Stone glanced up and over at Meyra, who was staring across at him, her whole body still shaking, he could see, even from ten yards off. She wasn’t going to come and help. That was for damn sure. Two of the Cheyenne stepped forward at last, seeing that they must help their fallen leader. Stone couldn’t recognize them for sure beneath their breathing bandannas, but he thought one of them was Fighting Eagle, whom Little Bear had mentioned as wanting to be his eventual successor.
“Got to dig hole first,” the brave said, walking a few feet to his parked cross-country bike and extracting a folding shovel from a backpack. “I’ll dig it right next to his body so we can just push it in. This whole thing doesn’t have to be all beautiful, you know, for the ritual to be fulfilled.” Stone thought he caught a slightly cynical wink from above the mask. He was sure they hadn’t stopped to bury all their dead before. When you’re attacked, you try to survive. That’s the oldest ritual.
After a few minutes of digging in the loose dirt of the sun-parched backland, the Cheyenne had made a hole about a foot and a half deep, two feet wide, and about six feet long. He stepped back, looked down with vague approval, and handed the shovel to Stone, who started to protest.
“Man who lead man to his death—that man must bury him. Cheyenne words. Cheyenne law. Understand?” Stone felt like he was being pushed to the limits of his own cool, but he couldn’t break. He had led them all here. Even though the reason for doing so had been imperative, still he was responsible for the deaths. It was true.
Chastened, Stone gritted his teeth and stood above the yard or so of smoking human garbage. He tried to wedge the shovel in beneath the V-shaped pelvic bone, above which the rest of the ashy body rested precariously, but the moment that metal touched bone, the bone crumbled into a hundred little pieces. Inside the glowing hulk he could see the red coals still throbbing peacefully, like the burned-down coals of a long-flaming log. There was no way he was going to transport the thing with any kind of dignity—he could see that right away. Well, he would bury the guy, Stone thought without looking around at the others, but it wasn’t going to win the Funeral of the Month Award.
He heard a sharp intake of breath from behind him as he dug the shovel into the pile of collapsed bones and flaming slime and lifted a bunch of it like mud from the ground. He threw the load a few feet or so down into the grave, where it sizzled against the slight wetness from below. Again he dug the shovel in, this time getting most of the burning mass onto its curved metal plate. The smell of the charred flesh was intense for a second and burned Stone’s eyes as a sudden breeze fanned the corpse chops right into his face. But he threw the load forward, and it spread apart as it tumbled into the grave, steaming as it touched moisture.
The bones and the chunks of burning flesh were the easy part. It was the actual puddle that was going to be hard. The stuff was more like boiling tar or oil than something that had been human. After a few feeble attempts at loading the wretched waste onto the shovel, Stone just turned the blade of the implement on its edge and swept it all sideways. The sticky mess flowed along the ground, pouring down into the grave to join its more solid brethren parts. Within a couple of minutes Stone had scraped all that he could of the recently deceased into the hole. Just a black scum remained on the ground where Little Bear had died.
Meyra walked over to the stuff in the hole and took her amulet from around her neck. A beautiful necklace of violet turquoise adorned with cougar teeth, it created the shape of a mountain lion, her family crest. The Cheyenne woman threw it down into the bubbling black mass that had been her brother, and it was gobbled down in a flash. A thing of beauty disappeared into a thing of unspeakable horror.
“From this moment on,” she said, raising her hands to the skies overhead, trying to find a patch of clear heaven through the mists and spreading smoke of the atomic bomb cloud so she could find and address the ancient Indian Gods, “from this moment on, I am no one,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “I have no family. I am the last of no lineage. I will live from minute to minute. I will live only to avenge my brother. There will be no other life. I will take the place he filled in life. I will become him, as he becomes you.”
She lowered her eyes to the cauldron of radioactive rot that farted out bursts of pure foulness and took in, without any mental shield, what her brother had become. She wanted to know. Wanted to see the total horror. And remember it for the rest of her life.
Chapter Two
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Stone said none too ceremoniously when Meyra had finished and stood with her head bowed and eyes closed. He didn’t know if she was in a religious trance or unconscious, but the mushroom cloud was starting to lean precipitously toward them now, the black curtains of superheated atoms starting to extend out at the very edges like a mist, a dark, blinding fog that crept out over the desolated prairie.
“Don’t you bury your dead?” Leaping Elk smirked, his hands on his hips as he stood next to the Bradley III tank, now on its side. Inside the tank were three of Stone’s NAA recruits. At least, they had been three of Stone’s recruits—mere lads not even out of their teens. Nothing living could have taken the temperature the tank had risen to as it had been caught in the direct radiation and heat waves of the hydrogen bomb. It still seemed to throb an almost invisible violet color, as if it were alive beneath the steel skin.
“That’s their coffin,” Stone replied icily as he rose and searched for Excaliber, his worse-for-wear bullterrier. “No one, no animal, will get inside that thing for a long, long time. And if they did, they’d be dead before they crawled back out the hatch.”
“Why?” Leaping Elk sneered again. “Is it guarded by some invisible white god?” He shot his right hand out and touched the side of the tank—and half screamed, pulling the hand back as it sizzled and burned against the armored steel, which was at a temperature of 1,435 degrees. The others laughed, even his fellow Cheyenne, and Leaping Elk’s lips ground furiously against each other. More than anything, he seemed to have the need to be taken seriously, not to be laughed at. His whole face seemed to flush a few shades darker, and with a snorting laugh the Cheyenne stuck his hand back out and this time clamped it down hard against the armor.
Some of the others gasped, and Stone looked away for a second as a stream of smoke went up above the fingers. They could hear the flesh burning beneath the hot metal. But Leaping Elk didn’t wince or make a sound. He took in their gaze, basking in their respect—nay, fear—of him, and laughed loud.
After about ten seconds he removed the hand and held it up for all to see. It was literally smoking, the flesh almost black in some places, red and bubbling up like a tar street on a hot summer day in others. The pain seemed to give him pleasure as he grinned, showing the mutilated appendage around. A mark of madness. A mark of the crazy wisdom of the Cheyenne. Stone looked quickly at the eyes of the other braves. And he could see that Leaping Elk’s shenanigans were working. Whether he was clever enough to plan it all out or a complete madman, Stone had no idea. But the rest of the Cheyenne were definitely looking at their chortling compatriot with a perverse respect.
“This is what the Cheyenne warrior can do,” the brave said, holding the sizzling palm up so that Stone could get a good view.
“And this is what the white man can do,” Stone said with a thin grin as he lowered himself down on top of his Harley 1200. “Get his ass the fuck out of here.” The bike was beat-up, covered with the grit and grime of warfare. But it felt good beneath his legs as Stone settled down on it, armed to the teeth and ready to fly. He whistled and a low shape appeared out of the dust, shook itself, and leapt up onto the black leather seat behind him.
“Good boy.” Stone grinned, scratching the animal behind the ears. A little cloud of dust rose above its head, and the pitbull barked beneath its slightly lopsided particle mask. The damned thing needed a bath, Stone thought, and then felt himself an idiot, worrying about a dog’s toilette when half the world was burning around them. He turned
the switch of the big Harley, and its instant ignition system worked perfectly, roaring the engine to life. He looked over at the still functioning tank, the one remaining Bradley III, with all the latest armaments, including a missile system and radar/laser guidance tracking.
He was glad it was on his side. Stone knew what the war machine was capable of. General Patton had been planning to conquer America with a fleet of them, à la Rommel in the African desert. And the Fascist madman might well have succeeded—if he wasn’t part of that swirling black cloud now. Stone gave the thumbs-up and saw Bull’s face, dimly peering back from within the tank, give him the return signal. He hadn’t trusted the big country boy back at boot camp, when Stone had infiltrated the general’s main camp. But now that they had been through one mini-war, one near execution, and one hydrogen bomb blast together, Stone trusted Bull implicitly. And that went for the other three NAA recruits who were still left. If they’d been through all this already and still hadn’t killed Stone with a shot to the back—or split with their weapons and all—then they sure as hell weren’t going to do it now. For better or worse, Martin Stone was amassing his own little private army, though his combat power of one tank, one motorcycle, one dog, and a bunch of angry Indians would have to improve significantly if he was really going to make any headway as a military power.
Stone didn’t even look back as he started the bike across the flat prairie, away from the cloud of doom that blotted out the dawn’s feeble light. The sun tried to climb up into the black shroud that filled the northern skies of Colorado. But things didn’t look too promising. The tank fell in behind Stone, following about twenty yards behind as Excaliber bedded down low on the back of the Harley’s long leather seat, gripping his front and back legs around the thing like a starfish around an oyster. His right front leg had been wounded by Patton’s troops. But with the splint that Stone had put on it, and the remarkable recuperative powers of the pitbull breed, the canine was already using it, putting pressure on it to hold itself in place atop the tearing cycle.
The Cheyenne looked hastily among themselves as the white men departed.
“Bah, we go north, past the cloud.” Leaping Elk snorted contemptuously, waving his burned hand at the towering mushroom cloud to the north.
“No, we go with Stone,” Meyra said softly but imperiously. She sat down in the slung-back seat of her three-wheeler, a heavy-duty cross-country vehicle with machine gun mounted on front, and started the engine. The rest of the small tribe was torn between Leaping Elk’s mad show of bravery and scorn for the world of the white man and Meyra’s simple but strong command. She was a descendant in the line of the Succession of the Chiefs. Only she was a woman. There had never been a woman chief among the Cheyennes. It made the braves feel peculiar, less than men, as they rushed to their all-terrains and started them up. But, taking off one after another, they fell in a long, ragged line behind her. At last there was just Leaping Elk and his own dummy, a shorter and fatter Indian who seemed to follow his every word and glance.
Leaping Elk continued to hold his badly burned hand up as he compared it against the mushroom cloud, seeking only he knew what sort of dark, aesthetic understanding. As the fleeting force of tanks and three-wheelers almost disappeared a mile off, its dust trail rising up slowly in the air, the Cheyenne, much to the relief of his lackey, mounted his bike and started off in pursuit.
Stone, in the lead, quickly found that he had to slow down from his forty miles per hour or the cloud of bomb dust that he sent up positively blinded anyone coming up behind him. He slowed to twenty, which helped a little, but it was still rough going. He hoped the others had their bandannas pulled tight and that the tank had been put on internal oxygen supply. Behind him, the pitbull nuzzled deeper into the space between the back of Stone’s leather jacket and the leather of the seat—as if the air coming from there were cleaner than what was flowing all around them.
As the prairie came into view in the slight morning, Stone saw to his disgust that the land had been decimated by the blast. The sun was having a hard time getting much light or warmth at all through the high cover of dark, radioactive fallout that was spreading out in a wider and wider dome like an umbrella now, perhaps forty miles across. But the little light that did filter through showed him just what the results of a ten-megaton blast were on planet earth. And it was terrible. Like beholding the rage of a jealous god.
Every standing object had been torn down. Not that there had been a hell of a lot of junk out there. But what little there had been—cacti, scraggly trees—had been torn from their roots and turned into smoking salad. They lay on their sides in pieces of burned plant fiber, steaming, shrunken roots reaching up toward the sky like a thousand skeletal fingers in anguished vegetable prayer. The entire area was covered with a layer of white powder, as if a snow had fallen. But this stuff was crystallized sand, or maybe something else, Stone figured as he rode over it. He could feel the warm clouds of heat rising up around him.
For the first few miles, most of the animal life he saw were just piles of ash—hard to tell if it was even animal or vegetable—or just mounds of ash and dirt congealed into bumps in the earth. But when they had gotten thirty-five, then forty miles away from ground zero, he could at least make out what kind of creatures they had been. Elk with their hides smoldering in dark, charred circles as if cigarettes had been put out in them in a hundred places. Heads—just skulls with horns still intact atop them, but blackened, almost shiny, as if coated with a high-gloss paint. A herd of northern bison came into view as he peaked the top of a rise and started down again. They were all grouped around one another, as if they had been trying to seek protection from the blast—pull in the wagons as it were—as they had formed a loose sort of wedge with the strongest males in front and the females behind. Then the calves huddled in the safety of the thickest part of the defensive formation.
Not that it had done them a bit of good, of course. They were all dead, half-burned corpses. Oddly, though parts of them had been consumed into black leather, other parts were nearly untouched. As Stone drove past them, Excaliber looked up from his cocoon and let out a plaintive howl. He recognized something in them. Some animal energy that had been consumed in the atomic fires. And in his own way he mouthed a mournful prayer from one creature to another, all of which were stuck on the most fucked-up planet in the universe.
Stone was struck by the haunting features the burning atomic winds had sculpted onto the dead bisom. There was an art of death: the way the heads on some were totally unscathed; their eyes still glassy and bright; other’s heads nothing but blackened stumps spitting up boiling blood from time to time, while the bodies beneath them were virtually untouched, thick brown matted hair hanging down around the corpses. It had all depended on exactly what angle the bomb’s rays and heat waves had reached them. It was like a panorama from the Museum of Natural History that Stone remembered visiting with his father, Major Clayton Stone, when he had been a child. The long, echoing marble rooms as big as a palace in a dream, and windows filled with scenes from all over the world—animals frozen forever in their dioramic habitat of plastic trees and paper moons.
“A museum of death,” Stone muttered to himself as he looked at the mix of decay and wholeness, blood and fur. Some of the irradiated creatures appeared almost comical, with whole bodies and heads but nothing but bones for legs. Others like something from a nightmare, their faces melted into porridge as Little Bear’s had been. Others even worse…
Stone spat down through his bandanna onto the prairie floating past him and pulled his eyes away from the death scene. He knew it was easy to get hypnotized by the dark beauty of destruction. But only madness lay that way.
To the south he could see mountains, but it was hard to tell how far away they were, since a haze caused by the dust the winds of the bomb had spread hung in the air like a curtain. Behind him—Stone turned around every ten or twenty minutes just to keep an eye on the course of the thing—the mushroom cloud was s
lowly spreading out, still in no great hurry. The light winds were pushing it to the south and east, as the top of the cloud still pushed its way into the very upper reaches of the stratosphere. When the damn thing came down, it could poison all of Colorado. Stone felt a deep bitterness start to rise up in him. The bastards just never got enough. The madmen, the Fascists, the destroyers of the world. They had to keep kicking at the planet till they blew her into little glowing pebbles and set her in orbit around the moon.
His glance was suddenly taken by a strange sight to the left of the course he was following. It looked as if hundreds of branches had been laid out in lines parallel to one another. And then, as he got closer, Stone saw that it was even weirder than that. The branches were snakes, and they were all dead. Cooked to a crisp, like fricasseed weirder. Their mouths were open wide, as if they had died gasping for air, and their bodies were all stretched out as far as they could go in a north-south direction. The outer edges of their skin had been turned a dark brown, like something that had been under the broiler for about half an hour.
Excalibar barked as if wanting to jump down, investigate, maybe have a snack or two. But Stone yelled around to the pitbull, “Sit down, you maniac. If you move one fucking inch—” Excaliber lowered himself back down on the seat but made a deep throaty sound, as if to say, “Then it better be chow time—and soon.” Stone realized the snakes must have been driven from their holes by the heat and then tried to escape the rays by turning in the direction of the blast and hyperventilating. Of course, nothing had worked.
Warlord's Revenge Page 2
