Doomsday Warrior 09 - America’s Zero Hour (10 page)

The Doomsday Warrior jabbed the harpoon forward again with a sudden and powerful motion. It went into Olmo’s hairy throat clear through his neck. Olmo’s eyes rolled up. The giant tottered and then, face forward, Olmo slammed into the red-caked snow. The most feared of the fighters of the North had met his match—Ted Rockson, the Doomsday Warrior.

“You
are
the Doomsday Warrior!” Tinglim said, falling to his knees and touching his hands together in front of him as if in prayer. “Excuse me for doubting you, God Rockson.”

“I’m no damn god—stand up, man! I’ve had to kill Olmo because you think Rockson is a god, not a man. Now you must help me—help
us
defeat Killov and his men. That’s what I ask—help, not worship!”

Tinglim rose slowly, as did the rest of the now-kneeling tribe. “Whatever you wish shall be. Come to our village. Be feasted, bathed, fed, as friends should be.”

It sounded good.

Ten

T
wo hundred miles northwest of Rockson’s party, on the Al-Can Highway:

Colonel Killov watched the snowy terrain move by at a good clip from his warm and cozy cushioned chair in the nose of his all-terrain vehicle. Equipped with every convenience, the treaded trailer had been built for General Dersky of Zhabnov’s Supreme Missile Command. But Dersky was no longer among the living, and Killov had inherited the vehicle when his troops captured Dersky’s five truck-mounted Megon-11 missiles in Idaho. Killov had lost four hundred eighty-nine of his last seven hundred crack Death’s-head Commandos in that raid, but it had been worth it.

Now he was headed north toward the Arctic Circle with the five missiles on balloon-tired trucks behind him. In another nine days—more or less—he would be within firing distance of Moscow itself. And his near rout in America, his failure to take over America, would be reversed. Armed with the unstoppable Megon-11 cruise missiles that could fly eighty feet off the ground at twenty-eight hundred kilometers an hour, Vassily would have no choice but to surrender the Soviet World Empire to Killov’s ironclad rule, or Moscow would be vaporized by the antimatter warheads of the missiles! If Vassily doubted that Killov would destroy Moscow, Killov would fire a missile toward Colorado, where he knew the American base called Century City was located. The entire west-central part of Colorado would be vaporized. That would show Vassily he meant business—and would also get Killov’s nemesis, Ted Rockson, the “Doomsday Warrior,” out of the way once and for all.

Killov had not yet been defeated! He smiled a cadaverous toothy grin, and popped an arunil pill into his lips and swallowed. In moments a flood of pleasure spread in his gut.

The well-equipped trailer he traveled in now was nothing compared to his living quarters on the top two floors of the Denver Monolith. His former headquarters, the eighty-story high, black, opaque Monolith dominated half the state. There he had a hundred servants, a command center that controlled hundreds of swift choppers and fifty thousand troops. Now the Monolith was besieged, soon to fall into the hands of the Red Army. But he would have it back, very soon.

They all thought he was beaten. But he wasn’t yet. Repayment was about to be made. He would aim the missile just far enough away from Denver to have the mountains to the immediate west of the city shielded from total destruction. Of course Denver and half its million inhabitants would be shaken. Many would die. But the Monolith would stand. Then a few weeks later, his loyal troops—and defectors from the regular army hopefully, once they saw his power—would reoccupy his headquarters, restore
his
Capitol to its dark prominence.

Big plans. Plans that depended on no one knowing where he was for the next nine days, until Moscow was in his missiles’ range.

Then let them know. Then let them kneel. It would be too late.

He took another pill, asyminol—a combination of several energy-stimulating drugs. He was a drug addict; his wasted skeletal body craved pills, not food. Killov hated to eat—even his vitamin-mix elixir was distasteful to his mega-drugged system. But the alarm on his watch/medical-alert instrument was beeping. He had to take sustenance. Resignedly, he opened a premixed vial of orange-colored vitamin fluid and drained it in a single swallow. Then in compensation he swallowed a megafetamine tablet.

Killov mused about his five missiles. Vassily had built the ultimate weapon—a force that used the destructive power of the universe, a contained “black hole” in time-space—and thus he had sealed his own doom. Killov broke into a big grin as the pill began leaking its aphrodisiac-hallucinatory stimulant into his intestines. His skeletal body quivered in ecstasy. He moved to the trailer’s window to watch the snow go by. He hardly made it. Damned, he’d have to have more sustenance. The doctor that traveled with him at all times, Dr. Witowski, had set up an intravenous feeding bottle and tube next to his airmatic bed-chair. Killov had a set of sterilized micro hypo needles in the drawer of the end table. He took one out now, attached it to the tube running from the hanging plastic bottle filled with bluish megavitamin and mineral protein glucose, and attached it to the tube. Then he jabbed the needle into the vein throbbing on his right forearm. It didn’t hurt much, it never did, anymore. Still, there were so many scars on his arms that he’d soon have to start using his thighs.

He adjusted the flow meter and watched the enervating life-giving food in soluble solution drip-drip-drip down into the tube. It was infinitely better than chewing and swallowing.

Yes, I am sick, he thought, but I am
respected.

They call me the skull, the monster, the dead man. So be it. Fear engenders respect. And respect engenders obedience. My troops will make this awesome journey through the coldest weather for me. No one would dare challenge me, or fates much worse than frozen death await them.

Killov picked up the interphone.

“How far north are we by the inertial readings, Mershneff?” he asked the driver of the vehicle.

“One hundred miles north of the forty-ninth parallel, Your Excellency,” the driver stuttered out, checking the gauge on the immense, black, light-illuminated dashboard.

“And our speed?”

“Only thirty kilometers per hour, sir—the terrain is quite bumpy and cracked, and wind-blown drifts make it difficult for the ten half-tracks carrying the troops, and even for the missile trucks.”

“Nevertheless, I want to reach the fifty-fourth parallel tonight. We’ve no time to dawdle. Notify all to move faster.”

“Yes, Your Excellency. Immediately, Excellency.”

The hum of the atomic-driven turbines went up a notch and Killov turned once again to the scene outside. He would be satisfied only when they reached the Yukon’s mountains. Of course there would be a great danger there, for the land hadn’t been explored since the nuke war over one hundred years earlier. But his crack troops, his equipment, would be up to it. And his protector,
Death Itself,
the all-powerful entropic power of the universe, had always protected Killov, for he was its most loyal servant.

Spirals of color began spinning in the snow outside as the numerous drugs in his body pushed him to the edge of hallucination. He had to lie down. He closed the window blinds. As he drifted in a drug-induced semi-twilight, he thought. With Rockson dead I will have America, then the entire world, united under my absolute rule. Then I will destroy it. In a million atomic fires, end it all!

To be the
last
to live.

But first . . . Moscow had to surrender, then a brief atomic war of subjugation, nuking the rebel territories of Australia, South Asia, and the Micronesian Free States. Then, when the world is mine, he thought, from my space satellite station, I will press the button and blow everything, every living thing on the five-billion-year-old planet Earth away!

My master, Death, would be most happy . . .

Eleven

R
ock saw wisps of smoke in the air, and when they crested a hill, there lay the Eskimo village. It was a group of several dozen igloos shimmering like immense half-pearls in the vast blanket of snow. Children played on small sleds pulled by husky pups. Women came out of the igloos, though, bundled as they were, it was hard to tell what sex they were. Only their softer complexions and long, silky black hair showed their gender.

Rock, and the Rock team—Archer, Chen, McCaughlin, and Detroit—plus Scheransky, were escorted to the largest white ice igloo.

“How the hell do you build these things anyway?” Rock asked curiously, as they approached the dome of ice.

“It must be done carefully,” Tinglim said. “The entrance must not be in the direction of the prevailing west winds, but perpendicular to it. The igloos are just domes made of ice bricks; actually wind-snow. Highly compact and hard snow we cut in the nearby drifts and cart here. They are laid upward in a spiral of diminishing diameter. If we had wood for scaffolds we would make bigger ones, but we migrate anyhow. So we abandon these igloos when the snowfall gets too heavy and buries them completely.

“Come, let us enter. Watch the ice steps, Rockson—they are steep and dark.”

They passed through curtains and entered the open space inside—a pleasantly lit chamber hung with pelts. On a platform at the far end sat two Eskimo children in thick layers of clothing. They giggled upon seeing the strangers and crawled under the furs. In the middle of the room a small metal stove let its heat into the center but not the edges of the room. The walls were all glazed ice.

“A marvel of engineering,” Scheransky said, “saves bricks too. Imagine, to make buildings out of frozen water!”

“Don’t you know your own history?” Rock asked. “You Russians used to make huge palaces of ice during the Czar’s winter carnivals, which were called
Moslenitza.
That was in the nineteenth century. Your Ivan the Terrible built an ice palace of clear ice on an island in the Volga River each winter. He made sure the walls were crystal clear on his side—he could see the ice castle from his own warm, heated palace. He filled the ice palace with naked virgins and horny dwarves. Ivan watched them try to keep warm together until they froze to death. Then he had his soldiers replace them with fresh victims. The sadistic pleasure of a diseased mind—right?”

Scheransky blushed. “I don’t believe it—but if it is true, that is one reason why we Communists had a revolution to overthrow the mad czars.”

“But Soviet Russia still goes on torturing people all over the world,” Rockson retorted heatedly.

Tinglim protested, “Stop! This is a peaceful house, no arguments! Come, let us sit on the bed platform. Because it is raised, it is the warmest place in the igloo. Let us have nice hot tea and discuss affairs of men, without women around.” He clapped his hands together.

The Nara women withdrew after leaving teapots and cups.

It was warm. Rock and the others removed their ice boots at the edge of the platform and leaned against polar-bear-fur pillows and sipped the hot buttered tea.

“This is more like it,” said Detroit. “But I don’t understand how it can be, say, sixty degrees Fahrenheit here, and the ice wall doesn’t melt.”

“It is caused by currents of air from blow-holes,” said Tinglim proudly, “Plus, of course, the force fields . . .”

“Force fields?” exclaimed Rock. “So that’s the humming I thought I heard.”

“Yes,” Tinglim said. “The Ice City people gave us devices to generate force fields along the ice walls to prevent the warm and cold air from mixing. See the little boxes every five feet along the sides? Go over and touch a wall.”

Rock did so, cautiously. There seemed to be some sort of almost magnetic resistance in the air which his hand had difficulty pushing through. Rockson returned to his seat.

“We could use some of these force field boxes,” Rock said, thinking how Schecter would love to get his hands on one, dismantle it, and see what makes it tick.

After the tea, Rock and Tinglim sat alone by the small metal fireplace in the center of the igloo while the rest of the Rock Team explored other areas of the Eskimo encampment.

The Nara chief told the Doomsday Warrior legends of how his people experienced the Nuke War a hundred years earlier.

“My tribe saw the white lines in the sky, followed by the blossoming of orange glows in the south—in the United States and southern Canada. That glow was followed a few days later by terrible storms here, and then the falling of the ‘burning rains.’ There are tales from the old ones—who were children then—of mysterious sickness. Red boils on the skin, dryness of throat, a gradual withering away of the limbs. And then the birth of strange, mutated children—some more like fish than humans. The mutants were buried alive in the snows near the sacred mountains. Hunting was bad, and the village was starving by spring.

“All the land grew dry, withered, deserted. The lakes had no boats on them in the spring; the rivers and creeks had no canoes in them. No red-coated moose hunters came through our town asking for guides. It is told that one of our young men took a sleigh to find out what had happened. He set off to Nome, Alaska. When he came back, he was all sickly and spotted. He died—but not before telling my people that instead of a white man’s city, there was only a great circular ice lake, with the scattered burned bones of tens of thousands lining its shores.

“So my people stayed in this area. Our medicine men—we call them
Nyqwit
—told us not to wander, for the rest of the world had been poisoned by a Great Evil War.

“So,” Tinglim continued, as Rock listened fascinated, “we stayed in this area and hunted as best we could and found leaves and berries to supplement our meager larders.

“My people were alone, cut off from the outside world, reduced to a few dozen families.

“Forsaking the old ways, and the
Nyqwit
advice, in a desperate search for food, we headed south, where the game was more plentiful. And came upon this unspoiled area. Here we thrived. Alone, for seventy or eighty years. Finally, others came. We have traded with other Eskimos and Indian tribes for the last thirty years. Our people grew so numerous that we split up—we the Nara Clan stayed in this area, near the ocean and fish. Others went into the forbidding Sasquatch Woods, and beyond it, built the Ice City.”