Warlord's Revenge Read online

  “Stone, Stone,” Peaches exclaimed, slipping the long ice pick up her sleeve in an instant. She ran over to him, rolling around like a bathtub of Jell-O beneath her mountainous dress. “What the hell have they done to you?”

  “I think I’m being fitted for shoes,” Stone whispered through gritted teeth, as he didn’t want her to see or hear the kind of pain he was in. “Said they’d gone to check if they had my size.”

  “Well, these are a little tight, my asshole friend. In fact,” she said with a grunt as she found the release lever on both the torture implements, “I’d say they’re making your feet bleed.” She gingerly pulled first one, then the other, device out, so that the needles slipped carefully out of Stone’s skin. They’d only penetrated about a quarter of an inch, but as Scalzanni had noted, the body had a shitload of nerves down there.

  “Thanks,” Stone said as she sliced through the leather thongs that bound him with a scalpel she picked up from a table filled with things that cut next to Stone’s hospital bed. “I was writing my will in my head—not that I have anything to give anyone. Why did you come?” he asked as he swung his body around to the side of the board and carefully lowered his feet to the concrete floor.

  “I told you, I had enough of this place. I heard the scuttle when I hit the streets this morning—that they caught someone. Someone big. I figured it would only be you. I heard of this place. Everyone has, but this is the first time I’ve actually paid it a visit.” She shuddered as she looked around the room and saw the mind-boggling devices of pain that the others were in. “Good God, I—I—” Even the toughest old whore this side of the Chicago Stockyards was taken aback by the sheer horror of it all.

  She walked over to the masked man and touched his shoulder gently. A groan was the only answer.

  “I’m going to cut you free,” the whore said, hefting the scalpel again and releasing the man from his bonds. “I don’t know if you can move or what but it—” Before she could finish, the torture victim sat up and swung his legs over the side. Peaches almost puked when she saw the flood of blood sweep down out of the sides of the mask. She didn’t want to know what was going on inside it.

  Meanwhile Stone was putting his feet down on the ground as carefully as if they were made of eggs. They hurt like the blazes. But not as much as they did a minute ago when the needles had still been in them. He stood up, and an involuntary scream escaped from his dry lips. As Peaches moved on to the next man like some garishly made-up angel of mercy, Stone saw her suddenly look over at him, about twelve feet away. He realized for the first time that he was stark naked and, in the midst of all the blood and death, unconsciously threw his hand over his pelvic region.

  “If you think I come all this way,” Peaches said with a laugh as she caught the motion out of her all-seeing eyes, “just to see your wang, you got another think coming.” She kept talking to keep her spirits up as she walked toward the upright iron maiden, the head in it staring back at her with dim, pain-swollen eyes. “ ’Cause, honey child, I seen more damn dicks in my time than there are trees in the Rocky Mountains. Seen ’em the size of pencils, seen ’em the size of baseball bats; seen white ones, and brown ones and purple ones; I seen straight ones and curved ones and broken ones; I seen…” She went on talking and cackling like an insane woman, but Stone could see, as he hobbled across the cold concrete floor, that she was helping the men. A few twitching smiles ran like currents across some of the other victims’ faces.

  Stone found his things on one of a row of shelves in which all their clothes and weapons had been placed—for later use or sale. He dressed as fast as he could, wincing again as he stepped into his boots. But he was so damn happy to still be alive—and have some firepower—that he pushed the pain down and told it to go fuck itself. By the time he stood up. Peaches had released four of them. They weren’t in good shape by a long shot. Stone was amazed that they could even move. But there they were—the mask man, the coffin man, the one with nails driven into his head. Even the man who had been skinned alive was somehow sitting up, all his exposed musculature pulsing and rippling with slime.

  Peaches started toward the one suspended over the acid vat and reached out for him. How she could reach through one’s natural disgust at the states of these men was incredible to Stone. But then, she had been dealing with men all her life. In her own way, perhaps she had always been an angel to those she had served. She reached the hanging half-man and pulled the wheel-mounted pulley system that held him over the vat back so that he was completely free of it. Even the others gasped—those who could still see, anyway. He was a half-man. His intestines, everything within, showing within plain view. It was as if he had been sliced in half by a guillotine and it was there for all the world to see. Only the fact that the chemical burning action of the acid had sort of sealed the whole bottom kept what was inside from falling out onto the floor. Peaches held out a hand to stroke his sweat-soaked forehead when the door swung open again, and before a single one of them could move, another guard rushed forward with .45 in hand.

  He fired without saying a word, at the first person he saw move in the torture room, which happened to be Peaches. The slug slammed dead center in her forehead, drilling through a wall of brain tissue and then out the back. She stopped dead in her tracks, frozen like an ice sculpture, and then toppled backward and flat onto her back, as dead as all her relatives. The guard turned sharply, a wild look in his eye as he saw the dead body of his compatriot on the floor. But as he leaned forward and let the gun drop for a second, a shape launched itself from the other side of the door. Stone, who had hidden from the guard when he burst in, came at the murderer from the right. As the man turned, trying to level his pistol, Stone came into him with his shoulder like a linebacker making a crunching block. The guard’s .45 flew into the air as he careened sideways across the floor. He screamed as he saw what was coming but was unable to do a goddamn thing to stop it. He hit the metal rim, and the whole top part of his body flew over the side and into the acid.

  There was a terrific commotion with hands flying around in the air and the burning liquid foaming like a boiling stew on the top of the vat. But not for long. Within seconds the guard was still, his waist draped over the side of the steel vat, as if he were washing his face. Stone walked over to the motionless body now that the waters had calmed down a little. He gripped his hand around the lower back of the man’s jacket and pulled. And what came out was not something even the devil dared dream about.

  Stone let the faceless and handless thing fall to the floor as he walked over to Peaches. She was as dead as you can get, her eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling, already drying out as her body began losing moisture, cooling and beginning to rot.

  “You old whore,” he whispered with tenderness in his voice, reaching down and closing the eyes with his hand so they didn’t have to be extinguished by being exposed to such harsh light. “You’re the bravest damn woman I’ve ever met.” With that, he turned to see what was left.

  Not much. The little group of should-be-dead men were gathered together waiting. Waiting for what, Stone couldn’t imagine. Not one of them even should have been alive. He walked over to them, and those that could, stared back at him with barely opened eyes. One guy with his head in a spike-filled mask; one guy with his body in a coffin piercing him from neck to groin; one guy with nails hammered into his head so he looks like a bloody ice-cream cone with three-penny sprinkles; one guy with all his skin peeled off so he looked like an overgrown, peeled grape: and one guy with only the top of him left, and all his guts ready to spill out over the floor like a broken garbage bag. Just the kind of crowd Stone loved to hang out with.

  “All right,” he said suddenly, taking charge. Whatever they looked like, however long they had left on this earth. Stone had to get them and his own ass out of there—and fast. Scalzanni could be back at any minute—or a contingent of guards. “We’re getting the hell out of here, right now. You!” he said, grabbing at the sleeve of
the nail-headed fellow. The man’s eyes swiveled around like a cow’s, as empty and dumb as the dirt beneath its feet. But he let Stone lead him over to the half-man, who hung as if in a swing from the mobile pulley system.

  “You push,” Stone said to the huge fellow, who seemed to have lost just about everything that had once been stored inside the brain. Still, he allowed his hands to be guided to the sidebars of the pulley and nodded once with a spit-dribbling smile, as if indicating that he knew what was expected.

  “You!” Stone said, pointing to the coffin man, who, with his legs outside the knitting-needle-filled box, was apparently able to walk, albeit in tremendous pain. He looked almost comical, like a turtle with a huge wooden shell on its back. But Stone didn’t laugh. “Lead him.” He reached out and placed the right hand of the marked victim on the coffin man’s shoulder.

  Stone turned and asked the skinless man, “Can you move?” To Stone he was the worst of the lot, even more horrific than the half-man. But he made himself look fully into the torture victim’s pain-shattered eyes. Only mucus, red and wet, and veins and tendons that seemed to undulate like a million little worms over his body covered him now. The face, too—carved down to the muscles of the cheeks, the tendons that operated the jaws and mouth long and leathery. Yet amazingly it could talk.

  “Lead on, Moses,” the bloody lips intoned hoarsely. “Deliver me to the Promised Land.” It laughed, and the motion made stuff fall off its face and arms, a pulsing gelatinlike substance that sprinkled onto the floor.

  “Okay, fellow torturees, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Stone said as he started carefully toward the door, his Uzi in his hand, ready to spray out a wall of death. He moved carefully through the door, surveying the darkened hallway that led off it. He walked down the hall in slow, peculiar steps, as his feet still felt like his socks were made of glass. He could feel the blood that continued to ooze out from the myriad little holes in the soles of his feet, making his boots produce an obscene sucking sound.

  Behind him it was the brainless leading the blind, leading the ugly, or something like that. The bizarre crew made its way down the flat cement corridor. They pulled and pushed and wheeled one another down the hall, making all kinds of wet sounds mixed in with the continued groans and little squeals of pain that emitted from one or another of them every few seconds—as their own personal pain device dug a little deeper into them from the motion.

  Stone moved about twenty feet ahead as they came to a larger hall that from the sudden draft of air he knew must lead out. He had barely taken two steps down it when he felt something land around his neck, and before he knew what was happening, he was being pulled backward off-balance. By the sharp pain that dug into his throat Stone knew instantly what it was—a garrote. He and his father had practiced with the damn little loops of wire enough times for him to know what the hell they were. And he had been suckered into one. He also knew that there was no return once they got you firmly noosed—that he would be dead in another ten seconds. The wire bit into Stone’s throat like a loop of fire, and he saw everything bursting with explosions of red all around him as his eyes nearly popped out of his skull.

  Suddenly the wire loosened and he was gasping for breath. He turned as consciousness flowed back into his blood-starved brain and raised his Uzi, which was still in his hand. But there was no need. The others were already upon the guard. The multilated men were all around him, pulling him back and down, their bloody hands reaching out and clawing at him. When they stepped back a minute later, there wasn’t a hell of a lot left of the bastard.

  “Come on,” Stone said hoarsely when he at last had regained his breath. He edged forward again, this time his eyes darting back and forth like a lizard’s, as he sure as hell wasn’t about to allow himself to be jumped a second time. But the way was clear along the basement corridor, and within a couple of minutes they reached a ramp that led up and into an open space. Stone searched around at the top of the ramp, but though there was a chair leaned back against the wall, no guard was in sight.

  “We’re out,” Stone said as he motioned for them to come up the ramp. Pushing each other, grunting and breathing like dying men, they somehow hobbled up the incline after him. Stone unlatched a steel gate and let them file past in their mobile freak parade before he closed it again. No sense in letting the bastards know in which direction the escapees had gone. They hightailed it—or as fast as a crew of the walking falling-apart can go—into the shielding woods. Stone led them into the increasingly thick pockets of trees for about ten minutes, until they were at least momentarily safe.

  “Well,” Stone started to say to the ragged, bloody crew with their masks and nails and flesh dripping off and what all, but the half-man, of all people, spoke up as he dangled from the pulley cart, the blank-faced nail head still pushing from behind.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” the half-man croaked out, hardly moving its lips at all, its eyes only open as wide as razor slits. “There is nothing to say. We’re all dead men. But at least we’ll die free—and not in that stinking room. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” mumbled the others who could still talk. Even the soon-to-die wanted to go out on their own terms.

  “Now go,” the half-man commanded Stone as he pointed to push him deeper into the comforting woods. “Go, for you are still of the world of the living. We are not!” Stone knew that it was true. There wasn’t a man among them who would see the next moonrise. He had done what he could—as little as it was.

  “Then God—God help you,” Stone said softly. He stood and watched silently for about half a minute as they lurched and crawled and led each other deeper into the dark woods, which stood cold but loving, ready to take them all into its earthen bed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Stone tore ass through the woods that ran along the perimeter of the mall for nearly half a mile. He kept about twenty feet inside the shielding trees, but he could see the outer edge of the sick shopping mart, and down its corridors where contented killers strolled, examining this Pandora’s box filled with the appliances of murder. Stone kept his Ruger .44 in one hand as he ran—just in case. The heavy load it carried would do just fine to slam right through small branches and brush—and into an attacker’s skull. He had just about reached the end of the mall when he heard bells going off at the far end—where he had just escaped from. They knew. The shit was hitting the fan. He just didn’t want to get sprayed.

  When he reached the end of the mall, Stone stayed in the woods until he was yet another quarter of a mile or so past it. Whatever their security apparatus, he could see, it wasn’t super-efficient, as he saw not a guard in sight. Making sure there was no posse, Stone edged toward the line of trees and then dashed out into the open, beelining along a wide dirt road toward the garage where the Harley and his dog sat waiting. He had sort of lost track of time, of how long he had been gone. It seemed like only hours, yet somewhere he must have lost a night or a day. Something was wrong. If he lived through the next few hours, he’d get it all straightened out.

  Stone’s feet hurt like he was doing long-distance running on razor blades. On one particularly sharp stab of pain, he threw his head back and winced, noticing that the sky was looking bad. All the shit and poison that had been accumulating up there for days now was spinning and twisting around like blood inside a washing machine. The dark cloud cover had dropped so low, it seemed that he could almost jump up and touch it. The storm clouds were huge whales of things, brown- and purple-tinged, positively puffed out of every dark edge as if they couldn’t contain the load in their radioactive guts much longer. And when they puked it all out, the world below would be in big trouble.

  The prospect of being rained on by the radioactive showers was motivation enough for Stone. He took off even faster down the road, telling his goddamn screaming feet to just shut up or he’d shoot them off. At last the broken-down garage came into view, and Stone saw that Pliers actually had been doing some work. The b
ails of barbed wire he had had stored away had all been unraveled, and he had formed a barrier of the sharp stuff about five feet high and a yard wide that ran the perimeter of the place, nearly a hundred feet on a side.

  “Hey, old man,” Stone yelled out, cupping his hands together as he reached what had been the access road, which was now protected by the wall of dagger-tipped wire. “Hey, Pliers,” Stone yelled out again, starting to get a little nervous, holding his .44 up to chest level, trying to sort things out in the dark. “Hey, I come for my dog and my—”

  “Hold your damn horses,” a voice yelled out from the darkness. Suddenly Stone saw a thin, flickering flame emerge from the little slabbed wood hovel the man lived in, and start to come toward him at a snail’s pace in the dark. “You young folks want to do everything now—this instant. Can’t wait a damn second. Why, when I—”

  “Hurry up, old man,” Stone yelled out impatiently, “or you’ll have the whole damn Mafia army breathing down your throat. You don’t want to get caught with me here, pal, so move it.” The possibility of violence being done to hs little home made the old tinkerer move faster, and the sliver of candle flame bent almost sideways as he pushed through the night.

  “Here,” he said as he came up to Stone just on the other side of the barbed-wire wall. “I put this damn stuff up. Now I feel imprisoned in my own damn home.” The old man laughed with a bitter snort as he undid some wires around a pole, and lifting one six-foot section of the barbed wire by a protected handhold, he pulled the whole piece back so Stone could slip through.