As the knife of one descended toward Stone’s chest, the pitbull launched itself from about a yard behind its master. It flew straight over his shoulder and caught the falling hand at the wrist. The weight of the dog took the attacker right over on his side while the animal ground down hard with its rows of dagger teeth. As the assassin hit the floor Excaliber bit again and yanked hard—and the hand pulled free from the arm, dangling all kinds of spurting veins and tendons. The dog shook the thing a few times, the fingers slowly opening and closing in good-bye spasms, and then tossed it into the air so that it flew almost straight up, bounced off the ceiling, and came down just inches from the person who had previously owned it. The assassin screamed even louder when he saw the missing appendage.
As the second commando dived in for the kill, attempting to get at Stone, who was still extricating himself from the bolo around his ankles, Excaliber, knowing the first man was harmless, turned on a dime and again launched himself with tremendous speed toward the attacker. The man didn’t even know what hit him. It could have been a meteor from space, so instantaneous and powerful was the blow. The pitbull’s jaws came down square around the man’s face. One second the commando could see Stone in front of him, and the next, just darkness and pain and the pink throat of a dog, for the pitbull had clamped its mouth over the front of the attacker’s face, taking the whole thing between its jaws. The dog bit down hard, and the whole central portion of the elite fighter’s face just sort of squashed together in a bloody mass. The pitbull ripped hard, and the man suddenly had no features—just a bloody pit out of which a scream emerged, the likes of which Stone had never heard before and hoped he never would again.
The faceless man fell to the carpet, blood pouring out of the holes mat had once been his eyes, nose, cheeks…. For all was gone, just a huge wound, drenched in blood, a wound that pulsed as he screamed. Stone let his heart start slowing as he finally got himself extricated from the bolo device. He rose to his feet and called the dog, which was standing arrogantly between the two dying men like a hunter over its kills, daring either of them to rise again, to try anything. It glanced back and forth at them with a proud warrior stare and panted, its eyes wide with excitement.
“Here, boy,” Stone said to call the animal, and it instantly trotted the few yards to him and stood by his side, rubbing its blood-soaked face against his leg. “You did good, dog. I’m going to see if I can’t dig up some kind of medal or something.”
Stone walked forward to see what remained of the attack force. The men in the back were all dead—the ones Stone had killed. The one with a missing hand appeared to be dead, or so near death that it hardly mattered—with ninety percent of his blood drained out of his body and all over the living room carpet within one minute.
The faceless man was the only one who was still alive somehow. And he shouldn’t have been. Not the way he looked. No one who looked like that would want to live. Or so Stone thought as he walked up to the assassin, his hands over his face, as he rolled back and forth on the slippery red rug.
“Who told you I was here?” Stone asked the writhing figure. He didn’t even know if the thing could speak, as its lips and teeth were gone—jaw too. But something uttered out of the red hole that moved where a mouth once might have been.
“You’re traitor,” the wound of a mouth gurgled, blood spewing out as it spoke. “We—we have a spy with you. Have—” It tried to laugh, or act like it could, to impress Stone with its machismo. But it wasn’t a good idea. Things spat up out of its throat, and blood seemed to just gush out of every opening of what had been a face.
“I’m going to do you a favor, asshole,” Stone said, not particularly wanting to do what he was about to. He walked to the couch, picked up the .44 Mag sitting there, and then headed back to the hall. He held it out, muzzle pointing at the commando’s heart. “I’m going to take you out of your pain, though God knows you wouldn’t have done the same for me.” Wincing a little, Stone pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER
TEN
IT TOOK Stone nearly an hour to make the place even vaguely presentable. He didn’t know who he was making it presentable for, but he couldn’t just leave blood and bodies lying all over the goddamn place. So he dragged them all outside about a quarter mile from the house to a pit they had used for compost and burning waste. He threw them in, poured two buckets of lye over them, and then covered the whole mess up with leaves and decay from another part of the heap. The bastards would at least help fertilize the ground, Stone couldn’t help but think with a dark laugh. Daisies and dandelions would grow from their rotting remains. Recycled assassins.
At last he got things together and quickly gulped down three cups of black coffee to keep himself awake. He was so quickly supersaturated with the high-caffeine brew that his eyes were half popping from his head. Excaliber, now that the excitement was over, looked as sick as a dog. Though Stone could hardly believe it, he discovered that the animal had gone through numerous cans, just ripping them open, the shattered tins lying broken all over the syrup and juice-splattered floor. He couldn’t even begin to get pissed off at the mutt after what it had just done. But when they were all mounted up on the Harley, Stone noticed that the dog was looking greener and greener around the gills. It had bitten off a little more here and there than it could chew. Stone headed out, closed the huge rock door behind them, and redeposited the “garage opener” back beneath the huge boulder so that if April came back, she could again have access to it. If, if, if…
Then he was on the bike and tearing down the dirt path as fast as the Harley could go without snagging into a tree. The pitbull looked more and more sick but clamped hold of the cool leather and closed his eyes, trying to pretend he was lying by a warm fire with a stomach about fifty percent smaller. The moon had sunk into the trees by the time Stone hit the bottom of the mountain path and got onto the main road. The Harley tore back along the long straightaway, Stone opening the big 1200-cc up to the limit, hitting a hundred and more when he was on flat patches of concrete and asphalt. Excaliber couldn’t even look as the world sped by in a complete blur but buried his face deeper in the seat.
At last, as light just began to paint the far horizon with strokes of orange, Stone saw the cutoff that was the way back to the bivouacked tanks. He turned down a back road and then through some fields, slowing down as the going got rougher. As the sun poked the red pate of its burning head up over the trees, Stone saw the Bradleys silhouetted against some trees. The two guards greeted him as he came to a sputtering halt in front of them.
“Been hunting?” Ross asked him as he glanced down at Stone’s jacket and pants. Stone looked down and saw that the entire lower portion of the uniform was streaked and mottled in red.
“Something like that,” Stone replied, not wanting to tell them what had really happened. There was a spy among them. It would be better for him not to reveal a thing—and perhaps the bastard would show himself. The men rose slowly as Stone yelled out, “Let’s get this thing on the road.” He was a wreck, and he knew it. He hadn’t gotten any sleep, and God knows when he would again—maybe never. He could feel his eyes all puffed out, his lips dry and hot. Stone kept his eyes on each man as they rose from their blankets, searching among the eyes to see if any were shocked that he was there. But not one displayed the slightest double take or amazement. It gave Stone the creeps to walk among them and know that he had been set up by one of these sons of bitches.
Stone took over Hartstein’s tank, switching crews and everything because he wanted access to another batch of the eight Mini-Hawk missiles that were hidden in the Bradley. Hartstein looked a little funny at him, but no one said a word. Stone knew that they all knew that he had used something extra—back there at the valley of burning cars. But he didn’t offer any answers, and they didn’t ask any questions. Stone was, after all, running this particular death show. Soon they were all inside, and Stone started the battle wagon up and headed straight north. The other two tanks
fell in quickly behind him, and soon they were cruising along the relatively flat land between two ranges of mountains that moved in a north/south direction on each side of a five-mile-wide valley. Stone watched the two behind him, locking the video sweep on them for a while. But they hardly wavered at all. Both his choices had been good ones, for they were driving the things like they had been cruising around in the machines since high school. Gradually Stone opened up, until they were moving along at about forty miles per hour. The shock system of the Bradley was so well designed that the men inside were hardly aware that they were moving at that speed. It was more of a fluid motion, as if they were at sea, going over long swells. Even Excaliber seemed unperturbed and lay on the steel shelf above the exhaust piping, his front paws wiggling slightly as if he were running in his sleep.
They had been traveling at near maximum speed for about an hour, skirting between the two ranges when the gap of the valley suddenly opened and they were facing a wide plain that stretched off to the northern horizon. It looked blank and desolate, with just scraggly brush here and there, skinny cacti, tumbleweed blowing like pool balls across the hard ground. Stone slowed down some as he eased the tank onto the more granular surface than the stuff they had been on—just in case. The one thing he had learned so far was: Never take anything for granted. Even the ground you walk on. But the surface held good enough. Although covered with a loose, sandy surface, just inches beneath the top it was hard and firm, almost baked into a claylike substance, and the tanks easily found good traction.
They moved in a straight line like metal ducks following their mother, only these weren’t so little, and their beaks had 120-meter firepower. Here and there, startled animals fled off into the prairie, their muscles flexing and uncoiling as their legs slammed into the earth to escape. They had gone but a few miles when Stone heard a low beeping and a red light to the right of the display panel was blinking. He glanced over.
“Radiation warning,” the panel was reading out. ‘Tank is entering area of increasing radiation levels. The armoring of the Bradley is equipped to withstand 200 Rads/hour. Radiation Warning. Tank is entering…” Stone found the rad indicator and blanched. The thing was rising at the rate of about ten rads a minute. What the hell could—Stone flipped down the special long-range viewing system and set it on maximum focus. He peered into the periscopelike device and gasped. Now he knew why their fucking balls were being attacked by gamma rays. An immense crater from an atomic blast stood several miles ahead and to the left of the compass path they were following. Stone whistled as he eyed the thing, glancing at the road ahead, driving the Bradley with one hand.
The crater was immense. Like something from a dream—a bad, bad dream. It was nearly a mile wide and made of a reddish-brown dirt that rose perhaps half a mile into the sky with long, sloping sides that appeared almost smooth and glowing with just the hint of a green tinge throughout. It looked like something that should have been on the dark side of the moon, not down here on the planet Earth. It was as if the very soil of the planet had been twisted, melted together into this coagulated sculpture of destruction. As they got closer Stone saw just how ugly the thing was—and how deadly, for along its glasslike, sloping sides, carcasses were everywhere. Not from the initial blast that had just melted everything near it but from the radiation that had lingered. Animals that had wandered too close had actually touched its still superhot surface—were killed almost instantaneously. They literally ringed the base of the huge crater for a twenty-yard strip, thousands of them. Much of the hide and flesh on the animals—buffalo, elk, bear, groundhog, fox, wolf—was still attached to the creatures, as if they had hardly decayed at all. And as they drew closer and Stone peered through the greatly magnified image of the giant boil on the face of the earth, he saw that the dead were almost untouched, even their eyes still staring as if alive. It was the weirdest damned thing he had ever seen. As if they’d all been preserved, stuffed à la Tony Perkins’ mother in Psycho.
Suddenly he realized what it was. The radiation. The same invisible energy that had killed the animals had also killed all the bugs, beetles, flies, even microscopic organisms, that usually fed off the dead. Thus everything that came to consume them tumbled to the crater’s sloping wall instead and joined those who had already fallen. All living things the in the face of that much radiation. Thus they were all preserved in a never-never land of death with the appearance of life.
Stone checked the radiation meter and saw that it was passing two hundred rads. He was steering the column now at an angle away from the crater, but they couldn’t get too far to the east or they’d run into a series of impassable chasms and fissures that, according to the tank’s map system, were just miles off. So the men of the three-tank attack force gritted their teeth, for they could all see the crater now on the main monitor screen of each tank and could hear the rad warning beeping, and tore through the hot terrain, shooting by the towering crater at top speed. They had to endure two hundred and fifty rads, then three hundred, as they came even with the tower of burning death. Then they were past it, and quickly the built-in Geigers on the outer surface of the Bradleys began signaling a drop. Within ten minutes it had dropped to half, edging below a hundred.
“Didn’t feel a thing,” Bo said, standing behind Stone, one big hand leaning down on the plastic headrest of the co-driver’s seat next to Stone’s, his farmboy face grinning.
“You wouldn’t feel a thing, but believe me, they went through us. A few hundred more rads and you’d feel it,” Stone said coolly as he checked the 360 video scan, noticing a sudden darkening to the west. “Your skin turns red at that high a dosage,” Stone went on. “Red like a lobster, it peels off your body like wet tissue paper. Your hair comes out in handfuls if you even touch it, your teeth, fingernails, ooze around as if embedded in putty. You just sort of—fall apart.” Stone said it as if telling a ghost story, ending in a ghastly whisper. And it worked. Bo and Simpson both shivered and crossed themselves. Even Excaliber seemed to let out a little groan of depression as he turned over on his private shelf and buried his face into the warm metal away from Stone.
But the darkness on the western horizon continued to hold Stone’s attention, and he stopped talking as he looked into the long-range monitor. It was as if the sky were turning black over there. It was only 3:30, Stone saw, checking the tank’s autoclock real-time readout. Anyway, night had never fallen like that, he thought, starting to get a little queasy as he took in the magnitude of the approaching sky. It was dark, with a sickly green color to it, the color of corpses, of vomit. The whole thing seemed to be churning and grinding into itself, like some sort of vortex. Streaks of lightning knifed through it everywhere in ribbons of white and blue fire constantly reaching down with loving electric arms to the earth below. But it was the darkness inside of it that was what really caught Stone’s attention. It was black, devoid of color, seeming almost to absorb light, and even through the armor, from miles off, Stone could hear it, like a hum a thousand miles off.
Whatever the fuck it was, he didn’t like it. And as various warning lights started flashing here and there on the control panel, the tank apparently didn’t like it, either. “High pressure disturbance approaching. Wind velocity up to 200 m.p.h. Armor of Bradley III is not sufficient to withstand such pressure.”
“Great,” Stone spat back. “You goddamned computers always tell me what’s wrong, but you don’t give me a clue as to how to do something about it.” He felt like smashing the goddamned board, as he had done once to his Amiga PC in the bunker. Smashed it to pieces—and then had to spend three months building it again with spare parts from his father’s workshop. Putting the top video on quickscan, he searched around the area for the slightest place they might hide. The whole landscape looked about as flat as a blade of glass except for a single rise about a mile in the direction from which the thing was coming. He couldn’t believe he was about to order the men into the approaching storm, but he knew there was no other way. Th
ey had to get protection —and fast
“We’re heading toward that hill or whatever it is, at 237 degrees on your compass. We’ve got to find cover.”
“Heading toward that motherfucking tornado out there,” Bull shouted back over the headset, almost blasting out Stone’s ears. “You’ve got to be crazy.”
“I’m telling you,” Stone said icily, mustering all the authority of command that he had lying around inside his exhausted body, “we’ve got no choice. The tanks aren’t equipped to handle winds of that speed. We need a windbreak between us and—whatever the hell it is. I’m going!” He turned and wheeled the Bradley around in a spinning frenzy of treads and dust. “You can come with me. Otherwise, if I find your bodies after it passes, I’ll try to bury them—if I have time.” With that he shut up and just tore toward the protruberance in the plain. He looked back and saw the other two tanks just sort of standing there for a few seconds. Then both of them came roaring after him, accelerating like they were coming out of the starting gate. Stone made right for the thing, but having to look into the face of the approaching mass of black clouds that appeared as big as the Rocky mountains was something he found hard to do. The dark curtains of destruction were too powerful. It was almost like looking into the eyes of an angry God. Not for mortal man to see.
As they drew closer, the other two Bradleys right on his heels not twenty yards behind, Stone saw that the rise was not that big at all—not as big as he had hoped. It was a series of five boulders lying side by side, covered with partial coatings of sand. They rose up about eight feet and from end to end were perhaps twenty long. Not enough to give them all cover. The storm loomed right in front of them now, the entire sky and horizon as far as they could see just a writhing pit of utter blackness. And the roar, even through the armoring was growing louder, like an approaching subway that suddenly roars in at one’s feet. The tanks were already shaking, buffeted by the advance winds. The men started panicking, looking at one another with clammy, desperate faces.
War Weapons Page 8
