Warlord's Revenge (26 page)

“Head to the woods,” Stone yelled, turning from side to side. “Find clothes for yourselves, blankets, anything to keep warm.
But get out fast. And don’t look back. You’re free. Free, goddamm it, free!” But like most imprisoned masses, the girls had
not the slightest idea of how to be free. Terrified, their arms clasped around their melony and peachy breasts, they wished
to be back in their drugged states of painlessness, back in their warm, temperature-controlled plastic worlds where everything
was taken care of for them and they hardly existed. But their fear of Stone’s screams; of his machine gun, which ripped down
at their heels; and of the insane look on the demon dog behind him on the motorcycle sent them fleeing for their very lives
down the corridors of the mall of death.

S
tone spent the next fifty minutes riding up and down the rows of stores, sending up the weapons he could see in eruptions
of exploding shells and rifles, shooting off the master controls of the glass-encaged girls, freeing them, sending them out
into a cruel world—but still a world. Better than being the slave whores they would have become. It looked pretty crazy, hundreds
of the naked, nubile women racing through the smoke, through the crowds of visitors to the mall who were all panicking now
and stampeding down the walkways.

When, as far as he could ascertain. Stone had freed virtually all of the display women, he tore down one of the side corridors,
virtually unnoticed. In pure panic, a man can go anywhere, do anything. His father had taught him that. And it was true. The
Mafia guards just ran around firing into the air, not knowing who was responsible or what was going on. And with Scalzanni
gone, no one was even giving orders anymore.

Stone took the bike up to fifty miles per hour as he shot through the waves of smoke that now swept down every street. The
few psychotic-looking drunks he tore past, the only residents of this more run-down part of the mall complex, reached out
with gangrenous arms at Stone, as if trying to take him down into hell with them. But the hands only clawed at wisping air
as the motorcycle ripped through them in a blur of metal and the scent of gunpowder.

Within five minutes he was out of the mall completely. He pulled the bike to a stop at a rise about half a mile away and a
hundred feet or so up. It was a little breastwork of sand and small rocks in the middle of nowhere from which to look down
on the devastated mini-city below. Trickles of white and gray smoke rose from a hundred places, as numerous stores burned
and explosions went off here and there. But it wasn’t enough. Not by a long shot. They could still fix it up again—repair
the damaged walls, put in new display windows, and soon be selling their wares of death, their sex slaves. Stone didn’t like
the idea at all.

He took out the field glasses and checked the hills to the northern side, then swept them back and forth along the long, smoky
corridors of the mall. The girls were out—most of them, anyway. He could see them streaming along dirt roads, up the sides
of hills to the north a mile or so. He undid the lever on the side of the Harley and swiveled out the launching tube of the
89-mm Luchaire missile system. He had loaded it at the bunker, ready for quick use. But now he had all the time in the world.
He sighted on the large gas tank that sat atop a three-story warehouse in the center of the mall. The tank was a cylinder,
immense, thick, perhaps sixty feet long by twenty high, that supplied all the fuel to the mall. One of the late Scalzanni’s
greatest prides.

Stone aimed up through the sighting system of the Luchaire until he figured he was just about dead-center on the thing. Then
he raised it a foot for drop, as the target was about three-quarters of a mile off. He pulled the trigger, and the launching
tube spat out a long tongue of orange and red as the entire bike shook from the backflow. The long missile emerged from the
tube as if ready to go into orbit, and streaked through the cold night, leaving a trail of white behind it as its jet flame
hurled it toward the gas tank. When it hit, just a few feet from where Stone had aimed, there was a flash that seemed to fill
the entire sky, and he pulled his face away. The wall of hot air that swept across his body nearly pushed him down.

When he turned back a few seconds later, Stone could see the flat fireball that spread clear across the entire mall. It was
like a bubble of fire, consuming everything in its grip, a dome of yellow. The entire contents of the tank were going up at
once, consuming everything in a withering heat that would leave only ashes, indistinguishable from one another. The place
was finished. That was for damn sure. The fireball of instant death was already rolling back a little, but it had set the
entire complex aflame. There would be nothing, nothing left.

Stone hoped the innocent had gotten out. If there were such things anymore, he thought with a dark laugh. He still had the
bitter taste of both the Mickey Finn that Peaches had drugged him with and the yellow gas from April’s little den, all floating
around the back of his throat. That—plus the dank, oily odor of burning chemicals and flesh that permeated the moist air—made
for quite a wretched mouthful. The night smelled like a corpse. But the stench was beyond him. For in his mind’s eye all he
could see was that line of hideous, mutated cripples, masked, pierced men, the wretched leftovers from Scalzanni’s experiments
in pain. He saw them walking, stumbling through the forest, holding one another up, leaving behind them a trail of blood a
mile wide.

“Jesus Christ, God, somebody up there,” Stone muttered, gritting his teeth hard as the night wind started coughing down curtains
of cold, bitter air. “Help those poor bastards to die.”

The pitbull sat up high on the bike. He watched the goings-on below with unfathomable brown eyes, sitting absolutely straight,
his front feet pushing down in front of him so he formed an almost triangular symmetry with his body on the seat. He looked
perfect. An object in harmony with himself. With a pose that had made even the earliest men revere and exalt his kind. For
they were beyond understanding. Excaliber sat frozen, in perfect canine meditation, musing on the murderous ways of man.

“Come on, dog,” Stone said suddenly as the black, radioactive clouds started dropping down like avalanches from the sky. “We
got to get the hell out of here.” There was a deep rumbling from above, and it shook the ground beneath him in powerful subsonic
waves that made his bones feel as if they were being tossed inside a blender. A drop of the black liquid hit his nose.

“Oh, fuck,” Stone said, snarling at the dropping storm. As if he needed more trouble. “Dog, get your ass in astro-cruise position,”
Stone screamed as he pulled out the tarp from the emergency pack in the back. He sat down and wrapped the space blanket around
both of them, tucking it under the dog’s sides so it was completely covered, as was Stone, at least up to his shoulders and
chest. He wrapped a piece of torn material around his mouth and started the bike forward just as a bolt of lightning arched
over the entire mall and a wall of water tumbled down from the skies like the wrath of God, black and unstoppable, ten billion
gallons of steaming atomic raindrops.

“We got to get to shelter before we get boiled like fucking lobsters, man. I mean, it’s coming dog, it’s coming down.” Stone
knew he probably sounded slightly hysterical, and the dog didn’t like it at all, sending back a terrified howl as his part
of the space blanket began shivering violently in stark fear. Stone released the clutch, and they shot down the back road,
the Harley’s tires spraying out a brown arch of dirt into the black air.

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…

Devastated by another nuclear blast, the western half of the country reels under attacks by radiation-crazed bikers and savagely
mutated wildlife. It’s more than enough to keep Martin Stone and his fiercely loyal pit bull busy as they search the slaughter-spattered
landscape for Stone’s missing sister April. But now Stone has been targeted by an even deadlier enemy-Scalzanni, a psychotic
Mafia kingpin who’s obsessed with making Stone pay for killing his brother.

After an army of vicious Mafia hit-squads. Stone heads off to confront Scalzanni and destroy his perversion-filled stronghold.
But to the Mafia boss, death is a family game-and April is the ace that will force the Last Ranger to play one final, desperate
hand…or die trying.

Martin Stone is

THE LAST RANGER

America’s Last Hope in America’s Darkest Age