Warlord's Revenge

by Craig Sargent

  Someone was after him bad, real bad. Enough to send out a fucking chopper, just to wait around in hiding—wait for Martin Stone to show up. And, of course, acting like a predictable mouse in a maze, Stone had done so. It felt great to be loved so much. He had made a lot of enemies in his short career out of the bunker, but somehow he hadn’t quite realized he was already on the number-one shit list of the bad guys. Well, if nothing else, Stone thought with bitter humor, he must be doing something right.

  He looked around, suddenly realizing the pitbull was nowhere in sight. But even as he strained to find it, the animal rose slowly from a muddy ditch across the one-lane road, covered with muck and dirt. Excaliber gave Stone a dirty look that he could feel even through the fiery shadows.

  “I told you from the start dog,” Stone said, looking the pitbull squarely in the eye. “When you travel with me, it’s flak time all the time.” The fighting dog looked somewhat chagrined by the turn of recent events. He had figured it was going to be bad—but this bad? A nice nuclear explosion before breakfast, a raiding party of mountain bandits after lunch, a chopper attack for a late-night snack. Excaliber shook himself violently for about five seconds, apparently trying to dislodge the blanket of debris that pretty much coated him at this point. Branches, dirt, little pieces of powdered helicopter flew off the vibrating animal like molecules being hurled free from a centrifuge.

  Once the bullterrior had cleaned itself sufficiently so at least it didn’t feel like a junkyard dog, it barked, gave Stone its usual look of amused resignation, and stood up on its back legs so its front paws were leaning against his chest. The narrow almost Oriental-looking face with its hooded, almond-shaped eyes loomed closer and closer, as if it were trying to make contact with his very soul. That was the thing he liked about animals, Stone thought with a chuckle as the canine’s long sandpaper-like tongue flapped across its master’s cheek—they forgot right away. Unlike human beings who could and usually did carry a grudge their whole life, the dog would let the anger, the feeling of betrayal, whatever it was, sweep through it, and then be gone. It wasn’t that it didn’t feel it but that it felt it completely. And then, like a cloud passing over the face of the sky, the darkness was gone and the animal’s face brightened again, ready for life, ready for whatever would come.

  “We could all learn a lot from you, you stinking ball of fur!” Stone laughed as the thick animal smell of the dog’s coat and tongue seemed to fill his senses. Stone suddenly had the absurd image of animals teaching men—giving them lessons in how to act properly. How to feel things fully, then let them pass without holding on either to the hate or the desire. The road to enlightenment taught by dogs, cats, hogs…

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” Stone said, suddenly pushing the pitbull back off him, “before I completely lose my mind.” He walked back over to the bike and saw that other than lying on its side and being covered with another coating of soot and small pieces of metal, it was all right. He lifted the 1200-cc with a burst of grunting and expletives. The thing weighed a ton. But after a few seconds it was up, and he mounted it, testing the wheels by bouncing up and down. Excaliber leapt up on the seat, Stone instant-started the engine, and they were off again, leaving the funeral fires behind to heat the cold night in waves of shimmering heat that rose up from the old country road.

  Stone tore through the night as the aurora far above seemed to at last tire out a little and drop back to a dim, pulsing pattern. The sky farther above was black. Not a star, the moon, nothing piercing the veil. It was as dark on the plains as he had ever seen it, as if a blanket had been dropped over the world. But the tunnel of light from his “fog buster” filled the mountain roads that he shot up and down with a flood of light. The nocturnal predators and prey of the forests scampered wildly off from the commotion of the passage of the Harley. Stone could see the yellow pairs of eyes of other wolf packs here and there staring out from among the forest. But the smell of blood was thick on the wind. They had made their kill—and were satiated—for the moment. One of them let out a low howl from behind a grove of trees. But Excaliber returned the growl in the same spine-chilling tone of caged animal fury. The pitbull would let no other animal challenge it—without returning the challenge.

  Stone didn’t like being pursued. It was one thing to battle it out, it was another to have some asshole—rather, a whole group of assholes—spending their every living day doing nothing but trying to kill you. A shiver ran down his back. Mafia? Guardians of Hell? The Dwarf? No, he was dead. Stone had killed him with his own hands. Not that it really mattered. They were all so interconnected, using one another for their own sick purposes. But someone, someone big, had obviously taken an extra-special interest in him. Death was carrying his name tag these days. The sky above looked like the lid of a coffin that was about to close forever.

  Stone was able to make good time and soon was on part of an Interstate that took him within miles of the bivouac—if his compass and landmark reckonings were correct. They were. For suddenly he recognized some low peaks and turned off through a series of fields, covered with the dead brown husks of millions of mountain flowers that felt like a cushion beneath the thick wheels of the Harley.

  Then he was at the camp, leaning down almost flat forward as he shot up the least angled slope of the thirty-foot-high plateau that sat like a little island of dirt rising up arrogantly from the bushy terrain around it. The second he reached the camp and the bike leveled out, Stone saw there was trouble. Big trouble.

  Leaping Elk and Meyra were facing each other in a cleared space, a dirt circle about fifteen feet wide. They were just a yard or so apart, and Stone saw with horror as a vagrant ray of crackling light from the fire danced along them that they were holding razor-sharp Cheyenne hunting knives in their hands. There wasn’t a sound in the camp, just Leaping Elk’s sickening smile as he stared at the much smaller Indian woman and the spreading circle of red on her buckskin jacket.

  Stone brought the Harley to a screeching halt, leaping from the big motorcycle so fast that it didn’t have time to release its auto kickstand and the whole machine tumbled over into the dirt, skidding sideways for about ten feet. Ex-caliber, who had just been waking himself from his usual traveling nap, barely had time to open his eyes before he found himself hurtling through the air and into the narrow branches of a nearby low tree. The dog groaned and curled itself up into a ball before it made contact. This was getting ridiculous, Excaliber thought angrily just before he struck. He was going to have to have a long, long talk with his master, who, he was now seeing, for all the food he provided—and that wasn’t a hell of a lot now that the pitbull thought about it—seemed to have a knack for producing painful experiences for the dog to go through. But it didn’t have a hell of a lot of time to dwell on the subject as the tree suddenly got real close.

  Stone ran across the plateau as fast as his legs could carry him, moving in a dark blur so that he suddenly crashed through the crowd of Indians and his own NAA recruits, who were all looking at the whole thing like it was some sort of late-night TV amusement. Stone started forward toward Leaping Elk, who still hadn’t realized Stone had returned and was locked in mortal combat with Meyra, who circled slowly around him now, her legs low and crouched. Arms reached out from both sides of him, holding Stone back from running into the circle.

  “No, you cannot,” one of the younger braves whom Stone recognized as Shining Eagle, said, holding him firmly. “They must fight it out. It is the Cheyenne way. We must have a leader. And there is no other method of deciding.”

  “But she—she’s just a woman,” Stone half screamed as he saw Meyra suddenly glance over and realize that he was there. She looked startled, first a mixture of fear, then relief, as she saw who it was. Then suddenly fear again, as she realized she had let her guard down. Leaping Elk, all six-feet-four of him, suddenly moved forward like a charging bull, his long blade slashing out at her.

  “She demanded it,” Shining Eagle said. “She was the
one who demanded the Trial of Knives. They must be allowed to—” But Stone wasn’t listening. Not when the Cheyenne woman was about to join her ancestors in a hurry.

  “Fuck that shit,” Stone spat out with the simple but eloquent words of someone who wasn’t about to be stopped. He gripped both of his hands together and in a flash slammed back and forth with his elbows into the faces of each of the Cheyenne braves, who staggered backward in a total daze. Bringing his arms forward with the reverse motion, Stone used the energy to launch himself ahead so that he shot forward the twelve feet separating the battling Cheyenne from himself like a projectile. Even as Stone moved, his mind thinking at lightning speed, he calculated in millisecond computerlike debate whether to reach for his pistol or knife, which were equidistant from his right hand, since he would be upon the fight by the time he got either of them out.

  In a quarter second Stone decided to go for the knife, and his hand snapped down toward the hilt, gripping it hard. By a half second he had it coming out and up in a tight arc. Then everything speeded up like a film coming loose from its sprockets. At the last second Leaping Elk, whose blade was almost at Meyra’s throat, somehow sensed Stone coming. His attention was pulled around as he slackened his attack for a second. That was Meyra’s opening. With the speed and power she had learned first from her father, one of the finest Cheyenne fighters in the territory, and later from her brother, the indian woman, barely twenty years old, snapped her right leg up with all her strength.

  Leaping Elk took the kick full in the stomach and it sent him flying backward so he careened right past Stone, who didn’t have time to react either. The Indian somehow caught himself from falling and came to a stop about three yards back. He sneered at Stone.

  “You. You think you can get me? You’re a fool.” The Indian laughed that crazy laugh again. And Stone saw that the foam around his mouth had increased so that it now covered his lips completely. His radioactive hand, the one not holding the hunting blade, was nothing but a dripping mass now, a gelatinous blob of red and purple that no longer even had fingers or much of anything except a bulbous shape, with pus that oozed out and fell from scores of grape-sized boils.

  “You can walk away,” Stone said as he let his knees relax and sink and, slowly, as if hardly moving, began angling himself to prepare for the brave’s attack. “And I won’t follow. Just walk, man—walk now!”

  “Walk?” The Cheyenne laughed again, and blood began streaming from his nose, mixing with the white foam like shaving cream around his jaws. “Why walk when I have the magic hand?” The brave laughed again. Every time he laughed now, it seemed to send a little geyser of blood out of his nose, or his ears, or some part of his being. It was as if the body was actually decomposing from within, the radio cative poisons he had breathed in, eaten, burned into himself had gone to work with a vengeance. He was dissolving inside, just a dammed-up wall of blood and cancerous cells ready to burst.

  “The magic hand!” The Cheyenne laughed again. He held the diseased, rotting stump-claw up and waved it at Stone. Little pockets of slime and red and brown liquid glistened in the flickering rays of the fire as they sprayed into the air. Stone jumped back, as fast as a jackrabbit. He sure as hell didn’t want to get any of that radiocative stew on him. He had just decided to reach for his gun, now that he was slightly out of range, when Leaping Elk charged with such speed that Stone was taken by surprise. He stopped his motion in midair and, realizing he didn’t have time to regain his balance, fell down backward just as the Indian’s knife hand descended from the sky like the cleaving sword of the great Cheyenne war gods.

  The blade passed less than an inch away from Stone’s left shoulder, but Stone, as he fell to the ground, slammed the point of his fourteen-inch Randall custom bowie straight into the Indian’s chest. The knife went in sideways, slipping between two ribs right at the top of the rib cage. Stone slid the length of the Cheyenne’s chest, letting the full weight of his own body falling bring the knife straight down. Like a butcher’s cleaver, the long hunting blade cut straight down and through the chest and stomach, splitting the entire mid-section of the Cheyenne open like a gutted steer. The heart, intestines, organs, every damn thing that pumped and churned away inside the Indian’s body, exploded out as if shot from a slingshot. The fleshy debris filled the air in a tornado of red.

  Stone ripped the knife out as it reached the Cheyenne’s pelvic bone and continued his own fall so that as the exploding body organs erupted forward, he was going in the opposite direction. He rolled along the ground in a tight ball. When he came up to his feet and spun around, the Indian had already fallen straight forward, stretched out full-length. He lay motionless in the garbage dump of his own organs, heart sliced in two, each side still desperately pumping away like a fish out of water, though nothing was sucked into their gasping ventricles but red dirt.

  Chapter Seven

  As Stone walked carefully around the spreading swamp of body organs, the rest of the audience looked at him like he was the last actor left in a Shakespearean tragedy in which everyone else had just been killed. Their eyes were filled with an equal mixture of amazement, anger, relief, fear—every goddamn emotion know to men.

  Stone didn’t pay them any heed once he saw that no one else was going to launch himself at him—at least for a second or two. He made his way around the butchered corpse and over to Meyra, who was just starting to rise from the ground. She had her hand over her right breast, and a scarlet stain had spread out nearly six inches in diameter right through her buckskin jacket. But her eyes looked clear, and her face still had color in it as she rose.

  “Are you all right?” Stone asked with concern as she stumbled for a second, holding on to his arms for support.

  “Yes. Yes—I think so.” The Cheyenne woman gave a frightened smile at the man who had just saved her life. “Thank you, Martin Stone. Whether or not you should have interferred,” she said softly, “I don’t know. But I do know I would have been dead in a few seconds at most. I don’t want to die. So thank you. Though I know it was my fault to demand the Challenge of the Knives. But after you left, after his balls pulled themselves back into place, he came back out from his hole and started bothering everyone again, waving that horrible hand around. I couldn’t stand it, I just couldn’t. No one else would do anything.”

  “It’s all right. It had to be done,” Stone said, comforting her and holding her shoulder in his hand. “The man wasn’t just a bastard—he also had radiation poisoning. It can drive men to complete madness before it actually kills them. Then they must be destroyed like rabid dogs.” Stone turned toward the nervous men. They all looked uptight. The Indians because Stone had apparently just broken a sacred Cheyenne rule—and because they seemed to have quite unsettled feelings about allowing a woman to lead them now. Stone’s own NAA men—Bull and the three other young recruits—looked concerned about the Cheyenne, who glared at them now, their ever present but usually hidden deep mistrust of the white man broken through in near vengeful fury. Though they had all hated Leaping Elk, they hated Stone, a white man, having killed him, even more. It stirred something primitive in their hearts. The white race, after all, had not been too generous in its near annihilation of the various American tribes.

  The whole damned scene was degenerating rapidly. Stone could see that if nothing else. And he realized for the hundredth time why he hated this leadership bullshit. Things had been at least less complicated, if no less dangerous, when it had just been him and the dog.

  “Look,” Stone said at last after nearly twenty seconds of complete silence by the entire force as they all tried to gauge each other’s intentions. “I know there’s a lot to talk about and that I may have broken your tribal regulations, but give me a break, okay? I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept now for four days. Even if we dissolve this whole damn unit in a few hours—just let me get two or three hours of some fucking shut-eye, okay? ’Cause 1 feel like a dead man right now. Can hardly even focus.” Stone tried to make
his right eye sort of close and start twitching—for credibility’s sake — though he didn’t have to try very hard.

  The Cheyenne looked at one another and mumbled a few remarks. Then one of them turned back.

  “All right. Stone. You’ve got your few hours. Let’s say until the sun has risen to the branches of that tree.” He pointed to the low wooden fingertips of a large fir some thirty yards off. Stone gauged that would happen at about nine in the morning. It was four-thirty now. That was almost five hours. Good God, he’d feel like he’d been to Club Med.

  “But then we talk. We decide things once and for all,” the brave went on coldly. The Indians stared at Stone hard, as did all the others. As glad as he’d been that they’d fought on his side for the last week, Stone suddenly felt equally apprehensive if they should turn against him. They moved forward, and Stone almost felt himself reaching for his Uzi as beads of sweat started to roll down his forehead. But they stopped after a few yards and began gathering the parts of their recently deceased tribal brother.

  He should have an uncle in the funeral business, Stone thought with dark bitterness. All this killing, it didn’t make a guy feel too good. And yet Stone had the gift for death, for dispensing death. The Nadi was the name given him by a tribe of Ute Indians who had saved him when he and his family had first emerged from the bunker after his father’s heart attack. It had been Stone’s idea to come out. Great idea. The Winnebago they had stocked as if going on a little picnic had hardly gotten a few hours from the bunker when they’d been attacked by a roving band of Guardians of Hell bikers out for some fun. His mother had been savagely raped and mutilated, his sister kidnapped, and Stone himself beaten and kicked to within an inch of his life. Less than an inch.

  “Nadi,” Stone mumbled under his breath. “Nadi, Nadi.”