Authors: Craig Sargent
S
tone tore ass through the woods that ran along the perimeter of the mall for nearly half a mile. He kept about twenty feet
inside the shielding trees, but he could see the outer edge of the sick shopping mart, and down its corridors where contented
killers strolled, examining this Pandora’s box filled with the appliances of murder. Stone kept his Ruger .44 in one hand
as he ran—just in case. The heavy load it carried would do just fine to slam right through small branches and brush—and into
an attacker’s skull. He had just about reached the end of the mall when he heard bells going off at the far end—where he had
just escaped from. They knew. The shit was hitting the fan. He just didn’t want to get sprayed.
When he reached the end of the mall, Stone stayed in the woods until he was yet another quarter of a mile or so past it. Whatever
their security apparatus, he could see, it wasn’t super-efficient, as he saw not a guard in sight. Making sure there was no
posse, Stone edged toward the line of trees and then dashed out into the open, beelining along a wide dirt road toward the
garage where the Harley and his dog sat waiting. He had sort of lost track of time, of how long he had been gone. It seemed
like only hours, yet somewhere he must have lost a night or a day. Something was wrong. If he lived through the next few hours,
he’d get it all straightened out.
Stone’s feet hurt like he was doing long-distance running on razor blades. On one particularly sharp stab of pain, he threw
his head back and winced, noticing that the sky was looking bad. All the shit and poison that had been accumulating up there
for days now was spinning and twisting around like blood inside a washing machine. The dark cloud cover had dropped so low,
it seemed that he could almost jump up and touch it. The storm clouds were huge whales of things, brown- and purple-tinged,
positively puffed out of every dark edge as if they couldn’t contain the load in their radioactive guts much longer. And when
they puked it all out, the world below would be in big trouble.
The prospect of being rained on by the radioactive showers was motivation enough for Stone. He took off even faster down the
road, telling his goddamn screaming feet to just shut up or he’d shoot them off. At last the broken-down garage came into
view, and Stone saw that Pliers actually had been doing some work. The bails of barbed wire he had had stored away had all
been unraveled, and he had formed a barrier of the sharp stuff about five feet high and a yard wide that ran the perimeter
of the place, nearly a hundred feet on a side.
“Hey, old man,” Stone yelled out, cupping his hands together as he reached what had been the access road, which was now protected
by the wall of dagger-tipped wire. “Hey, Pliers,” Stone yelled out again, starting to get a little nervous, holding his .44
up to chest level, trying to sort things out in the dark. “Hey, I come for my dog and my—”
“Hold your damn horses,” a voice yelled out from the darkness. Suddenly Stone saw a thin, flickering flame emerge from the
little slabbed wood hovel the man lived in, and start to come toward him at a snail’s pace in the dark. “You young folks want
to do everything now—this instant. Can’t wait a damn second. Why, when I—”
“Hurry up, old man,” Stone yelled out impatiently, “or you’ll have the whole damn Mafia army breathing down your throat. You
don’t want to get caught with me here, pal, so move it.” The possibility of violence being done to hs little home made the
old tinkerer move faster, and the sliver of candle flame bent almost sideways as he pushed through the night.
“Here,” he said as he came up to Stone just on the other side of the barbed-wire wall. “I put this damn stuff up. Now I feel
imprisoned in my own damn home.” The old man laughed with a bitter snort as he undid some wires around a pole, and lifting
one six-foot section of the barbed wire by a protected handhold, he pulled the whole piece back so Stone could slip through.
“Keep it open,” Stone said as he came in on wobbly feet. “I’m out of here as soon as I get my bike going.”
“What—what happened?” the old man asked nervously as he glanced back down the dark dirt road searching for signs of life.
But he saw nothing—so far.
“Look, pal, I didn’t tell you because it was none of your business—and because if you knew, if they found you, they would’ve
tortured you until—ah, you don’t even want to know. Anyway, I’m Martin Stone. Enemy number-one on their most-wanted list—bring
in dead only.”
“Well, I don’t care what you done,” Pliers said as he walked along beside Stone, who was headed over toward the barn where
his Harley sat hidden. “Any enemy of those scum, as far as I’m concerned, is a friend of mine. But you better head out along
the back roads. They’ll send out super-souped-up cars on the main road—catch anything that moves. I’ll show you the way.”
“Ain’t going that way,” Stone said as he nearly stumbled, making his way over some loose boards just inside the barn. “My
sister’s back there—I’m going in for her.”
“You’ll n-never make it,” Pliers said, stuttering in sheer terror at the thought as he tried to light the way ahead, his hand
held out to the side and grasping the flickering candle. “Those guys are—I mean, I’ve seen them—I mean—”
“Skip it, old man,” Stone said as he saw the black Harley sitting there like a bull in the gray-streaked darkness. “Where’s
the damn dog?” Stone said, looking around.
“Where is that little—” Pliers asked with a tone of incredible weariness in his voice. “From the moment you left, that son
of a bitch was nothing but a ball of trouble. Got into every damn thing in the place—opened up every crate, pulled out every
supply. And when it comes to eating, damn thing slurped up the first helping I gave before I even put it down. Lucky to get
my hand out in one piece. And then it looks up at me and growls. Like there’d better be more or—Little mutt scared me, I’ll
tell you. So I just kept feeding him and feeding him every time I came out near the barn. Or else the growls would start up
from the darkness. Why, that mutt of yours gobbled down in two days what my own damn dog eats in about a month. What’s wrong
with the creature —thyroid trouble, worms?”
“The only trouble with that dog is his fucking brains are screwed on backward,” Stone said, whistling loudly into the darkness.
“He thinks the entire planet and everybody on it are here for one purpose—to serve him. He thinks he’s a king—when he’s just
a stinkin’ dog. You hear that,” Stone bellowed into the spiderwebbed rafters of the dusty barn. “You’re just a fucking dog—now
get out here. ’Cause I’m starting this bike up and moving out. And when the Mafia gets here and finds Martin Stone’s dog,
I think they’re going to be very pleased about that.”
As if getting the drift, if not the grammatical subtleties, of Stone’s words, a low shape came lumbering out from a corner
of the place, its long, untrimmed nails plopping down with lazy steps. “Well, his highness makes an appearance,” Stone said
with biting sarcasm. “You look like shit—you know that, dog?” Stone said, shaking his head as he saw the apparition that suddenly
staggered into view and stood next to the Harley, lit up by the now straight candle flame. The animal was covered with dust—and
food. The old man had apparently fed the pitbull so much out of his fearful state that pieces of meat, bread, and milk, actually
covered the animals’ head and back. Its stomach was so distended, Stone swore it would drag an ant’s back walking along the
ground.
“Get on,” Stone said with disgust. “Either I’m sending you to finishing school—or off to live with the goddamn cannibals.
The way they eat, you’d be right at home there.” Stone started the motor of the Harley, and the pitbull let out a little whine
as it looked up at the seat that, from its vantage point, looked about a mile high. But as its master started slowly easing
the bike forward, the pitbull let out a quick bark and leapt up. Usually it would have been no problem. The pitbull had made
the jump from the ground to the back of the seat hundreds of times. But with the additional ten or fifteen pounds it had deposited
away, its trajectory sort of petered out before it really got going. It got its front paws on the back but not its rear ones,
and hobbled along on its back legs like some sort of circus animal behind Stone’s motorcycle.
“Good God,” Stone exclaimed as he glanced around and saw the ridiculous dancing dog coming up behind. He stopped the bike,
letting the animal catch up and somehow drag itself up, like a turtle up the side of Mt. Everest. “Try to leave the place
with a little style, a little cool,” Stone muttered to the animal, and it snorted back at him as if nothing untoward had happened,
though it couldn’t look him in the eye and settled down quickly on the leather seat ready for some heavy-duty digestive sleep.
Stone started the Electraglide forward, his eyes having adjusted to the darkness enough to see well now.
“More money—for the food, for your damn dog,” Pliers demanded, shuffling through the creaking darkness alongside Stone’s bike
as they headed toward the front barn door.
“Forget it, pal,” Stone snapped back. “I gave you a small fortune already and you know it. Thanks for the service. And I apologize
for any discourtesy and bluffed biting this mutt may have inflicted on you. And one final bit of advice,” Stone said as he
reached the outside air.
“What the hell is that?” Pliers yelled out through the darkness now that his candle had blown out from a puff of night wind.
“If those sons of bitches show up here, don’t let on you ever knew, saw, or talked to me—or my dog. Or you’re a dead man.”
With that Stone accelerated slightly and eased through the narrow opening of the barbed wire. He slid back down the road,
almost not moving for about fifty yards, high light off, the engine on a super-muffled low purr in neutral. He edged the bike
along, kicking it with his legs until the saw a small path almost hidden by the bushes off to one side. Stone steered the
bike onto it and saw within a few yards that it was an old path, probably used by cattle or deer decades ago but tamped down
enough for him to make his way bent over through the bushes, which reached out from every side with twigs and thorns like
a gauntlet of a million stabbing arms.
The dog didn’t like it. Unprotected by thick outerwear like Stone, it got scraped all over its hide by all kinds of scratching
tendrils. It kept letting out little yelps of pain and disturbed whines for Stone’s benefit up front. Which was all just fine
with Martin Stone. The dog deserved a little penance, a little punishment for being such an asshole.
The mall came into view alongside them, though dimly, about a hundred yards off through the trees. But he could see the lights
from the displays, the lamps that stood on the corners flickering through the maze of branches that stood between him and
the shopping center for all your murder needs. He gauged his approximate location by remembering certain signs he had seen
when walking around the place and made a wide, circular route so he came out on the far side of the mall, past where he had
made his escape from the torture room.
He slowed the bike down as the path suddenly opened up into a flat field of dirt, and Stone could see, as he let the Harley
coast slowly forward, his fingers on the trigger of the .50-caliber machine gun that was mounted at the front of the motorcycle—that
there was water, or liquid of some kind, ahead. He crossed the hundred yards or so of packed dirt, and his eyes squinted in
the gray fog as he tried to make out what the shapes were that he saw sticking up here and there in the inklike water. The
smell as he drew closer was sickening, a thick, meaty stench that filled the nostrils and lungs like a noxious gas.
Then all of a sudden he saw—and wished he hadn’t—arms and legs floating everywhere. Head and feet and sex organs. There were
parts of men and women bobbing around in a mini-sea of blackness. Stone brought the bike until it was about twenty feet from
the edge and looked in. He could see fairly well, as the light from the mall itself drifted over and back, bouncing off trees
and clouds even though they were several hundred yards away. Stone couldn’t even see the other side of the lake, though he
knew it had one. It was just that in the fog and mist that hovered over the place it seemed to disappear. Pieces of humanity
were everywhere. It was like an old auto junkyard, a swamp where the parts of useless vehicles were driven, thrown, buried.
Only these were human vehicles. They had been used for their value to Scalzanni, and then turned into hulks, dismembered and
thrown into this watery hell.
As he looked, Stone saw a snake slithering across the oily surface with a human hand in its jaws, taking it off to a more
solid spot where it could be digested in peace. Stone turned as he heard a loud burp behind him and saw the dog staring toward
the ocean of amputations too. It didn’t look good. The pitbull’s face seemed to turn green, and he jumped off the Harley suddenly,
walked a few feet, and began puking.
“Oh, God,” Stone said as he dismounted, throwing his hands up at the sky, which now rumbled with ominous thunder deep in the
black guts of the mountainous clouds above. “What next, that’s all I want to know,” Stone mumbled half insanely. “What next?”
“Me, that’s what’s next,” a voice, followed by a hellish cackle of laughter, came from off in the darkness. Stone’s eyes rocketed
over to the three figures approaching him—one small, two much larger on each side. The ratlike face came into view at about
twenty yards away.
“Scalzanni,” Stone spat out as he looked at the Mafia chieftain, still clad in his omnipresent black silk double-breasted
suit.
“You were expecting the pope?” Scalzanni laughed, and the two psychos on each side of him emitted grunting noises that Stone
took to be the same sort of general idea. “I don’t know how you got out of that room, Stone, but no mind now. “I still got
your sister. She’s locked up right in that same cage you tried to heist her from. You want her, you come through me to get
her.” The Mafia top man reached inside his coat with a crossdraw as both arms formed an X for a second. When they came out,
his hands were gripping the long, glistening, pointed meat hooks that Stone had hoped he wouldn’t see again for a long, long
time.