Doomsday Warrior 01 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Red force here in America for nearly two-and-a-half years. Just six months to go! Shit! He looked out the window with disgust and amusement at the groveling American race. They seemed so primitive, so stupid. The Russian peoples were obviously superior—they had won the Great War. Now these pitiful “humans” were hardly worthy of the once-proud name, Americans. Licking their lips hungrily, they pushed against the low barbed-wire fence some six feet from the commissary door and begged. The commander of the fortress allowed the Americans to be fed the Russian troops’ leftovers. “It makes us look good. We help the Americans. We even give them our own food,” he had explained with a laugh. Now, every morning the kitchen crews would appear at the rear swing windows at the back of the fort’s mess halls, and the American dregs would crowd around, scraping up every scrap.
    Sharovsky threw them more food, half a steel container of half-rotten beef stew. It flew through the air, a cloud of noxious, meaty spray, and landed on the clamoring beggars. Filthy faces moaning in the growing darkness. “More, comrade. Please, more.”
    Around them, the fortress city of Stalinville came slowly to life as the morning sun pierced the strontium green-tinged clouds that flew high above the fort. One of the circling clouds of radioactive dust that now eternally orbited the Earth. It looked like it was dropping down toward the Russian complex. But it would take hours. Life in Stalinville must go on. The narrow dirt-paved back streets of the American sector began bustling with activity as the gray-uniformed occupants of the ghetto made their way off to perform their menial jobs for their Russian masters. Many of them worked in the Red canning factories in the southern part of the fort, the industrial sector. Others headed for the textile mills to make clothes for the Soviet troops. Everything was made for the Russians; the Americans were given the leftovers or the occasional surplus.
    Peddlers were opening their small businesses along the winding street that was the main shopping area for the Americans. Shops, hidden, half submerged in doorways and basements, selling everything from old knives and pots and pans to scraps of salvaged material for making clothing. They hawked their wares as the crowds filled the muddy streets. Russian armored vehicles stood every five or six blocks, the crews looking down contemptuously. The workers stumbled from their huts, their crumbling tenements, and filed off to work. Those who didn’t meet work quotas or were absent from their jobs were subject to be sent out to the fields to do what was generically called Rehabilitation Work, but meant being trucked out to the surrounding countryside of Fort Stalinville. There, they would be made to rip the topsoil from the ground and pry out the boulders. The radioactive surface had to be removed so that the cleaner, purer soil below could someday be used again for agriculture.
    “Cigs here! Get your cigs here!” a legless man, seated on a wooden pulley yelled out to the glum crowds. “We got cigs of every size.” He smiled cheerfully. “Got whole cigs for a ruble, half for a half, a quarter for a two cent, and a nibble for a pen.”
    An old man with a face as long as a shadow came over, his immense, gray coat hanging nearly to his toes, as if to shield him from the darkness of life.
    “You got any Marlboros?” he asked hopefully. He had smoked some years ago, when supplies were more plentiful. Before the new Russian premier, Vassily, had started shipping the tobacco out, lock, stock and barrel. The legless man winked, his white face twisting in a strange leer. He reached inside a torn, white corduroy jacket, one of the arms almost totally stained with blue ink, and glanced around conspiratorially.
    “Don’t want no one to see this.” He held up a whole Marlboro, perfect, still ripe and pungent. The worker looked at it with a glow of recognition. His face