The Rabid Brigadier (9 page)

Suddenly Stone saw it—he knew the dog instantly—and rushed over to the six by six by six pen in which Excaliber was locked.
It made something sink in the pit of his stomach to see the animal caged up. When he had originally found it the dog was locked
in a Plexiglas prison along with a number of other animals at a biker bar.

“How you doing, boy?” Stone asked, kneeling down. Excaliber rose from a piece of cardboard in a corner of the pen and ambled
over to Stone. He barked softly in recognition and licked at Stone through the mesh enclosure, his long wet tongue slopping
over everything in sight. “You all right. They been treating you all right?” Stone looked around and saw a bowl filled with
water and next to it what looked like ground up meat of some kind. If the pitbull was getting fresh meat, he was doing a hell
of a lot better than he had done
under Stone, who had been more likely to feed him cookies and beer than the nutrients that a growing dog needed.

Stone wanted the animal to be unhappy. To bark and whine and beg to come back with master. But after a mildly affectionate
greeting, it turned, went back to the food bowl and began lapping up some of the red meat inside. It seemed perfectly content
with the setup.

“Ingrate,” Stone muttered under his breath.

“What was that?” Nurse Williamson asked, standing next to him.

“Nothing, just insulting my dog for not being more loyal,” Stone said as he stood up. Well, if the damned dog was so happy
in there it could just stay inside another night, Stone thought with disgust. He waved good-bye with a little salute.

“Adios, amigo—happy eating,” Stone said. Excaliber glanced over with one cocked eye but didn’t lift his head from the bowl,
unwilling to miss one second of life’s most wonderful experience.

CHAPTER
Nine

“Y
OU DON’T seem to like the fact that your dog seems none the worse for wear,” Nurse Williamson commented as they headed back
out to the front of the landbound animal ark.

“That’s correct,” Stone said. “In general, I think it’s wonderful what General Patton is doing to preserve these species.
Someday the world will thank him. But I’ve always resisted military training—wearing a uniform, loud ‘yes-sir’s’ and all that.
I spent the first twenty or so years of my life fighting against that approach to things with everything inside me. So when
I see my dog seem to go under the influence so easily, I guess I don’t like it. I want him to be a square cog in a round hole,
to be anti-rules and regulations like his master… and I especially don’t like seeing him happy inside a cage. It’s not a place
for anything, let alone a fighting dog with the intelligence and energy that his species has.”

Stone stopped, suddenly catching with his peripheral vision two shapes coming quickly out of the shadows from behind the warehouse.
Instinctively he raised both hands for combat before he saw their uniforms. Then he let his clenched fists loosen and drop
to his side with a self-disgusted laugh.

“I see what you mean about not having to defend yourself all the time,” Stone said, looking at Williamson. “I’m ready to fight
anything that moves—trees, clouds, you name it. I think my paranoia level has risen through the danger mark since I’ve been
out there.”

“Mr. Stone?” one of the soldiers asked, and Stone noticed that aside from being large fellows with a certain Cro-Magnon look
each of them had a somewhat ominous emblem on their lapel—a golden eagle carrying a skull in its claws.

“They’re Internal Security, I.S.,” she said to Stone, sensing his apprehension.

“We’d like to have a brief talk with you, Stone,” one of them said as they parked themselves on each side of him and crossed
their oak tree arms in a don’t-even-try-to-run-one-inch kind of relaxed demeanor. “It will just take a few minutes. Colonel
Spears would like to go over a few things with you.”

“Sure,” Stone said, burping. “Will there be any dessert?”

“Dessert, sure,” the other two-forty-pound plus trooper grunted with a little laugh.

“It will be okay,” Nurse Williamson said, holding onto his arm and starting forward. “I’ll come with you and then I’ve got
to get you back to the ward; you shouldn’t even really be out right now. He’s a sick man,” she said, looking up at the I.S.
men. “I’m supposed to give him another set of antibiotic shots and treat his wound.”

“You go,” the higher-ranked one said, pulling her arm
free of Stone’s and steering her toward the hospital at the other end of the encampment. “He’ll be there in time to get his
shots. He’s a big boy, and he can handle himself.”

“Get the needles ready,” Stone said to her as he walked off between the two uniformed gorillas. “Especially black cherry,
that’s my favorite flavor.” They led him down one of the side streets to a warehouse painted black—this one with machine-gun
emplacements on each side of the roof, thirty feet up. They were waved in by the guards at the front door, five of them with
submachine guns hanging on leather straps around their necks, and passed through a metal detector just inside the doorway
to the building. It rang out a beeping alarm.

“Okay, pal, take it out—all your hardware,” the leader of the two said, stopping and staring at Stone with dead eyes.

“But I’m not even carrying anything,” Stone said. Suddenly he remembered his boots; there was a snub-nosed .38 in one and
a blade in the other. He reached down and took them out and handed them over grudgingly. He didn’t like being without any
weapons, not in the new America. They passed him through again and this time the beeper remained silent. He was led down a
hall as white and sterile as the hospital had been and into a small five-sided room surrounded by mirrors on every wall. An
armchair sat in the dead center of the room, which made Stone feel slightly dizzy, as if its extra wall somehow set it out
of a normal three-dimensional perspective and set his nerves off center.

“Please be seated,” one of the I.S. men said, pointing to the chair. Stone glanced down at it to make sure no stakes or snakes
were waiting, and seeing nothing plopped down into it, glad of the chance to rest his overloaded stomach for a second.

“Someone will be right in,” the man said with a grim,
darting glance and the two of them turned, quickly exiting the room. Stone sat silently in the chair, looking around the room.
With the mirrors from floor to ceiling on every wall the illusion created was of endless images of him in the chair receding
into infinity, five infinities, for the image was reflected from every angle. The overall effect was as if one were falling
into oneself forever. It made him feel dizzy, as if he were flying into his own mind. He knew also that he was being observed;
behind one or perhaps all the mirrors men were watching him, perhaps taking pictures. The whole thing was a test. But for
what?

Stone suddenly heard a sharp metallic sound and felt bands shoot up around his wrists and ankles. He struggled hard, but he
was instantly and completely sealed in by steel wraps that felt unbreakable. The chair whirred deep inside and began stretching
out, moving. Within seconds it had spread out until it was flat—and he was on his back unable to move an inch.

“Ah, so sorry to inconvenience you, Mr. Stone,” a voice said as a doorway in one of the mirrors opened and a man stepped through.
He came toward the prisoner with slow, relaxed steps until he stood right over Stone. He smiled down—the smile a rattler has
when he spots a prairie dog a foot from his mouth. Stone suddenly wished he was back in the wastelands where they never smiled.
“But we do have to be careful,” the I.S. officer said softly. “I’m sure you can understand.”

“Oh, of course,” Stone answered, looking up, squinting since lights overhead made it difficult to see. “I don’t mind at all
being strapped down to a moving armchair and immobilized like a pig about to be slaughtered. The only thing I do mind is now
you’ve added armchairs to my list of things
to be paranoid about. From now on I’ll never be able to sit down in one without shooting it first.”

“Ah, very amusing.” The man laughed, more of a gurgle than a normal laugh. “It’s good to have a sense of humor. Shows the
signs of a superior intelligence. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Colonel Spears, head of the I.S. unit. Yours is a slightly
unusual case, and being unusual of course it attracts the attention of our security people. We just want to go over a few
things. Usually we do most of our recruiting from the towns—more stable environments. Much of the refuse we’ve picked up on
the road, in the wilds, have proved to be undesirable ultimately. You were actually rescued from a kill zone, and probably
would have been eliminated had you been doing anything but dying. But, paradox of paradoxes, we rescued you instead of killing
you.”

He reached below the chair and extracted a syringe from a hidden drawer.

“Torture time? Bamboo beneath the fingernails?” Stone asked as he saw the big needle rising back up into the air.

“Oh, hardly.” Colonel Spears laughed again. Stone didn’t like it when he laughed. It made his rodentlike face with slicked-back
black hair and angular cheekbones even more ratlike. “We’re very efficient here. That’s the rule of the game under General
Patton—efficiency. There are ways to find out the truth far better and more reliable than bone bending.” He squeezed the plunger
slightly and a little stream of clear liquid squirted up into the air. He lowered the syringe to Stone’s shoulder and plunged
the tip in. Stone winced for a fraction of a second. He hated fucking needles. He’d rather get shot than stuck with that long
ice pick.

“Sodium pentothal,” the colonel said, injecting a shitload of the stuff into Stone’s veins. He stood back and looked down
paternally at his clamped-down subject. Stone found
himself quickly falling under an avalanche of pressure in his brain. It just kept pushing him down until his consciousness
felt like it was in his feet.

“Name?” Spears asked.

“Stone, Martin Stone,” Stone heard his own lips numbly reply. It was as if he was watching it from beneath the water, a hundred
feet down, watching his mouth move high above, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.

“Born?” Spears asked, as he glanced down at a digital readout of a sophisticated lie detector that sampled Stone’s pulse and
body heat and veni-pressure from detectors within the steel clamps.

“Denver, Colorado.” Stone’s mouth answered while Stone looked up from the bottom of a mental quarry.

“Reason for being in the Green River.” Spears asked.

“I fell-fell in,” the Stone mouth answered.

“Reason for being here in Fort Bradley,” the I.S. chief asked, pacing around slowly in front of Stone. As he asked each question
Spears glanced up to watch Stone’s facial reactions and also the readouts on the monitor set below the now horizontal chair.

“No… rea—reason,” Stone’s lips dumply whispered. “Was being treated for bite wound. Just woke up today. No reason. No reason.”
He kept mumbling like a broken robot, as if his chemically altered, momentarily lobotomized brain couldn’t quite understand
the concept of “reason.” He was just here. That was all. There was no reason for it. It was all very existential or something.

“Are you a cannibal?” Spears asked, looking sharply at Stone’s face, which registered extreme repugnance.

“God, no,” the voice answered, and Stone cheered it on from his observation point down in his toes. That was true—score
a point for his side. “I’ve never touched human flesh, or my dog either. Both of us would rather eat ants.”

Spears laughed again. “Even under pentothal, a sense of humor. Remarkable, Mr. Stone, you have an extremely strong will and
personality to exhibit even that much independence. I gave you a large dose.” Colonel Spears went on and on, flashing him
quick questions about any number of things.

“Are you a homosexual? Do you have any diseases? How much money do you possess?” And Stone answered truthfully to all—“no,”
“no,” “none.”

“How many men have you killed?” Spears asked suddenly, moving up to the lie detecting monitor for close inspection of the
waveform results.

“Too many to count,” Stone’s mouth replied.

“More than ten?”

“Yes.”

“More than fifty?”

“Yes.”

“More than a hundred?”

“I would imagine so,” Stone’s mouth answered.

“Tell me, Mr. Stone,” the I.S. chief asked, as he stood right over the elongated chair and stared down into Stone’s face,
checking every muscle, every hint of facial expression. “Just how have you been able to kill so many? You don’t on the surface
look like a master killer.”

“However I look,” Stone’s voice answered with an almost bored weariness, “I have killed a number of men. Killing comes easily
to me. I was trained by one of the masters of killing, my father, Major Clayton Stone.” He paused and then went on slowly,
enunciating each word almost syllable by syllable—one of the effects of the truth serum. “I was told by the shaman of a tribe
of Ute Indians who saved my
life several months ago that I was a
nadi
, one with the gift of giving death.”

“Final question, Mr. Stone,” the colonel said with his razor-edged grin. “Why have you killed so many men?”

“Because they tried to kill me,” Stone answered, almost in a whisper now, as the drug was starting to send him under.

Spears bent down and looked closely at the green line that undulated across the monitor screen, studying its every curve closely.
At last he stood up fully. “You know, some men can actually learn to fool both pentothal and lie detector. But not many. Not
many at all. I think you’re telling the truth.”

“I am t—t—telling the truth,” Stone’s mouth stuttered, trying not to slobber as his lips were starting to feel like slime-coated
elephant’s ears flapping wetly against one another.

“Well, that’s all,” Spears said. He closed hinged steel doors over the lie detector below and pressed a button on the side.
The chair began slowly folding up like an accordion until it was a chair again. The hand clasps slid into the sides. Stone
was free. Even down in his drug-dazed cavern of a brain he liked that idea.