Authors: Craig Sargent
“Say what you want about me, boys—but no one talks about my mama. Bless her soul.” He crossed himself, then, smilingly sweetly,
he turned back to Stone.
“Before I was so rudely interrupted,” the man went on, sweeping his arm toward Stone as if he were bowing, as if he had manners
or etiquette, which was just about the most absurd thing imaginable, since the fat pig of a Warlord was covered with grease
and matted food from head to foot. Flies buzzed constantly around his long beard, trying to suck out food lodged in there;
snot caked his sleeves where he had been wiping it for years. “I was about to introduce myself. “I am Colonel William Beausmont,
King of Cheshard. Welcome to my country.”
Stone looked around him as if surveying the place. Then back at the “king” atop his overburdened packhorse, red sores all
around the animal’s sides and ribs from the huge weight above it and the constant spurring of the animal with the obese man’s
boots. “Place could use a little landscaping,” Stone muttered. “Looks like shit, if you want to know the truth.”
“Ah, a man who speaks the truth,” the tub of lies burped back, as he almost spat up some of the food he had eaten that morning.
“So refreshing when all those around me”—he looked around at his motley crew as if it were
they
who were foul and
he
covered with rose petals —”are bastards, liars, and double-dealing scum of the highest—or should I say, lowest order? Thus
I will speak the truth to you, little man,” Beausmont went on, scratching at his beard, which hung down over his chest as
if there were something trapped in there. Stone wouldn’t have been surprised to see something leap out and go slithering off.
“I’ll let you live—we’re not murderers around here—but you’ve got to pay. You know what I mean—good old-fashioned American
capitalism. I have a product. You buy it. Everyone is happy.”
“And just what product are you selling?” Stone asked with a cynical grunt as he edged his fingers just a trace closer to the
trigger of his hidden machine gun. Excaliber growled ominously behind him, and Stone hissed him silent with a sharp but low
sound out of the corner of his mouth. The dog set down again, but Stone could feel him quivering the way he always did before
an attack.
Don’t move, dog
, Stone commanded it mentally,
or I’ll kill you
. Whether it heard him or not, it quieted down slightly.
“Selling these.” The king of lard laughed good-naturedly, taking out some sort of medallion from inside his jacket. He held
it up to Stone to show him it wasn’t a bomb or anything, and then threw it across the fifteen or so yards separating them.
Stone caught it in the air and looked down at it. The object was preposterous. The end of a soda can that had been flattened,
a crude chain put through its pop top so it could be worn around the neck.
“It’s safe passage through these parts,” the filthy leader of the mountain bandits went on, sweeping his eyes over Stone’s
force as if trying to visually pry out the goodies. The muzzle of the Bradley III tank and the cold stares of a half dozen
Indians took some of the smile off his face. But still he went on loudly, now staring with little ice picks toward Stone,
trying to intimidate him. “You wear one of these, you get through. You don’t, you’re dead. It’s that simple. We got men throughout
these hills—ain’t no one gets through without paying. Our range extends for two hundred miles to the south. After that, you’re
in somebody else’s territory. That’s their problem—and yours. But it ain’t mine.”
“This is America, pal,” Stone said almost quietly but with a force that they all heard. “There are no separate countries or
kingdoms. No safe passages. That’s the thing about this country—you can go where you want.”
“Used to be friend, used to be,” the bandit leader went on, scratching his balls as he spoke. “But them’s the old days, these
is the new days—and
we
rule here. So give me some guns and bullets or we cut your balls to chop suey.” He looked around him, sweeping his hand across
his rows of horse-mounted fighters who had belts of slugs draped around their shoulders like mail armor, pistols, and sawed-off
mini-autos dangling from saddles everywhere. The ugly bastards looked like they were ready for war. But so was Martin Stone.
“Don’t you see this tank?” Stone asked, standing up now on the side kicks of his bike, so they could all clearly see and hear
him. If fatso was going to be dramatic up there on his horse, Stone knew he had to create a similar sort of power scene from
his end. “Don’t you assholes know what a tank can do?”
“Seen lots of ve-hi-cles ’round these parts,” the mountain king went on, slapping up at the flies that buzzed around his lips.
“Seen tanks, too—but not a one of them could fire, or assholes in ’em who knew how to make ’em do it.”
“Well, that’s not the situation here,” Stone said as coldly as glacial ice. “That tank can fire. And so can I—and these Cheyenne
here. And we can take out your whole damn crew. Believe me. I’m not bullshitting you. So let’s put it this way,” Stone went
on, catching Bull’s attention in the tank some ten feet behind out of the corner of his eye, signaling him to get ready. “
You
get out of our way right now and we’ll just say the whole thing was a mistake. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise? Otherwise?” The bandit king seemed stunned by the implied threat. He wasn’t used to being challenged. Not for
a long, long time. He raised his hands in the air as if to implore the gracious heavens above not to send him such fools to
deal with. Then his hands came down fast, and.a pump shotgun appeared from out beneath his mismatched coon-and-bearskin coat.
Flame was blasting out of it before even Stone could move.
Then all hell broke loose. Stone dropped back down to the seat of the Harley, flat on his stomach, and pulled the trigger
of the .50-caliber on the front frame. The weapon exploded into a hail of slugs just as the shotgun blast reached the motorcycle.
The wall of pellets slammed into the dirt near his right leg, a few of them ricocheting up from the rocks and through Stone’s
fatigues, making him grunt for a second in pain. There was a roar just behind his right ear as the Bradley’s huge cannon erupted
out a 120-mm shell. A funnel of air and smoke
whooshed
out behind the sudden pressure release of the two-foot-long shell, and Stone smelled the wave of cordite odor sweep over
him.
The tank shell hardly had time to get going before it slammed into the kings fur-covered chest. At the range of twenty-five
feet, the shell was traveling at such high speed that it tore through his chest and into his backbone before the detonator
encountered just enough resistance to detonate. The mountain murderer and his horse were blown in a hundred different directions,
sending scores of their fellow bandits and mounts flying down like bloody bowling pins. Screams and whinnies of terror filled
the air even above the cracks of pistols and automatic weapons.
Stone raised his head just enough to see the ranks of horsemen trying to get a bead on them. He swept the 50-caliber back
and forth across the bandits—and they fell like moths in a backyard light clumsily to the earth. Here and there the horses
took shots, too, and reared back, kicking around in the dirt. Others threw their riders and tore off up the valley slope to
escape. Again the Bradley roared, and Stone found it so deafening that he couldn’t hear a thing. Everything was suddenly occurring
in absolute silence, so it almost looked beautiful, a ballet of fire and death—the flames and puffs of smoke coming from all
directions, the shells from the tank going off about thirty yards to the left, dead center of a large formation of the attackers.
The group disappeared for a moment in an eruption of flame and dirt, and as it quickly cleared, men and horses were flying
off as if in a race with death, a race most of them had just lost. They tumbled through the air, broken, with missing arms,
flanks, heads, from the sheer force of the blast. Blood sprewed out from the newly created holes in jets of purest red.
And just like that, it was over. Half their force dead in ten seconds, the rest of the stunned bandits looked around in terror
at each other, turned, and ran. They were animals now—without their leader, who lay in flakes somewhere. Beyond pride, beyond
anything, they just wanted to survive.
Stone held his arms up as the remaining horses and their riders scrambled up and over the valley slopes, telling his men not
to fire. The Bradley ceased its thunderous volleys, and after a few more pops, so did the Cheyenne behind him. Ammunition
was too precious a commodity to waste in the murderous landscape that was America. Within seconds all the bandits were gone,
and only the dead or pieces of them were left, strewn around the ground as if a picnic of vampires and werewolves had just
finished using the area.
“I warned them,” Stone muttered to the afternoon wind as it brought the scent of horseflesh to his already burning nostrils.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn them.” He looked up at the afternoon sky, which was already growing dark, as if pleading with it.
The atmosphere was filling with high clouds that seemed to glow in the twilight, the dimmest of electric auras around their
mountainous shapes.
Stone started the Harley forward and past the charnal grounds as the rest of the men followed on their vehicles. Not one of
them talked. The annihilation was too complete, too fast to feel particularly heroic about. Only Leaping Elk, taking up the
rear, laughed and hummed to himself as he slowed to look at the pieces of bodies, fingers, and eyeballs floating around in
the blood-soaked prairie sands. He seemed to get a big kick out of it all, chuckling over each little mutilation, each severed
part. At last, tiring of it, he floored his cross-country and shot out over the puddles of blood, spitting them up in a red
mist behind him as he moved into the low hills after the others.
It took only minutes after the battle, after Stone and his men had departed, for the predators to emerge from their wretched
holes. Hundreds of them at first, then thousands, came up out of countless little tunnels in the earth, brown, wriggling bodies
that inundated the death grounds with blankets of hunger.
Cockroaches. Nature’s most perfect creature. The oldest living thing on earth that has remained unchanged. The roach had seen
the dinosaurs come and go. Big deal. Now nuclear weapons. But these roaches seemed to have thrived on a little atomic energy.
Cockroaches are two thousand times as resistant to radiation as are humans. Thus this bunch, exposed to enough rads to kill
any mammal, had only built up an appetite, like a sunburn can do to you after a long day at the beach. They came out with
voracious little feelers, hardly believing their luck at stumbling upon the ocean of blood, the smorgasbord of human flesh.
And so, being nature’s most perfect creature, they dug in and filled their stomachs fast. As they could dimly remember in
their genetic memories to a time when great, thundering lizards had once stampeded through the land, even the biggest dinner
could disappear faster than you could grab a fork. The oldest truth of life on earth: Eat your food fast, before it runs away.
S
tone led them on into the darkening night. The full moon was but a dim cottonball in the far sky, and he had to switch on
his headlights as the rest did the same behind him, sending out swaths of light that cut dusty tunnels through the filthy
air. Even through the high-clad clouds Stone could see the aurora borealis undulating out in rippling sheets of magnetic color.
The bomb blast had obviously shaken it all up, as the colors were far brighter than he had ever seen them—and the curtains
extended as if into the heavens themselves. Excaliber growled behind him on the seat and seemed nervous, sensing somehow the
momentary damage to the earth’s magnetic field.
At last Stone made the decision to stop. They’d been going for days now, on the run, hiding from a nuke blast, then on the
run again. It was too much for even the toughest of men to take forever. He came to a slow stop on a ridge that had a clear
view from all sides. They could bivouac here and, with a guard, get a good night’s sleep. They had all seen what their combined
firepower could do. It made for an easier night’s rest, if nothing else.
The force pulled into a defensive circle on the thirty-yard-wide plateau about twenty feet up from the surrounding land, the
guns of every vehicle aimed outward and down, so that if there was an attack, they would be ready. The Bradley was turned
on a dime in the center of the rise, its big 120-mm cannon facing out into the threatening night.
“You’re getting pretty fucking good with that thing,” Stone yelled up as Bull’s big head popped out of the center of the turret.
“Jesus Christ!” Bull laughed, climbing up to the top of the Bradley III. “Being cooped up inside a tank for twenty hours is
like learning to live inside a metal toilet bowl. I mean”—he nodded good-humoredly back at the others who followed up behind
the tank captain as he jumped down to the ground—”these guys stink.”
Stone smiled. “Stink is the perfume of battle, pal. Be glad you’re still able to sweat. It means you’re alive. The dead can’t
smell themselves rot. Only the living have that pleasure.”
“Keep stinking, keep stinking.” Bull laughed as he lifted his arm and poked his nose under it, taking a deep whiff. Even some
of the usually stone-faced Cheyenne laughed at that. The men seemed to get along pretty well, Stone had come to see, except
for that son of a bitch, Leaping Elk. The rest of the band seemed perfectly willing to let the past lie where it may and start
anew on an equal footing with the white man. But the half-crazed brave couldn’t let it lie.
It started up again as they ate, seated around a low, crackling fire just off to one side of the tank. Stone had warned them
about eating the snakes, promising them better food than that, anyway. He had promptly gone off and bagged a small elk in
the woods with his .44 Redhawk, taking it out with one fast shot to the head. The skull of the mountain elk was almost gone,
but the body, the meat, was untouched. Back at the bivouac, Stone let the Indians expertly slice the thing up and throw it
in thin strips over a grill on the fire. Within minutes they were chewing down a delicious if primitive dinner, eating the
strips in their hands, washed down with mouthfuls of water from their canteens or water gourds. Excaliber ate his three strips
in a second flat and looked up, mouth panting wildly for more. He was on thirds before all the men had even finished their
first helpings. But there was plenty to go around. No one needed to feel greedy.