The Damn Disciples (7 page)

With the bike assembled, Stone headed to the kitchen to see what the dog had wrought. It had licked clean the entire floor.
The animal was a junkie, an addict of anything that didn’t make him puke. And he had eaten a few of those in his day as well.

“It’s diet time again, pal,” Stone said with a disgusted look at the canine, which stood in the doorway looking up as if he’d
had nothing to do with the mess. Stone grabbed a mop from the closet and slopped it around the floor. “And don’t look at me
with those pathetic puppy-dog eyes, ’cause you ain’t been a puppy for eons now, and the eyes have gotten a little bloodshot
around the edges. You’d better start thinking of shipping out to the Betty Ford Clinic for some mental and physical rehabilitation.”
But the fighting canine just snorted, not wanting to hear any bull this hungry morning. It took Stone nearly half an hour
to get the place in a vague kind of order, and that was just getting the stickiest of the puddles off the floor, wiping the
splattered bits of food from the china closet and the refrigerator, the rows of shelves. The animal believed in the tornado
approach to eating—swallow everything and spit out what you don’t like.

An hour later, Stone was on the bike and heading out into the hard world. He stopped the Harley by the boulder where the transmitter
was kept hidden, and stood up. It was hard going, what with the steel clamp around his thigh and the huge bandage taped around
the incised section. But already he was getting used to dealing with the thing and swung the whole leg smoothly up over the
seat. The dog didn’t move an inch, just clamped onto the black leather, eyes peering from beneath its paws.

Stone was pleased to see that the bike stayed upright on the wide footrest he had welded on. He still wasn’t quite sure everything
was going to hold up. He pushed the boulder back from the hole and, wrapping the door opener up in its plastic bag, placed
it carefully down inside. Then he rolled the boulder back over the top. He never knew each time he left the bunker whether
or not he would ever see it again. And this time it seemed even more unlikely than the previous departures. The sky was growing
dark overhead, even though it wasn’t midday yet. The air was sharp with an icy blade that bit into his eyes and skin. The
steel clamp around his leg was already burning with cold. Things were just great. Stone got back on the Harley, kicked it
into gear, and headed into hell.

He was nervous for the first few minutes, taking the homemade vehicle slow along the narrow deer paths that led back down
the side of the slope. If he went over now in the state he was in, he might not be getting back up again. But to Stone’s pleasure,
on a day that was about as hospitable as the inside of a coffin, at least the bike seemed to be functioning perfectly. The
Harley 1400cc seemed to have a lot more acceleration than the old be. It was slightly heavier, though if anything that gave
it a lower center of gravity, setting it down on its wide tires like a small tank. The only thing a little disconcerting were
the different-shaped handlebars, which were more upright and swept back than his old ones. But after about half an hour of
getting used to the new cycle, Stone began getting used to the bars as well—and found that if he just lay back in the of saddle
the be almost steered itself.

He reached the end of the hidden access road to the bunker and moved at a crawl through the thicket of brambles and vines
that formed a camouflage ahead. There was a good thirty feet of the stuff, and the dog let out with a few sharp howls as its
hide was pricked by brambles. Then they were through, and Stone looked around behind him to make sure that from the single-lane
country road he was now on, you couldn’t see that there was anything heading off into the mountains. The bunker had been built
in just about the most inaccessible place in these parts. Stone shuddered to think what could happen if some psycho got hold
of the bunker—its weapons and supplies.

He headed south down the one-laner, which quickly turned to two. The road was already an obstacle course of cracks and potholes.
It hadn’t taken long for civilization’s trappings to begin crumbling. Still, Stone was able to on up his handiwork a little
when he hit a straightaway. And the son of a bitch nearly took off. Within seconds he was going seventy, then eighty, then
ninety miles per hour. The dog let out a strange sound from the back, and as Stone saw that the road got much rougher just
ahead he slammed on the brakes, figuring it was as good a time as any to test them. They were too good. Being used to the
looser brakes of the 1200, Stone pulled hard. The wheels locked and the bike just skidded along, stirring up a cloud of leaves
and dust behind him.

It was only his skill and fast reflexes that kept the Harley upright, though the pit bull came unlodged from its clamped hold
and crashed into Stone’s back in a flurry of paws and angry barks. Then he had the cycle under control again and slowed it
down to twenty as he headed over some potholes that you could have buried a cow in. But at last everything was back to more
or less normal and the two of them dug in for the long haul. As Stone hit more good patches of road, he eased the bike up
to the forty, then fifty, range. The wide tires made going over the rough road a little easier than the old be would have
done. All in all, not a bad trade-in.

They rode through the late afternoon, the dog standing up on its hind quarters, once it had gotten used to the feel of the
new machine, with its front paws up over Stone’s shoulder so the human and the furred head were fully focused on the world
ahead of them. The two-laner went on for about twenty miles, then changed to an interstate. Stone had used part of it before.
Some sections were still as good as the day they had been built, others as if they had been through a hurricane. Still, it
was worth using it, considering the time it would buy him on the good stretches. The first ten miles or so was easy going,
and it was almost possible to imagine that he was in the pre-Collapse days, heading out for a little spin in the country with
the family dog. Yeah, right—armed with a .50-caliber up front and so much firepower strapped to the bike and inside of his
jacket that he could have taken on Napoleon at Waterloo.

They came to what had been an old tollbooth collection junction, with wide curving ramps joing the interstate from several
directions. Stone slowed the Harley to a crawl and eased it through the opening between two of the six toll stations through
which thousands of cars had once rolled. He felt a bizarre twinge of guilt as he rolled through without paying his money,
the rusted bucket reaching for some change. Almost immediately on the far side of the toll plaza he began to drive past rusting
carcasses of cars, on the sides of the road and on the highway itself. It quickly became an obstacle course to get through.
Within ten minutes it was so inundated with rusting bodies, as if the heavens had rained automobiles, that Stone had to drop
the bike down to a walk so that he could balance it with both feet down on each side.

Brown twisted frames, with wheels and glass long gone. Inside some were still the original occupants—now just skeletons, lying
on their seats, sitting as if in an eternal traffic jam from which they would never emerge. It felt a little spooky to pass
a car, look in its paneless window, and see a skull smiling back at you. He didn’t stop to chat.

The car graveyard lasted for nearly twenty miles. A hell of a lot of people must have been caught in the blast of a nuke or
something, Stone mused, for so many to have been taken out like this at once. Then, as he went around a curve and over a rise,
they disappeared again. Stone quickly built up to thirty, then forty, as the interstate got hillier and began undulating up
and down like a snake so that he started feeling dizzy and heard the dog burping behind him as if it might lose some of the
vast feast that was still squeezing through its clogged digestive system.

As he started down the next hill, Stone saw a roadblock ahead. A wide barricade of wood and car hulks, cinder blocks—you name
it, it was in his way. Everything, including literally a few kitchen sinks. He had to slam on the brakes hard, as the blockade
was only about seventy yards down the hill. The bike came to rest about thirty feet from the wall of junk. Stone put his hand
up on the trigger of the 50-caliber as he saw shapes running behind the eight-foot-or-so-high barricade of all the debris
that would make a trashman ecstatic.

Suddenly Stone saw figures jumping down from the barrier, and coming out from around the sides. There were dozens of them—and
every ugly son-of-a-bitching one of them was wearing a baseball uniform, a cap, and carrying a bat. If they were a baseball
team they looked like they’d been playing with human heads, for their uniforms were splattered in blood, tom and tattered
as if a few knives and bullets had gone through them. And the bats that they held menacingly in their hands looked a little
worse for wear, with long cracks, splinters along their sides—and coated red from handle to head. Stone was glad he hadn’t
seen any of the “games.”

“Hold it right there, mister,” a huge fat lug of a fellow bellowed out from atop the pile of debris. He held a long bat in
one hand and slapped it into the palm of the other as though he was just looking for something or someone he could pound into
a pulp, into pâté for the evening’s appetizer. “What team you play for?” the man asked, pulling his filthy cap, an old Yankee
one if Stone’s eyes weren’t failing him, up from his eyes.

“Free agent,” Stone smirked back. “Don’t play for no team, just trying to get through here.”

“No one gets through here—unless they answer the riddle,” the man shouted. Suddenly he jumped all the way down from the top,
a good eight feet, and landed with a thud on the cement highway that they had effectively sealed off from passage.

“And what riddle is that?” Stone asked, letting his finger edge even closer to the trigger of the .50-caliber.

“Who won the American League batting championship in 1977?” the man asked with a dark look. Stone hadn’t the slightest idea.

“Daffy Duck,” he snorted back as the pit bull whined behind him, edging its furred head around his shoulder to see what was
causing the delay in travel arrangements.

“Wrong, asshole,” the blood-splattered Yankee-uniformed leader of the gang spat back with a smile on his face, since he knew
they were about to end up with one mean-looking motorcycle and a whole shitload of weapons. None who had been unfortunate
enough to pass this way had left. “Now, you can just get off that there motorcycle and walk away quick, and I’ll let you live,”
the man lied, “as sure as my name is Squid Ruth, the Babe’s grandson himself.” Since the asshole’s eyes were twitching around
in his boil-ridden face, and foam was collecting at the corners of his mouth as he edged forward slapping the bat harder and
harder, Stone somehow doubted they were going to let him walk away. And when he saw the streams of Yankee-outfitted bandits
coming around each side of the barricade, every one of them swinging a bat, Stone saw that it was time to start doing some
hitting of his own.

“Down, dog!” he screamed, praying that the overmacho mutt wouldn’t jump off. On the ground the two of them would be dead.
That’s why Stone had built himself a warwagon. He just prayed that the sucker worked. As the headman suddenly came charging
straight in on him, Stone squeezed hard on the trigger. The .50-caliber snorted out a mouthful of finger-size slugs that dissected
the whole front of Ruth’s grandson as if he was a pig in a butchering yard. The rib cage exploded out like lathing in a wrecked
building and the heart and lungs followed close behind as if they didn’t want to be the last ones to desert the sinking ship.
The corpse rocketed backward, slamming into the garbage barricade, and slid to the roadway, joining the trash.

The rest of the Yankee team stopped in their tracks as if caught in a rundown play between first and second bases, their bats
raised in their trembling arms. Their leader was dead. He had run the team, as general manager and top hitter, for years.
The Babe was dead; long live the Babe. And even as they hesitated, trying to regroup, Stone turned the handlebars hard and
twisted back on the accelerator. The bike squealed around on a dime, slamming into one of them who had stopped just a few
feet away, sending him flying into another little bunch, which toppled over. Stone leaned forward, hoping the dog was making
himself scarce on the seat as bats came whizzing in from all over the fucking place. He suddenly knew how a hardball felt
as it came in over the batter’s box.

But the bike shot through the crowds, and within a few seconds he was beyond their reach. He flew back up the hill he had
just traveled down and went a quarter-mile or so to the top before coming to a skidding stop and again twisting the bike around
in a one-eighty. The Yankees had stopped and now looked at him from a thousand or so feet away. Stone knew he had plenty of
time. Setting the kickstand down, he stepped off the bike and unlatched the Luchaire 89mm. He popped the top shell up from
its autofeed and slammed it into the firing tube alongside the bike. He had built this one so it could be fired while he was
riding, unlike the previous model, which he had to stop and aim for. Making sure the Luchaire was sighted straight ahead,
he remounted and started the be forward again.

“Hold your ears, dog,” Stone said as they started down the hill toward the barricade and the psycho Mickey Mantles who were
waiting. The startled heads of the team of killers turned in unison. They weren’t expecting this. Nor were they expecting
the sudden roar that erupted from Stone’s bike as he pulled the trigger on the rocket system. A tail of red and yellow erupted
just behind the bike as the missile burst forward in blurred acceleration. It took less than a second for the high-explosive
shell to hit into the obstacle a hundred feet ahead.

There was a huge roar and a cloud of smoke rushing everywhere as bodies and tires, sinks and logs, chairs and broken TVs went
flying off as though a cyclone had just swept through a garbage dump. Stone didn’t wait to see the total results of his little
urban-renewal project. He slammed his finger down on the .50-caliber, spraying out a scythe of death in front of him—and tore
forward through the smoke, aiming right for where the blast was still rising. Bodies seemed to be everywhere. Stone didn’t
know if they were after him or just reeling back from the explosion. And he didn’t wait to ask. The Harley ripped through
them—and then through the blast-created opening in the barricade.