The Damn Disciples

by Craig Sargent

  On the other side of the Guru the damn dog joined in too, looking like some kind of creature from the mists of the Neanderthal days with its archaic symbols scrawled over it in red. It snarled at the dancers as they passed, reminding them to keep their fucking asses high, and their feet aslapping. And they did. And didn’t need any more encouragement than those three and ten thousand milligrams of Nectar circulating through them.

  They twirled for hours, screaming and dropping to the floor in writhing convulsions as many of their nervous systems overloaded completely and began short-circuiting. And as the hours went by, Stone felt things go from bad to worse. For he was coming off the stuff fast. Every cell in him was aching. His head was just a throbbing mess of gristle, his eyes watery and puffed out, hardly able to see. As he spun, tears sprinkled down—to see what had happened to the only two creatures he cared about on this entire fucked-up planet. The Guru had molded them both to his personal designer taste. Had added them to his entourage befitting the rule of a small but growing empire of the brainless. Even the fucking dog didn’t have the spark it usually carried in its almond eyes. Stone tried to catch either of their eyes as he spun around them, knowing it was dangerous but having to try. To see if there was anything there at all anymore. He could see nothing. Though both of their gazes caught him at some point over the endless circlings, not a sign of recognition crossed their faces.

  The ritual went on for hours, until the room was filled with the odor of sweat and the strong-smelling Nectar. But at last, about midnight, the Guru suddenly departed again, along with Stone’s ex-family, in a swirling cloud of blue smoke. The pods left or were rolled out the door and back to the bunkhouses for the night. Now that he had stopped dancing, Stone’s body was already starting to tighten up. He walked as if on razor blades—for his feet felt as if they were on fire—back to his barracks and slid into bed. There he lay, shaking and sweating, his teeth chattering together like marambas in a salsa band.

  And through the cold night, as he wondered if he were going to live or die—and wouldn’t at all have minded the latter—Stone discovered what all addicts had had to learn through the course of mankind’s long addictive relationship with drugs. That what feels good when you first take it feels like the tortures of hell itself when you try to get off it. Stone was just a junkie with a monkey as big as a mountain gorilla climbing on his back, screaming out for more.

  TWENTY

  Stone couldn’t have gotten more than a couple of hours of tortured sleep before he was awakened by the Group Leader, who did his usual screaming and stick-smacking number to get them all going. He felt like shit. Shit wasn’t the word. He would have been happy to feel like shit. The gorilla on his back wasn’t giving up. If anything, it was growing, its ugly paws ripping at his brain. Stone wanted some of the Golden Nectar. He could feel it inside. He craved it. His body was demanding, begging, pleading, cajoling him for it. But Stone just gritted his teeth and let the sweat pour down his face.

  Fuck it. The pain was good. It hurt—but it cleared his mind. It razored through the curtain of fog that he had been in for the last week or more. It sliced through the cottony brain cells, screaming out reality to him. And Stone savored it. Let it rip into him. He would use the withdrawal to bring himself out of the drug stupor, would turn the pain into anger, and would direct it against the bastards who had done all this to him, to April, and to the damn dog. And to all the poor pods here, and those who had already died. Even as Stone made his face look blank, which was the hardest thing of all considering the amount of torment his mind and flesh were in, he rose from the bed, dressed, and joined the others, who were filing silently out, their eyes straight ahead, focused on infinity.

  Stone managed to do the same thing at the morning Aura Ceremony—having slipped his Nectar down his sleeve. Though it smelled wonderful and his cells cried out for him to drink it—just a drop or two—Stone poured the fucking stuff down his robe, getting it all even stickier and fouler inside. But even that was just another irritant that he could use to drag himself from the shell of nothingness he had been nearly digested into. At the drug factory he walked in stiff-legged, mounted his platform, and began stirring. No one noticed a thing. No foremen or guards at the door noticed that beneath the blank expression, the eyes staring straight ahead, Stone was in fact seething. There was pain in those eyes, and rage in those lips, threatening to scream out at any moment.

  But he didn’t scream—he just walked and stirred. And when he felt the fumes from the drug start getting to him, Stone ripped off a few small pieces of material from the sleeve of his robe while he kept stirring, and put them in each nostril so he to some extent was able to keep the mind-altering fumes out. As he stirred throughout the afternoon, Stone saw them pouring vat after vat into large barrels and then stacking them at the far end of the factory. Already there were over a hundred of the barrels—and Stone knew they were heading out of there soon. Once the bastards started getting their slimy fingers onto the rest of Colorado, it would be all over.

  Through the long painful day, Stone tried desperately to think up a plan—any plan. Hard enough under the best of circumstances, considering how outnumbered he was. But even harder in his present mental and physical state. Sweat poured down from every pore in his epidermis, and he was thankful for the long enclosing brown robe that hid his shaking from view. His suffering was his own. It was a private affair.

  The Guru came in again late that evening just before the end of Stone’s shift and he looked over the rising piles of barrels all filled to overflow with the Nectar. He seemed pleased with it all—and in a positively good mood for a Guru who most of the time emulated Adolf Hitler for all his demonstrativeness. The fat face smiled and his voice had an almost happy quality to it. At last his dark plans were coming to fruition. After a lifetime of crime and thievery, he was coming into his own. Would take his place alongside the great rulers of history. Only, his rule would last—unlike all the others’, the Napoleons, the Caesars, the Hitlers and Mussolinis—for many, many years. They were mere bureaucrats compared to him. For he had a magic helper that none of them did—the Golden Nectar.

  “The wagons will be here first thing in the morning,” Guru Yasgar told the foremen, patting the barrels as if they were the thighs of his harem. “No problems.”

  “No problems, Great One,” all the men cried out, throwing themselves into scraping bows before him as he left the place with a growl emerging from his whipping robe. Stone knew he had to act—tonight. After tomorrow it would be too late. That didn’t give him a hell of a lot of time to get it together. And considering the fact that he appeared to be entering the main stage of his withdrawal process as he started puking his guts out into the Nectar, it looked even worse. Stone managed to guide the upchuck slop right into the drug stew and stirred it quickly in. No one noticed. Stone figured people who ate human burgers wouldn’t mind a little puke in their drug malteds.

  By the time he was sent off from his shift, he was a wreck and could hardly twitch and lurch his way out the door. The guards gave him the once-over, but lots of the stirrers could be seen going into similar physical contortions. The fumes were powerful. The turnover rate at the drug factory was extremely high. And those who left didn’t usually get promoted upstairs—they croaked. It wasn’t the kind of career those looking for a long-term situation would be happy in. But then, Stone wasn’t planning on sticking around. He was getting out of this wretched place alive—or dead.

  He staggered back to his bunk; most of the pods were already asleep. Group Leader whacked at him, driving him down the middle aisle into bed.

  “To sleep, Pod number 47, to sleep! You must awaken at five o’clock. Nectar production has been stepped up.”

  “Great,” Stone mumbled as he climbed up into his top bunk and fell down onto the hard bed.

  “What was that, Pod number 47?” Group Leader asked him, leaning back and looking a little more closely at the man. Pods didn’t usually answer back with sma
rtass cracks.

  “I said…thanks for telling me now,” Stone said, talking in a slow monotone the way they all did. “It is an honor to produce more Golden Nectar for the Guru—for such a worthless being like myself to be of such service. I will sleep well tonight. Of that I am sure.”

  “Excellent attitude, Pod number 47,” the Group Leader said with a grim smile. “I will note that on your performance chart. Perhaps someday you shall rise to gray robe.”

  “I am not worthy, Group Leader.” Stone sighed deeply.

  “No, you are not,“ the pod crew chief replied as he walked away toward his single up by the door to keep his eye on everything.

  “Asshole,” Stone couldn’t help but mutter under his breath, which was better than jumping up and slugging the guy. But thank God the Group Leader didn’t hear him. He lay there, letting the tension and the pain ooze from his body. Only problem was, it didn’t ooze away as much as just keep bubbling up until he felt as if he was going to explode. The worst thing about the withdrawal, aside from the fact that he kept having to run to the shithole in the back of the place and let out with huge streams of diarrhea, was that it made his brain feel as if it was splitting into about a thou-sand pieces. But with ever-deeper descent into the torments of the drug-addicted flesh, Stone felt his mind growing clearer—and angrier.

  He lay there and thought and thought. And when he had put it all off as long as he possibly could, gauging that it was about three in the morning and that he didn’t have a hell of a lot of time, he at last sat up and said a silent prayer to whatever gods might be, and crossed himself unconsciously to ward off all the supernatural powers of the Guru. For though Stone was coming back to his old mind, he still feared Guru Yasgar, and the Transformer with that dead face, the glowing red eyes. How could the man even be human? There was more to this whole stinking ball game than he could yet understand. But then, he wasn’t here to unravel the fucking mysteries of the universe—just to grab April and the flea-bitten dog—and get the hell out of there. Only, he had to do something first.

  He rose, tried to plant his feet firmly on the floor as everything was spinning around, almost making him puke again. Stone walked slowly down the center aisle hoping he could even still fight. He wasn’t sure things worked quite like they once did. But he was about to find out.

  “Where the hell are you going, Pod number 47?” the Group Leader barked out as Stone came even with his bunk, where the man was half dozing with one eye open, his long stick held in his arms over his chest.

  “I’m going to go knock the Guru’s balls off,” Stone whispered in the half-darkness. He couldn’t help but let a smirk flash across his face. It felt good—even within the pain. Made it all worthwhile, in a way, that little smile. The Group Leader shot up from his bed like a cougar with a pinecone up its ass and came at Stone with the stick, ready to take his head off. As the stick flew in toward his skull, Stone slipped under it and slammed his fist up into the Group Leader’s lower abdomen. With his index finger arched forward at midjoint, the pointed fist slammed into the man’s guts and knocked all air out of him like bellows closing. The stick flew from his hand, and Stone caught it in midair and then guided the bent-over man who was making strange sounds below him around and out of the room—into a small utility closet off to the side where they could have a little discussion about a few things. Stone pushed the man right into the five-by-five-foot closet and closed the door behind him.

  Just as the Group Leader starting rising up again, Stone let him have a knee to the face. Various cracking sounds resulted and a gush of blood instantly covered the man’s features. Stone needed information—and fast. He was going to have to put the fear of God into this son of a bitch to make him spill. Had to make the man more afraid of Martin Stone than of Guru Yasgar. “Now you’re going to tell me a few things,” Stone said after he had waited a few seconds, enough time for the man’s brain to at least be hearing things again. “And you’re going to tell me, because the way I figure it, you’re an upper-echelon Group Leader and must be on smaller doses of the Nectar. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to run things as efficiently. That means you can also feel more pain.”

  Just as the man’s eyes looked up to see if there was some way he could attack, Stone slipped his hand down under the Group Leader’s ear and, just at the top of the neck and pressing in his finger, gave a shiatsu push to the nerve. The man started to scream, but Stone slammed his hand over the gasping mouth. He didn’t need any more visitors right now. The acupuncture, meridian 12 point. His father had showed him it—one of many places on the body where one could inflict pain, paralyze, or kill. And from the looks of the tortured face beneath him, Stone figured he was doing something right.

  “Now—I won’t hurt you again if you answer my questions, okay?” The Group Leader shook his head fast a few times as Stone let up on the pressure and took his hand from the man’s mouth. He kept the finger just touching the skin, ready to jam it in.

  “Where are my weapons…my clothes?”

  “I don’t—” the Group Leader began. But Stone slammed the index finger in like a spear and the man gasped as if the devil had just pushed a pitchfork through his heart.

  “Let’s tell the truth, okay, asshole?” Stone said, almost enjoying making the little bastard squirm after all they had put him through.

  “In—in building R—south side of town. All confiscated stuff is taken there.”

  “And second,” Stone said with a deathly darkness in his face. “Where are the girl—the Guru’s new woman—and the dog. Where are they?” The man looked as if he didn’t want to answer that one at all. But Stone pressed again, and he spat out the words as though they were bullets.

  “In the Royal Temple. The Guru has taken her as his Heavenly Wife—and they are to be wed in a few days.”

  “Great,” Stone said, slamming the stick down hard on the side of the Group Leader’s skull. The man collapsed in a heap on the floor. He’d be out long enough for Stone to get his thing done. And after that, it didn’t really matter. He’d be out of there—or he’d be dead.

  He made his way through the back alleys and streets until he reached the building the Group Leader had mentioned. Stone reconnoitered the place, making two complete circumferences before heading in. It was big—warehouse-size. Only trouble was, there was only one door that Stone could see—and it had a guard in front of it armed with an SMG. Stone wasn’t in the mood to start cat-burglaring it up the side of the damn thing—coming down from the roof. No, this was all going to have to be out front, every bloody bit of it.

  He walked suddenly from out of the shadows and straight toward the guard, waving at him to completely confuse the bastard. Stone came up fast on the man with one of the big artificial smiles that all the pods wore. “Group Leader just sent me to tell you this—” Stone said as he slammed his elbow around right into the guard’s face. Once, twice, three times he cracked the elbow around into the center of the head. When he stopped, the bloody tangle of broken bone and blood was not quite the same man it had been a minute before. He pushed the guard backward and they both half tumbled through the door, the guard falling backward, where he began writhing around silently as he stroked his bloody face as if it was a baby.

  Stone, seeing that the asshole wasn’t any more trouble to him, grabbed the SMG and a bag of ammo the guy wore on his hip and instantly felt a whole lot better. With a little firepower maybe he could actually wreak some havoc around the place. Suddenly the odds seemed a lot less formidable than they had just seconds before. He made a quick visual scan of the place, swinging a small oil lamp that had been sitting by the door. The numbers of rows of shelves that ran off in every direction made it seem like an impossible task. But once Stone began walking around he saw that things were all logically broken up into categories—of clothes, boots, weapons, whatever. It didn’t take all that long for him to find his stuff. He took off the filthy robe, coated on the inside from stem to stem with the Golden Nectar, and sli
pped into his black turtleneck sweater, motor-cycle jacket, jeans, and boots.

  That felt better. And better yet when he found his Ruger 44 and strapped the holster around his chest. Then the Beretta 9mm autopistol. And they’d laid the silencer down right next to it—how nice. Stone screwed it on, slammed a thirty-shot mag into the bottom of the thing, grabbing the ammo sack as well, and turned around. Now he was starting to get somewhere.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Stone headed through the darkness, toward the drug factory. There was no one out. That was one of the good things about a cult—they obeyed orders. Guards were posted here and there, but they were mostly set on the outer edges of the town to guard against invasion from the outside world. Somehow they hadn’t really thought too much about attack from within. For those who went mad just fell down and began spasming, or else never got up from their beds one morning, dead in their sleep, unable to face another day. But no pod had ever struck back against the cult. Until now.

  The withdrawal was still hitting Stone hard as ever. But he had already gotten used to it in a weird way, and just used the pain—the splitting headache—to drive himself on, the way a good boxer uses the blows he takes to wake him up and get his fighting juices flowing. Stone’s fighting juices were sure as hell flowing. He was ready to take on the world. He moved low in the shadows, savoring his returning memory, his abilities slowly restoring themselves. It was as if he were being reborn.

  He reached the drug factory and, looking up at the sky, saw that it was just at the edge of starting to change color from black to bruised purple. That meant dawn was coming in fast, like a fucking violet-hued freight train. And with it would come the carriers of the plague to the surrounding territories. He had to move now.… Oil lamps were burning inside the factory and Stone could hear the sounds of heavy work inside. The night shift. There would be at least four workers, two overseers, a guard or two. So he was dealing with a minimum of eight, a maximum of—He didn’t know. There could be fifty fucking people in there for all he knew. But it hardly mattered—he had to go in and take the whole fucking place out. He wasn’t going to allow a murderous scumbag like Yasgar to take over what pitiful remnants of America were left. There would be no chance of ever returning to some kind of real “civilization” then.