Warlord's Revenge (16 page)

“Well, looks like those two hit it off,” Stone said with a look of disbelief. Whenever he thought he was starting to understand
the pitbull’s modus operandi, the animal suddenly did something completely out of character. Sometimes he wondered if
he
was the one on the end of the psychological leash in this whole human/animal relationship.

“Just bring your bike on in here, mister. Mister?”

“Howzer,” Stone lied, not wanting the old man to know who he was. It could be his life if he did.

“Well, you just bring that ol’ ve-hi-cle in here.” He led the way, sweeping the cobwebs out of their path from the low rafters.
The place obviously hadn’t been used for a long, long time. “Now, this ain’t your Hilton Hotel or nothing,” Pliers said, “but
she’s clean, no rats around here—and no leaks neither,” he added proudly, pointing up at the ceiling, which, as far as Stone
could see, didn’t show any signs of water damage.

“Used to be a roofer, among other things,” the man said boastfully. “Other people may let their houses fall down around them,”
he said cryptically, “but old Pliers takes care of what’s his.”

“Well, this will do just fine,” Stone said, parking the bike behind an old stall so it wasn’t visible from the front. “Just
fine.” He headed back out to the yard and saw Excaliber still twisting in tight little circles as the yapping little dog followed
ceaselessly after him.

“Now, the only thing is,” Stone went on, “is though my dog and your dog are ol’ pals, usually Excaliber doesn’t get on too
well with other animals. Is there any kind of fence or place you could keep him sort of corraled in while I’m in town?”

“Matter of fact, I was just repairing my barbed-wire barrier,” the old man replied. “It had gotten rusty, but I cut out the
bad and interwove a batch of new stuff I was able to get my hands on and—” He pulled back a tarp on the ground, and Stone
saw a circle of barbed wire on a long roll, ready to be pulled out. “Gotta have something around here,” Pliers said, spitting
out a wad of brown. “Goddamn place ain’t nothing but thieves and killers, who’d rape their own grandmother if they had half
a chance.”

“I’m looking for Joey “Cheap” Scalzanni. Have you heard of him?” Stone asked.

“Scalzanni? Hey, mister, he’s the bastard who runs the whole damn show here.
Numero uno
. Don’t you know what’s going on?”

“Sorry, I’m a stranger in these parts,” Stone said, shrugging his shoulders. “Here… on business.”

“Well, if you ain’t one of them, I don’t know what kind of business you got here. But just looking at you and seeing that
you’re basically a decent fellow, I’ll have to tell you that if you go in there, you ain’t coming back. And that being the
case, I’ll have to ask you for another one of the dollars for your dog there. ’Cause I’m willing to feed him, but even with
these”—he jangled the coins—”a dog’ll eat a hell of a lot of food over the years. And—”

“You don’t have to convince me,” Stone said, reaching into his jacket pocket again. This time he took out ten of the silver
circles and handed them over. The old man’s greedy eyes almost popped their sockets as he scooped them in toward himself,
and two of them fell.

“Your dog will eat meat—every day. I swear to God. You hear me, mister.” Pliers said, laughing as he dropped to his knee to
collect the two errant coins. He was rich now, richer than he had ever dreamed was possible. Why, he would be able to have
what he had dreamed of for years now—a hand-cranked phonograph that he had seen in the town. And records. He could listen
to music again.

“Oh, God, thank you, thank you,” he sputtered over and over again as he took the fortune of shimmering silver and buried it
behind the barn in a foul-looking area of compost and rat corpses. No one would look there. Not even another rat.

Stone told Excaliber to stay, but the dog was so engrossed in his play that he didn’t even see him. Stone knew mat the animal
was trained enough to stay where he left it. Besides, Pliers would doubtless serve up a feast of horse meat tonight to celebrate.
That would insure the animal’s sticking at home base, lying flat on its back.

Stone checked both his weapons as he walked out into the darkness again, the crickets crackling like the hills were alive
with them. He had the Uzi mini-autopistol in his chest holster, and the Ruger .44 Mag at his waist. Both were fully loaded,
ready to give the undertaker some overtime. He walked toward the edge of the town which was about half a mile off. Though
it was barely five o’clock, the sky seemed as dark as if it were approaching midnight. The clouds above appeared swollen,
ready to burst their infected guts of poison at any time. But enough light filtered over from the town so that Stone could
stumble along. And as he went, he pulled a few things out from his jacket. Concepts that Dr. Kennedy had shown him when they
traveled together. A disguise—how just a few things could take someone’s eye off your main features. A blue wool sailor’s
cap and a pair of glasses, which were actually just clear glass but had suave tortoise shell rims that curled back Art Deco
fashion. The cap and glasses, plus the five-day growth of stubble on his face, made him look radically different from the
Martin Stone any of the bastards might have seen before. Or so he hoped.

Then he was there. There was no mistaking the fact that he had come to the town limits of Keenesburg. For like all Mafia towns,
it had its own rules, its own sign of welcome —poles fifteen feet apart with human heads on them. Shrunken, shriveled, twisted
little leathery coconuts of brown and black, with eyes turned to black tar the size of grapes staring down at the hesitant
traveler. Telling him, “Turn around and leave now, asshole. Unless you’re one tough motherfucker, you’ll most likely end up
on this pole with me.”

Stone touched his hat as if tipping it as he walked past the cranial guardians of the place and stepped onto a cracked asphalt
road. It was lighter here, as bulbs had been strung up on walls and sticks every hundred feet or so. Unadorned, almostblindinglittlespheresof
whitesent outsharp shadows from the two- and three-story buildings that lined both sides of what was apparently the main street.
The buildings were all wrecks, windows gone, doors gone, whole structures tilting to one side like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
And the few people he saw sitting on rocks or on small logs in front of them looked aboutsas wrecked as their homes. Listless
eyes, jaws hanging slack. A few of them tried to talk as Stone walked along, but all he heard was gibberish. It was like a
town of the mad, the brain-dead.

And
that
was one of the better sections, Stone found out as he walked on. For as he drew past the “residential” housing and more into
the business section of the town, skid row appeared. Drunken, bleeding wrecks of humanity lined the streets as little concrete
pillboxes dispensed shots of rotgut whiskey through their holes. In this town liquor, because of its ability to cause unconsciousness,
was the most precious commodity of all. Stone saw figures leaning over the most stupefied of the fallen drunks and going through
their clothes, even taking them, so that they were stripped naked. But he did nothing. He wasn’t Jesus Christ.

Here and there rats peered out from rusting gratings or scampered among some of the motionless bodies that appeared to be
dead. One was; Stone saw flies buzzing in and out of its mouth and nose. Then the snout of an immense rat ran out of the edge
of a basement and under the corpse’s shirt where it began gnawing in a frenzy, as Stone could see from the jerking movements
beneath the dead man’s shirt. He was going to have to try to became a travel rep for the place, Stone thought with dark humor,
just to keep himself from vomiting. He knew lots of people who would just love to come here for their winter vacation.

As he went on, the bars seemed to get a little better, the clientele if not less ugly, at least able to stand up and walk
around, until at last he reached what was clearly the town’s crossroad. Stone came to a corner, turned, and stood frozen as
he saw what lay ahead. For never in his wildest dreams had he encountered quite such a vis-ion, quite such a darkness on the
face of the earth.

S
tone was staring at a shopping center of crime. A giant mall carrying all the tools and accessories of death. Blocks of two-storied
picture windowed stores spread off in every direction in what must have been at least a ten-block-square setup. It didn’t
look all that dissimilar to a big suburban mall of old but for one thing—what they were selling. For as Stone walked down
one of the corridors that ran through the place, his eyes opened wide. Behind the Plexiglas store windows were all the things
a hoodlum, a murderer, or even a full-fledged crime lord could ever want.

Racks of pistols filled one window, machine guns another. On one side two full showrooms of knives, brass knuckles, and other
hand-to-hand utensils for heavy-duty maiming or disemboweling. Behind another window sat a wide selection of torture items—electric
prods, nooses, chairs with spikes on them, racks, gallows…. All in all, Stone could see, these bastards carried every goddamn
thing known to man for the mortification and destruction of human flesh.

The crowds that filled the mall’s walkways as Stone got deeper into it all seemed to be absolutely entranced by the goods
on display. If Al Capone had died and gone to heaven, he would have reappeared here, strutting along as the gangsters here
did, in their purple and pink and black silk suits. Scarred, smashed-in faces peered like orphans, faces pressed against the
inch-thick Plexiglas. Their lifelong dreams were inside those displays. Garrotes, hatches, axes, poisons, bombs, gases. For
those who cared, not a thing had been left out.

Stone made a right down one of the many high-ceilinged corridors that filled the place. It obviously had been a real mall
once. No one could have built something like this since America had collapsed. But though they had tried to keep it up, the
deterioration, the crumbling plaster, couldn’t really be hidden. Patches of ceiling were falling down, the industrial rug
on the floors had been meant to be changed every five years. It hadn’t been touched for twelve years, cleaned for three. The
dirt of tens of thousands of pairs of boots and shoes, cigarette butts, spit, snot, blood, and numerous other substances had
penetrated its once lime-green coloration and turned it a ghastly brownish shade, like mud.

Still, what was left was unquestionably impressive. Just the fact that the place was wired and most of its lights and neons
were still working was in this day and age an achievement of some magnitude. Stone realized that he was entering a new section
of the mall as women replaced weapons behind the windows. Young, beautiful women, naked for the all the world to see—and trying
to lure all passersby into their lair, to give them “the Ultimate Pleasure.” Each was a specialist in some aspect of the myriad
ways that the human body could “play”—from straight sex, to whips, to S&M and bondage to—for those who could pay—the ultimate
sex games where death itself was the object of the players’ affections. Where sexual release itself was predicated on the
murder of another. The sickest of the sick in a sick world.

Stone walked for nearly twenty minutes and still didn’t see the same thing twice. But no April. He didn’t even know exactly
what he was looking for, but he knew he’d know when he found it. He saw a large neon-lit bar—The Hot Load—sandwiched between
some of the sex establishments. He walked in and was met by a virtual explosion of noise, laughter, yelling voices. The place
was big and filled with bastards, men with faces that looked like they had had plastic surgery performed on them by gorillas.
The huge sons of bitches were loaded down with weapons like they were mobile armories—pistols of every make and functioning
order, SMG’s, shotguns, even grenades, and each man was draped with belts of slugs to make sure he had enough ammo to kill
wholesale.

The Hot Load was basically one long bar that ran the whole side of the joint, perhaps fifty round tables in the middle, and
then various amusements—jukeboxes, slot machines, and sluts strutting their wares on little runways, bumping and grinding
with profound crudeness along the other wall. Stone made his way over to the bar and managed to elbow his way gently between
two lugs the size of trees. It was another story catching the barkeep’s eye as the man was injecting himself with some substance
he had secreted just beneath the counter. But when the seven-foot and still counting bartender finished the injection, he
got a flushed, stupid smile on his face and turned back to tend his wards.

“Whiskey,” Stone said, raising his finger to catch the man’s attention. The huge fellow walked over to Stone, squinting a
little as he came. He stopped right in front of his would-be client and stared at Stone as a drugged smile wriggled back and
forth across the Neanderthal face.

“What the hell do you want, turkey?” the barkeep asked, slurring his words so that spittle flowed out the right corner of
his mouth like a little fountain of white.

“I want—want a drink,” Stone said apologetically as he raised his shoulders slightly. His disguise, the dumb wool hat, and
the glasses made him out to be a nerd, he knew, and he played it to the hilt. There was no way in hell any of the slime would
connect the man who had taken out a decent number of their own with this jocko who was in the wrong place.

“Does your mama know you’re out, boy?” the barkeep asked, unable to keep the stupid little smile from his thick lips. He was
stoned out of his mind and was getting kicks from playing with the asshole.

“My mama?” Stone asked, a little confused as he adjusted his wool cap slightly. “What does she have to do with—”

“You know, you’re just about the stupidest asshole I’ve ever seen,” the man said, fixing Stone with his dark little eyes,
all lit up and swirling with the drug he had injected into his veins. “I can’t hardly believe you’re still alive, asshole.
But I guess that Big Scumbag in the sky in his fucked-up wisdom protects even the jerk-offs of the world.”