Doomsday Warrior 06 - American Rebellion (7 page)

They drove down the main road and toward the back of the fort, passing row after row of storage buildings, then Nazi troop barracks and at last their own slave quarters on the outer edges. Rockson looked down at the blackened burning skin on his forearm and the words JOE 113. It was as good a name as any, he thought ironically. It would do for now. The truck suddenly lurched to a stop and the men were ordered out by the guards at the back.

“This is a garbage detail,” a young pimply-faced German lieutenant said to them in as officious and condescending a tone as he could muster, though his voice cracked every once in a while. “You are the waste of the waste, the scum of the scum,” the lieutenant addressed them, his red pimples covering his face like little volcanos about to erupt against the chalky whiteness of his skin.

“You are here to carry the waste products out of this fortress,” the lieutenant continued, walking back and forth in front of them. Off to his side stood another fifty or so men, those who already worked on the G-squad. “Some men considered it quite fortunate to end up here. When they move the refuse, the food, the bodies, the excrement, to the swamps to the west of the Fortress, they can eat what they can find. The men of the garage squad are the fattest men of all the slaves. So you see perhaps you are quite fortunate to be the scum of the scum.” He stood up to as imperious a height as he could at 5' 2" tall, wet his lips with a narrow tongue, and continued. “It is of no concern to me what you savages eat. All I demand of you is that the work get done. That each night whatever is here in this disposal sector is empty by nightfall. Then you and I will get along just fine and you can, as they say, have your cake and eat it too.

“My final words—you are the only slaves of the city who go outside the walls. Thus you will think no doubt of escape. Don’t. There are nearly twenty guards who will always be with you. They will kill you on the spot, without hesitation for the slightest infraction. Believe me. If you should somehow get away you would find, I’m afraid, nothing but radioactive swampland stretching for nearly fifty miles. Impenetrable. No man who has disappeared into its innards has ever returned.” The lieutenant looked around, decided he had said enough and turned on his heels back to his staff car, driving quickly off from the wretched smell that the piles of waste and bodies gave off as they festered in the slowly rising sun.

“You,” one of the guards said, pointing to Rockson and the ten men around him, “over there to the B-squad.” The Doomsday Warrior’s stomach almost turned when he looked inside a long steel dumpster and saw its load. Dead slaves from the past two days, taken from where they had fallen and just deposited here. The fortress, with somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 slaves—they had lost count—lost nearly 200 of them a day, so rigorous was the work load they carried, so little the allowance for rest. The corpses were piled one atop another inside the rectangular garbage disposal like bloody dolls. Their faces and pale white bodies were already ballooning up, bloating from their own rotting flesh and the gases they produced. The bodies were all naked—the clothes were recycled—not the humans. And Rockson could see as he looked closer that the flesh was crawling with insects, ants, roaches, centipedes, small yellow and pink worms—all taking their fill.

“Here,” a voice said brusquely. Rockson turned; one of the slaves, a large man nearly his own size, was handing him a rusted and slightly bent pitchfork.

“What the hell is this for?” Rockson asked, not too pleased with the budding thought of what in fact they were to be used for.

“For loading, what the hell do you think, scum,” the man snarled back. “Listen, I heard about you already. You’re the troublemaker who fought with Foster 236 over in block R17. I don’t care about that, but just don’t cause no trouble here, okay? I’m Smith 679. I’m the work boss of this gang. The Nazis hold
me
responsible for whatever goes down. Now I don’t give a shit about anyone but myself. You understand. I’m out for me—for every scrap of food, every bit of favor I can get from the Nazi pigs. Anything—any man, gets in my way, threatens my power—he’s dead. All I got to do is tell our friends over there that you’re causing problems and they’ll shoot you on the spot.” He looked Rockson up and down, a little surprised by the calm motionless way that Joe 113 listened to the words without betraying the slightest emotion.

“Understand?” Smith 679 asked, not quite able to bring himself to look right into those throbbing eyes, but focusing on his forehead instead.

“Sure,” Rockson spat out, becoming more disgusted by the minute by everyone in this damned hellhole. God, what his fellow Americans had sunk to, he thought. The way these slaves dressed, letting their clothing just disintegrate around them. They let themselves
be
slaves—helped the Reds and the Nazis carry out their plans of subjugation, humiliation and death. It was as if they had all just given up from the start—said here we are, signed, sealed and delivered, do what you want with us. Why, if every slave in the complex suddenly fought back, they could probably defeat the Germans or at least destroy the fortress. He felt a stirring in his breast to make them understand, to change the way they acted and thought. To change them from slaves into men. But how in hell he would ever do that he hadn’t the slightest idea.

“All right, let’s get this show on the road,” Smith 679 roared out to the other corpse disposers, who stood around listlessly, their gray and brown rags hanging to the ground like the fallen branches of a dead tree. The head of the corpsemen walked to the back of the dumpster and unhitched a large clasp, swinging the ten-foot square steel door open with a resounding clank as it hit the outer side.

“Bring the train,” Smith 679 ordered. From around the side of a large flat square concrete structure men came pushing a flatbed railroad car, stripped of everything except its wheels and wooden top. Rockson looked around and suddenly noticed that there were two sets of railroad tracks that ran through the garbage sector and off toward the west.

“Load ’em up,” Smith 679 roared out as the flatbed came alongside the open end of the dumpster from which bodies were already sliding in bloody trails onto the ground.

Two slaves in front of Rockson leaned over and dug their pitchfork into two of the falling dead, spearing them in the chest or stomach. They pulled back as hard as they could and heaved the things up and onto the railroad car, where they landed with loud spattering sounds. Rockson took a deep breath and lanced one—a large-bellied fellow with folds of fat that had formed breasts on his chest, now half rotted away. With all his strength the Doomsday Warrior hefted the thing in a perfect arc up from the ground and over to the train, where it slammed down with a squishing thud.

The slaves forked their way through the smorgasboard of dead until the train was loaded—bodies, arms, white legs drained of their blood, dangling over the sides.

“Get behind it, all of you,” Smith 679 ordered. His voice screamed, the veins in his throat popping out whenever he gave an order, as if he had to frighten his charges at every moment of contact with them. The twenty new men of the corpse squad lined up around the back and sides of the nearly 60-foot long flatbed, Rockson taking the middle back end.

“Heave, heave,” Smith screamed out, standing alongside the death car, waving his arms up and down in an effort to make them put some strength into it. The hardest part was just getting the immense momentum of the thing going. It felt to the slaves as if they were pushing against a mountain. Not a budge, but as they heaved and grew beet-red with exertion, slowly, an inch at a time, the thing rolled achingly forward. First an inch each second, then a foot, until suddenly it was sliding forward as its great bulk took over. Now they just had to keep the energy going, running alongside it, pushing with outstretched arms. It was nearly a mile and a half to the outer edge of the swamp where the corpses were to be dumped. The land was flat and the car filled with newly dead raced along as if to an important meeting.

“Why the hell don’t they use an engine?” Rockson asked the slave pushing next to him, a tough-looking fellow, but with a reasonably friendly face.

“Don’t want to waste the fuel,” the man spat, as he ran pushing from behind, bent over at an almost 50-degree angle. “ ’Sides, it gives them something for us to do—and they don’t have to get all involved in the stench and all.”

“Thanks,” Rock answered, grateful to even get a normal human response from one of these cold and hostile slave workers. Smith 679 and the guard team rode alongside in a small truck, also without sides, watching with bored expressions, their Kalashnikovs on their laps. They had seen the same sight for months and it no longer disgusted or even amused them. It was just work, until they could return to their air-conditioned barracks and eat and watch the films that the base provided. For there were elite troops, every one of them the proud flagbearers of the resurgent Nazi army—that at least in the back of the minds of all the Germans here in the U.S.S.A. might one day once again become the supreme forces. But these were thoughts they never expressed to their Red commanders and suppliers. They were firmly under Premier Vassily’s control. But someday, someday . . .

“Slow down,” Smith 679 screamed out through a small cardboard megaphone he always carried with him. He could see the foaming green and purple scummed swamp just a few hundred yards ahead. There was protective concrete stopgate about five feet from the edge but all he needed was for the fools to go too fast and slam right through. His private room, his real food—scraps from the officer’s canteen—all would be gone. His life he cared little about, it was the privileges, the power over the others.
That
was his only purpose, his only reason for life.

The slaves stopped pushing and ran alongside the gradually slowing death car, reaching out with extended hands when it grew closer to the swamp and pulling back now, trying to stop the great load of carcasses. They eased the freight in so the car stopped just a foot from the concrete embankment.

“Excellent, excellent,” Smith 679 said, jumping from the truck with as much of a smile as his greedy rodentlike face could exhibit. All his worries of losing his “wealth” vanished like clouds of a thunderstorm blown away—at least for today.

He walked over to the swamp and looked in. It seemed all right today. Sometimes it bubbled and seemed to almost writhe with releasing gasses and decomposing matter. Every bit of waste that the fort produced was dumped here—from the bodies to the rotting food of the officers to the excrement, used chemicals, and by-products of their science and production labs. It stretched on for miles, thick as pea soup but never smooth, always covered with a surface of thick, bubbling foam with the tops of things dumped in recently still poking through from place to place—the roof of a wrecked car, a leg . . . God knew how deep the thing was—but so far, at least, it seemed to be able to swallow everything they could give it. Only strange narrow black-barked trees with red leaves and purple vines running down their trunks seemed able to grow in the foulness. They stood every fifty, hundred feet or so in little groves of ten or twenty, rising right out from under the impenetrable green oily muck below them.

“Okay—dump ’em!” Smith 679 yelled out, walking the ten feet over to the railroad car. The men formed a line and walked down to the side of the car, each one in turn spearing the closest body on the flatbed on the tip of his long, curved pitchfork. Each man hoisted the thing with all his upper-body strength so that he was holding it almost upright some four or five feet straight over his head, and walked with lurching steps toward the edge of the swamp where he let the pitchfork fall forward so that the body splashed into the thick slime and disappeared instantly beneath the surface.

Rockson’s fork tore into a frail-looking elderly man with a long silver beard. The man’s naked body looked almost child-like without hair. He couldn’t have lasted very long in a Nazi workgang, Rockson thought to himself as he lifted it overhead and walked over to the bank. He let the man fall down and watched with a tightening sensation in his stomach as the body, that rigor mortis piece of nothing that had once been a man with a real life, was disposed of like the most wretched piece of refuse. He vowed to wreak revenge for all the dead right then and there. Somehow, he, whoever the hell he was, would make the murderers pay—in blood. And he also knew, whoever he was, that he was the kind of man who would do what he vowed.

His next corpse must have been ten days old, as it seemed ready to come apart at the proverbial seams of the shoulder and thigh at any moment. Rockson hefted it carefully, but as he jerked it overhead one of the legs fell off and landed on his shoulder, flopping onto the ground with a slapping dead sound. Rock watched the limbless body plunge into the green swamp and then, with a look of infinite disgust, speared the chalk-white leg with dark green veins running along each side and hefted it over into the muck. It had just hit the foam and slid in, when Rock felt himself grow faint. Voices, images, crashing in his head. He couldn’t understand them, but they hurt—burning like shrapnel ripping through his skull. He felt himself falling, falling, being pulled toward a cacophonous chorus of madness. Suddenly an arm was pulling him. Rock opened his eyes and looked up into the grimy face of the friendly slave he had talked to behind the railroad car.

“Mister you was almost just dead,” the man said, pulling Rock back, and letting him go, as he saw the man could stand on his own. “You was halfway down into that swamp,” the slave continued with a half grin on his face, “eyes rolling up in your head and all. I just happened to be behind you and . . .”

“Thanks,” Rock said, with a smile. He owed his life to the man. “What’s your name?”

“Tom 72,” he said, then leaned forward, relaxing. “Real name’s Calvin Windbinder.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Windbinder. I’m afraid I don’t even know my real name, so for the moment just call me Joe 113.”

“Well you watch out mister. Life ain’t worth a lip of soggy spit around here. They’d just as soon watch you go in as not. Even the other slaves. Me—I guess I ain’t given up on being a human being yet. No matter how bad things are.” He turned and headed back to the line of body movers, carrying the long blood-spattered pitchfork loosely in one hand. Rock stepped back from the endless miles of green swamp and scanned it with his keen eyes. The voices—very dim and moving off. What the hell were they? Why could he hear them and no one else? Nothing made sense to him. He was a stranger even in his own flesh.