Their bodies exploded together—her with her mouth thrown far open and her eyes twitching in her head like eggs in a blender. Stone, holding her firmly as she froze above him, his eyes wide open, looking at her, taking in her exquisite young body as he poured his maleness into her in an eruption of lava. The simultaneous bursts of their volcanic passion seemed to shake the very bed beneath them, transport them to another place away from what was to a land of only what should be—the beautiful, the perfect—the orgasmic transmutation.
Chapter
Eight
* * *
Stone had terrible dreams for the next few nights. Even as his body healed rapidly from the medicines and the lovemaking with LuAnn each night, the images of those beheaded farmers, of the sobbing widows and orphaned children left behind in a world that was already hard enough, all hardened Stone’s own heart as well. And on the fourth morning after the burial, and a full week and a half since he’d been caught in the high-rad rains, Stone sat down face-to-face with Undertaker at the kitchen table. The kitchen children were just cleaning up. The rest were out performing their farm and corpse-preparation chores. A mother and her three young children had been chewed up by a wild dog pack. The incident had occurred just over the ridge, and the Hanson clan buzzed about it all night, constantly telling their own dumb dogs, who preferred hanging out around the kitchen more than guarding anything, to keep a special lookout that night and bark goddamn loud if they heard anything.
“Why don’t you say what’s on your mind, Mr. Stone?” Undertaker asked him as they both finished the last bitter dregs of Undertaker’s “coffee.” “You have a peculiar look in your eyes, and you been talking about nothing but them dead farmers for days, or so my young Sharon—Linda—whatever the hell her name said,” Undertaker laughed.
“LuAnn,” Stone said, shaking his head in amazement. It was true what she had said—her father didn’t even quite know exactly who she was.
“Yeah—her. Been telling me you keep asking about how many kids they left behind, and if they had any food. And now you’re talkie’ about heading into Cotopaxi to pay the most murdering town in the territory a little visit. So I’m just askin’ again, what’s on your mind?”
“You have your skills, Undertaker,” Stone said softly. “And you’re damn good at them. I’ve learned a lot from you in these few days, but—but I have my skills, too, the skills that bring you customers. The skills of the Nadi.” Stone hesitated to say it, the word that the Ute Indians who had saved his life months before had given him. Nadi—he with the gift of giving death. “So I just think I should check out a crowd that likes to saw off men’s heads in front of their kids. I want to see what kind of men would do it. That’s all—just curiosity.”
“I’ve heard the name Nadi,” Undertaker said, his voice changed, almost fearful. He suddenly realized he had misjudged Stone, which seemed to unsettle him. And for the first time he shut up, turned pale, and sat back just a little.
“Nadi. They don’t give that name out too easily,” Under-taker said, staring at Stone as if something were floating behind his head. “Well, then, I guess you know what you’re doing. And I sure won’t be the man to question it. But all the same, watch your step in there. Some of the baddest dudes around inhabit that town. And they’re all looking for a fight, all looking to make a rep as the toughest of the tough. It don’t take much to get ’em started in Cotopaxi. How the hell you think we get so much business?”
“That’s the way I like them,” Stone said with a dark grin. “Mean and dumb.”
“Well, if you ever want to join on here, you got a job as an Apprentice Undertaker. I been watching you the last few days you been helping out around here. You got good eyes, good coordination. All the right qualities to be a full-service funeral director.”
“Well, that’s mighty kind,” Stone said, taking the last sip of the fake coffee, the only kind he was likely to see for a while. “And maybe someday I’ll take you up on that if the offer still stands. Right now I got other things to do first. Like I said, making corpses, for better or worse, seems to have been my vocation for the last few months since I left my father’s bunker and came topside. Not tucking them in with the daisies.”
LuAnn came to his attic room as he was packing his few belongings after having just made the bed.
“Going to run off like the others,” LuAnn said. “And, not even say a word. I thought you were different.”
“I wouldn’t have left without coming to say good-bye,” Stone said, walking over to her and grabbing her around the lower part of her back with both hands. He pulled her close and locked her in a long, tight kiss. When they broke for air, she stepped away and was laughing.
“Well, I guess I did make an impression on you, after all,” she said said as she saw his eyes start to light up like they had whenever they had made love over the last few nights.
“Damn right,” Stone replied as he flipped his pack up over his shoulder and started toward the stairs. “And you better believe I’m coming back here, whether I’m alive or in need of one of those boxes you all make so well, I’ll be back.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, suddenly going pale. “Please Martin. I—I—”
“Love is hard to hold right now, baby,” Stone said, pausing at the door for a moment as he looked over at her, his eyes suddenly soft and vulnerable. “I have too many unfinished tasks—not the least of which is finding my sister, April. It’s not a world that nourishes love, baby. I wish it were different. I wish—” He turned and started quickly down the stairs, not wanting her to see the tears forming in his own eyes.
He found Excaliber outside. He hadn’t paid much attention to the dog over the last few days, other than noting that it seemed to be alive and eating its share of chow. But when Stone’s attention was actually on the animal as he headed across the main yard, he noticed that it was playing with a bunch of farm dogs, shepherds, collies, mutts. Stone started ahead fast, with an expression of growing horror on his face. He had seen what Excaliber could do, and it didn’t like dogs.
But as usual, just when he thought he was starting to get an understanding of the pitbull, it went and did something that totally destroyed his preconceptions. It licked the face of a huge Labrador retriever, then barked happily jumping in the air. Stone called to the animal, shaking his head from side to side as he headed toward the motorcycle. But he had only just begun to scold himself for misjudging the pitbull so terribly when it did something to completely sabotage that idea as well. As a shepherd got a little too close and opened its jaws a little too wide, Excaliber went down on both knees in a flash, like a wrestler preparing for a throw. He sank both teeth around the animal’s lower front leg and pulled hard so the dog came crashing down on its face. They were “playing” around on grass and loose dirt, so the shepherd wasn’t hurt, but the animal, which must have outweighed Excaliber by a good forty pounds, nonetheless rose and backed off like it didn’t want anything to do with the pitbull. The others, too, shrank back in nervousness as the bullterrier looked around, happily wagging his tail again, confused as to what was wrong.
It was almost sad in a way, Stone thought as he whistled hard again. Excaliber turned and came rushing toward him. The pitbull was too strong, too good a fighter for its own good. And when threatened, it responded with primitive re-flexes. Too bad if some little poodle got crushed into pâté.
“Come here, boy, good boy.” Stone laughed as the animal began jumping and bucking around in the air as it was wont to do when in fits of extreme pleasure. “How you doing, dog?” Stone slapped the animal on the side of the head each time it reached its pinnacle of trajectory—about six feet off the ground—and it let its big tongue lap out around his wrist and arm, sending out a mini-spray.
The pitbull didn’t look half bad, considering. There were still tufts of hair missing here and there, like little semibald patches. But LuAnn insisted that it would all grow back again that one of their dogs had had similar radiatio
n burns when it explored an atomic-bomb crater about twelve miles off. The ointment she had used on it had totally healed the mutt. Stone glanced down at his own arm. It didn’t look great, but most of the swelling had diminished. Pinkish bumps about the size of dimes still lingered on his back and legs. His face was back to normal, other than what looked like a bad boil along one cheek and flakes of dried skin here and there from the peeling off of his outer epidermal layers. But that would just make him look a little meaner in Murder City, which was fine with Stone.
LuAnn had told him that the boys who had saved him had found a number of burned creatures just a few miles past where Stone had been picked up. But as the kids got closer to him they said the animal life was less severely damaged. Apparently the high-rad rains had been stronger to the east and more diluted to the west. Where you were when the glowing rains hit determined whether you lived or died. Stone and the dog had been on the right side of the tracks.
“Come on, pal,” Stone said as he threw his pack onto the back of the Harley, which was parked against the side of one of the barns. The pitbull jumped and came down a little lopsided on top of the seat, nearly falling off. Scampering wildly with all four legs, it managed to stay atop, though some of its hair did fly off and up into the air as it exerted so much energy.
“Damn,” Stone said as he mounted up in front of the dog when the animal was at last all settled down and the hairs had stopped floating around. “Hope you don’t go completely bald.” Stone was thinking about how hair loss could be one of the side effects of radiation poisoning. “Because you’ll look pretty fucking strange all pink, and with the other dogs laughing at your pink ass wherever you go, you’ll be fighting every damn second of every day.” The pitbull let out a long whine, as if it weren’t at all in the mood to hear any apocalyptic dog stories. And in a sudden mood of mercy Stone shut up and let the throttle go on the black Harley, which rocketed forward, screaming out a roar of power like something that should be caged.
Chapter
Nine
* * *
The sun hovered overhead like a white-hot light bulb about to blow. Stone had to squint to see a damn thing. With the rains past, the skies had cleared considerably, but a thick haze seemed to hang far overhead, as if the gods had put their dirty linen out to dry. He eased the Harley down the dirt road slowly at first, not used to the weight of the vehicle beneath him. Everything seemed new. Stone knew he had been a hair’s breadth from the other side. And now that he was back among the living, there was a sensation in the pit of his stomach like he had just been on a far-off vacation somewhere.
As Stone and his canine partner approached Cotopaxi they began seeing signs of “civilization,” if that was the word for it. Dwellings were hardly more than twisted hovels with raw branches with leaves still attached to them placed over them as roofing. Stone saw collapsing buildings with ripped laundry hanging out their windows, sad-eyed women staring down from the shadowy innards. Everything was in tatters—the people he began passing along the road had their garments literally falling from their bodies. But worst of all were the faces of all whom he passed. They were the faces of the already dead, the hopeless. Dark gray visages that were waiting for but one thing—to die, to be taken off the face of this miserable earth. It could be no worse in the next life than it was in this one.
As Stone drove on a few more miles, Excaliber began growling and snapping his tongue out at the air in lizard-like fashion, as if he were trying to catch an insect that had strayed too close. He soon saw what the pitbull was anticipating, for when they turned around a bend, the road ahead was lined with stands selling steaming pots of food and junk of every kind imaginable. Both sides of the road were lined with little pathetic stalls, hardly more than pieces of wood with junk balanced around them, or an occasional table made of hammered tin with items arranged atop it.
But it was a mockery of a real marketplace, for everything that was being sold was of the lowest quality and functioning order. Knives with broken blades, half pairs of shoes, shirts with no arms, radios and TVs with all their parts and wiring removed, just the frames left. What in God’s name anyone would do with any of it was beyond Stone’s ken as he slowed the be to a crawl to avoid hitting any of the people walking around.
The food, too—if it could be called that—was nothing to write home about, either. Brown oranges, their skins almost rotted away, individual pieces of bread with mold growing on them, bottles of soda with only a thick sludge left on the bottom like mud. It was a bazaar for the super-poor, the lowest of the low. A place where they might go and buy junk and feel like humans again, for a moment or two, until the black horror of the worthlessness of what they now owned hit them as they lay shivering and hungry in their sleep.
“Here, mister, got a nice glove for you,” a voice yelled out.
“Mister, here, got socks all sizes, some even with heels left,” screamed another.
“Cat jerky here,” an old woman cawed out. “Fresh and dehaired. Cat jerky—from the tail, not the paw.” A rack of leather cords were strung up between two poles, and on them were hanging cats of all sizes, strips of cats like leather, paws, ears, about a dozen tails all fricasseed and smothered in some kind of sauce. Stone felt his stomach getting a little uppity, though Excaliber seemed to take quite an interest in the culinary display, his eyes opening wider than they had All morning.
“Mister, mister, you want sell dog, make good stew. Good stew—me split profits with you,” one particularly ugly fellow with no now or ears kept shouting as they cruised by slowly. Stone could hear Excaliber growling softly behind him as he caught the man square in the eyes. The appeals for the quick bucks of Pitbull Platter suddenly stopped dead, and the fellow returned to stirring his huge vat of turnip soup, which he was trying desperately to hawk to the crowds. It was not exactly a breakfast dish—or any other, for that matter. But it was all he had, so he tried to sell it as if it were precious gold. “Soup, soup, delicious turnip soup. Good for gonorrhea, cancer, and tumors of the spine.”
It went on for blocks like that. And then it suddenly stopped. Stone passed a final stand, and then there were no more. The town itself stood ahead, a fairly well-developed place with two- and three-story buildings, most wood-framed, stretching off on all sides. These weren’t in great shape, either, though most of them did have roofs. But as he headed the bike in and came up to the first paved street he had driven on for a while, an all black dog, quite large, with burning red eyes, sudenly darted out from an alley and sprinted straight in front of the bike, forcing Stone to pull hard on the bars and slam the brakes on. The Doberman/shepherd hybrid gave a quick glance up at the canine sitting behind Stone and gripped its load a little harder between its daggerlike teeth. Stone blanched, for the midnight-black dog was carrying a hand, a human hand, in its jaws, the wrist cut about two inches up from the be of the hand. The whole damn thing was still trailing tendrils, dripping a pinkish liquid in little splotches on the cracked concrete beneath it.
The animal darted ahead suddenly, sprinting like a cheetah, and was gone into the far alley to dine in peace. Stone stared after it for a few seconds. If God was sending him signs these days, Stone thought darkly, then he would have to say that that had not exactly been an invitation to Paradise.
He let his heart calm down as the vision of the thing kept burning in his skull like a bad dream. Then he started the be up, seeing Excaliber staring intently down the dark alley like he wanted to go introduce himself. But Stone snapped his hand around, steering with the other for a second, and whapped the pitbull on the nose, just so he didn’t start getting any ideas. With all he’d been through lately, Martin Stone wasn’t in the mood to get in the middle of any dogfights.
Once inside the town, Stone could see that the citizenry had the same dreadful look as those on the outskirts had. They looked terrified, like they were afraid to let their breath completely out, their eyes darting back and forth like rats’, as if awaiting attack at any moment. Drunken
forms lurched around here and there as he drove on another block or two. And then they were everywhere. Men lying on their backs, their faces; propped up against the sides of the wood buildings; pissing against walls; vomiting out their guts; or just lying dead—facedown in the dirt of some alley, as if waiting to be buried only by the inevitable forces of decay.
Yeah, he was in the right place, all right. There was no mistaking it. The party was here. Seeing a bunch of motor-cycles parked outside one of the many drinking establishments along the street, Stone headed over, parking his Harley in an alley just around the side.
“You stay—you hear me, dog?” he said as he dismounted. He pushed the dog’s shoulders down. “Stay. I’ll be back soon. If anyone touches the Harley, you have my permission to make instant human jerky. Anything else?” He looked at the animal, which stared back up through a single disgruntled eye, its head tucked between its paws and an unmistakable expression that said, “Better bring me something, asshole, something tasty or there will be tires with teeth marks in them when you get back.”
Stone checked both his weapons—the mini Uzi with its long clip snapped in on his shoulder holster, and the Redhawk, .44 Mag Ruger on his hip. Between the two of them they should be able to send out some apt hellos should the need arise. Stone headed out around the alley and onto the main stretch of bars and flophouses. This seemed to be the central portion of the town as the joints were positively jumping with sounds, yells, even singing coming out of numerous, doorless doorframes and windowless windows.
Stone headed toward the place with the bikes out front. GET DRUNK HERE, a sign proclaimed above its splintered doorway, which apparently was the bar’s name, as well as its function. And from the openmouthed comatose bodies all around the street in front of the joint, it seemed to be successful in its services. Stone kicked a skinny, vomit-soaked Lush out of the way, who pumped both fists into the air without even opening his eyes, mumbled a few fuck-you’s just to let the world know he was still there, and fell flat over on his side where he began snoring loudly as Stone stepped over his outstretched feet.
The Vile Village Page 6