Warlord's Revenge (14 page)

Stone walked around in a little circle, trying to undo the cramps that had begun setting in along his right leg. He had been
shot, wounded, slammed, he’d taken every goddamn thing you could do to the human body. It was a wonder he could walk at all.
But this particular spasming pain along his calf had become intolerable. He sat down on a bam-door-size chunk of roadway that
lay buried sideways in the dirt and massaged the leg with his hands, trying to work the pain free.

Out of the corner of his eye Stone saw the pitbull run off about thirty yards to a whole bunch of the wrecked vehicles, all
lying piled among one another, as if it were a burial ground for dead automobiles. Stone glanced up to gauge the intentions
of the dead-man’s sky and didn’t like what he saw. Some of the darker, ringlike radioactive clouds were starting to swoop
down again, as if heading toward the earth, to strangle it in their poison rains.

He lowered his head to whistle for the pitbull, and his eyes opened wide. As the animal played atop the roof of a rusting
van, so that its leg broke through here and there as it pranced about, Stone saw something it didn’t. A brown blanket of moving
creatures coming out of the other wrecks that surrounded it. Tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, sweeping out
of their filthy, rusted metal lairs with a rapid motion, brown feelers rippling madly as they searched out the enemy that
had intruded in their ranks.

“Dog!” Stone screamed at the top of his lungs, cupping both hands around his mouth. “Look out, look down, down!” Stone pointed
with both hands toward the approaching armies of brown horror as he started hobbling back toward the bike, a few yards behind
him. The dog followed his motion, and as its head went down, its own eyes opened in abject terror. The animal was not afraid
of another living animal on this earth, but bugs—especially cockroaches—were another story. It let out an ear-shattering,
high-pitched squeal of terror, baying up into the air for a second. Then it looked down again and saw that it was completely
cut off. The things were coming from everywhere, the ground for a good twenty feet in all directions just a moving ocean of
brown and black roaches. All coming straight toward him.

Stone reached the Harley and started it up. Again he cupped his hands and yelled out to the canine. “Jump, you son of a bitch.
Jump, you hear me?” He pointed from the dog to the bike a few times and then started the engine, revving it hard. He knew
it was mean—for now the animal was afraid he was going to leave it, and that it was about to be eaten wholesale by an army
of radiation’s most beloved little pets.

But it worked. For as Stone slowly let out the clutch and started the 1200-cc forward, the pitbull took one final look as
the front ranks of the roaches reached the very edge of the brown Caddy roof he was standing on. Flexing his’muscular legs
down like little steel pistons, the bullterrier suddenly launched himself forward from the side. It was like a furry rocket
had taken off, as the combined strength of the animal’s innate power, mixed with its adrenaline at the approaching roach army,
with a dash of pure hate at Stone for daring to leave it, all combined to propel it forward. Stone watched in amazement as
the animal curled itself up into a ball so that it actually seemed to catch wind at a right angle to keep it going.

At last, after a flight of perhaps twenty-five feet, just enough to land it in the very outer reaches of the wriggling brown
bodies, the dog came down hard into a small group of them, squashing dozens beneath its paws. Letting out a yelp of disgust,
the bullterrier shot forward, darting over the rows of roaches like a hundred yard dash prospect for the Olympics. Stone started
the bike forward, coming up at an angle so that he would intersect the dog just past the blanket of brown. As he came by at
about fifteen miles per hours, Ex-caliber, at a full run, jumped again and came down like a swan with both wings cut off into
the backseat, sliding forward and slamming into Stone so that he almost dislodged him.

Stone somehow managed to keep the Electraglide upright, motivated by the desire not to end up as cockroach soufflé on this
beautiful radioactive evening. With both of them bouncing around like two psychotic men in a tub, the Harley shot forward
over the rough broken pieces of roadway beneath the overpass. Stone did all he could to keep the bike going, as they shot
back and forth between the oddly angled slabs like billiard balls. At last he came down hard on solid road, and they were
suddenly upright and on basically level ground. Stone floored the Harley without even looking back, shooting along the two-laner
that headed due west straight into the darkest part of the radioactive cloud cover, the burial blanket for mankind.

The advance scouts of the cockroach army reached the roof of the rusted Caddy, and their four flanks joined feelers, coming
up from every part of the car. Their waving tendrils patted along the nearly powdered crystal surface of the rusted metal
and up into the air, as if their quarry were somehow hanging there like a balloon. But however he had done it, he was gone.
A fair-sized dinner disappeared just when it was within mandibles’ reach. After scurrying around the car for nearly twenty
minutes, as the information that the dog had disappeared was conveyed to all, the insects began retreating back into their
filth-coated homes inside the decayed hulks, in ravenous and pissed-off moods.

S
tone didn’t even pause to take a breath until they’d gone ten miles. The thought of the blanket of little squirming brown
creatures did something to the center of his guts. Like his dog, Stone had problems with the idea of being eaten alive by
insects too. But apparently that had just been a pocket of them, as they weren’t swarming out from every tree. Still, Stone
realized he’d been seeing more and more of the little bastards since the bomb had gone off. The radiation either forced them
from their burrows—or perhaps they were attracted by the multitude of dead things to eat. Carnivorous cockroaches. It made
him shudder. In a few more years, if things kept going the way they were, there would doubtless be only roaches, sharks, and
rats left on the damn planet, anyway. And they’d look around one day and realize that all their victims were gone. And they’d
turn and stare at one another—and then go at it tooth and nail, until there was nothing left on the planet. Not a single living,
breathing thing.

“There I go again,” Stone said, berating himself as he eased back in the seat a little. “I must have the most fatalistic brain
this side of the torture chambers.” But when he thought about it, the sheer fact that he was alive and not in the gizzards
of an entire suburb of roaches was something to cheer about. They drove on what was fairly flat land for about twenty miles,
and Stone made good time. Then the two-laner turned to an asphalt one-laner that seemed to have been in the wrenching hands
of an earthquake or something. As he rode along it, the road got so bad that, in disgust, Stone at last just rode right off
the road and through the meadows and meandering hills.

But by twilight the sloping rises had turned to foothills, and the going got rougher and rougher, the trees in thicker bunches
so that he kept having to skirt dense sections, zigzagging all over the damn Rockies. He tried to push it as night fell fast
but found it almost impossible to keep going, so rough was the terrain; so dim was the light that soon they were moving just
a few miles per hour, bouncing up and down like yo-yos as the bike’s tires went over ditches, bumps, every damn thing that
mottled the flesh of the hills.

At last, exasperated and wanting to keep going but knowing, after his experience that morning, how easy it was to die if you
didn’t watch your ass, Stone came to a stop as he spotted a bunch of boulders side by side at the foot of a thousand-foot
slope off to the left. He pulled the Harley right up to the edge of one of the high boulders and, taking a few supplies along,
hauled himself up the ten feet or so to the top, where a fairly flat space about six feet in diameter would make passable
sleeping quarters. The dog made several running jumps, and then, using the seat of the Harley as a launching pad, it managed
to jump up so that its front paws just made the top, and with some frantic clawing against the rock below it with its back
paws, the dog at last pulled itself up and quickly turned to survey the area below and around them. The first thing it ever
did was check out the defensive and offensive capabilities of any situation. It was bred into the animal’s genes to think,
live, breathe, and dream of battle. Of tigers, and men with knives, of unknown nightmares, creatures that lived in its unconscious,
its deepest, darkest fears.

And it swore it saw some of them skulking around off in the shadows of the trees that spread off around them. The pitbull
whined and looked up at Stone, who was kneeling, spreading out a bedroll along the rock.

“Oh, don’t be such a fucking coward,” Stone admonished the animal as it sighted—or thought it did—something in a thicket of
bush about thirty yards off. At last the pitbull settled down, folding its legs under it and bringing its head to rest on
its front paws. It appeared to be asleep. But that’s only what it wanted any attackers in the dark to believe. Actually it
always had at least one eye opened just a slit, surveying the entire area. Stone found the most comfortable position he could
muster up on a piece of quarter-inch-thick blanket atop a granite boulder sheared smooth by Ice Age glaciers. Which wasn’t
very comfortable. He knew the dog would keep an eye on things. Sometimes the animal’s general anxiety was very useful, at
least to Stone, for knowing that the slightest crack of a twig in the woods would have the animal up and ready to go airborne,
Stone actually became relaxed enough to fall into a quick and deep sleep.

When he awoke, it was almost pitch-black out, but for the eerie glow of the aurora forcing its light through the high clouds.
He sat up and saw Excaliber standing by the edge of the boulder. His nose and tail were lined up as he stood, set in his pointing—and
hunting—stance. Stone followed the line of canine fire and saw eyes, three pairs of them—red and burning in the darkness,
almost as if from their own light. He could dimly make out large, dark, furred shapes just at the line of trees. They looked
larger than wolves, but Stone couldn’t see clearly. The pitbull was emitting an almost subsonic growl that Stone just heard
the edge of. But he knew the night eaters out there heard it. For similar low but equally threatening sounds emerged.

Stone knew they saw him now, and he loosened his Uzi, which he had worn in his sleep, around his chest in its holster. Apparently
that was too much, for the red eyes seemed to blaze brightly for a moment like a spark fanned with wind, and then they were
gone, just like that, and where they had stood were just pockets of darkness and the occasional call from a nervous bird.
Stone lay himself back down as the pitbull continued to hold its stance. This time it took him almost an hour to fall asleep
again. And his dreams were bad.

When he awoke again, he could see that it was morning. Or what would have to pass as morning, anyway. The light dribbled down
in gray puddles through the black clouds that rolled by, miles up. Stone knew the sun must have been positively burning down
through the upper atmosphere, bright as a searchlight, for more light was actually reaching him this morning than he’d seen
for days. Still, he found himself yearning for real sun, blue sky. The things one took for granted seemed suddenly priceless
when they were snatched away. The constant darkness was getting to him. Making him feel more like a corpse than a man. Living
in the darkness and semidarkness like bugs and spiders hidden beneath logs and deep in caves.

Stone and the pitbull scrambled down the side of the boulder and quickly mounted the Harley. There wasn’t a trace of their
night visitors, though Stone kept his holster’s flap open and the safety off on his Uzi autopistol. At least he could see
in the gray mist and was able to get the bike up to about twenty miles per hour; it was still a bumpy journey as they bounced
through the foothills. Then they were back on some kind of road that cut up into the higher mountain ahead, on the other side
of which Stone calculated the road should bring him to within a few miles of Keenesburg. It better.

Stone positively floored the Electraglide once he saw that the road wasn’t in terrible shape. It was funny how some of them
went like rotten fruit and others seemed unscathed, ready to stand up for another hundred years. Probably all depended on
who was getting paid off when they had been built—and how inferior the quality of Mafia concrete had been, Stone thought cynically.

He reached the peak of the final mountain around three in the afternoon and could see down for miles onto the far side. He
took out his field binocs and tried to find the town, or whatever it was. There—perhaps ten miles off to the west —was some
sort of habitation. Though all he could see was the cluster of buildings, nothing in greater detail than yards wide. Stone
put the field glasses away and, checking around to make sure that the damn dog wasn’t off chasing a venomous snake or grizzly
bear or some damn thing, took off down the descending road.

They had gone perhaps two miles when Stone, just rounding a curve, had to slam on the brakes to avoid crashing into a man
walking along the road. He was as naked as the day he was born and covered with wounds and sores dripping a thick pus from
numerous red openings. Stone could see they were radiation burns, for the man’s arms and back were covered with the raised
red welts that were literally melting off him—like Leaping Elk’s blob of a hand before he had been sent to hell. But this
one didn’t seem dangerous, just out of it.
Zombie
might be a better word for it, for as Stone came alongside the slowly walking figure, he could see that the man’s eyes were
gone as old marbles, dead and dull. He was just somehow clomping one foot down, then the other, mumbling something to himself
as he walked.