. But as Rockson finished and went to turn in after posting guards, both women followed him, setting up their own sleeping sacks on each side of him just yards away. All three of them lay there unable to really fall asleep as they felt the emotions run between them like electric current through a wire. They lay on their backs, eyes open, looking straight up at the sky, each with his or her own seething thoughts and desires. Suddenly the night lit up above as several meteors flew down into the lower atmosphere, burning up in gigantic bonfires in the sky. Since the war, the lower levels of atmosphere in the biospheres around the earth had allowed debris from space to burn more slowly, sometimes hitting the ground in somewhat larger chunks than it had in the past. And the larger masses burned spectacularly at lower altitudes as they speeded up, pulled down by the clutching arms of gravity. The sky was suddenly filled with balls of fire, screaming down from their trillion-mile journeys through space. The meteorites were so large that the Freefighters could see the shapes of them as they came burning down like hawks with their wings on fire, swooping in at stark angles. A globe of white seemed to drop right down on them, filling the night sky with near-daylight for a second. Then it whooshed past, crashing several miles off. They
could see the explosion, the white glow filling the horizon for a moment. Rona’s and Kim’s hearts were beating like pistons, but neither made a sound or reached out to be held by the man they loved. They were like two wolves circling prey, each waiting for the other to make a move. Rockson, seeing no alternative, glumly slept alone.

  The next day, Rockson woke them all early and after freeing the ’brids from their daily collection of burrs, brambles, and twigs, the force loaded up and was off again. Kim and Rona got on the case again within minutes of striking the trail.

  “You look like you could have used a few more hours of beauty sleep,” Kim said, looking over at Rona, whose eyes were often puffy when she first woke up.

  “At least I have something to beautify, dear one,” Rona replied, sitting high in the saddle, her khaki field jacket wide open in the morning heat, revealing her large melon breasts pushing against her gray sweat shirt.

  “Something’s not the word, darling,” Kim went on without missing a beat. “I would say stockpile is more accurate.”

  “If a man came to you looking for supplies,” Rona spat out, “I daresay he’d find only empty shelves.” And so it went.

  The attack force rode for hours, the clouds dissipating as the sun rose higher, cutting them apart with its golden machine-gun rays. They came to a rise in the increasingly sparsely vegetated terrain and Rockson took his field glasses to scan ahead. A motion on the ground several hundred yards forward caught his eyes. A long undulating shape, thick as a branch. A snake—a big one. As he moved the glasses to the right he saw another, then another.

  “Judas Priest,” the Doomsday Warrior cried out, causing Rona and Kim, sitting atop their ’brids on either side of him, to take out their own binocs and look.

  “Yech,” Kim said, making a disgusted expression. “They’re everywhere, Rock—it looks like hundreds of them spread out all across the near part of the plain.”