The Damn Disciples (2 page)

“
Drink, drink
,” they screamed. The High Priest stepped forward, clamped an iron hand around her head, and pulled it backward. Then he forced
some of the liquid from the skull into her mouth.

It burned, burned horribly, and she coughed and gagged and spat up half of it. But enough had gotten in to satisfy the pourer,
and he stepped back, putting the skull back onto the platter. The guard walked off slowly, each step exaggerated, ritualized.

“There. Isn’t that better already?” The Transformer asked with a lying fatherly concern. “The Golden Elixir you have drunk—it
will help you to get through the barrier of fear. Because it will exaggerate that fear a thousandfold. So you will have no
way of resisting any longer. Give in, child, give in. All will be without pain soon.”

The liquid hurt her mouth and throat and everything it touched on the way down. Whatever it was, it worked fast. For the woman
had hardly stopped coughing, her whole chin soaked in the sticky spittle, when everything began getting weird. The six men
around her began elongating and shrinking, almost melting before her as if they were made of clouds, not flesh. She was so
dizzy she could hardly stand up, but the guards wouldn’t let her fall.

A box was carried into the room accompanied by the beating of the drums. It was as if she were in a fun house, where everything
changed, everything was seen through a distorting mirror. And it was all twisted and horrible. And though she didn’t really
know what was going on, she knew somehow that she was drugged. And that things were just going to get worse.

“
IITTTT ISSSSSS DDEEEEEATTHHH WEEEEE FFEEEAARRR
,” the High Priest was saying, though his words sounded crazy, like a record on slow speed, everything deep and trembling.

“
DEEAAATTTHHH WEEEE FEEEAARR
,” the others chanted back.

“
SOOOO IIITTT IISSSS DEEAATHHH WEEEE MUUUUST LEEARNN TOOO LOOOVVVE
.”

“
WEEEE LOOOVEEE DEATTTHH!
” the others chanted.

The pine box was placed on the floor by the four men who were holding it and the top was opened. Inside was a corpse, recently
departed. It couldn’t have been more than a week old, since much of its flesh was still there. But it had had plenty of time
to rot, too. The features of the face were all blended together like a child’s finger painting. The flesh was bloated and
white, with worms and bugs eating their way through little tunnels and canyons within. The whole thing crawled with vermin,
lice, spiders, slugs, fungi, and molds.

She screamed again. And this time under the influence of the dozen or so mind-altering drugs that were mixed into the Elixir,
the scream was like a waterfall and seemed to take her into another world, another dimension, where she was blind and deaf,
and something was pressing all around her, squeezing her in.

And when she opened her eyes again as the scream stopped for an instant, she saw that they were in fact touching her—pushing
her down into the box in which slept the moldering dead one. She was thrown right on top of the rotting mess so that bugs
and worms scampered back into the innards. She began screaming again—so hard that she split her lips as her teeth bit through.
The motion of the guards’ push made the corpse thing whip its arms up around her so it held her in an embrace. Its devil’s
bad dream of a face, with a centipede staring right out at her through one of the green-slimed eyeholes, looked up at her
and seemed to wink. Then the leathery brown lips twisted back as ants came out of each corner of the mouth searching for more
food for their colony in the guts of the dead creature.

The underlings nailed the top back down right above her back, so she was wedged down even farther into the “man.” It pressed
close against her like an ardent, horny, even anxious, lover. And as the cold decomposing arms wrapped around as though they’d
just never let go, its swamp of a face pressed ever closer—the hard lips smacking at her as if trying to kiss her, the bugs
inside clacking their mandibles as if whispering sweet nothings. Through the long black night, the unmoving cold tried to
make love to the screaming warm.

The battle-scarred rat stood up on its hind legs and sniffed at the wind. There was meat ahead. It could smell the warm-blooded
creatures not far off. Human meat. It knew the smell. It had, after all, been a hunter, the leader of the pack for two years
now, a long, long time in rat linealogy. And though not many, they had taken humans down, had survived their weapons—and eaten
them.

It was the toughest of them, with its nearly two-foot-long body, a good thirty pounds of savage fury contained within a shimmering
black pelt slashed here and there with scars and gouges—and fangs that seemed too big for its mouth, curving out long and
ivory white like canines. The lingering radiation of the nukes that had gone off years before nearby had done a little twisting
and rearranging of chromosomes. So that what was once a nuisance, a vermin, a pest, was now a horror. Something from a nightmare
on the coldest of winter eves.

Its blood-coated whiskers twitched in the sharp morning breeze. It had eaten already; it and its pack had killed a wounded
stag they’d come across in the forest. It hadn’t been able to run fast enough and had fallen beneath their vicious onslaught.
It was ripped to shreds and eaten within minutes, so that not a trace of it remained. Not even the bones. That was only hours
before. But it was a mere snack. There were many in the pack, many mouths to be fed. The Leader turned and surveyed its army,
which scampered around and over each other behind it. Thousands of them, stretching off in a rough column nearly a hundred
yards long, twenty yards wide. It looked at them with its one good eye; the other, bitten in half long ago by a rival male
now deceased, had shrunken down to the size of a shriveled raisin, black and hard like a fragment of coal. The ripped and
torn creature inspired fear in even the largest of the other rats, who dared not look straight into the scarred, misshapen
face.

Its right eye worked just fine. The Leader stood up on a rock so that it was a good five feet above the squealing masses,
always almost out of control—almost. But under its direction they moved like an army, letting nothing stand in their way.
When it was gone … who could say. But such things rats didn’t worry about. Just the next meal. For as the Russian czar had
learned in the Revolution of 1918, “a lack of bread to eat is the fire of revolution.” The Leader was trapped too. It had
to feed them all, make sure the ravenous hordes didn’t turn—on him.

The Leader made motions with his paws, commanding the army of rats, brown and black and gray, sleek and fanged with long tails
dragging behind them, into two flanks. He would scout straight up the center, and when he called, they knew to come. He was
the general. His strategies had worked time and time again. Food was the reward they got in return for their loyalty, their
willingness to fight, to die for the Leader. He delivered. And it was eating time. Bring on the hot stuff. The human meat
that tasted so sweet. A rat’s greatest delicacy.

Martin Stone walked down the deer path along the edge of some thick woods supporting himself on a homemade crutch fashioned
from a V-topped branch, cursing every step of the way.

“Fuck, shit, piss. Goddamn leg—can’t even walk or do anything anymore. A man can’t even trust his own body parts—who the hell
can he trust? I ask you fucking that.” Though he didn’t actually address the leg, keeping his eyes ahead looking for groundhog
and snake holes, as he had already fallen twice in the last hour and didn’t feel like doing it again. But the leg damn well
knew who he was talking to. Ever since he had broken it in a fall two weeks before, it had been causing him all kinds of trouble.
First it had swollen up to the size of a balloon. Then, with herbs and cauterizing it and setting it with a splint, it had
seemed to go down again. He had thought maybe it was actually going to heal, and everything would be all right.

Yeah, right. Only, the leg was swollen again, and a very strange color along the whole side of his thigh. He could feel a
pounding in his heart—and knew he was getting blood poisoning. Stone had been having hallucinations for the last few hours.
Things crawling along the edges of the woods, always just out of his sight. It wasn’t that far to the bunker. He just had
to make it to his late father’s mountain retreat, built into the side of a mountain, and equipped with the most modern equipment,
computers, even medical supplies. Somehow he would have to treat himself, cut the leg open and … But he’d worry about that
later. First he had to even try to stagger the next five miles to the mountain at the north end of Estes National Park in
northern Colorado—then go straight up the side of the thing for another mile or two.… He prayed he had enough left in him
to make it. He was on his last leg.

There was a low growl at his feet, and Stone looked down as he almost tripped over the furred shaped that kept walking back
and forth in front of him.

“Watch it, dog, will you, for Christ’s sake,” Stone muttered, in no mood for even the slightest bit of bullshit on a cold,
painful morning like this one was turning out to be. He looked down and into the almond-shaped eyes of the ninety-pound pit
bull that was trotting along looking up. It appeared to be pissed off as hell, its face all squinched up and glaring at Stone
as if to say, “We haven’t eaten diddly-shit beyond some acorns and a few berries in the last twelve hours. Dogs can be assholes
too.” Or something like that.

“We’ll be there soon fucking enough,” the fighting terrier’s human companion snapped down. “Cool it, dog! You’re supposed
to be man’s best friend—not his biggest hassle. Just chill out, food hound. Cripples don’t need tripping.” The dog growled
under its breath and looked away disgustedly, as if it might catch a glimpse of something edible in the woods. It was never
meaner than when traveling on an empty stomach, like a fighter without sex for a month before the big bout. The lack of chewable
substance in its jaws sent the pit bull into a deep, dark, and brooding depression. Chow Boy better not get too close to him,
that’s all the dog had to say about the subject.

But suddenly all the arguing and snapping at one another like an ancient married couple was irrelevant. Excaliber sensed them
first, stopping suddenly in his tracks, just a few feet ahead of Stone, so the human nearly toppled over the top of the dog.
Stone started to curse up a storm, and raised his crutch ready to smack the canine a good stiff one right on the flank, when
he saw that Excaliber was set in full attack posture, pointing back in the direction they had just come from. Stone knew the
animal would never go into fighting mode against
him
, no matter how snappy their little argument. So he shut up and turned slowly around, supporting himself on the branch.

“Shit-coated Crispies,” Stone muttered under his breath, not even aware he had said the words. He didn’t like what he saw.
Not one fucking bit. Rats. An army of them, making the terrain just a blanket of brown and black swarming little bodies with
way too many and too big teeth for their foot-and-a-half- to two-foot-long frames. And they were closing in from both sides
fast, the forward ranks only a hundred yards or so away. Just ahead of the advancing vermin army came several gophers and
a snake or two, all scared up by the meat-eating procession that chewed down everything that got in its way. Though the invasion
of claws and snapping jaws was clearly after the pink stuff. And that meant one Martin Stone. Which, as he thought not too
hard about it, he realized was him.

Stone shook his head hard seeing that he was half hypnotized by the honor show coming in fast. He didn’t have time to be falling
into spaceland right now—or he was going to be meeting a lot of hungry mouths within about three seconds. Bracing himself
on the branch crutch that was under his left armpit, Stone whipped the shotgun he had snatched from an encampment of dead
cannibals—whom he had put in that state—and swung it around in front of him. The pit bull was snarling now, its jaws wide
as it pulled back, its tail just touching Stone’s leg—so it knew its back was covered. At least Chow Boy better see that it
was
covered. The dog didn’t like the gray skulking shapes that ran along on fast little claws one fucking bit. Shivers ran along
its spine like dirty waves at Coney Island Beach.

“Come on,” Stone screamed as his slow-witted brain realized they were being surrounded. Already they were blocked on three
sides; only the field directly ahead was not yet blanketed with the squirming little bodies crying out in squeaking high-pitched
commands to one another. “Let’s move it, dog. And I mean fucking pronto!” He started ahead, lurching along on the crutch as
he gripped the shotgun hard so it wouldn’t fall out. Suddenly the brown sea of rats came rushing in from every side—even ahead—and
Stone realized they had been successfully cut off. He dropped the shotgun arm down as low as he could hold it and still keep
moving, stumbling, half falling ahead. He pulled the trigger and the 12-gauge autofire slammed back in his hands, threatening
to pull him backward. But it did a hell of a lot worse to the wall of gray and brown straight ahead. The shot left the muzzle
only about six inches above the ground—and spread out a good ten feet before it met vermin flesh coming in. The steel pellets
got the better of the smashup, and a whole slew of rats went flying off in bloody spirals as a pathway was cleared right through
the living swarm.

As Stone stumbled forward he could sense the rats coming and snapping at his boots, trying to climb up him. But Excaliber
met them face to face, jaw to jaw, tooth to snapping tooth. Only, his were bigger, faster, and meaner. For as one would leap
up toward the charging pair, the pit bull would catch it in midair like some mutt out in the backyard catching a hot dog fresh
off the family grill. With a single snap the pit bull spat them out again, moving, never stopping. He took care of those that
charged toward Stone’s legs as well, ripping them right off the Chow Boy’s pants as they tried to scamper up and get some
fang into his flesh. In seconds the pit bull had disposed of a dozen, leaving their spurting corpses behind, which others
of the pack stopped and began chewing on. A meal on the run was always a happy occurrence.