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Occupied Riverdale	By : nodrogg Category: Comics > Archie & Co. Views: 9580 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Archie & Co, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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Occupied Riverdale - Chapter 3

Riverdale in the evening was a sad, silent wasteland. Many of its people were gone, now; all American males from ages eighteen to fifty were required to report to registration camps for screening. Those with specialized mechanical or technical skills - plumbers, machinists, mechanics, electricians, dentists, surveyors, &c. - received a classification of 'skilled labor' and were permitted to return home. Everyone else - lawyers, police officers, accountants, used-car salesmen, office managers - were herded onto prison buses and sent... away. To forced labor camps, work farms. Their families were taken away also. None ever came back.

Betty pedaled on, turning under a dead traffic light out onto Johnson Avenue. Her tires crunched over twigs and leaf litter.

There was no traffic on the entire avenue. Once that would have struck Betty as eerie; now the appearance of an ordinary automobile was cause for notice. Normally, only the work bus traveled these streets now, twice a day. The houses she passed had the same silent, darkened windows as her own; once she saw a candle flickering - the only evidence of life.

The Riverdale clock tower bonged, the mellow sound echoing across the silent town. It bonged again... and Betty faltered to a stop, sudden dread clutching at her. The third bell was the curfew. All slugai were to be off the streets at the tolling of that bell... or else. She was suddenly, horribly alone, exposed, defenseless...

The bell tolled. She sat astride her bicycle in the middle of the darkening street and felt her stomach churn.

Betty prayed then - eyes closed, she prayed for His protection for her and for her family. She prayed, and felt her fear ebb, becoming a tiny thing. Only then did she very deliberately push off, and continue down the street - wobbling ever so slightly.

From Johnson Ave, she turned out onto Main Street. She stayed out in the middle of the road.

"Remember," Archie had told her months before, "whatever you do, don't sneak. If a Eurasian patrol sees you trying not to be seen, no little piece of paper is going to do you any good. Ride like you own the place, right down the middle of the street. They may not even stop you."

For a while, it seemed they would not even notice her. She rode past padlocked businesses, their boarded up windows defaced with German and Cyrillic graffiti; some stores, looted and trashed, showed merely empty gaping frames. Abandoned, useless cars still lined the street, tires flat, their windows mostly smashed.

The Regal Cinema was closed now, but still operating; the marquee announced Th Right ous Fist of Ug nb rg Khan. Betty had seen it on one of the semi-compulsory after-work 'evenings out.' A young French slugai girl, high-spirited and headstrong, falls in love with the handsome, boy-next-door Russian officer visiting her factory compound and turns her back on the depraved, malingering friends she had thought daring revolutionaries, betraying them to the grisly deaths they so richly deserved. The officer literally carries her off on horseback to his own plantation, where she is to be a house servant, living in luxury and serving her man's desires. The acting was dreadful, the girl was far too pretty and well-fed, and the crude subtitles were badly translated.

At that, it was far better than the official indoctrination films they'd all been forced to watch, back in the early days of the occupation. She had never before seen a man being sat on an impaling stake, never before heard that high, gargling scream. She had never seen people vomit in a movie theatre before, either...

Posters of Baron Ugenberg striking a heroic posture were plastered here and there, all up and down the street; even in the blue twilight she could make out the red-black-yellow "U" banners that hung everywhere. It all looks so much like a screen play, she thought - like a spy movie set in Eurasia.

As if on cue, the heavy thudding of a helicopter became audible, growing in volume, hammering the quiet evening air into vibrating fragments. Betty stopped in the middle of the street and looked back at the flaring brightness of a searchlight, growing closer. Moments later the squat, ugly outline of a Eurasian Chahar helicopter appeared over the rooftops, its red running lights winking evilly. In seconds it would be upon her - it might have seen her already. There - she threw herself towards a half-open doorway, banged it open and with desperate strength hauled her bicycle after her into utter darkness.

Darkness became grey twilight as the electric glare of the searchlight approached. The hammering thunder of the Chahar's heavy rotors filled the world, as the street outside was suddenly washed in eye-watering brilliance - and by that light Betty saw that she was in what had once been the Dietrich's Main Street pharmacy. The light faded as the helicopter continued on, but she had time to take in the empty, looted shelves and silent, dusty refrigeration cases along the back wall... and then she was again in darkness.

"Gotta match?" A woman's voice, a girl's, husky and sounding amused, echoed in the dark. Betty gasped, staring vainly into the blackness. "No, I guess you wouldn't," the girl continued. "Never mind." A chik, chik of flint and a flicker of light, and a small yellow flame came into being. It moved, dimmed, flickering against something - and light blazed forth. Betty blinked dazzled eyes - then as she saw what the light revealed, she blinked again.

The girl who had lit the lamp was young, slender, with brick-red hair that curled
and tumbled in a wild, sensuous mane about her face and shoulders. She was also
startlingly underdressed: Sheared-away tatters of denim fabric riding perilously
low around her hips, and the tied-up remnant of a scissor-shredded tank undershirt,
were too scanty to do more than accent the smooth rounded curves of the body they
pretended to cover. She looked like a barefoot farmer's daughter out of a truck
driver's late-night fantasy, and Betty stared at her, feeling herself blushing.

"So, Betty Cooper," Cheryl Blossom said mockingly. "What brings you here?"

- - - - - - - - - -

Betty realized her mouth was hanging open, and pulled herself together. "What are you doing here?" she countered. "Is this - I mean, do you live here...?"

Cheryl laughed - hard, mocking laughter that sounded a great deal older than her seventeen years. "Do I look like I live here?" she asked. "I'm meeting someone - and that's all you need to know." There was a bitter edge to that you from which Betty flinched as from a blow.

"Cheryl - " she began, but the other girl cut her off.

"You need to go now," she said. "If my friend sees you, it'll mean trouble for both of us."

For a long moment Betty looked at Cheryl Blossom - clean, well-fed, naked under that tiny, cynically enticing costume - feeling two and two come together. "You... you're collaborating," she whispered.

"So what if I am?" Cheryl said scornfully. "Is that any concern of yours?" She reached past the lamp, and picked up a brownish-yellow packet of Eurasian cigarettes. She lit one over the lamp, and smiled lazily through blue smoke at the astounded Betty. "I do what I have to, just like you - and your friend Veronica Lodge."

"You leave Ronnie out of this," Betty said hotly, remembering what Veronica had done for her that day, and at what cost. "What's happened to her... isn't her choice."

"What do you know about it?" Cheryl Blossom exploded, mocking amusement turned to raw, hissing fury in an instant. Even in the mellow lamplight her face was older than Betty remembered, thinner - harder. "What do you know about 'choices'? What have you had to do? You little milk-drinking virgin, you think you've had it rough?" Her hands were raised, her corded fingers arched into claws.

"You weren't at school that day when the Mongols came - I was! You weren't lined up in the hallway and forced to strip naked while soldiers laughed and picked out their favorites -" Her voice was shaking, her tone rising toward a whispered shriek. "You didn't see that big stupid boy get shot in front of you because a soldier was fondling Midge Klump - but I did - he hit the floor and - and his head came open like - like a dropped watermelon..." Cheryl drew a deep, ragged breath and let her hands fall, her startling turquoise eyes glittering with unshed tears. She fumbled on the countertop for her dropped cigarette.

"And you weren't dragged across the floor into a classroom and gang-banged by hairy, smelly Mongolians, again and again and again..." She pulled hard and the coal flared, trembling in her hand.

Many nearby students had still been attending school each day, some for want of anything better to do, but Betty hadn't been there when the Eurasian occupation troops arrived. Something she ate had spoiled, and she had spent the day in bed, alternately throwing up and crawling to the bathroom. She had been horribly ill, and only later did she learn what a strange and subtle mercy had been granted her. Riverdale High School had died that day in screaming and flames, in shattered glass and sobbing girls and still, silent corpses. Students and faculty had been roughly sorted and ruthlessly culled; Anita Chavez had been garotted in her wheelchair, while Jeffrey Hunter's blind eyes stared just as blindly from his severed head. The boys were marched off to barbed-wire holding pens for "processing"; some were never seen again. Principal Waldo Weatherbee's corpse lay sprawled in the burning wreckage of his office where the naked, abused body of his pretty Miss Phillips was flung, while gunshots, screams and harsh laughter rang through the smoke-filled halls of the old school, as teachers were decapitated on their own desks and crying schoolgirls were gang-raped and gruesomely abused by grinning soldiers in every hall and room. The ancient savagery of the East descended upon placid Riverdale High that day, and its burned-out wreckage was home now only to birds and weeds - and bones.

Betty looked at Cheryl now, and genuine sympathy forced her forward, hands outstretched. "Cheryl - I'm so sorry."

"I don't need your pity," Cheryl Blossom snarled. "And my family doesn't need charity from any of you, not any more. When Hiram Lodge forced my father out of business and then had the nerve to employ him like a stock clerk at his own company, he swore he'd get even someday, and we swore to help. Any way we could." She tossed her head, sending her lustrous hair swirling.

Anything else she might have said was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of an approaching automobile. Headlights splashed brightness in the street outside.

"This conversation is over. Get out - or I'll have you arrested. Nothing personal, you understand." The mocking light was back in her eyes. "Sweet little Betty Cooper. When the Siberians and the interrogators get done with you, you'll be good for nothing but an enlisted man's brothel. You might last six months, there."

Betty was already backing away. Only at the last minute did she remember her bicycle. "Say hello to Archie for me," Cheryl called after her.

The back room of the drugstore was impenetrably dark - but the back door had been jimmied open, and stood as a rectangle of subliminally lighter blackness. Nevertheless the going was treacherous; the floor was littered with debris, and she dared not make noise...

Voices behind her made her turn; through the doorway she'd just quitted she saw a young Eurasian officer enter the light, in his brown peaked cap and brass-frogged khaki tunic. Even as Betty looked he reached out, took hold of Cheryl Blossom's scanty little tank top with both hands and casually ripped it open, pulling her into his arms. His hands sought her body hungrily while her silver laughter pealed - and Betty pushed out into the cool darkness, under the far-off, innocent stars.

To Be Continued
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Occupied Riverdale