Doomsday Warrior 16 - American Overthrow (23 page)

For they were in the middle of a wedding chapel. An ornate chapel to say the least, with banners and white lace everywhere. Tables were laid out with foods and wines, even fresh fruits. Standing up on a stage was General Hanover decked out in his military finest with acres of ribbons hanging like laundry on his chest. And next to him, looked drugged out as John Carradine in
Atomic Vampire,
was President Langford! His eyes were glazed over, staring straight ahead. General Hanover had had him rigged up in full tails and silk tie. It was a pitiful, humiliating sight.

Rock’s eyes jumped over to Kim who was there too. She hardly seemed to notice the goings-on, completely drugged out herself. Hanover had been unable to get anyone’s cooperation on all this without massive amounts of gas fed into their brains. Rock felt a kind of sad pride for the President and his daughter. They had held out until the last weeks at least, until they didn’t have their willpower anymore.

They all froze, the wedding party, the chaplain officiating, the officers gathered along a second floor balcony. There were a good hundred or more of Hanover’s top staff in attendance. And the Freefighters looked at each other, then Rock for several long seconds, unsure how to proceed.

“You’ve disrupted my wedding,” Hanover screamed with anger from the stage. “I didn’t invite you here.”
Balls,
real
balls!

“Sorry to be so rude, general,” Rockson yelled across the eighty feet or so that separated him from the ceremony on the stage. “But there’s not going to be any goddamn wedding. Or
anything,
for that matter, for
you
anymore. It’s over. Your damned psycho military nightmare is over.” Rock knew he was being a little bold, to say the least, since they were surrounded by rows of troopers, but one might as well be bold when it came to this sort of thing. It couldn’t hurt. He kept wondering why the bastards weren’t being touched by the gas that had taken out so much of the city. Maybe the place was super-insulated.

Kim looked beautiful, exquisite in a long silk and pearl gown that Hanover had dug up somewhere for her. Her honey-blond hair hung in golden tresses down her shoulders, and she carried a bouquet of flowers under one arm.

“Now please continue,” the general said to the terrified chaplain, who stood sweating a few feet off, all decked out in purple and black robes with military insignias all over it. “And— And do you, General Hanover, take this woman, Kim Langford, to be your lawful wedded wife?”

“Oh yes, I
do,”
Hanover replied with a lascivious look on his granite face. “I certainly do.”

“And you, Kim Langford,” the chaplain continued with his dastardly ceremony, a betrayal of any real ceremony of the vows of love that had ever occurred, “do you take this man, General Hanover, to be your husband. To serve him and obey as a slave, so help you God?”

“I—I,” Kim stuttered. Hanover leaned forward expectantly.

“No,
Kim, no,” Rockson shouted from across the room. “You’re Kim Langford. Think.
Think.”

“I—I—” Kim went on, getting a strange expression on her face as she tried to understand it all. It was so hard. But she knew she didn’t want to marry the slime who suddenly appeared in front of her, as her drugged-eyes cleared just slightly. “I—” she stepped forward, as if to embrace Hanover and quickly came up hard with a knee in his groin.

“Don’t!”
the general let out a scream of intense pain and toppled over sideways. Kim began running along the stage, falling after several steps as her legs didn’t work too well. She went down on hands and knees and kept crawling along the stage, obviously ready to do anything to get away from the bastard.

The officers standing around the center of the main floor and up in the second floor balcony above hesitated. Then they took out their service revolvers. They didn’t exactly want to kill the general’s bride. Even if she had just kicked him in the balls, but
something
had to be done!

“Come on, Kim, come on, baby,” Rockson exhorted her as she made her way down the side of the stage, against the wall, toward his voice.

She was like a terrified animal within the drug-induced daze, struggling to keep her body moving almost against its will. Suddenly she reached them, and Rockson reached out from behind a large leather couch and grabbed her.

“You’re all right,” Rock said, stroking her hair. “I promise you things will be all right, baby.” She looked at him through the dim baby-blue eyes, as if trying to remember his face. And Rockson felt like crying.

“You won’t get away,” Hanover screamed from the stage. “Shoot them, shoot to
kill,”
he commanded his officer corps. “I want the woman—dead or alive. Ted Rockson is not going to take her from me.” With those words the entire assemblage opened up with an absolute fusillade of gunfire. The place sounded like a shooting range as the slugs tore at the Freefighters from everywhere. Hidden behind a row of sofas, armchairs and chrome seats they returned the fire. The tops of furniture pieces began taking dozens of shots. They ripped through the thick fabric and stuffing and splintered out pieces of wood which flew up in the air. The Freefighters, who were flat down on the floor, were covered with the stuffing and other junk floating in the air all around them. Rockson covered Kim with his body and prayed a stray bullet wouldn’t take her.

It was like going through World War II all wrapped up into one minute. The firing seemed to go on and on, and everything around them was peppered with slugs. The whole world was smoking splinters, furniture pieces that rained down over them as if they were in a flaming toothpick storm.

At last the firing stopped as Hanover screamed to cease fire. The Freefighters glanced around at each other spread out on the floor. Rock nodded no, not to move. He knew the stoppage of slugs wouldn’t last for very long.

“Rockson, if you’re still alive, release her now,” Hanover’s voice spoke out. “And the rest of you can
walk.
Come now, you’re a military man. You know the odds. It’s common sense.” He waited a good twenty seconds and, seeing there was no response, ordered them to fire again.

And the whole place opened up on the four Freefighters, one zombie, and the President’s daughter. The noise was deafening as was the sensation for the trapped escapees of hearing bullets whiz right by their ears, and scalps, too close for comfort. What was left of the couches and antique seats began totally disintegrating and flying up in whole chunks all around them. Their little barricade of fine antiques was going to be cut down to tinder within a few more seconds. And yet if they rose up and made a run for it, there was no way they’d get five feet in that blazing wall of firepower.

Rock felt scared. Not for him. Not for dying, which he knew was only seconds off, as it seemed the entire officer corps of Pattonville just plunked away, enjoying themselves immeasurably. He was ready to die, had been for many years. He had seen the grim reaper come at any moment, take a man or a woman and rip them into the beyond in the blinking of an eye. There wasn’t a goddamned thing you could do about it. But Kim—and the President—dying or worse—being so drugged out they’d become a puppet for Hanover . . . He was afraid for America itself. Without the President, the entire country would be unilaterally weakened. The guy had just started bringing back some organization, spirit, with his death, or lifelong zombie servitude, the country would be set back a hundred years. That bastard Hanover was close to succeeding at his darkest plans.

“Oh, baby,” he said, whispering in Kim’s ear as he tried to cover her completely to stop any incoming slugs. “I love you.” He kissed her neck and thought he heard her echo the word, “love,” several times. He didn’t know if it was for him, or just zombie-mouthings, like a parrot repeating words. The slugs ripped a whole chunk of the seat that had been protecting them and pieces went ripping over his back, scraping along it. He squeezed her tighter. It was dying-time.

Suddenly there was a raucous commotion at the main door about ten yards behind them. The air was filled with more gunfire and stomping of many feet on the floor. Now they were trapped from every side, Rock realized, escape 120% impossible.

But even as Rockson whipped his free arm around, his pistol in hand to take out as many of the bastards as he could before they cut him down, he saw with total amazement that it
wasn’t
Hanover’s troopers at all. It was a zombie army, two hundred or so of Dr. Mason’s men joined by those they had freed already. And they were all well armed. The zombie-men were stumbling, heads lolling from side to side, rolling those crazy reddish eyes, gasmasks over their noses and mouths. But guns were held out with pride. They were ready to do their clumsy bit.

“Judas Priest,” Rockson whispered as the gunfire from above slowed down as the officer corps squinted to see just who the hell was coming in, wanting to make sure it wasn’t their own men.

“Thought we’d come and join in on the wedding party,” Dr. Mason said. He looked wild with his lab smock on, head and whole side paralyzed, yet wearing combat boots and carrying a Liberator 15 shot .9mm semi-auto with his good arm. “I always thought I’d make a great general,” he laughed as he hobbled in at the head of his gashead cavalry. Rockson had never loved a guy as much as he did the crippled doctor at that moment. “And my boys are ready to—dance too,” the doc said.

“There’s plenty of dance partners,” Rock screamed as the rest of the Freefighters looked on in joy. The brain-dead hordes had come to the rescue. “Hanover’s up on stage, the President’s with him, but otherwise everyone you see is basically the enemy. Go to it!”

“Let’s fuck ’em over boys,” Mason screamed as he came past Rockson down the aisle firing his rifle up toward the balcony. If the Pattonville troopers had been cautious for a few seconds, now they opened up in sheer terror, shooting down into the milling crowds which pushed eagerly through the smashed open door that Detroit’s grenades had taken out. They raised their weapons clumsily with Mason screaming at them to “fire, fire,” yelling like they were little children.

But fire they did and began taking out whole sections of the balcony. There were hundreds of them, and they had no real concept of fear. So they would just pick one person and raise their arm and slowly pull the trigger back again and again until target-contact was made, then move on to the next, completely oblivious to the bullets flying all around.

The slugs tore through the “wedding chamber” like a swarm of locusts set on wreaking total destruction on a field of wheat. Tables, party platters, meats all went flying, exploding into thousands of pieces. Glass, plates, and crates of wine all shattered and filled the air with spinning broken glass and a bloodlike mist from the wines.

Rock’s expression changed from frozen preparedness of dying to a smile. Even in the midst of all this hell, with bodies being blasted to bits on every side, he knew they had a chance now. He scanned the stage for the President and saw Hanover leading him offstage like a dog on a leash, through the edge of a back curtain.

“Take over,” Rockson screamed at Detroit as he ran in a crouch along the wall and up to the stage. Shots winged down from the side of the upper level as dozens of officers opened up trying to take out Rockson.

“Cover fire,” Detroit screamed. He jumped to his feet and instantly released two grenades which soared across the wide room heading unerringly toward that side of the balcony. Right behind them were a blasting of shots as Chen and Ralph pumped away with their handguns. Archer released a small phosphorous bomb-tipped arrow, just to add to the fun. Rock felt a slug whiz right by his nose, then felt the explosions of the various junk the Freefighters had just went over going off like the Fourth of July. The whole side of the balcony was just fire, smoke and screams. And the slugs stopped flying toward Rockson, at least for the moment.

He took advantage to rise up from the stairs—where he had stumbled from the blasts only sixty feet away—and tore up the rest of the stairs and across the stage.

As the zombies advanced into the room, firing from their disorganized ranks like some kind of chaotic but unstoppable force of nature, the officers poured down their own fire on them. Rockson moved like a stampeding stallion through the curtains and down into the backstage, which was as empty as an ashtray at a Smoker’s Anonymous meeting.

Rockson was on his own now. He came to an arched juncture after several hundred yards, and three possible tunnels, these rounded with concrete buffer-shells. He listened at each tunnel, but couldn’t hear anything.

Hanover was at least a minute ahead. It was a long time. He couldn’t make the decision with his rational mind. He closed his eyes and sensed the auras in each of the tunnels. Then chose. The
middle
one. He was sure of it.

He flew down the narrow passageway as he heard the firing rising in crescendo behind him. They were really whooping it up in there. Rock wondered how long it would take the officer corps to grow too terrified to fight as the zombie squads just kept coming after them. They were an army of nightmare proportion.

He ran with every bit of strength he could pump out of his aching legs and must have gone another two hundred yards or so when he came to a steel door. It was unlocked. He flipped the handle around a few times and stepped into the room, his .357 ready to fire.

It was a large chamber, steel-walled and roughly oval shape, stretching off perhaps a hundred feet. And it was filled with gas cannisters piled floor to ceiling. And lots of lab equipment. Maybe Hanover’s main lab for making the stuff.

Six huge steel vats sat in the middle of the floor. They were filled with a liquid, he could see because the vats were set down into the floor, about half way, so that only the top five feet of them rose above floor level. Inside of each vat were bubbling brews. The vats must have held thousands of gallons each. The gas vapors that rose up out of them were collecting in huge funnels about ten feet above and being piped into a compressor to one side. It was quite an operation.