The Vile Village (22 page)

They opened up, but the bikers were already on them. Scythes swung around like guillotines, slicing right through their human
targets so that arms, hands, legs, and heads flew freely through the air in a meteor shower of humanity. The farmers crawled
out of the way the moment they saw the bikers closing in. They hid in the nearby alleys and among the bodies of the already
dead as they watched both gangs clash in bloody battle. Stone managed to grab Excaliber, who was only too ready to leap into
the fray, and pulled him behind a small pile of bodies so that they were hidden for a second.

It was war. A bloody, screaming, limb-flying war. The two gangs fought against each other with fanatical hatred. For years
they had been battling one another psychologically as they an to rip apart a town that would have been too small for just
one of them. Now it all came out in an avalanche of hate and bullets and swinging scythes. It was hard to tell just what the
hell was going on. The bikers rode through the ranks of the Strathers gunmen. And when they had roared past and the air had
cleared for a moment, Stone could see that a good forty bodies covered the street. But a lot still remained standing. And
they turned, reloading frantically to meet the bikers, who had stopped about a hundred yards past and regrouped for a second
attack.

With a war scream, they closed in again, swinging their death blades, and Stone could see that they’d taken heavy losses,
too—they were down to perhaps half of their original numbers. But there was no surrender here, no laying down of peace terms.
They would fight until all the men on one side had been killed. The bikers again waded into the frantically firing Strathers
boys, as the farmers waited on the sides of the street, occasionally taking a stray bullet or the circular cut of a scythe,
sending some part of them on a quick trip off their body. It was a living bloody hell. Blade severed flesh, bullet splattered
nose and heart, knife sliced liver and pancreas, chain cracked skulls and released brains like pistachio nuts from their shells.

When the dust and blood had cleared again, Stone could see that there were but two Strathers boys and one biker left. He rode
past about seventy-five feet and turned. And as he turned, Stone saw that it was Bronson, shot in two places, the blood oozing
out but not nearly finished. Not as long as there were ever two of the bastards left who had mutilated his son. The biker
started forward, and as he drove the bike, standing up on the seat with a demonic grin and began swinging the scythe chain
getting up a good speed so it would behead properly, the biker leader spotted Stone and the dog hiding behind a corpse pile.
This only increased his fury and desire for revenge, and he pulled back hard on the reins of his bike, sending it flying forward
like a bobsled down a mountain.

The last of the Strathers boys who were still capable of standing and firing weapons tried to get a bead on the biker, but
it was impossible. He came at them like a phantom jet.

Suddenly he was just there, swinging the scythe like a madman. Two heads went shooting up into the air, crashing down to each
side of the street and coming to rest against the curb like bloody bocci balls. Bronson wheeled the motorcycle around and,
without stopping, came right at Stone, screaming at the top of his lungs.

“My boy, my boy, my boy ”

“Oh, shit,” Stone spat out as he saw that his little hill of bodies wasn’t the place to hang out anymore. Suddenly he noticed
it, parked in the alley alongside the brothel—his Harley. It had been moved earlier by the staff of the place, which had been
hosing down outside. Son of a bitch, if he could just make it there.

“Dog, stay here, don’t go after this guy. Hear me—or you’re hamburger.” With that, he leapt out from the body screen and tore
ass across the street. But the biker was even faster than he had thought, for suddenly the man was towering over him, the
screaming blade glistening like the jaws of death. Stone leapt to the side but felt the blade whiz right along his leg. A
slice from thigh to knee was opened up in an instant, a half inch deep, blood soaking out through his pants and dripping into
his boot.

The biker roared past, throwing the brakes on as Stone rose and rushed with all his strength toward the Harley. But the belt
was missing from the front-mounted machine gun. And Bronson had already come to a stop about a hundred and fifty feet away
and was starting back again. Stone could feel his leg starting to swell up from the coagulating blood in the wound. He couldn’t
run anymore. He was tired of running from
this
bastard, anyway. Suddenly he remembered the Luchaire 89-mm—the missile-launching system built into the side of the bike.
He prayed that he’d reloaded the damn thing. And as he undid the latch that held the tube in place and swiveled it out on
stainless-steel hinges, he saw that he had.

“Okay, bastard, do your best,” Stone whispered under his breath as he sighted down the long tube, trying to find the than
in its double-sighting system. But Bronson wasn’t waiting around for anyone to get a clear fix on him. Whipping back and forth
across the street by pulling the “reins” of his bike, the biker leader came at Stone atop his roaring chopper, the blade spinning
faster with every turn.

“Bye bye, motherfucker.” Stone grunted and pulled the trigger. There was a roar of fire right behind him as the tail of the
thing shot out. Then the missile burst from the launching tube at tremendous velocity. Bronson was about sixty feet away from
Stone, just looking for a good spot to sink his scythe into, when the missile hit him. It made contact right at the handlebars
of the bike, sending the entire metal package up into a volcanic eruption of metal and blood and steaming flesh that continued
to rain down for minutes. Stone thought he saw the head of the biker spinning wildly overhead like a satellite heading back
up into orbit, and a few other parts and pieces here and there shooting off in the fiery smoke of the explosion.

Stone raised himself up on one trembling arm so he was resting on the top of his bike. Here and there around the bloody street
he could see a few of the Strathers boys and a few of the bikers still alive. Still crawling around trying to kill one another,
slashing throats, strangling. Anything. It was a death trip to the end. And everybody won. Those who didn’t do each other
in, Stone saw, the farmers took care of. They came out of hiding with expressions of sheer pleasure, with smiles crossing
their pain-stricken mouths for the first time in years. They closed in on all who were still living and made them dead.

“J
esus, you’ve brought me a lot of fucking business.” Undertaker chuckled, wiping his brow as he stood among his coffin wagons,
which were parked along both sides of the street. His brood swarmed among the dead, stripping them of anything of value, then
sorted the bodies by size for later coffin fitting.

“They did it to each other,” Stone whispered as he looked around at the carnage, shaking his head. “I had hoped from the start
that I could set them against each other,” he said to the coffin maker. “Play on their jealousies and fears of one another.
But it worked beyond my wildest expectations. The suckers just blew each other away, down to the last man.”

“Well, I hate to say it, but I think you’ve just put a severe crimp in my coffin business,” Undertaker said, looking around
at the wholesale death. “Not that there won’t be more deaths, to say the least, but nothing like it’s been. Not that I mind.”
He laughed. “We’ll adjust, switch over to farming more, selling junk, maybe make furniture out of all that coffin wood I got
stacked up. My damn clan can do anything. It will be wonderful to see this town filled with life the way it once was. People
with smiles instead of blood on their faces.”

And even as he spoke, the townspeople, who had lived under the yokes of the two gangs for years now, came out of their various
hovels and basements, came out to see what had happened to those who had at them and raped their women, had stolen all that
was valuable from them and then beat them again. These people came out of the woodwork, and they walked among those who had
hurt them. And as Stone watched, they kicked out and punched at the already dead. They smacked and spat at the cleaved open
skulls with rolling pins. Somehow they tried to release their anger and grief on the cooling corpses of both gangs. And perhaps
it helped. For as they walked off, tears in their eyes, there was also something new. Something that hadn’t been there for
a long, long time: hope.

“Well, it’s just fitting that we should go out of the coffin business with a bang,” Undertaker said as he looked around at
all the bodies being stacked like firewood. “Damn, are we going to be busy! Need any overtime work?” he asked Stone, pulling
out a few silver dollars from his pocket and jangling them in front of him trying to tempt the man.

“Sorry, Undertaker, I just kill the slime—I don’t bury them. It’s not in the union contract.” He looked around and saw Excaliber
slowly walking over to him. The pitbull kept turning and licking at the gash of lion claws that had ripped all along its right
side. Stone looked down at his own bleeding and battered body. He needed some R n’ R bad. He thought suddenly of LuAnn, back
at the Hanson place, and he looked over at Undertaker, who had a notepad in his hand and was already counting up the dead.

“Maybe I could use a little work, if I could get back that room I was staying in up in the attic. Just for a day or two.”

“Stay as long as you want son, as long as you want.” Undertaker laughed, slapping Stone on the back. “Any man who can bang
a nail into a coffin lid is welcome in my house.”

“Thanks Undertaker,” Stone said softly, glancing up at an immense cloud that blotted out the hazy sun, casting the entire
town into shadow.

A razor chill ran up and down his spine. He must be going mad. The fucking cumulus looked like a woman—like April—long flowing
tresses of puffy hair sprayed out around mile-wide shoulders. And as he watched, the cloud seemed to come apart, the head
being suddenly severed from the rest of its cottony body by a high current of wind. The cloud head soared off trailing tendrils
of ethereal white as it spun around lost in the atmosphere miles above. And Stone knew that there was no rest. Not for him.
As long as April was out there—alive—his journey couldn’t end. Though he wished more than anything to stay, and heal, and
make sweet love to LuAnn for days at a time, when the next morning sun rose, Martin Stone would be on his way back out into
hell again.

A THIRD WORLD WAR HAS LEFT AMERICA A LAWLESS AND DATTERED LAND. BUT AMID THE PILLAGE AND HEARTLESS KILLINGS, ONE BRAVE YOUNG MAN HAS BECOME AMERICA’S LAST HOPE FOR JUSTICE AND FREEDOM…

IT’S RAINING CORPSES…

Caught in a radioactive rain storm, Stone and his pit bull, Excaliber, find themselves at the mercy of the Undertaker: part
mountainman, part doctor, and full-time mortician. Business is booming. As Stone recovers – with the help of the Undertaker’s
daughter – he realizes that he has entered into a valley of death – where two flipped-out, murderous gangs are locked in a
bloody struggle for control of the people and the land. Stone knows an opportunity when he sees one. He and Excaliber leave
their sickbeds to hire on with one of the gangs. The Last Ranger has a plan to trigger World War IV, an all-out Armageddon
to obliterate both thug armies at once. The only catch is that he’s the number one target on the killing field – where the
only winner is death.

Martin Stone is

THE LAST RANGER

America’s Last Hope in America’s Darkest Age