Doomsday Warrior 16 - American Overthrow (12 page)

“Bow to King Sulphur,” the guard intoned harshly, giving Rockson and the others coming in behind him a most nasty look. Rockson dropped to one knee and motioned for the rest of his men to do the same. It never hurt to carry out the customs and rules of a local society. First rule of combat anthropology.

The face of the ruler looked humanoid, similar to a man, but more like a rounded sculpture, a work of art by a Michelangelo perhaps. For it was smooth, smooth as marble. Notwithstanding that, it could move.

The lips twisted up and the lava king mumbled to a guard by his side. As he spoke, from behind a silk curtain that Rockson hadn’t noticed stepped another of the creatures, this one obviously a female.

She was without the lava scales that all the others had. In fact, she was naked. And she sure as hell looked all woman, even if she was made out of gray stone. Her skin had the same smooth marble texture of the king’s face. It was as if she’d been carved from living marble, multicolored streaks running through her. And her breasts were as full and upturned as any Renoir nude. The curve of her legs, her wasp-waist, were quite lust-producing. A work of art, not a person.

Rockson realized that he was staring at her; as if in a daze. She seemed to put a “hold” over him.

The king was yelling. Rock tore his eyes from the gray female and listened:

“Who you? Where?”
the face asked, moving slowly, the thick lips opening and closing like the doors of a rock-crushing unit.

“From above,” Rockson replied mustering the friendliest smile he could. Which was hard, considering he was staring into the face of a bloodless golem. A creature of stone. Suddenly he felt a shiver, then more of them, ripple along his backbone. The things were not even vaguely human. He sensed something. Inside they were different as well. He’d have to be
very
careful.

“Fell into
hole,”
he said doing a little air-drawing of them tumbling down from the earthquake.

The king nodded without making a sound. He had no doubt seen such phenomenon before. Surely other quakes had brought down animals at least into the chasm tunnel. But men—that was apparently a different story. Although the king and his naked consort didn’t seem afraid, they were very curious about the men who were now all half-kneeling. Even Archer had decided in his feeble brain to let Rockson guide him through all this, since he didn’t exactly comprehend a hell of a lot of what was going on.

“You want hurt my people, hurt the
Lavi?”
the king asked as he leaned back with huge arms folded across his chest.

“No hurt,” Rockson said, standing slowly to his feet. He let his hands dangle at his sides to show no harm was intended, but even at that slow motion guards around the room stiffened and held their weapons out. The king spoke some words to the naked marble woman by his side who answered in a peculiar clicking sound of rock-tongue striking against rock teeth. Then she turned black marble eyes to Rockson. “King Sulphur doesn’t like you, he wants to kill you,” the female humanoid spoke up. “I say no.”

“You speak—our language?” Rockson asked in amazement, letting his gaze rest on her perfect nudity again. He was nearly tongue-struck. He wasn’t sure if it was the curve of her perfect body or the carved Venus face, which had an almost angelic quality to it.

“Yes, I am the listener,” she addressed him. “I listen to the spirits in the rocks around our world. I have touched with your people above. And learned some of the language. The king is suspicious. You must not anger him.”

“No intention of that,” Rockson said, with a “shucks-who-me?” type smile.

She smiled back and Rock saw that the face really could have warm expressions without cracking. The king suddenly motioned again and two guards brought in a third lava-man struggling between them, until they were in front of the throne. The king sternly lectured the pathetic groaning creature in the rock-click tongue. It looked like the creature was crying pebbles from his eyes. Tears of black lava.

Then the king rose up and pointed down with his long staff with a double pronged spear, hooked like a fireman’s ripper. It looked like it could eviscerate a man in a single swipe. He aimed the end down at the hole that dropped down in the center of the teardrop shaped throne room.

And without further ado, the two guards pushed the struggling rock-man into the hole.

He had flailed around wildly. Made of rock or not, it sure as hell didn’t seem like he wanted to go down that hole-to-hell.

There was no thermal updraft to keep him aloft. But there was a bubbling lava dome below, glowing orange and red like a star. It only took a few seconds for the lava-man, once heaved, to land with a
splot
into the pot of boiling slag.

And he was under in a flash, screaming and melting as he sank. Whether they were made of the lava coating or just sort of grew it on them now didn’t matter a hell of a lot.

When it came to falling into lava, Rockson could see, the lava-man was dead as any human man could be!

The king turned to Rockson, and cracked a smile. “Nek?” he asked.

Did that mean
next?

Thirteen

I
n Pattonville, hundreds of miles off, the slave workers of Industrial Hut 17, all fifty of them, were pissed off as hell, which was amazing since half their brains had been eaten away by the repeated exposures to the slave-gas they’d received to keep them docile, and easily controlled. It had worked—up to a point. But even zombies can feel cold and hunger. And their hut was freezing; without the slightest trace of warmth.

The winter winds made shivering bodies on the cold concrete floors feel like they were freezing solid. And the lack of food for days! At least they had been fed to keep their bodies strong enough to work when they worked in the gas factories. But now—now not even that.

So they awoke snarling, their rotted teeth showing as they looked angrily at each other, wondering whether they should carve one of their “brother workers” up. For there was no camaraderie, or sharing between this bunch. They were more like flea-bitten Neanderthals than homo sapiens, each looking out for his own bone with a few flecks of meat on it. They were more animal than men.

And yet—and yet
something
burned within. Something that hardly knew expression. But this morning they were feeling cold, hungry and angry. And they finally felt that
something
too.

“Don’t fight,” one of the slaves, a large one, who had still somehow retained flesh on his overworked and whipped body spoke up. He spoke hoarsely, with lips that hadn’t moved for weeks. “They want us to fight each other,” he said.

There were grumbling all around and some snarls. They didn’t like the idea of any one of them taking power. They were
no
beings, zombie nothings; only the officers could control them. Such had been their brainwashing.

But still the big one went on. “Me 2,789,” he said, standing tall and looking around at them. Somehow his eyes seemed slightly less bloodshot than the others. Because of his large frame, the gas hadn’t taken him quite as well. “Was Henry. Yes Henry. I say . . .
Henry say,
we fight today! We not dogs! Must feed, give us blanket . . . But nothing. Nothing!
Nothing! Nothing!”

He screamed it over and over, banging one huge cut and bruised hand into the other like a drum from hell. The others joined in, somehow pulled out of their usual bickering and fighting among one another for space on the cold floor, and chanted instead.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing . . .” the zombie-workers yelled it, and laughed it. They
understood
it. And even in their dimwittedness they understood that it was a cruel kind of joke. Saw the humor in screaming for nothing. When that was all they had.

“Nothing!
Nothing!”

“Guards come,” another hissed, as he looked out of the broken side of the wall down the street for the factory detail squad which was marching stiff legged toward their aluminum hut. The zombie-men gasped and pulled back. The whips they feared more than anything. Whips with little teeth on them like barbed wire at the ends. They hurt, could rip whole chunks of flesh out. Many of them had gouges and running pus-sores from the barbed whips.

“Come on, you scum,” the sergeant in charge of the transport detail, screamed, banging a wooden nightstick against the aluminum walls, filling the hut with thunderous ear-splitting sounds. “Rise and work another day for the general and his glorious New America.”

“Food,
we need food to work,” the big slave, the one who had once been called Henry spoke up. The others gasped and pulled back, cringing like wild dogs.

“There will be food tonight,” the guard laughed, surprised at seeing one of them even have the balls to raise his voice. “A problem in commissary. Lot of food tonight.
Now
we work.”

“No food—no work,” the big one said, folding his arms across his chest and standing there in his torn filthy rag clothes, like he couldn’t be moved. A few of the others, a little braver, or hungrier came around their self-appointed spokesman and stood up a little taller, not down like most of them were, not all bent over. It felt good just to stand tall.

“Food, need
food,”
another said.

“Food or no work,” they all spoke out, one after another. And suddenly there were twenty, then thirty of them standing around the leader.

“Well!
Would you look at this,” the sergeant laughed, genuinely amused. He slapped the hilt of his rip-whip against the side of the wall. “Boys! Come in! I think we got us a regular strike going on here, labor problems.”

A few of the troopers came in the door holding submachine guns at chest level with huge banana clips coming out from below.

“Food,” Henry-the-leader said monotonously. “Then work!”

“No, you do what we tell you to do,” the sergeant said, his face suddenly turning from amusement to anger and then fury. Imagine! One of the slimy creatures dared to stand up to him. The troops all had contempt for the gas-brained slave workers. And it threatened their contempt of them if the things could talk, or reason, or resist. It had to be stopped. Civil order was threatened.

“Now move,
asshole,”
the guard screamed, whipping out his long black rip-whip right at the leader’s face. The ten foot coil unraveled in a blur and it snapped right against the leader’s cheek. A huge gash appeared from ear to mouth. The sergeant pulled back the whip and swung it back for a second strike.

The “leader” didn’t even flinch or touch the wound as it poured blood down the side of his face. The flesh opened up like two pancakes with red syrup. Some of the other workers gasped and started to pull back. But most stayed. The Russian and French Revolutions began with bread riots, just for simple bread. These men wanted no less.

The hand struck out again, and just as it reached the “leader” the huge slave somehow got his hand up and caught around the end of the rip-whip, where the barbs were thickest. The barbs dug into his hand as he wrapped it around his wrist and forearms a few times. Then he pulled hard. The guard came flying forward, being attached by a strap around his own wrist on the hilt end. As his troops watched in horror and raised their submachine guns, they couldn’t fire for fear of hitting their commander. He was sliding across the cardboard-mattressed floor fresh with the smells of the night’s excretions now, being dragged through shit and puke. The place smelled like an animal house.

But the sergeant wasn’t noticing that. Just that he was suddenly on the floor at the feet of the leader. And the others were around him now. Their feet came slamming down on him. Hundreds of feet, like out of a horrible dream. Scarred and boil-ridden, twisted and bone-broken feet, all slamming out of the air. Within seconds, his body was smashed in a dozen places.

Within seconds his men came rushing in through the door, and lined up until there were a dozen of them along the inner wall. Still, they withheld their submachine-gun fire, for fear of hitting their sergeant.

Suddenly the crowd of wild, raging half-men parted slightly. The second-in-command of the factory detail saw the bloody ragdoll that was left of his superior.

“Judas Priest!” he screamed in fear and rage, “Shoot! He’s dead!”

The dozen guards opened up with their submachine guns, shooting right into the thickest of the resisters. The “leader”—Henry—took a good thirty slugs. The bullets sliced down the man’s body, sending him flying to each side in two badly butchered pieces of human carcass.

The maddened zombie men screamed wildly and rushed forward, now overcome with animal fury They pulled pieces of glass and sharpened nails from their torn work clothes, weapons they had used on one another.

The guard’s submachine guns blasted away at the wall of zombie revolt which came at them in a stinking, polluted crowd of screaming half dead. Many fell, but many more slavering half-men replaced them.

“Nothing, nothing,
nothing,”
they intoned over and over like some sort of insane battle cry. And they fell. By the dozens, just piles of bodies squirming and twitching on the floor. But they kept coming now. Seeing that they were all about to die anyway, even the
stupidest
of creatures will fight back. Even a worm will bite when cornered. Many of them fell, their faces and chests blasted open by the firepower of Hanover’s troops. The primitive knives and shivs flashed and the guards fell too, piled one atop another. They screamed hard as the zombie men sliced up their bodies with great gratification in each thrust. All their pain, all that was left of their humanness within the walking dead physiques came out now in a tidal wave of murderous fiery rage.

They surged over the guards’ corpses and out into the streets, where the rest of the detail had pulled back to the right.

Another dozen troops set up yet another hail of firepower. Which didn’t save them either.

It took nearly an hour to completely quell the riot, once crack troops were sent in and shot to kill. It was the first big disturbance that Pattonville had seen since General Hanover’s takeover. And it was not to go unpunished.