Doomsday Warrior 06 - American Rebellion (16 page)

“Come on, get up, try to walk,” Rock said, lifting the gaunt slave to his feet. The man rose and then stumbled but caught hold of Rockson’s arm and steadied himself.

“Yes, I think I can—but not too fast.”

He held himself stiffly erect. Reborn from being a slave into being a man, at least partially, through Rockson’s words, he didn’t want to give up his dignity now. He walked shakily down the corridor, his body twitching with exquisite pain but his eyes clear and strong. Rockson pulled out a Luger from his belt and handed it to Lyons, who took it in trembling hands. It seemed symbolic of his emancipation—a material object that marked a metaphysical transition from savage to human.

“From this day forward,” Rock said, as they headed down the corridor to the stairs, “you are no longer a slave, Lyons, but a man. And as a man you’ll have to kill the enemies of freedom or be killed. Don’t hesitate. They won’t.” Rock looked the newly liberated man square in the eyes. Freedom was one thing, but keeping it for very long—that was another.

They came out onto the main floor corridor and walked smack into nearly a dozen Nazi storm troopers. Standing in front of them, holding the inevitable Luger that Hitler had done so much to popularize, Von Reisling, his face bright red with rage, his one good eye bloodshot and wide as if it were about to burst from its socket. The two groups—adversaries at the opposite ends of the spectrum of good and evil—stood stock still, frozen in a limbo of hesitation, each side facing down the other. Gunfight at the OK Corral, 2089 AD.

“You,” Von Reisling said, grinding his teeth together like pieces of crumbling chalk. He stared at Rona. “You—my queen. We gave you the ultimate honor—the perfect archetype of Aryan womanhood—a goddess to be worshipped by every proud soldier of the Fatherland. And you threw it all away.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Rona laughed out loud, throwing her head back for a second, and slipping a grenade into her hand from a pouch just behind her lower back. She flicked the pin out and got it launch ready. “My fine Führer Uber,” Rona said, making the eye signal to Rockson, one of a thousand body codes that the C.C. Freefighters learned as part of their training—signaling attack within seconds—hit the dirt on my movement. “I had no intention of ever being your goddess,” Rona went on, continuing to laugh, taking the Nazi’s attention away from what was actually going on. “Besides, you’re a dickless wonder anyway. No goddess could ever be satisfied with an ugly, effeminate, impotent Nazi pig like you, Von Reisling.” She figured one of the adjectives would cause a fuse to blow. And it did. Von Reisling’s face grew even brighter, almost the color of his pulsing blood, and she saw his chest inhale to scream out the command to fire. Only he should have screamed it faster. Rona threw the grenade so it slid along the floor like a bowling ball, and twisted around in a flash diving backward flat on the floor. Rockson grabbed Lyons at the instant he saw her arm move and pulled them both backward onto the marble-tiled floor. The three-second timer gave the Nazis just about enough time to look terrified and time to run. Then it went off, sending out a spitting shredder of shrapnel in every direction. Six men fell, gushing blood in jagged deep wounds in their legs and backs. But they had shielded the others from the metal storm, and they began firing back from their prone positions on the floor.

Rona and Rock edged backward along the walls, firing their subs on auto just inches above the floor. The screams from thirty feet away indicated something had received them. Suddenly Rock heard a sound from above and behind them—more S.S. coming down the stairs. They were boxed in, and the firepower was overwhelming. Just when things were starting to look good, Rock thought with disgust. He turned to Rona, who slid backward on her stomach six feet away across the corridor.

“Any more grenades?” Rock asked hopefully, cursing himself for not grabbing a few himself.

“Not a one,” she said, “and I can see—as I’m sure you can—that the party’s just about over.”

“I hate to say it, but—” His words were cut off as a slug tore into Rockson’s right shoulder, just missing the bone. He winced and then looked up again, slapping his palm over the wound to see how badly it was bleeding. It wasn’t too good, as the hand came back sopping wet. Bullets pinged back and forth along the corridor, just inches above them, ripping pockmarks into the wall. From the stairs above, another hail of fire opened up—coming closer by the second toward the three Americans.

“Oh Rock, I want to die holding you,” Rona cried out, and rolled across the hallway floor, slamming into the only man she had ever loved, half pinning him to the wall. Lyons, just feet behind Rockson, looked on in consternation, barely able to comprehend what was going on. Rona glued her lips to Rock’s as the Doomsday Warrior half gasped in surprise, a stab of pain going through his shoulder as she pulled him tight, wrapping herself around him like a starfish around an anemone.

Suddenly a roar of thunder blasted through the corridor as the very stone floor beneath them shook violently. There were roars, then screams through the thick sheets of dust that instantly filled the place. Screams of terrifying dimensions reaching notes that sent shivers up Rona’s back. Then loud crunching and slurping sounds. From behind them, the same explosion of stone as the walls erupted in a tornado of fragments. The Nazis on the staircase down the corridor from the Freefighters collapsed in a bloody heap as the stair beams unhinged and fell. The Narga crashed in through the walls, their huge swamp bodies slapping along the stone floor as they grabbed every German they could find and decapitated them, swallowing their heads like walnuts.

Rockson and Rona stood up slowly and Lyons remained on the floor, his arms over his head, trying to hide from the horrific sight of the Narga. The Doomsday Warrior sent out a powerful mental blast to make sure they didn’t chomp too quickly on one of his appendages.

“This is the Rockson! In the corridor ahead! The Rockson!”
Lyons ran over to Rock’s side, standing as close as he could to the Doomsday Warrior as the immense green slime things emerged from the swirling dust of the caved-in walls. They stopped just feet away, four of them, and stared down at the Americans.

“Should we eat him?”
a voice asked telepathically, poking a huge wet finger at Lyons, who let out a scream that echoed down the collapsed corridor.

“No, he’s with me,” Rockson said firmly. The swamp creatures turned and headed out in search of more goodies. Rock, Rona and Lyons walked over the headless German bodies that littered the hall and out into the street. The fortress was in ruins—half-eaten corpses lay everywhere, appendages strewn around like a parts shop. Countless fires lapped their licking flames into the air, as explosions rocked the ground every few seconds. Towering funnels of smoke joined together, creating a vast black shroud high over the fortress. The Narga had the destructive powers of an atomic bomb, leaving nothing untouched in their path. The Nazi invasion force, the Fourth Reich, destined to last “ten thousand years,” met its violent destiny lost in the slime-coated stomachs of the ugliest creatures God had ever put on the face of the earth.

Sixteen

T
he swamp mutations spent nearly two days inside the fortress city of Goerringrad or what was left of it, munching on the leftovers of their deceased enemy. They ate everything, grinding down the very bones that lay in the streets, sucking out the marrow like old dogs. Then they left, heading back to the swamps, to their world of eternal green hell. Behind them not a creature stirred, not even a mouse.

The slaves of the fortress had exited post haste from the burning death camp and run into the hills. It had all happened so fast, the Rockson appearing, and the creatures from hell itself. Now they were on their own, split up into smaller groups, anywhere from four to twenty, trying to clumsily hunt, make fires, keep warm. Over half would die in the next six months, but the other half would live, would be made tough fighters, ready to strike back at those who had forced them into chains.

Rockson, Rona and Lyons made their way slowly through the Rockies back toward Century City, over 150 miles away, moving at night and in the early dawn, and resting during the day in shade, so as to avoid any Russian drones that flew constantly overhead, searching for survivors of the Battle of Forrester—and the location of Century City. Lyons seemed very tired the first two days and Rock didn’t want to push him too hard. He had grown to like something in the feisty, humorous nature of the teenager and felt somehow responsible for him. As if releasing him from slavery had made him Rockson’s stepson, and Rockson the Father of Freedom. The three of them hit it off, and Lyons, once he saw that he wasn’t going to die, left the two Freefighters in stitches with his stories of his early life, traveling with his father who was a salesman selling everything from nails to snake oil, ammunition to corsets, magic spells, love potions, and positive, absolute triple-your-money-back money-making amulets. They had crisscrossed the U.S. twice a year, working their way all the way down to Texas and as far north as Canada, all in a beat-up old horsedrawn wagon.

“The wagon kept going,” Lyons told them with a grin. “It was the horses that dropped. Dad used to drive ’em so hard, always claiming they was just lazy sons-of-bitches. ‘Ain’t nothing lazier than a horse’ he used to tell me. ‘Man’s gotta make ’em work, earn their oats,’ And damned if he wouldn’t push them all day and night, just to get to the next town where they’d be having some kind of fair or something, and the damned thing would inevitably drop over like some big old tree hit by lightning, right in the middle of the road. And Dad would jump out and start kicking and screaming at that horse, claiming it was just being lazy. I’d say ‘Dad, the damned thing’s dead’ and he’d say ‘No he ain’t, just being lazy. Being dead is the laziest trick they got’.

“Saw a lot of this country,” Lyons went on, as they traversed a sharp pebbled slope, rising up nearly a thousand feet above them. “Before the Reds caught up that is. Said Dad was a spy ’cause they found binoculars and cameras in the wagon. Shot him right on the spot, right in front of me. Then took me off to the labor camps. And there I’ve been,” he said, looking at Rockson as he jumped over a black needled thornbush. “For nearly five years now,” Lyons continued. “Passed from one damned Red fort to another like a piece of cattle till
you
kicked some sense into my goddamned head. Being in those camps, at first you resist, you know. But day after day, they smash you, kick you, piss on you, don’t give you food, even water. They make you become a slave, Rock, mold you like clay over and over and over. And then one day your mind is just—gone. You know, I can remember the first few camps I was in—the guards who beat me, the work we did. But after that—it’s just a blur, like this mist that hurts to even touch.”

“It will come back,” Rock said softly. “Being free is perhaps the most painful thing a man can do. It’s much easier to stay in a state of perpetual numbness, then you don’t have to feel the pain. You become a slug, crawling on the ground, oblivious to the world, to life around you. But when freedom comes, it makes you sick to your stomach because it’s so frightening, because all those memories slowly come back, haunting you. But all memories fade, and new ones take their place. Most of the time,” he added softly, thinking with a twinge of his father being mutilated, killed, his mother and sisters raped, then killed. That was a memory that would never disappear as long as he lived.

By the third day, they were all enjoying the mountain trek. Lyons seemed completely recovered now, jumping around like a young buck, running circles around Rona and Rockson. He was slowly coming to life, and it warmed both their hearts to see it. Up there in the thick forests of Colorado, it felt as if all the world were all right, a paradise compared to so much of America. Birds, circling above, chirped out their songs. Deer and small game scampered around the woods, hardly afraid of the human since they had seen none in so long. Rock showed Lyons how to track and hunt. That evening as the sun set Rona built a small fire out of kumak tree branches, a new breed of oak that burned with hardly any smoke. The woods in this part of the Rockies were abundant with the sweet smelling species. Rock led the teenager through the woods, showing him how to walk Indian style so as not to make noise, to keep downwind, to spot tracks, droppings. The youth took it all in with great interest.

“There.” Rock said with a whisper, pointing to the right. “90 feet. See—it looks just like part of the bushes right? A shadow.”

Lyons squinted and then his face lit up. “I see it! Yeah! A deer or something.”

“A chameleon deer,” Rock said. “Or at least that’s what Shecter’s zoologist boys call them anyway. They’re able to change their color to match any surrounding they’re in—in seconds. There, it’s moving.”

The two men watched as the medium-sized male mountain deer walked from a dark patch to an open space lit up with red streaks from the quickly falling ball of fire 96 million miles away. Instantly, the creature’s hide turned a blazing red as if it were just a patch of light from the brilliant sunset.

“Now, sight up on the chest,” he said as Lyons swung the Kalashnikov around and imitated Rockson’s prone posture.

“Don’t try for a head shot—at least not with a rifle like this. The chest, lower part. Now squeeze.”

Both men pulled the trigger and their rifles spat twin slugs at the same instant. They entered the chameleon deer’s chest just three inches apart and passed through the heart, lodging in the lungs on the other side. The mountain deer looked extremely surprised for about one second as its head jerked straight up in the air. Then it fell flat over on its side, stone cold dead.

They walked over and Rock leaned down to look at the bullet holes.

“Perfect shot my lad,” Rockson said proudly, glad that his efforts were paying off. He hadn’t been wrong about the kid. He was going to turn out to be a good one. Maybe another Rockson himself. The Doomsday Warrior took out a razor sharp, short bladed bayonet he had snatched from the Nazi camp on the way out and showed Lyons how to butcher the deer, skin it, where the best meat was. Within minutes they had 20 pounds of thick steaks all sliced and piled, and Rockson was wrapping them in the thick leaves of the oak trees, tying the whole package with some of the thin vines that hung down around them.