Warlord's Revenge

by Craig Sargent

  “ ’Bye, pal,” Stone said softly, and he kicked forward with his foot so the burning sheet sailed suddenly over the edge into black space. It seemed to burn like a meteor, lighting up the mountain walls around with its sudden, incandescent glow. Then the sheet unraveled, and the burning body spun wildly in the night air below, arms and legs all spiraling out in a crazy dance as tongues of white fire licked over every part of the falling man. And Stone watched the legs and arms became a solid shape and then just a dot of yellow. And at last, as far as he could see below, into the valleys of gray fog, there was nothing. The old man had been eaten by the predator night.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Stone awoke the next morning, he was lying in the leather chair in front of the burned down fire with his Uzi in his right hand and his Ruger .44 lying on the armrest of the chair next to his left. Maybe he was getting just a little paranoid, Stone thought to himself as he sat there for a few seconds without moving an inch. But paranoia was the philosophy of those who survived.

  He looked into the glowing embers and saw the ghosts dancing there again, bloody, ephemeral mists that seemed to play tag among the stark blue fingers of flame.

  “Oh, Christ.” Stone groaned out loud. There was something about waking up knowing that all you were going to face that day were murderers, cannibals, wolves, God knew what all…. That made a man just want to close his lids and dive into the gray beyond for a few more hours. But he knew he couldn’t. April was out there, and he didn’t want to think about what might be happening to her.

  “Fucking foot,” he sputtered as he tried to rise from the chair but discovered that his foot had fallen asleep from the slightly peculiar position he had been sleeping in. He heard a similar snort of expletives from his side and looked down to see the pitbull stretched out on his back, basking in the last few strokes of warmth from the fading fire. The pitbull didn’t look like he wanted to go outside into the damp, radioactive cold, either.

  “We’ve gotta split, dog,” Stone said, rising at last as he looked down at the animal. One thing about the dog—it knew how to suck in every goddamn ounce of pleasure it could find. He hobbled on his still half-numb foot into the kitchen where he was happy to discover that the hit men who had wrecked the place had at least left the Maxwell House. Within minutes he and the dog were sipping deep drafts of black brew from his dead mother’s best china.

  Outside, it was just about as wretched as Stone had imagined. The sky was as dark as ever, though the high, thick cloud cover seemed to have broken up into long strips, almost rings of different colors. A black ring, then a brownish color, then an almost greenish one—each area of color perhaps ten, fifteen miles wide. Something was going on up there, but he sure as hell didn’t want to know about it. Even in the dim morning he could see for miles and miles to the west and south—where he would be heading—mountainous, jagged hills and dense pockets of forest. Much farther on, he saw another higher range of mountains—perhaps seventy-five miles off. He wished he’d eaten his fucking Wheaties, not that there were any to be had for blood or money.

  The bullterrier jumped up onto the back of the black Har-ley before Stone had even reached it, and clamped itself around the seat as if it were in love with it. Stone plopped down on the front portion and turned the “instant start.” It roared up in less than a second, and shifting into gear, he started slowly ahead down the steep road. In the freezing morning air, the condensed dew along the road had turned to ice and formed little puddles of sheer slickness. Stone had to slow to about five miles per hour, moving along with both his feet out on each side, sliding along the ground as if he were skiing. He didn’t want to go over up here.

  This worked fine until he had gone about two hundred yards down the winding mountain road, which was hardly wider than a bathtub. But then both his feet and the front wheel of the bike hit a large frozen patch at the same instant. Before he knew it, everything was going sideways, and Stone found himself sliding along the icy sheen with the bike on top of him. He heard barking, and his ear scraped along the road so that it sounded like a bomb was going off. Suddenly everything came to a stop, and there was total silence. Stone tried to move, but he was virtually pinned down by the weight of the Harley, though as far as he could tell, nothing had been broken. He managed to tilt his head around at a forty-five-degree angle and gulped hard when he saw what lay there.

  He was lying at the very edge of a granite abyss that dropped down at least three thousand feet before reaching spears of rock like punji sticks implanted by nature. His head and shoulder were just over the edge, the rest of him was trapped under the bike, which Stone suddenly saw, to his horror, was also partially hanging over the side. The weight balance between staying up and going down was not particularly great. He could see that in a sickening glance.

  Stone pulled his head back, as he didn’t particularly want to look down at the great drop. It made his heart beat like a drum machine on speed. He tried not to panic, not letting his body move a muscle. What would his father have done? Stone suddenly found himself thinking. What would Major Clayton R. Stone, ex-superfighter, have done? It seemed, Stone realized suddenly, that he always wondered what the old man would have done when he got himself into tight situations. But what the hell. The son of a bitch knew his stuff—even if the two of them hadn’t seen eye to eye. But his father had been dead for months now, while he, on the other hand, was here, stuck between nearly a ton of cold metal, perched on the end of a mountain, like Humpty Dumpty on the wall. And Stone knew that if he fell off this wall, nothing would put his ass together again.

  Suddenly he felt a shifting weight above him, as if something were running over the top, and then Excaliber appeared, peering down from the steel-alloy body of the Harley, dropping his paws over the edge, with a big tongue-hanging smile on his white-and-brown face. He stared down at Stone curiously, wagging his tail, begging with wide eyes to be let in on the game.

  “Dog, you’d better get your fucking ass off this bike,” Stone screamed out in a mad bellow. The pitbull was so startled by the explosion of sound that it nearly threw itself backward and onto the ground. The whole bike wobbled back and forth above Stone, as if debating whether to topple over now or wait a few minutes so Martin Stone’s brain could be messed with a little more. It apparently decided on the latter course of action, for the 1200-cc bike suddenly dropped back over onto the dirt with a thud and settled down again.

  Stone let his pounding heart slow down to about half its chest-bursting gallop and took a deep breath.

  “Excaliber,” he yelled, though the sound didn’t come out with a great amount of projection, as his chest was pinned by part of the seat and he could only inhale about a third of his regular lung power. “Excaliber,” Stone wheezed out again. This time he heard an answering bark from the other side of the bike.

  “Pull bike,” Stone said commandingly. “Pull the bike! Bike, bike! Pull the fucking bike, you hear me!” He realized he was getting louder with each word and that his whole body was shaking. The bike started acting up above him, and Stone shut up again, making himself relax and calm down. He was in no great shakes to hasten his great ski jump into the beyond. The pitbull barked again, seemed to think about the words, and then Stone heard what could only be described as stone scraping along metal. He felt the bike shudder above him and realized that the animal had bitten into some part of it. And indeed, hidden from view on the other side, the canine had sunk his incisors into part of the long tailpipe that ran down the lower right back portion of the Harley. With the greatest pound-per-square-inch bite in the dog kingdom, the pitbull actually managed to snap right through the metal so that the tips of the its teeth were inside the piping.

  Setting itself, the animal began pulling with all it had. But nothing seemed to happen. As Stone felt the angle of the bike shift just an inch or so and then stop, he realized that part of the bike must be digging into the ground, hitting it at an angle and stopping it from moving any farther. Stone tried t
o shake his foot to get the animal’s attention. He sent out the command to shake, anyway, but his legs—all squeezed up beneath the Harley—just sort of vibrated weakly.

  “Grab my pants, dog,” Stone screamed out again. “The pants, the pants!” With all he had, he exerted himself to wiggle the foot around and then collapsed again as the movement put a tremendous strain on the tendons and muscles of his leg. The pitbull let go of the exhaust pipe and approached the oddly moving foot, sniffing hard at it four times. It looked up at the bike, back down at the foot, and then seemed to put two and two together. The dog carefully lowered itself down to ground level and, opening its jaws, moved them forward over the pants leg as carefully as a mother handling her pups, making sure not to bite Stone or even break the skin. When it had its jaws up over the pants about three inches or so, the dog clamped down hard, and its teeth bit through the thick denim like a bear trap.

  Excaliber set himself so that his whole body was aiming backward, while his legs bent forward at about a forty-five degree angle. Then he pulled. At first nothing seemed to happen at all, beyond the strong denim material stretching out an inch or two and the dog straining. When the material had been stretched to its absolute fullest and the dog saw that it hadn’t torn, he seemed to switch into second gear. Letting out a high-pitched squeal from between his closed jaws, the pitbull leaned back even more sharply, so that he was pulling the load at an almost horizontal angle.

  Stone felt like his leg was about to be ripped off, but he bit his lip and shut up. He knew this was his only chance. The dog pulled and pulled, expending incredible energy. Every muscle in its body seemed to stand out like ropes across its rippling, shiny pelt. And suddenly the bike moved. Not a lot at first, just a half inch, but for the first time since he’d looked down, Stone started to think that perhaps he’d actually come out of all this in one piece. With the heavy denim fabric and Stone’s leg, almost acting like a slide beneath it, the big Harley started shifting forward inch by grudging inch.

  The pitbull pulled until the machine came forward about a foot, and then stopped, stepped back with all fours, setting itself again in a perfect angle against the machine to give himself the greatest leverage. If a super-computer had calculated the exact angle to pull the bike at for maximum effect, it would have come to the same figure that the canine did by instinct. After about a dozen such pulls, Stone yelled for the dog to stop again. He looked down and saw that he was off the edge, looking down at gravel and dead patches of grass. Now free of danger, he was able to struggle and slide around with all his strength—and within a minute or so managed to extricate himself from the death trap.

  “Good fucking dog,” Stone said as he stood up and walked around the back of the bike where the animal sat, looking all puffed up about his feat of strength. “Yeah, I know, I’ll make sure you get a medal from the President.” He scratched the pitbull between the ears, and it let out a little yawn of bored narcissism. Come on, let’s get the hell out of here—before something else happens.” Stone righted the Harley with some effort. On its side, it was like a few thousand pounds of turtle that had tumbled onto its back. But then it was up—and it seemed undamaged. The whole side was scraped free of paint, but it was used to a lot worse than that.

  They remounted, and Stone went extra slow down the road, this time his hands squeezing the brakes with constant little motions. It took them hours to get all the way to the bottom and back onto a flat and iceless two-laner that headed straight west. Like all the roads and highways of America, this one had cracks and grass sprouting through myriad little holes and slits in it. But it was traversable, and Stone let the bike edge up in speed, hitting first thirty, then forty, until he was cruising along in the dim twilight of the early afternoon at fifty-plus. The dog was fully alert today, having finally had even a dog’s fill of sleep it had caught in front of the fire the night before. It rested its front paws up on each side of Stone’s leather-jacketed back and wrapped its back legs forward and around the sides of the leather seat so that it appeared to be riding the thing sitting upright, which it was. The pitbull’s head scanned back and forth to each side of the road, fascinated by the speeding terrain. Its eyes moved like little slot-machine fruits as it tried to catch and focus on any particular object, which was impossible. But that didn’t stop the pitbull from trying until it was as dizzy as a spinning child and started feeling its morning coffee threatening to rise up from its usually cast-rion stomach.

  Stone kept a sharp eye on the speeding landscape as they moved along. He knew that the hunters of the world struck when you didn’t see them—not when you did. His eye took in every tree ahead, every boulder that loomed toward them, every rise, every patch of thick pine forest. Took them in, searched them, scanned them for a glint of steel, the motion of a bush, for anything abnormal. For Stone was a predator too. And he knew how to hunt the hunters. But other than eyes here and there, and the rustle of leaves off on the sides of the road, there was nothing.

  After about an hour Stone began running into wrecks of cars. He passed just a few at first, their rusting hulks oddly serene in the midst of the weed-sprinkled two-laner. The glass on them and all removable parts had long since vanished, but the basic frames remained, slowly rotting, sinking lower toward the roadway, until they became the roadway, nothing but a brownish-red coating of oxidized steel. Eventually they would melt into the roadway itself, would sink into the earth and—Stone made himself stop musing on such metaphysical postulations on the ultimate decay of the entire universe, though riding along these roads filled with steel corpses, it was hard to avoid.

  The cars became more frequent as Stone approached an ancient intersection where several Interstates came together at once. The great, curving ramps of concrete that had once supported millions of cars yearly were now just broken-down and collapsed ruins. Like the Roman monuments that had once seemed the glory of the world, eternal, unsmash-able, so America’s great highways were now finding their destiny in dust. Stone had to laugh. It was all rubble. Not even passable anymore by car. Only a motorcycle could drive through the debris. He slowed to a stop as they came underneath an overpass that was still in one piece, though the roadway at each end had come free of the actual moorings, so it just sort of stood there on rows of cement pillars like an aqueduct going nowhere.

  “Let them try to figure that one out.” Stone smirked at the dog as he stepped off the bike. “Future aliens from space studying civilization here on earth. When they try to decipher what this single bridge in the middle of nowhere is—” Stone laughed. The pitbull jumped down and looked up, trying to understand the intellectual heights to which its master was attempting to lead it.

  Stone walked around in a little circle, trying to undo the cramps that had begun setting in along his right leg. He had been shot, wounded, slammed, he’d taken every goddamn thing you could do to the human body. It was a wonder he could walk at all. But this particular spasming pain along his calf had become intolerable. He sat down on a bam-door-size chunk of roadway that lay buried sideways in the dirt and massaged the leg with his hands, trying to work the pain free.

  Out of the corner of his eye Stone saw the pitbull run off about thirty yards to a whole bunch of the wrecked vehicles, all lying piled among one another, as if it were a burial ground for dead automobiles. Stone glanced up to gauge the intentions of the dead-man’s sky and didn’t like what he saw. Some of the darker, ringlike radioactive clouds were starting to swoop down again, as if heading toward the earth, to strangle it in their poison rains.

  He lowered his head to whistle for the pitbull, and his eyes opened wide. As the animal played atop the roof of a rusting van, so that its leg broke through here and there as it pranced about, Stone saw something it didn’t. A brown blanket of moving creatures coming out of the other wrecks that surrounded it. Tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, sweeping out of their filthy, rusted metal lairs with a rapid motion, brown feelers rippling madly as they searched out the enemy that had
intruded in their ranks.

  “Dog!” Stone screamed at the top of his lungs, cupping both hands around his mouth. “Look out, look down, down!” Stone pointed with both hands toward the approaching armies of brown horror as he started hobbling back toward the bike, a few yards behind him. The dog followed his motion, and as its head went down, its own eyes opened in abject terror. The animal was not afraid of another living animal on this earth, but bugs—especially cockroaches—were another story. It let out an ear-shattering, high-pitched squeal of terror, baying up into the air for a second. Then it looked down again and saw that it was completely cut off. The things were coming from everywhere, the ground for a good twenty feet in all directions just a moving ocean of brown and black roaches. All coming straight toward him.

  Stone reached the Harley and started it up. Again he cupped his hands and yelled out to the canine. “Jump, you son of a bitch. Jump, you hear me?” He pointed from the dog to the bike a few times and then started the engine, revving it hard. He knew it was mean—for now the animal was afraid he was going to leave it, and that it was about to be eaten wholesale by an army of radiation’s most beloved little pets.

  But it worked. For as Stone slowly let out the clutch and started the 1200-cc forward, the pitbull took one final look as the front ranks of the roaches reached the very edge of the brown Caddy roof he was standing on. Flexing his’muscular legs down like little steel pistons, the bullterrier suddenly launched himself forward from the side. It was like a furry rocket had taken off, as the combined strength of the animal’s innate power, mixed with its adrenaline at the approaching roach army, with a dash of pure hate at Stone for daring to leave it, all combined to propel it forward. Stone watched in amazement as the animal curled itself up into a ball so that it actually seemed to catch wind at a right angle to keep it going.