“Thanks,” Stone said, shaking his head from side to side. “But I don’t think so.” The very thought of eating a single bite of the super-irradiated food, which had been soaking up God knew what for years now, was not something that Stone was about to pay money for. “Tell me, am I on the right road to Amarillo? I’ve got—some business there.”
“Sure the hell are. Jes’ keep going straight ahead ‘bout thirty miles or so. Then you’ll see this big ol’ highway. It’s busted up pretty bad in places, but with a cycle you could probably get through. Amarillo? Jeeez.” The man seemed impressed by the idea. A mythical place far beyond anything he would ever reach again in his short moist life. “I was there once, can’t even remember when now. But it was a big damned place, I remember that.”
“Well listen,” Stone said, revving up the bike. “You all take care now.” He smiled at the kids who grinned shyly back. They were cute in a grisly sort of way beneath the sores and the flaking flesh and the cracked lips. Kids were kids, even when they were radioactive.
Stone could hardly bear to look at the entire assemblage all staring at him. One of the dogs jumped up to be petted but tumbled back to the ground, hardly able to get up the energy. It fell over on its three working legs, the fourth a shriveled up little leathery thing, and squirmed around the ground pushing itself in a circle but unable to quite rise. Stone closed his eyes for a second and then opened them and started forward. He didn’t look back.
As he drove along he saw others as well. The region was actually quite well-populated considering he hadn’t seen a soul for about a hundred miles. And they all had the same radioactive afflictions covering their bodies. Shacks along the roadway were selling all sorts of things—foods, skins, artifacts from the past. And all of them were burnt and half destroyed—pelts hanging on a wall were actually burned through with holes in some places. Yet people were buying the stuff. To this crew it was all normal. A whole society based on the acceptance of radioactivity in everything, even themselves.
Stone wondered what happened to them when they died as he didn’t see a single body lying around anywhere. With this bunch one would think death would be an hourly occurrence. But as he drove on past three more craters about five miles apart he came upon a line of several dozen of the dying. They were marching along slowly as if they had all the time in the world—which they didn’t, seeing how they were rotting as they walked. These were even worse off than the ones he’d already passed, skin hanging off bone, faces dissolved down to the skeletal core. Drops of red and brown dripped from tears in their clothes, which were numerous. They had their arms atop the shoulders of the one in front of them like the blind leading the radioactive blind. And some clearly were without their sight anymore, with sockets filled with pink and black custard.
They took not the slightest heed of Stone as he drove slowly by them. The leader of the group looked the most diseased of all with no face whatsoever, just a mass of raw flesh and some holes where a mouth and nose and ears should be. Yet he led them forward with purpose, one shrunken leg slamming down, then the next. Stone gulped and turned away from the face which did not deign to look toward him. They were of two different worlds, heading in different directions.
Stone wondered just where the hell these guys were in such a mind to get to, but as he drove ahead about two miles he saw where they were going: to their burial ground. This was the field alongside the road where their ancestors had already marched the same trek. The dead fields on which not a thing grew were filled with bones and still-rotting corpses. There must have been hundreds of them, with their bones spread out for an acre or more. Some of the skeletons were in the shadows of the rocks that rose here and there, and Stone could see in the dimness that they glowed. The place must have been a sight at night, with all the remains glowing up a storm. A man could open an amusement park, or a restaurant across the road. The Eat By The Light of the Radioactive Dead Chow House. He wondered if he was cracking up.
It was getting dark but he didn’t stick around to see the bone fireworks while heading south as fast as he dared travel in the twilight as the road grew steadily worse. He drove into the night, the Harley’s headlight cutting through the blackness with a wide beam. Stone didn’t stop until near midnight when he couldn’t see a single one of the bomb craters, even standing on top of the bike and looking around 360 degrees. He made himself gulp down another can of Spam and some hard biscuits, then a handful of vitamins he had snatched from the bunker.
He camped out on a rise where he could see all around him nice and clear, and chewed down the lousy chow bite by unappetizing bite. The sight of all those rotting folks had done wonders for his stomach. But he knew if he didn’t eat he’d start getting weak, even sick. This was not the way to travel around the new America. The weak perished as fast as they came along. They were the fodder of accelerating barbarism.
When he’d finished, Stone went over to the dog. It still wasn’t moving though the heart did not seem to have slowed since he’d last checked. He knew the animal hadn’t eaten for days now. He made a gruel from some of the biscuits and some condensed milk, and then mixed it all together with water from his thermos to form a wet paste. Stone wedged the dog’s mouth open and started slowly slopping small spoonfuls of the stuff in, then turned the animal’s head from side to side trying to work some down. He spent nearly twenty minutes spooning the slop and could hardly even tell if any was getting down the canine’s gullet, as much of it seemed to have fallen on Stone’s pants and down to the ground. But with the very last spoonful the dog suddenly coughed and spat up a spray of the food, then lapsed right back into complete stillness.
Still it was movement of some kind. It showed the creature was still on this side of the black veil. Great, Stone thought darkly as he sat back against the bike, took out both of his pistols, and laid them on his lap for instant access. So the dog was alive. One fucking cough in three days and I think it’s the medical miracle of the century. He somehow fell asleep but he slept fitfully, waking up and reaching for the guns as he thought he heard something. But each time it was just a dream, and he sank from one nightmare to another like a drowning man being bounced from wave to storming wave.
CHAPTER
Seven
THE next morning Stone woke to a biting rain, which had already soaked his hair and outer clothes. Thank God he’d covered Excaliber’s box before he retired, or the deeply dreaming mutt would be floating in dog soup right now. He mounted up onto the bike, knowing it was too wet to even try to make a fire for coffee—and with all things considered—he was in just about the foulest mood he could remember, grayer even than the rain-streaked air around him, through which he could see but fifty or sixty feet. He stared straight ahead, grinding his teeth together with angry unconscious mouthings about the state of affairs. He then fell into a trance with all his attention on the road and its numerous holes and chasms already filling with water, some looking big enough for the bike to completely disappear into without a trace.
After about fifty miles Stone was slightly heartened to see a rusting sign that said Hartley was the next town. That meant Amarillo wasn’t more than another thirty. He’d be there by nightfall. Not that he was greatly looking forward to it, since he had little or no idea of just how he was going to go about rescuing April. The Dwarf was the cleverest bastard he’d come up against and Stone knew he’d have to be extremely careful—and lucky—to come out of this one. He wished beyond measure that he’d killed the little bastard the last time they met—when he’d had the chance. If only he’d looked out the window and had seen that the murdering eggman had landed in water after his twelve-story fall. He could have torn ass downstairs and ended the threat to mankind with a few slugs. If, if, if. If a rat had a tux it would be a Senator. That’s what his dad had always said. The Major hadn’t gotten along with the political breed especially well.
With the rain continuing, the four-laner he was riding on became virtually unusable, and Stone had to take the next exit ramp, w
hich was broken into jagged sections, though he was able to tear over it with a few quick jumps of the bike. Then he was back on sparsely bushed flat terrain with a few rolling hills to the east. He got up a good head of steam and headed south, keeping a close eye on the compass he’d super-glued to the top of the bike while in the bunker. The rain at last seemed to die out, though a constant irritating mist continued to fill the air, making him have to wipe his face every twenty or so seconds as the stuff felt sticky, uncomfortable. He could see a little better now and got up to a respectable forty on the soaked flats.
He couldn’t have been off the highway more than twenty minutes when he heard a sound. Very dim at first—like a far-off airplane propeller—then louder as he cruised on. It was more than one thing creating the noise, not airplanes but cars, he realized. It was rare to hear a whole bunch at a time, as cars were an oddity in the new America. Most motor vehicles were no longer functioning, and those that were didn’t have gasoline to run them. Gas was nonexistent. Stone had only the bunker’s supply and one other hidden hundred gallon tank that his father had set up. After all that was used up he’d be in the same boat as the rest of the sinking world. Yet here someone apparently obtained enough octane to get a whole little fleet of them going.
Stone suddenly heard shooting and debated whether to go on straight ahead or check out the sounds that were coming from the low hills to the west a mile or two. His decision was to keep going—he had his own problems—and he did, even giving it extra gas to get out of there. But as the firing continued he could hear it sounded like one gun was returning the fire of a dozen. Now that wasn’t right whichever way you looked at it. Against his better judgement, Stone whipped the bars to the right and pulled back on the accelerator so that the bike shot forward as though it wanted in on the action too.
It took only a minute to get to the top of a row of hills a few hundred feet high, and he came to a stop as he reached the peak and looked down over the far side. It was a vast canvas of beauty and death. Stone could see for miles, the rolling hills far to the east, a lightning storm sending down flickers of yellow. But it was the battle unfolding right below him that caught his eye. A single rider was on a motorcycle as big as Stone’s and was tearing ass almost parallel to the row of hills Stone gazed down from. The biker was being pursued by four vehicles, just about the most ramshackle things Stone had ever seen, hardly more than mini log cabins built atop rusting frames. One of the “cars” had no frame at all, just some branches lashed down onto the axles. On them, four men were sending out a storm of death—bullets, arrows, and even a slingshot that one of them used to fling steel balls as fast as the eye could see.
Stone could see the biker clearly thought he had it made to safety as the figure sat up a little straighter and looked around as if to give a Bronx cheer as he pulled slowly ahead of the pursuing masses. However, the biker couldn’t see what Stone could: two more cars were coming in the opposite direction right over the next slope several hundred yards off. With down-sloping walls on both sides of the escape route, the biker was being led into a trap. Stone made another split-second decision: he hunched down into the seat and pushed off with both feet, turning the Harley to max.
The bike shot forward along the top of the hill. Stone didn’t think he’d been spotted by any of the parties concerned—yet. He kept low, pulling back so he could keep an eye on the whole scene unraveling. He’d have to time it all perfectly or it was a wrap before he even began. He saw the biker reach the top of the slope and suddenly catch sight of the two other attack cars, these as sloppily made as the main force, just branches and pieces of jagged steel all roped together around the wheels and the chugging engines. Clouds of oily smoke were sent up as they drove the metal bodies forward like lumbering rogue elephants.
The biker unleashed a few blasts from some kind of rifle he had tied to the front of the cycle, and one of the riders hanging on the side of one of the cars took a direct hit and went flying off. But then the biker did too. Stone saw his right shoulder fly back and a splotch of red appear on the black jacket, which had writing on the back that Stone couldn’t read. Somehow the biker stayed on. And in a way that sheer perseverance made Stone feel that he had done the right thing. No one should die who fought to live so hard. He saw there was no more time and swerved the bike to the right, suddenly shooting down the slope right toward the fifty yards of open space between biker and the cutoff cars. He gripped down on the machine gun’s trigger when he was halfway there, not wanting to give the bastards another second to peg in shots on the biker, who looked like he couldn’t take another hit.
Stone’s 50-cals tore up the turf between the approaching attack cars and the biker and created some confusion for them, Stone could see. They slowed down slightly and looked around trying to find out who was letting loose with the firepower. Then one of them sighted Stone coming down the hillside like a demon possessed. The men in the two cars instantly stopped their pursuit of the biker and both vehicles turned toward Stone like two immense sailing ships creaking and shaking with the turns. The foul-looking specimens on the backs of both vehicles began opening up with their various crude weapons, screaming wildly and pointing as Stone’s bike bore down on them.
Though they clearly felt that it was Stone who was making the mistake as they laughed and shouted that the biker was crazy, that changed quickly enough as Stone let loose with another burst from the 50-cal and this time he was in better target range. The slugs tore across the front of one of the cars, sending out a whirlwind of blood from inside that splattered through the broken windows. The car lurched wildly away from its companion vehicle and veered over toward the slope, where it overturned and went skidding along on its back, crushing the three riders into a stew of red dirt.
But the other car, whether out of bravery or stupidity—or both—kept coming at Stone, who pulled his glance away just long enough to check out the biker. The rider had stopped and was standing by his bike kicking at it. The machine wasn’t moving. Great! The rest of the five-car attack force was approaching rapidly from the south, and the biker took out his rifle from atop the stalled cycle and lifted it toward the approaching cars. Stone ripped his gaze back on the single attack car ahead. It was about a hundred feet off and he could now see the face of the driver and a man by his side, aiming a shotgun through the glassless windshield. Both looked like they’d been eating coal.
The shotgun fired and Stone felt a whoosh of lead pass just over his shoulder. He pulled the 50-cal again and swept it straight down the center of the truck. Guts and faces and stuff exploded out the window space in a gush of red. Suddenly Stone was past the thing like two jousting knights bypassing one another. He wheeled around and saw that the car was still moving along but out of control. He shot forward and caught up with it, leaning to one side as he came alongside the vehicle, which had slowed to about ten and was putting along like a little golf cart.
Stone made a strange sound when he saw what his slugs had wrought inside the thing. They’d been cut to pieces. Neither man had a face anymore or much of anything else for that matter. But that was their problem. He pulled up to the car, setting one foot inside of it, and grabbed hold of the bloody collar of the ex-driver, pulling him out the door and over his bike so the corpse fell with a splat behind him. Stone saw that the second man’s foot was wedged in on the gas pedal, keeping the vehicle going. Good, maybe he had a little special delivery present for the rest of the gang. Keeping the bike maneuvered alongside the ancient hybrid vehicle, he turned the wheel, bringing the car around in a wide circle, then he straightened it back out again.
The biker had dropped to one knee and was firing at the fleet of cars bearing down on him, which were unleashing their own stream of fire. Stone aimed the car toward the center of the approaching attackers.
“Come on—go faster, you rusting son-of-a-bitch,” Stone screamed at the thing, though the metal wreck didn’t seem to hear him, just moved along at the same ten miles an hour, happy as a purr
ing cat. Stone let loose with another volley with his free hand on the bike handlebar, not so much to hit anything as he was still too far, but to let the biker know it was time to get the hell out of there. There was no need to make Custer’s Last Stand. The helmeted head swung up and around and seemed confused for a second. But then when he saw Stone firing at the cars, not at him, the biker jumped up and began tearing ass back toward Stone as fast as his legs could move.
The four cars spread out about fifty feet apart and came in on them in a half circle, clearly an attack strategy they had worked out before, one that doubtless plenty of men had fallen to. But Stone wasn’t up for a shooting match. Not when he had a mobile bomb at his disposal. He kept the steering wheel aimed right at the dead center of the advancing wolf pack of dilapidated steel and wood, and suddenly the dead copilot of the truck fell over right in front of the seat, his shattered body lodging on the pedal. The vehicle suddenly lurched forward, giving Stone barely time enough to pull himself away and avoid the bike getting tangled up and going down. The car surged, and as he saw its graffiti-covered back tear off he let loose with a continued barrage from the 50-cal, aiming down below to try to hit something good.
The biker ran past the driverless car, staying out of the way of Stone’s fire. The car kept on like it had a will of its own. As the four cars focused all their weaponry on the thing for a moment, Stone reached the biker running forward.
“Get on,” he screamed, but the biker didn’t need any encouragement. Stone could hardly see a thing beneath the dark helmet but the face smiled. Just as the car reached the front ranks of the four cars trying to pass around it, one of Stone’s shots must have hit something, for suddenly the special delivery let out with a loud crack from underneath and it burst into flames. The flames moved so fast and intensely that they spread out in a wall on both sides, extending out a good twenty feet. The nearest two attack vehicles were caught in the blast and their unprotected gas tanks ignited as well. Each went up in violent blasts of steel and smoking flesh.
Is This The End? Page 5