Warlord's Revenge (2 page)

He sneered at Stone and opened his mouth and his arms to the sky, taking in deep breaths of the foul ash that was starting
to fall a little thicker now, in long sheets, misty and ephemeral, floating down almost gracefully and spinning around like
black snowflakes. The dark ash. was sucked into the Indian’s mouth and lungs before he realized the particles were burning
him, scalding his tongue and throat. He exploded out in a violent cough, and the others could see the little red marks where
the hot ash had made contact with the membranes of his mouth.

The Cheyenne smiled proudly at the Indians, who seemed impressed by his “bravery” but deigned to keep their flimsy shields
of cloth over their fallout-coated faces. Bravery was one thing, being an asshole was something else.

“We’ve got to bury him,” Meyra said suddenly, loudly, and firmly, startling Stone from his eye-to-eye with the still coughing
Cheyenne—Leaping Elk, if Stone remembered correctly. The Indian had been second-in-command of the small band of nomads. Little
Bear had easily fended off his halfhearted attempts at rule. But now… Already Leaping Elk was trying to take command of the
remaining Cheyenne braves through feats of daring, an almost mad kind of Indian courage with a contempt for death. Already
he was going to challenge Stone for leadership of the hybrid fighting force. But for the moment, anyway, the others didn’t
seem like they were too interested in sucking in radioactive fallout. Stone made a mental note to keep an eye on the macho
Cheyenne. There was something crazy in those eyes that he didn’t like at all.

“What?” Stone asked, turning to Meyra, who stared at him, her eyes hardly able to focus on his face. Her lips were white,
her deeply tanned skin looked almost pale in her state of near emotional breakdown. Yet even now Martin Stone found it hard
not to see her beauty, the perfect ridges and curves of her young face. And found it hard not to remember lying hard against
the perfect young body that had pressed back against him with animal desire. Stone suddenly felt a sharp headache sweep through
his head, whether from the radiation they had all doubtless absorbed or because of the sudden twinge of guilt he felt over
memories of fucking her when she was staring at her barbecued brother, who was sending out foul-smelling smoke signals that
he had been overcooked.

“I said we’ve got to bury him,” Meyra repeated in a kind of gasping hiss, as if she couldn’t quite find the air to talk. She,
too, wore one of the masks, and it made it hard to suck in what little oxygen there was out there.

“But—” Stone began to protest as gently as he could, as he stared over at the bubbling garbage dump of a man, knowing that
it would be impossible to bury it; it would come apart in their hands. The still boiling flesh of the brain and the bubbling
organs occasionally burped up steam in the center of what had been the stomach, kidneys, liver, intestines, all melted down
into a thick black stew as dense as oil and which glowed with an infinitesimal blue flame along its entire surface.

“No, Martin Stone, do not argue with me,” the Cheyenne fighting woman replied coldly. “He
must
be buried. It is the Cheyenne way. For a warrior of my people to die in battle and not be buried according to our most sacred
rituals is what you call blasphemy. You understand, Stone. His soul would rot in a limbo of death rather than be reborn into
a world of peace and a plenitude of animals. We would condemn him to the Cheyenne version of eternal damnation. If a people
do not even bury their dead but leave them to lie out and be consumed by the coyotes, the lizards, that people deserves to
die.”

“All right, all right,” Stone said softly, holding his hands up as if to ward her off. “You win. But we’d better hurry.” He
squinted, taking in the movement of the great swirling cloud. It still didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get to them. Just expanding
out from the middle like a tire being pumped with air. The wind currents tonight, thank God, were minimal.

The other Cheyenne had just grunted out general noises of assent as Meyra had spoken, but as Stone started toward the radiation-cooked
flesh, not one of them made a move to help him. Stone felt his guts tighten up, as if they might release whatever was still
down in there from the day before. He looked slowly down at the remains of the man he had come to know and respect. There
weren’t many men around anymore who were basically decent—and tough enough to back it up. That made the hideousness of the
Cheyenne chief’s remains that much more terrible.

Stone circled around the human bonfire, tightening the bandanna around his mouth and nose. The smell of the cauldron of steaming
organs in the center of the black-ash pelvic bone was repulsive. He had smelled burning flesh before—cannibalism was not all
that unusual these days. But this was far worse somehow, sweeter—with a burning chemical edge of spiciness. He kept circling,
trying to figure out a way to move the smoking thing. There wasn’t any. It wasn’t even a solid thing—or even a
few
solid things. The bottom of it was just puddle, with fingernails, teeth, and bones of fingers and toes all half submerged
like prehistoric fossils beneath the surface. The flame-rippling hulk resting in the center was an uneven mesh of bone and
charred, leathery skin that still crisscrossed the inner skeleton like dark webs. Somehow the skull had stayed atop the black
ribs, but it was tilted sideways at an angle of nearly ninety degrees, hanging on by the tail of the medulla oblongata, which
had hardened from the flames into a leathery tendril that rose from the top of the flaming spinal cord and into the skull.
The bubbling brain inside stewed away, as if trying to get ready in time for dinner.

Stone glanced up and over at Meyra, who was staring across at him, her whole body still shaking, he could see, even from ten
yards off. She wasn’t going to come and help. That was for damn sure. Two of the Cheyenne stepped forward at last, seeing
that they must help their fallen leader. Stone couldn’t recognize them for sure beneath their breathing bandannas, but he
thought one of them was Fighting Eagle, whom Little Bear had mentioned as wanting to be his eventual successor.

“Got to dig hole first,” the brave said, walking a few feet to his parked cross-country bike and extracting a folding shovel
from a backpack. “I’ll dig it right next to his body so we can just push it in. This whole thing doesn’t have to be all beautiful,
you know, for the ritual to be fulfilled.” Stone thought he caught a slightly cynical wink from above the mask. He was sure
they hadn’t stopped to bury all their dead before. When you’re attacked, you try to survive. That’s the oldest ritual.

After a few minutes of digging in the loose dirt of the sun-parched backland, the Cheyenne had made a hole about a foot and
a half deep, two feet wide, and about six feet long. He stepped back, looked down with vague approval, and handed the shovel
to Stone, who started to protest.

“Man who lead man to his death—that man must bury him. Cheyenne words. Cheyenne law. Understand?” Stone felt like he was being
pushed to the limits of his own cool, but he couldn’t break. He
had
led them all here. Even though the reason for doing so had been imperative, still he was responsible for the deaths. It was
true.

Chastened, Stone gritted his teeth and stood above the yard or so of smoking human garbage. He tried to wedge the shovel in
beneath the V-shaped pelvic bone, above which the rest of the ashy body rested precariously, but the moment that metal touched
bone, the bone crumbled into a hundred little pieces. Inside the glowing hulk he could see the red coals still throbbing peacefully,
like the burned-down coals of a long-flaming log. There was no way he was going to transport the thing with any kind of dignity—he
could see that right away. Well, he would bury the guy, Stone thought without looking around at the others, but it wasn’t
going to win the Funeral of the Month Award.

He heard a sharp intake of breath from behind him as he dug the shovel into the pile of collapsed bones and flaming slime
and lifted a bunch of it like mud from the ground. He threw the load a few feet or so down into the grave, where it sizzled
against the slight wetness from below. Again he dug the shovel in, this time getting most of the burning mass onto its curved
metal plate. The smell of the charred flesh was intense for a second and burned Stone’s eyes as a sudden breeze fanned the
corpse chops right into his face. But he threw the load forward, and it spread apart as it tumbled into the grave, steaming
as it touched moisture.

The bones and the chunks of burning flesh were the easy part. It was the actual puddle that was going to be hard. The stuff
was more like boiling tar or oil than something that had been human. After a few feeble attempts at loading the wretched waste
onto the shovel, Stone just turned the blade of the implement on its edge and swept it all sideways. The sticky mess flowed
along the ground, pouring down into the grave to join its more solid brethren parts. Within a couple of minutes Stone had
scraped all that he could of the recently deceased into the hole. Just a black scum remained on the ground where Little Bear
had died.

Meyra walked over to the stuff in the hole and took her amulet from around her neck. A beautiful necklace of violet turquoise
adorned with cougar teeth, it created the shape of a mountain lion, her family crest. The Cheyenne woman threw it down into
the bubbling black mass that had been her brother, and it was gobbled down in a flash. A thing of beauty disappeared into
a thing of unspeakable horror.

“From this moment on,” she said, raising her hands to the skies overhead, trying to find a patch of clear heaven through the
mists and spreading smoke of the atomic bomb cloud so she could find and address the ancient Indian Gods, “from this moment
on, I am no one,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “I have no family. I am the last of no lineage. I will live from minute to
minute. I will live only to avenge my brother. There will be no other life. I will take the place
he
filled in life. I will become him, as he becomes you.”

She lowered her eyes to the cauldron of radioactive rot that farted out bursts of pure foulness and took in, without any mental
shield, what her brother had become. She wanted to know. Wanted to see the total horror. And remember it for the rest of her
life.

“L
et’s get the hell out of here,” Stone said none too ceremoniously when Meyra had finished and stood with her head bowed and
eyes closed. He didn’t know if she was in a religious trance or unconscious, but the mushroom cloud was starting to lean precipitously
toward them now, the black curtains of superheated atoms starting to extend out at the very edges like a mist, a dark, blinding
fog that crept out over the desolated prairie.

“Don’t you bury your dead?” Leaping Elk smirked, his hands on his hips as he stood next to the Bradley III tank, now on its
side. Inside the tank were three of Stone’s NAA recruits. At least, they had been three of Stone’s recruits—mere lads not
even out of their teens. Nothing living could have taken the temperature the tank had risen to as it had been caught in the
direct radiation and heat waves of the hydrogen bomb. It still seemed to throb an almost invisible violet color, as if it
were alive beneath the steel skin.

“That’s their coffin,” Stone replied icily as he rose and searched for Excaliber, his worse-for-wear bullterrier. “No one,
no animal, will get inside that thing for a long, long time. And if they did, they’d be dead before they crawled back out
the hatch.”

“Why?” Leaping Elk sneered again. “Is it guarded by some invisible white god?” He shot his right hand out and touched the
side of the tank—and half screamed, pulling the hand back as it sizzled and burned against the armored steel, which was at
a temperature of 1,435 degrees. The others laughed, even his fellow Cheyenne, and Leaping Elk’s lips ground furiously against
each other. More than anything, he seemed to have the need to be taken seriously, not to be laughed at. His whole face seemed
to flush a few shades darker, and with a snorting laugh the Cheyenne stuck his hand back out and this time clamped it down
hard against the armor.

Some of the others gasped, and Stone looked away for a second as a stream of smoke went up above the fingers. They could hear
the flesh burning beneath the hot metal. But Leaping Elk didn’t wince or make a sound. He took in their gaze, basking in their
respect—nay, fear—of him, and laughed loud.

After about ten seconds he removed the hand and held it up for all to see. It was literally smoking, the flesh almost black
in some places, red and bubbling up like a tar street on a hot summer day in others. The pain seemed to give him pleasure
as he grinned, showing the mutilated appendage around. A mark of madness. A mark of the crazy wisdom of the Cheyenne. Stone
looked quickly at the eyes of the other braves. And he could see that Leaping Elk’s shenanigans were working. Whether he was
clever enough to plan it all out or a complete madman, Stone had no idea. But the rest of the Cheyenne were definitely looking
at their chortling compatriot with a perverse respect.

“This is what the Cheyenne warrior can do,” the brave said, holding the sizzling palm up so that Stone could get a good view.

“And this is what the white man can do,” Stone said with a thin grin as he lowered himself down on top of his Harley 1200.
“Get his ass the fuck out of here.” The bike was beat-up, covered with the grit and grime of warfare. But it felt good beneath
his legs as Stone settled down on it, armed to the teeth and ready to fly. He whistled and a low shape appeared out of the
dust, shook itself, and leapt up onto the black leather seat behind him.

“Good boy.” Stone grinned, scratching the animal behind the ears. A little cloud of dust rose above its head, and the pitbull
barked beneath its slightly lopsided particle mask. The damned thing needed a bath, Stone thought, and then felt himself an
idiot, worrying about a dog’s toilette when half the world was burning around them. He turned the switch of the big Harley,
and its instant ignition system worked perfectly, roaring the engine to life. He looked over at the still functioning tank,
the one remaining Bradley III, with all the latest armaments, including a missile system and radar/laser guidance tracking.