At last, after a flight of perhaps twenty-five feet, just enough to land it in the very outer reaches of the wriggling brown bodies, the dog came down hard into a small group of them, squashing dozens beneath its paws. Letting out a yelp of disgust, the bullterrier shot forward, darting over the rows of roaches like a hundred yard dash prospect for the Olympics. Stone started the bike forward, coming up at an angle so that he would intersect the dog just past the blanket of brown. As he came by at about fifteen miles per hours, Ex-caliber, at a full run, jumped again and came down like a swan with both wings cut off into the backseat, sliding forward and slamming into Stone so that he almost dislodged him.
Stone somehow managed to keep the Electraglide upright, motivated by the desire not to end up as cockroach soufflé on this beautiful radioactive evening. With both of them bouncing around like two psychotic men in a tub, the Harley shot forward over the rough broken pieces of roadway beneath the overpass. Stone did all he could to keep the bike going, as they shot back and forth between the oddly angled slabs like billiard balls. At last he came down hard on solid road, and they were suddenly upright and on basically level ground. Stone floored the Harley without even looking back, shooting along the two-laner that headed due west straight into the darkest part of the radioactive cloud cover, the burial blanket for mankind.
The advance scouts of the cockroach army reached the roof of the rusted Caddy, and their four flanks joined feelers, coming up from every part of the car. Their waving tendrils patted along the nearly powdered crystal surface of the rusted metal and up into the air, as if their quarry were somehow hanging there like a balloon. But however he had done it, he was gone. A fair-sized dinner disappeared just when it was within mandibles’ reach. After scurrying around the car for nearly twenty minutes, as the information that the dog had disappeared was conveyed to all, the insects began retreating back into their filth-coated homes inside the decayed hulks, in ravenous and pissed-off moods.
Chapter Twelve
Stone didn’t even pause to take a breath until they’d gone ten miles. The thought of the blanket of little squirming brown creatures did something to the center of his guts. Like his dog, Stone had problems with the idea of being eaten alive by insects too. But apparently that had just been a pocket of them, as they weren’t swarming out from every tree. Still, Stone realized he’d been seeing more and more of the little bastards since the bomb had gone off. The radiation either forced them from their burrows—or perhaps they were attracted by the multitude of dead things to eat. Carnivorous cockroaches. It made him shudder. In a few more years, if things kept going the way they were, there would doubtless be only roaches, sharks, and rats left on the damn planet, anyway. And they’d look around one day and realize that all their victims were gone. And they’d turn and stare at one another—and then go at it tooth and nail, until there was nothing left on the planet. Not a single living, breathing thing.
“There I go again,” Stone said, berating himself as he eased back in the seat a little. “I must have the most fatalistic brain this side of the torture chambers.” But when he thought about it, the sheer fact that he was alive and not in the gizzards of an entire suburb of roaches was something to cheer about. They drove on what was fairly flat land for about twenty miles, and Stone made good time. Then the two-laner turned to an asphalt one-laner that seemed to have been in the wrenching hands of an earthquake or something. As he rode along it, the road got so bad that, in disgust, Stone at last just rode right off the road and through the meadows and meandering hills.
But by twilight the sloping rises had turned to foothills, and the going got rougher and rougher, the trees in thicker bunches so that he kept having to skirt dense sections, zigzagging all over the damn Rockies. He tried to push it as night fell fast but found it almost impossible to keep going, so rough was the terrain; so dim was the light that soon they were moving just a few miles per hour, bouncing up and down like yo-yos as the bike’s tires went over ditches, bumps, every damn thing that mottled the flesh of the hills.
At last, exasperated and wanting to keep going but knowing, after his experience that morning, how easy it was to die if you didn’t watch your ass, Stone came to a stop as he spotted a bunch of boulders side by side at the foot of a thousand-foot slope off to the left. He pulled the Harley right up to the edge of one of the high boulders and, taking a few supplies along, hauled himself up the ten feet or so to the top, where a fairly flat space about six feet in diameter would make passable sleeping quarters. The dog made several running jumps, and then, using the seat of the Harley as a launching pad, it managed to jump up so that its front paws just made the top, and with some frantic clawing against the rock below it with its back paws, the dog at last pulled itself up and quickly turned to survey the area below and around them. The first thing it ever did was check out the defensive and offensive capabilities of any situation. It was bred into the animal’s genes to think, live, breathe, and dream of battle. Of tigers, and men with knives, of unknown nightmares, creatures that lived in its unconscious, its deepest, darkest fears.
And it swore it saw some of them skulking around off in the shadows of the trees that spread off around them. The pitbull whined and looked up at Stone, who was kneeling, spreading out a bedroll along the rock.
“Oh, don’t be such a fucking coward,” Stone admonished the animal as it sighted—or thought it did—something in a thicket of bush about thirty yards off. At last the pitbull settled down, folding its legs under it and bringing its head to rest on its front paws. It appeared to be asleep. But that’s only what it wanted any attackers in the dark to believe. Actually it always had at least one eye opened just a slit, surveying the entire area. Stone found the most comfortable position he could muster up on a piece of quarter-inch-thick blanket atop a granite boulder sheared smooth by Ice Age glaciers. Which wasn’t very comfortable. He knew the dog would keep an eye on things. Sometimes the animal’s general anxiety was very useful, at least to Stone, for knowing that the slightest crack of a twig in the woods would have the animal up and ready to go airborne, Stone actually became relaxed enough to fall into a quick and deep sleep.
When he awoke, it was almost pitch-black out, but for the eerie glow of the aurora forcing its light through the high clouds. He sat up and saw Excaliber standing by the edge of the boulder. His nose and tail were lined up as he stood, set in his pointing—and hunting—stance. Stone followed the line of canine fire and saw eyes, three pairs of them—red and burning in the darkness, almost as if from their own light. He could dimly make out large, dark, furred shapes just at the line of trees. They looked larger than wolves, but Stone couldn’t see clearly. The pitbull was emitting an almost subsonic growl that Stone just heard the edge of. But he knew the night eaters out there heard it. For similar low but equally threatening sounds emerged.
Stone knew they saw him now, and he loosened his Uzi, which he had worn in his sleep, around his chest in its holster. Apparently that was too much, for the red eyes seemed to blaze brightly for a moment like a spark fanned with wind, and then they were gone, just like that, and where they had stood were just pockets of darkness and the occasional call from a nervous bird. Stone lay himself back down as the pitbull continued to hold its stance. This time it took him almost an hour to fall asleep again. And his dreams were bad.
When he awoke again, he could see that it was morning. Or what would have to pass as morning, anyway. The light dribbled down in gray puddles through the black clouds that rolled by, miles up. Stone knew the sun must have been positively burning down through the upper atmosphere, bright as a searchlight, for more light was actually reaching him this morning than he’d seen for days. Still, he found himself yearning for real sun, blue sky. The things one took for granted seemed suddenly priceless when they were snatched away. The constant darkness was getting to him. Making him feel more like a corpse than a man. Living in the darkness and semidarkness like bugs and spiders hidden beneath logs and deep in caves.
>
Stone and the pitbull scrambled down the side of the boulder and quickly mounted the Harley. There wasn’t a trace of their night visitors, though Stone kept his holster’s flap open and the safety off on his Uzi autopistol. At least he could see in the gray mist and was able to get the bike up to about twenty miles per hour; it was still a bumpy journey as they bounced through the foothills. Then they were back on some kind of road that cut up into the higher mountain ahead, on the other side of which Stone calculated the road should bring him to within a few miles of Keenesburg. It better.
Stone positively floored the Electraglide once he saw that the road wasn’t in terrible shape. It was funny how some of them went like rotten fruit and others seemed unscathed, ready to stand up for another hundred years. Probably all depended on who was getting paid off when they had been built—and how inferior the quality of Mafia concrete had been, Stone thought cynically.
He reached the peak of the final mountain around three in the afternoon and could see down for miles onto the far side. He took out his field binocs and tried to find the town, or whatever it was. There—perhaps ten miles off to the west —was some sort of habitation. Though all he could see was the cluster of buildings, nothing in greater detail than yards wide. Stone put the field glasses away and, checking around to make sure that the damn dog wasn’t off chasing a venomous snake or grizzly bear or some damn thing, took off down the descending road.
They had gone perhaps two miles when Stone, just rounding a curve, had to slam on the brakes to avoid crashing into a man walking along the road. He was as naked as the day he was born and covered with wounds and sores dripping a thick pus from numerous red openings. Stone could see they were radiation burns, for the man’s arms and back were covered with the raised red welts that were literally melting off him—like Leaping Elk’s blob of a hand before he had been sent to hell. But this one didn’t seem dangerous, just out of it. Zombie might be a better word for it, for as Stone came alongside the slowly walking figure, he could see that the man’s eyes were gone as old marbles, dead and dull. He was just somehow clomping one foot down, then the other, mumbling something to himself as he walked.
“Hey, pal,” Stone yelled out, but the man didn’t budge an inch or even deign to glance over at his caller. “Suit yourself,” Stone said, and started forward again. He wasn’t about to stop and get into an encounter therapy session with the naked, pus-ridden fellow to find out why the poor lad was so shy. Not today.
But he had scarcely gone a hundred yards when Stone saw it was going to have to be group therapy if he was going to open a practice for the insane soon-to-be-dead. For there was another one and, in front of him, another. In fact, there was a whole line of them straggling along with all the enthusiasm of those about to attend the Inquisition. And all naked and covered with the same dripping red sores and welts, their skin nothing but bubbles and foam in many places. The hair on all of them had all fallen out, and they were as bald as eggs, though these were bloody eggs, as the skin atop the skulls had started rotting to the consistency of week-old pumpkin.
Stone slowed down, keeping both feet on the ground and his fingers on the trigger of the Harley’s 50-cal. mounted up front. But these dudes weren’t dangerous. Except to his stomach. As he watched, they beat at their already decimated frames. They whipped at themselves with belts and branches filled with thorns, pounded at their shoulders and their heads with rocks until their hands were red. Even the pitbull stared at the scene with revolted fascination. And as they stumbled along like the army of the walking dead, Stone could hear them half whispering, almost singing to themselves:
“You are poison, you are rot,
You must die, must be not,
You are filth, you are scum,
Smash your flesh, make you brains run.”
And other such cheerful verses, at least as far as Stone could make out, though it was hard to really tell, as they mumbled in a singsong way through toothless, lipless, and, in some cases, tongueless mouths. It made for quite a chorus as he wheeled slowly down the road, passing dozens of them, each one in a worse state of decay and imminent danger of popping than the one before him. At last he reached what appeared to be the very front of the line, as he could see down the yellow-lined road ahead for nearly a mile and there wasn’t another figure. He pulled up alongside the “leader.” He, too, was naked and covered with the pus-oozing blisters and boils, the whole chunks of skin falling from his body. It was like looking at something in a state of constant decomposition, every step making a piece jar loose, something pop and spit out a gush of red and brown. This one at least was doing something besides falling apart. He was swinging an ancient family-sized tin can that had once been filled with pickles back and forth in front of him. Only now it was burning a fatty subtance like melted wax but with a distinctly sour and sickening smell. The man sputtered as he walked, sending out a spray of spittle in front of him like a fine mist with every word:
“I must rot, I must fall,
I must bleed and scream and crawl…”
“Uh, howdy, stranger,” Stone said as he pulled the bike up alongside the lead scout of the naked stumblers. “Nice day, huh?” This one at least acknowledged him, Stone saw as the man turned his head slightly toward the intruder, without breaking stride, without letting the lamp that emitted a little chimney of thick gray smoke from stopping its pendulum swing back and forth as if driving the demons off ahead by choking them. The man’s eyes caught Stone’s, and he felt a shudder rush up and down his body like a snake undulating down a log. For the man only had what looked like the beginnings of a face. The muscles were there in plain sight, many of the veins lying there like red-and-blue strings wriggling slightly like so many worms as they continued to pump their diseased radioactive blood through the rotting physique. It was as if the face hadn’t been finished, had never had the skin put on it, the features drawn in. Just two wet, dark balls, like olives in a martini of blood and slime, peered back at him from within what had been a man’s face.
“If you don’t mind my being a little nosy?” Stone said with as cheerful a grin as he could muster under the circumstances. “Just why are you fellows—uh—taking a walk naked, and, you know, hitting yourselves and all that?”
“We must be punished,” the man croaked back, and Stone tried to keep the smile on his face as the little tubes of red flesh that were the man’s lips wriggled up and down, the two teeth that were left in the oozing mouth, hanging by threads, swinging back and forth as he spoke, as if they might tumble out at any moment. “We are God’s chosen. Chosen to die for man’s sins.” The man groaned and suddenly reached up with his free hand and smashed himself in the head with a hammer.
Stone involuntarily winced, as did the pitbull behind him, and he was starting to get edgy about the sick scene unfolding in front of them. When Stone opened his eyes a split second later, the man was reeling from the blow, a hole the size of a quarter opened right in the side of his skull as a pinkish, gruellike substance flowed out like Silly Putty. Yet still the man kept walking, lurching forward on legs that were hardly more than gangrenous stalks held together by sheer pressure onto the cracking, rubbery bones beneath them.
“Why—must you be punished?” Stone went on, wanting to just floor the bike ahead but somehow needing to know the reason for the group’s bizarre behavior.
“Man has sinned. That is why he is being destroyed. By punishing ourselves we are helping God. Carrying out his work.” The man smiled a red hole of a smile, as if pleased with his explanation. “All must die. But we are hastening the process. And causing ourselves great pain. As much pain as possible. That is the whole idea. That is the punishment. Blessed be the self-mutilators, for they are carrying out the atomic judgment’s work.” Again he smiled, and the red hole opened and closed again like the jaws of some wretched creature from a nightmare.
“I s-see,” Stone stuttered, unable to argue with such logic. “Well, well—good luck,” he muttered, realizing as the
words left his lips how absurd they were. But the man either didn’t hear them or was unable to relate to the inherent absurdity of the statement. Instead he whipped the hammer up again at his head, and it sank nearly an inch into and through the rotting skull. He seemed to stagger again, sinking down almost to his knees. But then somehow, incredibly, the mobile piece of rot regained his balance and kept on. And as Martin Stone swore that what he was seeing was just about the most horrible thing he’d ever encountered, he saw something worse. For the walking ooze, noticing through cracked, bleeding eyes that the little fire in its pot was burning low, reached toward itself with a scooping hand, its fingers all stiff, and dug the hand right into its side, where Stone could see it had previously scooped out a bunch.
It poked around into its own innards as it walked, hardly faltering and, after a few seconds of digging, ripped out a whole big batch of human rot. It swung the hand around and threw the load on top of the low blue flames as the last of the old fire almost went out. There was a sudden sheet of blue and yellow as the radioactive slime caught fire in a flash. A cloud of yellowish smoke rose up all around them, making Stone and the dog cough and wave it away from their faces.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Stone half screamed as he floored the bike forward, trying to get out of the nauseating mist. He exhaled hard as he shot away from the line of moaning men, who continued to slice and beat at themselves with great enthusiasm. He breathed deeply in and out, trying to get the filthy poison out of his lungs. The dog, too, seemed to hyperventilate, whether through instinct or realizing that the human smoke was bad, Stone didn’t know. But the two of them, man and animal, took deep filling breaths of air, pushing out from the very bottom of their lungs for the next twenty minutes as they rode along. Stone didn’t know if the stuff could really hurt him or not. But it sure hadn’t done the fellow from whom it had come any good.
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