Warlord's Revenge

by Craig Sargent

  But for the moment the room appeared to be functioning perfectly. Everywhere were green and amber blinking lights, numbers buzzing across screens, sine waves and graphs, clicking sounds as radio transmissions were automatically tape-recorded. Stone could see no one. Somehow he knew that if someone was hiding here, he would sense them. Yet he felt nothing. He went to the main computer console, sat down, laid the big .44 up on the Formica table, and entered the “on” code. The screen blinked to life, and the moment it did, a red light blinked on and off and the words EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION, EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION gal-loped across it in flickering letters.

  Stone stared up in amazement as lines of glowing green print begin advancing down the face of the wide glass monitor in front of him:

  MARTIN, THIS IS APRIL. I CAN ONLY HOPE THAT IT’S YOU WHO IS READING THIS. BUT YOU WOULD BE THE ONLY ONE WHO COULD ACCESS THE CRAY II. I’M WITH DR. KENNEDY. BUT WERE BOTH IN GREAT DANGER. ALL OF US ARE. YOU TOO. THEY’RE AFTER US, MARTIN. A HIT TEAM, TRACKING US DOWN LIKE DOGS FROM THE MOMENT WE ESCAPED FROM THE DWARF’S RESORT. THE DOC WAS WOUNDED, BUT I THINK HE’LL LIVE. BUT WE CANT STAY HERE. THEY’RE TOO NEAR. WE’RE GOING TO RESUPPLY OURSELVES AND LEAVE. LEAVE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT THROUGH THE EMERGENCY DOOR. MARTIN—WE’RE GOING TO GO TO THE PLACE WHERE YOU AND I VACATIONED WHEN WE WERE KIDS. YOU KNOW WHERE I MEAN—WHERE GRANDMOTHER LIVED OUT HER LAST YEARS. IT’S ISOLATED ENOUGH THAT NO ONE COULD FIND US. AND WE’LL WAIT FOR YOU. I PRAY THAT YOU’RE STILL ALIVE. IF YOU’RE NOT, I’M SURE THAT IT WON’T BE LONG UNTIL I JOIN YOU IN WHATEVER THERE IS AFTER ALL THIS—’CAUSE IT’S PRETTY FUCKING HORRIBLE WHERE I’M STANDING. LOVE APRIL.

  Yeah, that was sis, all right, Stone thought with a sardonic twitch. Always the card, always the optimist. Always a way with words to make you look on the bright side of things. Not that it wasn’t all true. So she had gone to their other summer home in Stoneham in Pawnee National Park. If the bunker was in remote territory, that place was ready for a cover of National Geographic. It was high up on the side of a mountain, right up in the goddamn clouds. It was only twenty miles to the southeast but was inaccessible to anyone without a pickax and a llama. If she made it, she’d be safe —for the moment.

  Stone keyed out the message and then asked for and got access to general information—the main directory of his father’s extensive computer-information system. When his father had set the system up, knowing his son might someday need it, even have his life be dependent on the data, the Major had tried to make it as simple and user-friendly as possible. So all Stone had to do was pick a subject, then zero in on more and more precise information.

  “AREA OF INFORMATION?” the computer printed out on the monitor in front of him.

  “RADIATION,” Stone typed in. The computer box on the table was hooked up with parallel port cables to the mainframe, a Cray II Jr., the only computer that the Cray company had ever allowed to be sold to a private individual, his father. But then, being a war hero, and the president and main stockholder of one of the most powerful and influential munitions manufacturing plants in the country, Major Clayton R. Stone, ex-Ranger, circa Special Forces, circa LURPS, Vietnam, was not often a man who didn’t get his way.

  “RADIATION,” the computer terminal scrolled in a flash in front of Stone. A list of subheadings about the subject flashed on and off.

  “MEDICAL TREATMENTS FOR:” Stone keyed in, and sat back as the mainframe seemed to gulp down the information with a little electronic bump on the far side of the large computer room.

  “RADIATION POISONING.” The green words began jumping across the screen almost as fast as Stone could read them, “EXPOSURE TO VARIOUS FORMS OF RADIATION FROM WASTE PRODUCT TO REACTOR MATERIALS TO BOMB DETONATION. TYPICALLY GAMMA RAYS, BETA PARTICLES, HEAT WAVES, SUFFICIENT TO CAUSE SIGNIFICANT TO TOTAL CELLULAR DISRUPTION AND/OR ANNIHILATION.

  “HYDROGEN BOMB BLAST,” the screen scrolled on. A chart appeared on the terminal of an H-bomb going off, and the computer asked Stone for its size.

  “TEN MEGATONS,” he keyed in. “DETONATION DISTANCE 25 MILES.”

  Within a second the screen was digitizing back, “CENTRAL LOCATION OF BLAST HERE.” A flashing dot appeared on the monitor, and then concentric circles going outward from the explosion at ten-mile intervals, “DEAD ZONE,” the inner ring read, as did the second one. “AT 30 AND 40 MILES,” the monitor scrolled, “SEVERE POISONING FROM GAMMA RAYS AT 50—SURVIVAL POSSIBLE. MAXIMUM TREATMENT NEEDED.”

  “SYMPTOMS: NAUSEA, BLEEDING FROM ALL ORIFICES, HAIR LOSS, TEETH LOSS, FINGERNAIL LOSS. PEELING OFF OF SKIN AND LIPS IS NOT UNCOMMON WITH RADIATION BURNS OF SEVERE MAGNITUDE. LEUKEMIA, CANCER OF ALL FORMS, BEGIN SHOWING UP WITHIN 6 TO 12 MONTHS.

  “RADIATION MADNESS: OFTEN A KIND OF MADNESS CAN SET IN ON THOSE HEAVILY IRRADIATED BUT NOT KILLED OUTRIGHT. SYMPTOMS ARE SIMILAR TO RABIES, WITH FOAMING AT THE MOUTH AND VIOLENT, EVEN PSYCHOTIC, ACTIONS.

  TREATMENTS: RECENT DISCOVERIES SHOW THAT POTASSIUM IODIDE, SEA KELP, AND CERTAIN MIXTURES OF VITAL MINERALS AND TRACE ELEMENTS CAN ACT AS POWERFUL CLEANSING AGENTS TO THE ENTIRE BODY. AS LONG AS THE SYSTEM IS FED THESE SUBSTANCES IT NEEDS, IT WILL NOT HAVE TO TAKE THEM FROM THE FOOD SOURCE OR THE AIR, BOTH OF WHICH WILL BE RADIOACTIVE.

  “SUGGESTED PRESCRIPTIONS:

  POTASSIUM IODIDE—20 MG PER DAY.

  KELP TABLETS—100 MG PER DAY.

  MIXED TRACE ELEMENTS AND VITAMINS—200 MG PER DAY.”

  The computer sped on and on, giving Stone more information on how to deal with radiation poisoning than he could deal with. From not eating any animals that grazed or fed on other animals for at least six months to not touching any but spring water for at least two months. He tried to note what he could but at last grew impatient, knowing he had to get the hell out of there. He knew what he had come to find out. He knew they had all been heavily saturated with radiation and were right now living in the spit-up of the big bomb. Unless they could clean out their systems internally, they were dead men. Whatever the Indians believed about the power of the Cheyenne spirits, it was the white man’s poison that would kill them all.

  Chapter Five

  Stone swore he felt funny as he walked out of the computer room, this time shutting the steel door securely behind him. He didn’t know if it was reading about all the stuff or what, but he swore he had all the symptoms—every damn one of them. The strangest thing was his skin, which felt all sunburned. Even his guts felt like they’d been microwaved, everything all hot and threatening to spasm at any moment. Stone moved fast to the medical supplies room and quickly found the pills the computer had referred to. He opened one of each of the vials of the three radiation-fighting pills the computer had recommended and popped a few into his mouth, swallowing them down with water from a nearby faucet.

  Taking as many of the boxes as he could carry, but leaving at least a little for the future, if there was any such thing, Stone headed back out to the garage section and loaded them up on top of the back of the Harley, securing them in place on thick, nearly impervious plastic alloy boxes that sat in a wide frame on the back of the motorcycle. Then he headed back to the ammunition room and reloaded the Uzi 9-mm auto-pistol. He had felt naked without it. But an extra batch of thirty- and fifty-round clips, and four dozen magazines for the Ruger .44, made him just a little more secure. He loaded up his arms with more of the 89-mm Luchaire mini-missiles. He had used them all up. What had seemed like a lifetime supply when he had put the last batch on the bike had gone in under a month. Now he would hoard them like diamonds. He carried a half dozen out to the Harley, snapping them in place in a slim-line auto-feed built on the side of the bike so he could pop each shell up and slam it right into the tubular launcher.

  Stone made a final trip back to where he knew the pitbull would be waiting. Still, he wasn’t quite prepared for the mess it had managed to make in the hour they had been there. The canine had somehow pushed the chair over to the kitchen cabinets where it knew cans of food were stored, had managed to climb up on said chair, open the ca
binet doors, knock out rows of the carefully stacked tins of everything from sardines to toothpaste, ravioli to apricots in syrup. Not that the terrier knew what the hell it was doing. But as every oak tree knows—from the littlest acorn… Thus some of what crashed to the ground the fighting cannonball of muscle and leathery hide found appetizing. In fact, it found a surprising variety—and quantity—of the mixed together substance to be to its liking.

  “Oh, God, dog,” Stone whispered, his face growing pale as he saw the damage the creature had inflicted on his mother’s once clean kitchen. She would be turning in her grave. Stone had a sudden vision of her, back when they had all lived together, of how she had yelled at him for leaving a plate of chicken out at night, saying it would bring in the bugs and the rats. If she could only see it now. The thought brought a smile to his face.

  “Come on, dog, you’re going to pay for this, when I can figure out how.” Stone said as he leaned over and threw a handful of the anti-radiation drugs into the pitbull’s mouth. The animal gulped, burped, farted, and then swallowed them down along with a final mouthful of some sort of reddish liquid it had been slurping out of a half-chewed can. Casting a final eye around to see if it had somehow missed any particularly delectable goodies, the canine decided it had used up this scene. And with a snort, as if to indicate the party was over because it was leaving, the pitbull turned on its heels and walked after Stone, its somewhat enlarged stomach rolling from side to side, almost scraping the floor like the gondola of a blimp in rough winds.

  Once they were outside of the bunker again, Stone watched with a sense of dread as the granite doors closed behind him, moving smoothly on the huge ball bearings that his father had had installed. The kind used to move the rockets down at the Cape. When there had been such things. He always felt like it would be the last time he saw the place each time he left it. The world seemed to be getting more dangerous by the day. Stone returned the radio transitter to the ground, wrapping it back inside the thick plastic, and rolled the boulder over it. Excaliber looked at him with intrigued eyes, wondering what sort of bone it was that needed such a large rock over it.

  Stone checked his luminescent watch dial, turning his wrist up, and saw that there was just enough time to get back to the bivouac before dawn. The sky looked solid as a rock now, just one immense cloud that was heading south a few miles an hour faster than it had been before. But it was staying high for the moment. He couldn’t smell any rain. Rain that would bring the poison back down to earth.

  They shot along the dirt path at a fast clip, and Stone felt kind of reckless at this point. It sure as hell wasn’t like his life expectancy was going up or anything. He kept trying to tell himself that he didn’t have rad poisoning. But the more he denied it, the more it clawed at his mind, at his thoughts. Like an itch he didn’t want to scratch, the very denial of its existence gave it increased power to grab him. He did feel hot everywhere. He could feel cold sores coming out on his mouth. His brain did feel like it was warmed-over Jell-O. On the other hand, he hadn’t slept for about fifty hours, either. That might have something to do with it. Yeah, he was sleepy, that was all. And if he was incredibly lucky and made it back to camp as fast as he had left it, he might even be able to get a nice long sleep of about forty-five minutes or so.

  Excaliber sensed it first. In a flash he was up on the backseat, his front paws up over Stone’s shoulders, a motion that his master knew the animal only exhibited on threatening occasions. He loosed his jacket with one hand, freeing the Uzi for quick draw if he needed it. Then Stone heard it—a drone like a mosquito, then a bee, getting louder by the second. Suddenly he saw it—a light coming straight toward them. But it seemed to be floating. As the beam came to rest squarely on his face, nearly blinding him, Stone realized it was a chopper. They were being hunted from the air.

  The whirring blades of the Mini Huey filled the sky over Stone’s head with a deafening roar, and the pitbull set to barking up at the craft, which, even twenty yards up and forty or so in front of them, sent a gale storm of wind down at them, whipping the grit from the road into their eyes and mouths. Above the Harley, which had skidded to a stop—Stone couldn’t see, could barely keep the big bike upright—three men looked down from the mini-attack chopper debating whether to try to take Martin Stone alive or shoot him dead on the spot. Their boss had said either way was fine. As long as his head was brought back—attached to its body or not. They decided to kill him. From each side of the chopper’s bulbous plastic cockpit two hit-men opened up with ,45-caliber Ingrams, the preferred hit weapon, Stone knew, of the Mafia death squads.

  Two rows of slugs plowed straight toward the bike and its occupants, sending up small violent eruptions of dust in the exploding asphalt of the one-laner as they scissored their way inexorably forward.

  “Jump,” Stone screamed, leaping from the bike with every ounce of strength in his tired legs. He felt the muscles tighten, then uncoil—and he was flying through the air and darkness. Everything around him was a screaming hell of whistling slugs that he could feel tearing right by him, just inches away from his face, his chest. His body flipped and corkscrewed through the shadows and then came down hard in some bushes. Stone felt the air get knocked out of him as he landed, but he made himself go with it, not panicking, and was able to absorb most of the blow. He spun around from the darkness of the little grove of wild shrubs as the chopper buzzed past, its scythes of .45-caliber steel leaving a pockmocked, broken road behind.

  Stone knew he had only seconds. Already the chopper was turning around a hundred yards past and starting back. This time they would hover over him and send down a fusillade. There was no way he could survive. He looked off behind him, hoping to find sheltering woods but saw only a long, sloped field of low bushes, a few cacti—no place to hide. Suddenly his head swung around to the Harley, on the road twenty feet ahead of him. He had rearmed the Luchaire back at the bunker. See, he wasn’t such a stupid guy, after all. Getting to it, loading it, before the chopper reached him again, that was another…

  Stone let his mind argue about the feasibility of such an action while his body took off leaping over the bushes on the run. He reached the bike just as he saw the chopper complete half its turn, about fifty feet up, the wide and blinding searchlight beneath the craft lighting a circular patch of terrain below with the sudden noonday illumination of the sun. Animals and lizards, caught in the light, froze like statues until the Huey was past, and then ran, terrified, back to their holes and lairs. Only Stone had nowhere to hide.

  He fumbled at the autofeed of the magazine that was attached to the side of the Electraglide. His hands seemed to want to move by themselves, doing little fumbling dances at the release for the shells.

  “Come on, you little assholes,” Stone screamed down at his own fingers, demanding that they do what they were paid to. At last the thumb and forefinger of his right hand managed to get it together enough to click the lever—and up popped one of the long rockets. Stone grabbed it just as the light of the chopper began steering a path through the darkness back toward him. He ripped the release off the launching tube and pulled it out toward him, so the unit snapped out on steel hinges. Stone slammed the shell in and spun around alongside the firing cylinder. He slid back the “arm” signal and then turned to sight up the chopper.

  Sighting it up was not exactly the problem. It wasn’t like he couldn’t find it, but that the damn thing was suddenly right there, looming toward him like some sort of flying pterodactyl of the Pleistocene Era searching for dinner. He couldn’t see in the sudden blinding impact of the searchlight but could distinctly hear the snaps of the two Ingrams opening up on him again. Stone tried desperately to sight it but could see only the light—a sun of brilliance taking out his vision.

  Stone aimed at the light itself, at its blinding center even as it filled the very air above him, and pulled the trigger. The tube at his side seemed to explode as the bike shook violently from side to side. Stone found himself thrown backwar
d by a sudden roar of such power that he felt as if his very flesh were being shaken from his bones. He found himself suddenly sitting back on his ass, slamming down onto the hard roadway as his eyes snapped up straight ahead. The chopper, just fifty feet in front of him, was on fire. Within, Stone could see the hit men coated with flames, like marshmallows sizzling with blue licks of fire as they melt within a camp fire. Only these marshmallows were screaming. The horrible screams of those who perish by fire.

  But they didn’t have a hell of a long time to wait to die. The gas tanks of the chopper suddenly went, as the flames created by the detonation of the 89-mm spread into the fuel pumps. The secondary went up like Mt. Vesuvius in the sky, blasting the occupants and the craft itself out in all directions in a maelstrom of blazing particles. The ruins rained down for two hundred feet around, depositing flaming debris in numerous piles in the darkness. Suddenly there were hundreds of fires burning around the hillside, like some sort of sacrificial blazes. Fires to the gods. The dark gods. The death gods, who drank death, inhaled the smoke of burning things like the intoxicating vapors of the finest opium. The smoke of the dead men—and the smoking, smashed husk of the chopper—rose and mingled together, indistinguishable anymore as being man or machine. Rose higher and higher, as if reaching to join the great atomic clouds far above.

  Chapter Six

  Stone rose slowly after the main storm of the chopper debris had fallen back down to earth. Dancing particles filled the air, their crystalline shapes reflecting back little rays from the flames of the many fires below. That had been close, Stone thought with a rapidly beating heart. Too close. He looked down and saw that the front of his jacket was singed, his eyebrows and hair burned at the very edges.