The Damn Disciples
Read The Damn Disciples Online
Authors: Craig Sargent
The heat wave followed the blast itself, and Stone felt a rush of fifty-mile-per-hour superheated wind rush right over his
back as if he were lying in front of a blast furnace. Then there was a terrible screaming. The pods who had been waiting to
ambush him were all human torches now…
Stone heard sounds behind him from out of the flame-spattered darkness. And as three figures came into view, Stone knew he’d
just gone from the fire into something much worse. For coming at him with a vengeance in their respective eyes were Guru Yasgar,
seated atop a raging tusked elephant, and Excaliber, the traitor, running alongside a rampaging giant. Stone’s own, fierce-toothed
pit bull dog, looked like he wanted the first piece of flesh from the Last Ranger!
The Last Ranger Series:
The Last Ranger
The Savage Stronghold
The Madman’s Mansion
The Rabid Brigadier
The War Weapons
The Warlord’s Revenge
The Vile Village
The Cutthroat Cannibals
Is This the End?*
Published by
POPULAR LIBRARY
*
Forthcoming
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Copyright © 1988 by Warner Books, Inc.
All rights reserved.
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First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56643-8
Contents
She was brought into the room stark naked. It was part of the “cleansing” process to break them down, to humiliate them, make
them feel ashamed. For shame, and its sister—guilt—were how they broke minds, how they reached inside and rearranged things
to their liking. Six men wearing demonic masks and long black flowing robes sat atop high wooden chairs, thrones almost, with
dark hideous carvings of snakes and demons undulating up and down their sides. With the robes and masks covering them, only
the men’s fingers, long and pale, which stretched out on the armrests on each side of them—and the twin Is of reflecting light
that were their eyes—could be seen within their engulfing hoods. They hardly looked human.
Two strapping men wearing long brown robes and with police nightsticks strapped to their sides dragged the woman into the
room holding her up under each arm. For she was resistant, to say the least, terrified, trembling and crying at every step.
They half carried her to a red circle about four feet wide painted on the floor and placed her in the absolute center of it.
Then they stood back so they were outside the circle.
The woman was beautiful. Even with her tear-streaked dirty face, her unwashed body that stood without a stitch of clothing
before the robed ones. She looked like a living sculpture of female perfection with her upturned breasts, slim waist, and
rounded hips that seemed to curve into an-other dimension and then back again. And the blond patch of fur between her legs,
which she covered with one hand while the other tried to shield her firm young breasts from view. The tears kept running down
her face in fear—and shame.
But the men who looked onto her nakedness were too old, too dried up, without enough of the juices of life left within them
to find even the slightest bit of desirability in such a nubile young paragon of femininity. They no longer felt such things
as desire, at least desires of the normal kind—to touch, kiss, hold—the things that men—and women—dream of. Their dreams were
darker by far, without a trace of warmth or life. Dreams only of total submission, total control, total pain. The making of
that which was human into something different.
“Do not cry, child,” one of the robed voices spoke, his masked face just a shadow within the shadowed hood. And even as the
words were spoken, she became a thousand times more frightened. For they were words that a skeleton might speak, like bones
cracking together. There was no warmth in the voice, just the cold mechanical tones of something that was dead inside.
“Do not fear us, child,” another voice spoke up. “We are here to make you whole, make you perfect.” A hand rose up from out
of the dark sleeve and her trembling increased—for the hand seemed to be without flesh, so long, so white were its fingers,
so flat and narrow its palm. The finger pointed at her.
“You are chosen to be one of us. To be one of the Perfect Ones, one of the Disciples of the Perfect Aura. This is a great
honor.” The rest of them cackled beneath their black hoods, the sound of dry leathery tongues rasping against bone, echoing
through the room.
“We are the Perfect Ones. Unlike human beings, who are confused and imperfect, we are completed—and perfect. We are without
prejudices, without any of the thousand failings of mankind. We are the Perfect Ones.”
“The Perfect Ones,” the other five echoed in.
“To be Perfect—is to be without fear,” the head man said, his eyes like red lasers inside his hood. He was the only one with
such orbs, which in the gray light of the room, glowed bloodred. “That is what makes the human mind imperfect—fear. Do you
understand?”
“Y—yes,” the woman stuttered, her throat catching even as she talked. “I’m afraid. Very afraid.” She began crying again.
“Please—let me go. I’ll just leave and—” Leathery laughter met her pleas.
“No, no, there is no leaving from here,” the High Priest said with the firmness of a noose snapping closed around a throat.
“But do not fear, child.” He rose up from his center chair and he seemed to be a giant to the woman, whose heart began beating
even faster, whose tears began flowing down like an unstoppable stream. “We are here to
help
you. To take all these feelings of fear out of you—and give you peace for the first time in your life. You must just give
yourself to us. All that you are.”
“
Give yourself to us
,” the others echoed from beneath their black hoods.
“You must give up the illusory idea of being a single individual. For it is
this
which gives people pain—trying to separate themselves from the herd, trying to be an individual when there can only be peace
in the group. In the Perfect Whole.”
“
Peace in the group
,” the hooded figures hissed back. And now they all rose up and stepped down from their chairs and walked out to the wooden
floor around her. The woman’s heart began beating so rapidly that her chest could be seen moving. She would have tried to
run right to the window and jump out—even to her death—anything would have been better than these “men.” But she couldn’t
move an inch. She was paralyzed with her fear, as if curare had been injected into her muscles and not one would move. And
they knew about that—the six hooded ones—the six Priests of the Perfect Aura. They knew that fear made people lose all control,
made them screaming animals without a vestige of pride or courage.
They formed a circle and began moving around her. A coat of sweat covered her naked flesh to join the flowing river of her
eyes as adrenaline surged through her. As they moved, the long black robes began spinning out around them and incomprehensible
sounds emerged from within. They all seemed much larger than life, the robes rising seven feet or more above the red wooden
floor. And with the material flaring out around them, even their shapes seemed to change. It was hard to see them, and she
was beginning to wonder if they were even men.
As they moved, they began to chant a strange guttural language. From the very dawn of time, animal sounds and clicks, tongues
scraping across teeth, the language of the creatures who had become men—but were not yet men. And as the “song” emerged from
their hidden lips, drums began beating around her, deep resonant sounds that were like rumbles of thunder and vibrated through
her very bones as if she were in an earthquake.
Then they were going faster and the drums were rising in volume and tempo until she thought her ears would shatter from the
noise. And they were spinning around her like six tops gone mad, than black robes now wide around them like the twirling skirts
of gypsy dancers. And suddenly, as they hit cruising speed, they pulled out objects from inside their thick cotton robes and
held them out, waving and shaking the things as they circled.
She screamed now. The paralysis at least left her lips for a few moments. And her hands flew up over her face as she totally
forgot that she had been covering her more personal areas. She kept screaming. For the things they were holding out were organ
parts of the human body. One held an eyeball out at the end of its dripping tendrils, shaking the thing like a rattle every
time he passed around her. Another held a human arm, hand, fingers and all, and gripped it by the open arm wound, stabbing
it in her direction so that fingers almost touched her face each time he ran by. One waved a heart, another gripped a dried
human brain though it kept disintegrating within his bony fingers. Another a male sex organ, huge and dried out, like some
long dead snake, whipping it toward her skull like a bludgeon. And the sixth, the Head Priest—the Transformer, she saw, as
he made his turn—was holding an entire human bead, eyes opened, staring at her, tongue hanging sideways out of its mouth as
dried blood coated the worm-infested lips like lipstick to give it a little class. They whirled faster and faster until it
was all just a blur and she didn’t even realize she was screaming without stop.
The hands snapped out their dead objects and began making contact with her as they whirled in a circle just a yard or so out
from her naked, shaking body. She covered her face and eyes with her hands, like a child trying to hide from nightmares beneath
the blankets. But these nightmares weren’t going away.
Suddenly they stopped, and the drums, too, ceased in midbeat. After a few moments she dared open her eyes just a fraction
of an inch and peered through the shielding hands. One of the underlings in brownish-red robe was carrying in a platter with
a silver cover over it, like some sort of Foie gras at a four-star restaurant—when there had been such things. He carried
it to the Head Priest, who put his skull down and, opening both arms wide, addressed her solemnly.
“
Now
you will go through fear, live fear, become fear. And when you emerge on the other side—you will no longer live
in
fear. You will be beyond it. I am the Trans-former. I shall make you as we are. Give yourself up, little one, there is nothing
to save. There is no self.”
“
There is no self
,” the others chanted loudly.
He lifted the silver cover, and she gasped. Inside, on a shining silver tray with all kinds of strange symbols and designs
etched into its surface, was a human skull—and it was filled with liquid that danced and shimmered gold even in the shadowy
grayness.
“The Liquid of Purification,” the Head Priest said with reverence. “The Golden Elixir. Drink.” He lifted the skull to her
lips, and she screamed again and stepped back. Or tried to there behind her and by merely placing their bodies in the right
spot they locked her in place so she couldn’t move.
