The Cutthroat Cannibals Page 6

  It took about fifteen minutes to reach the camp, though they would have gotten there much faster if Stone hadn’t been limping along like a wounded soldier returning from the front. Then suddenly they came through a grove of firs and there it was, the strangest little encampment Stone had ever seen. There were about twenty completely round structures perhaps ten feet high, shaped somewhat like igloos only they were all made of tires. Car tires, truck tires—you name it, you could find it in the wall of somebody’s home. When he was on better terms with this crew, Stone vowed, he’d ask them just where they bought their construction materials.

  But he had to wonder if he’d ever get to pose the question, as they approached the edge of the Indian village, set off with a small, completely encircling fence made of branches piled atop one another. For rising above the open space in the branch barricade were heads dangling from ropes tied to a long pole stretched across the opening. There were five buffalo skulls, and two human. The flesh of the buffalo skulls had long ago disappeared so they were basically slabs of bone that looked as if they’d had little patches of fur glued not very symmetrically over their surfaces. The human heads looked as if they’d been stripped from their bodies within weeks, months at most. The flesh had hardened, pulled in, so they still looked like human faces carved out of leather. Eyes had turned into horrid black eggs, beef jerky lips shriveled up into little mouth-cracking grins as if it was all a big joke. Stone swore he saw the eyes of one moving to keep a scope on him. He gulped hard and tore his own eyes away, vowing not to look at the damned things ever again.

  As they walked beneath the head greeting committee the Indians around the camp saw that their returning warriors had brought back some strange cargo. Evidently they didn’t get a hell of a lot of visitors in these parts, for every man, woman, and child in the village dropped whatever they were doing, rose, and headed quickly over to see what God had wrought. Their faces didn’t look too inviting; maybe they were trying to visualize how Stone’s head would look up there as an addition to their small but highly regarded skull welcoming sign.

  But when they caught sight of the dog trotting along half hidden behind Stone’s legs, the Indians’ faces took on a different look—one of stark terror. They backed off, talking wildly to one another in dialect that was incomprehensible to Stone, not that he was an expert in Indian lingo. Still this stuff sounded like it might be spoken on Uranus. Whatever power the mutt had over the sons of bitches Martin Stone would play to the hilt. The ninety-pound ball of ass-kicking pit bull was his only chance in this rapidly deteriorating scene. But the question still was why the hell did they react to the dog as they did? Stone looked down for a second at the loping animal and was suddenly thankful he had treated the canine to a stomach-filling load of Dog Gourmet Crackers that he had found weeks before. He hoped the beast remembered.

  Suddenly Stone was pushed hard by the shoulder and he nearly fell forward, barely managing to stop himself with the stick before he toppled to the ground. He raised his eyes and saw sitting ten feet in front of him, on a throne made from a huge red leather reclining seat, one of the biggest and ugliest men he had ever seen. The man was a giant, obviously the chief. What made it obvious was his feather headdress made of countless different colored feathers that trailed down his back all the way to the ground.

  The man’s body was huge, spilling out over both sides of the seat, which was itself quite large, one of those pre-Collapse era couches that could pull out into a bed. His huge stomach poked out of his center like a beer barrel ready to explode. He must have weighed five-hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce. Yet it was the face that caught Stone’s attention. It was ugly, hideously ugly. One eye had been ripped out or destroyed by disease many years before. The chief had replaced it with a black stone just about the size and general shape of an eye, fitted into the optic opening. Looking at it was like staring into the very blackness of space, into a vacuum. The whole right side of his face was paralyzed into a stretched-out grimace, probably the result of a stroke, Stone thought, as he had seen such paralysis before. It made the chief look as if one side of his face was trying to scream, trying to let out a howl of mad horror, while the other side was completely normal, and it stared at Stone with a cold hatred.

  “Down, white bastard,” a voice screamed out behind him. “Bow to Chief Buffalo Breaker.” A hand pushed at Stone’s back again, hard. This time he couldn’t stop his fall in time and slammed down onto the ground, flat on his face. He’ heard a sharp growl behind him and barely had time to push himself up with his hands, screaming at Excaliber to stop. The dog didn’t take kindly to Stone being slammed around. The pit bull had gone into its preattack crouch, and the brave who had pushed Stone was backing off step by slow step, his eyes big as onions, as he moved. Stone knew that they’d both be dead meat if the dog snapped even one mouthful of flesh from the bastard. He reached over and grabbed the bull terrier, pulling hard at the dog’s ear, catching him totally off balance for a moment. The animal tumbled over onto its side, and with a pissed-off look, cooled off. The pit bull sat back on its haunches but glanced around at the brave, who had joined the crowd of about a hundred or so Indians who now stood in a full circle around the captive and their chief.

  “Who are you?” the chief asked, raising a huge staff that had once been a mop handle—only now attached to the steel clamp that had held the string mop was a long red fox tail, all that was left of the creature that had once flashed it proudly. These guys had a strange sense of decoration.

  “I’m Stone,” he answered, raising himself up only enough to address the fellow, but not so much as to start some big brouhaha again over showing the proper respect. “Who are you?”

  “Chief Buffalo Breaker. Run whole river. Our river, Wasatawa River—our world. You trespasser.” Then the chief seemed to hesitate as he looked at the dog. He seemed to become unsure just how to proceed, and studied the creature closely. Excaliber stared straight back at him with its own unflinching orbs. At last, as if the animal’s will was stronger than the tub of lard squashing down into his recliner so that its four legs dug nearly six inches into the dirt, the chief looked away.

  He turned back to Stone and tried to ask casually, though his voice seemed to catch in his throat, “That your dog?”

  “Like I said to one of your associates,” Stone said, looking up from the dirt, where he had raised himself to a half sitting position that no one seemed to think overly insulting to officialdom, “he’s his own damned dog—we’re sort of traveling companions, business associates or something.”

  The chief grunted and then grew silent again as Stone quickly looked at the crazy artwork decorating the poles staked into the ground behind the reclining chair. There were perhaps two dozen of the totem poles spread out in a semicircle behind the big man, each ten-foot pole with heads of beasts and mythical symbols carved into it. Stone swept his glance around quickly and saw why the Indians had acted as if the dog was some great honcho. Looking up he saw the animal’s face, sculpted from river mud, high atop two of the poles in the dead center of the magical circle. It didn’t look exactly like Excaliber but it did have the same sort of elongated face, the same almost oriental-looking eyes. Of course these particular clay dogs did have wings and talons, but if the Indians wanted, Stone would be glad to glue some on the pit bull. Obviously they worshipped some damn creature from their distant past who just happened to look like Ex-caliber’s great-great-grandfather, give or take a few hundred generations. There was gold in that there fur.

  “But dog obeys you?” the chief asked again, coughing as if it was no big deal but he just happened to be curious about it.

  “Damned right he does,” Stone lied. “Follows my every command, in a snap. Why, I could make him run, jump or even fly if I had a mind to,” Stone said, looking hard at the chief. The fat man looked momentarily stunned by that bit of information and the lard-covered adam’s apple bobbed up and down like an elevator unsure of what floor to stop on. The chief li
fted his foxtail staff and banged it twice and a whole bevy of feather-headed, copper-skinned, warpainted braves flew out of the woodwork, instantly surrounding Breaking Buffalo. Stone could hear all kinds of talking and whispering, then what sounded like an argument between some of the indians. Their eyes kept turning to look at the dog, then up at the sacred sculptures of the tribe’s main god. They just didn’t seem able to quite believe it. But they had to.

  After about five minutes the crowd cleared away again. The chief pulled a lever on the side of the huge red leather chair and the whole seat slid forward, almost depositing the load of humanity onto the ground. But Breaking Buffalo held on to the armrests on each side of him and after everything settled down, now lying almost in a reclining position, his head back on a beaver pelt pillow, the chief spoke up.

  “Stone Man, you stay. Take dog and go with braves. They show you where. I talk to all the gods. I talk to Myhwhanka, the Hawk Dog. He will decide whether you live or die.”

  “Sounds good,” Stone said as two of the braves came over, helped him to his feet, and started leading him off. “I’ll be looking forward to talking with you again.” And the thought flashed through his mind as mad thoughts do when one is completely and deliriously desperate that perhaps he could somehow sneak up at night and tie Excaliber to one of the poles with some leather thongs or something. At least get a little inside help on the chief’s tribal god powwow.

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  LIVING in a house made of tires was not exactly Stone’s idea of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. He’d much rather that they had chained him outside or something. Not that it wasn’t comfortable inside the twenty-foot-round structure in which everything was made of tires—walls, chairs, tables…. The problem was the smell. The damn tires still smelled like the rubber they were made of even though most of them seemed years old. Excaliber didn’t seem to appreciate the odor as he kept running up to the wall, to the narrow openings between the piled-up doughnuts, trying to suck in some fresh air. Stone made a quick reconnoiter of the whole structure, even managing to climb up to the ceiling by using the air vents as footholds. But though he covered just about every square inch of the place he couldn’t find any opening that anything bigger than a softball could squeeze through. And though the tires looked as if they were just piled on top of one another, so he should be able to knock the top ones off, he couldn’t. Either the damn things had been glued together with some sort of resin or they were attached by some hidden method that Stone couldn’t see from the inside. Either way, he appeared to be here for the duration.

  After about ten minutes he heard some sounds at the door, which was two immense truck tires that could be rolled over the opening. Two braves standing guard outside the structure rolled them away, and one of the tribe came walking in searching around first for Stone, then the dog with his eyes. If the chief looked strange this fellow looked positively alarming. His entire face was painted blue, his lips and nose red, his arms purple. He looked at a glance like three bizarre races, all from different planets, that had been stapled together. The Indian wore all kinds of skins, snakes, teeth, and god knew what all that covered his entire body and hung almost to the floor, giving off a stench of their own. Around the Indian’s neck was an immense necklace, a collection of flattened tin cans—Budweiser, Miller, Coke—names, colors that brought back a sudden storm of memories from the old days before the barbarians had taken over.

  The Indian shook a long rattlelike device in his right hand, a contraption made out of old pipes and plumbing valves into which ball bearings had been sealed so it made a clanging metallic sound. With his left hand he sprinkled a greenish liquid, throwing out drops all over the place like the pope entering a holy city to consecrate the grounds. The brave clearly was trying to create some magical protection from the stranger—and the demon dog. The medicine man, Stone decided, as the man made chanting noises that passed for singing and did his spray-and-rattle thing with great gusto. The two braves at the entrance looked for a few seconds, then shuddered as if they didn’t like to look too closely at magic lest they get their own asses burned, and pushed the six-foot-high tractor tires back into place.

  The medicine man danced right around the entire structure keeping a wary eye on the pit bull, which merely lifted its head slightly from an airhole where it had been trying to get a half doze and escape from the nightmare of the place. Stone watched in amazement, sitting back on his ass, his ripped leg stretched out in front of him. The bastard was a real medicine man, like the fucking late movies on TV. In spite of his use of modern artifacts Stone had to admit he looked like the real thing, gave a good show.

  But the moment the tires were rolled back into place so they were sealed up again, Stone wondered for the tenth time in as many minutes just what the hell was going on. For this particular shaman suddenly rushed over to him and hissed out in perfect English, “Thank God I can dispense with all this fucking Indian mumbo jumbo.” He threw the rattle and the vial of putrefying frog blood down on the dirt floor.

  “What the hell?” Stone half stuttered, his mouth dropping open in disbelief at the words and the perfect diction of the magic man.

  “Nanhanke—numero uno witch doctor,” the blue-faced brave said, holding out a hand. “Also known as Flashing Hand aka John Linderstein.”

  “What the—” Stone could only reiterate as he limply took the offered hand, which pumped his with enthusiasm.

  “You don’t know how glad I am to talk to someone from the outside. I’ve been stuck here for three years, three years. But we’ll talk later, man. Your leg—it’s broken.” He started to lean down as if to grab hold of it, but Stone held up his hand. The man spoke so fast and moved with such frenetic energy that Stone wondered if he was partaking of some medicine-man herbs on the side. Of course, having his face painted blue didn’t help to engender trust in Stone’s guts either.

  “Whoa, slow down pardner. I like to know who I let touch my leg, you know what I mean? Who are you? Who are these Indians? What the hell is going on here?” Stone asked, his voice rising excitedly so he even set Excaliber to growling and letting out with a few barks just to let the world know he was included in the complaint.

  “Shhhh,” the witch man said, putting his fingers to his purple lips. “Can’t let them hear us.” He turned and glanced at the door, picked up the rattle and shook it, screaming out Indian chants as he danced around the place a few times. Stopping suddenly he ran silently over to the front two tires and looked through quickly. Seeing that the two guards didn’t give a flying fuck about what was going inside, in fact would just as soon have nothing to do with the practices of witchery, the Indian turned and walked with a half smile back to Stone, who still didn’t trust the maniac worth a damn.

  “There, now we’re alone,” he said as his face lit up with a smile that seemed to give the man a much better feeling than it gave Martin Stone. It wasn’t that Stone wasn’t more than ready to find anyone in this damn place who would help him, it was just that staring into a smiling mouth filled with filed-down teeth, with purple lips around it was not doing wonders for the doctor-patient relationship.

  “Listen pal,” Stone said, “just tell me what the hell’s going on around here. You want to help me, that will help me. First, who the hell are you bastards?”

  “We’re the Atsana—the Hidden Ones or Those Who Live from the River, depending on how you translate from the Indian. The tribe came here many years ago, attracted by the hidden valleys—for as you’ve probably already discovered it’s virtually impossible to get in and out by mountains, only water. And the river is over three hundred miles long, every bit of it covered with rapids and more rapids. It’s probably one of the most hidden areas in the entire country. Anyway when the tribe learned of the total collapse of the American government, of the anarchy and warlords that descended on the outside world, they cut off what little communication they had with it five years ago. All the canoes were burned, any sort of communic
ation with the outside totally severed. So the Atsana stayed on, living off what wildlife there is on the two-mile strip of shoreline here, and of course off what the river brings on her murderous waves, which is bountiful.”

  He held up one of the can tops from around his neck. “Got these fresh—can you believe it?—four crates of beer, just floating along. We get everything from the river. Floods upstream have brought a treasure trove of materials over the years. Chairs, tables, TV sets—not that we can do anything with them. Boxes filled with all kinds of junk, bodies, clothes, plywood. And one day, about two years ago, a flood of tires. The whole village was out there plucking tires out of the river for three days. As you can see we built a whole village with the booty. Strong, aren’t they?” He pounded his fist against one of the walls with pride.

  “I see,” Stone said, starting to get at least a glimmering of the picture. “And you?” he asked, for the blue-faced son of a bitch didn’t fit even into the madness of the junk-collecting tribe.

  “I… I am half indian,” the magic man said, “born into a blackfoot tribe about three hundred miles from here. I was lucky—or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. When I was fourteen the federal government decided to throw a few bucks the Indians’ way and they set up this super accelerated tutorial program to help get some of the braves of my tribe into college, so we could return later and help our own. Good idea. It lasted of course only about six years, actually helped maybe three of us before the politicians decided to put the money into some new weapons system or something. But in that time I was able to get into college and then with a special scholarship into medical school.” Stone looked at the graffiti-covered witch man with incredulity.