Warlord's Revenge (12 page)

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 to 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.

“ ’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.

W
hen 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.