The Damn Disciples

  TRAITOR!

  The heat wave followed the blast itself, and Stone felt a rush of fifty-mile-per-hour superheated wind rush right over his back as if he were lying in front of a blast furnace. Then there was a terrible screaming. The pods who had been waiting to ambush him were all human torches now…

  Stone heard sounds behind him from out of the flame-spattered darkness. And as three figures came into view, Stone knew he’d just gone from the fire into something much worse. For coming at him with a vengeance in their respective eyes were Guru Yasgar, seated atop a raging tusked elephant, and Excaliber, the traitor, running alongside a rampaging giant. Stone’s own, fierce-toothed pit bull dog, looked like he wanted the first piece of flesh from the Last Ranger!

  Also by Craig Sargent

  The Last Ranger Series:

  The Last Ranger

  The Savage Stronghold

  The Madman’s Mansion

  The Rabid Brigadier

  The War Weapons

  The Warlord’s Revenge

  The Vile Village

  The Cutthroat Cannibals

  Is This the End?*

  Published by

  POPULAR LIBRARY *Forthcoming

  Copyright

  POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

  Copyright © 1988 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Popular Library® and the fanciful P design are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  Popular Library books are published by

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56643-8

  Contents

  TRAITOR

  Also by Craig Sargent

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  PROLOGUE

  She was brought into the room stark naked. It was part of the “cleansing” process to break them down, to humiliate them, make them feel ashamed. For shame, and its sister—guilt—were how they broke minds, how they reached inside and rearranged things to their liking. Six men wearing demonic masks and long black flowing robes sat atop high wooden chairs, thrones almost, with dark hideous carvings of snakes and demons undulating up and down their sides. With the robes and masks covering them, only the men’s fingers, long and pale, which stretched out on the armrests on each side of them—and the twin Is of reflecting light that were their eyes—could be seen within their engulfing hoods. They hardly looked human.

  Two strapping men wearing long brown robes and with police nightsticks strapped to their sides dragged the woman into the room holding her up under each arm. For she was resistant, to say the least, terrified, trembling and crying at every step. They half carried her to a red circle about four feet wide painted on the floor and placed her in the absolute center of it. Then they stood back so they were outside the circle.

  The woman was beautiful. Even with her tear-streaked dirty face, her unwashed body that stood without a stitch of clothing before the robed ones. She looked like a living sculpture of female perfection with her upturned breasts, slim waist, and rounded hips that seemed to curve into an-other dimension and then back again. And the blond patch of fur between her legs, which she covered with one hand while the other tried to shield her firm young breasts from view. The tears kept running down her face in fear—and shame.

  But the men who looked onto her nakedness were too old, too dried up, without enough of the juices of life left within them to find even the slightest bit of desirability in such a nubile young paragon of femininity. They no longer felt such things as desire, at least desires of the normal kind—to touch, kiss, hold—the things that men—and women—dream of. Their dreams were darker by far, without a trace of warmth or life. Dreams only of total submission, total control, total pain. The making of that which was human into something different.

  “Do not cry, child,” one of the robed voices spoke, his masked face just a shadow within the shadowed hood. And even as the words were spoken, she became a thousand times more frightened. For they were words that a skeleton might speak, like bones cracking together. There was no warmth in the voice, just the cold mechanical tones of something that was dead inside.

  “Do not fear us, child,” another voice spoke up. “We are here to make you whole, make you perfect.” A hand rose up from out of the dark sleeve and her trembling increased—for the hand seemed to be without flesh, so long, so white were its fingers, so flat and narrow its palm. The finger pointed at her.

  “You are chosen to be one of us. To be one of the Perfect Ones, one of the Disciples of the Perfect Aura. This is a great honor.” The rest of them cackled beneath their black hoods, the sound of dry leathery tongues rasping against bone, echoing through the room.

  “We are the Perfect Ones. Unlike human beings, who are confused and imperfect, we are completed—and perfect. We are without prejudices, without any of the thousand failings of mankind. We are the Perfect Ones.”

  “The Perfect Ones,” the other five echoed in.

  “To be Perfect—is to be without fear,” the head man said, his eyes like red lasers inside his hood. He was the only one with such orbs, which in the gray light of the room, glowed bloodred. “That is what makes the human mind imperfect—fear. Do you understand?”

  “Y—yes,” the woman stuttered, her throat catching even as she talked. “I’m afraid. Very afraid.” She began crying again. “Please—let me go. I’ll just leave and—” Leathery laughter met her pleas.

  “No, no, there is no leaving from here,” the High Priest said with the firmness of a noose snapping closed around a throat. “But do not fear, child.” He rose up from his center chair and he seemed to be a giant to the woman, whose heart began beating even faster, whose tears began flowing down like an unstoppable stream. “We are here to help you. To take all these feelings of fear out of you—and give you peace for the first time in your life. You must just give yourself to us. All that you are.”

  “Give yourself to us,” the others echoed from beneath their black hoods.

  “You must give up the illusory idea of being a single individual. For it is this which gives people pain—trying to separate themselves from the herd, trying to be an individual when there can only be peace in the group. In the Perfect Whole.”

  “Peace in the group,” the hooded figures hissed back. And now they all rose up and stepped down from their chairs and walked out to the wooden floor around her. The woman’s heart began beating so rapidly that her chest could be seen moving. She would have tried to run right to the window and jump out—even to her death—anything would have been better than these “men.” But she couldn’t move an inch. She was paralyzed with her fear, as if curare had been injected into her muscles and not one would move. And they knew about that—the six hooded ones—the six Priests of the Perfect Aura. T
hey knew that fear made people lose all control, made them screaming animals without a vestige of pride or courage.

  They formed a circle and began moving around her. A coat of sweat covered her naked flesh to join the flowing river of her eyes as adrenaline surged through her. As they moved, the long black robes began spinning out around them and incomprehensible sounds emerged from within. They all seemed much larger than life, the robes rising seven feet or more above the red wooden floor. And with the material flaring out around them, even their shapes seemed to change. It was hard to see them, and she was beginning to wonder if they were even men.

  As they moved, they began to chant a strange guttural language. From the very dawn of time, animal sounds and clicks, tongues scraping across teeth, the language of the creatures who had become men—but were not yet men. And as the “song” emerged from their hidden lips, drums began beating around her, deep resonant sounds that were like rumbles of thunder and vibrated through her very bones as if she were in an earthquake.

  Then they were going faster and the drums were rising in volume and tempo until she thought her ears would shatter from the noise. And they were spinning around her like six tops gone mad, than black robes now wide around them like the twirling skirts of gypsy dancers. And suddenly, as they hit cruising speed, they pulled out objects from inside their thick cotton robes and held them out, waving and shaking the things as they circled.

  She screamed now. The paralysis at least left her lips for a few moments. And her hands flew up over her face as she totally forgot that she had been covering her more personal areas. She kept screaming. For the things they were holding out were organ parts of the human body. One held an eyeball out at the end of its dripping tendrils, shaking the thing like a rattle every time he passed around her. Another held a human arm, hand, fingers and all, and gripped it by the open arm wound, stabbing it in her direction so that fingers almost touched her face each time he ran by. One waved a heart, another gripped a dried human brain though it kept disintegrating within his bony fingers. Another a male sex organ, huge and dried out, like some long dead snake, whipping it toward her skull like a bludgeon. And the sixth, the Head Priest—the Transformer, she saw, as he made his turn—was holding an entire human bead, eyes opened, staring at her, tongue hanging sideways out of its mouth as dried blood coated the worm-infested lips like lipstick to give it a little class. They whirled faster and faster until it was all just a blur and she didn’t even realize she was screaming without stop.

  The hands snapped out their dead objects and began making contact with her as they whirled in a circle just a yard or so out from her naked, shaking body. She covered her face and eyes with her hands, like a child trying to hide from nightmares beneath the blankets. But these nightmares weren’t going away.

  Suddenly they stopped, and the drums, too, ceased in midbeat. After a few moments she dared open her eyes just a fraction of an inch and peered through the shielding hands. One of the underlings in brownish-red robe was carrying in a platter with a silver cover over it, like some sort of Foie gras at a four-star restaurant—when there had been such things. He carried it to the Head Priest, who put his skull down and, opening both arms wide, addressed her solemnly.

  “Now you will go through fear, live fear, become fear. And when you emerge on the other side—you will no longer live in fear. You will be beyond it. I am the Trans-former. I shall make you as we are. Give yourself up, little one, there is nothing to save. There is no self.”

  “There is no self,” the others chanted loudly.

  He lifted the silver cover, and she gasped. Inside, on a shining silver tray with all kinds of strange symbols and designs etched into its surface, was a human skull—and it was filled with liquid that danced and shimmered gold even in the shadowy grayness.

  “The Liquid of Purification,” the Head Priest said with reverence. “The Golden Elixir. Drink.” He lifted the skull to her lips, and she screamed again and stepped back. Or tried to there behind her and by merely placing their bodies in the right spot they locked her in place so she couldn’t move.

  “Drink, drink,” they screamed. The High Priest stepped forward, clamped an iron hand around her head, and pulled it backward. Then he forced some of the liquid from the skull into her mouth.

  It burned, burned horribly, and she coughed and gagged and spat up half of it. But enough had gotten in to satisfy the pourer, and he stepped back, putting the skull back onto the platter. The guard walked off slowly, each step exaggerated, ritualized.

  “There. Isn’t that better already?” The Transformer asked with a lying fatherly concern. “The Golden Elixir you have drunk—it will help you to get through the barrier of fear. Because it will exaggerate that fear a thousandfold. So you will have no way of resisting any longer. Give in, child, give in. All will be without pain soon.”

  The liquid hurt her mouth and throat and everything it touched on the way down. Whatever it was, it worked fast. For the woman had hardly stopped coughing, her whole chin soaked in the sticky spittle, when everything began getting weird. The six men around her began elongating and shrinking, almost melting before her as if they were made of clouds, not flesh. She was so dizzy she could hardly stand up, but the guards wouldn’t let her fall.

  A box was carried into the room accompanied by the beating of the drums. It was as if she were in a fun house, where everything changed, everything was seen through a distorting mirror. And it was all twisted and horrible. And though she didn’t really know what was going on, she knew somehow that she was drugged. And that things were just going to get worse.

  “IITTTT ISSSSSS DDEEEEEATTHHH WEEEEE FFEEEAARRR,” the High Priest was saying, though his words sounded crazy, like a record on slow speed, everything deep and trembling.

  “DEEAAATTTHHH WEEEE FEEEAARR,” the others chanted back.

  “SOOOO IIITTT IISSSS DEEAATHHH WEEEE MUUUUST LEEARNN TOOO LOOOVVVE.”

  “WEEEE LOOOVEEE DEATTTHH!” the others chanted.

  The pine box was placed on the floor by the four men who were holding it and the top was opened. Inside was a corpse, recently departed. It couldn’t have been more than a week old, since much of its flesh was still there. But it had had plenty of time to rot, too. The features of the face were all blended together like a child’s finger painting. The flesh was bloated and white, with worms and bugs eating their way through little tunnels and canyons within. The whole thing crawled with vermin, lice, spiders, slugs, fungi, and molds.

  She screamed again. And this time under the influence of the dozen or so mind-altering drugs that were mixed into the Elixir, the scream was like a waterfall and seemed to take her into another world, another dimension, where she was blind and deaf, and something was pressing all around her, squeezing her in.

  And when she opened her eyes again as the scream stopped for an instant, she saw that they were in fact touching her—pushing her down into the box in which slept the moldering dead one. She was thrown right on top of the rotting mess so that bugs and worms scampered back into the innards. She began screaming again—so hard that she split her lips as her teeth bit through. The motion of the guards’ push made the corpse thing whip its arms up around her so it held her in an embrace. Its devil’s bad dream of a face, with a centipede staring right out at her through one of the green-slimed eyeholes, looked up at her and seemed to wink. Then the leathery brown lips twisted back as ants came out of each corner of the mouth searching for more food for their colony in the guts of the dead creature.

  The underlings nailed the top back down right above her back, so she was wedged down even farther into the “man.” It pressed close against her like an ardent, horny, even anxious, lover. And as the cold decomposing arms wrapped around as though they’d just never let go, its swamp of a face pressed ever closer—the hard lips smacking at her as if trying to kiss her, the bugs inside clacking their mandibles as if whispering sweet nothings. Through the long black night, the unmoving cold tried to make love to the scre
aming warm.

  ONE

  The battle-scarred rat stood up on its hind legs and sniffed at the wind. There was meat ahead. It could smell the warm-blooded creatures not far off. Human meat. It knew the smell. It had, after all, been a hunter, the leader of the pack for two years now, a long, long time in rat linealogy. And though not many, they had taken humans down, had survived their weapons—and eaten them.

  It was the toughest of them, with its nearly two-foot-long body, a good thirty pounds of savage fury contained within a shimmering black pelt slashed here and there with scars and gouges—and fangs that seemed too big for its mouth, curving out long and ivory white like canines. The lingering radiation of the nukes that had gone off years before nearby had done a little twisting and rearranging of chromosomes. So that what was once a nuisance, a vermin, a pest, was now a horror. Something from a nightmare on the coldest of winter eves.

  Its blood-coated whiskers twitched in the sharp morning breeze. It had eaten already; it and its pack had killed a wounded stag they’d come across in the forest. It hadn’t been able to run fast enough and had fallen beneath their vicious onslaught. It was ripped to shreds and eaten within minutes, so that not a trace of it remained. Not even the bones. That was only hours before. But it was a mere snack. There were many in the pack, many mouths to be fed. The Leader turned and surveyed its army, which scampered around and over each other behind it. Thousands of them, stretching off in a rough column nearly a hundred yards long, twenty yards wide. It looked at them with its one good eye; the other, bitten in half long ago by a rival male now deceased, had shrunken down to the size of a shriveled raisin, black and hard like a fragment of coal. The ripped and torn creature inspired fear in even the largest of the other rats, who dared not look straight into the scarred, misshapen face.

  Its right eye worked just fine. The Leader stood up on a rock so that it was a good five feet above the squealing masses, always almost out of control—almost. But under its direction they moved like an army, letting nothing stand in their way. When it was gone … who could say. But such things rats didn’t worry about. Just the next meal. For as the Russian czar had learned in the Revolution of 1918, “a lack of bread to eat is the fire of revolution.” The Leader was trapped too. It had to feed them all, make sure the ravenous hordes didn’t turn—on him.