Authors: Craig Sargent
He was glad it was on his side. Stone knew what the war machine was capable of. General Patton had been planning to conquer
America with a fleet of them, à la Rommel in the African desert. And the Fascist madman might well have succeeded—if he wasn’t
part of that swirling black cloud now. Stone gave the thumbs-up and saw Bull’s face, dimly peering back from within the tank,
give him the return signal. He hadn’t trusted the big country boy back at boot camp, when Stone had infiltrated the general’s
main camp. But now that they had been through one mini-war, one near execution, and one hydrogen bomb blast together, Stone
trusted Bull implicitly. And that went for the other three NAA recruits who were still left. If they’d been through all this
already and still hadn’t killed Stone with a shot to the back—or split with their weapons and all—then they sure as hell weren’t
going to do it now. For better or worse, Martin Stone was amassing his own little private army, though his combat power of
one tank, one motorcycle, one dog, and a bunch of angry Indians would have to improve significantly if he was really going
to make any headway as a military power.
Stone didn’t even look back as he started the bike across the flat prairie, away from the cloud of doom that blotted out the
dawn’s feeble light. The sun tried to climb up into the black shroud that filled the northern skies of Colorado. But things
didn’t look too promising. The tank fell in behind Stone, following about twenty yards behind as Excaliber bedded down low
on the back of the Harley’s long leather seat, gripping his front and back legs around the thing like a starfish around an
oyster. His right front leg had been wounded by Patton’s troops. But with the splint that Stone had put on it, and the remarkable
recuperative powers of the pitbull breed, the canine was already using it, putting pressure on it to hold itself in place
atop the tearing cycle.
The Cheyenne looked hastily among themselves as the white men departed.
“Bah, we go north, past the cloud.” Leaping Elk snorted contemptuously, waving his burned hand at the towering mushroom cloud
to the north.
“No, we go with Stone,” Meyra said softly but imperiously. She sat down in the slung-back seat of her three-wheeler, a heavy-duty
cross-country vehicle with machine gun mounted on front, and started the engine. The rest of the small tribe was torn between
Leaping Elk’s mad show of bravery and scorn for the world of the white man and Meyra’s simple but strong command. She was
a descendant in the line of the Succession of the Chiefs. Only she was a
woman
. There had never been a woman chief among the Cheyennes. It made the braves feel peculiar, less than men, as they rushed
to their all-terrains and started them up. But, taking off one after another, they fell in a long, ragged line behind her.
At last there was just Leaping Elk and his own dummy, a shorter and fatter Indian who seemed to follow his every word and
glance.
Leaping Elk continued to hold his badly burned hand up as he compared it against the mushroom cloud, seeking only he knew
what sort of dark, aesthetic understanding. As the fleeting force of tanks and three-wheelers almost disappeared a mile off,
its dust trail rising up slowly in the air, the Cheyenne, much to the relief of his lackey, mounted his bike and started off
in pursuit.
Stone, in the lead, quickly found that he had to slow down from his forty miles per hour or the cloud of bomb dust that he
sent up positively blinded anyone coming up behind him. He slowed to twenty, which helped a little, but it was still rough
going. He hoped the others had their bandannas pulled tight and that the tank had been put on internal oxygen supply. Behind
him, the pitbull nuzzled deeper into the space between the back of Stone’s leather jacket and the leather of the seat—as if
the air coming from there were cleaner than what was flowing all around them.
As the prairie came into view in the slight morning, Stone saw to his disgust that the land had been decimated by the blast.
The sun was having a hard time getting much light or warmth at all through the high cover of dark, radioactive fallout that
was spreading out in a wider and wider dome like an umbrella now, perhaps forty miles across. But the little light that did
filter through showed him just what the results of a ten-megaton blast were on planet earth. And it was terrible. Like beholding
the rage of a jealous god.
Every standing object had been torn down. Not that there had been a hell of a lot of junk out there. But what little there
had been—cacti, scraggly trees—had been torn from their roots and turned into smoking salad. They lay on their sides in pieces
of burned plant fiber, steaming, shrunken roots reaching up toward the sky like a thousand skeletal fingers in anguished vegetable
prayer. The entire area was covered with a layer of white powder, as if a snow had fallen. But this stuff was crystallized
sand, or maybe something else, Stone figured as he rode over it. He could feel the warm clouds of heat rising up around him.
For the first few miles, most of the animal life he saw were just piles of ash—hard to tell if it was even animal or vegetable—or
just mounds of ash and dirt congealed into bumps in the earth. But when they had gotten thirty-five, then forty miles away
from ground zero, he could at least make out what kind of creatures they had been. Elk with their hides smoldering in dark,
charred circles as if cigarettes had been put out in them in a hundred places. Heads—just skulls with horns still intact atop
them, but blackened, almost shiny, as if coated with a high-gloss paint. A herd of northern bison came into view as he peaked
the top of a rise and started down again. They were all grouped around one another, as if they had been trying to seek protection
from the blast—pull in the wagons as it were—as they had formed a loose sort of wedge with the strongest males in front and
the females behind. Then the calves huddled in the safety of the thickest part of the defensive formation.
Not that it had done them a bit of good, of course. They were all dead, half-burned corpses. Oddly, though parts of them had
been consumed into black leather, other parts were nearly untouched. As Stone drove past them, Excaliber looked up from his
cocoon and let out a plaintive howl. He recognized something in them. Some animal energy that had been consumed in the atomic
fires. And in his own way he mouthed a mournful prayer from one creature to another, all of which were stuck on the most fucked-up
planet in the universe.
Stone was struck by the haunting features the burning atomic winds had sculpted onto the dead bisom. There
was
an art of death: the way the heads on some were totally unscathed; their eyes still glassy and bright; other’s heads nothing
but blackened stumps spitting up boiling blood from time to time, while the bodies beneath them were virtually untouched,
thick brown matted hair hanging down around the corpses. It had all depended on exactly what angle the bomb’s rays and heat
waves had reached them. It was like a panorama from the Museum of Natural History that Stone remembered visiting with his
father, Major Clayton Stone, when he had been a child. The long, echoing marble rooms as big as a palace in a dream, and windows
filled with scenes from all over the world—animals frozen forever in their dioramic habitat of plastic trees and paper moons.
“A museum of death,” Stone muttered to himself as he looked at the mix of decay and wholeness, blood and fur. Some of the
irradiated creatures appeared almost comical, with whole bodies and heads but nothing but bones for legs. Others like something
from a nightmare, their faces melted into porridge as Little Bear’s had been. Others even worse…
Stone spat down through his bandanna onto the prairie floating past him and pulled his eyes away from the death scene. He
knew it was easy to get hypnotized by the dark beauty of destruction. But only madness lay that way.
To the south he could see mountains, but it was hard to tell how far away they were, since a haze caused by the dust the winds
of the bomb had spread hung in the air like a curtain. Behind him—Stone turned around every ten or twenty minutes just to
keep an eye on the course of the thing—the mushroom cloud was slowly spreading out, still in no great hurry. The light winds
were pushing it to the south and east, as the top of the cloud still pushed its way into the very upper reaches of the stratosphere.
When the damn thing came down, it could poison all of Colorado. Stone felt a deep bitterness start to rise up in him. The
bastards just never got enough. The madmen, the Fascists, the destroyers of the world. They had to keep kicking at the planet
till they blew her into little glowing pebbles and set her in orbit around the moon.
His glance was suddenly taken by a strange sight to the left of the course he was following. It looked as if hundreds of branches
had been laid out in lines parallel to one another. And then, as he got closer, Stone saw that it was even weirder than that.
The branches were snakes, and they were all dead. Cooked to a crisp, like fricasseed weirder. Their mouths were open wide,
as if they had died gasping for air, and their bodies were all stretched out as far as they could go in a north-south direction.
The outer edges of their skin had been turned a dark brown, like something that had been under the broiler for about half
an hour.
Excalibar barked as if wanting to jump down, investigate, maybe have a snack or two. But Stone yelled around to the pitbull,
“Sit down, you maniac. If you move one fucking inch—” Excaliber lowered himself back down on the seat but made a deep throaty
sound, as if to say, “Then it better be chow time—and soon.” Stone realized the snakes must have been driven from their holes
by the heat and then tried to escape the rays by turning in the direction of the blast and hyperventilating. Of course, nothing
had worked.
Stone glanced back when he was a few hundred yards farther on and could see dimly through the dust clouds that some of the
Cheyenne were reaching down as they drove past and over the cooked snakes, grabbing a few for later dining. He winced involuntarily
but didn’t slow. These guys were
all
crazy, he decided. That was for damn sure.
It was when they had gotten beyond the direct bomb damage and fatalities that the injuries really got to Stone. For here,
the wildlife had been wounded but not killed. They passed dozens, often hundreds, of limping, writhing, growling, crying-out
animals. Armadillos, field rats, deer, bison, bears, raccoons, lizards, snakes—all screaming for merciful deliverance from
a pain they neither understood nor could cure. A pain that already made their fur start to fall out, their teeth topple like
rotting acorns, their guts turn to bloody stew inside their stomachs. They bared their teeth halfheartedly at the mini-fleet
as the men drove past, and Stone had the urge to get down from his Harley and put some of them out of their misery. But there
were too many. Too damn many by far. What was he going to do, perform merciful acts for the whole fucking world? Clean up
after the death wish of mankind had been released each time? Forget it, pal. Not today.
Still, he was hardly able to look at the suffering creatures and had to hold his eyes like steel marbles straight ahead on
the course he was following—due south. His mouth tightened as he hardened himself to a cruel world, and to the cruelty that
men must allow themselves to endure just to survive.
But when they reached the first of the low hills that quickly led to a full-fledged range a few miles off, Stone saw suddenly
that it was mankind he was going to have to worry about a lot more than the animals. Namely his own ass. He had just gone
into a low valley about a hundred feet wide with small grassy hills rising on each side when he saw them: men coming down
from the slopes ahead on horses, mules, and all sorts of ragged-looking mounts. The horses looked better than their riders.
A filthier bunch of detoothed, scarred, and pockmarked faces sitting atop fat, greasy bodies Stone could hardly recall having
seen.
He came to a stop as the rest of the column fell in behind him, until his Harley, the tank, and the eight three-wheelers of
the Cheyenne formed a rough wedge so they all had firing clearance at the primitive cavalry.
“Well, what have we here?” The leader apparent of the raiding party laughed from atop his barrel-chested steed. The horse
looked like it could pull a tractor; so did its master. “A pretty sorry-looking bunch, if I do say so myself.” The man laughed,
and his entire frame of four hundred and fifty plus pounds shook from side to side, as his gnarled face—which looked like
it had been through a hundred fights, a dozen bitings, and at least a few acid burnings—scrunched up in amusement, an expression
Martin Stone didn’t like at all. He looked back and forth to both sides of the valley, where the bandits sat atop their various
mounts. There were at least forty to the right, and two dozen on the left side of the valley floor, down which Stone and his
crew had been heading.
“Have you taken a good look at yourself recently?” Stone asked, pulling his hand back on the right handlebar so it rested
near the firing trigger of the .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the front of his Harley.
“No, I haven’t taken a look at myself,” the jowled tub of boil-ridden lard yelled back. “There isn’t too many mirrors around
these parts on account of they’ve all been broken. People use ’em for knives. But I knows I ugly, anyway.” The man laughed,
and his friends on each side howled along with him. “Shoot, everybody in these parts knows I is the ugliest man in Colorado.”
“He so ugly, his mama puked all over him the second he popped out of her belly!” One of the nearby riders laughed through
toothless lips. The leader of the group, apparently a devotee of humor only when it was originated by him, leaned to the side
of his steed so that it almost toppled over and slammed out a bear-sized fist, sweeping the speaker right off his mule and
onto the dirt. The man looked up, mortified, but didn’t dare say a word.