Is This The End?

by Craig Sargent

  Stone was already inside as the animal pondered. He rushed several steps inside the huge chamber that stretched off ahead and his eyes stopped like they’d been frozen with Magic Glue as he stared toward the right side of the room. For there, tied down naked to a bed with her legs spread apart was his sister. The Dwarf had rigged up some insane kind of contraption right above her, a whining pulley system with levers and straps and all kinds of madness which had been built into a steel frame erected over the bed. It was easy to see just what the little slime had in mind: to deflower April by lowering himself mechanically from the top. He was stabbing away with one of his arm stumps at a set of dials to his right and the entire rig was lowering his miniature twisted naked body right down on top of the dazed, drugged woman.

  “Jesus, mother of God,” Stone muttered under his breath, so repulsed by the sight that he stood totally frozen for the sheerest second paralyzed with horror. The Dwarf was only inches from making his consummation real.

  “Dwwaaaarrrrffff!” Stone screamed out with every bit of rage that burned within him. The yellow eggman’s eyes suddenly darted up as he saw his mortal enemy.

  “You bastard, you’re dead. You must be dead. You can’t ruin everything,” he shrieked like a rusty hinge, slamming even harder at the controls of the pulley system to go down so that he could impregnante her with his freak child.

  “Noooooooo!” Stone screamed as he rushed forward, not daring to fire as he might easily hit April as well. “Noooooooo!” The Dwarf suddenly realized he was’t going to make it—and in the choice between producing the heir to his throne or saving his own wretched life, the Dwarf without hesitation chose the latter. He pressed another button on the panel, cursing under his breath as he gave Stone a look of sheerest hatred.

  “You die now!” he hissed. “We all die!” Suddenly he was rocketed over onto his side, the whole pulley contraption turning and depositing him right into his wheelchair, which sat next to the bed. In a flash he was stabbing away with both stumps at the twin machine guns built into the arm rests on each side. A stream of white hot slugs peppered the room. But both Stone and Wonderdog had already hit the dirt.

  “You’ve brought this on the world, Martin Stone,” the Dwarf screamed. “A hundred missiles will rain down on the planet Earth. What is the sound of total annhiliation, Stone?” he laughed, and even as Stone rose up to sight the zooming chair up with his SMG, a surface of the wall opened and in a flash the Dwarf was through it as it ripped shut behind him.

  “Oh God no,” Stone whispered, his face drained of blood as he rose to his feet. He walked quickly back to April and looked down at her. She was in a total daze, even more drugged out than she’d been the night before at the banquet. Stone saw barely a trace of light in her eyes. But as he kept looking down into her sweat-coated face he saw her lips move almost imperceptibly.

  “Martin, Martin, thank God,” she whispered as soft as a dove’s wings fluttering.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-four

  “COME on, baby,” Stone said as he freed her and then found some clothes so she could cover herself. She seemed to be coming out of it just a little, at least she seemed to recognize Stone as she just kept whispering “Martin, Martin, Martin,” over and over again like some sort of prayer to protect her against all the horror that she’d undergone.

  “It’s okay now,” Stone lied to her as he put shoes on her limp feet. “You’re safe, April, it’s all over.” The dog kept sniffing at the insane pulley contraption over the bed and suddenly snapped at it hard, taking a dislike to the machinery involved. It took only a few rips for the pit bull to pull the whole side of the thing apart, as joints bent with a squeaking sound and suddenly the whole thing toppled over and hit the floor with a thundering crash. April’s eyes jerked up wildly at the sound. But Stone stroked her as a small smile crossed over his face. At least the dog had awakened her.

  Suddenly he heard what sounded like engines and two of the Ballbusters came screeching through the opened door he had just come through.

  “Stone, it’s you,” one of them shouted, and Stone realized it was Raspberry. It was hard to tell at first as blood was streaming down the whole side of her face. Still, she was riding her bike and talking, so it couldn’t be too bad. “I was just making a final sweep for any of my girls. We’re getting out of here man. The place is going to blow in sixteen minutes. You need a ride?”

  “No, not yet,” Stone said. “I’ve got to try to stop the Dwarf—he’s headed for the missile room to launch the whole fucking sky full of Star Wars missiles down on the Earth—down on this place. Take April, though. Get her out of here, then all of you just get away fast. I’ll—do my best. If I don’t make it out could—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Raspberry replied, looking him in the eye. “She’ll be taken care of, I promise you.”

  “Thanks,” he said wearily and then turned down the corridor as the biker queen got April on the back of her Harley and pulled the girl’s arms around her waist.

  “Hold on sugar, we’re going for a ride like you’ve never been on.”

  “Martin, Martin,” April just kept moaning but held on firmly as the bike screamed out its gasoline roar and headed back out of the Dwarf’s chambers. Stone knew there was one final level below this—the missile command center. The map had indicated fire stairs at the far side of this level. He ran over more oozing dead bodies—the work of the biker chicks. They didn’t take any prisoners. And three dead Ballbusters were mixed in with the carnage.

  Stone hit the fire stairs on the run, spraying a burst inside the doorway. But no one was on the other side. Above him he could hear the motorcycles as the Ballbusters were driving right up the stairs as they had come down. With the dog at his heels Stone edged down the two flights to the final level. The steel door that had stood at the entrance was blown right off its hinges—and two more Ballbusters lay around their twisted bikes, blood coating everything like a squeezed jelly donut. They’d tried to get in down here—and hadn’t.

  “Dog, it’s kiss your ass goodbye time, you understand pal,” Stone said, whispering to the dog as he checked his SMG. A final clip and one in the 9mm and that was it. “’Cause we got to go in there, whatever’s happening. It’s been fun,” Stone said, reaching down and giving a quick scratch behind the animal’s ear. The dog looked up with a strained expression as if to say—please Chow Boy, emotion is for peacetime—it’s fighting time now. They charged down the stairs leaping over the bikes and the dead and tore through the charred frame.

  There were greenshirts waiting, a good dozen of them hidden around the floor. But they weren’t quite ready for action, thinking that the roar of the bikers’ engines meant that the enemy were splitting. And that was their last mistake. For Stone came in firing from both hands before they could even react. It was like Bad Day at Black Rock and Gunfight at the OK Corral all rolled into one, with slugs flying everywhere into greenshirts. The pit bull ran hugging the wall, then flew up on a shirt starting to get a bead on Stone, and slashed the side of his face down to the bone. When they had both passed not one guard was left untouched.

  Just beyond was the main computer center—the brain of the entire missile defense system. Stone’s jaw hung open as he came tearing in. The place was as big as two football fields and absolutely filled to overflow with beeping and blinking radar and computers, monitors and readouts, rows of screens showing the view of the Earth from the missiles’ point of view in space, twenty-thousand miles above the Earth. It all could be seen displayed out in acres of command post equipment. This must have been the center of the entire space fleet, Stone realized. And the Dwarf had control of it. Surely the gods had gone mad.

  He ran down the huge complex firing at everything, including technicians at various posts. And his slugs rocked them from their seats. Anyone who was trying to blow up the world was fair game in Stone’s book and he didn’t hesitate to blow every bastard he could see right out of his chair. Bullets tore into the
screens and control panels as Stone left a smoking sparking trail behind him and small fires which broke out here in there in the circuitries. Exca-liber took up shotgun and keeping an eye on anything that moved, taking out a pistol hand that reached from a shadow. The hand still gripping the gun fell to the floor. The pit bull didn’t look back.

  Suddenly Stone saw him ahead—the Dwarf, racing down a row of control panels in his wheelchair, punching out with his stumps at rows of buttons and dials with an absolutely maniacal expression on his face. Stone prayed it wasn’t already too late, that this wasn’t the final launch sequence that Dwarf was punching in right now. He ran down the central aisle of the place firing, holding the trigger and letting loose with a barrage. The Dwarf heard the cracks and turned his wheelchair on a dime, both of the twin machine guns on the armrests opening up. They came right at each other, two men, one representing the darkness, the other the light, snarling with hate, guns blazing. Then Stone took a hit as a slug tore right through his left thigh. He went down in a tumble of hands and legs and slammed hard into the side of a table, letting out a quick scream from the intense pain. Excaliber dove behind an immense blinking computer as a dozen slugs ripped into the steel floor just behind him, leaving gouged-out, smoking little craters.

  The Dwarf laughed shrilly and came forward from about fifty feet off, his guns continuing to smoke as two rows of slugs raced toward Stone’s prone body. “Die Stone, die!” the Dwarf screamed, wanting more than anything to take out this bastard who had ruined his wedding night. The bullets were inches from Stone when a shape hurtled down from one of the cross beams that were built all over the place holding lights, racks, screens. This was a human shape falling—the dwarf woman, Elizabeth. And she was holding an immense butcher knife stolen from the kitchen, used to hack up whole cows.

  She slammed into the Dwarf, landing on his lap just as the wheelchair came beneath her.

  “You!” the Dwarf hissed in real amazement that he had been betrayed by one so lowly, such a slave of no meaning as the woman who raised her muscular arms high.

  “Me!” she laughed back, slamming the sixteen inch blade deep into his scrawny chest. “Me—the dwarf bitch. The worm, the cockroach of NAUASC. Me, Dwarf. And who is the powerful one now?” She stabbed again and then again and again with furious rage, no longer impotent. The dwarf’s whole upper body was carved right from the bones like a badly butchered piece of meat, everything hanging down, bones shattered and all. He lost control of the wheelchair as he let loose with a long shrill scream that made the hair on the back of Stone’s neck stand on end. Then the wheelchair crashed into a steel wall.

  Yet he still heard the dwarf woman’s knife, the screams and gurglings of the Dwarf. After another ten seconds there was no more sound. Stone sat up and checked his leg. It was bleeding good, but the bullet didn’t seem to have penetrated any arteries. He tied a tourniquet around the top of the leg with a piece of material from a dead tech’s shirt. He was able to walk, limping along. Excaliber jumped from behind the table where he had taken up refuge and trotted warily alongside Stone, snarling and showing all his teeth as the two of them approached the overturned wheelchair.

  Stone could see a big puddle of blood spreading out from beneath. He reached over and pulled the wheelchair back with some difficulty, as it weighed a ton. But suddenly it dislodged and fell over on its back. Stone gasped. Both of them were dead. Elizabeth’s hands were still clutched around the knife which was sunk to the hilt into the Dwarf’s chest. She had split the whole back of her head open in the fall, slamming into the side of the steel table. It was cracked like an egg with most of her brains already on the floor around her. Yet she looked happy, almost serene with a smile on her now cooling face. She had done it, she had killed the death freak that no man had been able to kill. And there was a great satisfaction, even unto death, for that accomplishment.

  Stone reached over in spite of himself, and touched the Dwarf to make sure he was dead. The little eggman had escaped death seemingly miraculously in the past. Stone realized he had almost begun to believe the little fucker was immortal. But he was dead all right this time. There was no mistaking it, not with his ribs cut open and his heart and lungs all slashed to pieces. Not with most of him spreading down onto the floor like cheap peanut butter dripping from the edge of the jar. The eyes were open staring straight ahead. And they looked afraid. A look Stone had never seen on the Dwarf before. Elizabeth had even managed to coax that emotion from him at the very end. She had done more than she had realized.

  Stone hobbled down the aisle as fast as his wounded leg could carry him, firing at the panels, blowing up everything he saw. He looked up at the displays of the missiles’ video system from space as the computers kept showing their angles and trajectories for firing down at Earth. It looked bad—but he didn’t know how to interpret it for sure. Stone looked at a clock on the wall as he reached the end of the aisle, leaving everything smoking and blowing up behind him. There was one minute left before bye-bye time if the biker chicks’ bombs went off. And somehow he thought they would. He glanced around the command level searching for a way out, an elevator. Suddenly he saw a red sign with the letters “Emergency Rocket Escape” on a wall.

  “Come on, dog,” Stone screamed at the pit bull, which had jumped up on a table and was starting to gulp down a left-behind sandwich.

  “Oh Christ,” Stone said with disgust. “Eating even as armageddon approaches. Let’s move, dog,” he bellowed as he hobbled for all he was worth toward the rocket sign. The pit bull gulped the fake ham and swiss on rye down in a single gulp and reached Stone in three quick leaps. Stone saw a glass window like a fire alarm in the old days. “Break In Case of Emergency.” He reached out with the butt of his SMG and slammed at the glass, then pushed the broken pieces away and pressed a large red button that sat ominously inside.

  The steel door on the wall slid open and Stone stepped a little nervously into the telephone-booth-sized room as the dog slithered in between his legs and sat down disgruntled about having to get into such a small space again, as that was all it seemed to be doing lately, crawling into its own coffin.

  “Hold onto the grips at your side,” a mechanical sounding voice spoke over a speaker hidden above his head. “Ejection time ten seconds.”

  “Hold on to your fur, dog,” Stone screamed down as he felt the whole thing start vibrating like it was thinking of erupting. “We’re about to ride the Cyclone at Coney Island and the bomb blast at Hiroshima all rolled into one.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-five

  STONE felt the rocket system ignite beneath him as the steel-walled cylindrical booth trembled as if in an earthquake. He felt the heat and then the jarring rush of super acceleration as he hit four g’s in one second. And suddenly he found himself being squeezed down and hardly able to breathe. The rocket shot up a steel tube with a tail of smoke rushing behind. Stone thought his ears as well as his chest would burst. The pressure was tremendous. And even as they rose the rocket seemed to fire harder, accelerating as it climbed. Stone felt like he was being crushed. His head fell onto his chest and pressed hard against it. He saw Excaliber on the floor of the rocket booth, flattened like a rug, his mouth wide open and huffing for air.

  They then burst free of the ground and there was a sudden great change of pressure as Stone felt his ears pop. They rose for about four more seconds and Stone could see through a crack in the side, damaged when they rose, that they were up about five hundred feet above the ground. Below he could see the ruins, the wreckage above ground stretching off for miles. There was a second small explosion above and Stone felt the whole escape shell jerk hard as a parachute billowed up overhead.

  The instant the parachute snapped open the pressure was released on his lungs and he could breathe again. Excaliber as well took in a long breath and then let out with a pissed-off yowl. Even as he went to take in a second breath of sweet oxygen Stone saw the ground below him turn yellow and orange. The very earth see
med to be rent asunder as flames rocketed out from numerous fissures in the ground. It was as if a volcano were being born as gas and fire shot up everywhere, creating multiple chasms in the earth from the pressure of the explosions below.

  “Oh God no,” Stone whispered as he felt the surge of heat from the flames. But even as he thought he had bought it and his blood drained from his cheeks he felt the chute lift them and then they were being buffeted around in the air. Suddenly they were being bounced inside the booth like someone shaking dice in a cup, spinning around in the air as the heat currents sent the chute all over the place. They rose to about seven hundred feet and then shot fast toward the south. Then they were coming down again, only it was too fast. Stone looked through a crack in the metal ceiling—the chute was aflame above them. The ground loomed up brown and filled with shattered concrete and then even as Stone knew they were coming in much too fast, they hit. And he fell into peaceful darkness.

  “Martin, Martin, please wake up.” It was April and she was calling him. He was in heaven. His mother and father were standing there. And she was with them too and they were all smiling. But Stone wasn’t sure he wanted to embrace them as the flesh was falling from their faces and blood oozed from their reaching hands. No he didn’t want to, didn’t want to—

  “Martin, it’s April. Open your eyes—you’re alive.” Stone opened his eyes slowly and saw faces above him. They weren’t his parents. April and Raspberry were looking down at him with concern. His head ached like it was on fire. Everything burned.

  “What—what—” he stuttered as he rose to a sitting position. The escape booth he had ridden in lay shattered all around them. God only knew how he had survived the fall. The dog, needless to say, was up and about sniffing the air, searching for food scents and waiting for Chow Boy to get his act together.