The Cutthroat Cannibals Read online

  “Christ, dog, don’t drown me all over again—okay?” Stone grunted, realizing even as he spoke that the damned dog was alive too. Things were turning out a little better than he had expected. He raised himself up onto his elbows, still lying in the sand, and looked back toward the river. A deep trail led from the edge of the sandbank about fifty feet away. The animal had dragged him all the way out of the river. Excaliber had saved his life. There was no question about it.

  “Sorry about that, dog,” Stone muttered sheepishly as the canine stared back, its head tilted to the side, looking at him a little concerned. How the Chow Boy could have survived all this time without the assistance of the pit bull was beyond the creature’s comprehension.

  Stone tried to move and a fire shot up and down his right leg.

  “Shit,” he half screamed out as his whole head filled with explosions of color and pain. He looked down at the leg and saw that it was bleeding profusely. He realized he had a compound fracture—the thigh bone of his right leg was actually poking through the purple skin, like an ivory snake emerging from its fleshy burrow. Stone thought he was going to be sick for a second and he gagged, turning his head to the side and coughing up another glass or so of the brown river water. After that he felt a little more clearheaded as it appeared he had cleaned out most of the muck he had taken in.

  Slowly it dawned on him just what had happened and where he was. The bike was gone. Damn! He had depended on the thing. It had been with him since he left the bunker. With its speed and formidable armory of weapons it had been a mini warwagon. It would be difficult to survive without it. But if he ever got out of this alive, it was just barely conceivable that he might be able to construct another back at the bunker—just barely. Stone snickered at his morbid thoughts as he lay there in the middle of nowhere. He thought he heard a growl in the grove of trees that stood about a hundred feet off and reached down for his Ruger .44-cal. It was gone, as was the Uzi. He’d lost everything. Excaliber let out his own guttural growl back toward the source of their would-be visitor, and whatever was out there seemed to disappear—at least for the moment.

  Stone tried to rise and instantly collapsed. Aside from still feeling as weak as a newborn, explosions of mind-wrenching pain shot up and down his right leg and his backbone at his slightest attempt to get up on the appendage. And here he was stuck with no medical equipment in the most remote area of the entire territory. Not that anyone out there would do anything except kill him and perhaps eat him if he were to be found. Stone made a silent reminder to say his prayers more often, because something up there sure as hell was pissed off at one puny mortal being named Martin Stone.

  The river seemed to be slowly edging toward them as the floodwaters rose another notch or two. It was absolutely filled with debris now, animals, torn trees, fish swirling around the rushing waters in dead schools, spinning around like propellers as they followed one another down through the foaming pathways. Well, he was alive, and he might as well stay that way, Stone decided with a snort as he tried to ignore the burning slivers of sensation that were running along his entire right side, threatening to send his brain back into dreamland from the sheer intensity of the jolts. He had to move fast before the whole fucking scene fell completely apart. The dog was something else, but he wasn’t a surgeon.

  “Dog,” Stone said, coughing up more dark spittle. “Dog, you listening?” Stone asked, as the animal stood just feet away staring straight at him with an amused expression. “You better be listening cause I need your damned help.” Stone snorted again and looked away for a second. Something inside him hated the idea that the dog was so necessary for his survival. It was supposed to be man who aided the dumb but loyal beast, not the other way round.

  “My leg,” Stone said, grimacing fiercely as he dragged himself up on one elbow. Even that was a torturous visit to Painland as any movement with any part of his body made the inch or two of bone that protruded from his thigh dig around like a kitchen spoon stirring up the bloody soup a little more. There was no way he could travel yards, let alone the hundreds of miles back to the bunker, without drastically altering his physical state. And he’d better work fast, for the blood was starting to flow a little quicker around the edges of the pierced flesh. A red stream already coated his whole calf and the small rocks and sand beneath him. Lying in a puddle of his own blood was quite depressing.

  He leaned his head back, ignoring the pain that demanded his attention, and surveyed the shore that the dog had pulled him onto. There was another forty feet or so of rock-littered sand, then a tree line filled with fir and spruce. Thick groves of the towering trees ran for perhaps another fifty yards at most, then stopped at the base of the granite mountain that ran alongside the river. The towering wall was impossibly high, blotting out three quarters of the sky above so that just a long twisting highway of blue and puffy white wriggled by overhead. The cliffs were thousands of feet high, virtually straight up at ninety-degree angles to the earth in many spots. He’d need pinions and ropes—ten thousand dollars’ worth of mountain-climbing equipment—and two good legs to have even a chance to get out of there.

  Stone could feel his heart quickening as adrenaline flowed into him like liquor. “Calm down, you asshole—don’t panic,” he half shouted, startling the dog, which jumped backwards in the air, rising up nearly a foot off the ground as it thought he was yelling at it. Stone chuckled at the sight of the canine as its hair stood on end and its eyes suddenly expanded to nearly double their size. Then it hit the dirt about a yard away and relaxed instantly when it saw Stone laughing and realized that it hadn’t done anything wrong, hadn’t broken one of the many incomprehensible rules of the Chow Man.

  And with the laughter came the first release of tension he had had since being caught up in the avalanche. When he stopped Stone found he could think just a little more clearly. What would the major have done? Stone tried to visualize his old man getting stuck in exactly the same predicament somewhere in North Vietnam or Cambodia or any of the hundred places he’d dealt in his trade with the ultraspecial forces of the Rangers. Well, number one, his father wouldn’t have let himself get stuck in such a situation. But what if he did, Stone demanded of himself. The first thing he’d do is fix his fucking leg.

  He scouted around the tree line and spotted broken branches lying around their bases. Some appeared fairly long and straight—perfect for making a splint.

  “Dog,” Stone said, suddenly growing a little hopeful in spite of himself as he began wondering if maybe he did have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting out of this whole fiasco.

  “Over there, see that branch? Branch, dog, you hear me? BRANCH!” Stone pleaded desperately with the animal, imploring it to understand what he was saying. The animal looked at him with a curious expression, tilting its head back and forth as if trying to comprehend the meaning of the moving lips and the squawking sounds emerging from them.

  “Play dog, play!” Stone shouted encouragingly, making a throwing motion with his hand toward the spot where pieces of branch lay scattered around from a lightning strike that had slammed into a grove of Colorado spruce a week before. “Get stick,” Stone grimaced, throwing his arm forward again, trying to make the animal think he had actually heaved something.

  Whether Excaliber believed the dreadful charade or not Stone would never know, but it took off like a rocket in the direction he had pointed. The pit bull flew about thirty yards until it reached the branch pile. It stood there staring back at Stone and barked a few times as if confused.

  “Pick up a fucking branch, don’t play dumb with me, dog,” Stone half screamed across the shoreline, wincing with pain at the end of the command. The dog, as if tired of farting around, reached down and picked up the biggest one it could find and clamped its teeth down around it. It tore back to Stone dragging the ten-foot-long, five-inch-thick piece of broken tree limb along with it. With the dog’s powerful jaws and legs it was easy going for a load that would have made a man stagger a
little. Excaliber pulled the branch right up to Stone and let it fall to the rock-strewn sand.

  “Good boy,” Stone said enthusiastically. The damned animal could have been on the fucking Johnny Carson show in the old days, no question about it. He leaned over, trying to ignore the waves of exquisite torture that ran along his spinal cord as he touched the wood. It was strong but too thick for a splint. He’d be like a walking table with a leg this thick.

  “Listen dog,” Stone said, looking over at the animal that was only a foot or so from his face, its tongue hanging far out as drool rolled down it and onto the ground. “You did good, real good,” Stone said, nodding his head. “Better than any other dog in the entire fucking state could have done, you can bet your bone on that.” He looked closely at the animal’s inscrutable almond-shaped eyes to see if it was listening. But as usual the canine remained as poker-faced as some hardened card shark sitting in a broken-down shack of a bar in the middle of the wastelands.

  “You did good, dog, but you got to do better,” Stone said, his smile vanishing as he felt a little flood of blood spill out from the protruding bone like a fountain of red to set off the ivory. “I need another one. Thinner.” He made motions with his hands as he touched at the thick branch, indicating that he needed something about half as wide. The animal looked on in utter puzzlement as if it didn’t have the foggiest idea what Stone was talking about. He was like an Eskimo trying to communicate with a Watusi—a lot of flailing around with hands, babytalked words, and not a bit of understanding.

  At last, as the dog just didn’t seem to be picking up on his philosophical subtleties, Stone made the throwing motion with his hand again. Following the arch of his hand, as if it were trying to calculate the trajectory that a piece of wood would have made, the animal took off like a racehorse from the starting gate. It was hauling ass so fast by the time it reached the branch graveyard that it couldn’t stop in time and skidded right into them sideways rolling wildly about, its paws pumping in all directions. Stone lowered his head for a moment and shook it, glad for the dog’s sake that there weren’t any other mammals around to witness the animal’s grace. But what it lacked in smoothness it sure as hell made up for in innate animal wisdom. For after nosing around in the pile that extended like a set of fallen pick-up sticks for about thirty feet, it at last chose one. Setting it firmly in its glistening teeth it tore back to Stone. And even from the distance he could see immediately that it was perfect, exactly half the size of the first in both length and width.

  “Dog, you’ve outdone yourself,” Stone said, looking at the animal with almost a hint of fear on his face, as it had been so accurate about what he had needed. “Excaliber, I’ll ask you once and then never again,” Stone said, staring intensely at the creature as it let its treasure fall right next to Stone’s leg. “Do you understand every fucking word I’ve ever said? Is this all some giant headgame and you’re really Einstein with fur, just playing with me?” The animal’s only response was to slap out the wet tongue like a reptile whipping out at an insect. The tongue swept right up over its eyes and then across its whole muzzle, then pulled back into the white-and-brown face, which looked back at Stone with the perfect emptiness of the void.

  The branch was about two inches thick and green. The stuff was tough and wouldn’t give even under a lot of pressure. Stone reached for his custom Randall Bowie knife, but of course it, like everything else, was gone. He cursed himself for not even thinking about how he was going to slice the damned thing up. Even at his best, Stone knew it would be a bitch to rip the branch apart barehanded.

  “Shit,” Stone muttered, so depressed for a moment that even his physical pain diminished next to the fact that without any supplies or equipment whatsoever human beings weren’t one fucking inch above the animal world. Perhaps they were even below it. For tools were what defined men, and Stone had none. Suddenly Excaliber’s pointed canines caught his attention. The dog could bite through one of these if he felt like it. Stone had seen the creature chomp through tables, beds, metal pipes, things a damned sight tougher than this piece of wood, and leave them in splinters.

  “Dog, time for another little favor,” Stone said sweetly. He held the branch out, his fists about a foot apart on it, and pushed the wood up against the animal’s nose. But the pit bull pulled away quickly, sputtering and spitting out the branch. “Don’t fuck with me now,” Stone yelled maniacally. “I’m not in the mood. You’ve got teeth—now bite!” As if acting out a game of charades again, Stone snapped his mouth open and closed so his teeth clattered loudly against one another. The animal stepped back another foot or two, just to make sure that the pink creature hadn’t gone completely bananas, even rabid perhaps. For the dog had seen other rabid dogs and skunks slam their teeth together like that. But then seeing that the Chow Boy wasn’t about to actually launch himself at the dog, Excaliber walked forward again, sniffing at the strong scent of the green cracked wood.

  It licked gingerly at the surface, getting a taste of bittersweet sap that it seemed to like as it licked at the oozing crack in the branch a few times.

  “Don’t lick—bite,” Stone half screamed, knowing his energy was fading. The sun would set in hours, and if he didn’t get out of this situation, he would be up shit creek with a frozen paddle. “Bite, bite!” Stone demanded, again snapping his mouth so hard that it made his teeth hurt. Suddenly the dog seemed to get the message, for it barked and moved into a half crouch, its muscles all tensed and coiled as if to say the bullshit was over. Making sure that Stone’s hands holding the fallen tree limb were far enough apart, the bull terrier opened its mouth to the widest extension possible. Then with a blurred snap like the jaws of a shark, it closed them hard onto the wood.

  Stone felt the shudder of the branch in his hands and nearly fell forward from the sheer ferocity of the attack. It was like a killer shark’s sudden, ruthless move on its prey—the same blinding motion, the same snap of the head when contact was made to give an extra rocket boost of power to the blow. And Stone wondered for a crazy split second if the damn dog was related somewhere way way back to sharks of the prehistoric world, predators of immense size that would make even today’s watery monsters seem like mere guppies. Pit bulls the size of dinosaurs—that was all the world needed, Stone mused as he held on for dear life to the shaking branch.

  Excaliber’s teeth ripped into the green wood, tearing it into paperlike shreads. Once, twice, three times he pulled his jaws a few inches open and then slammed the guillotine shut again. With over 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch exerted, the most of any canine in the world, it didn’t take long. The second bite did it and the third severed any of the remaining green silky tendrils that clung to one another. Stone held both the severed pieces up and, selecting the stronger and straighter half, held that one up again for the dog to do its thing with. Within seconds he had two perfect pieces. Reaching down, Stone ripped back at his blood-soaked tattered pants.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight. Looking at it, he felt the bile rise up in his guts. There’s something about seeing one’s own flesh ripped and pierced deeply that makes most men feel a little funny inside. The bone was poking right out, cracked as cleanly as the branch the dog had just done his beaver act on. During the avalanche or the fall into the river the leg had just snapped right in two like a turkey bone at a Thanksgiving dinner. He could still feel it, all the veins and arteries were working, but there was a sense of incompletion without the straightness of the bone. For a moment Stone felt what it would be like to lose a limb, and he didn’t like the sensation at all.

  He gritted his teeth and pulled on the leg, forcing it with a screaming effort back into the flesh. The broken edges disappeared back inside like worms descending into their holes. A spurt of blood from the pressure squirted up from the wound right into his face, coloring his vision red for a few moments. Stone didn’t hold back on the scream that echoed back and forth, up and down the granite mountain walls. The pit bull squealed and bucked up
in the air again, obviously a trifle on edge from the day’s events.

  But Stone knew that was only the half of it. With the bone back inside, he again took a deep breath and then extended the leg out as far as he could, trying to push it into some kind of anatomical symmetry with itself so it wouldn’t jut out at a bizarre angle halfway down his thigh. And through the curtain of pain, he could feel the two parts of bone join and mesh, and his leg felt right for a second. Stone stopped and fell backwards, cringing in pain but keeping one hand firmly clamped down on the set leg so it wouldn’t jerk free again.

  After about a minute, the volcano seemed to settle down in his skull. Stone sat up and checked out the wound. The blood was still oozing out, but at least the leg looked fairly straight, the way he liked it. Stone undid his belt with some difficulty and then placed both three-foot-long sticks along each side of the leg. When it was all placed together about as well as he was going to get it, he wrapped the belt around wood and leg and tightened it closed. The belt acted not only as the tie for the branches but as a sort of tourniquet, depending on how tight he made it. Stone reminded himself to loosen the thing every twenty minutes or so. Or as the major had once said to him, when describing gangrene, “the flesh starts turning purple then actually green, and the pus is so thick that if you squeeze it, it comes out like a rotten banana from beneath the stinking flesh.” Gangrene was not something Stone was looking to add to his list of life experiences.