War Weapons (14 page)

T
HEN IT was more of the in-again out-again consciousness of Stone’s brain. He really didn’t know where he was or where the
hell anything else was, either. But he knew he was Martin Stone. And in his mind he kept saying that over and over to himself.
For he was spinning too fast, too hard, to let go. If he did, he might go over a falls from which there was no return. He
felt the X-shaped torture device he was on being turned on its back —because he was suddenly looking straight up at the overlit
ceiling of the hut. There was more laughter, gales of it, and then his clothes were being cut or ripped right off his body,
and something was smeared all over him, something sticky and coating. Even in his semi-comatose state it didn’t feel pleasant,
stinging sharply where it touched against broken skin and blood-oozing wounds. Stone wanted nothing more than to reach down
and clean the sticky skin, but as he did so, his hand again snapped against the chain that confined it, and with a sigh of
resignation Stone steeled himself to his imminent death. He just wished he didn’t have to go so coated with slime.

Then he was being carried. He knew because he could feel his stomach going up and down and he felt like he was going to puke.
And the next thing he knew, he did—to his side—which shot down onto one of those carrying him, who smashed into Stone’s back
with something hard. The pain sent him back to the periphery of total darkness. He didn’t know how long it had been, then
one eye opened and he saw the sky above, stars leering down like a drunken crowd, cheering on his annihilation. Then he was
being lowered and he could feel the cold dirt of the prairie floor below his back. And when he opened his one working eye
just a crack the size of a razor blade, he could see them again, standing above him like ogres a hundred miles high, and their
faces were all contorted, their lips wide and flapping. And for some reason he couldn’t hear again, but he knew what they
were doing. Knew that they were laughing, laughing at him.

Stone suddenly felt terribly cold and, realizing he was out in the middle of the Northern Colorado desert, naked, with some
sticky icing all over him, wondered, just for a second or two, what the hell they were doing. Then, as the cold stiffened
up his muscles so that the bruises and welts and broken blood vessels from the hundreds of kicks and punches that had been
rained down upon him suddenly hurt as if he were on fire, Stone mercifully, as if his body had just become supersaturated
with pain and couldn’t take another drop, lapsed into the comforting darkness once again.

When he came to next time, it was quick. All of a sudden his eyes opened and his mind was much clearer than it had been. They
were gone, at least as far as Stone could see, though he could only turn his head from side to side. He was in the middle
of nowhere, with cacti rising in the moon and starlit darkness. There were large mounds every thirty feet or so, towering
columns of packed dirt. Most of them were half collapsed, their walls broken in various places like a chimney from a long
closed factory.

Jesus, he was thirsty. His mouth felt like he had been chewing marbles, broken marbles. His lips felt huge, like pillows,
and he could feel blood still dripping slowly from all over him. Stone wondered how he looked, narcissism raising its eternal
head even in the midst of all this. He wondered if they’d fucked him so bad that his face was all misshapen, his teeth gone—if
he was hideous now, like so many of the poor wounded and radiation-burned bastards he’d seen already in his travels. But it
was hard to tell what had been particularly damaged because everything was in pain, every square inch of his flesh and bones
felt like they had been put through a shredding machine. He managed to crane his neck just enough to look down at the rest
of his body. He was as naked as the day he was born but covered with some syrupy stuff. In spite of it all, Stone let out
a laugh, which hurt like hell. He looked like the fucking tar baby from Uncle Remus. Well, at least the bastards who wanted
to do him in were imaginative. Stone had to give Patton and his sick crew that. But exactly what they had in mind for him
escaped him. To have the syrup harden in the frigid night air? Turn him into some kind of corpse candy bar enclosed within
a frozen sugary coating?

To his displeasure Stone was becoming more conscious by the second. He much preferred the other place. But his mind cleared
as the cold set in and his one working eye opened more than just a slit so he could pretty much see the whole fucking world
around him. And he didn’t like what he saw. Ants. Just a few to the left of his head where he had turned, but farther off,
coming out of one of the high mud towers, were more of them—a lot more. By the light of the silvery moon Stone could see ugly
little faces drawing closer to him. The advance scouts. One approached straight toward him—it was a big son of a bitch for
an ant, a good inch long with mandibles big enough to not want it to get too close. It made a beeline for Stone’s nose, as
if the finishing line of its race. And as Stone looked on, the reddish-black insect suddenly leapt forward and landed on the
tip of his bloody nose. Without even an introduction it opened the half-inch-wide jagged jaws and slammed them closed on a
little piece of hanging flesh.

Stone couldn’t believe the sound his scream made as it left his lips. He flung his head back and forth, dislodging the little
bastard, which flew off with a tiny chunk of Martin Stone for its reward. Stone’s scream stopped after a few seconds, but
his heart started beating so fast that he could hardly breathe through his snot- and blood-choked throat. He had screamed
not so much from the pain, though it hurt like a razor being sliced slowly across his nerves, but because he suddenly realized
what the madman Patton had in store for him. To be attacked by these things. By these thousands of little mouths. Mouths that
could, from just the one bite that Stone had received so far, be incredibly painful.

“Shit,” he growled up into the night air. “Shit,” he spat out at the stars staring amusedly down, at the three-quarter moon,
looking like a punctured ball about to fall from the sky. “I don’t want to go like this, you son of a bitches.” Stone didn’t
know if he was addressing the general or the galaxies, but it hardly mattered. Neither were listening.

Suddenly Stone just let his whole body go limp. He lay there absolutely motionless, as the crickets and the wind joined together
in a whistling, crackling chant of the darkest part of night. Chant of death, of teeth on flesh, of jaws cracking open skulls.
Well, at least the bastard wouldn’t shoot off the A-bomb he had threatened to. He had Stone now, there was no reason any longer.
Not that it was going to help America, Stone knew. The man would probably be able to carry out his dark plans of absolute
control and controlled extermination. Stone was just as glad he wouldn’t be around to see it. Yeah, all things considered,
it was probably just about time to kick off. He tried to rationalize in his mind, tried to get into the idea of death, groove
on it.

But he didn’t groove on it when the second scout ant leapt up onto his cheek and took out a lobster-claw-sized chunk of prime
human. Stone involuntarily yelled out again. He just hated how it felt when those snapping turtle-like jaws bit into him.
But he didn’t have time to dwell too much on that one, for another burning sensation ripped into his ear. Then his neck. Then
his foot and leg. And though Stone did his best to roll and twist, the best he could manage was a few inches one way or another.
But only a few of the miniature monsters were dislodged. The rest took as much as they could carry of the dripping flesh and
popped back down onto the prairie floor, heading immediately back to the colony tower some thirty feet off. And as they went,
they passed hordes of the advancing columns of main army ants. These had even larger mandibles, jaws, and bodies for carrying
huge loads of supplies back to the colony. And even as Stone struggled and shouted curses in mortal horror, the ants leapt
up from the ground by the dozens, then the hundreds. And they were everywhere on him, and Martin Stone could feel himself
being slowly eaten up, could feel the outer layers of his flesh already being torn off. And he knew with growing horror that
it would take a long time for him to die. Perhaps many hours. And he would feel and know and sense every second of what was
already sending him to the brink of absolute madness: the death of ten million bites.

M
ARTIN STONE entered a world of pain that few men get to experience. Many have died perhaps as painfully—by fire or acid—but
these, at worst, kill within minutes. Stone would not be so lucky. He kept thinking that it wouldn’t get worse, but it did,
as more and more of the writhing bodies swept over him, covered him in a blanket of their consuming passion. But as men adjust
to even the most terrible of situations and just try to keep things from getting worse, Stone tried to keep the rippling little
brown bodies from his eyes. That was going to be the most horrible. Seeing them as they actually ate right into the socket.
Stone wondered what he had done to offend whoever was up there minding the store.

Suddenly he was doused with cold liquid, and a shudder ran down his body. He opened his eyes to see a woman, clad in deerskin
and bear hide, holding a large gourd filled with water, which she dumped on him again. Stone sputtered as some of it rushed
into his mouth, but the terrible pain was lessened all over him as the water washed the army of flesh-takers away. As the
woman bent over him to one side, Stone could see that she was an Indian, with long black hair pulled back inside her fur collar
and coppery, smooth skin. And even in the midst of the most wrenching pain Stone had ever experienced, he could see that she
was beautiful. She bent out of view, and Stone could feel some cutting or pulling against the chains that held him. His right
hand snapped free, and he pulled it down, flexing it and stretching it. The muscles felt like they had turned to rock, the
veins and nerves frozen like wet ropes in the Arctic.

Then she was around the other side, and his left hand came free. Then his legs, too, were released from the torture rack,
and she reached down, helping Stone rise to his feet. He could barely stand, and she supported him as he felt his legs turn
to rubber bands and waver wildly beneath him. Everything was spinning, and he could see from the look in her eyes that he
looked bad, real bad. She scanned him up and down, and Stone remembered that he was naked and a sense of modesty came over
him that made him so dizzy, he tumbled back to the dirt. She pulled him by the shoulders several yards away from the still
streaming lines of ants, searching for their missing meal, angry and moving fast. She helped Stone into some deerskin pants
and shirt and fitted moccasins on his feet. Just being away from the fucking mandibles and protected from the subfreezing
temperature made Stone feel like he was at Club Med basking in the sun. Almost.

As he lay half propped up against a stump of an ancient petrified tree, Stone saw the woman drag a body out of the shadows
and bring it up to the
X
. It was an NAA’er, his throat slit, Stone could see through blurred eyes. The woman attached the body’s hands and legs to
the chains, not that he was going anywhere, and then stepped back. Already the ants started closing in, not even aware that
they had been given a substitute meal. But then it hardly mattered to them. All human beings tasted pretty much the same.

“Come on,” the Indian woman said as she came back to Stone and helped him to his feet again.

“Who—who are you?” he asked, wondering if all his teeth were still there, as his mouth felt real strange, as if he had chewed
a whole stick of cotton candy at once and there was little room to breathe or talk.

“I’m Meyra, daughter of Fighting Bear, of the Cheyenne. Come, we must go. Go fast. I killed two of their guards—they’ll check
on you at dawn. I know them.”

“You killed them? You know—” Stone asked, both confused and just wanting to ask her something so he could look into those
brown eyes, which drew him in like oases of perfect calm and beauty in the midst of his terrible, mind-blasting pain.

“Shut up, mister,” the woman said, and Stone could feel as she held him with one arm around her shoulder, the other pulling
him up by a grip on the outside of the deerskin he was wearing, that she was strong, very strong. But still he felt himself
starting to give out after just a few steps. His body just didn’t want to work, things were broken, gears fallen out of alignment
here and there.

“You’ve got to help me a little,” she said, her face just inches from his so he had a sudden insane impulse to kiss her, which
he didn’t. Even delirium wouldn’t be explanation enough. “I can’t carry you completely on my own. Try, just try, to keep pumping
your legs—I’ll guide you.” She pulled him closer against her so he was half covered by one side of her thick fur coat.

“Trying,” Stone said with a thin smile. “Tryin’, I swear I am.” And again everything was just sort of surreal, as it had been
for quite a while now. Alice in Wonderland had nothing on Martin Stone. His eyes kept opening and closing like doors for the
birds on cuckoo clocks. Somehow he kept just sending the command to his legs to move, and they did—up to a point. Every few
steps a knee would give out, or a thigh just felt like it wasn’t there. But she would catch him as he started to go, and that
would wake him enough to help her out. But it was rough going, every step of it.

Suddenly she threw him down onto the ground, diving down alongside him, and Stone, after catching his breath from the blow,
started to ask her what the hell was going on. But she slammed a hand over his mouth. Lights appeared about fifty yards dead
ahead of them, and they heard the sound of a motor. It was one of the NAA jeeps out on perimeter patrol. But they hadn’t been
alerted yet about Stone’s escape and went by with twin beams piercing the night, without even noticing the two figures lying
facedown behind a thick cactus.