The Cutthroat Cannibals (2 page)

But, even in his semistupor, Stone could see that he was just out of the frying pan and into the flood. He was floating along
in the center of the swollen river, which was even wider than it had seemed from the air, and rougher too. The river was a
churning brown ocean capped with whiteheads and waves slapping wildly against one another like crowds of overenthusiastic
theatergoers. For just a moment his whole body was turned around in the current and, looking back, he saw his Harley. Broken
into pieces as if a bomb had gone off inside it, it was lying spread out among the rocks, flames licking up from its burst
fuel tanks. Well, I won’t be needing it anyway, Stone thought cynically even as the water playfully snapped him back around
front again, as if it had been showing him his past and now was going to show him his future.

It didn’t look too fucking bright. Ahead, the river got, if anything, more swollen and rough. He could see branches poking
up everywhere and carcasses floating all around, already bloated from the intake of water so they looked as if they’d been
dead for days instead of hours. Stone tried desperately to clear his fogged senses. He felt like he’d been Mickey Finned—everything
was in a fog, a haze of wet grayness. It was as if the curtain that draped over death’s very entrance was falling over him,
a veil from another world.

“Son of a bitch,” Stone suddenly spat out along with a mouthful of water.
I ain’t gonna go that fucking easily
, he thought angrily. If he had survived the fall maybe he could survive the crushing river ahead. On second thought maybe
not, Stone realized, as his waterlogged clothes began dragging him back under again. He could feel himself going down, and
try as he might there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to stop it. The saturated pants and jacket felt as if they weighed
a thousand pounds, and his own diminished strength, about that of a three-year-old, didn’t help matters any. Not when he was
being carried downriver through swirling currents and whipping foam playing with him as if he were a rubber duckie in a tub.
And even as he frantically tried to pull off the combat jacket he was wearing, Stone felt himself going down.

Then the sky, the light, disappeared from his eyes and he went under, just another unlucky creature swallowed up by the flood-swollen
river. He sank down a foot or so beneath the river’s surface, and for just a second he could see the dimness of the sky above
him through the water. It was like looking through the distorting lens of a broken camera. And just for that instant he swore
he saw a skull, dark and mocking, staring down at him. Then he was sucked down and his own skull was filled with a terrible
bursting pain.

* * *

From out of the jaws of the grinding river a demonic-looking face appeared, like some sort of creature from mythologies past.
It swam with rapid strokes of its four legs, which paddled away beneath the surface like wheels on a Mississippi riverboat.
And through the currents, through the swirling whirlpools that dragged animal corpses down into the river’s black stomach,
through the branches and whole trees that tore downriver smashing everything in their path, the pit bull swam, its eyes fixed
unerringly on the spot where it had just seen Stone disappear. His head bobbed up again for a flash, and even from the thirty
or so yards that still separated them the dog could see that Stone was in bad shape, his eyes closed, face blue. Then the
head disappeared and this time it didn’t come up again.

Like a duck heading for home the dog paddled even harder, shooting sideways through the rushing river. Suddenly it reached
the spot where Stone had gone down and without faltering in its motion curved its body and headed straight down into the water,
like some sort of furred dolphin. It swam frantically back and forth a few yards beneath the surface searching for him, but
could find nothing in the mud-swirling nether regions of the rapids. Then suddenly it saw him, caught in a swift rip current
about six feet down and being pulled fast. The canine shot in that direction, pushing with every ounce of its strength. And
even with that it barely moved an inch or two at a time. It seemed that the animal would never reach him, and it felt its
lungs screaming for air. But it knew that if it rose up it would never see the sucker again.

With a final surge it suddenly became caught in the same current that was pulling Stone. The dog shot forward and slammed
right into his chest. His arms and legs were just flopping around like something dead, but the dog didn’t wait to carry out
any examinations. It opened its jaws filled with teeth capable of snapping through steel plate. The jaws closed around Stone’s
collar and the animal pulled with everything it had. Up it rose through the murky waters, rising as though from a nightmare.
Somehow it broke surface and then headed toward the closer shore, about fifty feet off. The going was incredibly rough, for
the pit bull was trying to deny the very forces of nature. It snorted wildly hardly able to breathe with the heavy package
in its mouth. And Stone, completely unconscious and turning half purple from the water he had swallowed, was no help at all.
He was more like a corpse.

Then just as it seemed that the animal couldn’t go another inch, its eyes nearly popping from the Odyssean exertions of its
task—a sandbar suddenly came into view poking out from the bank about twenty feet off. The dog gave a final lunge, pushing
forward with all four feet at the same instant, and, with Stone’s shirt buried in its mouth, it slid forward up onto the bank
and out of the river’s deadly grasp. The animal pulled forward, never so happy to have been on solid ground in its life. It
dragged Stone, its four paws sinking deep into the watery sand, and after about twenty seconds had pulled him a good forty
feet back, off of the sandbar and onto the safety of the rocky shore. The dog sat back breathing hard, its tongue hanging
out of its mouth, its whole body trembling, chest rising and falling rapidly as it filled its lungs again and again with the
delicious oxygen. And as it greedily sucked in air it stared hard at its provider. But Stone wasn’t moving. Not a twitch.

S
TONE didn’t move for many minutes as the dog stared down at him, its eyes locked on his face like a priest contemplating the
beyond. Without realizing it, the animal had done perhaps the only thing that could have possibly made a difference to the
half-drowned Stone—it had set him down on his front, on his chest and stomach. The pressure of his own body slowly forced
the water in his lungs to ooze out so that a small trickle of muddy liquid dripped from between his lips and down onto the
sand just an inch below his face, which was turned sideways on the rocks. It was as if gravity itself was giving Stone artificial
respiration as the liquid just kept being squeezed from the saturated lungs until nearly a quart had come out.

Suddenly Stone coughed, a hacking, throat-wrenching sound that made even the dog feel a pain rush through its neck. He sucked
in a mouthful of sand on the intake. Sputtering and spitting, he pushed his arms down hard. They felt as if they were made
of rubber, but were able to generate enough energy to roll him over. For a few seconds Stone thought he was still underwater,
and he clawed at the air like an enemy as his lips drank in the cold oxygen. But then as he realized he was in fact able to
breathe, his eyes shot open, and he saw that he was alive and that a silver dollar of a sun was weakly cutting down through
a misty cloud cover above. To the side of the sun a huge furred face, with a long pink tongue lolling out of it, hovered over
Stone’s face, a drool of saliva pouring down right onto his nose.

“Christ, dog, don’t drown me all over again—okay?” Stone grunted, realizing even as he spoke that the damned dog was alive
too. Things were turning out a little better than he had expected. He raised himself up onto his elbows, still lying in the
sand, and looked back toward the river. A deep trail led from the edge of the sandbank about fifty feet away. The animal had
dragged him all the way out of the river. Excaliber had saved his life. There was no question about it.

“Sorry about that, dog,” Stone muttered sheepishly as the canine stared back, its head tilted to the side, looking at him
a little concerned. How the Chow Boy could have survived all this time without the assistance of the pit bull was beyond the
creature’s comprehension.

Stone tried to move and a fire shot up and down his right leg.

“Shit,” he half screamed out as his whole head filled with explosions of color and pain. He looked down at the leg and saw
that it was bleeding profusely. He realized he had a compound fracture—the thigh bone of his right leg was actually poking
through the purple skin, like an ivory snake emerging from its fleshy burrow. Stone thought he was going to be sick for a
second and he gagged, turning his head to the side and coughing up another glass or so of the brown river water. After that
he felt a little more clearheaded as it appeared he had cleaned out most of the muck he had taken in.

Slowly it dawned on him just what had happened and where he was. The bike was gone. Damn! He had depended on the thing. It
had been with him since he left the bunker. With its speed and formidable armory of weapons it had been a mini warwagon. It
would be difficult to survive without it. But if he ever got out of this alive, it was just barely conceivable that he might
be able to construct another back at the bunker—just barely. Stone snickered at his morbid thoughts as he lay there in the
middle of nowhere. He thought he heard a growl in the grove of trees that stood about a hundred feet off and reached down
for his Ruger .44-cal. It was gone, as was the Uzi. He’d lost everything. Excaliber let out his own guttural growl back toward
the source of their would-be visitor, and whatever was out there seemed to disappear—at least for the moment.

Stone tried to rise and instantly collapsed. Aside from still feeling as weak as a newborn, explosions of mind-wrenching pain
shot up and down his right leg and his backbone at his slightest attempt to get up on the appendage. And here he was stuck
with no medical equipment in the most remote area of the entire territory. Not that anyone out there would do anything except
kill him and perhaps eat him if he were to be found. Stone made a silent reminder to say his prayers more often, because something
up there sure as hell was pissed off at one puny mortal being named Martin Stone.

The river seemed to be slowly edging toward them as the floodwaters rose another notch or two. It was absolutely filled with
debris now, animals, torn trees, fish swirling around the rushing waters in dead schools, spinning around like propellers
as they followed one another down through the foaming pathways. Well, he was alive, and he might as well stay that way, Stone
decided with a snort as he tried to ignore the burning slivers of sensation that were running along his entire right side,
threatening to send his brain back into dreamland from the sheer intensity of the jolts. He had to move fast before the whole
fucking scene fell completely apart. The dog was something else, but he wasn’t a surgeon.

“Dog,” Stone said, coughing up more dark spittle. “Dog, you listening?” Stone asked, as the animal stood just feet away staring
straight at him with an amused expression. “You better be listening cause I need your damned help.” Stone snorted again and
looked away for a second. Something inside him hated the idea that the dog was so necessary for his survival. It was supposed
to be man who aided the dumb but loyal beast, not the other way round.

“My leg,” Stone said, grimacing fiercely as he dragged himself up on one elbow. Even that was a torturous visit to Painland
as any movement with any part of his body made the inch or two of bone that protruded from his thigh dig around like a kitchen
spoon stirring up the bloody soup a little more. There was no way he could travel yards, let alone the hundreds of miles back
to the bunker, without drastically altering his physical state. And he’d better work fast, for the blood was starting to flow
a little quicker around the edges of the pierced flesh. A red stream already coated his whole calf and the small rocks and
sand beneath him. Lying in a puddle of his own blood was quite depressing.

He leaned his head back, ignoring the pain that demanded his attention, and surveyed the shore that the dog had pulled him
onto. There was another forty feet or so of rock-littered sand, then a tree line filled with fir and spruce. Thick groves
of the towering trees ran for perhaps another fifty yards at most, then stopped at the base of the granite mountain that ran
alongside the river. The towering wall was impossibly high, blotting out three quarters of the sky above so that just a long
twisting highway of blue and puffy white wriggled by overhead. The cliffs were thousands of feet high, virtually straight
up at ninety-degree angles to the earth in many spots. He’d need pinions and ropes—ten thousand dollars’ worth of mountain-climbing
equipment—and two good legs to have even a chance to get out of there.

Stone could feel his heart quickening as adrenaline flowed into him like liquor. “Calm down, you asshole—don’t panic,” he
half shouted, startling the dog, which jumped backwards in the air, rising up nearly a foot off the ground as it thought he
was yelling at it. Stone chuckled at the sight of the canine as its hair stood on end and its eyes suddenly expanded to nearly
double their size. Then it hit the dirt about a yard away and relaxed instantly when it saw Stone laughing and realized that
it hadn’t done anything wrong, hadn’t broken one of the many incomprehensible rules of the Chow Man.

And with the laughter came the first release of tension he had had since being caught up in the avalanche. When he stopped
Stone found he could think just a little more clearly. What would the major have done? Stone tried to visualize his old man
getting stuck in exactly the same predicament somewhere in North Vietnam or Cambodia or any of the hundred places he’d dealt
in his trade with the ultraspecial forces of the Rangers. Well, number one, his father wouldn’t have let himself get stuck
in such a situation. But what if he did, Stone demanded of himself. The first thing he’d do is fix his fucking leg.