War Weapons (16 page)

Then she was lying atop him again, and she raised herself up and found his manhood with her hand. She placed the swollen tip
just inside the flesh petals beneath her reddish fur and then slowly lowered herself on it. Her eyes closed, and her lips
parted, as a hiss of air came from between her teeth. Slowly the spear of turgid flesh slid deeper and deeper into the recesses
of her body. Stone felt his own urgent writhings as his body and limbs seemed to vibrate. From where he didn’t know, but suddenly
he felt infused with strength, and he pumped up hard into her to meet her descending flesh.

Suddenly he plunged all the way into her, to the very hilt of himself, and she seemed almost to half faint so that he had
to catch her with his hands as her face came down toward him. She was so beautiful by the dancing flames of the fire, her
black hair spread down her shoulders and back, her slim, perfect body above him, her femaleness fitted over him like a sheath
over a sword. Suddenly he thrust hard up into her, overcome with pure animal lust. She gasped and sank down deeper onto him,
opening, opening like the petals of a flower open for the sun. And before he knew it, Stone was driving up into her again
and again, his hands gripped firmly around her waist so he held her in check above him, while his hips just pistoned into
her, driving his staff to the very depths of her burning core.

Then she seemed to go mad atop him, riding him, bouncing up and down to meet his thrusts. Her mouth opened wider and wider,
as if she were a fish gasping for air, and her breasts seemed to swell and grow, the nipples rising, begging to be licked
and bitten. Her whole body seemed to glow and pulse with a reddish aura, and he could feel the electric currents between them,
the very primal energies of man and woman, mingling with and recharging each other. Then they were both going mad, over the
edge, devoid of humanness, but just pure animal spirit desiring nothing more than to crush themselves against the other, take
and be taken, push and open, explode and ooze.

Stone could feel himself at the edge, a lava of lust building deep inside himself. And he could feel by her moans and gasps
and by the increasing jerking spasms of her body as she seemed like a spineless puppet, writhing around atop him, that she
was almost there too. And he pushed even harder, deeper, until he could be no farther into her, her soul, and he held himself
there, extended to his full length. She seemed to go mad, flopping atop him like a fish out of water, her whole body snapped
and jerked, her head rolled from side to side as she slid down on him, taking every molecule of him. Then she screamed, and
her back spasmed up and down its length and she ground down against his stomach, wrapping herself completely around him. Stone
pulsed and exploded inside of her in a nova of heat and gasps. He felt the steaming liquid rise in him, and then, like a geyser
of steam, he erupted into her, pumping, pulsing like a beast alive within her.

“
Yanna
,” she said minutes later as she lay naked and covered with a sheen of sweat and half the healing paste she had smeared on
him, and she looked almost greenish over her coppery skin as the low flames of the fire wriggled back and forth in waves of
red and orange. “Yanna,” she said again in the softest of whispers, tracing her finger softly up and down his spine as he
lay facedown, naked, on a shining black pelt.

“
Yanna?
” he asked in a whisper from out of the love-scented semidarkness.

“Lover,” she answered like a dove cooing. “The giver of love, really, is how you would say it in my language.” So he was a
yanna
, a giver of love—and a
nadi
,—giver of death. If he had to choose one, Stone thought as he reached out and traced the perfect curve of her pomegranate
breasts, then he would make love, not war.

W
HEN HE awoke the next morning, Stone’s eyes were fixed right on the opening at the top of the tepee, so he saw immediately
that the day was cold. Silver sky and blank walls of clouds rolled overhead like an endless sheet of metal. He felt as if
he were on fire—the temperature in the tepee had risen considerably overnight. He reached for her but she wasn’t there, and
Stone rose up to look around. As he did he realized that—lo and behold—he could actually move. He didn’t feel great, to say
the least. Everything hurt like he had received about a million razor cuts and a stomping from a pack of dinosaurs. But as
he hadn’t even been able to support his body the night before, anything was an improvement.

“I’m here,” a voice said, kneeling over the fire. Stone smelled strong odors wafting over toward him with an almost palpable
presence. “Just cooking some breakfast.” She smiled over at him. “Man like you needs to eat.” She wore only a sort of loincloth,
hardly more than a strap of leather around her triangle of moist, reddish hair, and a deerskin vest, open down the middle
so her breasts stood out, draped on each side by the soft tan hide. Stone felt himself starting to get excited again and could
hardly believe it. He should have been dead—yet here he was, ready to fuck his brains out. The women was either the sexiest
thing he had ever laid eyes on or she was a witch. There was no other answer.

“Are you a witch?” He grinned as he propped himself up on a bunched-up old bison head that she used for a pillow—clothes hung
on its horns, which circled out from both sides around the end of the bear-fur bed. She carried a steaming bowl toward him
and kneeled down on the bed so that their legs were just touching.

“Yes, a witch,” she answered as she lifted a wooden spoon full of a porridgelike substance. “A witch over men —whose hearts
or bodies I crave. A man like you.” He started to answer, but as he opened his lips she thrust the spoonful of hot chow into
his mouth and he gulped it down hard. It took him a good ten seconds to even sort out the taste—something like oatmeal and
chopped liver.

“What the hell is it?” Stone asked as she held a second steaming spoonful up to his lips.

“This time I’ll save you your stomach.” She laughed. “And I won’t tell you—remember what happened last night. All that matters
is that it’s super-high protein and will help your body recover.” She pushed it into his mouth, and as his stomach hadn’t
rejected the first load, Stone took it down, and damned if it didn’t taste pretty good once you got past how it looked and
smelled. After he had finished off two bowls of the stuff and nearly half a gallon of some “medicinal” liquid she gave him,
Meyra helped him get dressed as she got into her things too.

“The others are waiting for us,” she said to him as she stood up on her toes and kissed him quickly on the mouth. “Are you
ready to go? There is much to do and little time. Can you walk?”

“Yes,” Stone said, pushing her off so he could try to walk around on his own. “I think so.” He made a wide circle around the
inside of the tepee. He felt light-headed, but nothing like the totally numb, leg-dropping zombie state he had been in.

“It would seem your treatment worked, Doctor,” Stone said, going over to her and pulling her close, up against his bearskin
coat, cupping her ass through her own thick garb.

“It is passion that keeps a man alive,” she said with a faint smile. “All ancient medicines and magic systems are based on
that. I just brought out—shall we say—what is already inherent in you.”

“I’ll say,” Stone said, looking deep into those eyes he couldn’t get enough of. “Pulled out, and up, and every which way.
And I wouldn’t mind doing it a—”

“Come on, lover boy,” she said, starting toward the exit of the tepee, half pulling him along by the collar. “We’re holding
up a meeting.” Stone walked outside behind her as she shut the bison-skin flap of the Indian structure. His eyes took a few
seconds adjusting to the light of the cloud-shrouded day. Both eyes, he was pleased to note, were still working, albeit at
half mast. Stone stumbled forward a few steps, until she took him by the elbow and led him down a dirt path past two other
tepees. They came to a small fire with two long logs on each side of it. Stone wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but
what he saw was definitely not it. The eight or so Cheyenne who sat before him hardly looked the type of Indian that Stone
had in his mind of how Indians should look. None of them wore bearskin but denim jackets of all different colors, jeans, and
boots. Several of them had earphones on, Walkmans attached to their belts, and seemed to be listening to jazz or rock that
Stone could dimly hear floating through the insect cracklings and fire poppings of the early morning.

He sat down on an empty space on one of the logs, and Meyra sat beside him. He looked around at the other faces for jealousy
or anger—after all, he had just spent the night with one of their women. But he didn’t see it—just a sort of removed curiosity
about him. And neither hostility nor friendliness was offered.

“You guys don’t look like Indians,” Stone said, knowing as he said it that it was the wrong thing to say.

“And you don’t stink like a white man,” one of the others, several scars gouging along one side of his face, replied. “How
the hell are Indians supposed to look?”

“Hey, lighten up,” Meyra said, looking around at them. “Guy almost lost his life fighting the general. Put his cock right
on the line.” Stone was slightly startled by her use of the curse and then realized that he was again judging everything by
some notions of an America that was long gone. Women shouldn’t curse, Indians shouldn’t wear denim and have Walkmans. He tried
to banish all the bullshit from his head and just take them as they were.

“So what’s the scene?” one of them directly across from Stone asked, his hair slicked back beebop-style, a gold earring in
one ear. He had the same copper skin and strong features that Meyra did, and Stone knew instantly that he was her brother.
“Are you—the commander of the tank force that was captured? Commander Stone?” he asked.

“That’s me.” Stone smiled back, feeling friendly toward all of them, considering the night he had just been given as a kind
of supreme reward for having been hacked to within an inch of his life. And now that he had been with her, Stone couldn’t
say he wouldn’t go through it all again. “But as for being a ‘commander,’” he explained, “If you saw the outcome of my attack,
you’d know that’s not a word that should be used in front of my name.”

“Don’t bust your balls—there’s always someone ready to do it for you,” the Indian, apparently the leader of the group, said,
offering a slight smile. “You were set up—we saw them baiting a trap days ago but didn’t know who the hell they were baiting
until it was too late.”

“Tell me—my crew, the tanks, there was a dog…” The words spilled out of Stone’s mouth in a waterfall of worry.

“One of the tanks was destroyed. The men were taken away. As for a dog, sorry, Stone, I didn’t see nothing. But men I was
probably two miles off, looking through these cheap-shit binocs.” He snapped his fingers against a pair that hung around his
neck. “Name’s Little Bear—named after my dad.” He held out a hand. “Glad to meet you, Stone. I’ll be honest with you—I’ve
never been a great fan of the white man. I mean, let’s face it, all the great killers were white, and you don’t need no Plato
to tell you that. But any enemy of Genera] Patton is a friend of mine—especially someone willing to give his skin. We know
of his missile too. Though just recently did we learn of his decision to use it. We have a contact on the inside there. A
missile tech—a friend of Sis’s here.” He pointed with his eyes toward Meyra, who looked into the fire with deep concern. Little
Bear spat into the flames, and the little droplets sizzled and popped into midair.

“He would destroy our entire land, Stone—if he sets that fucking thing off. A land we have inhabited for thousands of years—gone.
But we’ve had no way to stop him—there are just these ten of us. The rest of the tribe is split up over the whole northern
part of Colorado and up into Wyoming. The NAA bastards tracked down over half of what was left of my tribe and exterminated
them—women, children, sleeping in their tepees. We must stay in small roving groups now to survive—never staying in one place
for more than a week or two, always leaving false trails. They have been sending out their search-and-destroy teams of choppers
and tanks on a monthly basis.
You
tell us—that’s why we called this meeting. Do
you
know of a way in—a way to destroy him once and for all? A way to avenge our people?”

Stone thought hard and looked down at the ground as if the answer might have been written in the hard dirt. He wasn’t quite
ready for all this. He had been close to being ant pâté about ten hours before—and now they were asking him questions of military
strategy that Napoleon might have gotten a stomachache from.

“You say you have a person on the inside,” Stone said without looking up as he got a sudden cramp in his neck and his gut
started tightening with tension. He suddenly realized he wasn’t going to get another moment’s rest. He was going to be back
in the fray—instantly. “What does he do—what’s his rank.”

“It’s a woman,” Meyra spoke up. “A friend of mine from high school from a nearby town who was recruited by the NAA about a
year ago when they first started establishing their base. At first she hoped, as did many people in the territory, that they
would be a positive force. But they weren’t, and soon she saw that. But there’s an unwritten policy of the NAA that they don’t
tell their recruits, Stone —and that is, no one leaves. Alive, anyway. So she met with me several times, relaying information
to us about the state of things in there. We know where the main munitions are, the missile silo, even Patton’s headquarters.
But we just haven’t felt we had the strength to mount a full attack.”

“Do you have any explosives?” Stone asked, looking up so a sliver of sunlight caught him in the face and the entire band of
Cheyenne could suddenly see just how badly Martin Stone had been beaten. Any lingering animosity they might have had toward
the “white man” instantly vanished.