Authors: Craig Sargent
Stone reached for his .44 Redhawk, but both of the torpedoes already had rods in their hands and whipped them up so they were
targeted on Stone’s chest.
“Oh, that wouldn’t be fair,” Scalzanni commented as he walked slowly toward Stone, twirling the flesh-rippers in each hand.
“You and I—we’re gong to have this out like men. Hand-to-hand. They’ll make sure we stick to the rules.”
“Rules—right.” Stone smirked as he pulled his hand slowly away from his Magnum. “Well, can I use my damn knife?” he asked
as the Mafia killer stalked closer. Stone opened his jacket slowly to show the bowie hanging there. He could hear the dog
still puking its guts out about ten feet behind him on the other side of the Harley. Probably didn’t even know that his master
was about to become Italian cuisine.
“But of course,” Scalzanni replied, motioning with his hooks for Stone to take it out. “The whole reason I ain’t just shooting
you dead right now is ’cause you got a big rep, asshole. Killing you would give me bragging rights all around these parts.
So take out whatever toothpick you got in there, ’cause it ain’t gonna do you a fucking bit of good.” Stone took up the offer
and slowly extracted the blade from his side, getting a good grip on it. He didn’t really trust the torpedoes not to do him
in. But they’d wait—until the last second. If their boss was winning, no guns. But if he started losing, Stone knew he’d have
to be able to take out both of them too. Great.
He stepped away from the Harley and glanced down quickly at the ground around him, searching the dirt for any drops or obstructions,
so he wouldn’t get tangled up. He brought his eyes back up to the advancing Mafia killer. He’d seen the man do his thing with
those hooks, and Stone had no illusions about the task ahead of him. The guy was small, as skinny as a fucking rail. But he
was lethal with meat hooks. He circled slowly, planting one foot carefully down, then the next, making sure he made no mistakes.
“Don’t be so shy,” Scalzanni said, coming almost straight toward Stone now. “Got some friends who want to meet you.” He held
the hooks stretched out far at each end of his arm in the strange posture that Stone had seen him use just before he had killed
the mountain man back at The Hot Load. Stone stepped back, not letting the arms get anywhere within reach.
This was the right thing to do. Scalzanni suddenly struck, swooping both hands and the hooks in them down like the flapping
wings of a condor. The two meat hooks came together in midair like brain-crushing tongs with a sudden eruption of sparks as
metal slammed against metal. But Stone was gone, having danced a good yard away. Scalzanni was fast, incredibly fast. He moved
with the paranoid, darting speed of a fucking weasel. Stone studied the hooks in each of the Mafia don’s hands. There was
no opening for him, so he moved slowly but constantly backward, always in a circle to Scalzanni’s right. Out of the corner
of his eye he noted the torpedoes watching with bemused grins as they let their .45s dangle loosely in their hands. They had
no doubt as to the outcome of this particular match. He’d have to wait for the little slime to make a mistake, if he ever
did, and then move in on him. The man’s fighting style was just too hard to penetrate.
But it was Stone who made the mistake. Thinking he was still within the area he had scanned with his eyes, he stepped backward
and found himself toppling over as his ankle was caught by a root. Suddenly he was lying flat on his back, his knife by his
side. As he grabbed for it, all hell broke loose.
Scalzanni, seeing his opportunity, charged forward, flailing away with both of the hooks like some sort of psychotic Captain
Hook. The first hand missed, but the second, as he came right up to his fallen adversary, was coming in on target. As the
meat hook in the Mafia killer’s right hand descended like a question mark searching for blood toward Stone’s skull, Stone
tightened his eyes and prepared for the blow.
It never came. Out of the shadows behind the Harley, a shape hurtled like a ball shot out of a catapault. Excaliber. His jaw
opened as he leapt and suddenly the teeth came into violent contact with Scalzanni’s wrist, holding the hook that was descending
on Martin Stone’s brain tissue. The dog slammed its jaws shut with all of the two thousand pounds per square inch it could
exert, enough to chew through iron. A man’s skinny wrist was hardly any resistance at all. The hand, still holding the hook,
suddenly shot free and spiraled off through the night air as if looking for something to kill. Excaliber continued his trajectory
past the two men, coming down about eight feet off in the dirt. He instinctively stayed low as he hit, knowing the firepower
would be erupting soon.
Stone didn’t waste a second, taking advantage of the dog’s attack to leap to his own feet. Before Scalzanni had time to realize
he had just lost his right hand and all that went with it, Stone was up, his hand grabbing around the left wrist holding the
second hook. As the Mafia chief’s head swung back, Stone ripped the hook in a circle up and into the slime’s face. The point
of the hook dug straight into Scalzanni’s narrow mouth, and as Stone ripped it up, as if hauling a piece of meat, the curved
metal hook tore up through the skull, then out the top.
It was as if Stone had the man impaled on an immense fishhook, and he quickly pushed his human “fish” backward. Scalzanni
was in no position to resist, seeing as how his mouth, throat, and entire head were pierced clean through with his own weapon.
His eyes twisted around madly in his head, which was already becoming coated with red that bubbled out the fracture at the
top of the skull and from his nose and mouth. Making sure the frantically struggling Scalzanni was between him and the torpedoes,
Stone rushed backward until he saw the black lake filled with arms and heads. With a burst of strength he gripped the handle
of the meat hook and heaved with everything he had. The Mafia chief fairly took off from the ground and flew up into the air.
He didn’t come down until he had gone a good twenty feet out above the black, oily swamp of death—the swamp where he had ordered
hundreds of others thrown without a thought as to their wretched screams.
Now he couldn’t scream, a half-inch-thick piece of metal taking up the space where his vocal cords used to be. But he could
flail around like a chicken with its head cut off, which he did. But only for a few seconds, for the swamp was like quicksand,
like glue. And it pulled at him, wanted him to join it. With a final ghastly burp of bubbles, the Mafia don of dons was sucked
beneath the surface until only one finger barely poked through the slime-coated surface. It was as if the sea of death, as
vast and all-consuming as it was, could take only a portion of a man of such darkness and evil. It would take it days to fully
digest his flesh in its foul, poison-dripping jaws.
But Stone didn’t wait around to look at Scalzanni’s final gurglings. Even as he released the sick load into the air, he threw
himself to the ground and rolled three times to the side. Not a second too soon, for as they saw their boss head to sea, the
torpedoes opened fire, blazing away with both .45s as fast as they could pull the triggers. But shooting is one thing—hitting
another. Stone, who had come to one knee and crouched low in the darkness, could see them both easily silhouetted by the lights
of the mall behind them. He sighted up first one, dead center of the Cro-Magnon face, and pulled the trigger, then shifted
the Ruger a fraction of an inch and fired again. Elapsed time—.76 of a second.
Forty feet away, two faceless corpses toppled over dead before they hit the cold ground. Stone rose from the dirt and walked
forward edgily, the Ruger held out in front of him ready to spit hellfire. But there was no need. Not for these two, anyway.
They were already sinking into the ground. Slowly, of course. But then, the dead are very patient.
T
he pitbull walked over to Stone, snorting up a storm and spitting out a spray of red as it tried to rid its mouth of the foul
taste. The taste of Scalzanni. For the blood had spewed out the mafioso’s severed wrist and covered the animal’s face from
the tip of its nose to its neck. The dog looked like some sort of Darwinian nightmare, the first
Canine redfacus
in the world.
“You look like shit,” Stone said, bending down to make sure the blood was all from someone else, which, as he glanced around
the dog’s head and neck, he saw was the case. “But you saved my damn ass again, dog.” The animal looked up and squinted at
Stone through inscrutable almond-shaped eyes as if to say, “If you weren’t always about to get your ass turned to grass, it
wouldn’t have to be Wonder Dog to the rescue.”
“Yeah, well, keep it up”—Stone grinned from one corner of his mouth—” ’cause I need all the fucking help I can get.” The thought
of that hook coming down on him, the last second when Stone could virtually feel the pointed tip tearing through his brain,
that image would live in his mind forever. As would the image of the dog ripping off Scalzanni’s entire hand. Of such things
are the pleasant memories of old age built.
“Come on,” he said, walking toward the Harley. The pitbull, of course not realizing that he looked like a walking advertisement
for the Save a Battered Dog Foundation, tromped along at Stone’s heels, his tongue hanging out of his mouth like an old, stretched-out
piece of rubber tire. This was ending up to be a good evening, the dog was starting to decide. Fighting got its blood going,
even helped its digestion. Why, after all the fuss, the animal suddenly realized, it had even built up another appetite. It
let out a sharp whine as it jumped back up on the cycle—just to let Stone know that after its puking bout and its aerobics,
it was hungry. Its vomit-scented breath, which came in hot, panting bursts of air into Stone’s face, was enough to get his
own stomach gurgling like a goddamn broken pipe.
“Pal, my present to you for saving my ass,” Stone grumbled, turning his face away and trying to suck in a deep breath of the
cold night air, “is going to be some goddamn dog mouthwash.” He started the Harley through the darkness, straight toward the
mall. The shit clearly
had
hit the fan. People were running everywhere down the corridors. Bells, alarms, and sirens were going off ail over the place.
There was no point in playing tag with the bastards. Stone was going in. Straight in.
The bike roared out of the darkness surrounding the mall and slammed up onto one of the concrete walkways like a steel buffalo
ready to do battle. The few pedestrians dived for cover, flying off in all directions like bowling pins trying to flee the
ball. Bent over far forward on the Electraglide like a cross-country racer, the dog equally clamped down and low to the seat,
they tore down one of the side corridors at a good forty miles per hour. It was all junk here—the windows for the first few
blocks containing only hats, camouflage outfits, paintings of famous killers. But after he’d gone about a quarter of a mile,
Stone saw the displays, which rushed by the bike in a blur, change to firearms. Rifles, SMGs, machine guns—all filled the
windows.
He pressed a small button just below the trigger mounted in the right handlebar of the droning Harley and swiveled the muzzle
of the .50-caliber machine on the front of the bike so it turned like a python to the right. Stone slammed his finger down
on the trigger, and the steel barrel sprayed out a hailstorm of destruction. The slugs tore through the big windows, ripping
them to shreds. Behind Stone, who was moving just fast enough not to get nicked by the debris, the mall walkway began exploding
out from every window in a wall of twisting glass shrapnel. Those who were walking along the corridor were cut into bloody
dolls that danced peculiar jigs and screamed incomprehensible songs before they collapsed into oozing twitching pieces of
red meat on the cement sidewalk.
But Stone didn’t stick around to see the end of the performance. He just wanted to be the cause. He tore toward the middle
of the mall, to where he knew April was still being held—if the pre-death words of Scalzanni were true. And the bastard had
had no reason to lie to Stone then, as he believed he was about to sink one of his hooks right into Stone’s brain. Pity, things
hadn’t quite worked out. Stone kept his finger on the trigger of the .50-caliber, decimating whole blocks of windows filled
with weapons. The screaming slugs kept going after they slammed through the glass—they ripped into things inside the stores,
into ammo boxes, shells, boxes of powder. Explosions began taking out whole walls in the trail that Stone left behind him.
Concrete ceilings erupted up into the air; chunks of car-sized walls spun lazily up a few hundred feet before slamming back
down and into something or someone else. For those caught in the fire and concrete maelstrom, it was proof—if any was needed
—that there
was
a hell on earth.
Then Stone saw her—blocks ahead—in the same glass prison that he had been gassed in. He came to a complete stop, took out
his binocs, and sighted down the long corridor as clouds of smoke began rising behind him. He could see her—sweet April—so
drugged out that her lips hung down like a Ubangi’s, her eyes open enough to let only a pinprick of light into them. He couldn’t
see another living soul down the entire mall. Not one. Stone knew it was a trap. Knew that they were waiting for him. But
then, he wasn’t exactly planning things out on a drafting board these days.
“Come on, dog, the night is young,” Stone said, reaching around and patting the pitbull, which was sniffing at the air with
a concerned expression. It knew something big was in the offing. “We’re going to go looking for some dog biscuits, okay?”
Stone smirked at the dog, laughed, and sat down hard in the seat. All in all, the pitbull didn’t like the way its master had
just said whatever he’d said. Somehow he knew in his innate animal wisdom that dog biscuits were not on the agenda.
Stone revved the Harley and suddenly let its brakes go as if it were a jet plane gaining power for takeoff. The 1200-cc motorcycle
shot forward like a Brahma bull coming out of the pen. For a few seconds the bike careened all over the wide mall corridor—some
asshole had spilled a whole tray full of drinks hours earlier. The dog let out an earsplitting whine as the bike went all
the way over at a forty-five-degree angle. But Stone slammed his boot down, kicked hard, and the bike evened out again.