The Damn Disciples (6 page)

“Faster! Faster!” Yasgar commanded. For the frenzy was not wild enough, the blood not flowing freely enough to satisfy his
cravings, his bloodlust. He pulled a horsewhip from within his robe and snapped it into the air above their heads so that
it made a thunderous crack.

“Dance, you bitches, dance!” Yasgar screamed, his black rat eyes as dark as pits within the fat jowled face, the whip cracking
out again and again, ever closer to their soft spinning flesh. Now they moved faster. Fear was the great motivator. Fear was
what made the world go round. What made empires rise—and fall.

Guru Yasgar’s little empire had begun when he was just a kid. A snot-nosed six-year-old who saw that his mental powers, his
will, were stronger than the other children’s. It was an easy thing to intimidate them, make them give him their lunches,
change, even books and sweaters. He rarely had to fight to back up his aggressiveness. But when he did, those who challenged
him wished they hadn’t. For the child was like a wild beast when he grew angry—biting, spitting, using any weapon at hand.
And he would hurt them. Bones would be broken, eyes would come free from their sockets, teeth from their fleshy grooves.

As the child grew older and entered puberty, he discovered that his willpower worked just as well over the opposite sex, too.
In no time he had a little harem going and was pimping to the other high school kids. His girls brought him
all
the money—for already his wrath was something not to be brought down on oneself. By the age of fifteen, he had killed one
of them. She had made the mistake of stealing from him. Her body was found floating in a nearby river a few months later.
Her head was never recovered.

The young Yasgar’s greatest idol during these formative years was Charles Manson. The way Manson had used his own willpower
and the manipulation of sex was like a Red Sea Scroll for the criminally evolving teen. And once he discovered that he could
get control over groups of men as well—by using the girls to seduce them, by having orgies that he directed, as Manson had
done—the world was his. The great director—of human lives. A role he found most pleasing. By the age of twenty, he had an
arrest sheet five yards long. But the longest the cops could ever put him away for was six months. And even then he got out
in two for good behavior. Which he set up by having two of his fifteen-year-old “virgins” sleep with the warden. It was pitiful
how easy it was to ascend in this world of weak minds and even weaker flesh.

But the law was closing in on him on the East Coast, to which up until now he had confined his operations. So be-coming Guru
Yasgar, he moved out to Colorado, where he knew there were a number of cults, communes, off in the hills. The perfect place
to let his brand of cancer breed. He bought nearly a thousand acres in the southeastern part of the state, below La Junta.
Starting out with an initial two dozen or so followers, within five years Yasgar had hundreds. And having virtual slave labor,
he had been able to build—a city. A minicity of rough-hewn wood cabins and a three-story palace, a bizarre oriental-looking
monstrosity of Guru Yasgar’s own twisted design.

It wasn’t hard to attract more and more followers. Men and women crave sex. Society so represses the animal urges and instincts,
male and female are so embattled and pushed apart, that Yasgar could manipulate it all to his own dark ends. The orgies grew
ever larger, until it was as if Yasgar were directing an epic rather than something of human scale. Yet still he wasn’t satisfied,
still wanted to make his “cleansing” process, which basically brainwashed his new recruits into the ways of his cult—the Perfect
Aura—faster, more efficient. Wanted his control to be total and absolute. Wanted their submission to be a hundred percent.

He began experimenting with drugs—mixtures of heroin, cocaine, Demerol, pentothal, and other mind-altering concoctions. Drugs
used on schizophrenics, on horses, on elephants. And though some died in his attempts to create just the right mixture, at
last success was his. With this Golden Elixir—and the super speeded up brain-“cleansing” techniques he had developed over
the years—Yasgar could take a man or woman and bring them from the outside to total slavehood within three days. He challenged
any other guru or warlord to meet that demanding statistic. Not that there were any newsletters so they could all exchange
brain recipes. But he knew his power. He proved it every minute of every day. And that was what mattered. That a living god
be worshipped by more and more of humanity. Numbers mattered. Perhaps someday the entire world would be his.

Yasgar looked down at them, at the beauteous flesh twisting around, every part of their bodies moving in a different direction
as if they were quicksilver, were streams of rain. He looked at their nubile flesh, their perfect breasts. And began choosing
which ones he would have tonight, would play with back in his “palace.”

“Dance,” he screamed out in commanding deep tones, like the very voice of a living god. “Dance or die,“ he chanted, cracking
out the long bullwhip, which danced above their heads like a wind-blown tendril beneath the ghost moon, -whipping ever closer,
taking little bites out of thighs and breasts, cheeks, shoulders, buttocks. He was maddened with sick desire now, beneath
the robe. He felt flushed with the supreme control of the women, their flesh broken and bleeding beneath his hands. It was
the highest of pleasures that a dark god could feel on this earth.

Stone had just one problem—aside from a broken leg that might or might not have to be amputated and a fever of a 102 that
wouldn’t break. He’d lost all his firepower and his Harley 1200cc bike when he’d been caught in an avalanche and swept right
off the side of a mountain. He wasn’t about to venture out into the wilds without a miniwarwagon. But that meant building
one up—almost from scratch. In spite of the pain that kept streaming up and down the leg, he headed out to the garage to see
just what the hell was there to work with.

A quick perusal of the three cars, two motorcycle frames and assorted spare wheels, engines, and transmissions showed him
that it was possible. It was going to be a pretty ugly-looking hybrid, that was for damn sure. Stone dragged a motorcycle
frame on a dolly over to a hydraulic work station. Attaching the frame to various bolts and clamps, he pressed a button on
the lift’s side and it rose a yard off the ground, making the frame easily accessible from every side. Stone got out the welding
equipment from the corner, an oxy/acetylene job. His father had made sure that there were extras of everything, so that if
one vehicle went, they could strip the others. It meant that from a total of three cars and several bike frames, they could
end up with five or six vehicles over a number of years—progressively uglier, no doubt, but there weren’t too many beauty
contests these days. He attached a chain to the engine, a Harley 1400cc, a little higher powered than his old bike but not
any larger in cubic feet. It was a slightly more advanced model that the major had picked up just months before the whole
ball game collapsed. It would soup the be up to higher acceleration and cruising speeds, though already he’d been near the
limit of his ability to hang on half the time. A more powerful be was a little hard to imagine.

He moved the mobile chain pulley and set the engine inside the bike and he quickly began welding it to the frame. Stone thanked
God now that he had spent three summers working in Sprague’s Auto Repair Shop. By the time he’d left to go to college, he
was one of the best mechanics in the place. Al himself had offered Stone a job starting at $250 per week. Not bad for a teenager.
Now there were hardly enough operating cars left in America to employ a full gar-age of mechanics. Times had changed. When
these were gone, there wouldn’t be any more.

Stone had to grab a visored mask and throw it over his head as the sparks began flying all around him in showers of white.
He felt dizzy from the fever. But the work, the movement, also got blood rushing through his veins, blood with healing antibodies
to fight infection, with fresh bone marrow to begin building new linkages of bone within his fractured leg. It felt good—just
to be alive after what he’d been through recently. Stone got the engine welded in place, then the transmission, all within
three hours. In another two, the seats, the weapons clamps—everything else—was in place as well.

Stone stood back and surveyed what he had wrought. It looked like a child that shouldn’t have been born. Like five different
bikes squeezed into one, which was just about the case. The wheels seemed a little too big, too wide, more like they should
be on a car. The seat was a good foot longer than his old one, as though it belonged to a bike twice as large. The bars pulled
up into the air semibiker style. All in all, it was a mechanical mutation that Evel Knievel would undoubtedly have been proud
of. Now all Stone had to do was give it some teeth.

He stopped off in the kitchen to get some coffee, and saw that the dog was at it again. It was hard for Stone to believe it
could want more, with its stomach already so swollen that it looked as if it had a huge cancerous tumor dragging all the way
down to the ground. But the dog was scrounging around the huge mess of rotting food that it had created the night before,
and sniffing as if it had pretensions to gourmethood. Every few seconds it leaned down and picked up a choice item—pickled
pear, chunk of spam, syrup-coated peach squirming around the floor like a rogue eyeball. Stone avoided the mess completely,
not even vaguely able to deal with cleaning it all up. Maybe if he just let the mutt lick away for a few more hours there
wouldn’t be anything left to clean.

He made himself a whole Thermos full of coffee and, sipping slowly, as it nearly scalded his lips, he headed down the hall
to the weapons room to see what he was going to turn a vehicle into a wagon with. His father had been no slouch in the armaments
department either. But then, being the president of a multinational munitions company didn’t hurt matters any. There was wall-to-wall,
floor to-ceiling steel shelving covered with crates filled with handguns and rifles, ammunition…and the bigger stuff as well.
Mortars, tripod-mounted .50 caliber machine guns that could pierce armor. And even bigger stuff than that—handheld rocket
launchers, the Luchaire 89mm missile system that Stone had used previously, and had found to be very effective, to say the
least. He took it down from the shelf. The last one; after this there were no more. He put it in an industrial cart with wheels
and pushed the cart on around the square room, which contained an amazing amount of firepower, considering. Stone was trying
to walk without the crutch already. It hurt like he was being tortured—but with the steel band tightly around the broken area,
it seemed to at least hold the whole thing together. He knew he was doing wonders for his body and would be a complete wreck
by the time he hit fifty. On the other hand, since he probably wouldn’t live past thirty, he wasn’t going to start worrying
about it.

Next he took a small crate of rockets—a half-dozen of them, then a .50-caliber machine gun, with automatic belt feed. Stone
walked on around the shelves, which towered up above him filled to overflow with the products of the dark side of man’s technological
expertise. But if the other bastards had them, Stone wanted them too. And worse. He reached up and took down a sawed-off Browning
12-gauge autofire shotgun. That would do nicely—and a hundred rounds of ammo. Then, for personal use, a Beretta PM 12S, stripped-down
version, 9mm, and with twenty-, thirty-, even fifty-round clips that could be fired singly or on full auto, emptying a whole
load o in seconds. And finally—for his takeout handgun—another Ruger Red Hawk .4d with twelve-inch barrel. The thing would
have made Clint East-wood green with envy. He strapped it on. It made Stone feel very secure.

He pushed the shopping cart of destruction out of the room and back down the hall. He was walking into the lion’s den. How
did the poem go? “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Well, it wasn’t a good night—it was a rotting, screaming night.
And he wasn’t going gentle, but kicking, blasting his resistance to the last second. Back in the garage, Stone used the block
and tackle to haul up the machine gun first. He set it down right between the raised handlebars like a water buffalo’s horns,
and getting the right-size steel clamps to hold it in place, welded it down. He tested it, turning the wheel back and forth.
The machine gun was set as if in concrete. Then the Luchaire missile tube—about three feet long, twelve inches wide—to the
side of the be.

It was slow going, making sure the ball-bearing hinges were angled just right. For even a slight angle off made the tube scrape
against the be when he opened it out. But at last, with a little more fiddling with the welding torch, Stone had that set
in too. Then the rack for the shells right below it so he could pop one out from the top of the spring-loaded container tube
by just pushing a release button. It gave him the ability to load and fire the 89mm rocket within five seconds.

Finally Stone took some steel boxes from one of the shelves of the garage and mounted them as well on the back of the bike.
Storage for ammunition, tent, med supplies, and spare clothes. After spending nearly the whole day on the project, he stood
back and looked. It was definitely one of the weirder gasoline vehicles ever to roll along the planet earth. Even the dog,
when he came snooping around from its floor mopping, made a sucked-in face and let out a howl of derision, like “You expect
me to ride on that hunk of shit?”

But when Stone lowered the completely assembled motorcycle back down to the ground and sat atop the thing trying it out—testing
the feel of the bars, the give of the seat—the pit bull jumped on behind him and began sniffing around, snarling and biting
at the thick leather as if he wasn’t sure if it was enemy or friend.