Authors: Craig Sargent
“Hey, pal,” Stone yelled out, but the man didn’t budge an inch or even deign to glance over at his caller. “Suit yourself,”
Stone said, and started forward again. He wasn’t about to stop and get into an encounter therapy session with the naked, pus-ridden
fellow to find out why the poor lad was so shy. Not today.
But he had scarcely gone a hundred yards when Stone saw it was going to have to be group therapy if he was going to open a
practice for the insane soon-to-be-dead. For there was another one and, in front of him, another. In fact, there was a whole
line of them straggling along with all the enthusiasm of those about to attend the Inquisition. And all naked and covered
with the same dripping red sores and welts, their skin nothing but bubbles and foam in many places. The hair on all of them
had all fallen out, and they were as bald as eggs, though these were bloody eggs, as the skin atop the skulls had started
rotting to the consistency of week-old pumpkin.
Stone slowed down, keeping both feet on the ground and his fingers on the trigger of the Harley’s 50-cal. mounted up front.
But these dudes weren’t dangerous. Except to his stomach. As he watched, they beat at their already decimated frames. They
whipped at themselves with belts and branches filled with thorns, pounded at their shoulders and their heads with rocks until
their hands were red. Even the pitbull stared at the scene with revolted fascination. And as they stumbled along like the
army of the walking dead, Stone could hear them half whispering, almost singing to themselves:
“You are poison, you are rot,
You must die, must be not,
You are filth, you are scum,
Smash your flesh, make you brains run.”
And other such cheerful verses, at least as far as Stone could make out, though it was hard to really tell, as they mumbled
in a singsong way through toothless, lipless, and, in some cases, tongueless mouths. It made for quite a chorus as he wheeled
slowly down the road, passing dozens of them, each one in a worse state of decay and imminent danger of popping than the one
before him. At last he reached what appeared to be the very front of the line, as he could see down the yellow-lined road
ahead for nearly a mile and there wasn’t another figure. He pulled up alongside the “leader.” He, too, was naked and covered
with the pus-oozing blisters and boils, the whole chunks of skin falling from his body. It was like looking at something in
a state of constant decomposition, every step making a piece jar loose, something pop and spit out a gush of red and brown.
This one at least was doing something besides falling apart. He was swinging an ancient family-sized tin can that had once
been filled with pickles back and forth in front of him. Only now it was burning a fatty subtance like melted wax but with
a distinctly sour and sickening smell. The man sputtered as he walked, sending out a spray of spittle in front of him like
a fine mist with every word:
“I must rot, I must fall,
I must bleed and scream and crawl…”
“Uh, howdy, stranger,” Stone said as he pulled the bike up alongside the lead scout of the naked stumblers. “Nice day, huh?”
This one at least acknowledged him, Stone saw as the man turned his head slightly toward the intruder, without breaking stride,
without letting the lamp that emitted a little chimney of thick gray smoke from stopping its pendulum swing back and forth
as if driving the demons off ahead by choking them. The man’s eyes caught Stone’s, and he felt a shudder rush up and down
his body like a snake undulating down a log. For the man only had what looked like the beginnings of a face. The muscles were
there in plain sight, many of the veins lying there like red-and-blue strings wriggling slightly like so many worms as they
continued to pump their diseased radioactive blood through the rotting physique. It was as if the face hadn’t been finished,
had never had the skin put on it, the features drawn in. Just two wet, dark balls, like olives in a martini of blood and slime,
peered back at him from within what had been a man’s face.
“If you don’t mind my being a little nosy?” Stone said with as cheerful a grin as he could muster under the circumstances.
“Just why are you fellows—uh—taking a walk naked, and, you know, hitting yourselves and all that?”
“We must be punished,” the man croaked back, and Stone tried to keep the smile on his face as the little tubes of red flesh
that were the man’s lips wriggled up and down, the two teeth that were left in the oozing mouth, hanging by threads, swinging
back and forth as he spoke, as if they might tumble out at any moment. “We are God’s chosen. Chosen to die for man’s sins.”
The man groaned and suddenly reached up with his free hand and smashed himself in the head with a hammer.
Stone involuntarily winced, as did the pitbull behind him, and he was starting to get edgy about the sick scene unfolding
in front of them. When Stone opened his eyes a split second later, the man was reeling from the blow, a hole the size of a
quarter opened right in the side of his skull as a pinkish, gruellike substance flowed out like Silly Putty. Yet still the
man kept walking, lurching forward on legs that were hardly more than gangrenous stalks held together by sheer pressure onto
the cracking, rubbery bones beneath them.
“Why—must you be punished?” Stone went on, wanting to just floor the bike ahead but somehow needing to know the reason for
the group’s bizarre behavior.
“Man has sinned. That is why he is being destroyed. By punishing ourselves we are helping God. Carrying out his work.” The
man smiled a red hole of a smile, as if pleased with his explanation. “All must die. But we are hastening the process. And
causing ourselves great pain. As much pain as possible. That is the whole idea. That is the punishment. Blessed be the self-mutilators,
for they are carrying out the atomic judgment’s work.” Again he smiled, and the red hole opened and closed again like the
jaws of some wretched creature from a nightmare.
“I s-see,” Stone stuttered, unable to argue with such logic. “Well, well—good luck,” he muttered, realizing as the words left
his lips how absurd they were. But the man either didn’t hear them or was unable to relate to the inherent absurdity of the
statement. Instead he whipped the hammer up again at his head, and it sank nearly an inch into and through the rotting skull.
He seemed to stagger again, sinking down almost to his knees. But then somehow, incredibly, the mobile piece of rot regained
his balance and kept on. And as Martin Stone swore that what he was seeing was just about the most horrible thing he’d ever
encountered, he saw something worse. For the walking ooze, noticing through cracked, bleeding eyes that the little fire in
its pot was burning low, reached toward itself with a scooping hand, its fingers all stiff, and dug the hand right into its
side, where Stone could see it had previously scooped out a bunch.
It poked around into its own innards as it walked, hardly faltering and, after a few seconds of digging, ripped out a whole
big batch of human rot. It swung the hand around and threw the load on top of the low blue flames as the last of the old fire
almost went out. There was a sudden sheet of blue and yellow as the radioactive slime caught fire in a flash. A cloud of yellowish
smoke rose up all around them, making Stone and the dog cough and wave it away from their faces.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Stone half screamed as he floored the bike forward, trying to get out of the nauseating mist. He exhaled
hard as he shot away from the line of moaning men, who continued to slice and beat at themselves with great enthusiasm. He
breathed deeply in and out, trying to get the filthy poison out of his lungs. The dog, too, seemed to hyperventilate, whether
through instinct or realizing that the human smoke was bad, Stone didn’t know. But the two of them, man and animal, took deep
filling breaths of air, pushing out from the very bottom of their lungs for the next twenty minutes as they rode along. Stone
didn’t know if the stuff could really hurt him or not. But it sure hadn’t done the fellow from whom it had come any good.
B
y the time they reached the outskirts of Keenesburg, Stone still didn’t feel like he had really laundered his lungs. He felt
dirty and wanted nothing more than to find a bath, try to clean the stench of decay and rot off him. The dog kept snorting
and sneezing and scratching at itself, as if it were covered with fleas. Stone found a small garage/stable at the very outer
perimeter of the town, a ramshackle place that no one else apparently was using, since neither a vehicle nor a single horse
or mule sat in the broken-down, fenced-in area, or in the half-collapsed barn, framed on each side by trees.
The place was out-of-the-way, almost nonexistent—the kind of place Stone loved. He came to a stop just in front of a little
shack—hardly more than a bunch of warped pieces of plywood nailed up into a square about six feet high and eight feet long.
It was hard to believe someone would live in it, but from the little trickle of smoke rising up out of the chimney made from
an old paint can on top, Stone had to assume that was the case. And sure enough, when he dismounted and knocked on what he
deducted was the door as all four sides looked pretty much the same, an old man, as ancient-looking as the face of the desert,
pushed out on the wall so that it swung around on crude hinges, and stepped out. He carried a shotgun in his arms and tried
to look as mean as possible, though standing about 4′ 10″ and being hardly more than a shriveled-up raisin of an old man with
a thousand lines creasing his leathery face, fingers as thin as pencils, he wasn’t too fear-inspiring.
“What the hell you want?” the old man asked suspiciously, squinting one bloodshot eye at Stone.
“Sorry if I’m in the wrong place,” Stone said, holding his hand slowly up in the air to show he meant no harm. “I thought
I saw a sign out there by the road that said ‘garage.’”
The old man laughed a short and bitter sound and then said. “No, ain’t been no garage here for years. Ain’t been no fuel,
no nothing. And since my son died—the bastards killed him”—the man went on looking toward the town in the distance and spitting
at it—”ain’t done much of nothing but sit around and wait to die.” The old codger, whom Stone estimated had to be at least
ninety-five or a hundred years old gave him a big grin, his mouth filled with wooden teeth, as if the statement were quite
amusing.
“Well, look, if you’re just sitting around waiting to die,” Stone said, moving his hand slowly into his pocket so as not to
startle the man, “why not make a few bucks doing it?” He took out two silver dollars from a stack he had filled a pocket with,
coins he’d taken from his father’s bunker supplies. Stone had learned quickly after leaving the bunker, having lived there
for five years, that money was worth a hell of a lot more than it had been before. And that a silver dollar was enough for
men to kill for.
The man’s eyes grew wide at the proffered coins, shining in the few straggly rays of gray light that sputtered down from the
fallout sheets ten miles up, just sitting up there looking down on them all like the cloaked judges of doom.
“Name’s Lomax,” the man said, suddenly as friendly as a summer day. “But people around here always called me Pliers, on account
I always been good with my hands.” He took the coins from Stone’s palm and drew them to him like the most precious things
in the world. He held them up, turning them over in his hand, almost hypnotized by the clear shininess of their perfect surfaces.
“What I gotta do?” he asked, suddenly suspicious again, and the grin of incredible luck vanished from his face like it had
never existed. The possibility that he would suddenly lose the little beauties that he regarded with an almost religious awe
made a ratlike paranoia streak into his brain like mercury rising in a thermometer.
“Just let me park my motorcycle in that bam,” Stone said, turning and pointing to his Harley, about twenty yards off. At the
back part of the black leather seat, Excaliber was trying to find a comfortable position as he twisted this way and that on
the cool leather, wriggling his paws in the air as if performing some insane dance. “And take care of that there dog too.”
Stone prayed that the old fellow liked dogs, because too many people were after him, and those people would know about the
dog as well. It would stand out in the town like a sore thumb. Not that Stone had any illusions that he wasn’t walking into
a trap, anyway. But he wasn’t one to place the fucking noose over his head and pull the trapdoor as well.
“Bike and dog—that’s all, mister?” the old man said with a laugh of relief as he saw that he was going to get to keep his
little fortune, after all. “Why, I loves dogs. In fact…” He whistled twice, and a scampering sound came from inside the plywood
hut. Before Stone could warn him to stop, a dog came tearing out and straight toward the bike. It was the strangest damn little
thing Stone had ever seen—a hybrid of hybrids, a mixture of every breed under the sun—only about twenty pounds of furry little
dachshundy thing, with, Stone saw in growing amazement, only three legs. The fourth had been chopped off about two thirds
of the way up, so the dog scampered along on three but, all things considered, with speed and balance.
“Excaliber!” Stone screamed out, raising his arm as the pitbull saw the little barking fuzzball coming toward the bike. Stone
knew the animal had never gotten along with other dogs—it wasn’t in his blood. The pitbull rose up in a flash onto the seat
and launched itself free with a powerful stroke of pistonlike legs. Stone groaned and closed his eyes for a second, unable
to witness the chomping, bloody mess that was about to occur. But when Stone opened his eyes, there was no blood at all. Instead
the two dogs stood almost face-to-face, though Excaliber had to look down, as the small mutt was hardly bigger than a cat.
Still, the thing gave one of the canine terrors of Colorado a firm but friendly look, and the bullterrier, being impressed
by the sheer tenacity of the little sucker, took an instant liking to him and began playing lightly with the dog, running
this way and that in front of it, suddenly changing direction as the overfurred mutt joined in the fun.