The Rabid Brigadier (23 page)

B
UT IT got even louder as Stone heard the first whistling cannon shell fly overhead and erupt in a thunderous roar several
blocks away. He looked at his watch. They were a half hour ahead of schedule. Either they had double-crossed him, or they’d
heard the shooting and decided to go for it. Stone ran over Sergeant Zynishinksi’s body and frantically scanned the release
panel on the wall. At last he found the number and pulled it and Excaliber’s cage snapped open with a ping. This time the
dog flew out and ran to Stone, where it rubbed its head against his leg by way of thanks. Stone looked around at the other
barking and squealing animals. They’d all be consumed in the firestorm that was about to descend. They hadn’t done shit. He
searched for the master release switch and found it.

“Get ready to move, dog,” Stone said, pointing toward the front of the place, “’cause the fur is about to fly.” He pressed
the button hard and there was a loud whirring sound.
Suddenly every gate in the animal holding center opened and a flood of fur, fangs, claws and stiff tails such as the world
has never seen erupted onto the floor. Stone and the pitbull made their way at full speed back through the warehouse, just
linebacking their way through whatever got in the way. By the time they reached the back door the tank attack had begun in
earnest and jeeps were already roaring around the base, men running around tucking in their shirts as they slammed magazines
into their rifles. Stone leaped atop the Harley, turned it on, kicked into gear, all in one motion. He felt the weight of
the pitbull land on the back of the bike and started forward at full throttle, doing a half wheelie before the front end slammed
down and shot ahead.

Stone glanced around for a split second as they started down one of the streets and a smile streaked across his mouth as he
saw the tidal wave of animal life pouring from every opening of the warehouse. The terrified creatures quickly spread out
through the city on a mad dash for freedom, running through the legs of the rushing men, beneath the wheels of the streaming
vehicles. The rats were deserting the ship and nothing better get in their way.

Stone headed toward the general’s quarters as shells began going off everywhere. The crime bosses
had
been able to fire the damned things after all. From what he could see, the barrage was coming from all three sides of the
fort, unrelenting, shell after shell, sending up whole buildings at a time. A blast went off just ten yards to the right of
Stone and he nearly went over but caught the bike with the weight of his leg, pushed with everything he had on his boot, skidding
along the asphalt, and righted the Harley without falling. The artillery units of the fort located at numerous sites around
the encampment began opening up and soon shells
traveling in both directions virtually filled the air overhead as if it were D-Day, or something pretty damned close to it.

Suddenly there was a terrific explosion at the north end of the camp, in one of the munitions buildings, that shook the road
beneath the Harley. A ball of flame shot out hundreds of feet in every direction as a tower of burning debris flew straight
into the sky as if Vesuvius were once again erupting. Vehicles careened by wildly all around him, but no one paid Stone any
attention. In the smoke and flames already rising everywhere, it was hard to tell who anyone was.

He reached the corner that turned toward the general’s headquarters and slowed down to a halt. Moving the bike an inch at
a time he peered down the street toward where he knew there were machine-gun emplacements. But now, there was just smoking
ruins. The entire building had taken not one but two hits at each end. Burning timbers, flaming masterpieces, melting sculpture
lay in smoking fragments everywhere. Stone edged the bike slowly down the street, his hand on the trigger of the .50 caliber
machine gun built in above the front fender. Not that it looked like much of anything could have survived the blasts. But
as if to prove him wrong once again, a figure coated in black ash rose from the ruins, and whipped up a rifle, taking a bead
on Stone. He slammed his finger down on the bike’s handlebar trigger and the bike shook slightly back on its shocks as ten
slugs big enough to take out an elephant slammed into the man, sending him spinning backwards like a top. Stone got off the
bike and walked forward, searching for the body.

He saw it lying between two burning beams, the flames just starting to lap at its arms and legs. Stone stared down, and felt
his stomach turn as the ripped apart, bloody thing on the ground moved its lips, tried to speak.

“He’s not dead, Stone. The general escaped. And all your
traitorous plans will fail. Patton is at the missile silo now, and he’s going to punch in the coordinates of Fort Bradley.
We’ll all die. All die together.” The blood-coated face coughed and a gush of red liquid came rushing out. Then it sank down
like the good dead thing that it was into the ground, into the dark soil that would be its home for the next billion years.

CHAPTER
Twenty-Two

S
TONE PUSHED the Harley to the max as he shot down the street that led out of the fort. All around him Fort Bradley was covered
with dancing sheets of yellow and red flame and secondary explosions every few seconds as a shell or pile of them went up.
The tanks in the attack force were still sending down a cyclone of shells without letup, just sweeping their huge cannons
back and forth over every square inch of the place. The NAA troops for their part sent back volleys of artillery and even
missiles from a multiple launch rocket system. But they had no targets to sight up and their shells exploded in the woods
all around the attack force, blowing up trees into flaming toothpicks, but not striking one of the tanks.

Suddenly he saw her coming through the smoke just off the side of the street like a ghostly apparition. Stone pulled both
brakes hard and the Harley came to a skidding stop, doing a one-eighty just feet from Elizabeth.

“Martin… what’s happening… they said you were a traitor. They said—”

“Get on!” Stone barked. He couldn’t go through his philosophical arguments again with tank shells landing just yards away.

“I—I can’t,” she said, sobbing, putting her hands to her face. “They said you—”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Stone screamed in exasperation. “If you want to hate me, fine, but stay alive to do it, okay? You’ll
be dead in another minute if you keep standing there.” A 120mm came whistling down into the rooftop of a warehouse just across
the street from them and they were almost knocked down by the force of the blast. But it seemed to make up her mind and she
ran to the bike.

“Get on right behind me,” he yelled over the roar of the firefight. “The dog can fit behind you.” She pulled her leg over
the leather seat in back of Stone, as Excaliber, looking a little chagrined by the musical seats, squeezed back as far as
he could until his furry back was up against Stone’s rack section on the rear of the Harley. Stone checked to make sure that
everyone was basically on, and shot down the street as another shell sent the asphalt they had just been standing on up into
a ball of superheated tar. He pushed the bike hard and it flew over bodies, past flaming tanks. A few NAA soldiers recognized
him and let fly with a volley of rifle shots, but the Harley was already gone into the swirling mists of oily black smoke.

At last he saw the main gate ahead and the two machine guns set up, ready for an infantry assault. But they were aimed forward,
and Stone was coming from behind. Without even stopping to really think about it—or he might not have—Stone accelerated and
as Elizabeth buried her head in the back of his leather jacket, the Harley shot into the emplacements.
The bike slammed into two troops, sending them flying, and then the front wheel hit some sandbags. The Harley seemed to almost
take off, as if it had gone off a ski jump ramp, and came down with a wicked slam about thirty feet outside the fort. Stone
ripped the wheel to the right and the whole bike tilted over at a forty-five degree angle as they veered off. The 9mm slugs
of the machine guns burped out death but the slugs raced into the air just behind the Harley. And within seconds he was out
of the line of fire.

Stone waited until he was about a quarter mile from the fort and then stopped the bike.

“Last stop, baby,” he said, turning around to her.

“You’ve taken me from there,” she said, looking back at the flaming maelstrom that had been the place she lived for two years.
“I have nowhere else to go. Take—take me with you.”

“I can’t,” Stone said softly. “I have to do something—right now. And the chances are I won’t be coming back. I’ve got to go…
now… I’m sorry.” She dismounted and stood by the bike, looking into his eyes with tears filling her own.

“Come back for me, Martin Stone. Please come back.” Stone managed a narrow smile, and then without a word was gone.

He tore down the road that led to the silo, hunched far over onto the bike as the dog hung on for dear life behind. He prayed
he would be in time. The results were too horrible to contemplate. Somehow Stone didn’t want to die in a burst of atomic fire.
He didn’t like the idea. A knife, a gun: he could deal with that, though he in no way sought it, but to have your atoms themselves
burnt down into… nothing—just super-heated neutrons or something spinning through space. The thought gave him shivers in the
very depth of his bowels.

He hit eighty, even ninety on the straightaway and was about halfway there when it began to snow. Oh Christ, was it going
to be one of those nights, Stone thought with apprehension, starting to tighten up inside in knots of growing fear. The snow,
although not dense, was cold and thick, wide crystalline flakes that were big enough to make a small meal when they landed
on the lips or tongue. They quickly coated the road and the land around him, dusting it all with a shimmering blanket of white,
pure, innocent, unstained white. It was beautiful, in a way, Stone thought coolly as he had to slow the bike to fifty to avoid
skidding. It reminded him of when he had been a child and had had one of those bottles with Santa and all eight reindeer inside
it and when you shook it the sky filled with the white snow, obscuring everything. Stone had always wondered if that’s what
it would look like after an atomic blast; if the fallout would drop down in thick sticking flakes like that, like tonight.
Maybe it was the night to die after all. It sure as hell had the table settings for it.

He reached a fork in the road. Shit, he hadn’t remembered a fork at all. He stopped the bike, looked back and forth for almost
a minute, prayed and went to the right. Everything headed to the right. Everyone knew that. He had gone about ten miles and
was just starting to be sure that he had the wrong direction when he saw the fenced-in silo ahead in the pale morning light
that was just starting to trickle down through the sea of flakes that now filled the slate-gray sky. He had scarcely pulled
within thirty yards of the front gate when a voice boomed over a loudspeaker.

“Hold where you were, unless you want to die!” a voice yelled out over a P.A. system. “What business do you have here?”

“I’ve got no time to explain,” Stone said, knowing these
fellows were not about to let him in no matter what he had to say. He jumped from the Harley and before they quite realized
what he was doing Stone already had the Luchaire 89mm missile tube unlocked and pulled free from the side of the bike. He
aimed dead center between the two sandbagged machine-gun nests, forward right through the wire-mesh fence.

“Jesus, he’s got—” the voice screamed over the microphone and one of the big tripod-mounted 9mm’s started to fire, a row of
slugs scissoring across the hard-packed dirt toward the Harley. Stone pulled the trigger of the missile launcher and the rocket
screamed out of the front like something searching for blood. A tail of flame shot out the back of the hollow firing tube.
The Luchaire 89mm found what it was looking for. The missile, designed to blow out the sides of even the biggest tank, landed
right between the two gun posts and the whole world went up in a hailstorm of red and yellow, sending all ten men flying up
into the air like bowling pins hit by a sledgehammer. The blood of the blasted dead splattered out onto the snowy ground,
creating a wild pattern of bright red drips and splatters in the sheer white surface.

Stone ran toward where he remembered the steel door in the ground to be and searched frantically around for the handle. Deep
in the soil beneath him he swore he felt subsonic rumblings as if the earth itself were about to vomit. Suddenly he found
something and pulled hard and the steel door swung up. At that very instant the ten-foot-wide alloy-steel dome that covered
the top of the silo began whirring and opening down the middle. The two sides of the nearly impervious steel slid smoothly
and slowly apart, disappearing down into wide slots in the concrete circle around them.

Stone lowered himself into the entrance and shot down the
rung ladder hand over foot as he heard the missile stirring, things clicking everywhere below him. Suddenly he heard another
sound above, barking. Excaliber had followed him to the edge and right on in after him, not quite realizing the distance to
be covered inside. As Stone looked up the yelping dog came flying down toward him like a meteor of fur. He caught the animal
on his chest and they both went careening down the shaftway, bouncing back and forth between the ladder and the curved solid
wall of the missile shaft behind them like ping pong balls. Stone felt himself hitting the bottom hard and then blacking out
for a flash. He came to in what couldn’t have been more than a second to find himself entangled in the squealing pitbull’s
legs. It pulled itself free almost immediately, stood upright and looked at him with a hangdog expression. It knew it had
fucked up.

Stone didn’t have time for reprimands. At least his arms and legs still worked. He walked around the base of the towering
missile as the covering far overhead completely opened and locked. If the fucking thing fired now, Stone thought, standing
only yards from the base of the rocket, he’d be BBQ before he had time to scream. He walked around the circular walkway as
far from the towering atomic missile as he could—as if it mattered. Stone reached the shielded door to the control room and
carefully lifted his head to the Plexiglas window. They were in there, Patton and the two technicians. The general was screaming
at them and they were pushing dials and buttons and shit all over the place. Firing time had definitely arrived. Stone took
two grenades he had grabbed from the dead suckers upstairs and looped them together with his belt. He hung it over the handle
of the door and pulled both pins, rushing back around the
base of the missile as the spear of high tech steel started shaking violently.