Warlord's Revenge (8 page)

Stone was able to make good time and soon was on part of an Interstate that took him within miles of the bivouac—if his compass
and landmark reckonings were correct. They were. For suddenly he recognized some low peaks and turned off through a series
of fields, covered with the dead brown husks of millions of mountain flowers that felt like a cushion beneath the thick wheels
of the Harley.

Then he was at the camp, leaning down almost flat forward as he shot up the least angled slope of the thirty-foot-high plateau
that sat like a little island of dirt rising up arrogantly from the bushy terrain around it. The second he reached the camp
and the bike leveled out, Stone saw there was trouble. Big trouble.

Leaping Elk and Meyra were facing each other in a cleared space, a dirt circle about fifteen feet wide. They were just a yard
or so apart, and Stone saw with horror as a vagrant ray of crackling light from the fire danced along them that they were
holding razor-sharp Cheyenne hunting knives in their hands. There wasn’t a sound in the camp, just Leaping Elk’s sickening
smile as he stared at the much smaller Indian woman and the spreading circle of red on her buckskin jacket.

Stone brought the Harley to a screeching halt, leaping from the big motorcycle so fast that it didn’t have time to release
its auto kickstand and the whole machine tumbled over into the dirt, skidding sideways for about ten feet. Ex-caliber, who
had just been waking himself from his usual traveling nap, barely had time to open his eyes before he found himself hurtling
through the air and into the narrow branches of a nearby low tree. The dog groaned and curled itself up into a ball before
it made contact. This was getting ridiculous, Excaliber thought angrily just before he struck. He was going to have to have
a long, long talk with his master, who, he was now seeing, for all the food he provided—and that wasn’t a hell of a lot now
that the pitbull thought about it—seemed to have a knack for producing painful experiences for the dog to go through. But
it didn’t have a hell of a lot of time to dwell on the subject as the tree suddenly got real close.

Stone ran across the plateau as fast as his legs could carry him, moving in a dark blur so that he suddenly crashed through
the crowd of Indians and his own NAA recruits, who were all looking at the whole thing like it was some sort of late-night
TV amusement. Stone started forward toward Leaping Elk, who still hadn’t realized Stone had returned and was locked in mortal
combat with Meyra, who circled slowly around him now, her legs low and crouched. Arms reached out from both sides of him,
holding Stone back from running into the circle.

“No, you cannot,” one of the younger braves whom Stone recognized as Shining Eagle, said, holding him firmly. “They must fight
it out. It is the Cheyenne way. We must have a leader. And there is no other method of deciding.”

“But she—she’s just a woman,” Stone half screamed as he saw Meyra suddenly glance over and realize that he was there. She
looked startled, first a mixture of fear, then relief, as she saw who it was. Then suddenly fear again, as she realized she
had let her guard down. Leaping Elk, all six-feet-four of him, suddenly moved forward like a charging bull, his long blade
slashing out at her.

“She demanded it,” Shining Eagle said. “She was the one who demanded the Trial of Knives. They must be allowed to—” But Stone
wasn’t listening. Not when the Cheyenne woman was about to join her ancestors in a hurry.

“Fuck that shit,” Stone spat out with the simple but eloquent words of someone who wasn’t about to be stopped. He gripped
both of his hands together and in a flash slammed back and forth with his elbows into the faces of each of the Cheyenne braves,
who staggered backward in a total daze. Bringing his arms forward with the reverse motion, Stone used the energy to launch
himself ahead so that he shot forward the twelve feet separating the battling Cheyenne from himself like a projectile. Even
as Stone moved, his mind thinking at lightning speed, he calculated in millisecond computerlike debate whether to reach for
his pistol or knife, which were equidistant from his right hand, since he would be upon the fight by the time he got either
of them out.

In a quarter second Stone decided to go for the knife, and his hand snapped down toward the hilt, gripping it hard. By a half
second he had it coming out and up in a tight arc. Then everything speeded up like a film coming loose from its sprockets.
At the last second Leaping Elk, whose blade was almost at Meyra’s throat, somehow sensed Stone coming. His attention was pulled
around as he slackened his attack for a second. That was Meyra’s opening. With the speed and power she had learned first from
her father, one of the finest Cheyenne fighters in the territory, and later from her brother, the indian woman, barely twenty
years old, snapped her right leg up with all her strength.

Leaping Elk took the kick full in the stomach and it sent him flying backward so he careened right past Stone, who didn’t
have time to react either. The Indian somehow caught himself from falling and came to a stop about three yards back. He sneered
at Stone.

“You. You think you can get me? You’re a fool.” The Indian laughed that crazy laugh again. And Stone saw that the foam around
his mouth had increased so that it now covered his lips completely. His radioactive hand, the one not holding the hunting
blade, was nothing but a dripping mass now, a gelatinous blob of red and purple that no longer even had fingers or much of
anything except a bulbous shape, with pus that oozed out and fell from scores of grape-sized boils.

“You can walk away,” Stone said as he let his knees relax and sink and, slowly, as if hardly moving, began angling himself
to prepare for the brave’s attack. “And I won’t follow. Just walk, man—walk
now
!”

“Walk?” The Cheyenne laughed again, and blood began streaming from his nose, mixing with the white foam like shaving cream
around his jaws. “Why walk when I have the magic hand?” The brave laughed again. Every time he laughed now, it seemed to send
a little geyser of blood out of his nose, or his ears, or some part of his being. It was as if the body was actually decomposing
from within, the radio cative poisons he had breathed in, eaten, burned into himself had gone to work with a vengeance. He
was dissolving inside, just a dammed-up wall of blood and cancerous cells ready to burst.

“The magic hand!” The Cheyenne laughed again. He held the diseased, rotting stump-claw up and waved it at Stone. Little pockets
of slime and red and brown liquid glistened in the flickering rays of the fire as they sprayed into the air. Stone jumped
back, as fast as a jackrabbit. He sure as hell didn’t want to get any of that radiocative stew on him. He had just decided
to reach for his gun, now that he was slightly out of range, when Leaping Elk charged with such speed that Stone was taken
by surprise. He stopped his motion in midair and, realizing he didn’t have time to regain his balance, fell down backward
just as the Indian’s knife hand descended from the sky like the cleaving sword of the great Cheyenne war gods.

The blade passed less than an inch away from Stone’s left shoulder, but Stone, as he fell to the ground, slammed the point
of his fourteen-inch Randall custom bowie straight into the Indian’s chest. The knife went in sideways, slipping between two
ribs right at the top of the rib cage. Stone slid the length of the Cheyenne’s chest, letting the full weight of his own body
falling bring the knife straight down. Like a butcher’s cleaver, the long hunting blade cut straight down and through the
chest and stomach, splitting the entire mid-section of the Cheyenne open like a gutted steer. The heart, intestines, organs,
every damn thing that pumped and churned away inside the Indian’s body, exploded out as if shot from a slingshot. The fleshy
debris filled the air in a tornado of red.

Stone ripped the knife out as it reached the Cheyenne’s pelvic bone and continued his own fall so that as the exploding body
organs erupted forward, he was going in the opposite direction. He rolled along the ground in a tight ball. When he came up
to his feet and spun around, the Indian had already fallen straight forward, stretched out full-length. He lay motionless
in the garbage dump of his own organs, heart sliced in two, each side still desperately pumping away like a fish out of water,
though nothing was sucked into their gasping ventricles but red dirt.

A
s Stone walked carefully around the spreading swamp of body organs, the rest of the audience looked at him like he was the
last actor left in a Shakespearean tragedy in which everyone else had just been killed. Their eyes were filled with an equal
mixture of amazement, anger, relief, fear—every goddamn emotion know to men.

Stone didn’t pay them any heed once he saw that no one else was going to launch himself at him—at least for a second or two.
He made his way around the butchered corpse and over to Meyra, who was just starting to rise from the ground. She had her
hand over her right breast, and a scarlet stain had spread out nearly six inches in diameter right through her buckskin jacket.
But her eyes looked clear, and her face still had color in it as she rose.

“Are you all right?” Stone asked with concern as she stumbled for a second, holding on to his arms for support.

“Yes. Yes—I think so.” The Cheyenne woman gave a frightened smile at the man who had just saved her life. “Thank you, Martin
Stone. Whether or not you should have interferred,” she said softly, “I don’t know. But I do know I would have been dead in
a few seconds at most. I don’t want to die. So thank you. Though I know it was my fault to demand the Challenge of the Knives.
But after you left, after his balls pulled themselves back into place, he came back out from his hole and started bothering
everyone again, waving that horrible hand around. I couldn’t stand it, I just couldn’t. No one else would do anything.”

“It’s all right. It had to be done,” Stone said, comforting her and holding her shoulder in his hand. “The man wasn’t just
a bastard—he also had radiation poisoning. It can drive men to complete madness before it actually kills them. Then they must
be destroyed like rabid dogs.” Stone turned toward the nervous men. They all looked uptight. The Indians because Stone had
apparently just broken a sacred Cheyenne rule—and because they seemed to have quite unsettled feelings about allowing a woman
to lead them now. Stone’s own NAA men—Bull and the three other young recruits—looked concerned about the Cheyenne, who glared
at them now, their ever present but usually hidden deep mistrust of the white man broken through in near vengeful fury. Though
they had all hated Leaping Elk, they hated Stone, a white man, having killed him, even more. It stirred something primitive
in their hearts. The white race, after all, had not been too generous in its near annihilation of the various American tribes.

The whole damned scene was degenerating rapidly. Stone could see that if nothing else. And he realized for the hundredth time
why he hated this leadership bullshit. Things had been at least less complicated, if no less dangerous, when it had just been
him and the dog.

“Look,” Stone said at last after nearly twenty seconds of complete silence by the entire force as they all tried to gauge
each other’s intentions. “I know there’s a lot to talk about and that I may have broken your tribal regulations, but give
me a break, okay? I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept now for four days. Even if we dissolve this whole damn unit in a few hours—just
let me get two or three hours of some fucking shut-eye, okay? ’Cause 1 feel like a dead man right now. Can hardly even focus.”
Stone tried to make his right eye sort of close and start twitching—for credibility’s sake — though he didn’t have to try
very hard.

The Cheyenne looked at one another and mumbled a few remarks. Then one of them turned back.

“All right. Stone. You’ve got your few hours. Let’s say until the sun has risen to the branches of that tree.” He pointed
to the low wooden fingertips of a large fir some thirty yards off. Stone gauged that would happen at about nine in the morning.
It was four-thirty now. That was almost five hours. Good God, he’d feel like he’d been to Club Med.

“But then we talk. We decide things once and for all,” the brave went on coldly. The Indians stared at Stone hard, as did
all the others. As glad as he’d been that they’d fought on his side for the last week, Stone suddenly felt equally apprehensive
if they should turn against him. They moved forward, and Stone almost felt himself reaching for his Uzi as beads of sweat
started to roll down his forehead. But they stopped after a few yards and began gathering the parts of their recently deceased
tribal brother.

He should have an uncle in the funeral business, Stone thought with dark bitterness. All this killing, it didn’t make a guy
feel too good. And yet Stone had the gift for death, for dispensing death. The Nadi was the name given him by a tribe of Ute
Indians who had saved him when he and his family had first emerged from the bunker after his father’s heart attack. It had
been Stone’s idea to come out. Great idea. The Winnebago they had stocked as if going on a little picnic had hardly gotten
a few hours from the bunker when they’d been attacked by a roving band of Guardians of Hell bikers out for some fun. His mother
had been savagely raped and mutilated, his sister kidnapped, and Stone himself beaten and kicked to within an inch of his
life. Less than an inch.

“Nadi,” Stone mumbled under his breath. “Nadi, Nadi.”

“What was that?” Meyra asked, turning to him so the whole side of her body was pressing against him. He could still feel her
flesh quivering as if she was freezing.

“Nothing,” Stone said with a deep sigh, looking up at the sky to try to grasp hold of the stars, the moon, for a second, to
find his bearings. But there was only that black sheet high above, the spreading cloud of atomic death that seemed to gather
in the darkness and swell as it spread out across Colorado to the east and south. He almost felt tears come to his eyes. It
was as if there were nothing sometimes. Just an abyss into which one could fall if one looked too long, thought about it too
often. Everything was wounded or dead; even the sky was filled with a black blood that would soon rain down. The abyss. It
never had seemed closer.