Things were different in the South, more of the cities had been burned but there were fewer Germans. Except in the areas where they were thicker than the clouds of mosquitoes that plagued the bayous. A trio of warheads had come through the supply lines down from the North, Chicago was supposedly the source but those operating out of Chi-town were a dying breed. The word in the South was that the Germans were on to them and Chi-town would be left to the outfits and the Krauts soon enough.
The chinks had pulled the teeth out of the South when they’d fired their initial bombardments so the southern rebels had no means of doing anything with the warheads they’d been allotted. That didn’t stop them from cracking them open and hotwiring them into a trio of supped up IEDs. Their information network had turned them onto a supply/troop train running all the way from Michigan to the Deep South and they couldn’t resist the chance to give the Krauts and their Northern bitches a little surprise.
When the warheads had gone off and taken out three quarters of the supply train, the Robot, the Doktor, and the Psychic had been sleeping. Their APC had swerved off the road and tipped onto its side, rattling them around like change in a panhandler’s cup in the street. That had been twenty minutes ago.
Now the Robot stood in the middle of the road, small arms fire from rifles and handguns, and even bows, shattering upon his matte black exterior. His red eyes glowed brightly as he laughed cold and hollowly at the meatbags around him. One black metal hand braced his outstretched right arm, embossed eagles and swastikas of gold shining in the midday sun, while the outstretched arm spat bolts of red energy in every direction. Trees and bodies smoked as they fell to the ground, bisected by the lethal red beams.
The Doktor took up another section of the road, tendrils of silver metal whirling like slashing blades around him, amputating the limbs of men and women that drew too close to him. He was silent as he killed, a stoic warrior of the Bushido, refusing to dishonor himself or his foes with foolish laughter or unnecessary violence. Those with the sense to stay out of his reach we given clouds of silvery splinters expelled from his metal flesh, each sliver was tipped with a monomolecular edge.
The Psychic had fallen beneath the truck when it tipped and had nearly been flattened, at the last second his power had kicked in and emerald beams struck the truck. It had still fallen on him, but it had been shiny metallic goop by then. In each hand he held a pistol and kept a steady stream of rounds from behind the cover of a busted apart APC, only pausing to reload or scrunch up his face to fire another deadly ray out into his surroundings.
It had been the Driver’s fault the truck had tipped. He’d felt the heat and smoke coming to life up ahead and known what had happened, if he hadn’t swerved off the road their truck would have been pancaked by the APCs surrounding it and he and the Psychic would be so much mangled meat stuck to the metal exteriors of their allies. He stood atop the wreckage of a warhead, buoyed by the heat and destruction it had generated, and around him swirled an inferno or red and orange. Tendrils of fire snaked away from him and into the trees and grass surrounding the road, setting everything living afire. His laughter was as maniacal as that of the Robot’s, but less chilling because it was at least human and recognizable.
The Robot was the second of his kind, his brother had broken free of German programming because his American made software and processors had been able to take in information and assess its value without the filter of Germanic programmed dogma blinding it and shackling it. Certain data had also corrupted and he had irrevocably adhered to Socialist dogma. The younger Robot had been built with crude and sluggish processors compared to his older brother, he could think for himself but he worked better if someone held onto his leash and pointed his laser at the right meatbags.
The Doktor had learned his trade Japan at the height of scientific research into biology and disease, he had watched whole swathes of the Chinese and Korean populations die horribly as their insides liquefied or they vomited themselves into death by dehydration. It was then that he decided the frailties of living flesh would never fell him and he left his homeland to engage in cutting edge research with the Germans, eventually encasing his flesh in a living skin of metal, forever sealing him away from disease and bloodshed.
The Driver had always loved fire, from the time he was a young lad that wandered lush fields of peat in Ireland till the Germans introduced him to some of Hitler’s mad “magicians” and now he was never without his closest love. He’d had no talent with the mystic arts to begin with, but they’d used chemicals and scalpels on his brain to remedy that problem. Now with words and will he could call fire into life around him and walk through it unharmed, his was the power of firestarting.
The Psychic had been a blind man living in the gutters of Berlin. He’d been picked up by German soldiers looking for test subjects for the same men that had helped make the Doktor’s living metal skin. They had no intention of blending his flesh with metal though, they’d intended on attempting to grant him the gift of sight and they had, after a fashion. Vat grown organs and parasites had been grafted to portions of his brain and his optic nerves in particular; some of these fleshy sacks had been harvested from now dead undesirables that had shown psychic potential before they’d been heaved into an oven. When he’d first opened his eyes the green rays had turned Hitler’s top three mad doctors into red and green goop. The soldiers assigned to the project took to calling his power Weinachten-ing.
When the last rebel bled out the group gathered where the head of the convoy would have been, the Doktor was the nominal leader, in that he was sane enough to organize a coherent plan and capable of properly motivating the Robot. As he surveyed his surroundings the tendrils of his metal hair swirled around him with a life of their own, twitching and slashing at their surroundings.
“This does not bode well for our attempts at clamping down on the leaks in American intelligence.”
The Robot’s speaker system was crisp and clear and not nearly as inhuman and metallic as his laughter, “Let them discover our plots, more rebel meatbags will fall to the Vaterland and the Führer’s most righteous warriors.”
“Or I won’t be payin enough attention next time an I’ll be getting squashed between you two metal SOBs,” said the Driver.
The Robot turned its blank face to the Driver and said, “Despite your past usefulness you are flesh and bone and of no consequence when compared to our value.”
The Psychic adjusted his thick glasses and raised a brow at the Robot, “And what of the things growing on my optic nerves? How does your value rate against them?”
The Robot laughed coldly and red light glowed within the barrel of his arm, “My sensors can determine the moment your powers will spring to life and exit your eyes, if they work this time. I can watch you as if you move in slow motion if I so desire and see the microscopic muscle movements that indicate your power will enter the physical world. If both beams move at the speed of light they will strike us at the same time, I would wager my reflexes are sharper than yours, meatbag.”
The Psychic shrugged, but he removed his hand from his glasses.
The Doktor cleared his throat, “If you two are done comparing the figurative width and length of your genitals I would like to continue with the mission, if there are no objections that is.”
The Robot scanned their surroundings, “No life signs detected, mission accomplished.”
“Excellent,” the Doktor then gestured at the Driver, “if you would be so kind as to send these honorable men to the afterlife in the tradition of the Vaterland.”
The Driver nodded and lit everything combustible within eyeshot on fire, including bodies. Once that was done he nodded to the Doktor.
The Doktor spoke, “We continue on foot to the rendezvous point, resupply, and return to the North as planned.”
The Robot was confused, a not entirely uncommon experience for him, “We return to the North? I was told that our orders were to quell what pathetic resistance there was in the South.”
The Doktor’s metal lips split into a thin smile, “That was indeed what you were told. However, it is not what we are ordered to do. We will resupply, on our journey back to the North it is assumed that we will engage more rebels and destroy them. Our ultimate goal is Chicago; it is there that we will find worthy foes, it is there that scores will be settled my friend.”
The Robot laughed and bent down to the ground, sticking a black finger into a still warm pool of blood. When he stood he brought the bloody finger to his face and painted a gruesome smile across it. Then he laughed that chilling metal laugh.
We meet the antagonists.
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