Doomsday Warrior 01 (12 page)

The farmers and tradespeople on the many winding roads of Westfort waved and stopped to talk to one another as they passed as if the morning could go on forever. Here and there, children ran playing, wrapped in different colored ribbons, Tonight was the celebration of the annual harvest planting. There would be dancing and feasting on wild pig and turkey caught especially for the occasion. The festivities would, of course, be held underground in one of the large mining tunnels that the Westfort citizens had expanded during the eighty years since they had founded a community there.

Many of the Free Cities that now lived a secret life hidden from the eyes of their Russian enslavers had sprung up—just out of nowhere. Two families—the Capstans and the Maldanados—fleeing from the storm of atomic bombs that fell that fateful day, a century earlier, had traveled for weeks in the woods and then come upon these valleys at the foot of some low mountains. They had stopped to camp for the night or two to catch their breath, and had never left. Westfort was populated with their descendants and a few lost stragglers who had wandered in from time to time.

The citizens of Westfort set about their daily tasks—working the fields hidden by ingenious brown netting that let light through but created the illusion of being solid ground to any passing videodrones or choppers. There was much to be done this spring. The earth seemed to be growing more and more fertile every year, now that they had learned the trick of dampening the radiation by burying it deep and constantly adding topsoil from the forests and mulch and organic matter. The last three years’ crops had each been better than the one before it. This year they had added string beans, pumpkins and peas to their growing list of vegetables. Maybe someday, all the ancient fruits and vegetables of America would be brought back into cultivation. They saw themselves as more than farmers but as the regenerators of a new United States. The keepers of the flame of agriculture and a way of life. These seeds were in their safekeeping for future generations to have and hold and plant.

In one of the fields, little Jamie Curtis ran squealing behind her father’s mules as they pulled a large, double-sided plow that swept the dark earth into two mounts on each side of the blades.

“Watch out, Jamie,” Pete Curtis, Jamie’s father yelled as he pulled the reins of the two stubborn mules as hard as he could. “Come on now, you get away from there. You could get hurt!”

The little girl ignored her father, playing in the spray of dirt that flew up behind the groaning beasts of burden. Her blond pigtails tossed in the early morning breeze as she jumped and frolicked in her denim coveralls. Pete stopped and looked at his daughter jumping. He had to laugh. She looked so darn cute. What a lucky man he was. A wife like Jenny and a little girl who could laugh at life and play. His hunting dogs. Life suddenly seemed rich and even in this half-destroyed world. With renewed vigor he returned to plowing the field.

“Get on there, you damn mules.” They brayed back at him, opening their long jaws and pulling back the lips to reveal white, cavity-mottled teeth. This time they weren’t going to move and that was that, they decided. Pete dropped the reins and went behind them to start kicking. “Won’t move, here, why—”

Everyone in Westfort heard the sound at the same moment. The city was only two miles from one end to the other. You could almost yell to someone on the opposite side. The sound grew louder. A machine? From the sky. A plane! They tensed. They were well hidden, but still. The Sukav roared in until it was directly overhead, four thousand feet up. Through the air holes of the netting, the spaces between trees, the townspeople stared up apprehensively. Two small, glinting objects detached themselves from the jet which immediately wheeled sharply to the left and accelerated its departure in a trail of blue exhaust. The people watched curiously as two parachutes opened over the falling objects and slowed them to a crawl as they dropped directly toward the center of the valley.

“What is it, Daddy?” Jamie asked, standing next to her father who stared up, shielding his eyes from the sun with an upturned hand.

“Don’t know, baby, maybe some kind of leaflet, writing or something.” The Russians had, in the past, dropped posters ordering the surrender of all Free Americans. They had dropped thousands of tons over vast sections of the country about ten years earlier. “Surrender and you will not be harmed,” the badly typed sheets read. The Freefighters had had a good laugh at that.

The parachutes dropped lower and lower, hovering right over the center of town. Every eye watched, every heart slowed to a crawl. Suddenly there was a ball of fire in the sky. A blast so hot that it burned every eyeball, instantly fusing it to its socket, turning the faces of the watchers into a black leathery substance in less than a millionth of a second. They didn’t have time to scream as the heat and gamma rays of a million-degree thermonuclear neutron bomb shot through their living cells. They crumpled to the ground, their cellular structures broken down into a mass of putty and charred carbon. Brains oozed out of black eyeholes and wide open, powdery mouths. Fingers slid off of hands and feet dropped from legs as the tissue, the muscle and the tendons dissolved and fell in boiling puddles to the burning ground. Every living thing in Westfort, every man and woman and child, every goat, and dog and sheep and cow, every bird, every plant and tree and blade of grass was instantly and totally annihilated.

The smoke of the two blasts formed into one violently churning mushroom cloud, glowing orange and yellow and black, that quickly stretched up nearly two thousand feet in the air. But with the western wind strong this morning, that soon blew away. Now the town looked positively peaceful. The houses mostly intact, coffee cups standing where they had been set, a canoe drifting silently in a still pond. Only the shriveled bodies, as black as meat cooked for days in a blast furnace, and the stripped and smoldering trees betrayed the fact that something was wrong. Terribly wrong!

Nine

C
entury City’s main underground thoroughfare was bustling with people and activity as Rockson left the Council chambers and walked slowly through the center of the Lincoln Square, nearly a thousand feet square and a hundred high. Here, the main industrial and assembly work of the Freefighters went on, with large ventilation fans in the raw rock ceiling pulling out smoke and chemical fumes. It had been nearly a month since Rockson had had time enough to slow down and see how things were going. Broad smiles met the appearance of the man who had done so much to free America. The Ultimate American was a legend throughout the continent, to the downtrodden masses who saw in the uncatchable Rock the symbol of all their striving, their anger, their hatred for their Red masters. But in his own city, he was also one of the citizens, who the people knew as a compassionate man. Rock knew many of them by name, always talking with them when he could, helping with problems.

“Howdy, Rock,” an elderly, white-bearded gent said, pushing a dolly loaded higher than he was with chemicals for the hydroponics.

“Hey, Keaton,” Rock said, smiling, slapping the wiry old codger on the back. They had gone out hunting together years earlier and Rock still remembered things the old-timer, who had prospected for years, had taught him about tracking. “We’ll have to hit the plains again,” Rock said.

“Goddamn right,” Keaton replied with a toothless smile, pushing his load forward. Rockson moved on, exchanging greetings with scores of Century City citizens who stopped to talk and press the flesh of their war champion.

The jobs of Century City were divided up by a complex process of lottery and skills. Those who were highly trained in such work as computer chip assembly, weapon making and hydroponics worked continuously at these jobs, but even they were expected to put in their share of free time working on the ever-expanding tunnel network of Century City, which had to be continually added to to accommodate the city’s growing population, storage and industrial needs. Other workers were chosen by rotating lottery to work at the needed labor—changed every few months so that all citizens shared equally in the hardest and least-favored jobs—sewer maintenance, the manual jobs of transporting goods, working on the camouflage materials above the entrances to the city. The most prestigious job of Century City, and the one that all citizens had their names on waiting lists for the apprenticeships to open up, was the building of the Liberator automatic rifle. The rifle, Century City’s main export to other Free Cities for use in the war against the Reds, was the pride of every man and woman of the town. Invented by Dr. Shecter, it was a .9mm rifle that could with a snap of a switch change from single shot to full auto. With a muzzle velocity of twelve hundred meters per second firing fifty-round clips, the non-jamming rifle came with silencer and infrared nightscope. As the Reds had found out, the rifle could rip a man’s chest apart at half a mile. The Liberator was one of the Freefighters’ most potent weapons against the Red invaders and it was much in demand in the other hidden cities who traded back their own small-scale industrial goods, pelts or produce as payment. The Liberator was produced in a large factory assembly-line layout at the northern section of the cavernous industrial square. Work went on twenty-four hours a day in three shifts of two hundred workers each. The need for such weapons was too great and too important to ever stop. Over four hundred of the weapons were produced a day, then shipped out in small ten-man groups on mule and hybrid.

It was Dr. Shecter’s dream, and Rock’s, that within the next ten years, assembly lines for the rifle and ammunition could be built in all the Free Cities. Shecter was busy designing much more powerful weapons that he promised to reveal to Rock as soon as the bugs were ironed out. The more firepower the Freefighters could train on the Red armies, the quicker their asses would be kicked all the way back to Red Square.

Rock walked over to the Liberator factory and moved from line to line greeting the workers who looked up but continued to perform their jobs for they knew one stoppage would snag the whole line. Rock hefted a just-completed Liberator from the end of one of the lines and sighted down its three cylindrical scopes—one of Shecter’s innovations. Perfect! But of course—the men and women of Century City took their work seriously. A faulty rifle could well mean the life of one of their fighting teams. Could be a brother, a son. The rifles were as perfect as human dexterity could produce. Every one they helped turn out had their spirit in it, their guts and dreams for the future.

Rock continued along the assembly line to where about thirty men and women were filing away at the super-hardened manganese stocks, putting them into final form.

“Hello, Mrs. Greiger,” Rockson said, putting his hand on the shoulder of a middle-aged woman with deep purple circular lines under her eyes. “How is he?”

“Oh, you must have been away, Mr. Rockson,” she answered in a monotone. “He died four days ago. The fever got so high. His flesh turned dry and flaky. He was in much pain.” She looked as if she were about to cry. “But he never complained. The funeral was yesterday.” Charles Greiger, her husband, had been bitten on the hand by a small albino spider while on a wood-gathering squad. By evening his hand had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Within twenty-four hours he had lapsed into a deep fever and a semicomatose state. He had somehow lingered on for nearly a month but death was inevitable.

“I’m sorry,” Rock said, looking down at the concrete work floor. “Charles Greiger was a good man. A member of the Council, a good hunter and a brave fighter. I will remember him.”

The words seemed to genuinely brighten her disposition. Her mouth relaxed for the first time in days. “Thank you, Mr. Rockson,” she said in a whisper.

Rockson took the elevator four levels down to hydroponics to see how things were going. There had been a virulent fungus that had killed nearly a quarter of the city’s crops just a week before he left with the Attack Force. He walked to a sliding steel door and held his palm up to a sensor set in the solid rock wall. The door slid open and Rockson walked into a well-lit agricultural paradise, nearly a quarter of a mile long. An entire level had been devoted to farming, not just to provide foodstuffs for the citizens of Century City but to perform experimentation, crossbreeding with different vegetables and fruits—more radiation resistant, disease immune—but still maintaining the nutritive value of the crops. Within temperature-controlled walls the biologists who worked these sections had stored and catalogued nearly half of every variety of plant and vegetable from prewar America. They were ecstatic when a member of the community, hunting expedition or Attack Group came back with new varieties of flora. Someday, every one of these seeds would be the beginning of millions, billions, of plants that would cover the decimated continent once again—when it was free.

“Hello, Rockson,” chief scientist, head of hydroponics, Kraft said, shaking hands profusely with the warrior. “Good to see you’re back safe from another expedition.”

“Good for us, not the Russians.”

“Of course, of course,” the overweight, constantly fidgeting Kraft replied. He was one of the miracle workers, along with Dr. Shecter, of Century City. Kraft seemed able to do absolutely anything with seeds. He had crossbred countless forms of vegetation, making them useful again. Fruits like apricots, pears and strawberries, vegetables such as corn, red onions and asparagus, which had all nearly disappeared from the American continent, being highly vulnerable to radioactivity, he had resurrected and bred back until they were genetically strong enough to withstand the rads and countless new diseases that seemed to mutate and spring up daily.

“How are the plants?” Rockson asked with a concerned look. “There was some sort of fungus attacking everything just before I left.”

“Oh fine, Rock, fine.” Kraft smiled, waving his hand in the air as if it had all been nothing. “You know, actually that was quite an interesting case. We were losing about a twentieth of the wheat and barley crops a day and were looking for vegetation fungus—bacteria—as the culprit. The usual—microscopic analysis, then petrie dishes, cultures—would have taken months. Suddenly I had a thought. The way the one fungal sample we had been able to isolate looked reminded me of something from an old textbook. I checked it out. Can you believe it, Rock, it was a mutated form of hoof-and-mouth disease—something that only used to hit animals! We treated it with the drug that had been prescribed and, presto, no more damaged crops. We’re working on breeding a resistance into all the grain products now, so there won’t be any more such outbreaks.”