Stone suddenly felt terribly cold and, realizing he was out in the middle of the Northern Colorado desert, naked, with some sticky icing all over him, wondered, just for a second or two, what the hell they were doing. Then, as the cold stiffened up his muscles so that the bruises and welts and broken blood vessels from the hundreds of kicks and punches that had been rained down upon him suddenly hurt as if he were on fire, Stone mercifully, as if his body had just become supersaturated with pain and couldn’t take another drop, lapsed into the comforting darkness once again.
When he came to next time, it was quick. All of a sudden his eyes opened and his mind was much clearer than it had been. They were gone, at least as far as Stone could see, though he could only turn his head from side to side. He was in the middle of nowhere, with cacti rising in the moon and starlit darkness. There were large mounds every thirty feet or so, towering columns of packed dirt. Most of them were half collapsed, their walls broken in various places like a chimney from a long closed factory.
Jesus, he was thirsty. His mouth felt like he had been chewing marbles, broken marbles. His lips felt huge, like pillows, and he could feel blood still dripping slowly from all over him. Stone wondered how he looked, narcissism raising its eternal head even in the midst of all this. He wondered if they’d fucked him so bad that his face was all misshapen, his teeth gone—if he was hideous now, like so many of the poor wounded and radiation-burned bastards he’d seen already in his travels. But it was hard to tell what had been particularly damaged because everything was in pain, every square inch of his flesh and bones felt like they had been put through a shredding machine. He managed to crane his neck just enough to look down at the rest of his body. He was as naked as the day he was born but covered with some syrupy stuff. In spite of it all, Stone let out a laugh, which hurt like hell. He looked like the fucking tar baby from Uncle Remus. Well, at least the bastards who wanted to do him in were imaginative. Stone had to give Patton and his sick crew that. But exactly what they had in mind for him escaped him. To have the syrup harden in the frigid night air? Turn him into some kind of corpse candy bar enclosed within a frozen sugary coating?
To his displeasure Stone was becoming more conscious by the second. He much preferred the other place. But his mind cleared as the cold set in and his one working eye opened more than just a slit so he could pretty much see the whole fucking world around him. And he didn’t like what he saw. Ants. Just a few to the left of his head where he had turned, but farther off, coming out of one of the high mud towers, were more of them—a lot more. By the light of the silvery moon Stone could see ugly little faces drawing closer to him. The advance scouts. One approached straight toward him—it was a big son of a bitch for an ant, a good inch long with mandibles big enough to not want it to get too close. It made a beeline for Stone’s nose, as if the finishing line of its race. And as Stone looked on, the reddish-black insect suddenly leapt forward and landed on the tip of his bloody nose. Without even an introduction it opened the half-inch-wide jagged jaws and slammed them closed on a little piece of hanging flesh.
Stone couldn’t believe the sound his scream made as it left his lips. He flung his head back and forth, dislodging the little bastard, which flew off with a tiny chunk of Martin Stone for its reward. Stone’s scream stopped after a few seconds, but his heart started beating so fast that he could hardly breathe through his snot- and blood-choked throat. He had screamed not so much from the pain, though it hurt like a razor being sliced slowly across his nerves, but because he suddenly realized what the madman Patton had in store for him. To be attacked by these things. By these thousands of little mouths. Mouths that could, from just the one bite that Stone had received so far, be incredibly painful.
“Shit,” he growled up into the night air. “Shit,” he spat out at the stars staring amusedly down, at the three-quarter moon, looking like a punctured ball about to fall from the sky. “I don’t want to go like this, you son of a bitches.” Stone didn’t know if he was addressing the general or the galaxies, but it hardly mattered. Neither were listening.
Suddenly Stone just let his whole body go limp. He lay there absolutely motionless, as the crickets and the wind joined together in a whistling, crackling chant of the darkest part of night. Chant of death, of teeth on flesh, of jaws cracking open skulls. Well, at least the bastard wouldn’t shoot off the A-bomb he had threatened to. He had Stone now, there was no reason any longer. Not that it was going to help America, Stone knew. The man would probably be able to carry out his dark plans of absolute control and controlled extermination. Stone was just as glad he wouldn’t be around to see it. Yeah, all things considered, it was probably just about time to kick off. He tried to rationalize in his mind, tried to get into the idea of death, groove on it.
But he didn’t groove on it when the second scout ant leapt up onto his cheek and took out a lobster-claw-sized chunk of prime human. Stone involuntarily yelled out again. He just hated how it felt when those snapping turtle-like jaws bit into him. But he didn’t have time to dwell too much on that one, for another burning sensation ripped into his ear. Then his neck. Then his foot and leg. And though Stone did his best to roll and twist, the best he could manage was a few inches one way or another. But only a few of the miniature monsters were dislodged. The rest took as much as they could carry of the dripping flesh and popped back down onto the prairie floor, heading immediately back to the colony tower some thirty feet off. And as they went, they passed hordes of the advancing columns of main army ants. These had even larger mandibles, jaws, and bodies for carrying huge loads of supplies back to the colony. And even as Stone struggled and shouted curses in mortal horror, the ants leapt up from the ground by the dozens, then the hundreds. And they were everywhere on him, and Martin Stone could feel himself being slowly eaten up, could feel the outer layers of his flesh already being torn off. And he knew with growing horror that it would take a long time for him to die. Perhaps many hours. And he would feel and know and sense every second of what was already sending him to the brink of absolute madness: the death of ten million bites.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
MARTIN STONE entered a world of pain that few men get to experience. Many have died perhaps as painfully—by fire or acid—but these, at worst, kill within minutes. Stone would not be so lucky. He kept thinking that it wouldn’t get worse, but it did, as more and more of the writhing bodies swept over him, covered him in a blanket of their consuming passion. But as men adjust to even the most terrible of situations and just try to keep things from getting worse, Stone tried to keep the rippling little brown bodies from his eyes. That was going to be the most horrible. Seeing them as they actually ate right into the socket. Stone wondered what he had done to offend whoever was up there minding the store.
Suddenly he was doused with cold liquid, and a shudder ran down his body. He opened his eyes to see a woman, clad in deerskin and bear hide, holding a large gourd filled with water, which she dumped on him again. Stone sputtered as some of it rushed into his mouth, but the terrible pain was lessened all over him as the water washed the army of flesh-takers away. As the woman bent over him to one side, Stone could see that she was an Indian, with long black hair pulled back inside her fur collar and coppery, smooth skin. And even in the midst of the most wrenching pain Stone had ever experienced, he could see that she was beautiful. She bent out of view, and Stone could feel some cutting or pulling against the chains that held him. His right hand snapped free, and he pulled it down, flexing it and stretching it. The muscles felt like they had turned to rock, the veins and nerves frozen like wet ropes in the Arctic.
Then she was around the other side, and his left hand came free. Then his legs, too, were released from the torture rack, and she reached down, helping Stone rise to his feet. He could barely stand, and she supported him as he felt his legs turn to rubber bands and waver wildly beneath him. Everything was spinning, and he could see from the look in her eyes that he looked bad, real bad.
She scanned him up and down, and Stone remembered that he was naked and a sense of modesty came over him that made him so dizzy, he tumbled back to the dirt. She pulled him by the shoulders several yards away from the still streaming lines of ants, searching for their missing meal, angry and moving fast. She helped Stone into some deerskin pants and shirt and fitted moccasins on his feet. Just being away from the fucking mandibles and protected from the subfreezing temperature made Stone feel like he was at Club Med basking in the sun. Almost.
As he lay half propped up against a stump of an ancient petrified tree, Stone saw the woman drag a body out of the shadows and bring it up to the X. It was an NAA’er, his throat slit, Stone could see through blurred eyes. The woman attached the body’s hands and legs to the chains, not that he was going anywhere, and then stepped back. Already the ants started closing in, not even aware that they had been given a substitute meal. But then it hardly mattered to them. All human beings tasted pretty much the same.
“Come on,” the Indian woman said as she came back to Stone and helped him to his feet again.
“Who—who are you?” he asked, wondering if all his teeth were still there, as his mouth felt real strange, as if he had chewed a whole stick of cotton candy at once and there was little room to breathe or talk.
“I’m Meyra, daughter of Fighting Bear, of the Cheyenne. Come, we must go. Go fast. I killed two of their guards—they’ll check on you at dawn. I know them.”
“You killed them? You know—” Stone asked, both confused and just wanting to ask her something so he could look into those brown eyes, which drew him in like oases of perfect calm and beauty in the midst of his terrible, mind-blasting pain.
“Shut up, mister,” the woman said, and Stone could feel as she held him with one arm around her shoulder, the other pulling him up by a grip on the outside of the deerskin he was wearing, that she was strong, very strong. But still he felt himself starting to give out after just a few steps. His body just didn’t want to work, things were broken, gears fallen out of alignment here and there.
“You’ve got to help me a little,” she said, her face just inches from his so he had a sudden insane impulse to kiss her, which he didn’t. Even delirium wouldn’t be explanation enough. “I can’t carry you completely on my own. Try, just try, to keep pumping your legs—I’ll guide you.” She pulled him closer against her so he was half covered by one side of her thick fur coat.
“Trying,” Stone said with a thin smile. “Tryin’, I swear I am.” And again everything was just sort of surreal, as it had been for quite a while now. Alice in Wonderland had nothing on Martin Stone. His eyes kept opening and closing like doors for the birds on cuckoo clocks. Somehow he kept just sending the command to his legs to move, and they did—up to a point. Every few steps a knee would give out, or a thigh just felt like it wasn’t there. But she would catch him as he started to go, and that would wake him enough to help her out. But it was rough going, every step of it.
Suddenly she threw him down onto the ground, diving down alongside him, and Stone, after catching his breath from the blow, started to ask her what the hell was going on. But she slammed a hand over his mouth. Lights appeared about fifty yards dead ahead of them, and they heard the sound of a motor. It was one of the NAA jeeps out on perimeter patrol. But they hadn’t been alerted yet about Stone’s escape and went by with twin beams piercing the night, without even noticing the two figures lying facedown behind a thick cactus.
When they were completely out of view, Meyra rose again and pulled Stone to his feet.
“Sorry,” she said with just a glimmer of a smile flickering across her face. “I had to shut you up.”
“You can shut me up anytime you want,” Stone whispered back, his throat hardly capable of speech now, as the cold completely swelled up the damaged cells that had been broken by the beatings. She dragged him on for what seemed like miles, Stone feeling more dead than alive but aiding her with every bit of remaining willpower he had. He knew that if he faltered or fell, he was a dead man. And he didn’t relish another meeting with his ant buddies back there, nor to see her graceful face eaten away until it was blood-splattered bone. And those thoughts gave him the energy to go on. Stark terror is a strong motivator.
At last she stopped, and he felt himself leaning on something, something quite pungent. He opened his eyes and saw a horse—more likely a mule, as its shoulders were lower than his.
“Get on,” she said, still whispering, as if she were afraid they’d be heard out there in the middle of nowhere. He leaned toward the skinny thing and tried to climb on but just couldn’t muster the strength in his legs or arms for the job. He felt embarrassed, stupid. A man always wants to be strong, particularly in front of a woman he finds attractive. And Stone could hardly move a muscle. A three-year-old child would have beaten him at arm wrestling at that moment.
“Come on, big boy,” she said with a trace of amusement in her voice. “Let’s try to get this load on. After that you can rest.” She grabbed him around the ass, taking a good handful with each hand, and started hoisting him up on the thing.
“Goddamn fucking son of a bitch, mother—” Stone snorted under his breath like a madman, so furious was he at his super-weakened state. But as she pushed and he grabbed hold for all he was worth with his half working arms, fingers gripped around the mule’s scraggly mane, somehow he made it up and onto the creature’s narrow back. Stone was draped right over the thing, its pointed backbone poking into his stomach, which didn’t need any more work done on it right now. She took the reins and led the animal forward, and the rocking, up-and-down motion instantly made Stone feel like his guts were on fire. But he knew he couldn’t even raise himself up. Hardly able to breathe, his face turning red, he lay draped like a blanket, his face staring straight down at the cold, brown dirt passing by below him.
Stone had totally lost track of time, so he had no idea how long they bounced along like this. It felt like centuries, but it just as easily could have been hours or even minutes. But at last they came to a complete stop, and Stone felt several pairs of hands peeling him off the back of the exhausted pack mule. Then he was being carried hand and foot into some sort of tepeelike structure and laid down on a soft bed made of furs, warm and comforting like a woman’s arms. Stone felt his stomach relaxing, ever so slightly, for the first time in hours. The others disappeared from the conical-shaped buffalo-hide structure, and she closed the flap behind so they were totally sealed in. She struck something in the center of the floor of the tepee, which was a good twenty feet wide at its base, tapering to about two at the top, which was opened up for the release of fumes and smoke. A fire burst into being, and the warm flames instantly fell against Stone’s face some eight feet away.
“Now, let’s see what the bastards did to you,” she said, coming over to him and standing beside the bed. As if he were a sick and limp child, she took off first the long coat, then the deerskin pants and moccasins she had clothed him in on the desert. He vaguely knew what was going on, as a deep gray ness had now descended on him. The heat of the fire relaxed him more and more. And he could feel her hands moving over him, up and down. She seemed to be washing him with something, then drying it off. Then putting an ointment over him that instantly felt soothing and cool. In a way Stone felt embarrassed being naked while she worked all over him. But then he had always been proud of his strong swimmer’s body and his well-endowed other features. Still, he didn’t know what he looked like anymore, after the beatings and the ant picnic on his chest and face. And for some reason, in the midst of all the madness and death around him, Stone found the most important thing was that he wouldn’t be hideously ugly—like the monsters he had seen out there.
Then he did at last fall into the darkness again. But this time it was a loving darkness. A darkness in which the hands continued to run across him and the warm fires caressed him, and the furs beneath his back felt so warm and endlessly soft, as if he could swim in them. And Stone wondered in his
dreamy state if perhaps he’d died and this was heaven.
But as he did fall into a deeper, almost comalike sleep, the heaven turned to hell, as the ants were upon him again. Only this time he was both in his body feeling it all and ten feet above it, floating there like some kind of bird, as he watched himself slowly disappear beneath the churning jaws of the carpet of blood-soaked ants. He could see his outer layers of skin disappear, then the muscles beneath. Then his raw, pumping arteries and organs were attacked and eaten by the things one tiny bloody bite at a time. Until he was just a single beating heart lying on the prairie floor surrounded by ivory bones that glowed in the moon-carved night. And then the ants closed in on the heart as it seemed to almost roll away from them, propelled on little arterial feet. But they caught it, and they bit into that too. And when the last bite had been taken, mere was nothing left. And Martin Stone floated in his dream above the nothing that was now himself. And he felt himself crying that he was dead—more that this body was gone and he wouldn’t have a burial, wouldn’t even sink into the dirt and become flowers and trees. And the tears fell and watered the ground where his body had been, wetting the bones with little waterfalls of liquid silver that danced across them.
Suddenly he was awake again. She was sitting next to him and stroking his face slowly, with such delicacy and grace that it sent goose bumps up his spine, an electric sense of her presence and warmth.
“You were crying in your sleep,” she said softly.
“I—I—” Stone started to protest, not even knowing what it was he was protesting.
“Shh,” she said, again laying her fingers across his lips. “Don’t protest. All men—especially the men of my tribe—are afraid to cry. But it releases the poisons, the toxins. It is the body’s way of healing from the inside, as I try to heal you from the outside.” She pulled back the blanket that had been half covering him and reached down for a gourd filled with a green paste.
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