Authors: Craig Sargent
“Well, if there’s anything that’ll keep me going out there,” he said with the edge of a smile as he nodded over at the slate-black
sky to the north and east where he was about to head to try to track down April, “it will be the thought of your delicious
body in my arms. It’s an image a man can carry for the rest of his life, a carrot to lure him forward like some sort of dumb
mule.”
“That’s how I like my men.” She smiled slyly as she stepped back from the Harley, which suddenly roared to life like an uncaged
mountain cat. “Dumb and able to fuck even when they’re wounded.”
“That’s me to a
t
.” Stone laughed, throwing his head back. “There, we’ve been computer-matched. See, I have to make it back. For a second date.”
She turned suddenly without another word, as she didn’t want Stone or the others to see the moisture forming in her eyes again.
She hated feeling vulnerable, her emotions out there for all the world to see. That she was in love and terrified. Terrified,
not for herself but for the man she had to admit she was in love with. Terrified that she would never feel his body against
hers, or his stiffness deep inside her, like the sword of King Arthur unlocking her deepest woman’s secrets.
“Where is that damn dog?” Stone spat out as he spun his head around, trying to sight the pitbull. But even as he spoke the
words, the canine appeared out of nowhere and, with a wild kind of leap, jumped over a pile of empty pill crates and onto
the back of the Harley. He just made it, his front paws landing at the very back of the leather seat. But his back feet slammed
into one of the higher empty boxes, and it went tumbling off. With a yelp of pain the bullterrier lunged forward with a second
effort and managed to pull himself through sheer flailing motions up onto the seat. When he had finally settled down, he looked
up at Stone who was staring at him shaking his head from side to side. The pitbull let out an almost inaudible whine and buried
his head in the seat, gripping hard on both sides with his legs. It had not been his greatest effort.
Stone glanced around, searching for Meyra, but she had already walked off and wouldn’t look back. He eased the big bike ahead
and down off one of the declinations so they were both almost at a ninety-degree angle to the ground for a few seconds. Then
the front wheel of the Harley caught the slow curve in the earth below, at the base of the rise, and they landed almost smoothly,
the motorcycle suddenly shooting ahead as soon as both wheels made contact with the earth. Stone didn’t look back, either.
There were only tears in the past. God knew what in the future.
He headed due east, along a series of open fields with low slopes and not too bumpy a surface grade, so he made some good
speed. The sky looked so bad, he didn’t even want to look at it. But every few minutes, unable to help himself, he would glance
up and take another peek. It wasn’t even noon yet, but the day was as dark as the inside of a thundercloud. It was as if it
were twilight, a polar twilight. The swirling fallout clouds had smoothed out now, spreading into long, flattened rings of
radioactive debris that looked miles thick as they twisted slowly off to the east and south. The cloud above felt as if a
solid object had been hammered up overhead, a curtain of steel, a wall of solid black iron.
Stone could just see without the headlight of the bike, of which he’d just as soon save the power. There weren’t any more
supplies to replace those he had in the bunker. And already items were getting low in a few areas. He was going to have to
get greedy. The days of using up every damn thing were over.
“Your hear that, dog?” he asked, half twisting his head around toward the pitbull. “We’re going to have to be frugal with
supplies from now on. F-R-U-G-A-L—do you understand what that means, dog? It means one biscuit when you might want two, one
side of steak when three or four would have hit the spot. We’re
all
going to have make sacrifices. You hear me, sacrifices!” But the animal either was sound asleep or was pretending to be,
and thus not subject to the lectures of human beings.
After about an hour of driving, Stone saw more dead animals. A tribe of raccoons, about fifteen of them. All of them were
burned hideously, their fur pelts scarred and pitted like a sofa that someone had used as an ashtray. Then a whole hillside
of deer; the damn things must have been on the rise and caught by the blast waves of the bomb skimming over the highest tips
of land as it sent out diminished but still deadly energy past its thirty- and forty-mile destruction circles. As he drew
past the family of deer, Stone’s guts rocked with nausea, for the still half-furred creatures were covered with brown blankets
of roaches. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands, rushing over the corpse feasts, grabbing out little brown pincers of deer
meat and then taking them back to their grubby little holes in the desert floor.
He gunned the bike, not wanting the things even to take note of him, though Stone was sure they were only after dead things.
There seemed to be more and more bugs and roaches. He prayed they were just a localized phenomena and not yet another problem
to worry about. If the roaches started growing as big as cats and added on wings and fangs, Stone was going to pack it in,
he decided right then and there.
But soon there was far more to worry about than bugs. The black clouds above had thus far been high up, not yet beginning
their descent to earth to release their store of radioactive poison. But as Stone moved further east, a whole portion of the
sky suddenly seemed to start dropping fast, as if diving off from the rest. He could suddenly smell moisture in the air, dank
and chemical-tasting. Excaliber sat up straight, eyes wide open. He growled hard, his muzzle just behind Stone’s neck. A wind
started blasting down from the heavens, and Stone did everything he could not to lose control of the Harley. Bushes, small
trees, and cacti all blew far over on their sides, up and down the low foothills around which the Rocky Mountains loomed like
the homes of the gods, the Himalayas of the North American continent.
The blackness seemed to descend on them like someone slowly decreasing the current of electricity to a light bulb until they
could hardly see a thing. The feeling of being crushed by a huge weight was overwhelming. It was as if a mountain were descending,
just a black line of writhing moisture that dropped yards per second, coming down on the earth like a press.
“We’ve gotta stop, pal,” Stone suddenly screamed out to the canine as he threw the brakes on hard. This time, though it barely
sufficed, the pitbull at least had a little warning that they were coming to an emergency stop. He dived back down to the
seat, wrapping both front and rear legs around the cushioned leather and held on for dear life as Stone brought the huge Harley
to a skidding stop, digging his heels in so hard that they dug up little furrows of dirt for about ten yards on each side
of the bike.
Then he was off the Harley and running to the back, throwing open one of the biggest of the supply boxes, which he had mounted
on a rack unit there. He pulled out a long silver poncho—a specially made “space blanket” Stone had dug up back in the bunker’s
supply room. It was supposedly impervious to caustic substances. Well, he was about to find out. Anchoring one side to the
motorcycle, which was standing on its wide autokick pads on each side of the frame, Stone looked around and saw a fallen tree
about a foot thick, ten feet long. He rushed behind it as Excaliber followed along curiously, his ears flapped behind him,
the secondary lids on his eyes dropping down to protect him from the wind-borne sand and dust that was now flying through
the air like hordes of stinging insects. Stone rolled the log back to the flapping end, and by pulling it evenly beneath the
length of the tree section, he was able to anchor it solidly.
“Come on, we don’t want to get caught in it,” Stone yelled as he heard a sound from above and a streak of blue lightning swept
across the black clouds from side to side as far he could see. He got inside the lean-to and unzipped the flaps on each side,
anchoring them down with rocks. Barely had he closed them both when there was a sound like another A-bomb going off and the
entire earth seemed to shake beneath them. Then there was a deluge of rain. It seemed to just release all at once, and the
space blanket sagged noticeably as the first sheets of gale-blown radioactive rains came pouring down on them.
Stone pulled back closer to the Harley as if it would somehow protect him. But even the nearly one-ton vehicle rattled and
bounced in the winds as if it were a bronco in a rodeo, about to be released from the starting gate. The dog whined as the
thunder boomed from every side of them, and burrowned its nose into the dirt right behind Stone’s leg. It covered its head
and eyes with its paws and just tried to escape the horrible reality of the situation. The rain slammed into the tarp and
rushed down the sides, making a little instant waterfall outside. Some of the water began seeping back underneath, and Stone
lifted his body up so only his boots were touching, crouching in the darkness.
The lightning suddenly seemed to strike just outside their shelter as the entire sky lit up. For a split second Stone could
see right through the material, so bright was the flash of electricity. And then, just as it faded, another, and another bolt,
until the lightning was coming down in a fusillade of spears all around them. The pitbull let out a high-pitched squeal of
pure fear that sent Stone’s hackles up even above the deafening chorus of the storm. The booms of thunder came galloping in
one after the other, like wild horses looking to trample the shelter below, and Stone could feel his bones shake inside his
skin, as if the outer layer might just get tossed off.
Then the rains really came. Buckets, torrents of black water, poured down on their little haven as if it were searching them
out. Liquid, as thick as sewage and as foul-smelling as if they were in a garbage dump, inundated the tarp, trying to get
in. First a gust of dark liquid from the east, then, unable to find an opening, the wind would switch around to the west and
spit down gushes of the filthy water, trying to sneak in from behind them or through the spokes of the bike, which Stone had
only been partially able to cover with part of the lower tarp flaps. Man and dog pulled in closer and closer together, trying
to get as far from the cascading black foulness as they could. The dog knew in its animal wisdom what Stone knew scientifically:
that the stuff was some bad shit.
The storm seemed to go on forever, but in reality it was hardly five minutes, when suddenly the rains stopped almost instantaneously,
and then were gone. Stone waited a minute, letting his heart settle down, making sure that it wasn’t some sort of trick and
that one of the damn black clouds wasn’t waiting right overhead, waiting to just pour out a shitload of the high-rad water
on his head. But nothing happened, and he nervously duck-walked over to one side and lifted the flap. The ground around them
was drenched, coated with an oily substance that gave everything a shiny blackish tinge. An almost invisible haze of heat
fog rose up from the heat being generated by the radioactive particles as they interacted with one another from the water
molecules sinking down into the earth.
Stone looked up at the sky like a man who’s just been kicked to the ground looks up into the face of his attacker. But the
clouds had already pulled back up, high up, rejoining the miles of flat, steellike ribbons that hung in the afternoon sky,
as dark and impenetrable as the black soil that buries the dead.
S
tone could see the effect of the rain as he drove on toward the mountain, which now rose almost straight up overhead. Animals
writhed in pain everywhere, their coats of fur or scales, feathers or hides, all burned and smoking as if splashed with acid.
Bald patches dotted them, beneath which the skin was red and oozing. Many of their eyes had been melted from the acid rains
so that just an overcooked, egglike mass dripped out of the sockets. The radioactive rains were just taking their first dividends.
Wherever they fell. Stone knew, there would be equal horror and pain. He prayed that his men would remember to get out of
the damn rains when the clouds finally caught up with them to the southwest.
Though he felt the urge, there was no way in hell Stone could go out there and put all the damn suffering creatures out of
their misery. So he steeled his eyes and jaw and drove forward, having to move slower now as the foothills were turning to
mini-mountains, and peaks loomed overhead like skyscrapers of solid grarite. But Excaliber let out little whines of sympathy
as they drove past the squealing, bellowing, doomed animals, as if to let them know that someone, something, was witness to
their final hour.
Within half an hour of driving on rougher and rougher terrain, sometimes at nearly a forty-five degree angle, Stone spotted
a good cover for the Harley and brought it to a stop, getting off and walking it the last few yards between two flat boulders
with just enough space for the bike. With a few bushes tossed over the Electraglide, no one, even if they were passing right
by, would notice the motorcycle unless they stepped on the thing.
Then it was straight up the side of the mountain. Stone wasn’t sure at first that the pitbull could traverse such steep, rocky
slopes, but after the first few minutes, once the canine got the hang of something it had never really done before in its
life, it was ahead of him the rest of the way, jumping and scrambling from one little outcropping to the next. Together, Stone
doing most of the grunting, the two of them spent the rest of the afternoon climbing the mountain as the clouds lifted slightly
and the sun warmed the sky to a beaten brass color.
Stone didn’t have any problems at first, but as they got higher up the slope, the ground, a distant speck far below, he could
feel his stomach start to turn a few somersaults. He had never been great with heights. But as there was no one to hear his
excuses, after getting his breath and making a sort of mental adjustment to how high he was every few hundred feet or so,
he made his way up the granite wall. The dog must have had mountain goat in its genes. For Exca-liber, it was all barking
and tail wagging, king of the mountain, and “What’s taking you so long, asshole?” That was unquestionnably his favorite game.