War Weapons (11 page)

They moved in a straight line like metal ducks following their mother, only these weren’t so little, and their beaks had 120-meter
firepower. Here and there, startled animals fled off into the prairie, their muscles flexing and uncoiling as their legs slammed
into the earth to escape. They had gone but a few miles when Stone heard a low beeping and a red light to the right of the
display panel was blinking. He glanced over.

“Radiation warning,” the panel was reading out. ‘Tank is entering area of increasing radiation levels. The armoring of the
Bradley is equipped to withstand 200 Rads/hour. Radiation Warning. Tank is entering…” Stone found the rad indicator and blanched.
The thing was rising at the rate of about ten rads a minute. What the hell could—Stone flipped down the special long-range
viewing system and set it on maximum focus. He peered into the periscopelike device and gasped. Now he knew why their fucking
balls were being attacked by gamma rays. An immense crater from an atomic blast stood several miles ahead and to the left
of the compass path they were following. Stone whistled as he eyed the thing, glancing at the road ahead, driving the Bradley
with one hand.

The crater was immense. Like something from a dream—a bad, bad dream. It was nearly a mile wide and made of a reddish-brown
dirt that rose perhaps half a mile into the sky with long, sloping sides that appeared almost smooth and glowing with just
the hint of a green tinge throughout. It looked like something that should have been on the dark side of the moon, not down
here on the planet Earth. It was as if the very soil of the planet had been twisted, melted together into this coagulated
sculpture of destruction. As they got closer Stone saw just how ugly the thing was—and how deadly, for along its glasslike,
sloping sides, carcasses were everywhere. Not from the initial blast that had just melted everything near it but from the
radiation that had lingered. Animals that had wandered too close had actually touched its still superhot surface—were killed
almost instantaneously. They literally ringed the base of the huge crater for a twenty-yard strip, thousands of them. Much
of the hide and flesh on the animals—buffalo, elk, bear, groundhog, fox, wolf—was still attached to the creatures, as if they
had hardly decayed at all. And as they drew closer and Stone peered through the greatly magnified image of the giant boil
on the face of the earth, he saw that the dead were almost untouched, even their eyes still staring as if alive. It was the
weirdest damned thing he had ever seen. As if they’d all been preserved, stuffed à la Tony Perkins’ mother in
Psycho
.

Suddenly he realized what it was. The radiation. The same invisible energy that had killed the animals had also killed all
the bugs, beetles, flies, even microscopic organisms, that usually fed off the dead. Thus everything that came to consume
them tumbled to the crater’s sloping wall instead and joined those who had already fallen. All living things the in the face
of that much radiation. Thus they were all preserved in a never-never land of death with the appearance of life.

Stone checked the radiation meter and saw that it was passing two hundred rads. He was steering the column now at an angle
away from the crater, but they couldn’t get too far to the east or they’d run into a series of impassable chasms and fissures
that, according to the tank’s map system, were just miles off. So the men of the three-tank attack force gritted their teeth,
for they could all see the crater now on the main monitor screen of each tank and could hear the rad warning beeping, and
tore through the hot terrain, shooting by the towering crater at top speed. They had to endure two hundred and fifty rads,
then three hundred, as they came even with the tower of burning death. Then they were past it, and quickly the built-in Geigers
on the outer surface of the Bradleys began signaling a drop. Within ten minutes it had dropped to half, edging below a hundred.

“Didn’t feel a thing,” Bo said, standing behind Stone, one big hand leaning down on the plastic headrest of the co-driver’s
seat next to Stone’s, his farmboy face grinning.

“You wouldn’t feel a thing, but believe me, they went through us. A few hundred more rads and you’d feel it,” Stone said coolly
as he checked the 360 video scan, noticing a sudden darkening to the west. “Your skin turns red at that high a dosage,” Stone
went on. “Red like a lobster, it peels off your body like wet tissue paper. Your hair comes out in handfuls if you even touch
it, your teeth, fingernails, ooze around as if embedded in putty. You just sort of—fall apart.” Stone said it as if telling
a ghost story, ending in a ghastly whisper. And it worked. Bo and Simpson both shivered and crossed themselves. Even Excaliber
seemed to let out a little groan of depression as he turned over on his private shelf and buried his face into the warm metal
away from Stone.

But the darkness on the western horizon continued to hold Stone’s attention, and he stopped talking as he looked into the
long-range monitor. It was as if the sky were turning black over there. It was only 3:30, Stone saw, checking the tank’s autoclock
real-time readout. Anyway, night had never fallen like that, he thought, starting to get a little queasy as he took in the
magnitude of the approaching sky. It was dark, with a sickly green color to it, the color of corpses, of vomit. The whole
thing seemed to be churning and grinding into itself, like some sort of vortex. Streaks of lightning knifed through it everywhere
in ribbons of white and blue fire constantly reaching down with loving electric arms to the earth below. But it was the darkness
inside of it that was what really caught Stone’s attention. It was black, devoid of color, seeming almost to absorb light,
and even through the armor, from miles off, Stone could hear it, like a hum a thousand miles off.

Whatever the fuck it was, he didn’t like it. And as various warning lights started flashing here and there on the control
panel, the tank apparently didn’t like it, either. “High pressure disturbance approaching. Wind velocity up to 200 m.p.h.
Armor of Bradley III is not sufficient to withstand such pressure.”

“Great,” Stone spat back. “You goddamned computers always tell me what’s wrong, but you don’t give me a clue as to how to
do something about it.” He felt like smashing the goddamned board, as he had done once to his Amiga PC in the bunker. Smashed
it to pieces—and then had to spend three months building it again with spare parts from his father’s workshop. Putting the
top video on quickscan, he searched around the area for the slightest place they might hide. The whole landscape looked about
as flat as a blade of glass except for a single rise about a mile in the direction from which the thing was coming. He couldn’t
believe he was about to order the men
into
the approaching storm, but he knew there was no other way. They had to get protection —and fast

“We’re heading toward that hill or whatever it is, at 237 degrees on your compass. We’ve got to find cover.”

“Heading toward that motherfucking tornado out there,” Bull shouted back over the headset, almost blasting out Stone’s ears.
“You’ve got to be crazy.”

“I’m telling you,” Stone said icily, mustering all the authority of command that he had lying around inside his exhausted
body, “we’ve got no choice. The tanks aren’t equipped to handle winds of that speed. We need a windbreak between us and—whatever
the hell it is. I’m going!” He turned and wheeled the Bradley around in a spinning frenzy of treads and dust. “You can come
with me. Otherwise, if I find your bodies after it passes, I’ll try to bury them—if I have time.” With that he shut up and
just tore toward the protruberance in the plain. He looked back and saw the other two tanks just sort of standing there for
a few seconds. Then both of them came roaring after him, accelerating like they were coming out of the starting gate. Stone
made right for the thing, but having to look into the face of the approaching mass of black clouds that appeared as big as
the Rocky mountains was something he found hard to do. The dark curtains of destruction were too powerful. It was almost like
looking into the eyes of an angry God. Not for mortal man to see.

As they drew closer, the other two Bradleys right on his heels not twenty yards behind, Stone saw that the rise was not that
big at all—not as big as he had hoped. It was a series of five boulders lying side by side, covered with partial coatings
of sand. They rose up about eight feet and from end to end were perhaps twenty long. Not enough to give them all cover. The
storm loomed right in front of them now, the entire sky and horizon as far as they could see just a writhing pit of utter
blackness. And the roar, even through the armoring was growing louder, like an approaching subway that suddenly roars in at
one’s feet. The tanks were already shaking, buffeted by the advance winds. The men started panicking, looking at one another
with clammy, desperate faces.

“Now listen to me,” Stone said over the mike. “We’ve still got a chance. Wedge the tanks together in a
V
facing the boulders. When I say go, we all move forward until we meet. Now!” The three tanks moved cautiously forward until
they banged into each other, grinding at the outer coverings of surface steel, pushing at one another like bulldozers.

“All right, stop, stop!” Stone yelled out when it seemed they were as entangled as they could get without wreaking actual
destruction. ‘Turn off the engines, so if there’s contact with debris and a gas line somehow gets severed, the feed line will
be retracted.”

“But it’s dark,” a voice said almost hysterically, as all three tanks’ electrical systems suddenly went dead.

“Relax,” Stone said, “there’s an auxiliary lighting system —should go on any—” Suddenly a small amber light came on directly
overhead in Stone’s tank and, he assumed, in the others. They all sat back and waited to see if they would live or die.

T
HE STORM seemed to attack them like a living thing. A thing set on destruction, on annihilation of everything it made contact
with. First came the winds, twisting in funnels of gray and brown, ripping up everything they touched. Vegetation, animals,
birds—all were consumed in their path, pulled up by hundreds of the chimneys of wind that touched down everywhere and then
pulled up again when they’d eaten their momentary fill.

The tanks rocked back and forth, violently banging into one another as the hurricane-force curtains of air slammed into them.
The boulders offered some protection, though even they rocked around in place like eggs boiling off the top of their steamers.
Within the windstorm were branches, pieces of ground-up cactus, and the corpses of numerous animals and birds, all wildly
spinning around as if inside a washing machine. Inside the tanks the men could feel some of the objects slam against the sides
or top, banging them like a giant gong, so their brain cavities reverberated with unpleasant sensations.

But the wind was only the start of it, for after several niinutes the sheer darkness that Stone had seen through the scan
system came upon them. And it was a darkness without a trace of light, a darkness of almost biblical proportions. A darkness
of sand. A storm of pure sand extending for twenty miles came roaring over them. And it deposited its load on them like a
dump truck making a delivery.

“What the hell’s that?” Bo asked nervously as the first sheets of sand drove into the steel plating. It sounded like a thousand
little pings, hardly audible themselves, but put together, like a rising chorus. Within seconds the chorus became a scream,
then an avalanche of sound. And suddenly they were being thrown around inside the tanks like rag dolls as the three vehicles
bounced up and down and every which way and were attacked by the currents of sand that seemed to come in from every possible
angle. Stone prayed the tank was as sealed as it was supposed to be, because he knew that to be exposed to the intensity of
particles out there would be instant death. A man would be shred to little tunalike flakes in a second. Still, it’s hard just
to sit quietly, wanting to live, while death rages all around you.

The storm just seemed to get thicker and meaner until the air was nothing but sand, as if the earth itself had risen up and
become airborne. And as the waterfall of particles roared into them at velocities up to 250 miles per hour, they etched themselves
onto every square inch of the tanks, polishing them, blasting off their surface coating of “impervious” paint. As the sand
came, it piled up against the boulders and the tanks, creating a huge dune that quickly rose ten, then twenty, feet in the
air. Though it kept sliding down or flying off at the edges, so much more sand was being added to it that the thing somehow
grew. It toppled over onto the tanks so that they were nearly covered with the stuff, and then more sand started collecting
on the hollow created between tanks and boulders.

The physics of sand waves dictated that the dune rise and fall, rise and fall, as sand was piled onto it and then washed off.
But always it grew a little wider and higher. The men inside the tanks had been terrified when they heard the screeching of
the winds, then the sands hitting them. But as it grew quieter around them and, after about an hour, absolutely silent, they
all became extremely concerned, having no idea what had happened. With tank systems all down, they couldn’t even check. Thus
they sat, three men to a tank, plus one dog, waiting and contemplating the end of their existences. The air felt somewhat
stale, though they all knew about the self-contained oxygen supply, having used it just days before to ward off fire. But
it didn’t taste good and hardly filled their need for fresh oxygen. So they lay around the floors of the tanks in the semidarkness,
in states of panting half asphyxiation.

After two hours, not having heard a thing from outside, Stone at last made the decision to see just what the hell had happened.
He rose and turned on the tank’s systems, and everything sprang to life, but as it did, warnings flashed from every panel.
Stone tried to read what they were saying, but it wasn’t at all clear. It was as if the entire operating system of the Bradley
were overloaded, as if every defensive sensor were picking up trouble. Stone checked the video scan and got nothing but a
pitch-black screen. Then he tried the sighting periscope, with the same result. They seemed to be nowhere, in the middle of
nothing. It didn’t make sense. Unless—slowly a thought began entering his head that filled him with real fear—they were buried
alive. Tanks and all. Beneath feet, perhaps yards, or more. Beneath tons of sand.