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  Stone searched for some kind of horn on the cross-country vehicle and suddenly found it, slamming his hand down and holding it. That got their attention as angry faces looked up, their still vibrating heads filled with pain from the earsplitting air horn. Stone pointed ahead toward the tunnel with an outstretched arm.

  “The tunnel! Now! Move, man, there’s no fucking time. Move! Move! Move!” With that he started forward and into the tunnel. He had a feeling the weather was about to get really bad. He saw that the single chunk of concrete that sat in the center of the entrance was barely balanced against another piece to its side. Knowing there wasn’t time to play around, Stone accelerated right toward the flat side of the eight-foot-high slab, slamming into it with the left side of the all-terrain. The bike and Stone’s head seemed to shake and ring, as if they were slamming around inside the bells of Notre Dame. But the rock moved. Slowly the two-foot-thick square slab of roadway fell over and slammed to the ground with a roar of dust and sand.

  Stone coughed and wiped his eyes free of the grit as he started slowly in, not sure of just what was inside. But it was almost clean; the sand from the wind hadn’t pushed the outer soil and dust in more than about ten yards or so. It must have been a secondary service road or some goddamn thing that ran under parts of the highway. Off in the dim darkness he could see rusting frames and what looked like a line of the trucks that laid down salt when the snows came. There was enough room for his men—even the tanks. Maybe they were going to get through this damned thing, after all. Stone let himself feel just a glimmer of hope in his heart, an organ that had felt as cold as ice for the last few hours.

  He spun the all-terrain around, amazed that the thing even ran, so banged up and bashed in was its entire outer frame, and shot back toward the entrance about ten yards off. The rest of them were tearing toward him now, and Stone came right up to the edge of the tunnel, pulled the all-terrain to the side, and stood up on the leather seat to cheer them on. His heart was beating like a cricket’s legs, and Stone knew something was about to happen. Just knew it. Something real bad.

  “Come on, come on, you goddamn sons of a bitches,” he yelled, waving his hands forward frantically like a cop directing traffic. Behind him on the seat, Stone could hear Excaliber growling under his breath, and he knew the animal sensed it, too—the feeling of something dreadful almost upon them.

  One of the Cheyenne came shooting in on his all-terrain, then another. They whizzed by him, and Stone yelled as they flew past.

  “Keep going—there’s room. Aim your lights so the others can see.” They shot on into the innards of the tunnel, switching on their beams so that the wide, curved chamber was illuminated with dancing shadows for hundreds of feet. Another of the Indians tore in, and then one of the tanks, which had to slow down as it lumbered past Stone, sending out a spray of dust from its cranking metal treads. Stone gave the thumbs-up and a thin smile, knowing they could see him on the video scan—if it was still working.

  “Damn, we’re gonna make it,” Stone spat out through dust-coated lips. But the moment he turned back toward the entrance and his eyes picked out the two roaring shapes—one tank and one three-wheeler, the moment he saw Little Bear’s face through the darkness of the two A.M. night, riding for his life with Carla beside him, the entire sky lit up like nothing he had ever seen. The light was absolutely white, like the very face of God, too powerful for the human eye to take. And at the very second that he saw the light of darkness, Stone instinctively flung his hand over his eyes to protect them. Even through the fingers he could see the light—the bones of his hand showing white, like looking at an X ray through his own skin.

  “Fuck,” Stone said with a groan, not believing this was all happening. But he had little time to get depressed about the situation. For the shock waves, the sound waves, the thousand other waves of the ten-megaton superbomb that had gone off twenty miles away came streaming out over the countryside in every direction like an atomic flood, a waterfall of pure death. There was a roar, as if a train were running over him, and then a curtain of dust and rock seemed to completely fill the opening of the tunnel, and he was flung backward from atop the all-terrain. Stone felt his body slammed down into the concrete, as if the hand of God were pressing him down, squeezing him into the earth. There was a tremendous heat, and then the very earth beneath him seemed to vibrate with such intensity that it felt as if his bones were being shaken free of his body, his brain from out of his skull. And as Martin Stone lay half buried in falling dust and chunks of the cement ceiling, he passed out for the third time in two days.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  DUST WAS falling everywhere. That was the first thing Stone saw when his eyes opened. The air was tilled with a billion specks of spinning dust, and he could barely breathe. Voices yelled out to one another to see if everyone else was still alive. He rose and looked around. Everything was covered with the cement dust. It was like a ghostland, a land where nothing was real. The concrete frame of the tunnel had held, but it had poured down a shit-load of particles and chunks from the shock of the explosion, which had roared through the prairie with an atomic vengeance. Stone could see shapes here and there, some of them moving. He ripped a piece of material from his jacket, which was in tatters now, and wrapped it around his mourn to keep out the dust. That was a little better. Suddenly he heard a whine and saw what looked like a gray turtle crawling along. But as it charged forward and the coating partially blew off, Stone saw that it was the dog, still hobbling on, unstoppable by anything God or man had to offer. Stone grabbed the pitbull and felt tears come to his eyes, so dirty and fucked up did the animal appear. Yet still he was bright-eyed, tail wagging and trusting Stone to lead him through an unfathomably dangerous world.

  Yeah, Stone thought with a deep twinge of bitterness as he saw what had been wrought all around him. He had been doing a great job of leading them so far. He ripped another piece of material and made a similar gas mask for the dog. The pitbull tried to shake off the cloth wrapped around its nose and jaws, but Stone slapped it hard on the nose twice. Excaliber looked at him with hurt eyes but stopped trying to dislodge the thing.

  Another shape moved, ghostly grit-covered arms and hands reaching up from the roadway. Stone felt a shiver run up and down his spine. It was like a horror movie, like one’s worst nightmare. But he resisted the infantile impulse to run and helped the shape to its feet.

  “Meyra, you’re alive, thank God,” Stone said when he saw her face beneath the coating. He hugged the Cheyenne woman close so that a little cloud of the particles lifted from her, puffed off by the air pressure of their bodies meeting. As the roar that still rumbled through the ground slowly ceased and the dust cleared a little, they looked around and saw that they were all okay—those who had made it in, anyway. Stone didn’t even want to think about those outside. With the beams of their various lights cutting through the dusty darkness like laser swords Stone walked to the entrance and saw that it was covered with sand, chunks of concrete from the roadway above embedded within like jewels set into a pendant. He poked into the mini-avalanche with a piece of narrow steel rod he saw on the road, and it went in over a yard, still encountering resistance. It would take them forever to dig out. But they had a tank.

  “Bring the Bradley up and push her through that shit,” Stone told Bull, who headed back up into the tank with his three-man crew. “Slowly, slowly,” Stone cautioned him as the tank came forward, the Cheyenne pulling their all-terrains off to each side. Bull turned the turret completely around so that the 120-mm was facing backward and set the front of the steel vehicle right up against the side of the collapse. Then he started slowly forward, inch by inch. The tank went into the obstacle like an elephant into a hundred-foot tree. At first the whole surface seemed to push back easily, then the Bradley met more resistance. Bull slowly increased the power so the treads were grinding against the concrete tunnel floor, sending out glowing sparks into the darkness like a hailstorm of firef
lies. But slowly the wall slid backward until suddenly with a rush of air and dust the whole thing collapsed in an outward direction, and the tank lumbered through and into the outside world, the deadly world that awaited them.

  The rest of them rode their all-terrains up over the yard or so of debris that still covered the opening and headed fifty or sixty feet out onto the prairie. The sky was a throbbing orange-green, a sick dead color. Then they all stopped and turned to see what the hand of man had wrought. The mushroom cloud was still rising to the clouds and above, going ten, fifteen miles up. The gargantuan funnel of mega death glowed like a furnace, writhing in dark oranges and reds, as if a beast were caged inside, a killing beast that had been released and now was caged again inside the Day-Glo mushroom-shaped cloud that must have been a good two miles wide. Now that the shock waves and the radiation and every other goddamn thing that a hydrogen warhead puts out when it blows its stack had passed them, it was eerily quiet, without a sound, except for a very deep low-pitched hum, almost subsonic, that seemed to vibrate up from the very earth beneath their feet.

  Stone remembered the words of the men who had been responsible for directing the Manhattan Project—the top-secret operation that had created the A-bomb—Robert Oppen-heimer, upon witnessing the first test blast. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It was worse than that, Stone thought bitterly to himself as he stared at the grave of mankind, the end of the line for a species that didn’t have enough brains to know not to blow its own fucking brains out. The burning cloud was evil; he could feel it laughing within the fires, laughing at all that it consumed. What other creature in the entire universe was so fortunate—it was created by its master, who then fed himself to it to assuage its hunger. What other energy or entity anywhere received such kind and generous treatment?

  Stone looked frantically around for the second tank—containing Hartstein, Bo, and three of the other men. He rode forward slowly about fifty yards out from the highway, which was crumbled up into little chunks everywhere and reached a slight turn in the rift. Stone saw instantly that if he’d thought it was bad below, it was a thousand times worse here, where everything had received the full impact of the blast. One of the three-wheelers and the other tank had been right in the path of the waves of radiation that had poured out—unshielded as Stone and the others had been by the wall of concrete and earth that stood between them and the explosion. Little Bear and Carla lay sprawled by their all-terrain—what was left of it, anyway. For the vehicle had been twisted, melted large tires just pieces of bubbling putty. And the bodies … Stone could hardly bear to look at the melted human flesh dripping off bone. Eyeballs, teeth, all oozed down floating in a red mush that spread out around the two of them and collected in a pool.

  The second Bradley, which had come to within a hundred and fifty feet of making it into the tunnel, was on its side like some toppled beast of the jungle, looking somehow absurd and ridiculous in its death, though it had been powerful and commanding of respect just minutes before. And Stone could see as he walked through the piles of hot sand that gathered at his ankles that there was no one alive inside. Not with the metal on the armor glowing with a dull pulsing red, the entire tank throbbing with an aura of radiation like a thing alive. Not with a foul, oily smoke drifting up from small cracks here and there. Stone prayed mat they had died fast in there.

  “He’s dead,” a voice said softly from behind him, and Stone turned slowly, feeling more and more like a zombie, like a psychiatric patient on a heavy dose of Thorazine. It must have been the radiation he had absorbed—they’d had to have taken some—that on top of every other fucking thing he’d been through in the last forty-eight hours. He was overloaded. With everything. Almost with life itself. He felt sick, in the pit of his stomach, the bottom of his soul.

  “Yes, I know they’re dead,” Stone said in a monotone, thinking she meant the recruits who he had led into hell, who lay forever entombed in an atomic crypt with a half-life of two thousand years.

  “No, my brother. That’s his body over by the edge.” She looked down, her eyes bloodshot and wet.

  “Are you sure?” Stone asked in a whisper. “They were pretty … beat up. Perhaps…” He lied knowing full well who they were.

  “His earring,” she said, holding it out. “It withstood everything, isn’t it funny?” She started laughing as she cupped the still shining golden earring shaped like a hawk’s feather in her hand. “It’s owner is dead, but it shines on. That’s good for jewelry advertising. They should really tell everyone that it’s atomic bomb-proof—I’m sure they could sell millions.” She was laughing hysterically now. Laughing and crying all at once, on the very brink of madness. Stone reached out and slapped her hard across the face, and she glared at him angrily. She lunged forward and tried to strike at him, a clawful of fingernails to the eyes, but he caught her hand in his own at the last second.

  “Good, get mad,” Stone said, looking her firmly in the eyes, holding her in his grip like a vise. “Because if you mourn, you’ll die. The only way forward, through all this, is anger.” Stone knew that they couldn’t let their armor down for a second—they had been poisoned. He didn’t know how much, but he knew they’d need every ounce of the will to live to come through this. And it was worse than that. For already an immense cloud of fallout was building high above them. Stone could see the clouds of dust spiraling like dark galaxies above them, spreading slowly out miles up. Tomorrow they would drop. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next for a week or two, they would come down in the winds and the rain. And God help those who were caught directly beneath it, who drank water with radioactive particles in them, ate meat, or even breathed it in. They’d have to get the hell out of there—and fast.

  “Well, he didn’t give his life in vain,” Meyra said. Her copper skin had a reddish tinge to it, as did Stone’s. “Patton is dead—the madman is dead. The exterminator of my people is dead.”

  “Yeah, we won,” Stone whispered with a look of deep weariness and pain. “But it’s still not over, baby. Not by a long shot.” He reached out and held her in his arms, there on the edge of nowhere, as he looked off at the burning desolation that spread off in every direction. It was like the smoking ruins of Hiroshima—every cactus, every bush, every tree gone, wiped out as if they’d never existed. Just a flat-land of dust and a building dam of fallout above that looked as if it would burst and pour down on them forever. And Stone prayed, as he held her close against him, pressing her breasts against his chest, crushing her flesh as he tried to feel her life energy, tried to feel something beautiful in the midst of this hell. Stone prayed that the madman was in fact dead. That his very atoms were spinning in the twisting mushroom cloud on the horizon. That he was gone. Gone like Little Bear, gone like Bo and Hartstein, gone like all the hundreds, perhaps thousands, that he had caused to die. Gone beyond, beyond, beyond.

  A THIRD WORLD WAR HAS LEFT AMERICA A LAWLESS AND BATTERED LAND. BUT AMID THE PILLAGE AND HEARTLESS KILLING, ONE BRAVE YOUNG MAN HAS BECOME AMERICA’S LAST HOPE FOR JUSTICE AND FREEDOM…

  In the barbarous, collapsed civilization that is now his country, Mafia crime lords, bikers, toothless bandits, and New American Army troops vie to get Martin Stone. But his most dangerous enemy by far is the would-be savior who calls himself General Patton III, whose insanely inspired blueprint for what’s left of the world is a sweeping, brutally enforced state of peace—but a peace of slaves, a peace of the dead.

  Parton has vowed to take Stone out if it’s the last thing he ever does. Stone knows the general is a man who keeps his word. The only hope for the Last Ranger is for him to take out the granie-jawed tyrant first.

  Martin Stone is

  THE LAST RANGER

  America’s Last Hope in America’s Darkest Age

 

 

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