Stone pulled back closer to the Harley as if it would somehow protect him. But even the nearly one-ton vehicle rattled and bounced in the winds as if it were a bronco in a rodeo, about to be released from the starting gate. The dog whined as the thunder boomed from every side of them, and burrowned its nose into the dirt right behind Stone’s leg. It covered its head and eyes with its paws and just tried to escape the horrible reality of the situation. The rain slammed into the tarp and rushed down the sides, making a little instant waterfall outside. Some of the water began seeping back underneath, and Stone lifted his body up so only his boots were touching, crouching in the darkness.
The lightning suddenly seemed to strike just outside their shelter as the entire sky lit up. For a split second Stone could see right through the material, so bright was the flash of electricity. And then, just as it faded, another, and another bolt, until the lightning was coming down in a fusillade of spears all around them. The pitbull let out a high-pitched squeal of pure fear that sent Stone’s hackles up even above the deafening chorus of the storm. The booms of thunder came galloping in one after the other, like wild horses looking to trample the shelter below, and Stone could feel his bones shake inside his skin, as if the outer layer might just get tossed off.
Then the rains really came. Buckets, torrents of black water, poured down on their little haven as if it were searching them out. Liquid, as thick as sewage and as foul-smelling as if they were in a garbage dump, inundated the tarp, trying to get in. First a gust of dark liquid from the east, then, unable to find an opening, the wind would switch around to the west and spit down gushes of the filthy water, trying to sneak in from behind them or through the spokes of the bike, which Stone had only been partially able to cover with part of the lower tarp flaps. Man and dog pulled in closer and closer together, trying to get as far from the cascading black foulness as they could. The dog knew in its animal wisdom what Stone knew scientifically: that the stuff was some bad shit.
The storm seemed to go on forever, but in reality it was hardly five minutes, when suddenly the rains stopped almost instantaneously, and then were gone. Stone waited a minute, letting his heart settle down, making sure that it wasn’t some sort of trick and that one of the damn black clouds wasn’t waiting right overhead, waiting to just pour out a shitload of the high-rad water on his head. But nothing happened, and he nervously duck-walked over to one side and lifted the flap. The ground around them was drenched, coated with an oily substance that gave everything a shiny blackish tinge. An almost invisible haze of heat fog rose up from the heat being generated by the radioactive particles as they interacted with one another from the water molecules sinking down into the earth.
Stone looked up at the sky like a man who’s just been kicked to the ground looks up into the face of his attacker. But the clouds had already pulled back up, high up, rejoining the miles of flat, steellike ribbons that hung in the afternoon sky, as dark and impenetrable as the black soil that buries the dead.
Chapter Ten
Stone could see the effect of the rain as he drove on toward the mountain, which now rose almost straight up overhead. Animals writhed in pain everywhere, their coats of fur or scales, feathers or hides, all burned and smoking as if splashed with acid. Bald patches dotted them, beneath which the skin was red and oozing. Many of their eyes had been melted from the acid rains so that just an overcooked, egglike mass dripped out of the sockets. The radioactive rains were just taking their first dividends. Wherever they fell. Stone knew, there would be equal horror and pain. He prayed that his men would remember to get out of the damn rains when the clouds finally caught up with them to the southwest.
Though he felt the urge, there was no way in hell Stone could go out there and put all the damn suffering creatures out of their misery. So he steeled his eyes and jaw and drove forward, having to move slower now as the foothills were turning to mini-mountains, and peaks loomed overhead like skyscrapers of solid grarite. But Excaliber let out little whines of sympathy as they drove past the squealing, bellowing, doomed animals, as if to let them know that someone, something, was witness to their final hour.
Within half an hour of driving on rougher and rougher terrain, sometimes at nearly a forty-five degree angle, Stone spotted a good cover for the Harley and brought it to a stop, getting off and walking it the last few yards between two flat boulders with just enough space for the bike. With a few bushes tossed over the Electraglide, no one, even if they were passing right by, would notice the motorcycle unless they stepped on the thing.
Then it was straight up the side of the mountain. Stone wasn’t sure at first that the pitbull could traverse such steep, rocky slopes, but after the first few minutes, once the canine got the hang of something it had never really done before in its life, it was ahead of him the rest of the way, jumping and scrambling from one little outcropping to the next. Together, Stone doing most of the grunting, the two of them spent the rest of the afternoon climbing the mountain as the clouds lifted slightly and the sun warmed the sky to a beaten brass color.
Stone didn’t have any problems at first, but as they got higher up the slope, the ground, a distant speck far below, he could feel his stomach start to turn a few somersaults. He had never been great with heights. But as there was no one to hear his excuses, after getting his breath and making a sort of mental adjustment to how high he was every few hundred feet or so, he made his way up the granite wall. The dog must have had mountain goat in its genes. For Exca-liber, it was all barking and tail wagging, king of the mountain, and “What’s taking you so long, asshole?” That was unquestionnably his favorite game.
As the gray sun completely disappeared behind the radioactive muck above, the world suddenly got quite dark again, and Stone reached the peak of the mountain he had been ascending. The pitbull was lying up top on its side, as if admiring the nonexistent sunset, and yawned and looked away as its struggling and sweating master dragged himself up onto the small plateau like a half-drowned sailor pulls himself onto a floating crate. It was all Stone could do to restrain himself from bopping the goddamn mutt right in the nose. But fortunately for it, he felt too exhausted to expend the energy and collapsed instead on the granite rock and lay there, panting hard, for several minutes.
At last Excaliber, actually growing worried about his motionless food supplier, rose and walked over. He licked Stone with a long, sweeping stroke of his rough, wet tongue. Stone’s eyes opened with a look of absolute fury, though he hardly moved an inch, so tired was his body.
“Get that goddamn tongue out of my face or you won’t have it to fuck around with—you hear me, dog?” The pitbull gave a final half lick with what seemed like a foot-long mop and then stepped back with a bright-eyed, busy-tailed expression and barked six times in rapid succession. If there was anything Stone hated, it was enthusiasm—especially when he could hardly move. But slowly he rose, not wanting to get caught out here when the total darkness set in. Not at the edge of a mountain with a long drop onto a floor of granite teeth.
He moved carefully across the plateau and then along a narrow ledge only about two feet wide that circled around the side of the mountain. The drop was far, to say the least, the boulders looking like little pebbles from Stone’s vantage point. So he didn’t look and prayed the dog wouldn’t start getting too frisky. But they edged along the narrow passage for about a thousand feet in about ten minutes without any problems and reached another plateau. This one was covered with vegetation and trees and extended for nearly a mile before the next towering peak shot up like a castle tower another few thousand feet higher into the dank air.
His father, always the military man, always the special forces, the Rangers in his blood, had built the family’s vacation retreat right up in the goddamn middle of nowhere, on this peak that was ten thousand feet or more up, surrounded and hidden by some of the highest mountains in the Rocky Mountain range. When the family had used the place in the past, they had driven up from the other side where the
slope was much more gradual, though even then it took hours and hours of winding road to get even near the top. But Stone didn’t have time for luxuries like that. It would have added a full day to his journey.
He walked along the plateau, covered with the dead undergrowth of the previous summer’s vegetation. His early years up here flashed through his mind like the snapshots from a family album. How beautiful it had been in the summer, with the mountain flowers blooming golden and purple and the air always so crisp and sweet, like drinking cider from the very skies. He had enjoyed it tremendously then—a great adventure for a young boy, who would run off and disappear for hours at a time, hanging off the sides of cliffs, taking pictures of mountain goats, tangling with the bald eagles that had three families nesting around the excellently protected high cracks in the mountain’s nearly vertical walls on the north and west sides. It had been a miraculous, life-filled fantasy world of color and smell. Stone had never gotten bored back then, even spending months with just his family, grandfather, and two dogs. There were no neighbors, to say the least. Just them, in the stone-hewn two-story house his father had built by hand over a period of five years. Them and the animals they shared the mountain with.
But now it was dark, cold. Everything was different. Stone knew it was bad to bring up those pictures of the past. It only brought pain. The world never would be the same again. Nor his life. There was no looking back. The ghosts were dead. The ghosts of the past had to die. Still, it hurt as he stomped silently across the ice-patched ground toward the other side. The view was spectacular, as always. As he and the dog moved quickly along the rock edges of the flat, mile-long oasis of life, they looked out over the lower Rockies off to the south where they had just come from. Even in the darkness, with just slivers of light from the full moon, like a burned-out crystal behind the curtains of radioactive cloud, he could see perhaps fifty miles. Mountain after mountain getting lower and lower as they sank in the darkness. And far, far off, the lowlands and vast patches of brown and black and gray like blurred fields from a dark dream.
It was the dog that found him first. Excaliber, as usual, had trotted on ahead to explore everything, to make sure no monsters, demons, or other dogs were waiting to attack them. But he found something else. Stone suddenly saw the pitbull about twenty yards ahead, bent down, sniffing at something.
“Good God,” Stone whispered in the silvery darkness. It was a man, a naked body lying on the pebble-strewn ground atop the blanket of thick brown husks of grass. And he was mutilated horribly. A mass of wounds and holes, stabs and slices, burns and smoking holes, which Stone realized had probably been caused by the recent rains. They would have passed over here, and the guy looked like he hadn’t moved for a while.
Stone kneeled down and gasped. Though it was hard even to tell, so smashed and bubbled was the face, he knew. It was Kennedy. Dr. Martin Reagan Kennedy, Snake-oil salesman extraordinaire, who had helped save his sister.
“Oh, Christ,” Stone muttered, his eyes filling with tears. It wasn’t fair. Why were the best the ones who always got it—instead of the slime?
“Kennedy, Doc Kennedy,” Stone said, stroking at the few wisps of white hair that puffed up from the top of the bloody head. To his amazement the eyes opened, if only a slit, and two blood-filled orbs looked up at him.
“What—come back for more?” the lips hissed out almost inaudibly. “Can’t you see I’m already dead, fool? But if you want to waste more time killing me, then go ahead. Go ahead.” Stone could hardly believe the man was alive, let alone able to talk.
“Doc, Doc,” he said, and he knelt looking down at the snakeman’s battered and burn-cratered face. “It’s me, Stone. Martin Stone. Remember?” The eyes somehow focused on Stone and then seemed to widen slightly. The body took in a deep breath and seemed to shiver.
“Stone—Stone, I can’t believe it. How can I still be alive after what I’ve been through? Oh, God.”
“You’re cold, Doc,” Stone said, charitably not mentioning the rest of Doc’s condition—that he was just a corpse that had forgotten to die. The body was so terribly sliced up, still smoking from a hundred little boils that had burned right into the skin from the high-rad rains, that Stone felt a shiver rush through his own flesh as he took off his thick brown leather field jacket and laid it down over the suffering flesh.
“They’ve got her, Stone,” Kennedy said with a forced, breathless whisper. Stone had to lean over closer to hear the man, as his lips hardly moved. “They attacked us—did this to me, took April. I heard her screaming. I—I—”
“It’s okay, Doc,” Stone said softly. “Save your breath. You—”
“Don’t be a fool, man,” Kennedy said, and his eyes caught Stone’s, who saw that even inside this dying nightmare there was—for a second, anyway—the same sharp mind, the same super-aware consciousness that Stone had known when they had traveled together. “I’m dying. I know it, you know it. Let’s not play.” He coughed, and the frail, blood-splattered shell that was left of him, shuddered from head to toe as if in spasm. Then he relaxed again. Excaliber stood off to the side, looking curiously at the doctor. He remembered the man’s smell, remembered that he had liked him, that he had given him a burning liquid that tasted wonderful and had put the dog into opium-hazed dreams for hours.
“Mafia,” the thin white lips intoned so softly that Stone had to lean even farther over so that his head was only a few inches from the dying man’s mouth. “Top-of-the-line pros,” Kennedy went on. “Used a chopper. I heard them say, as they were dragging April off, that they were taking her to Keenesburg. They must have thought I was dead. Though—though you never know with them. Maybe they wanted me to hear. Knew you would find me.”
“They can’t be that good,” Stone replied, his own voice sounding magnified a hundred times compared to the ghastly timbres of the dying man.
“Never underestimate them, Stone,” Kennedy went on after taking a hacking, shallow breath. “Never—” Suddenly he stopped in mid-sentence and his whole face seemed to grow bright red. His back arched up so that his chest was pushed out, and it almost looked like he was trying to do a gymnastic back bend for a second or two. Which was, of course, ridiculous. He wasn’t doing anything except dying. Suddenly, as if a plug had been pulled from a machine, the body completely lost all its muscular power and slammed back down onto the cold mountain ground.
Stone knew Kennedy was dead now. The body had a purplish sheen on the cheeks. He could feel the death. Feel the sudden loss of a being that had been on the side of man. That was the hardest thing for Stone—seeing the good die.
He lifted the body, keeping the jacket over the mutilated nakedness, and walked with it the few hundred yards to the stone house built right on the very edge of the mountain. The Mafia had been there, too; the place was in shambles. They had gone through everything, overturned every bureau, ripped out every closet. Looking for what? Stone couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t as if he or his family had hidden some secret or some object in the mountain retreat that they would have use for. No, it was just part of their modus operandi—destroy, maim, kill, and then destroy some more. They had just gotten some kicks annihilating what belonged to him and his.
Stone lay the body down on the living room table and fell back in the plush leather chair in front of the fireplace. He just sat there for a few minutes without moving, trying to control his emotions, his feelings of absolute deadness. Ex-caliber came up alongside and, feeling exhausted now itself, sat down beside the chair and put its head in its paws, shivering its fur up and down, trying to create some warmth, as it was freezing in the unheated stone house, the mountain winds outside blowing through myriad cracks in the place as the night set in.
Stone rose at last, threw some logs into the fireplace, and after a few minutes got a decent blaze going. But there was one more thing he had to do before he could rest. He walked to the corpse of Dr. Kennedy, took his jacket off it, and looked down at the frail old man. He hadn’t been that big t
o begin with, and after what the bastards had done to him, and then the rains… Stone knew he couldn’t let the corpse stay here overnight. There were wolves in these mountains. They would smell it quickly and would attack the stone shelter, which, without windows, courtesy of the Mafia hit men, would allow them entry. He walked to one of the bedrooms and ripped a sheet from a bed, then wrapped the corpse in the long cotton sheet until it was bound tightly like a mummy. He went to the kitchen and found a can of kerosene.
“Stay here, dog,” Stone said as he lifted the package of death over his shoulder. “What I’m going to do—I don’t want you to see. Remember him in health and life, okay?” The animal turned from its place on the rug in front of the fire, as if Stone must be mad even to think that the animal would consider such a suggestion. Then it turned forward again to soak up as many of the hot, crackling rays as it could before cruel reality intruded again.
Stone carried the load outside and to the edge of the mountain that the house was built on, only about ten yards off. It was as if they were in the clouds, up there with the gods, higher than any of the slopes ahead, just darkness and curtains of mist swallowing up the land below. He lay the body down and sprinkled it with the kerosene until almost every square inch of the sheet was damp. In the sky above, the aurora borealis suddenly appeared as if a mirage, a vision. The ghostly drifting patterns of red and blue and yellow and green wove down subtle hues of twisted color across the dead man’s face.
“A funeral for a brave man,” Stone said as he flicked his Ronson all-weather lighter. “The kind the Vikings and the Indians used to give for their noblest warriors.” He leaned down and touched the tongue of blue to the sheet, and it burst instantly into flame. Within seconds the pyre was roaring, and there was just a solid wall of fire in front of him. He waited a few seconds to let the fire reach inside, too, until everything was burning, everything being purified by the flames, every bit of the filth and dirt of life being washed off for the journey to wherever.
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