War Weapons (21 page)

D
UST WAS falling everywhere. That was the first thing Stone saw when his eyes opened. The air was tilled with a billion specks
of spinning dust, and he could barely breathe. Voices yelled out to one another to see if everyone else was still alive. He
rose and looked around. Everything was covered with the cement dust. It was like a ghostland, a land where nothing was real.
The concrete frame of the tunnel had held, but it had poured down a shit-load of particles and chunks from the shock of the
explosion, which had roared through the prairie with an atomic vengeance. Stone could see shapes here and there, some of them
moving. He ripped a piece of material from his jacket, which was in tatters now, and wrapped it around his mourn to keep out
the dust. That was a little better. Suddenly he heard a whine and saw what looked like a gray turtle crawling along. But as
it charged forward and the coating partially blew off, Stone saw that it was the dog, still hobbling on, unstoppable by anything
God or man had to offer. Stone grabbed the pitbull and felt tears come to his eyes, so dirty and fucked up did the animal
appear. Yet still he was bright-eyed, tail wagging and trusting Stone to lead him through an unfathomably dangerous world.

Yeah, Stone thought with a deep twinge of bitterness as he saw what had been wrought all around him. He had been doing a great
job of leading them so far. He ripped another piece of material and made a similar gas mask for the dog. The pitbull tried
to shake off the cloth wrapped around its nose and jaws, but Stone slapped it hard on the nose twice. Excaliber looked at
him with hurt eyes but stopped trying to dislodge the thing.

Another shape moved, ghostly grit-covered arms and hands reaching up from the roadway. Stone felt a shiver run up and down
his spine. It was like a horror movie, like one’s worst nightmare. But he resisted the infantile impulse to run and helped
the shape to its feet.

“Meyra, you’re alive, thank God,” Stone said when he saw her face beneath the coating. He hugged the Cheyenne woman close
so that a little cloud of the particles lifted from her, puffed off by the air pressure of their bodies meeting. As the roar
that still rumbled through the ground slowly ceased and the dust cleared a little, they looked around and saw that they were
all okay—those who had made it in, anyway. Stone didn’t even want to think about those outside. With the beams of their various
lights cutting through the dusty darkness like laser swords Stone walked to the entrance and saw that it was covered with
sand, chunks of concrete from the roadway above embedded within like jewels set into a pendant. He poked into the mini-avalanche
with a piece of narrow steel rod he saw on the road, and it went in over a yard, still encountering resistance. It would take
them forever to dig out. But they had a tank.

“Bring the Bradley up and push her through that shit,” Stone told Bull, who headed back up into the tank with his three-man
crew. “Slowly, slowly,” Stone cautioned him as the tank came forward, the Cheyenne pulling their all-terrains off to each
side. Bull turned the turret completely around so that the 120-mm was facing backward and set the front of the steel vehicle
right up against the side of the collapse. Then he started slowly forward, inch by inch. The tank went into the obstacle like
an elephant into a hundred-foot tree. At first the whole surface seemed to push back easily, then the Bradley met more resistance.
Bull slowly increased the power so the treads were grinding against the concrete tunnel floor, sending out glowing sparks
into the darkness like a hailstorm of fireflies. But slowly the wall slid backward until suddenly with a rush of air and dust
the whole thing collapsed in an outward direction, and the tank lumbered through and into the outside world, the deadly world
that awaited them.

The rest of them rode their all-terrains up over the yard or so of debris that still covered the opening and headed fifty
or sixty feet out onto the prairie. The sky was a throbbing orange-green, a sick dead color. Then they all stopped and turned
to see what the hand of man had wrought. The mushroom cloud was still rising to the clouds and above, going ten, fifteen miles
up. The gargantuan funnel of mega death glowed like a furnace, writhing in dark oranges and reds, as if a beast were caged
inside, a killing beast that had been released and now was caged again inside the Day-Glo mushroom-shaped cloud that must
have been a good two miles wide. Now that the shock waves and the radiation and every other goddamn thing that a hydrogen
warhead puts out when it blows its stack had passed them, it was eerily quiet, without a sound, except for a very deep low-pitched
hum, almost subsonic, that seemed to vibrate up from the very earth beneath their feet.

Stone remembered the words of the men who had been responsible for directing the Manhattan Project—the top-secret operation
that had created the A-bomb—Robert Oppen-heimer, upon witnessing the first test blast. “I am become death, the destroyer of
worlds.” It was worse than that, Stone thought bitterly to himself as he stared at the grave of mankind, the end of the line
for a species that didn’t have enough brains to know not to blow its own fucking brains out. The burning cloud was evil; he
could feel it laughing within the fires, laughing at all that it consumed. What other creature in the entire universe was
so fortunate—it was created by its master, who then fed himself to it to assuage its hunger. What other energy or entity anywhere
received such kind and generous treatment?

Stone looked frantically around for the second tank—containing Hartstein, Bo, and three of the other men. He rode forward
slowly about fifty yards out from the highway, which was crumbled up into little chunks everywhere and reached a slight turn
in the rift. Stone saw instantly that if he’d thought it was bad below, it was a thousand times worse here, where everything
had received the full impact of the blast. One of the three-wheelers and the other tank had been right in the path of the
waves of radiation that had poured out—unshielded as Stone and the others had been by the wall of concrete and earth that
stood between them and the explosion. Little Bear and Carla lay sprawled by their all-terrain—what was left of it, anyway.
For the vehicle had been twisted, melted large tires just pieces of bubbling putty. And the bodies … Stone could hardly bear
to look at the melted human flesh dripping off bone. Eyeballs, teeth, all oozed down floating in a red mush that spread out
around the two of them and collected in a pool.

The second Bradley, which had come to within a hundred and fifty feet of making it into the tunnel, was on its side like some
toppled beast of the jungle, looking somehow absurd and ridiculous in its death, though it had been powerful and commanding
of respect just minutes before. And Stone could see as he walked through the piles of hot sand that gathered at his ankles
that there was no one alive inside. Not with the metal on the armor glowing with a dull pulsing red, the entire tank throbbing
with an aura of radiation like a thing alive. Not with a foul, oily smoke drifting up from small cracks here and there. Stone
prayed mat they had died fast in there.

“He’s dead,” a voice said softly from behind him, and Stone turned slowly, feeling more and more like a zombie, like a psychiatric
patient on a heavy dose of Thorazine. It must have been the radiation he had absorbed—they’d had to have taken some—that on
top of every other fucking thing he’d been through in the last forty-eight hours. He was overloaded. With everything. Almost
with life itself. He felt sick, in the pit of his stomach, the bottom of his soul.

“Yes, I know they’re dead,” Stone said in a monotone, thinking she meant the recruits who he had led into hell, who lay forever
entombed in an atomic crypt with a half-life of two thousand years.

“No, my brother. That’s his body over by the edge.” She looked down, her eyes bloodshot and wet.

“Are you sure?” Stone asked in a whisper. “They were pretty … beat up. Perhaps…” He lied knowing full well who they were.

“His earring,” she said, holding it out. “It withstood everything, isn’t it funny?” She started laughing as she cupped the
still shining golden earring shaped like a hawk’s feather in her hand. “It’s owner is dead, but it shines on. That’s good
for jewelry advertising. They should really tell everyone that it’s atomic bomb-proof—I’m sure they could sell millions.”
She was laughing hysterically now. Laughing and crying all at once, on the very brink of madness. Stone reached out and slapped
her hard across the face, and she glared at him angrily. She lunged forward and tried to strike at him, a clawful of fingernails
to the eyes, but he caught her hand in his own at the last second.

“Good, get mad,” Stone said, looking her firmly in the eyes, holding her in his grip like a vise. “Because if you mourn, you’ll
die. The only way forward, through all this, is anger.” Stone knew that they couldn’t let their armor down for a second—they
had been poisoned. He didn’t know how much, but he knew they’d need every ounce of the will to live to come through this.
And it was worse than that. For already an immense cloud of fallout was building high above them. Stone could see the clouds
of dust spiraling like dark galaxies above them, spreading slowly out miles up. Tomorrow they would drop. Tomorrow, and the
next day, and the next for a week or two, they would come down in the winds and the rain. And God help those who were caught
directly beneath it, who drank water with radioactive particles in them, ate meat, or even breathed it in. They’d have to
get the hell out of there—and fast.

“Well, he didn’t give his life in vain,” Meyra said. Her copper skin had a reddish tinge to it, as did Stone’s. “Patton is
dead—the madman is dead. The exterminator of my people is dead.”

“Yeah, we won,” Stone whispered with a look of deep weariness and pain. “But it’s still not over, baby. Not by a long shot.”
He reached out and held her in his arms, there on the edge of nowhere, as he looked off at the burning desolation that spread
off in every direction. It was like the smoking ruins of Hiroshima—every cactus, every bush, every tree gone, wiped out as
if they’d never existed. Just a flat-land of dust and a building dam of fallout above that looked as if it would burst and
pour down on them forever. And Stone prayed, as he held her close against him, pressing her breasts against his chest, crushing
her flesh as he tried to feel her life energy, tried to feel something beautiful in the midst of this hell. Stone prayed that
the madman was in fact dead. That his very atoms were spinning in the twisting mushroom cloud on the horizon. That he was
gone. Gone like Little Bear, gone like Bo and Hartstein, gone like all the hundreds, perhaps thousands, that he had caused
to die. Gone beyond, beyond, beyond.

A THIRD WORLD WAR HAS LEFT AMERICA A LAWLESS AND BATTERED LAND. BUT AMID THE PILLAGE AND HEARTLESS KILLING, ONE BRAVE YOUNG
MAN HAS BECOME AMERICA’S LAST HOPE FOR JUSTICE AND FREEDOM…

In the barbarous, collapsed civilization that is now his country, Mafia crime lords, bikers, toothless bandits, and New American
Army troops vie to get Martin Stone. But his most dangerous enemy by far is the would-be savior who calls himself General
Patton III, whose insanely inspired blueprint for what’s left of the world is a sweeping, brutally enforced state of peace—but
a peace of slaves, a peace of the dead.

Parton has vowed to take Stone out if it’s the last thing he ever does. Stone knows the general is a man who keeps his word.
The only hope for the Last Ranger is for him to take out the granie-jawed tyrant first.

Martin Stone is

THE LAST RANGER

America’s Last Hope in America’s Darkest Age