Warlord's Revenge Read online

  “GOT SOME

  FRIENDS

  WHO WANT TO

  MEET YOU,”

  SCALZANNI SAID.

  Suddenly he struck—swooping both hands and the meathooks in them down like the flapping wings of a condor. They came together like brain-crushing tongs in midair with a sudden eruption of sparks as metal slammed against metal. But Stone was gone, having danced a good yard away. The guy was fast, incredibly fast. He’d have to wait for the little slime to make a mistake.

  But it was Stone who made the mistake. He stepped backward and found himself toppling over a root. Then he was lying flat on his back, his knife by his side. Scalzanni charged forward flailing away with both hooks like some sort of psychotic Captain Hook.

  The meathook in the Mafia killer’s right hand descended like a question mark searching for blood toward Stone’s skull…

  ALSO BY CRAIG SARGENT

  The Last Ranger

  The Savage Stronghold

  The Madman’s Mansion

  The Rabid Brigadier

  The War Weapons

  Published by

  POPULAR LIBRARY

  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: 978-0-446-56647-6

  Contents

  “GOT SOME FRIENDS WHO WANT TO MEET YOU,” SCALZANNI SAID.

  ALSO BY CRAIG SARGENT

  Copyright

  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 One

  If death be a painter, then its murderous brush swept across the sky in broad, radioactive strokes of blood-red, pumpkin-orange, and shroud-black with a deft master’s touch. A mushroom cloud, a mosaic of writhing color and absolute blackness, rose above the prairie lands of northern Colorado like a tower of cancer. It was as if all the fires of hell had released their foul smoke at once and these spires of total disintegration had joined into one great cloud that loomed above the earth like a monument to the apocalypse. Up it rose, unstoppable, into the cloud line and beyond, an immense, hideous sculpture to the folly of mankind.

  The mushroom headed straight up ten miles and then spread out flat at the top, as if it were being sliced off by the high winds of the upper atmosphere—that part of its radioactivity being swept off to all portions of the world to add a little more poison to the soil and water. As if the planet earth hadn’t been poisoned enough already. The smell of the burned dead was just beginning to permeate the countryside, a scent that would linger for a long time. There were a million tons of steamed blood and molten life to be found in the dark cloud, in the swirling smoke that was but the remnants of the atomic fury that had erupted just minutes before.

  The skies around the black pillar—which had the appearance of an immense tornado now, its four-mile-wide funnel swirling slowly like the gas storms of Jupiter—were a vibrant purple-and-green color, the color of air before lightning strikes, the color of a corpse’s cheeks. The ghostly glow seemed to suffuse the entire horizon in every direction, and the heavens above. Even the stars, winking down in horror, appeared orange and yellow, tinted like diseased little spots, pimples of rot in the wounded night.

  “The air tastes like shit,” Martin Stone said, turning toward Meyra, whose eyes were wet and reflective, like little pools of perfect pain. The Indian woman didn’t actually cry as much as release a constant stream of salty moisture that flowed from the inner edges of each eye. The tears flowed down, streaming across her cheeks and between her lips as she sucked unconsciously at them.

  But then, she had a right to cry, and to continue to cry forever. Her brother, Little Bear, the leader of a small band of Cheyenne, had just been burned to a crisp by the detonation of the ten-meg atomic warhead that had blown its top some thirty miles to the north of them.

  Meyra tried not to look, but she couldn’t help it and turned again to glance down at what had been her brother. It was horrible. Terribly, revoltingly, vomitingly horrible. It was as if he had just melted. A plastic toy taken by a sadistic child into his playroom and burned with a blowtorch. Turned over and over like an animal on a spit and splayed with the fire until he was no longer human but a melted thing whose features—nose, eyes, lips, and neck—all dripped and blended into one another like an amorphous Jell-o, its teeth poking out here and there from a puddle of flesh at its feet.

  Little Bear’s skeleton still remained somehow. Sort of. It, too, had been twisted and plied by atomic fingers so it looked like an anatomist’s nightmare—ribs curving out at all different angles, some bent in, leg bones broken in numerous places. The whole thing was like something that had been put through a bone crusher, something Picasso might have sculpted to show the horror of war. The true ugliness of death.

  Meyra lurched suddenly toward the smoking mess of human debris in quick little steps, and Stone rushed forward as he saw her stumble and start to collapse. Her body hurtled straight toward the bubbling pit of what had once been her brother—only Stone’s strong arms reached out at the last second and pulled her back from crashing into the smoking remains. Her eyes were spinning around in her head like Ping-Pong balls, just the whites showing. He half carried her back a few yards and came to one knee, holding her on his leg, cradled in his arms. He could feel her quivering like a terrified animal.

  After a few minutes, those who were left of the attack force Martin Stone had assembled gathered around him and Meyra, who remained motionless in his arms. They just stood in a loose circle around the frozen pair, not sure what to say, overwhelmed by the immensity of the atomic blast they had just lived through, and the still rising mushroom cloud, its reds and oranges fading to steel-gray and black as its revolutions per minute, its turning stack of radioactive particles and melted life, also slowed. A cyclone of death, barely moving. But then it had all the time in the world. The hydrogen bomb had gone off quickly—in one ten-millionth of a second. But it was the fallout cloud, the radiation, that would get to enjoy the lingering destruction, frolicking in it for months, as all living things caught in its path slowly became diseased, rotted and died away.

  Martin Stone looked up from his own dark thoughts as he suddenly realized they were waiting for him to do something. God knows what. But they had no one else to turn to—just filthy, ashen faces looking, for all their toughness and macho, like little kids who were lost and unutterably alone. Being in the vicinity of a nuke blast can do that to a man sometimes. Put him a little on the melancholy side. The towering black pyre miles to the north seemed to sing out their names on the hot, radioactive breezes, as if the cloud knew it had missed something but would be back to claim it.

  “Oh, for chrissake,” Stone yelled out angrily as he stared around at the remnants of the bizarre attack
force he had managed to assemble to take on General Patton and his Fascist New American Army—four recruits from the NAA itself who had come to join him (there had been eight just twenty-four hours earlier). And seven of the Cheyenne left. Little Bear was dead. Leaderless, the Indians, all of them so stone-faced and tough when he had first encountered them—with their stoic, coppery faces; long black hair, and buckskin jackets—didn’t seem nearly so sure of themselves now. Even they looked toward Stone with odd expressions. What the hell did they expect him to—

  “Well, at least put some wraps over your faces, assholes,” Stone said gruffly as a little wave of black stuff seemed to suddenly float down over them like ashes from the sky. “You breathe this stuff in…” He spoke through his own mash of wet fabric that covered his nose and mouth, catching some of the black ash on his palm It was still hot. Stone released it just as quickly, and it swirled to the blast-strewn ground like a dark feather joining the blanket of debris that had swept across the terrain for nearly fifty miles, covering everything with a dark, gritty sand that was still warm beneath their feet. “… and you’re dead men, as surely as if that motherfucker over there”—he eyed the cloud, which seemed to grow thicker and darker every minute—”had chewed you up in its fires.”

  A few of the Cheyenne folded their arms as if to indicate that they were men enough to breathe in any goddamn thing they felt like breathing. But the rest of the men, Indians and raw NAA recruits alike, found strips of cloth here and there among their packs on the backs of their three-wheeled bikes that stood parked in a rough circle some thirty yards off. They wet the strips down with water from their gourds and canteens and tied them securely around the lower portions of their faces, so that all the air coming in through their noses and mouths was being crudely, if fairly efficiently, filtered. Stone knew that once the bomb blast was past, it was the particles floating around in the air that were the most danger. Breathing them in, getting them lodged in lung tissue, could mean disease, cancer, months or even years later. The promise of radioactivity was that it never stopped radiating; it would still be glowing long after the remains of the body it had inhabited—and destroyed—was melted back into indecipherable dirt.

  Within minutes they were reassembled around Stone with their makeshift gas masks on, their eyes now staring at him with even more desperation than before, more pleading, without daring to plead. Stone knew why he had been so dubious of this “leader” role. He had been pretty much on his own—until now. And that he could deal with. If he died? Well, there wouldn’t be a hell of a lot tears to mourn him. But with men under his command—with all that entailed—he’d have to change careers fast. He couldn’t explain to them why. Couldn’t give them the slightest comfort at the edges of hell. He couldn’t even answer those questions himself. Why had it all happened? Why had America collapsed into barbarism and savagery? Why did crime lords and murderers rule the once great country that was nothing now but a thousand little principalities, a thousand little sadistic dictators and princes of death? Why had men reverted to cannibalism, sacrifice? Why had his own mother been… No, these were questions he didn’t even ask himself. What fucking right had this bunch to look at him like that?

  “And what about you two?” Stone asked as he stood up and looked at the two Cheyenne who remained maskless, smirking at the rest of their band. Meyra turned away from the group as she dabbed at her eyes, not wanting the others to see her with tears. It was not befitting an Indian to show pain. Especially not one with the blood of Cheyenne royalty in her veins. Their culture had evolved for thousands of years, the rule being to swallow pain. But it wasn’t her brother’s death that disturbed her so but that she had seen him in that state—that repose of wretched decay. He was like a beacon of horror, a black lamp that kept pulling her eyes toward it. Like looking down at a mortal wound in one’s own chest that meant annihilation. Meyra could not tear her eyes away from the charred corpse some twelve yards off, kneeling as if in prayer in the center of the oily brown-and-black puddle that was its melted flesh and organs, forming a rough circle for about a yard around it. An Indian Buddha in death meditation.

  “Don’t need to,” snarled back one of the two Cheyenne who still had his face unmasked, the taller and nastier-looking one. “White men need that sort of protection. But not us.” He slapped himself on the chest, and then so did his shorter friend, who looked around at the other Indians with a shit-eating grin.

  “Suit yourself, pal,” Stone replied coolly. “But don’t come running to me when your nose starts running red and you cough and a river conies out. ’Cause there won’t be nothing I can do.”

  “Didn’t ask you to do nothing,” the Indian said, holding up a turquoise amulet. “Cheyenne medicine is all I need, man. White medicine causes cancer.” The Cheyenne was a few inches taller than Stone, though very lean and lanky like a snake. His lower lip was all busted, an injury from long ago. It had healed over completely but made him seem to have lost a portion of his mouth, the lip having been reduced to the size of a pencil line, a light purplish color. It gave him an oddly buck-toothed appearance on the upper right portion of his face, as his teeth tended to poke out all the way to the roots like the partial grin of a skull.

  He sneered at Stone and opened his mouth and his arms to the sky, taking in deep breaths of the foul ash that was starting to fall a little thicker now, in long sheets, misty and ephemeral, floating down almost gracefully and spinning around like black snowflakes. The dark ash. was sucked into the Indian’s mouth and lungs before he realized the particles were burning him, scalding his tongue and throat. He exploded out in a violent cough, and the others could see the little red marks where the hot ash had made contact with the membranes of his mouth.

  The Cheyenne smiled proudly at the Indians, who seemed impressed by his “bravery” but deigned to keep their flimsy shields of cloth over their fallout-coated faces. Bravery was one thing, being an asshole was something else.

  “We’ve got to bury him,” Meyra said suddenly, loudly, and firmly, startling Stone from his eye-to-eye with the still coughing Cheyenne—Leaping Elk, if Stone remembered correctly. The Indian had been second-in-command of the small band of nomads. Little Bear had easily fended off his halfhearted attempts at rule. But now… Already Leaping Elk was trying to take command of the remaining Cheyenne braves through feats of daring, an almost mad kind of Indian courage with a contempt for death. Already he was going to challenge Stone for leadership of the hybrid fighting force. But for the moment, anyway, the others didn’t seem like they were too interested in sucking in radioactive fallout. Stone made a mental note to keep an eye on the macho Cheyenne. There was something crazy in those eyes that he didn’t like at all.

  “What?” Stone asked, turning to Meyra, who stared at him, her eyes hardly able to focus on his face. Her lips were white, her deeply tanned skin looked almost pale in her state of near emotional breakdown. Yet even now Martin Stone found it hard not to see her beauty, the perfect ridges and curves of her young face. And found it hard not to remember lying hard against the perfect young body that had pressed back against him with animal desire. Stone suddenly felt a sharp headache sweep through his head, whether from the radiation they had all doubtless absorbed or because of the sudden twinge of guilt he felt over memories of fucking her when she was staring at her barbecued brother, who was sending out foul-smelling smoke signals that he had been overcooked.

  “I said we’ve got to bury him,” Meyra repeated in a kind of gasping hiss, as if she couldn’t quite find the air to talk. She, too, wore one of the masks, and it made it hard to suck in what little oxygen there was out there.

  “But—” Stone began to protest as gently as he could, as he stared over at the bubbling garbage dump of a man, knowing that it would be impossible to bury it; it would come apart in their hands. The still boiling flesh of the brain and the bubbling organs occasionally burped up steam in the center of what had been the stomach, kidneys, liver, intestines, all melted down into
a thick black stew as dense as oil and which glowed with an infinitesimal blue flame along its entire surface.

  “No, Martin Stone, do not argue with me,” the Cheyenne fighting woman replied coldly. “He must be buried. It is the Cheyenne way. For a warrior of my people to die in battle and not be buried according to our most sacred rituals is what you call blasphemy. You understand, Stone. His soul would rot in a limbo of death rather than be reborn into a world of peace and a plenitude of animals. We would condemn him to the Cheyenne version of eternal damnation. If a people do not even bury their dead but leave them to lie out and be consumed by the coyotes, the lizards, that people deserves to die.”

  “All right, all right,” Stone said softly, holding his hands up as if to ward her off. “You win. But we’d better hurry.” He squinted, taking in the movement of the great swirling cloud. It still didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get to them. Just expanding out from the middle like a tire being pumped with air. The wind currents tonight, thank God, were minimal.

  The other Cheyenne had just grunted out general noises of assent as Meyra had spoken, but as Stone started toward the radiation-cooked flesh, not one of them made a move to help him. Stone felt his guts tighten up, as if they might release whatever was still down in there from the day before. He looked slowly down at the remains of the man he had come to know and respect. There weren’t many men around anymore who were basically decent—and tough enough to back it up. That made the hideousness of the Cheyenne chief’s remains that much more terrible.

  Stone circled around the human bonfire, tightening the bandanna around his mouth and nose. The smell of the cauldron of steaming organs in the center of the black-ash pelvic bone was repulsive. He had smelled burning flesh before—cannibalism was not all that unusual these days. But this was far worse somehow, sweeter—with a burning chemical edge of spiciness. He kept circling, trying to figure out a way to move the smoking thing. There wasn’t any. It wasn’t even a solid thing—or even a few solid things. The bottom of it was just puddle, with fingernails, teeth, and bones of fingers and toes all half submerged like prehistoric fossils beneath the surface. The flame-rippling hulk resting in the center was an uneven mesh of bone and charred, leathery skin that still crisscrossed the inner skeleton like dark webs. Somehow the skull had stayed atop the black ribs, but it was tilted sideways at an angle of nearly ninety degrees, hanging on by the tail of the medulla oblongata, which had hardened from the flames into a leathery tendril that rose from the top of the flaming spinal cord and into the skull. The bubbling brain inside stewed away, as if trying to get ready in time for dinner.