“Can’t—breathe,” a voice whispered back. “Can’t—”
“The switch, the switch. Oxygen on!”
“Yeah, I see it. There.” Then the voice died out. Shit, the specs said the Bradley could easily take a hit like that. But the specs had been wrong before, many times. If a whole tankload of them died already … The video scanned past the burning tank, and Stone saw that the flames were already dying down, but suddenly Foster was emerging from the top. The idiot had panicked and opened the hatchway. He closed it, or someone did from below, and the terrified manran to the edge of the tank to jump down. He had barely started his descent when slugs tore into him from every direction. A hundred rounds must have ripped into the flesh within two seconds, and the body spun and jerked wildly in the air, held in place momentarily by the sheer force of the multitude of bullets. Then the flood of lead ceased, and the body, bleeding from so many holes that it would take an hour or two to count them all, slammed down onto the dust and flopped around like a spastic worm.
This couldn’t go on, Stone suddenly realized. If he had an ace in the hole, it was time to use it—or there wouldn’t be any more games to be played. He slammed his hand down on the “Missile Systems On” button, and a whole portion of the control panel suddenly lit up.
“Missiles?” The machine read out on the computer terminal before him.
“All.” Stone slammed his finger down on the answering button.
“Range?”
“Impact detonation,” Stone input. “Firing at ninety degrees.”
“Formation?” the missile systems computer program asked.
“Four left, four right,” Stone input. He glanced up at the video screen and saw that the vehicles were almost upon them. Once there, they could plant dynamite, petrol bombs. It was now or—
“Systems armed,” the screen read out. “Signal launch to implement.”
Stone ground his thumb down hard onto the “Launch” button. There was a whirring sound, and above them, the top of the tank seemed to lift up, at least to those killers who were within yards of the Bradley, bringing their vehicles to a screeching stop. On each side of the turret a missile rack popped up into view, four steel tubes with the tips of shining, cone-shaped noses just poking out of them. The things buzzed and clicked and quickly spun around into firing position, moving on ball bearings hidden in the armor below. They seemed to set themselves, as if shocks were coming out beneath them, and then they fired.
The leader of this particular group of slime, who had fired the grenade launcher at Stone’s tank, had just driven up to the side of the Bradley as the missiles went off. In fact, he was looking right at the point of one, reaching his hand out to touch it. It took his head clean off as it shot free of its launching pad—severing the tattooed face cleanly from its body—but not detonating, as the flesh didn’t even offer enough resistance to its sensing devices to trigger it. On each side of Stone’s tank, four Mini-Hawks, the most powerful short-range missile ever built, shot out exactly six feet above the ground, their own computer-guidance systems taking control. They began veering off from one another within a fiftieth of a second, heading left and right. By the time they reached the first lines of the advancing cars and trucks ahead, they were about thirty feet apart.
Eight mountains of fire erupted around the three besieged tanks. The very ground beneath them seemed to shake, and the Bradleys shook back and forth, buffeted from every side by shock waves. It took almost twenty seconds for the main explosion to settle down and just the secondaries to continue on, little pops here and there through the thick tank walls. Stone’s brain ceased ringing like a bell. He wondered if the video camera mounted topside was still functioning, but as he raised his eyes to the screen he saw that it was. And the scene it transmitted back was one of total devastation. The attack vehicles lay strewn every which way, steel bodies peeled back like opened tuna-fish cans, melted tires like gumdrops too long in the sun. And the bodies—or pieces of bodies, really—lay draped over everything, like the final strokes of a painting, buckets of blood and ground-up flesh heaved over the picture, adding a certain element of unquestionable finality.
Here and there Stone could see bodies moving feebly through the smoke, as the vehicles burned like bonfires on both slopes, like some sort of sacred ceremony of winter. Ceremony of death. The invasion was clearly over.
“Let’s move out,” Stone said over the mike as he guided his Bradley over the wreckage and toward the boulder barricade. He lowered the huge 120-mm and began firing from a hundred yards off and kept firing, so that by the time they reached it, the wall had been pulverized and the three tanks were easily able to mount the debris with their thick climbing treads.
Behind them, those mountain bandits who were left, those who could still move, gathered what was left of their gang and the two or three vehicles that still functioned and started heading slowly back to their mountain hideout. Many of the living were without hands, arms, legs. They would have to lay low for a while, pull back some of their operations, hide, heal their wounds. But for this particular band of cutthroats, murderers, rapists, and mutilators, though they couldn’t admit it to themselves, their backs were broken. They would never rule the mountains again. They had been destroyed.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
THERE’S SOMETHING about killing that makes a man hungry. Maybe it makes him feel his own mortality and want to fill up on as much chow as possible in case he is suddenly called to the great beyond. After all, who knows what’s to eat up or down there? Or how long a trip it is. Suffice it to say that when they stopped about four hours later after traveling nonstop on an almost perfectly northerly direction on the compass, the men were ravenous and lit into the food that Hartstein, who was turning out to be a pretty good cook, threw together from a deer that he had his gunner shoot with his 50-cal during the journey. He’d jumped down from the tank, slit its throat and chest to bleed the son of a bitch, and then had just let it sort things out on the back of the Bradley for the next few hours. There wasn’t a huge amount of the big buck left after the 50s had done their work, but there was enough for nine men and a dog.
Which was fine with Stone. He wanted them to all be stuffed, too tired even to think. For he was close enough to the bunker now to check a few things out. He had three of them help him unhitch the Harley from the back of the Bradley and saw that it had taken a few shots in the body. But no lines or electrical connections had been severed, and the bike looked functional. Posting two guards, Stone told them he had to check out something ahead and would be back in several hours. They looked bored and waved him and Excaliber off as they roasted more strips of the meat. The pitbull was torn between the sizzling juices of the buck and accompanying Stone. But he knew instinctively that they were near the bunker and that somehow it was important for him to go with Stone. It was, after all, a fighting dog’s responsibility to be with his master at all major battles, wars, and reconnaissances. Or so Excaliber and his breed had always felt, since their warrior bloodline had been bred into their existence. Besides, there were a few foods that the bullterrier remembered from the bunker that it wouldn’t mind trying again. Already it was trying to plot some way of getting Stone to give it some treats.
Things were going better with the crew than Stone could have hoped. But that only gave him a chance to worry about other things—about April. She hovered in his mind like a ghost, an accusing presence that said nothing but stared at him with big, helpless eyes. And always blood, blood spouting from her; from her face, her fingertips.
The Harley flew through the frigid night, its sharp beam lighting up the darkness ahead. The woods on all sides of him grew still, menacing, with shadows suddenly dancing around as they were created and stirred up by the passing light of the motorcycle. The dog growled beneath its breath as it stared off into a grove of trees. Stone twisted the accelerator a little harder. He knew the animal was seeing something, sensing something, that humans couldn’t. Something tha
t wasn’t friendly waiting out in those woods.
But soon they were heading along the rising mountain road that led to the hideaway. Stone knew it had cost the Major nearly a million, maybe more, to build that place. It had been blasted and carved right into the side of a mountain that his family had owned, along with hundreds of acres, just north of Estes National Park. His father had started saying ten years ago that nuclear war was coming, that the country would collapse. And Stone had thought him a right-wing fool, an ex-Ranger and millionaire weapons-manufacturer who believed his own propaganda. He and the Major had fought over so many things in their years together, both outside and inside the bunker.
Five years they had been in there. Five years. It seemed impossible, a meaningless number. Five years of his mother and father and sister all living inside walls, in a twenty-thousand-square-foot space equipped with all the most modern conveniences—kitchen; sauna; immense living room; separate bedrooms and living quarters; a war room filled with weapons and ammunition; experimental quarters, including Stone’s father’s computer center; and a firing range built in the back of the bunker, hacked out of the solid granite walls. Stone had hacked them a lot deeper during their firing sessions over five years. As much as Stone had resented the old man, in many ways he had come to see that the Major had been right about a lot of things. He had swallowed his pride and allowed his father to teach him. So for the first time, inside the confines of the world’s costliest fallout shelter, Major Clayton R. Stone had taught his son, Martin, all the tricks in the book—and those that weren’t, as well. His father had been the last of a tough, tough breed. The last of the Rangers—the ultra-special forces of the U.S. military services. And now he was gone. But somehow what he knew, and had stood for, lived on in Martin Stone. Whether Martin wanted it or not, he had been handed the mantle. He had been chosen to be the Last Ranger.
“Thanks, Dad,” Stone spat out into the night air, which had now turned to an inky blackness as the stars and moon struggled to punch their way through the layers of clouds that drifted above the mountains. Stone grimaced as he hunched down lower on the bike to protect his lips and face from the now freezing winds. Excaliber sank down behind him, spreading all four legs around the leather seat like a starfish around a clam and hanging on with every bit of muscle power he could exert, which with a pitbull is enough to require a crane to extract him. Excaliber burped loudly behind him, snapping Stone’s mind from his moody wanderings. The dumb dog was always pulling him from depression. “Dog, what did I do before I met you?” Stone laughed into the night air, turning his head for a second. Excaliber sniffed back and let out a loud fart, then another, then a whole series. Though the bike was moving at about forty miles per hour, the wind streaming past Stone’s face to the back, he still got a whiff of the remains of the pitbull’s overindulgence in buck dinner and wished he hadn’t.
“Jesus stinking Christ,” Stone yelled, turning again. “Keep your ass pointed south, dog—you hear me? I’m going to have to start feeding you Turns and Pepto-Bismol.” Although just where he could obtain either of those items in the barbarous, collapsed civilization that was now America was a little beyond him. But after a whole series of putts, burps, and little grunts of exertion, the dog suddenly spat up a well-browned eyeball of the mountain elk that he had gobbled down too fast. After the ejection of the eye, which Stone had the fortune not to witness or he might well have lost much of his dinner as well, the terrier settled down once again, trying to lie on its side, as its distended stomach felt hot and boiling with gas. It tried to remind itself not to eat so much or so fast the next time. But it knew as it did so that it would forget, and in fact immediately did forget, as it started remembering the last time they had been to the bunker and the master had opened cans. There had been many cans, filled with delicious things. Its eyes half closed as it saw visions of dog delicacies floating by like little clouds just above its head.
Stone grew wary as they approached the last stretch of main road that led to the bunker. It was a long stretch of cracked highway that had been snow-covered the last time he had been through. He had been attacked by two mountain men on snowmobiles and had taken them out before they took him, but it had been close. He eyed the almost flat road ahead, suddenly lit up by the Harley’s beam, and accelerated sharply—just in case. Within seconds he had the bike up to fifty, then sixty and seventy. The road was firm, hard-packed, and the evening clear, so with the long, tungsten-filtered headlight he could see for hundreds of yards. The Harley tore along like a racehorse, beautiful, sleek, its streamlined weaponry poking off it like quills ready to stab out. As the bike roared along Stone suddenly saw flashes of light from the woods on the right. Attack. He twisted the accelerator even further, and the motorcycle shot into overdrive, accelerating almost effortlessly to a hundred miles per hour. It tore along, almost impossible to see, as the slugs fired by the thirty or so half-retarded mountain boys with no teeth and heads that came to little points didn’t come near the bike but just whistled by in its airstream.
Stone didn’t stop until he had reached the start of the mountain road, fourteen miles on. Then he slowed the bike to a crawl and edged it between a wall of dense bush, hanging vines, and branches. Thorns and twigs scratched against his skin, and Excaliber barked as an ear got pierced by a particularly long needle. But at last they were through and onto the deer path that weaved and rambled all over the place to the bunker. His father had planned for it to be this isolated from the very start. There was no reason for anyone to have any idea that something was up this way. It had been left as undeveloped as it had been before the place was built, even to the extreme of using special wheeled trucks up to the deer path and then three-wheeled vehicles the rest of the way. And from the lack of a trace of any tire tracks other than a few indentations of the Harley’s wheels left the last time be was here, it was working. No one had come by.
Soon the sheer rock face behind which the bunker had been built loomed into view, and Stone brought the Harley to a slow stop. He stepped off, and the auto kickstand snapped into place, anchoring the still droning bike on wide alloy metal pads on the ground. Stone walked over to a table-sized boulder and pushed his shoulder against it hard. Either he was getting weaker or the damn thing had put on weight since the last time he had come. But at last it budged slightly and then started shifting away. The hole that it covered was revealed, and Stone reached down into it and grabbed hold of a plastic bag at the bottom. He extracted a small transmitter from the bag and, aiming it at the solid rock wall, pressed the device.
The mountainside made a sound and then seemed to split in two as the rock face, for a height of ten feet, slid apart in two pieces. They moved silently all the way to each side until a large rectangular opening big enough to drive a truck into had been created. Stone remounted the Harley and eased it inside, using both feet on the ground to guide it. Once inside, he dismounted again and headed into the innards of the bunker. The three-foot-thick rock walls slid closed again with just a hiss of compressed air. Then all was quiet again.
It always felt strange for him to come into this place—their presence was so strong. He could see them, hear them talking, arguing, laughing. It gave Stone an eerie feeling, yet at the same time a secure one, to be here. This, for better or worse, was all the home he had. It was the only place he really felt safe. Behind those granite walls he could at last totally relax, not even have to have a pistol or knife on hand at all times, as he did out there. So the first thing Stone did as he came into the living room—with its sunken multi-levels, its deep comfortable designer couches, and modern art on the walls—was take out his .44 Mag and his Uzi 9-mm automatic pistol and heave them on one of the couchs —the couch that had been officially his all those years. For they had each had their own space—their own allotted area. They’d had to or they would have gone mad. Every animal needs territory, even if it’s measured in inches. The living area, which had been the Major’s pride and joy, really was a beautiful space�
�high ceilings with indirect lighting from above so it almost gave the effect of daylight; expensive rugs; paintings on the walls; fish tanks, still bubbling happily away, fish fed automatically by computer, cleaned, oxygenated, every damned thing. The Major had spared no expense in making the place as nice as he could. Yes, let’s all live happily after nuke war and the breakdown of civilization.
Stone took the thick, rolled-up canvas he had taken from the Harley and unrolled it on the floor. The Michelangelo—the painting of the Creation—that he had taken from the ruins of Pattern’s headquarters back at Fort Bradley. He stared at it as it lay on the floor, mesmerized by its beauty, its huge, sweeping clouds, its angles drifting down, and God’s hand reaching down to strike life into mankind. Then, in a kind of trance, Stone took the wide canvas and nailed it up on the wall. He knew it was all insane—a gift of some kind for his family, for his father. A way, perhaps, of showing there had been love between them, when now there was really no way to show it. At least it would survive in here. Out there it would have been eaten, drenched with rain, gone to tatters within months.
Stone wanted nothing more than to take a shower, get in bed for about a year. But he couldn’t leave the attack force alone for more than a few hours. He just didn’t trust them. So he headed immediately for his father’s computer room, not even allowing himself to lie down on the couch for one second, knowing he wouldn’t get up for days. Wearily, he plodded down the hall, glancing behind him for Excaliber, but the pitbull had already disappeared into some hallway or other. The animal had been here before; it would find its way around. Stone reached the steel door that guarded the computer section and punched in the access code on a small digital keypad that rested in the wall. Within seconds the door slid and he walked inside the large, high-tech workshop. It still slightly boggled his mind that his father had installed all this stuff in here. Stone hadn’t come into the room the entire five years he had lived in the bunker. Only after the Major had died of a sudden heart attack had he entered.
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