The Damn Disciples Read online

  A quick perusal of the three cars, two motorcycle frames and assorted spare wheels, engines, and transmissions showed him that it was possible. It was going to be a pretty ugly-looking hybrid, that was for damn sure. Stone dragged a motorcycle frame on a dolly over to a hydraulic work station. Attaching the frame to various bolts and clamps, he pressed a button on the lift’s side and it rose a yard off the ground, making the frame easily accessible from every side. Stone got out the welding equipment from the corner, an oxy/acetylene job. His father had made sure that there were extras of everything, so that if one vehicle went, they could strip the others. It meant that from a total of three cars and several bike frames, they could end up with five or six vehicles over a number of years—progressively uglier, no doubt, but there weren’t too many beauty contests these days. He attached a chain to the engine, a Harley 1400cc, a little higher powered than his old bike but not any larger in cubic feet. It was a slightly more advanced model that the major had picked up just months before the whole ball game collapsed. It would soup the be up to higher acceleration and cruising speeds, though already he’d been near the limit of his ability to hang on half the time. A more powerful be was a little hard to imagine.

  He moved the mobile chain pulley and set the engine inside the bike and he quickly began welding it to the frame. Stone thanked God now that he had spent three summers working in Sprague’s Auto Repair Shop. By the time he’d left to go to college, he was one of the best mechanics in the place. Al himself had offered Stone a job starting at $250 per week. Not bad for a teenager. Now there were hardly enough operating cars left in America to employ a full gar-age of mechanics. Times had changed. When these were gone, there wouldn’t be any more.

  Stone had to grab a visored mask and throw it over his head as the sparks began flying all around him in showers of white. He felt dizzy from the fever. But the work, the movement, also got blood rushing through his veins, blood with healing antibodies to fight infection, with fresh bone marrow to begin building new linkages of bone within his fractured leg. It felt good—just to be alive after what he’d been through recently. Stone got the engine welded in place, then the transmission, all within three hours. In another two, the seats, the weapons clamps—everything else—was in place as well.

  Stone stood back and surveyed what he had wrought. It looked like a child that shouldn’t have been born. Like five different bikes squeezed into one, which was just about the case. The wheels seemed a little too big, too wide, more like they should be on a car. The seat was a good foot longer than his old one, as though it belonged to a bike twice as large. The bars pulled up into the air semibiker style. All in all, it was a mechanical mutation that Evel Knievel would undoubtedly have been proud of. Now all Stone had to do was give it some teeth.

  He stopped off in the kitchen to get some coffee, and saw that the dog was at it again. It was hard for Stone to believe it could want more, with its stomach already so swollen that it looked as if it had a huge cancerous tumor dragging all the way down to the ground. But the dog was scrounging around the huge mess of rotting food that it had created the night before, and sniffing as if it had pretensions to gourmethood. Every few seconds it leaned down and picked up a choice item—pickled pear, chunk of spam, syrup-coated peach squirming around the floor like a rogue eyeball. Stone avoided the mess completely, not even vaguely able to deal with cleaning it all up. Maybe if he just let the mutt lick away for a few more hours there wouldn’t be anything left to clean.

  He made himself a whole Thermos full of coffee and, sipping slowly, as it nearly scalded his lips, he headed down the hall to the weapons room to see what he was going to turn a vehicle into a wagon with. His father had been no slouch in the armaments department either. But then, being the president of a multinational munitions company didn’t hurt matters any. There was wall-to-wall, floor to-ceiling steel shelving covered with crates filled with handguns and rifles, ammunition…and the bigger stuff as well. Mortars, tripod-mounted .50 caliber machine guns that could pierce armor. And even bigger stuff than that—handheld rocket launchers, the Luchaire 89mm missile system that Stone had used previously, and had found to be very effective, to say the least. He took it down from the shelf. The last one; after this there were no more. He put it in an industrial cart with wheels and pushed the cart on around the square room, which contained an amazing amount of firepower, considering. Stone was trying to walk without the crutch already. It hurt like he was being tortured—but with the steel band tightly around the broken area, it seemed to at least hold the whole thing together. He knew he was doing wonders for his body and would be a complete wreck by the time he hit fifty. On the other hand, since he probably wouldn’t live past thirty, he wasn’t going to start worrying about it.

  Next he took a small crate of rockets—a half-dozen of them, then a .50-caliber machine gun, with automatic belt feed. Stone walked on around the shelves, which towered up above him filled to overflow with the products of the dark side of man’s technological expertise. But if the other bastards had them, Stone wanted them too. And worse. He reached up and took down a sawed-off Browning 12-gauge autofire shotgun. That would do nicely—and a hundred rounds of ammo. Then, for personal use, a Beretta PM 12S, stripped-down version, 9mm, and with twenty-, thirty-, even fifty-round clips that could be fired singly or on full auto, emptying a whole load o in seconds. And finally—for his takeout handgun—another Ruger Red Hawk .4d with twelve-inch barrel. The thing would have made Clint East-wood green with envy. He strapped it on. It made Stone feel very secure.

  He pushed the shopping cart of destruction out of the room and back down the hall. He was walking into the lion’s den. How did the poem go? “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Well, it wasn’t a good night—it was a rotting, screaming night. And he wasn’t going gentle, but kicking, blasting his resistance to the last second. Back in the garage, Stone used the block and tackle to haul up the machine gun first. He set it down right between the raised handlebars like a water buffalo’s horns, and getting the right-size steel clamps to hold it in place, welded it down. He tested it, turning the wheel back and forth. The machine gun was set as if in concrete. Then the Luchaire missile tube—about three feet long, twelve inches wide—to the side of the be.

  It was slow going, making sure the ball-bearing hinges were angled just right. For even a slight angle off made the tube scrape against the be when he opened it out. But at last, with a little more fiddling with the welding torch, Stone had that set in too. Then the rack for the shells right below it so he could pop one out from the top of the spring-loaded container tube by just pushing a release button. It gave him the ability to load and fire the 89mm rocket within five seconds.

  Finally Stone took some steel boxes from one of the shelves of the garage and mounted them as well on the back of the bike. Storage for ammunition, tent, med supplies, and spare clothes. After spending nearly the whole day on the project, he stood back and looked. It was definitely one of the weirder gasoline vehicles ever to roll along the planet earth. Even the dog, when he came snooping around from its floor mopping, made a sucked-in face and let out a howl of derision, like “You expect me to ride on that hunk of shit?”

  But when Stone lowered the completely assembled motorcycle back down to the ground and sat atop the thing trying it out—testing the feel of the bars, the give of the seat—the pit bull jumped on behind him and began sniffing around, snarling and biting at the thick leather as if he wasn’t sure if it was enemy or friend.

  SEVEN

  With the bike assembled, Stone headed to the kitchen to see what the dog had wrought. It had licked clean the entire floor. The animal was a junkie, an addict of anything that didn’t make him puke. And he had eaten a few of those in his day as well.

  “It’s diet time again, pal,” Stone said with a disgusted look at the canine, which stood in the doorway looking up as if he’d had nothing to do with the mess. Stone grabbed a mop from the closet and slopped it around the flo
or. “And don’t look at me with those pathetic puppy-dog eyes, ’cause you ain’t been a puppy for eons now, and the eyes have gotten a little bloodshot around the edges. You’d better start thinking of shipping out to the Betty Ford Clinic for some mental and physical rehabilitation.” But the fighting canine just snorted, not wanting to hear any bull this hungry morning. It took Stone nearly half an hour to get the place in a vague kind of order, and that was just getting the stickiest of the puddles off the floor, wiping the splattered bits of food from the china closet and the refrigerator, the rows of shelves. The animal believed in the tornado approach to eating—swallow everything and spit out what you don’t like.

  An hour later, Stone was on the bike and heading out into the hard world. He stopped the Harley by the boulder where the transmitter was kept hidden, and stood up. It was hard going, what with the steel clamp around his thigh and the huge bandage taped around the incised section. But already he was getting used to dealing with the thing and swung the whole leg smoothly up over the seat. The dog didn’t move an inch, just clamped onto the black leather, eyes peering from beneath its paws.

  Stone was pleased to see that the bike stayed upright on the wide footrest he had welded on. He still wasn’t quite sure everything was going to hold up. He pushed the boulder back from the hole and, wrapping the door opener up in its plastic bag, placed it carefully down inside. Then he rolled the boulder back over the top. He never knew each time he left the bunker whether or not he would ever see it again. And this time it seemed even more unlikely than the previous departures. The sky was growing dark overhead, even though it wasn’t midday yet. The air was sharp with an icy blade that bit into his eyes and skin. The steel clamp around his leg was already burning with cold. Things were just great. Stone got back on the Harley, kicked it into gear, and headed into hell.

  He was nervous for the first few minutes, taking the homemade vehicle slow along the narrow deer paths that led back down the side of the slope. If he went over now in the state he was in, he might not be getting back up again. But to Stone’s pleasure, on a day that was about as hospitable as the inside of a coffin, at least the bike seemed to be functioning perfectly. The Harley 1400cc seemed to have a lot more acceleration than the old be. It was slightly heavier, though if anything that gave it a lower center of gravity, setting it down on its wide tires like a small tank. The only thing a little disconcerting were the different-shaped handlebars, which were more upright and swept back than his old ones. But after about half an hour of getting used to the new cycle, Stone began getting used to the bars as well—and found that if he just lay back in the of saddle the be almost steered itself.

  He reached the end of the hidden access road to the bunker and moved at a crawl through the thicket of brambles and vines that formed a camouflage ahead. There was a good thirty feet of the stuff, and the dog let out with a few sharp howls as its hide was pricked by brambles. Then they were through, and Stone looked around behind him to make sure that from the single-lane country road he was now on, you couldn’t see that there was anything heading off into the mountains. The bunker had been built in just about the most inaccessible place in these parts. Stone shuddered to think what could happen if some psycho got hold of the bunker—its weapons and supplies.

  He headed south down the one-laner, which quickly turned to two. The road was already an obstacle course of cracks and potholes. It hadn’t taken long for civilization’s trappings to begin crumbling. Still, Stone was able to on up his handiwork a little when he hit a straightaway. And the son of a bitch nearly took off. Within seconds he was going seventy, then eighty, then ninety miles per hour. The dog let out a strange sound from the back, and as Stone saw that the road got much rougher just ahead he slammed on the brakes, figuring it was as good a time as any to test them. They were too good. Being used to the looser brakes of the 1200, Stone pulled hard. The wheels locked and the bike just skidded along, stirring up a cloud of leaves and dust behind him.

  It was only his skill and fast reflexes that kept the Harley upright, though the pit bull came unlodged from its clamped hold and crashed into Stone’s back in a flurry of paws and angry barks. Then he had the cycle under control again and slowed it down to twenty as he headed over some potholes that you could have buried a cow in. But at last everything was back to more or less normal and the two of them dug in for the long haul. As Stone hit more good patches of road, he eased the bike up to the forty, then fifty, range. The wide tires made going over the rough road a little easier than the old be would have done. All in all, not a bad trade-in.

  They rode through the late afternoon, the dog standing up on its hind quarters, once it had gotten used to the feel of the new machine, with its front paws up over Stone’s shoulder so the human and the furred head were fully focused on the world ahead of them. The two-laner went on for about twenty miles, then changed to an interstate. Stone had used part of it before. Some sections were still as good as the day they had been built, others as if they had been through a hurricane. Still, it was worth using it, considering the time it would buy him on the good stretches. The first ten miles or so was easy going, and it was almost possible to imagine that he was in the pre-Collapse days, heading out for a little spin in the country with the family dog. Yeah, right—armed with a .50-caliber up front and so much firepower strapped to the bike and inside of his jacket that he could have taken on Napoleon at Waterloo.

  They came to what had been an old tollbooth collection junction, with wide curving ramps joing the interstate from several directions. Stone slowed the Harley to a crawl and eased it through the opening between two of the six toll stations through which thousands of cars had once rolled. He felt a bizarre twinge of guilt as he rolled through without paying his money, the rusted bucket reaching for some change. Almost immediately on the far side of the toll plaza he began to drive past rusting carcasses of cars, on the sides of the road and on the highway itself. It quickly became an obstacle course to get through. Within ten minutes it was so inundated with rusting bodies, as if the heavens had rained automobiles, that Stone had to drop the bike down to a walk so that he could balance it with both feet down on each side.

  Brown twisted frames, with wheels and glass long gone. Inside some were still the original occupants—now just skeletons, lying on their seats, sitting as if in an eternal traffic jam from which they would never emerge. It felt a little spooky to pass a car, look in its paneless window, and see a skull smiling back at you. He didn’t stop to chat.

  The car graveyard lasted for nearly twenty miles. A hell of a lot of people must have been caught in the blast of a nuke or something, Stone mused, for so many to have been taken out like this at once. Then, as he went around a curve and over a rise, they disappeared again. Stone quickly built up to thirty, then forty, as the interstate got hillier and began undulating up and down like a snake so that he started feeling dizzy and heard the dog burping behind him as if it might lose some of the vast feast that was still squeezing through its clogged digestive system.

  As he started down the next hill, Stone saw a roadblock ahead. A wide barricade of wood and car hulks, cinder blocks—you name it, it was in his way. Everything, including literally a few kitchen sinks. He had to slam on the brakes hard, as the blockade was only about seventy yards down the hill. The bike came to rest about thirty feet from the wall of junk. Stone put his hand up on the trigger of the 50-caliber as he saw shapes running behind the eight-foot-or-so-high barricade of all the debris that would make a trashman ecstatic.

  Suddenly Stone saw figures jumping down from the barrier, and coming out from around the sides. There were dozens of them—and every ugly son-of-a-bitching one of them was wearing a baseball uniform, a cap, and carrying a bat. If they were a baseball team they looked like they’d been playing with human heads, for their uniforms were splattered in blood, tom and tattered as if a few knives and bullets had gone through them. And the bats that they held menacingly in their hands looked a little worse for wea
r, with long cracks, splinters along their sides—and coated red from handle to head. Stone was glad he hadn’t seen any of the “games.”

  “Hold it right there, mister,” a huge fat lug of a fellow bellowed out from atop the pile of debris. He held a long bat in one hand and slapped it into the palm of the other as though he was just looking for something or someone he could pound into a pulp, into pâté for the evening’s appetizer. “What team you play for?” the man asked, pulling his filthy cap, an old Yankee one if Stone’s eyes weren’t failing him, up from his eyes.

  “Free agent,” Stone smirked back. “Don’t play for no team, just trying to get through here.”

  “No one gets through here—unless they answer the riddle,” the man shouted. Suddenly he jumped all the way down from the top, a good eight feet, and landed with a thud on the cement highway that they had effectively sealed off from passage.

  “And what riddle is that?” Stone asked, letting his finger edge even closer to the trigger of the .50-caliber.

  “Who won the American League batting championship in 1977?” the man asked with a dark look. Stone hadn’t the slightest idea.

  “Daffy Duck,” he snorted back as the pit bull whined behind him, edging its furred head around his shoulder to see what was causing the delay in travel arrangements.

  “Wrong, asshole,” the blood-splattered Yankee-uniformed leader of the gang spat back with a smile on his face, since he knew they were about to end up with one mean-looking motorcycle and a whole shitload of weapons. None who had been unfortunate enough to pass this way had left. “Now, you can just get off that there motorcycle and walk away quick, and I’ll let you live,” the man lied, “as sure as my name is Squid Ruth, the Babe’s grandson himself.” Since the asshole’s eyes were twitching around in his boil-ridden face, and foam was collecting at the corners of his mouth as he edged forward slapping the bat harder and harder, Stone somehow doubted they were going to let him walk away. And when he saw the streams of Yankee-outfitted bandits coming around each side of the barricade, every one of them swinging a bat, Stone saw that it was time to start doing some hitting of his own.