The Cutthroat Cannibals (3 page)

He scouted around the tree line and spotted broken branches lying around their bases. Some appeared fairly long and straight—perfect
for making a splint.

“Dog,” Stone said, suddenly growing a little hopeful in spite of himself as he began wondering if maybe he did have a snowball’s
chance in hell of getting out of this whole fiasco.

“Over there, see that branch? Branch, dog, you hear me? BRANCH!” Stone pleaded desperately with the animal, imploring it to
understand what he was saying. The animal looked at him with a curious expression, tilting its head back and forth as if trying
to comprehend the meaning of the moving lips and the squawking sounds emerging from them.

“Play dog, play!” Stone shouted encouragingly, making a throwing motion with his hand toward the spot where pieces of branch
lay scattered around from a lightning strike that had slammed into a grove of Colorado spruce a week before. “Get stick,”
Stone grimaced, throwing his arm forward again, trying to make the animal think he had actually heaved something.

Whether Excaliber believed the dreadful charade or not Stone would never know, but it took off like a rocket in the direction
he had pointed. The pit bull flew about thirty yards until it reached the branch pile. It stood there staring back at Stone
and barked a few times as if confused.

“Pick up a fucking branch, don’t play dumb with me, dog,” Stone half screamed across the shoreline, wincing with pain at the
end of the command. The dog, as if tired of farting around, reached down and picked up the biggest one it could find and clamped
its teeth down around it. It tore back to Stone dragging the ten-foot-long, five-inch-thick piece of broken tree limb along
with it. With the dog’s powerful jaws and legs it was easy going for a load that would have made a man stagger a little. Excaliber
pulled the branch right up to Stone and let it fall to the rock-strewn sand.

“Good boy,” Stone said enthusiastically. The damned animal could have been on the fucking Johnny Carson show in the old days,
no question about it. He leaned over, trying to ignore the waves of exquisite torture that ran along his spinal cord as he
touched the wood. It was strong but too thick for a splint. He’d be like a walking table with a leg this thick.

“Listen dog,” Stone said, looking over at the animal that was only a foot or so from his face, its tongue hanging far out
as drool rolled down it and onto the ground. “You did good, real good,” Stone said, nodding his head. “Better than any other
dog in the entire fucking state could have done, you can bet your bone on that.” He looked closely at the animal’s inscrutable
almond-shaped eyes to see if it was listening. But as usual the canine remained as poker-faced as some hardened card shark
sitting in a broken-down shack of a bar in the middle of the wastelands.

“You did good, dog, but you got to do better,” Stone said, his smile vanishing as he felt a little flood of blood spill out
from the protruding bone like a fountain of red to set off the ivory. “I need another one. Thinner.” He made motions with
his hands as he touched at the thick branch, indicating that he needed something about half as wide. The animal looked on
in utter puzzlement as if it didn’t have the foggiest idea what Stone was talking about. He was like an Eskimo trying to communicate
with a Watusi—a lot of flailing around with hands, babytalked words, and not a bit of understanding.

At last, as the dog just didn’t seem to be picking up on his philosophical subtleties, Stone made the throwing motion with
his hand again. Following the arch of his hand, as if it were trying to calculate the trajectory that a piece of wood would
have made, the animal took off like a racehorse from the starting gate. It was hauling ass so fast by the time it reached
the branch graveyard that it couldn’t stop in time and skidded right into them sideways rolling wildly about, its paws pumping
in all directions. Stone lowered his head for a moment and shook it, glad for the dog’s sake that there weren’t any other
mammals around to witness the animal’s grace. But what it lacked in smoothness it sure as hell made up for in innate animal
wisdom. For after nosing around in the pile that extended like a set of fallen pick-up sticks for about thirty feet, it at
last chose one. Setting it firmly in its glistening teeth it tore back to Stone. And even from the distance he could see immediately
that it was perfect, exactly half the size of the first in both length and width.

“Dog, you’ve outdone yourself,” Stone said, looking at the animal with almost a hint of fear on his face, as it had been so
accurate about what he had needed. “Excaliber, I’ll ask you once and then never again,” Stone said, staring intensely at the
creature as it let its treasure fall right next to Stone’s leg. “Do you understand every fucking word I’ve ever said? Is this
all some giant headgame and you’re really Einstein with fur, just playing with me?” The animal’s only response was to slap
out the wet tongue like a reptile whipping out at an insect. The tongue swept right up over its eyes and then across its whole
muzzle, then pulled back into the white-and-brown face, which looked back at Stone with the perfect emptiness of the void.

The branch was about two inches thick and green. The stuff was tough and wouldn’t give even under a lot of pressure. Stone
reached for his custom Randall Bowie knife, but of course it, like everything else, was gone. He cursed himself for not even
thinking about how he was going to slice the damned thing up. Even at his best, Stone knew it would be a bitch to rip the
branch apart barehanded.

“Shit,” Stone muttered, so depressed for a moment that even his physical pain diminished next to the fact that without any
supplies or equipment whatsoever human beings weren’t one fucking inch above the animal world. Perhaps they were even below
it. For tools were what defined men, and Stone had none. Suddenly Excaliber’s pointed canines caught his attention. The dog
could bite through one of these if he felt like it. Stone had seen the creature chomp through tables, beds, metal pipes, things
a damned sight tougher than this piece of wood, and leave them in splinters.

“Dog, time for another little favor,” Stone said sweetly. He held the branch out, his fists about a foot apart on it, and
pushed the wood up against the animal’s nose. But the pit bull pulled away quickly, sputtering and spitting out the branch.
“Don’t fuck with me now,” Stone yelled maniacally. “I’m not in the mood. You’ve got teeth—now bite!” As if acting out a game
of charades again, Stone snapped his mouth open and closed so his teeth clattered loudly against one another. The animal stepped
back another foot or two, just to make sure that the pink creature hadn’t gone completely bananas, even rabid perhaps. For
the dog had seen other rabid dogs and skunks slam their teeth together like that. But then seeing that the Chow Boy wasn’t
about to actually launch himself at the dog, Excaliber walked forward again, sniffing at the strong scent of the green cracked
wood.

It licked gingerly at the surface, getting a taste of bittersweet sap that it seemed to like as it licked at the oozing crack
in the branch a few times.

“Don’t lick—bite,” Stone half screamed, knowing his energy was fading. The sun would set in hours, and if he didn’t get out
of this situation, he would be up shit creek with a frozen paddle. “Bite, bite!” Stone demanded, again snapping his mouth
so hard that it made his teeth hurt. Suddenly the dog seemed to get the message, for it barked and moved into a half crouch,
its muscles all tensed and coiled as if to say the bullshit was over. Making sure that Stone’s hands holding the fallen tree
limb were far enough apart, the bull terrier opened its mouth to the widest extension possible. Then with a blurred snap like
the jaws of a shark, it closed them hard onto the wood.

Stone felt the shudder of the branch in his hands and nearly fell forward from the sheer ferocity of the attack. It was like
a killer shark’s sudden, ruthless move on its prey—the same blinding motion, the same snap of the head when contact was made
to give an extra rocket boost of power to the blow. And Stone wondered for a crazy split second if the damn dog was related
somewhere way way back to sharks of the prehistoric world, predators of immense size that would make even today’s watery monsters
seem like mere guppies. Pit bulls the size of dinosaurs—that was all the world needed, Stone mused as he held on for dear
life to the shaking branch.

Excaliber’s teeth ripped into the green wood, tearing it into paperlike shreads. Once, twice, three times he pulled his jaws
a few inches open and then slammed the guillotine shut again. With over 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch exerted,
the most of any canine in the world, it didn’t take long. The second bite did it and the third severed any of the remaining
green silky tendrils that clung to one another. Stone held both the severed pieces up and, selecting the stronger and straighter
half, held that one up again for the dog to do its thing with. Within seconds he had two perfect pieces. Reaching down, Stone
ripped back at his blood-soaked tattered pants.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. Looking at it, he felt the bile rise up in his guts. There’s something about seeing one’s own flesh
ripped and pierced deeply that makes most men feel a little funny inside. The bone was poking right out, cracked as cleanly
as the branch the dog had just done his beaver act on. During the avalanche or the fall into the river the leg had just snapped
right in two like a turkey bone at a Thanksgiving dinner. He could still feel it, all the veins and arteries were working,
but there was a sense of incompletion without the straightness of the bone. For a moment Stone felt what it would be like
to lose a limb, and he didn’t like the sensation at all.

He gritted his teeth and pulled on the leg, forcing it with a screaming effort back into the flesh. The broken edges disappeared
back inside like worms descending into their holes. A spurt of blood from the pressure squirted up from the wound right into
his face, coloring his vision red for a few moments. Stone didn’t hold back on the scream that echoed back and forth, up and
down the granite mountain walls. The pit bull squealed and bucked up in the air again, obviously a trifle on edge from the
day’s events.

But Stone knew that was only the half of it. With the bone back inside, he again took a deep breath and then extended the
leg out as far as he could, trying to push it into some kind of anatomical symmetry with itself so it wouldn’t jut out at
a bizarre angle halfway down his thigh. And through the curtain of pain, he could feel the two parts of bone join and mesh,
and his leg felt right for a second. Stone stopped and fell backwards, cringing in pain but keeping one hand firmly clamped
down on the set leg so it wouldn’t jerk free again.

After about a minute, the volcano seemed to settle down in his skull. Stone sat up and checked out the wound. The blood was
still oozing out, but at least the leg looked fairly straight, the way he liked it. Stone undid his belt with some difficulty
and then placed both three-foot-long sticks along each side of the leg. When it was all placed together about as well as he
was going to get it, he wrapped the belt around wood and leg and tightened it closed. The belt acted not only as the tie for
the branches but as a sort of tourniquet, depending on how tight he made it. Stone reminded himself to loosen the thing every
twenty minutes or so. Or as the major had once said to him, when describing gangrene, “the flesh starts turning purple then
actually green, and the pus is so thick that if you squeeze it, it comes out like a rotten banana from beneath the stinking
flesh.” Gangrene was not something Stone was looking to add to his list of life experiences.

Taking the other half of the branch the dog had brought—this section was about three inches thick and five feet long—Stone
put his weight on it and, pushing with all his arm strength, somehow rose up so he was standing.
There, that’s better
, Stone thought to himself, trying to trick himself into feeling positive. He looked around, up and down the river, then along
the banks on each side and the towering mountain walls that formed the river valley, searching for a way out. The river, the
sheer slopes, the raging foam, the early evening sky starting to lose its daytime luster, all possessed a certain dark beauty.
But try as he might Martin Stone couldn’t see a single avenue of escape.

S
TONE hobbled around on his makeshift splint and crutch, testing out just how functional his leg was. And the answer was: not
very. He felt as if he had been put through a meat grinder twice and then sewn back together again by somebody who had taken
lessons from Dr. Frankenstein’s gardener. But the leg seemed to hold up, though a jolt of electricity ricocheted up and down
his nervous system every time he put the slightest bit of weight on it. And the bleeding was slowing as a dark coagulation
began forming on the outer skin.

The dog trotted happily along beside Stone. Now that Stone was up and about doubtless in no time he’d have them both out of
there and off to a nice hot meal. No doubt about it. Already the canine, whose stomach was feeling quite empty after all the
rescue operations, began visualizing meat and slabs of gravy-soaked bread, and saliva began flowing from between the opened
jaws in a waterfall of anticipation.

“Come on dog, out of the way,” Stone said, mock smacking the creature with his hand for it kept walking right in front of
him, making him half trip. He didn’t know what the hell kept rustling up a storm back in the thick but not very deep groves
of trees. And he didn’t want to. Without his weapons—the pistols or the Bowie—he was a sitting duck, a sitting injured duck,
that just about anything bigger than a groundhog wouldn’t have a hell of a lot of trouble taking out. The dog would have to
be his defense and offense for the moment. And for one of the few times in their short but fiery relationship Stone was glad
the animal was such a tough, brawling son of a bitch.