Doomsday Warrior 01 Read Online Free PDF Page B

destroyed.
    Oh, how easy it would be to drop just one little neutron bomb on each Free City and eradicate the diseased area. If we just knew where, Dashkov thought, staring out the thick-glassed window, probing into the far mountains with his eyes as if searching for the rebels. Already the results were good. Three captured Freefighters, as they called themselves, had been captured and taken prisoner before they could kill themselves with those little cyanide capsules they carried. Strapped into the Mind Breaker they had quickly broken and a city had been found by the Soviet forces—Glennville, not a big city, about five thousand men and women. Their sobbing comrades could take no more of the Mind Breaker’s laser probes. They had told. The Russian MIGs had swooped down, bats of black death from the purple sky, and dropped a 50 kiloton neutron bomb right on the mile-wide grove of camouflaged trees and tunnels that was Glennville. A second later, in a flash of star fire, they had all been taken out. Vaporized, deatomized, riddled with gamma radiation so intense it fried their eyeballs like overcooked eggs and made black blood trickle from their dead, opened mouths.
    Not pretty, Dashkov thought, as he had inspected the dead city. But efficient. Oh, how efficient. What a wonderful weapon. I love this neutron bomb. It is a blessing to mankind. And they do not even suffer—out in a second. It is almost humanitarian. And the radiation evaporates in a few days. I must get Killov to allow me to use more of these. Then, if we could just capture Ted Rockson, The Ultimate American, as these rabble love to scrawl on the walls, that would really break the backs of the rebel forces. That would change, as these Americans used to say, the whole ballgame!
    The filthy bagman walked slowly down the long, narrow backstreet of Little USA, filled with garbage, excrement and vermin. He was nearly as dirty as the street, covered with a long, flowing, once-brown tweed coat, now more air than fabric, torn and bitten by fleas and mites, and coated with a layer of grease as thick as bark. The bagman’s face was brown, the color of wet mud. His unkempt beard covered the lower part of his face and his neck like some sort of net of filth.
    He muttered to himself as he moved, slowly, furtively, like a basement rat. He placed one foot down, then the other, waiting, breathing in, then moving again. And he intoned as he walked:
They will die
    Not I
    They took my bread
    They be dead
    They took my eye
    They will cry.
    The bagman’s singsong kept the rhythm of his motion as he slipped around the corner of the street and onto one of the main thoroughfares of the poorest area of the American sector—if one could call a thirty-foot-wide track of dirt with a thin layer of gravel on top a thoroughfare. But the Russians didn’t care much about the roads of the American section of the fortress. They never came here. They wouldn’t dare come alone. Not here. Not where the slaves, the refuse, the lost ones lived. Like him. The ones with nothing. The Russians kept to their part, the southern sector, with their fortress bunkers, their vast, concrete, barbed-wired sanctuary, filled with kitchens and baths and televisions—things the Americans of Stalinville had never seen. The Reds had their own lives—lives of luxury, especially the officers with their clubs, whorehouses and dancehalls. They lived the good life, above lieutenant that is. Below—even for the Red troops—things were not so great. There was meat and warm bunks, eight in a room, but there were no luxuries. Every Red occupation soldier had been drafted. Plucked from the vast reaches of the Soviet Empire that now spanned the entire world. Soldiers from Soviet Georgia, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, East Germany. Units of men who sometimes could only barely communicate with each other and had to use sign language or English, which for the Reds had become a second language, a trade language, just to get the