Warlord's Revenge (7 page)

“Come on, dog, you’re going to pay for this, when I can figure out how.” Stone said as he leaned over and threw a handful
of the anti-radiation drugs into the pitbull’s mouth. The animal gulped, burped, farted, and then swallowed them down along
with a final mouthful of some sort of reddish liquid it had been slurping out of a half-chewed can. Casting a final eye around
to see if it had somehow missed any particularly delectable goodies, the canine decided it had used up this scene. And with
a snort, as if to indicate the party was over because
it
was leaving, the pitbull turned on its heels and walked after Stone, its somewhat enlarged stomach rolling from side to side,
almost scraping the floor like the gondola of a blimp in rough winds.

Once they were outside of the bunker again, Stone watched with a sense of dread as the granite doors closed behind him, moving
smoothly on the huge ball bearings that his father had had installed. The kind used to move the rockets down at the Cape.
When there had been such things. He always felt like it would be the last time he saw the place each time he left it. The
world seemed to be getting more dangerous by the day. Stone returned the radio transitter to the ground, wrapping it back
inside the thick plastic, and rolled the boulder over it. Excaliber looked at him with intrigued eyes, wondering what sort
of bone it was that needed such a large rock over it.

Stone checked his luminescent watch dial, turning his wrist up, and saw that there was just enough time to get back to the
bivouac before dawn. The sky looked solid as a rock now, just one immense cloud that was heading south a few miles an hour
faster than it had been before. But it was staying high for the moment. He couldn’t smell any rain. Rain that would bring
the poison back down to earth.

They shot along the dirt path at a fast clip, and Stone felt kind of reckless at this point. It sure as hell wasn’t like his
life expectancy was going up or anything. He kept trying to tell himself that he didn’t have rad poisoning. But the more he
denied it, the more it clawed at his mind, at his thoughts. Like an itch he didn’t want to scratch, the very denial of its
existence gave it increased power to grab him. He
did
feel hot everywhere. He
could
feel cold sores coming out on his mouth. His brain
did
feel like it was warmed-over Jell-O. On the other hand, he hadn’t slept for about fifty hours, either. That might have something
to do with it. Yeah, he was sleepy, that was all. And if he was incredibly lucky and made it back to camp as fast as he had
left it, he might even be able to get a nice long sleep of about forty-five minutes or so.

Excaliber sensed it first. In a flash he was up on the backseat, his front paws up over Stone’s shoulders, a motion that his
master knew the animal only exhibited on threatening occasions. He loosed his jacket with one hand, freeing the Uzi for quick
draw if he needed it. Then Stone heard it—a drone like a mosquito, then a bee, getting louder by the second. Suddenly he saw
it—a light coming straight toward them. But it seemed to be floating. As the beam came to rest squarely on his face, nearly
blinding him, Stone realized it was a chopper. They were being hunted from the air.

The whirring blades of the Mini Huey filled the sky over Stone’s head with a deafening roar, and the pitbull set to barking
up at the craft, which, even twenty yards up and forty or so in front of them, sent a gale storm of wind down at them, whipping
the grit from the road into their eyes and mouths. Above the Harley, which had skidded to a stop—Stone couldn’t see, could
barely keep the big bike upright—three men looked down from the mini-attack chopper debating whether to try to take Martin
Stone alive or shoot him dead on the spot. Their boss had said either way was fine. As long as his head was brought back—attached
to its body or not. They decided to kill him. From each side of the chopper’s bulbous plastic cockpit two hit-men opened up
with ,45-caliber Ingrams, the preferred hit weapon, Stone knew, of the Mafia death squads.

Two rows of slugs plowed straight toward the bike and its occupants, sending up small violent eruptions of dust in the exploding
asphalt of the one-laner as they scissored their way inexorably forward.

“Jump,” Stone screamed, leaping from the bike with every ounce of strength in his tired legs. He felt the muscles tighten,
then uncoil—and he was flying through the air and darkness. Everything around him was a screaming hell of whistling slugs
that he could feel tearing right by him, just inches away from his face, his chest. His body flipped and corkscrewed through
the shadows and then came down hard in some bushes. Stone felt the air get knocked out of him as he landed, but he made himself
go with it, not panicking, and was able to absorb most of the blow. He spun around from the darkness of the little grove of
wild shrubs as the chopper buzzed past, its scythes of .45-caliber steel leaving a pockmocked, broken road behind.

Stone knew he had only seconds. Already the chopper was turning around a hundred yards past and starting back. This time they
would hover over him and send down a fusillade. There was no way he could survive. He looked off behind him, hoping to find
sheltering woods but saw only a long, sloped field of low bushes, a few cacti—no place to hide. Suddenly his head swung around
to the Harley, on the road twenty feet ahead of him. He had rearmed the Luchaire back at the bunker. See, he wasn’t such a
stupid guy, after all. Getting to it, loading it, before the chopper reached him again, that was another…

Stone let his mind argue about the feasibility of such an action while his body took off leaping over the bushes on the run.
He reached the bike just as he saw the chopper complete half its turn, about fifty feet up, the wide and blinding searchlight
beneath the craft lighting a circular patch of terrain below with the sudden noonday illumination of the sun. Animals and
lizards, caught in the light, froze like statues until the Huey was past, and then ran, terrified, back to their holes and
lairs. Only Stone had nowhere to hide.

He fumbled at the autofeed of the magazine that was attached to the side of the Electraglide. His hands seemed to want to
move by themselves, doing little fumbling dances at the release for the shells.

“Come on, you little assholes,” Stone screamed down at his own fingers, demanding that they do what they were paid to. At
last the thumb and forefinger of his right hand managed to get it together enough to click the lever—and up popped one of
the long rockets. Stone grabbed it just as the light of the chopper began steering a path through the darkness back toward
him. He ripped the release off the launching tube and pulled it out toward him, so the unit snapped out on steel hinges. Stone
slammed the shell in and spun around alongside the firing cylinder. He slid back the “arm” signal and then turned to sight
up the chopper.

Sighting it up was not exactly the problem. It wasn’t like he couldn’t find it, but that the damn thing was suddenly right
there, looming toward him like some sort of flying pterodactyl of the Pleistocene Era searching for dinner. He couldn’t see
in the sudden blinding impact of the searchlight but could distinctly hear the snaps of the two Ingrams opening up on him
again. Stone tried desperately to sight it but could see only the light—a sun of brilliance taking out his vision.

Stone aimed at the light itself, at its blinding center even as it filled the very air above him, and pulled the trigger.
The tube at his side seemed to explode as the bike shook violently from side to side. Stone found himself thrown backward
by a sudden roar of such power that he felt as if his very flesh were being shaken from his bones. He found himself suddenly
sitting back on his ass, slamming down onto the hard roadway as his eyes snapped up straight ahead. The chopper, just fifty
feet in front of him, was on fire. Within, Stone could see the hit men coated with flames, like marshmallows sizzling with
blue licks of fire as they melt within a camp fire. Only these marshmallows were screaming. The horrible screams of those
who perish by fire.

But they didn’t have a hell of a long time to wait to die. The gas tanks of the chopper suddenly went, as the flames created
by the detonation of the 89-mm spread into the fuel pumps. The secondary went up like Mt. Vesuvius in the sky, blasting the
occupants and the craft itself out in all directions in a maelstrom of blazing particles. The ruins rained down for two hundred
feet around, depositing flaming debris in numerous piles in the darkness. Suddenly there were hundreds of fires burning around
the hillside, like some sort of sacrificial blazes. Fires to the gods. The dark gods. The death gods, who drank death, inhaled
the smoke of burning things like the intoxicating vapors of the finest opium. The smoke of the dead men—and the smoking, smashed
husk of the chopper—rose and mingled together, indistinguishable anymore as being man or machine. Rose higher and higher,
as if reaching to join the great atomic clouds far above.

S
tone rose slowly after the main storm of the chopper debris had fallen back down to earth. Dancing particles filled the air,
their crystalline shapes reflecting back little rays from the flames of the many fires below. That had been close, Stone thought
with a rapidly beating heart. Too close. He looked down and saw that the front of his jacket was singed, his eyebrows and
hair burned at the very edges.

Someone was after him bad, real bad. Enough to send out a fucking chopper, just to wait around in hiding—wait for Martin Stone
to show up. And, of course, acting like a predictable mouse in a maze, Stone had done so. It felt great to be loved so much.
He had made a lot of enemies in his short career out of the bunker, but somehow he hadn’t quite realized he was already on
the number-one shit list of the bad guys. Well, if nothing else, Stone thought with bitter humor, he must be doing something
right.

He looked around, suddenly realizing the pitbull was nowhere in sight. But even as he strained to find it, the animal rose
slowly from a muddy ditch across the one-lane road, covered with muck and dirt. Excaliber gave Stone a dirty look that he
could feel even through the fiery shadows.

“I told you from the start dog,” Stone said, looking the pitbull squarely in the eye. “When you travel with me, it’s flak
time all the time.” The fighting dog looked somewhat chagrined by the turn of recent events. He had figured it was going to
be bad—but this bad? A nice nuclear explosion before breakfast, a raiding party of mountain bandits after lunch, a chopper
attack for a late-night snack. Excaliber shook himself violently for about five seconds, apparently trying to dislodge the
blanket of debris that pretty much coated him at this point. Branches, dirt, little pieces of powdered helicopter flew off
the vibrating animal like molecules being hurled free from a centrifuge.

Once the bullterrior had cleaned itself sufficiently so at least it didn’t feel like a junkyard dog, it barked, gave Stone
its usual look of amused resignation, and stood up on its back legs so its front paws were leaning against his chest. The
narrow almost Oriental-looking face with its hooded, almond-shaped eyes loomed closer and closer, as if it were trying to
make contact with his very soul. That was the thing he liked about animals, Stone thought with a chuckle as the canine’s long
sandpaper-like tongue flapped across its master’s cheek—they forgot right away. Unlike human beings who could and usually
did carry a grudge their whole life, the dog would let the anger, the feeling of betrayal, whatever it was, sweep through
it, and then be gone. It wasn’t that it didn’t feel it but that it felt it
completely
. And then, like a cloud passing over the face of the sky, the darkness was gone and the animal’s face brightened again, ready
for life, ready for whatever would come.

“We could all learn a lot from you, you stinking ball of fur!” Stone laughed as the thick animal smell of the dog’s coat and
tongue seemed to fill his senses. Stone suddenly had the absurd image of animals teaching men—giving them lessons in how to
act properly. How to feel things fully, then let them pass without holding on either to the hate or the desire. The road to
enlightenment taught by dogs, cats, hogs…

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Stone said, suddenly pushing the pitbull back off him, “before I completely lose my mind.”
He walked back over to the bike and saw that other than lying on its side and being covered with another coating of soot and
small pieces of metal, it was all right. He lifted the 1200-cc with a burst of grunting and expletives. The thing weighed
a ton. But after a few seconds it was up, and he mounted it, testing the wheels by bouncing up and down. Excaliber leapt up
on the seat, Stone instant-started the engine, and they were off again, leaving the funeral fires behind to heat the cold
night in waves of shimmering heat that rose up from the old country road.

Stone tore through the night as the aurora far above seemed to at last tire out a little and drop back to a dim, pulsing pattern.
The sky farther above was black. Not a star, the moon, nothing piercing the veil. It was as dark on the plains as he had ever
seen it, as if a blanket had been dropped over the world. But the tunnel of light from his “fog buster” filled the mountain
roads that he shot up and down with a flood of light. The nocturnal predators and prey of the forests scampered wildly off
from the commotion of the passage of the Harley. Stone could see the yellow pairs of eyes of other wolf packs here and there
staring out from among the forest. But the smell of blood was thick on the wind. They had made their kill—and were satiated—for
the moment. One of them let out a low howl from behind a grove of trees. But Excaliber returned the growl in the same spine-chilling
tone of caged animal fury. The pitbull would let no other animal challenge it—without returning the challenge.

Stone didn’t like being pursued. It was one thing to battle it out, it was another to have some asshole—rather, a whole group
of assholes—spending their every living day doing nothing but trying to kill you. A shiver ran down his back. Mafia? Guardians
of Hell? The Dwarf? No,
he
was dead. Stone had killed him with his own hands. Not that it really mattered. They were all so interconnected, using one
another for their own sick purposes. But someone, someone big, had obviously taken an extra-special interest in him. Death
was carrying his name tag these days. The sky above looked like the lid of a coffin that was about to close forever.