Authors: Craig Sargent
Warlord's Revenge
GOT SOME
FRIENDS
WHO WANT TO
MEET YOU
,”
SCALZANNI SAID.
Suddenly he struck—swooping both hands and the meathooks in them down like the flapping wings of a condor. They came together
like brain-crushing tongs in midair with a sudden eruption of sparks as metal slammed against metal. But Stone was gone, having
danced a good yard away. The guy was fast, incredibly fast. He’d have to wait for the little slime to make a mistake.
But it was Stone who made the mistake. He stepped backward and found himself toppling over a root. Then he was lying flat
on his back, his knife by his side. Scalzanni charged forward flailing away with both hooks like some sort of psychotic Captain
Hook.
The meathook in the Mafia killer’s right hand descended like a question mark searching for blood toward Stone’s skull…
The Last Ranger
The Savage Stronghold
The Madman’s Mansion
The Rabid Brigadier
The War Weapons
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First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56647-6
Contents
“
GOT SOME FRIENDS WHO WANT TO MEET YOU
,” SCALZANNI SAID.
I
f death be a painter, then its murderous brush swept across the sky in broad, radioactive strokes of blood-red, pumpkin-orange,
and shroud-black with a deft master’s touch. A mushroom cloud, a mosaic of writhing color and absolute blackness, rose above
the prairie lands of northern Colorado like a tower of cancer. It was as if all the fires of hell had released their foul
smoke at once and these spires of total disintegration had joined into one great cloud that loomed above the earth like a
monument to the apocalypse. Up it rose, unstoppable, into the cloud line and beyond, an immense, hideous sculpture to the
folly of mankind.
The mushroom headed straight up ten miles and then spread out flat at the top, as if it were being sliced off by the high
winds of the upper atmosphere—that part of its radioactivity being swept off to all portions of the world to add a little
more poison to the soil and water. As if the planet earth hadn’t been poisoned enough already. The smell of the burned dead
was just beginning to permeate the countryside, a scent that would linger for a long time. There were a million tons of steamed
blood and molten life to be found in the dark cloud, in the swirling smoke that was but the remnants of the atomic fury that
had erupted just minutes before.
The skies around the black pillar—which had the appearance of an immense tornado now, its four-mile-wide funnel swirling slowly
like the gas storms of Jupiter—were a vibrant purple-and-green color, the color of air before lightning strikes, the color
of a corpse’s cheeks. The ghostly glow seemed to suffuse the entire horizon in every direction, and the heavens above. Even
the stars, winking down in horror, appeared orange and yellow, tinted like diseased little spots, pimples of rot in the wounded
night.
“The air tastes like shit,” Martin Stone said, turning toward Meyra, whose eyes were wet and reflective, like little pools
of perfect pain. The Indian woman didn’t actually cry as much as release a constant stream of salty moisture that flowed from
the inner edges of each eye. The tears flowed down, streaming across her cheeks and between her lips as she sucked unconsciously
at them.
But then, she had a right to cry, and to continue to cry forever. Her brother, Little Bear, the leader of a small band of
Cheyenne, had just been burned to a crisp by the detonation of the ten-meg atomic warhead that had blown its top some thirty
miles to the north of them.
Meyra tried not to look, but she couldn’t help it and turned again to glance down at what had been her brother. It was horrible.
Terribly, revoltingly, vomitingly horrible. It was as if he had just melted. A plastic toy taken by a sadistic child into
his playroom and burned with a blowtorch. Turned over and over like an animal on a spit and splayed with the fire until he
was no longer human but a melted thing whose features—nose, eyes, lips, and neck—all dripped and blended into one another
like an amorphous Jell-o, its teeth poking out here and there from a puddle of flesh at its feet.
Little Bear’s skeleton still remained somehow. Sort of. It, too, had been twisted and plied by atomic fingers so it looked
like an anatomist’s nightmare—ribs curving out at all different angles, some bent in, leg bones broken in numerous places.
The whole thing was like something that had been put through a bone crusher, something Picasso might have sculpted to show
the horror of war. The true ugliness of death.
Meyra lurched suddenly toward the smoking mess of human debris in quick little steps, and Stone rushed forward as he saw her
stumble and start to collapse. Her body hurtled straight toward the bubbling pit of what had once been her brother—only Stone’s
strong arms reached out at the last second and pulled her back from crashing into the smoking remains. Her eyes were spinning
around in her head like Ping-Pong balls, just the whites showing. He half carried her back a few yards and came to one knee,
holding her on his leg, cradled in his arms. He could feel her quivering like a terrified animal.
After a few minutes, those who were left of the attack force Martin Stone had assembled gathered around him and Meyra, who
remained motionless in his arms. They just stood in a loose circle around the frozen pair, not sure what to say, overwhelmed
by the immensity of the atomic blast they had just lived through, and the still rising mushroom cloud, its reds and oranges
fading to steel-gray and black as its revolutions per minute, its turning stack of radioactive particles and melted life,
also slowed. A cyclone of death, barely moving. But then it had all the time in the world. The hydrogen bomb had gone off
quickly—in one ten-millionth of a second. But it was the fallout cloud, the radiation, that would get to enjoy the lingering
destruction, frolicking in it for months, as all living things caught in its path slowly became diseased, rotted and died
away.
Martin Stone looked up from his own dark thoughts as he suddenly realized they were waiting for him to do something. God knows
what. But they had no one else to turn to—just filthy, ashen faces looking, for all their toughness and macho, like little
kids who were lost and unutterably alone. Being in the vicinity of a nuke blast can do that to a man sometimes. Put him a
little on the melancholy side. The towering black pyre miles to the north seemed to sing out their names on the hot, radioactive
breezes, as if the cloud knew it had missed something but would be back to claim it.
“Oh, for chrissake,” Stone yelled out angrily as he stared around at the remnants of the bizarre attack force he had managed
to assemble to take on General Patton and his Fascist New American Army—four recruits from the NAA itself who had come to
join him (there had been eight just twenty-four hours earlier). And seven of the Cheyenne left. Little Bear was dead. Leaderless,
the Indians, all of them so stone-faced and tough when he had first encountered them—with their stoic, coppery faces; long
black hair, and buckskin jackets—didn’t seem nearly so sure of themselves now. Even they looked toward Stone with odd expressions.
What the hell did they expect him to—
“Well, at least put some wraps over your faces, assholes,” Stone said gruffly as a little wave of black stuff seemed to suddenly
float down over them like ashes from the sky. “You breathe this stuff in…” He spoke through his own mash of wet fabric that
covered his nose and mouth, catching some of the black ash on his palm It was still hot. Stone released it just as quickly,
and it swirled to the blast-strewn ground like a dark feather joining the blanket of debris that had swept across the terrain
for nearly fifty miles, covering everything with a dark, gritty sand that was still warm beneath their feet. “… and you’re
dead men, as surely as if that motherfucker over there”—he eyed the cloud, which seemed to grow thicker and darker every minute—”had
chewed you up in its fires.”
A few of the Cheyenne folded their arms as if to indicate that they were men enough to breathe in any goddamn thing they felt
like breathing. But the rest of the men, Indians and raw NAA recruits alike, found strips of cloth here and there among their
packs on the backs of their three-wheeled bikes that stood parked in a rough circle some thirty yards off. They wet the strips
down with water from their gourds and canteens and tied them securely around the lower portions of their faces, so that all
the air coming in through their noses and mouths was being crudely, if fairly efficiently, filtered. Stone knew that once
the bomb blast was past, it was the particles floating around in the air that were the most danger. Breathing them in, getting
them lodged in lung tissue, could mean disease, cancer, months or even years later. The promise of radioactivity was that
it never stopped radiating; it would still be glowing long after the remains of the body it had inhabited—and destroyed—was
melted back into indecipherable dirt.
Within minutes they were reassembled around Stone with their makeshift gas masks on, their eyes now staring at him with even
more desperation than before, more pleading, without daring to plead. Stone knew why he had been so dubious of this “leader”
role. He had been pretty much on his own—until now. And that he could deal with. If he died? Well, there wouldn’t be a hell
of a lot tears to mourn him. But with men under his command—with all that entailed—he’d have to change careers fast. He couldn’t
explain to them why. Couldn’t give them the slightest comfort at the edges of hell. He couldn’t even answer those questions
himself. Why had it all happened? Why had America collapsed into barbarism and savagery? Why did crime lords and murderers
rule the once great country that was nothing now but a thousand little principalities, a thousand little sadistic dictators
and princes of death? Why had men reverted to cannibalism, sacrifice? Why had his own mother been… No, these were questions
he didn’t even ask himself. What fucking right had this bunch to look at him like that?
“And what about you two?” Stone asked as he stood up and looked at the two Cheyenne who remained maskless, smirking at the
rest of their band. Meyra turned away from the group as she dabbed at her eyes, not wanting the others to see her with tears.
It was not befitting an Indian to show pain. Especially not one with the blood of Cheyenne royalty in her veins. Their culture
had evolved for thousands of years, the rule being to swallow pain. But it wasn’t her brother’s death that disturbed her so
but that she had seen him in that state—that repose of wretched decay. He was like a beacon of horror, a black lamp that kept
pulling her eyes toward it. Like looking down at a mortal wound in one’s own chest that meant annihilation. Meyra could not
tear her eyes away from the charred corpse some twelve yards off, kneeling as if in prayer in the center of the oily brown-and-black
puddle that was its melted flesh and organs, forming a rough circle for about a yard around it. An Indian Buddha in death
meditation.
“Don’t need to,” snarled back one of the two Cheyenne who still had his face unmasked, the taller and nastier-looking one.
“White men need that sort of protection. But not us.” He slapped himself on the chest, and then so did his shorter friend,
who looked around at the other Indians with a shit-eating grin.
“Suit yourself, pal,” Stone replied coolly. “But don’t come running to me when your nose starts running red and you cough
and a river conies out. ’Cause there won’t be nothing I can do.”
“Didn’t ask you to do nothing,” the Indian said, holding up a turquoise amulet. “Cheyenne medicine is all I need, man. White
medicine causes cancer.” The Cheyenne was a few inches taller than Stone, though very lean and lanky like a snake. His lower
lip was all busted, an injury from long ago. It had healed over completely but made him seem to have lost a portion of his
mouth, the lip having been reduced to the size of a pencil line, a light purplish color. It gave him an oddly buck-toothed
appearance on the upper right portion of his face, as his teeth tended to poke out all the way to the roots like the partial
grin of a skull.