“Why so many dogs?” Stone asked Williamson as she led him down the middle of the place, which with its hundred-by-hundred-foot space filled to the rafters with dogs smelled and felt more like a zoo than an army storage depot.
“General Patton is a dog lover and breeder,” she answered, glancing over nervously as they passed an immense Doberman that stared unflinching back at them. “He’s concerned that a number of the purebred species will die out or become genetically damaged by radiation so as to produce only mutant and weakened offspring. These animals represent a relatively clean germ pool from which to restock. His dream is that after the country is restored to law and order these dogs will be reintroduced back into the population.”
“Sort of a Noah’s Ark of canines?” Stone said with a grin.
“Exactly.” She laughed. “And I think yours must be over here somewhere.” They walked into a section that was filled with pitbulls, both American and English. They were a beautiful lot and Stone let out with a low whistle. To see so many of the breed in one place was quite a sight—their black and brown and white and mixed coats shining like lions’ manes. The handlers clearly took excellent care of their charges. It was evident in all the animals’ bright eyes and brushed coats.
Suddenly Stone saw it—he knew the dog instantly—and rushed over to the six by six by six pen in which Excaliber was locked. It made something sink in the pit of his stomach to see the animal caged up. When he had originally found it the dog was locked in a Plexiglas prison along with a number of other animals at a biker bar.
“How you doing, boy?” Stone asked, kneeling down. Excaliber rose from a piece of cardboard in a corner of the pen and ambled over to Stone. He barked softly in recognition and licked at Stone through the mesh enclosure, his long wet tongue slopping over everything in sight. “You all right. They been treating you all right?” Stone looked around and saw a bowl filled with water and next to it what looked like ground up meat of some kind. If the pitbull was getting fresh meat, he was doing a hell of a lot better than he had done under Stone, who had been more likely to feed him cookies and beer than the nutrients that a growing dog needed.
Stone wanted the animal to be unhappy. To bark and whine and beg to come back with master. But after a mildly affectionate greeting, it turned, went back to the food bowl and began lapping up some of the red meat inside. It seemed perfectly content with the setup.
“Ingrate,” Stone muttered under his breath.
“What was that?” Nurse Williamson asked, standing next to him.
“Nothing, just insulting my dog for not being more loyal,” Stone said as he stood up. Well, if the damned dog was so happy in there it could just stay inside another night, Stone thought with disgust. He waved good-bye with a little salute.
“Adios, amigo—happy eating,” Stone said. Excaliber glanced over with one cocked eye but didn’t lift his head from the bowl, unwilling to miss one second of life’s most wonderful experience.
CHAPTER
Nine
“YOU DON’T seem to like the fact that your dog seems none the worse for wear,” Nurse Williamson commented as they headed back out to the front of the landbound animal ark.
“That’s correct,” Stone said. “In general, I think it’s wonderful what General Patton is doing to preserve these species. Someday the world will thank him. But I’ve always resisted military training—wearing a uniform, loud ‘yes-sir’s’ and all that. I spent the first twenty or so years of my life fighting against that approach to things with everything inside me. So when I see my dog seem to go under the influence so easily, I guess I don’t like it. I want him to be a square cog in a round hole, to be anti-rules and regulations like his master… and I especially don’t like seeing him happy inside a cage. It’s not a place for anything, let alone a fighting dog with the intelligence and energy that his species has.”
Stone stopped, suddenly catching with his peripheral vision two shapes coming quickly out of the shadows from behind the warehouse. Instinctively he raised both hands for combat before he saw their uniforms. Then he let his clenched fists loosen and drop to his side with a self-disgusted laugh.
“I see what you mean about not having to defend yourself all the time,” Stone said, looking at Williamson. “I’m ready to fight anything that moves—trees, clouds, you name it. I think my paranoia level has risen through the danger mark since I’ve been out there.”
“Mr. Stone?” one of the soldiers asked, and Stone noticed that aside from being large fellows with a certain Cro-Magnon look each of them had a somewhat ominous emblem on their lapel—a golden eagle carrying a skull in its claws.
“They’re Internal Security, I.S.,” she said to Stone, sensing his apprehension.
“We’d like to have a brief talk with you, Stone,” one of them said as they parked themselves on each side of him and crossed their oak tree arms in a don’t-even-try-to-run-one-inch kind of relaxed demeanor. “It will just take a few minutes. Colonel Spears would like to go over a few things with you.”
“Sure,” Stone said, burping. “Will there be any dessert?”
“Dessert, sure,” the other two-forty-pound plus trooper grunted with a little laugh.
“It will be okay,” Nurse Williamson said, holding onto his arm and starting forward. “I’ll come with you and then I’ve got to get you back to the ward; you shouldn’t even really be out right now. He’s a sick man,” she said, looking up at the I.S. men. “I’m supposed to give him another set of antibiotic shots and treat his wound.”
“You go,” the higher-ranked one said, pulling her arm free of Stone’s and steering her toward the hospital at the other end of the encampment. “He’ll be there in time to get his shots. He’s a big boy, and he can handle himself.”
“Get the needles ready,” Stone said to her as he walked off between the two uniformed gorillas. “Especially black cherry, that’s my favorite flavor.” They led him down one of the side streets to a warehouse painted black—this one with machine-gun emplacements on each side of the roof, thirty feet up. They were waved in by the guards at the front door, five of them with submachine guns hanging on leather straps around their necks, and passed through a metal detector just inside the doorway to the building. It rang out a beeping alarm.
“Okay, pal, take it out—all your hardware,” the leader of the two said, stopping and staring at Stone with dead eyes.
“But I’m not even carrying anything,” Stone said. Suddenly he remembered his boots; there was a snub-nosed .38 in one and a blade in the other. He reached down and took them out and handed them over grudgingly. He didn’t like being without any weapons, not in the new America. They passed him through again and this time the beeper remained silent. He was led down a hall as white and sterile as the hospital had been and into a small five-sided room surrounded by mirrors on every wall. An armchair sat in the dead center of the room, which made Stone feel slightly dizzy, as if its extra wall somehow set it out of a normal three-dimensional perspective and set his nerves off center.
“Please be seated,” one of the I.S. men said, pointing to the chair. Stone glanced down at it to make sure no stakes or snakes were waiting, and seeing nothing plopped down into it, glad of the chance to rest his overloaded stomach for a second.
“Someone will be right in,” the man said with a grim, darting glance and the two of them turned, quickly exiting the room. Stone sat silently in the chair, looking around the room. With the mirrors from floor to ceiling on every wall the illusion created was of endless images of him in the chair receding into infinity, five infinities, for the image was reflected from every angle. The overall effect was as if one were falling into oneself forever. It made him feel dizzy, as if he were flying into his own mind. He knew also that he was being observed; behind one or perhaps all the mirrors men were watching him, perhaps taking pictures. The whole thing was a test. But for what?
Stone suddenly heard a sharp metallic sound and felt bands shoot up around his wrists an
d ankles. He struggled hard, but he was instantly and completely sealed in by steel wraps that felt unbreakable. The chair whirred deep inside and began stretching out, moving. Within seconds it had spread out until it was flat—and he was on his back unable to move an inch.
“Ah, so sorry to inconvenience you, Mr. Stone,” a voice said as a doorway in one of the mirrors opened and a man stepped through. He came toward the prisoner with slow, relaxed steps until he stood right over Stone. He smiled down—the smile a rattler has when he spots a prairie dog a foot from his mouth. Stone suddenly wished he was back in the wastelands where they never smiled. “But we do have to be careful,” the I.S. officer said softly. “I’m sure you can understand.”
“Oh, of course,” Stone answered, looking up, squinting since lights overhead made it difficult to see. “I don’t mind at all being strapped down to a moving armchair and immobilized like a pig about to be slaughtered. The only thing I do mind is now you’ve added armchairs to my list of things to be paranoid about. From now on I’ll never be able to sit down in one without shooting it first.”
“Ah, very amusing.” The man laughed, more of a gurgle than a normal laugh. “It’s good to have a sense of humor. Shows the signs of a superior intelligence. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Colonel Spears, head of the I.S. unit. Yours is a slightly unusual case, and being unusual of course it attracts the attention of our security people. We just want to go over a few things. Usually we do most of our recruiting from the towns—more stable environments. Much of the refuse we’ve picked up on the road, in the wilds, have proved to be undesirable ultimately. You were actually rescued from a kill zone, and probably would have been eliminated had you been doing anything but dying. But, paradox of paradoxes, we rescued you instead of killing you.”
He reached below the chair and extracted a syringe from a hidden drawer.
“Torture time? Bamboo beneath the fingernails?” Stone asked as he saw the big needle rising back up into the air.
“Oh, hardly.” Colonel Spears laughed again. Stone didn’t like it when he laughed. It made his rodentlike face with slicked-back black hair and angular cheekbones even more ratlike. “We’re very efficient here. That’s the rule of the game under General Patton—efficiency. There are ways to find out the truth far better and more reliable than bone bending.” He squeezed the plunger slightly and a little stream of clear liquid squirted up into the air. He lowered the syringe to Stone’s shoulder and plunged the tip in. Stone winced for a fraction of a second. He hated fucking needles. He’d rather get shot than stuck with that long ice pick.
“Sodium pentothal,” the colonel said, injecting a shitload of the stuff into Stone’s veins. He stood back and looked down paternally at his clamped-down subject. Stone found himself quickly falling under an avalanche of pressure in his brain. It just kept pushing him down until his consciousness felt like it was in his feet.
“Name?” Spears asked.
“Stone, Martin Stone,” Stone heard his own lips numbly reply. It was as if he was watching it from beneath the water, a hundred feet down, watching his mouth move high above, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.
“Born?” Spears asked, as he glanced down at a digital readout of a sophisticated lie detector that sampled Stone’s pulse and body heat and veni-pressure from detectors within the steel clamps.
“Denver, Colorado.” Stone’s mouth answered while Stone looked up from the bottom of a mental quarry.
“Reason for being in the Green River.” Spears asked.
“I fell-fell in,” the Stone mouth answered.
“Reason for being here in Fort Bradley,” the I.S. chief asked, pacing around slowly in front of Stone. As he asked each question Spears glanced up to watch Stone’s facial reactions and also the readouts on the monitor set below the now horizontal chair.
“No… rea—reason,” Stone’s lips dumply whispered. “Was being treated for bite wound. Just woke up today. No reason. No reason.” He kept mumbling like a broken robot, as if his chemically altered, momentarily lobotomized brain couldn’t quite understand the concept of “reason.” He was just here. That was all. There was no reason for it. It was all very existential or something.
“Are you a cannibal?” Spears asked, looking sharply at Stone’s face, which registered extreme repugnance.
“God, no,” the voice answered, and Stone cheered it on from his observation point down in his toes. That was true—score a point for his side. “I’ve never touched human flesh, or my dog either. Both of us would rather eat ants.”
Spears laughed again. “Even under pentothal, a sense of humor. Remarkable, Mr. Stone, you have an extremely strong will and personality to exhibit even that much independence. I gave you a large dose.” Colonel Spears went on and on, flashing him quick questions about any number of things.
“Are you a homosexual? Do you have any diseases? How much money do you possess?” And Stone answered truthfully to all—“no,” “no,” “none.”
“How many men have you killed?” Spears asked suddenly, moving up to the lie detecting monitor for close inspection of the waveform results.
“Too many to count,” Stone’s mouth replied.
“More than ten?”
“Yes.”
“More than fifty?”
“Yes.”
“More than a hundred?”
“I would imagine so,” Stone’s mouth answered.
“Tell me, Mr. Stone,” the I.S. chief asked, as he stood right over the elongated chair and stared down into Stone’s face, checking every muscle, every hint of facial expression. “Just how have you been able to kill so many? You don’t on the surface look like a master killer.”
“However I look,” Stone’s voice answered with an almost bored weariness, “I have killed a number of men. Killing comes easily to me. I was trained by one of the masters of killing, my father, Major Clayton Stone.” He paused and then went on slowly, enunciating each word almost syllable by syllable—one of the effects of the truth serum. “I was told by the shaman of a tribe of Ute Indians who saved my life several months ago that I was a nadi, one with the gift of giving death.”
“Final question, Mr. Stone,” the colonel said with his razor-edged grin. “Why have you killed so many men?”
“Because they tried to kill me,” Stone answered, almost in a whisper now, as the drug was starting to send him under.
Spears bent down and looked closely at the green line that undulated across the monitor screen, studying its every curve closely. At last he stood up fully. “You know, some men can actually learn to fool both pentothal and lie detector. But not many. Not many at all. I think you’re telling the truth.”
“I am t—t—telling the truth,” Stone’s mouth stuttered, trying not to slobber as his lips were starting to feel like slime-coated elephant’s ears flapping wetly against one another.
“Well, that’s all,” Spears said. He closed hinged steel doors over the lie detector below and pressed a button on the side. The chair began slowly folding up like an accordion until it was a chair again. The hand clasps slid into the sides. Stone was free. Even down in his drug-dazed cavern of a brain he liked that idea.
CHAPTER
Ten
STONE STUMBLED back to the hospital. The two I.S. men who’d taken him in walked along on each side of him, holding him as he started weaving too much to one side of the street. But he just shook them off. He’d walk back on his own if he had to crawl. At last the words FORT BRADLEY HOSPITAL FOR SURGERY crawled into his eyeballs and Stone pushed through the door. Nurse Williamson was waiting in the lobby and took him from the custody of the Cro-Mags. Stone was glad to see them go.
“Come on,” she said, taking her patient by the arm. “You look like hell. Let’s get you to bed.” Her he let lead him. Even in his stupor the feel of her flesh, her warmth against him, felt wonderful. She opened a door, snapped on a light and half threw him down on the bed, where he landed right on his face and stomach. She quick
ly undressed him and got him under the covers. His body was nearly as limp as a rag doll now as the entire load of truth serum circulated through his veins, acting much like a dose of barbiturates. She injected him quickly with several shots of God knew what all. Even in his zombie state Stone was getting pissed off at how many drugs were being pumped into his flesh. It was getting a little ridiculous.
But then she pulled the covers over him and turned off the lights. He fell asleep within seconds into a mercifully dark and, for the moment, safe pit of unconsciousness. But already paranoid images filled his dreams. The eagle, the golden eagle of the I.S. unit, dozens of them were flying down out of a storm-filled sky. And in the blood-dripping claws of each one, a human skull, the prunelike faces shriveled back in shrunken head screams of total horror… then they dove for his skull.
He woke, kicking and shaking his fists. He was surrounded by feathers and beaks.
“No, no, it’s me, relax,” a voice said from out of the darkness. Stone opened his puffy eyes and saw Nurse Williamson in the dim glow of a night-light across the room. “You had a bad dream. You were shivering. Here, I’ll put another blanket on you. It got very cold suddenly outside—must be an arctic front coming in.” She grabbed a navy blue hospital blanket from a nearby closet and unfolded it, spreading it over him with a quick throw. She came around to the front of the bed.
“There, is that better—” she started to ask. Without really being aware of what he was doing—just wanting her—Stone reached out and grabbed her, arms pulling her down on top of him. She landed on his chest, their two bodies touching at every point. She resisted at first. But as she felt the warmth, the need of his body to be next to hers, she gave in. She could feel something melting inside her, a shield she had put up ever since she had joined the NAA. She hadn’t let a man get this close to her since she’d been raped. Not that a lot hadn’t tried. But she felt something for Stone. Something inexplicable. And rather than try to leave, she turned her head toward him and sought his lips like a bird too long denied food. And when their tongues touched it was as if she exploded into a bomb of passion.
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