Last Ranger Read online

  A look of supreme satisfaction swept over the Dwarf’s face for having felt it for even an instant—the death of a man. Suddenly the two corpses burst into open flame everywhere on their bodies. But still the electric bolts drove on, cracking and moving around the two smoking, jerking shapes like they were torching every cell of them. The bodies blackened to the color and texture of charcoal, and as the yellow flames swept through them, even what was left began disintegrating. Within two minutes from onset of power they were hardly more than burnt husks that vibrated in the air.

  The Dwarf stabbed out again at the control panel and then let himself fall back into his seat drained. The electricity stopped instantly and the remains fell with hardly a sound as there was nothing solid enough left to make such noise. The Ten basked in the vision of the glowing remains for several minutes as normal men might bask in a sunset or a mountain vista. Theirs was the beauty of pain, the aesthetic of blood.

  “Take the remains away,” the Dwarf said after a few minutes. The MP’s came forward and began vacuuming up the corpse powder into huge industrial bags. “Take what’s left out into the main hall. Put them each in their own stainless steel urn, side by side. And a sign above them: ‘These two broke the Rules of Assured Survival.’ And get a new rug from supply—make it a nice dhurrie, something blue. I’m tired of this brown.”

  CHAPTER

  Two

  MARTIN Stone stared down at the pit bull on the back of his Harley. The dog looked like it was dead, or damn near it. Nothing was moving on the animal, not a breath, or muscle quivering. It had been like this for days now in a sort of coma as if it were waiting for Stone to fix it up again, repair the knife wound into its heart that it had taken fighting at his side two days before. Saving his life was more like it.

  “Come on dog,” Stone whispered through jaws clenched hard so his feelings wouldn’t rise up. The very fact that he felt so much for the damn dog made him feel like an idiot in a way. On the other hand he trusted the animal more than most of the people he’d met these days. “Come on Excaliber,” he said again, scratching the motionless animal as it lay sideways half curled up inside a low steel box carrier he had rigged up on the back rack of his Harley 1500. “You can make it.” He didn’t know if the animal could hear him or not. But it couldn’t hurt to give the pit bull a little attention. Too bad there weren’t any nurses around, that would surely have gotten the creature’s heart fluttering a little as it had a way with the fair sex most men would envy.

  The stitching along the pit bull’s chest seemed to be holding up well enough, and as far as Stone could see no infection had set in. It looked red along the eighteen stitches that it had taken to open and close the canine’s chest. But the man who had done the slicing had told him redness was normal. The once doctor had gone right in there and actually touched the animal’s heart. Stone had seen it with his own eyes, the dog’s living, beating heart being held in the “doctor’s” hands as he had repaired the slice along one side. It had seemed like a terrible violation of the animal’s body, which it was—but it had also kept him alive, though just how long the pit bull was going to stay in that condition was a question Stone didn’t want to think too hard about.

  He put his head down until it was just touching the dog’s, and closed his eyes trying in some ridiculous telepathic way to establish some sort of contact with the dog. Let it know that he was still out there trying to get it all together. He knew he must be imagining it but somehow he felt for a few seconds like he was in contact with the pit bull and it was—if not ready to do the turkey trot—still hanging in there. It was almost as if it were in some kind of suspended animation with its every bodily function slowed down to a crawl. Maybe it was a defense mechanism that the breed had to protect itself. He knew that every other trait Excaliber had been given via his bloodline made him about as tough as living things could get. Maybe the dog had a built-in hibernation mode as well. Giving Stone a chance to…. To what? Damned if he even knew what the hell he could do beyond what had already been done.

  He lifted his head from the comatose animal and raised it up toward the low-flying mountain-sized clouds. It had been getting darker all afternoon, but now as Stone’s eyes scanned the heavens, he saw that even the glow of the sun had pretty much disappeared. Though it was only three in the afternoon it seemed to be night, a sickly night with a greenish tint to the entire sky as if it was made of mold. Stone felt a strange sensation sweep through his whole body, like he was holding his finger in a socket. He glanced down to see that the dog’s hair was all standing on end, pricked up by the charge in the air. Something was up—and it wasn’t a winning lottery ticket.

  Even as he walked back to the front of the bike and mounted up, the heavens seemed to grow a few shades darker and a ghastlier green, almost like the face of a corpse, which Stone had unfortunately been seeing a lot of these days. Faces that didn’t die in peace and sink into the ground but followed him into his dreams, all mixing and blending together into one great entity—the sky itself perhaps. It looked like it was rotting, falling down in chunks onto the earth below. The air was oppressive, hard to breathe, as if he were deep underground and there was no oxygen. Stone started the Harley forward, moving slowly as he didn’t want to be caught unawares going any real speed.

  He had barely gotten up to about twenty miles per hour when the whole horizon lit up with a thousand streaks of lightning, blinding Stone. He had to slow down fast and throw both feet down onto the ground to keep upright. The spears of lightning sparked and bolted in all directions, but he was able to see by cupping one hand over his eyes and squinting. It looked like all hell was breaking loose as the clouds were being whipped around by frenzied winds. They broke into massive sections and flew around wildly like fish seeking deeper waters. The winds picked up fast, thirty, then forty miles an hour at least. And the loose sand from the flatlands he was traveling through whipped up all around him, flying into the front of the bike and his face and chest like the grains were bent on annihilation. Stone had to bend his whole body forward to keep from being blown over. He pulled some goggles he had around his neck over his eyes and that helped a little, at least protecting them from the dust which bit into his unprotected neck and face like little slivers of glass.

  But Stone suddenly had a lot more to worry about than some heavy-duty razor cuts—he saw it, even through the curtains of sand, coming in from the west. It was huge, a funnel of wind, of black churning energy a good half mile wide. It seemed to extend high into the cloud line piercing them like some sort of Indian rope trick. And even from a few miles off he could hear the sound it made above the whistling sand. Stone didn’t like the sound one bit, the grinding and crunching as everything the tornado passed over was being ripped up and systematically dismantled like it was all made of toothpicks.

  He could feel the sheer energy of the thing, like one can sense the power of a great fighter as he walks by. It moved slowly with a kind of arrogance. The towering black chimney seemed to change direction almost at will as if it were curious about certain features in the landscape or wanted to go tear up a forest of low trees and send them flying into the air, twisted trunks and broken branches. And just as Stone thought he might actually get by it through a series of narrow plateaus as the land dropped lower out of the Colorado highlands descending into northern Texas and the great ranges, the tornado suddenly shifted right toward him and chugged with the roar of an H-bomb.

  It’s an interesting experience having a mile-high funnel of megadeath coming straight at you like it wants to shake your hand—off your body. And Stone wasn’t all that interested in making the acquaintance with the death spiral. He veered the bike to the right and floored it, taking his chances that a gust of wind would knock him over. He got the Harley up to about thirty, letting both booted feet slam down every few seconds to keep balance and sending up clouds of dust along each side of the bike’s trail. Stone’s very bones felt like they were being shaken inside a blender.


  It seemed like it was going to work—at first. Then the tornado veered again as if it had eyes in its dark head and knew what it wanted. And it came straight toward him.

  “Give me a fucking break,” the receiver of unwanted attentions screamed up at the black skies, wondering if the very gods had it in for him, because it sure as hell seemed that way. He hadn’t said his prayers for quite a while. That was it. “I pray dear God—save my ass,” Stone screamed into the wind, but not even his own ears could hear above the roar of the approaching funnel. It was as if he were standing at the edge of the main runway at the largest airport in the world and a thousand jets were all revving their engines at once. Stone wanted to throw his hands over his ears as the noise hurt his eardrums, made them feel like they were thinking of snapping like the skins of an old drumhead. But as his fingers were holding the handlebars of his bike it didn’t seem like the greatest idea.

  The entire landscape to his west was now taken up by the swirling funnel, and Stone could see into it now, could see the multicurrents of inner motion, a thousand complex interactions of wind all buffeting one another and moving in concentric circles within it. And it was filled, like the vacuum cleaner that it was, with everything it had passed over. Trees, animals, birds, grass, bush and thousands of tons of dirt all revolved within like the filthy clothes of an entire city in some gigantic washing machine in the sky. And even as Stone ripped back on the accelerator trying to make a final dash out of harm’s way, he knew he wasn’t going to make it.

  Suddenly it was upon him, and it was as if he were in a dream. The entire bike was lifted into the air as the sheer wall of blackness closed right over him. There was no sky, no world, no nothing except the spinning end over end, not knowing where or who he was. He could feel the sheer energy of the thing as he entered its very fabric. He could feel the moisture of the funnel, the roaring crushing power of its 400 mph-plus winds which swung him around its outer edge. And he could feel as well the sheer malevolence of the thing, like it had a consciousness and it was to destroy.

  Stone saw an entire tree coming toward him like it was playing a game of chicken. At the last possible second the thing suddenly shot up out of his way as though it had been hooked by a fisherman in the clouds. But something tore into the side of Stone’s head, for he felt himself stunned and a sharp pain rip through his right temple. He squeezed his hands instinctively around the bars and wrapped his legs tighter against the sides as he struggled to hang onto consciousness. Now he was going even faster and he could dimly see the outer world, the trees, the prairie spinning as though he were on a turntable, as things pulled up from the sundered earth below shot by all around him.

  Stone suddenly knew he’d be seeing his mother and father again real soon. Well, that would be nice. He wondered in a strangely calm way within the storm of his fear just what it would be like to die. And suddenly he wished with a burst of incredible force that surged through his body right up from the depths of his libido that he could get laid once more before he died.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  WHEN Stone came to he was lying in the middle of what looked like one of the major battles of World War II. Dead, broken, twisted things lay everywhere. Trees had been ripped from the ground, their roots trailing behind like tendrils dripping green blood. The animal life had been decimated as if Mother Nature had come to hate all that she had created and wanted to kick some bloody booty. Fur, legs, grisly blood-soaked things not even recognizable anymore lay strewn everywhere amidst the carnage. Even the soil itself had not been spared as great chunks of it had been ripped up, the surface of the terrain gouged out in many spots for yards down, taking all the topsoil, the nutrients away so that the tornado’s legacy would last far beyond the damage it had created today.

  As Stone’s head cleared slightly he suddenly realized he was sitting on dirt. Excaliber? The bike? He turned his head this way and that and nearly screamed out with pain as he felt that his neck was stiff as a board. Every other part of him wasn’t doing great, he discovered, as he rose up and immediately fell back down again. His joints, muscles, and one knee all felt like they had been through a wrestling match with a grizzly. He must have taken some fall from that merry-go-round from hell. He walked a few steps and nearly stumbled on the crushed head and shoulders of an elk that had been torn raggedly in two. Stone looked around, reaching down for a branch which he used to support himself and his aching right leg. Then he did a quick walkabout of the nearby area searching for bike and dog.

  The devastation was so intense it was as if an atomic bomb had gone off. The landscape had been made to look almost like the moon because where the trees had been ripped free of their moorings, huge holes were left, and craters gouged right out of the soil. It was ugly, as if the earth had been raped. Stone had read about the power of tornados but had never really given too much credence to it all. How the sheer force, the velocity of the swirling winds could generate such speed and power that straws could be driven through inch thick metal. He didn’t see that straw —but he did see a branch that had been driven right into the side of a boulder, about five feet of it was still protruding out at about a forty five degree angle. The leaves had all been stripped off but it was clear that the rest of the branch had penetrated cleanly inside the granite boulder a good ten feet in diameter. It looked surreal, like something Picasso might have created on a particularly rambunctious night. Doubtless it would have brought huge bucks in the SoHo art world. When there had been such things.

  Where the hell was the dog? He began fearing the worst —that he might well never see the animal again, alive or dead, or the Harley. That they’d just been swept off like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and were now in another state, crushed into a stew of dog and twisted motorcycle parts. He kept trying to wipe the image from his mind, but just as quickly it kept reasserting itself like a bad dream that wouldn’t go away. Stone began feeling sick in the very pit of his stomach.

  He walked through the rubble for nearly an hour, making wider and wider circles, poking through the debris, the overturned trees with his stick. Everything was in such shambles it was hard to even see clearly, like a forest that had been turned on its head, and sprinkled liberally with dirt. At last, his lips grim as pencil lines, his throat tightening up so he could hardly breathe, Stone sat down against the trunk of a fallen tree and let out a long sigh. It was all gone, the animal was dead. He threw his head back to look up at the sky, wanting to make contact for a few seconds perhaps, with a God he wasn’t sure he even believed in. And then he let out a strange sound, a mix of disbelief and joy.

  About twenty-five feet up, nestled in one of the trees that hadn’t been taken down, was the bike, and it looked like the box that the canine had been in was still attached to the back, though he couldn’t see inside it from where he was. A smile spread across Stone’s face and he felt the pain in his entire body subside to about a tenth of what it had been. It wasn’t total disaster time yet. Within seconds the smile began fading as he realized the bike was twenty-five feet up in the air, lodged in the side of a tree like it was planning on building a nest there. Slight problem. No big deal, he’d just call in Rent-A-Crane.

  Stone walked over to the ninth wonder of the world and around the base of the tree a few times. It was easy to see why the tornado hadn’t gotten this baby. It was thick as a sequoia and had branches that you could have constructed a house on. The sides of the bark were peppered with little dots and Stone looked close, seeing small bits of gravel embedded in them. The force of the funnel had sent bits of rock shrapnel flying out everywhere. That accounted for the little blood blisters all along his exposed flesh. He was lucky it hadn’t been worse.

  The branches of the tree looked like they formed a kind of handhold path to the bike. The problem was getting up the first eight feet or so. He found a foothold on a protruding knob and pushed up hard, jumping up with his arms at the same time. Stone barely caught hold around the next branch and swung there for a few s
econds, his hands clawing at the hard, almost reptilian textured bark. Then realizing he was about to fall backwards he somehow sent out a little extra and scampered aboard the thing, kicking and grabbing at it like a wildman. Once on, it wasn’t too hard to climb to the next and then up. Within a minute he was alongside the bike.

  He came up to the back box, his heart beating fast, and could hardly bring himself to peer over. For if the dog wasn’t inside, then…. But he saw fur as he pulled himself slowly up to the level of the black box. The dog was inside. He had strapped the canine down tightly enough to hold it in one place. At the time it had seemed like he was overdoing the whole thing with double cables everywhere. But it had unquestionably meant the dog’s life. Stone found a hold along the back of the bike and sat between the two joining branches. He reached out and stroked the animal’s side, feeling for heartbeat and breath. At first he felt nothing, but the pit bull was still warm though his lungs weren’t moving as far as he could tell. But as he held his hand right over the ribcage he felt it, a dim but unwavering beat. Although somebody up there sure as hell seemed to have it in for Martin Stone, the same party or parties sure as hell seemed to favor the pit bull. If it had nine lives—it had just used up about half of them.

  “Great!” Stone muttered as his mood grew dark again, from a pure hit of relief into a funk within a few seconds. The road to manic depression. Now he just had to get everybody down. He looked down. It was impossible. Perhaps he could get the dog, but…. “Shit,” he snapped at himself; he knew he was going to have to try. He climbed up a notch and opened another box alongside the dog’s. Inside were supplies he had filled the Harley with before leaving the bunker, the retreat, dug into the side of a mountain that his father, Col. Clayton Stone, had built years before. Thank God he had included ropes in the box. As he had to spend some time in the mountains recently— and it had been without weapons or ropes—he had over-compensated for this trip. The cable he’d taken was the best he found in the supply room of the bunker. Half inch wrapped nylon, tested to hold over a ton. And a pulley system. That wasn’t tested nearly so high. But Stone wasn’t going to worry about that right now.