The Damn Disciples Read online

  Stone took out both pistols, the big .44 and the 9mm, and walked out of the shadows and toward the front door. The guard on duty didn’t even really take much heed of Stone when he saw him. People had been coming and going all night. But when he spotted the two rods in the pod’s hands, the cult guard’s whole face seemed to freeze up, even through his drug haze. Pods didn’t have guns. And in the split second it took for him to realize what that meant, it was too late. The fast lived, the slow died. Even as he raised his rifle and reached frantically for the trigger, Stone’s silenced 9mm spoke softly. But it spat out a burst of slugs that sliced into the man’s chest and sent him flying backward, up the ramp and then crashing through the door that led into the Golden Nectar brewery.

  There were seven men inside, the eighth was dying in a bloody pile on the floor. And they sure looked surprised to see one Pod #47 holding two nasty-looking firearms. Stone came tearing into the room, or at least what passed for tearing, on legs that felt as if they belonged to a ninety-year-old arthritic. Everybody was frozen—except for the stirrers atop the two steaming drug vats. They knew they couldn’t stop—not for a second.

  “Now, I don’t want to hurt no one,” Stone snarled as his eyes snapped back and forth around the room making sure no one tried anything dumb. “Just get out of here right now, and you can all live.”

  “Pod number 47, drop those guns immediately and return to your barracks,” one of the foremen screamed at Stone, standing about ten feet away with one of the long smacking sticks in his hand.

  “No chance, pal.” Stone smirked back with a certain dark satisfaction that he didn’t have to listen to these jerkoffs anymore, didn’t have to follow their every command while his brain sat in the mud at the bottom of the ocean. The foreman, perhaps fearing the wrath of Yasgar should he let anything get fucked up, suddenly charged forward, raising the stick over his head as if he was going to behead Stone. But that wasn’t quite how it worked out. For even as the cult officer got within a yard and started to bring the stick down, Stone’s 9mm burped out another stream of bullets. They sliced the guy’s whole face into Swiss cheese, with blood running out of the holes. The stick flew from his hands as he went flying backward, as though he had been kicked by a mule. His face red with blood that poured out onto his robe, the foreman slammed into one of the barrel stackers and they both went sprawling.

  “Now, out. I mean it—right now!” Stone screamed out, letting another few shots go up into the beamed wooden ceiling, which sent a shower of dust and sawdust down over them all. But the two jerking dying things on the floor appeared to be enough even for the brain-cleansed. And they walked backward out of the building, their arms held high, their zombie faces showing traces of human tenor. The stirrers kept going, though, torn between leaving and their posts—since they knew they were dead men if they budged.

  “Down—and out,” Stone shouted again, letting a stream of bullets dance across the sides of both vats.

  “But it will all go up in flames,” one of them protested.

  “That’s the general idea,” Stone yelled back. “Now, down! I’m losing patience.” He released another few rounds, even closer to them. The sound of bullets whistling by their skulls made the two let the paddles go and come tearing down the stairs. Stone kept his eyes firmly on them as they headed out the door; then he bolted it behind them. Now he was alone. Just him, two corpses, and thousands of gallons of mindfuck juice. Well, they were all about to have a nice little party.

  Stone slammed both pistols back into their holsters and rushed over to the controls in front of the gas jets. He turned both burners all the way up so their flames were a good five feet high and began reaching up around the sides of the vats. Then Stone turned the valves that released the precious poison by turning a huge tap on one side. The stuff poured down onto the floor, quickly inundating the jerking dead men, as if they were taking a final bath before an extended stay in hell. Stone rushed to the back of the place, where the rows of filled barrels stood waiting to head out into the world. Only, he wasn’t going to give them the chance. He ran up and down the rows opening the spigots on the sides of the barrels. Their contents began pouring out onto the floor like a party of drunks who couldn’t hold their liquor.

  Suddenly he heard a crackling sound behind him and turned. The stuff had caught on fire over near the vats. The drug liquid that had poured out on the floor was a flaming sheet and reaching up toward the main vats. Stone knew what would happen when full contact occurred. Party was over. Time for the fat lady to sing. He tore ass down the center of the place, stumbling and almost going over like some Bowery drunk. The withdrawal was doing wonders for his whole balance system. But fire is a strong motivator. And already the entire side of the floor holding the vats was ablaze in a carpet of reaching yellow and red. Stone ran straight for the door, nearly slipping as he hurdled the two corpses on the floor, their blood spreading out for yards in each direction, mixing with the Golden Nectar, which nearly covered the entire wooden floor.

  Stone could feel the flames reaching for him, singeing the hair on his head, making the whole left side of his body feel as if it was about a thousand degrees hotter than the right side. He reached the door, threw the bolt, and ripped the thing open. Stone knew there would be trouble waiting out-side. But he’d worry about that in a second. The fire was burning his tail right now. He came tearing out of the place like a racehorse at the Kentucky Derby. And bowled right through about ten pods who were standing in front with sticks in their hands, apparently trying to get up the nerve to make a charge. Only, Stone came flying through them so fast they didn’t have a chance to strike at him. By the time they turned and started toward Pod #47, who was still tearing ass away from the building, it was too late.

  There was a sudden roaring sound from within the Nectar factory. And they could all see that the fire had grown a thousandfold. For the orange glow was streaming through every crack in the place, through the open door, through air vents in the roof. But that only lasted for an instant. Then came the explosion. It was an oddly peaceful explosion—in a way. Less sound than one might think—but incredible fury. For as the entire load of highly inflammable Nectar caught and released its great stored-up energy all at once, the burning blast rushed out in all directions. The log building that housed the factory had been well made, securely constructed. Strong enough to withstand the howling winds of winter. But not an explosion in its very guts.

  Even as Stone continued to tear butt, getting to about sixty yards away, he heard the sound behind him. It was like being inside a thundercloud when it released its heavenly lion’s roar. And then he didn’t know what the hell was going on except that the whole world was bright yellow and he was being lifted and tossed around like a leaf with a firecracker tied to its tail. He literally flew right through the smoking air a good twenty feet up, and he suddenly knew how it felt to be a meteor entering the earth’s atmosphere. Then he hit—and hard. Only his years of training and his still-youthful agility allowed him to come down without breaking anything. Though it hurt like hell.

  The heat wave followed the blast itself, and he felt a rush of fifty-mile-per-hour superheated wind rush right over his back as if he was lying in front of a blast furnace. Then there was terrible screaming. And when he lifted his head after a few seconds and dizzily focused on the scene behind him, he saw why. The pods who had been waiting to ambush him were all human torches now. Every part of them burning as if they were trying to light up the heavens all the way to Alpha Centauri. Behind them the entire drug factory was ablaze in a solid wall of flame. Nothing could be seen but fire, already twisted beyond recognition from what it had been just seconds before. The flaming pods ran wildly in all directions, like moths caught in a campfire. Then they collapsed onto the ground, where they joined in the blaze.

  Stone watched the conflagration for a few seconds. He didn’t feel good about seeing men die like that. But he did feel a deep satisfaction that, whatever happened now, he had put
the expansion plans of the Guru—maybe even the existence of the cult itself—in big doubt. That was pretty good for a man who could hardly walk and felt as if he had a hangover from a thousand-year drinking bout. But his feelings of self-congratulations didn’t last long. For as Stone sat up, he heard sounds behind him from out of the flame-splattered 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 vengeance in their respective eyes were Guru Yasgar, seated atop a raging tusked elephant, and Excaliber, the fucking traitor, who ran alongside the rampaging giant as though he wanted the first piece of the flesh pie of Martin Stone

  TWENTY-TWO

  Having an elephant, tusks and all, with huge trunk waving in the purple dawn, coming straight at him, was not something Stone had ever experienced before. And doubtless he never would again. In fact, it didn’t look as if he was going to experience much of anything after about the next five seconds. But even as he somehow made himself rise to both legs, which trembled like toothpicks riddled with termites beneath him, and pulled out both pistols into his hands, the Guru screamed out orders to the elephant and kicked it hard on both ears so the thing came to a skidding stop not ten feet from Stone. Yasgar screamed down something in a language that wasn’t English to the dog, and it stopped as well. Stone had to admit, even in the midst of all the blood and death, that it pissed him off to see the dog obey a command so quickly and totally when he hadn’t been able to get it to even fetch a fucking ball on command in the months they had been traveling together. And even as he thought it, he knew how absurd it was to be thinking about something so trivial when he was about to be squashed.

  Guru Yasgar looked down at him from atop the immense beast of burden. He didn’t look too happy about it all as the light danced over his face. Even off the drugs now, Stone had to admit it gave his heart a little bit of a turn to look up into that face. The man exerted an almost palpable power, the presence of evil as he stood up high on the elephant silhouetted by the violet dawn that slowly brightened the heavens behind him.

  “Pod number 47—why have you done this?” the Guru asked. He seemed genuinely curious within his fury. It was something that shouldn’t have happened, couldn’t have happened.

  “The name’s Stone,” Stone replied, looking up at the man high above him. “Pod number 47 died last night while I puked my guts out getting off this shit you addicted me to.”

  “It’s impossible for any man to break free of a successful cleansing,” Yasgar said as the elephant stared hard at Stone, as if it was praying it got the chance to squish his head like a rotten pumpkin. The dog, too, Stone saw with disgust, was giving him the once-over, its lips pulled back, its teeth showing. It was pointing at him, lining up tail, back, and nose to make a perfect line. Stone knew what that meant. He had only seconds.

  “Well, sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Yasgar, but I did it. Don’t you think so?” Stone nodded his head toward the burning drug factory behind him and let a smile play across his lips.

  “I was going to have my elephant here, Shiva, rip your balls off, impale you on her tusks,” the Guru said, letting his own smile flicker on the thick lips within the hooded robe. “But now…now I think that I will have your own dog kill you. Yes, that will be a fitting punishment for such terrible deeds.” Yasgar looked down at the pit bull and again screamed out something that sounded to Stone like Greek, but was in fact demonic Sumerian incantations that the Guru used in many of his ceremonies taken from real scrolls, thousands of years old.

  “Nis Isshtar. Nis isshtar,” he commanded the pit bull. Stone didn’t know the exact meaning of the words, but he knew what they basically meant: rip out Stone’s brains, he, and lungs—and then hurt him. The dog growled and crouched low, the stance it took when it was about to leap on something’s bones. Stone had seen the animal do it enough fucking times—only, it had always been on someone else. The very thought that the pit bull, after all they’d been through, was working for the other side, brought a little flush of moisture to Stone’s eyes. He didn’t mind dying. But going out with such a cloud of betrayal over the whole thing, that hurt, it really hurt. Perhaps, in its own way, more than anything. Even more than the pains of the withdrawal that continued to stream through his body.

  Stone raised the Ruger toward the pit bull, knowing the 9mm wouldn’t be enough. His hand closed hard around the butt and his finger reached for the trigger. But he couldn’t pull it—even though he knew that if he didn’t, it would be too late. Once the dog was airborne, he wouldn’t be able to stop it even with a whole chest full of slugs. The animal seemed to suddenly go crazy. It twitched and foamed and jumped around as if it had Mexican beans up its ass. It was clearly having a problem carrying out the Guru’s orders. Its jaws opened and closed, the razor-sharp teeth snapping down as if it was chewing some invisible enemy.

  “Isshtar, Isshtar!” Yasgar screamed over and over, now standing to his full height atop the elephant so that he looked quite fearsome, even to the animal. But if the Guru expected that to take care of it, he was suddenly horribly surprised. For the dog just stood there, shaking harder, as if it was having an epileptic fit. It couldn’t do it.

  “All right, then,” Yasgar screamed, with the full orange dawn now flaming behind him, making it look as though God was doing the lighting for the bastard. “I’ll do it my-self. Crush him,” he commanded the elephant, kicking it on each side of the head with his spurred boots. “Crush him, smash his fucking brains out.” Stone heard the Guru’s voice slip out of its dark modulated tones into a gruff New York accent, and he could see the bastard’s real roots in a flash. Not that it mattered.

  For suddenly the elephant was coming forward, straight at him, with fury in its soup-bowl-size eyes. Stone fired right into the animal’s chest and neck. But it was a joke Even a .44 wasn’t stopping this sucker. Suddenly the beast was there, towering above him like a mountain as its huge gray trunk came slapping down at him. The first hit knocked Stone to the ground as if he had been struck with a tree. And even as he lay there dazed, searching for his pistols that had fallen to the ground, the trunk came down a second time. The elephant wrapped the long snout around Stone and lifted him up into the air. It waved him around a few times as though he was a baton for an orchestra of death, and then held him far out about eight feet above the ground. Stone looked back and could see the huge tusks of the beast pointing toward him. There was no question about what the elephant had planned for him next. It was shish-ke-Stone time.

  But even as the beast let out a great trumpeting roar and Yasgar raised his hands to the sky in triumph, wanting to see the body ripped .to shreds on the ivory spears, Excaliber sprang up from the ground as though he had been fired from a launching pad. The jaws opened to full width as he arced right up into the air straight at the great beast. Then the pit bull made contact with the trunk just above where it was holding Stone. The jaws closed like a bear trap snapping shut on a grizzly. And the elephant let out a trumpet that woke the entire camp—even savages miles off in the mountains. The neighborhood was jumping this early morning.

  The pit bull crunched hard again—and the trunk tore cleanly in two, severed clear through by the guillotine jaws. Stone found himself falling through the air with the trunk still wrapped around him. Then everything was in a weird kind of slow motion. He felt himself falling, falling through the air as if forever, as the dog fell away in a different direction, its face covered in red. Then the elephant was up on its hind legs as its trunk, only about a third its previous size, spewed out gallons of blood like a hose gone mad. The red ocean covered Stone as if it was raining down from the very heavens.

  And as it reared, the huge beast sent Yasgar flying off its back. He fell good twelve feet down the side of the thing, landing on his back. And though Stone could see that the fall had by no means done him in, the same couldn’t be said when the elephant came crashing down on him. Even as Yasgar started to rise from the dirt and reached inside hi
s robe for a poison-tipped blade to take out Stone himself, the elephant gave off a throaty gurgle. Cutting off an elephant’s trunk is like cutting off a man’s cock—the damage to the beast’s nervous system was too at for it to go on.

  The many tons of gray hide came slamming right down on top of the Guru. And all his great powers of persuasion and mind control, his abilities to take over men’s minds and women’s bodies, was for naught. For he was squashed into a bloody pie beneath the beast. Stone saw the body disappear beneath the immense bulk of the dying beast and then a flood of blood, forced out under pressure, come shooting out from under the elephant. The tusked creature flopped once as if an electric current had gone through it and then it lay there motionless, the river of blood pouring from the hacked-off trunk as if someone had left the valve on in the family washing machine.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Stone looked at the dog. The dog looked at Stone. And they both got strange expressions on their faces. Then the dog got a real sheepish look and walked the twenty feet or so to Stone, where he rubbed up against his leg. Stone was touched by the gesture. The dog was obviously still having some brain problems himself, under the drugs and hypnotic commands of the Guru, but still he than to show that things were okay.