Warlord's Revenge

by Craig Sargent

  Just when Stone’s battered brain and churning stomach were starting to settle down, Leaping Elk had to inject some psychosis into the proceedings. He took a piece of the meat, chewed it for a few seconds, and then, standing up, spat it into the fire near Stone’s feet, where the bloody minute steak sputtered softly in the flames.

  “How Cheyenne can eat meat killed by a white man, this I cannot understand,” the tall, lanky Indian said contemptuously, staring hard at the others. They watched him but didn’t stop chewing. If it took a tongue-lashing to keep eating, so be it. Leaping Elk whipped his other hand out of the shadows and held up one of the gamma-rayed, bug-eyed snakes they had passed earlier.

  “Eat this. The desert provides for us. This will give us strength.”

  “The desert didn’t provide that,” Stone said softly between chews, praying that this wasn’t going to escalate into a scene and he would have to stop eating, get up, and get into a fight with a fucking insane Indian. “An atomic bomb did. And everything touched by that bomb is deadly. Is poison. You eat that and you’re a dead man.”

  “Dead?” The Cheyenne laughed as he turned dramatically in front of the eating men. “Why am I not dead from this, then?” He waved his atomically burned hand, which had swelled up to double its normal size, the fingers like red cigars, the palm huge and distended like a catcher’s mitt, all purple and spotted. Even the hungriest of Cheyenne had to look away as he ate. “See, I absorb its poisons. That is the Indian way. You defeat all that challenges you. You kill it—and absorb it. Its energy becomes you. You become it.” He waved his burned hand high above his head, staring at it as if looking into the face of God, and did a strange little dance. Then he lifted the stiff polelike snake to his lips and took a huge bite, chomping down hard on the cooked flesh. They all heard the crack as his teeth snapped through the cartilage. Leaping Elk gulped hard as the head and neck of the snake slowly disappeared into his grinding mouth.

  After four bites he reached down into the darkness and took up a handful of stiff snakes, throwing the spears of frozen, high-rad snake chow out over to them.

  “Eat it! You hear me! I command you to eat of the snake!” The Cheyenne was in a frenzy of some kind now, his face all red, his eye twice as big as normal, his mouth dripping at both corners, a white, bubbling foam that seemed to come from deep within.

  “Stop it,” a voice suddenly said, cutting through the night, and for a second there was shocked silence, only the snap of the fire piercing the air as they all turned to Meyra, who had stood up in sudden anger at Leaping Elk’s attempts to bully them all with his madness. “You hear me,” she said, staring hard at him across the ten feet or so that separated the two. They were the only ones standing, the rest of the Cheyenne and Stone’s men still chewing away as they watched the little drama unfold. Excaliber, in seventh heaven, quickly went after Meyra’s food when he saw it unguarded at her feet. He disappeared with five whole strips into the shadows, from which slurping sounds of something trying to eat far more than it possibly could emerged for several seconds.

  The two Indians locked eyes in silence, and they could all feel the pure energy of two wills in combat streaking between the pair. Stone let his hand drop to his side so it was near his Ruger—just in case. He knew it wouldn’t be good politics to drop the Cheyenne in his tracks. But if the loony attacked Meyra, Stone wouldn’t think twice, let the chips fall where they may.

  “You don’t run things around here,” Leaping Elk said, his voice as cold as a hit man’s, his eyes suddenly focused and very calculating.

  “Nor you,” Meyra snapped back. “If my brother was alive, you would have not dared act so stupid.”

  “It is not stupid,” the Cheyenne said, suddenly enraged, as he raised himself to his full six-feet-four. “The eating of the snakes is the Old Way. We must stick with the Old Ways —the new ones will kill us. We will no longer be Indians but white man. We will lose the magic, the medicine. The snakes, the snakes…” Now he seemed to go completely mad as his face twitched and blood oozed out of the radiated hand in a sudden gush. He threw snakes at her, at all of them, threw the stiff bodies like little spears, reaching down again and again.

  “Eat them, do you hear me?” And when he was done and could find no more of the fried snake jerky, he looked at her with an even stranger grin than before and, suddenly lowering his pants, snarled out, “And you can eat this. You hear me, bitch woman? You can have this.” He waved his organ in his radioactive hand, hefting it like some kind of metaphysical weapon of the sexes.

  Meyra’s face grew contorted, so filled with rage did she become. She rushed the few feet separating them with the speed of a leopard, shouting all the way.

  “Goddamn right I will, pig. Goddamn right.” He raised his hands to grab her as she rushed up to him, but the twisted smile on his half-lipped face suddenly turned to a scream as her knee came up under him. She slammed the bony kneecap up into the Cheyenne’s testicles with the force of a can-nonball, and the large Indian took off right up into the air as if he’d been launched from a silo. He must have risen a good two feet straight off the ground before he fell back to earth, landing on his side where he writhed and screamed in exquisite agony.

  “Don’t talk to me about the Old Ways, you pig.” Meyra sneered down at him, curling her lips back in utter disgust. “You dirty the name of Indian. No real Cheyenne would ever have done something like that. Crawl off, vermin, away from me.” Leaping Elk’s lackey helped drag him off into the shadows, as the Indian couldn’t even raise himself up off the ground. She had hurt him bad. And Stone knew a man like that was the most dangerous of all.

  She looked back at the other Cheyenne. “I know I’m a woman. And I know you’re all tough macho men who couldn’t stand to break a thousand years of tradition and let a woman run things. But that’s not what I want. My brother’s dead, but I’m not going to follow this maniac. And if any of you do, you’re as insane as him. He sullies the name Cheyenne.” The others nodded and grunted in agreement as they sucked at their teeth and reached for a final piece or two of the meat. They did respect him. Leaping Elk definitely had the crazy wisdom in his veins. But he was too crude. Too much animal in him. None of them wished to die, and they could see, could feel, that that was where he was heading—and fast.

  “Let’s try to do things in a more democratic way. You know, we’ll decide things together, vote on them. Perhaps the old ways are gone forever. Perhaps they’re no good any longer.” They looked at her and one another noncommittally. The idea was too radical, too new.

  “I’m going to leave for a few hours,” Stone said when they were all satiated and lying around the fire with dumb smiles on their faces. The NAA recruits and the Indians shared a jug of gin one of the men pulled out, and seemed to be getting along all right. Stone had purposely wanted to wait until they were all too full and lazy to move. There would be no more trouble tonight, though he knew there wasn’t a hell of a lot holding the whole fighting force together.

  “I’m going to get some medicine for us,” Stone went on as all eyes focused sleepily on his shape, silhouetted by the orange heat waves of the cooking fire. “Anti-rad pills. My father stashed them not that far from here. I’ll be back before dawn. We need them. The radiation is already running through our veins, in our lungs. There are ways to neutralize it—if we move fast, real fast. ’Cause though I’m sure all of you are skeptical as hell, we’re in a race against time already. Death is waiting up in those skies, in those clouds, as surely as it’s already streaming through our bodies at this very moment.”

  Chapter Four

  The hard hand of the night slapped against Stone’s face as the north wind blew across the lower mountains of the Rockies. But he didn’t push the painful sensations away—in fact, he welcomed anything to get his mind off all the problems confronting him—the radiation, the feuding Cheyenne, April… Every minute he was alive, things seemed to get more complicated.

  “Fuck!” he spat out into the win
d. It felt good to scream it. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He didn’t even know exactly who he was angry at—maybe at the whole goddamn world. But Excaliber apparently shared similar feelings. For he joined in howling out his own canine profanities along with his master, gripping the seat hard with all four limbs as he bayed up into the night, into the cold air above.

  The sky was getting stranger all the time, Stone noticed as he bounced around the seat of the droning Harley as it shot up and down mountain roads at a good clip. The colors of the aurora were truly bizarre tonight—reds and violets and greens, like some sort of dark rainbow. The phantasmagoric pulsations ran back and forth from the earth to the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere in rippling patterns of energy. The whole sky looked like it was on fire. The earth was unsettled and vomiting out her magnetic rage at being nuked.

  But it was the rows of burning yellow eyes along both sides of the mountain road that caught Stone’s attention. For he knew they had teeth attached to them. Timber wolves, a pack of them. By the number of blazing eyes he knew there were a lot. Must have been driven off by the blast and congregated together in one huge hunting unit. Within seconds the glowing orbs were on all sides of him, and Stone could hear the growls coming from the shadows, from behind the trees. Growls that quickly turned to barks as the wolf pack argued among itself about whether or not to attack. Excal-iber stood up, his fur bristling, his jaws pulled back to crocodilian proportions. The pitbull let out with a heart-stopping growl and then another, baring his fangs in a smile of, “If you’re gonna boogie, come on, mother, do it.” He and his breed, Stone had learned, much to his dismay, never shrank from a good fight. Especially against fifty or more wolves. Why, the night was just beginning.

  But the pitbull’s challenge unsettled the wolves just long enough for Stone to pull back on the throttle so the Harley accelerated from thirty to seventy in three seconds. The front wheel lifted off as he tore down the road, his headlight slicing back and forth through the darkness ahead like a sword. The wolves gathered themselves and tried to head the bike off, the ones farthest ahead darting in at a sharp angle to try to stop it.

  “Down,” Stone screamed out to the bullterrier, which he could feel was sort of half hanging on to the back of the bike, getting ready to jump off and into the thick of it. “Get your fucking ass down or I leave you here,” Stone screamed in his most commanding tones. He didn’t have time to play around. The dog whined and sat back down with a thump of anger. It kept its head on the seat but its jaws open, in case one of them got close enough to take a nip out of.

  Stone saw the shapes hurtle from both sides simultaneously—big ones, by the light of the beam. Their fur bristled silver in the reflection, and they grew closer until Stone could feel their musky breath upon him, their jaws reaching out. But leaning far forward on the bike, at that speed, Stone was more like a projectile than a person. The front bars and low windbreak of the Harley slammed into the two 175-pounders like they were made out of paper. The pair of timber wolves went flying backward in the direction from which they had come, both of them out cold, spinning around in the air, blood whipping from their mouths and ears. One more wolf tried a final, futile leap, thinking he could be the hero of the hunt. It was his last mistake. The screaming 1200-cc was going seventy-five by the time it had gone fifty yards. The wolf came head on toward the bike as if playing a game of Chicken.

  Vehicle hit predator, and one went flying. The wolf exploded off to the side, one whole side of its neck severed open so it leaked out thick red blood like a broken pipe in a basement. Stone almost lost control of the bike as it bounced to the right from the impact, digging in at a steep angle. But throwing one foot down as they were about to go over at high speed, he was able to bounce the bike right back off the prairie floor like a stone bouncing off a pond. The Harley shot a straight course ahead, but there were no more takers. Stone could feel the yellow eyes burning into his back without looking around.

  He was glad to see he had correctly gauged the distance to his father, Major Clayton’s, hidden mountain bunker in the northern hills of Estes National Park. He had figured two and a half to three hours. But with his ass being goosed by the wolf attack, he had trimmed it down to just over two. Stone hit the country road, an ancient one-laner that was already cracking into a thousand threads of concrete from the harsh winters and broiling summers and the lack of the slightest repairs. Five miles on this and then he turned off into what to the passerby could only have seemed like a dense bunch of bushes and brambles. But by pushing aside the barbed branches he was able to get through the ten feet or so of mini-jungle, sealing it behind him. He moved off at about twenty miles per hour down the almost invisible path through a series of hills covered with low brush and fir trees.

  At last Stone reached the sheer side of a mountain wall and pulled the bike to a stop. He dismounted, the auto kick-stand popping out in a flash so the bike stayed upright on its own. Excaliber opened one eye and, seeing nothing particularly exciting going on, at least at that moment, closed it again to get another few seconds of nod on its schedule. When Stone reached the boulder in the ground that hid the transmitter allowing entrance to the bunker, he knew instantly that someone had been there. He had been attacked just days before, by a Mafia hit squad of assassins. But he had been positive they had followed him directly in and that no one else knew about the place. Yet the huge football-shaped boulder had definitely been rolled back at a slightly different angle than he had left it.

  He budged the heavy rock aside, looking down cautiously into the three-foot hole below, to make sure there wasn’t a bomb or such planted there. He had learned that complete and total paranoia was the best policy out here in the lawless lands. But the transmitter, wrapped in a plastic bag, was the only object in the dirt hole, and Stone carefully lifted it and aimed it at the solid rock face. He pressed a switch, and the very sides of the mountain wall seemed to slide apart as two three-foot-thick doors of solid granite slid apart, creating a wide entrance. Stone mounted the bike and drove it in, the walls closing behind him automatically, as they were programmed to do unless receiving a counter-instruction within ten seconds. He parked the bike alongside the two cars and a van parked in the outer garage of the bunker.

  “Home” again. It still made him feel weird every time he came in the damn place. “Come on, dog!” Stone put his fingers in his lips and let loose with a sharp blast that made the pitbull’s ears instantly perk up like flags rising on a flagpole, as its eyes opened as wide as omelets. It looked at Stone as if to say, “That wasn’t fair,” and then rose and jumped down off the bike. Realizing where it was, the animal suddenly sped up and rushed ahead of Stone. It knew the way by heart, and the moment he opened the front door that led into the main house, the animal had disappeared in a blur and headed down the hall, through the living room and into the kitchen. The goddamn mutt was nothing more than a trained Pavlovian rat, Stone thought with disgust—behaviorized into making all the right turns to get to its beloved chow.

  As he walked through the living room Stone’s gaze swept around the entire space, still clean and spotless, with its large loftlike area, its plants, plush wall-to-wall carpeting, thick caressing couches. In his mind he kept seeing them all sitting there, his mother knitting, his father reading military tales or Kipling stories, his sister writing her poetry on her computer or doodling with her MacPaint. Happy little family scene, Stone thought as he blinked his eyes and rubbed them hard.

  Ghosts. Ghosts of the past. Would he ever be rid of them? They seemed to cling to him like a spiderweb, wet and sticky and suffocating. They had all lived together for five years inside the ultramodern hole in the side of a mountain, twenty thousand square feet plus of every imaginable convenience, fully stocked kitchen, armaments room, private bedrooms, firing range… The Major had been prepared, that was for damn sure, Stone thought as a little grin passed over his face. Now that the son of a bitch was dead, Martin found himself actually caring about his old man a lot more than h
e had done when the Major had been alive. Then they had done nothing but argue. For years. Even as they lived together in the bunker there had been an electric tension between them as Major Clayton R. Stone, Ret., had tried to teach his son his ways—and Martin had resisted. Now that the old man was dead, Stone could allow himself softer memories of the past. It all became hazy, events a little funnier, his father a little less of a person and more of a myth, a dream that had happened in another life, a dream Stone held in his head like a haunting hologram.

  Stone blinked again, and the ghosts disappeared, vanishing from the couches, the rug. He walked through the wide living space and then down a long hallway to his father’s main computer room. The instant he touched the door, he knew something was up.

  It was ajar. Yet when he had left it just days before, he had closed it—and it required a punched-in combination on a computer keypad to the right of the doorway to gain entrance. Stone pulled out his .44 Magnum and held it loosely at solar plexus level, eyeing every comer of the beeping, pulsing room. His father had been a computer buff—even a genius, perhaps—and had filled this, his private chamber, with nearly a million dollars worth of computers, processing gear, and communications devices. God knew what all. The preprogrammed setup was still carrying out all sorts of functions on its own, powered by computer-run electric generators and a combination of solar and gasoline power, for which his father had once told him the place could fuel itself for ten years without a single drop being added. Then it would die—as dead as the mountain rock itself.