The Damn Disciples (4 page)

Stone’s face broke into a broad smile in spite of his fear and precarious position. The damn things were cute as hell as they
flopped around like fluffy little stuffed toys, hardly real, too fucking cute for words. At least, two of them were—for Stone
suddenly got a glimpse of the third one, hidden in the back beneath some straw. And this was one that wasn’t so cute. Something
had gone wrong. He had been seeing more of them now. Mutations. The radiation left by the bombs that had been dropped five
years before—the reason he and his family had been rushed to the shelter by his father. Radiation damage sometimes took a
generation—even two—before it made itself fully felt. They had learned that at Hiroshima. And the twisted scaly thing, with
a face like a little demon that hissed up at him, definitely had its genes twisted around some way. It sure as hell wasn’t
a normal chick. But he suddenly had a hell of a lot more to worry about than the future of the eagle species. He heard a flap
of wings, a loud cawing sound, and then a shadow covered his entire body. Stone turned, startled, wondering what the hell
could be shadowing him 11,000 feet up. The fucking mother. She was huge—and mean. The great curved beak came snapping at him
and Stone was barely able to duck out of the way as the jaws slashed at his face. He threw the hook up and mercifully caught
it on the first try, pulling himself without even testing it.

The eagle’s talons came slashing at his back as the bird thought he was reaching farther into the nest. Stone raised himself,
his arms moving like little steam pistons as they pulled him quickly into the sky. The talons of the enraged bird slashed
down the back of his jacket, which fortunately for Stone was a thick leather biker jacket that he had snatched from a dead
soul who didn’t need it anymore. And even that, thick enough to take rolls from a bike at sixty miles per hour, began turning
to tatters from the eagles’ relentless blurred assault.

Now that Stone was above the nest and not any immediate threat to it, the bird suddenly halted its attack. The great golden
and white feathered carnivore hovered above the hatchlings flapping its yard-wide wings and counting them with its crystal
eyes—even the scaly one, which it didn’t quite know what to make of yet but was going to raise along with the other three.
They were unharmed. Its trained eye detected no wounds, no red along the puffy white down. The creature on the mountainside
hadn’t had a chance to eat them. The eagle cawed twice to the chicks, which set them hopping about and opening and closing
their mouths like waste-disposal units set on fast.

The bird swung its wide wings together and took off right up the side of the mountain so that within a second it was just
behind Stone’s head again and looking hard at what the struggling human’s plans were.

“Fuck off bird, will you!” Stone screamed out, his voice bouncing off the jagged mica-flecked rocks that scraped at his chest
and face as he pulled himself up. “I’m gone, I’m history. Go give some fucking upchuck to juniors down there, okay?” He reached
the anchor spot and ripped the hooks out without even daring to turn his head around. He could sense that the bird was just
inches behind him, could feel it as the flapping wings blew a strong breeze over him, ruffling his hair as if he were in a
storm.

But the eagle, though it cawed at him with little stinging messages to get the hell out of there, and clawed at the air just
a yard or so behind him to show what it could do if it wanted to, seemed content to let Stone go. Which was fine with Stone.
The bird could have the whole fucking mountainside. If he ever made it to the top, he’d never even
look
at the hellish slope again. But the adrenaline that surged through his system from the attack gave him gently of energy to
climb the remaining three hundred feet. It took only an hour and a half. Which was pretty amazing for a one legged man.

It took only a few more minutes for Stone to reach the slope into which the bunker had been built. The major had spared no
expense when it came to protecting his family. As the head of one of the country’s most successful munitions and military
related R & D companies, Major Clayton R. Stone, ex-Special Forces, ex-Ranger, ex just about every god-damned thing you could
name, had both the resources and the expertise to plan and build the shelter. While other men were building fallout shelters
made of concrete tubes sunk a few feet into the earth—the major had the whole inside of a granite slope blasted out, creating
tens of thousands of square feet of survival space for his family. Stone had never even gotten along with the son of a bitch
that well in life; the two had argued from just about the day he was born. But he had to admit, in the brave new world that
was America, he was grateful he had the place to come to now. Without it, he would have been just another dying man in the
woods.

He walked up to a large boulder about thirty feet in front of the steep face that rose up more thousands of feet above them
capped with white diamond fields of snow. Putting his shoulder against it, he pushed with all his might. It hadn’t been that
difficult to move the boulder in the past, but then he’d had two legs to work with. Falling on his face several times, Stone
at last managed to get the thing rolled over a few feet and reached down into the three-foot-deep hole. He pulled up a small
plastic bag. He stood up, took out a small device from the bag, and pointed it at the solid rock wall The mountain opened.
Two three-foot-thick, ten-foot-high granite sections slid silently apart. Stone lurched for-ward, his wounded leg throbbing
up painfully again as streams of fire coursed through his veins. The dog trotted happily alongside of him. It knew what the
cavern built into the side of a mountain contained—food. More food than it had seen for days. And for the dog that was just
about tantamount to entering the very doors of paradise. It flopped its tongue out and began salivating up a flood before
they had gone three yards inside.

The doors closed automatically behind him and Stone glanced around the outer garage, with its few cars still parked around.
Nothing looked disturbed. But he was careful. There had been an infiltration once before. There couldn’t be another. Stone
pushed open the door that led to the main living quarters, and the dog let out a happy bark as it entered into the warmth
and safety of the bunker. The entire place was operated by computer, so although no lights were on, when Stone walked from
room to room, they automatically switched on and off around him. His father had set up the place so that it was theoretically
self-sufficient for the next twenty years or more. Air and water were purified and recycled. Life-support systems, lighting,
temperature, plant watering, all were controlled by a Cray II Super Computer, possibly the only one still operating, as not
too many people were using such things in the hellhole that America had be-come. Except maybe as a latrine.

As Stone headed into the living quarters, the pit bull again rushed all around his feet like a living bolo.

“What the hell are you, dog, a cat?” Stone asked, almost tripping again. “Cats are supposed to slither all around their master’s
legs, not
dogs
. Now get some canine etiquette in that dumb brain, okay?” The animal just looked up at him with saliva-dripping sincerity
and kept rushing back and forth only inches ahead of him banging into the walls. Stone walked through the large communal area
that his family—the major, his mother, and sister April, God help their souls—had spent most of the five years they had inhabited
the place. His father had known there was going to be war—and he had been right. The night he had a dream warning of the blood
fire to follow, he packed the whole family up at two in the morning and they drove from their Denver home here to his little
oasis in the middle of nowhere. They had barley arrived when they saw the huge atomic sparks to the north and east. They had
gone inside and locked the doors. For five fucking years.

Stone could feel their ghosts. He always could. It was as though they were right there. His sister, playing with her Maclntosh
computer by the glowing logs in the fireplace, glowing electric the moment Stone entered the room. There was his mother knitting,
her forehead pinched together as she thought about this or that design she was working on. And his father, down in his computer
room, that ran the whole place. Doing God knew what—for five years. A great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live
there. Only, Stone had.

Ghosts! They were moving around now. In his fever and increasing delirium, Stone swore he could see their faces—his father
all blue from his heart attack, his mother raped and mutilated by bikers only hours after they had left the place. His sister
April—he couldn’t see her ghost. That meant
she
was still alive. But for how long?

He headed past the plants still blooming, fed by hydroponic units, the goldfish off to one side, given food, oxygenated, every
damn thing. The whole world on auto. Stone had a sudden bizarre thought as he wondered whether the fish got lonely. Cared
for completely by machine. Not a human hand ever tapping the glass, eyes looking down. It was weird. He took the mutt to the
kitchen, knowing it would drive him crazy for the job that lay ahead of him. A task that would be hard enough without some
animal barking up a storm and tearing down the place. The dog’s hunger on top of the food smells in the kitchen made it go
half mad with excitement the moment they walked inside. It leaped up and around in the air in a corkscrewing motion like some
kind of dolphin out of water.

“Cool it, garbage barge,” Stone said sharply. All he needed was for one of the animal’s leaping nips to take off his nose
or chin or something that he’d rather keep. He’d seen what the canine’s dagger jaws could do. It was like standing next to
a spinning propeller. Stone pulled out some cans at random from the well-stocked shelves above. His mother, who liked to cook,
had been, in a claustrophobic sort of way, in heaven. With twenty years’ worth of sup-plies, canned food, frozen meats, and
vegetables. Every-thing, even a gourmet chef would have been proud to use. Post—Collapse of Civilization chefs, anyway.

But Stone wasn’t serving any flaming horse meat tonight. Wincing with pain as he held up one of the cans to the electric opener,
Stone opened tuna fish, then undid a bottle of pickles, then pulled a frozen steak out of one of the freezers and threw it
all down in a big Tupperware bowl.

“Now eat slow, big boy,” Stone said with a smirk, knowing that was the last thing in the world the animal was likely to do.
The dog tore into the feast like a great white shark hitting into a sea lion. Pickle chunks, frozen meat that shattered when
the dog clamped into it—all flew off in different directions, splattering the floor and the side of the refrigerator.

“Oh, God,” Stone muttered to himself, turning and limping off. Well, the dog would just have to lick up all that it had just
centrifuged off—because Stone might not be around for a while. He hobbled back out to the connecting hall and down to the
end of it. He keyed in a code on a small inset keyboard and a steel door slid open, allowing him entry. The place never ceased
to amaze him. He walked into his father’s computer/communications/scientific lab—the thousand square feet of space where he
had spent the last five years of his life, never allowing any of them to enter. Stone hadn’t ever seen the inside of the room
until after the major’s death.

And he had been in for a shock. For among the many things the major had been doing was filling a computer full of information.
Everything that he had learned in his long career as a fighting Ranger in four different major wars—and he had lost track
of how many minor, secret, unpublicized ones—had been preserved for his son on tape. A way to communicate from the grave,
to send Stone information in magnetic form that had already saved his ass.

Stone walked through the beeping, clicking, flashing maze of computers, radar receivers, tapes recording every CB message
that came in. This, too, would all go on for decades, or so the major had assured them all. And he had reason to doubt the
man’s word or foresight. As much as Martin hated to admit it, the old man had turned out to be right about every goddamn thing.
Stone had inherited a bleak, violent world—along with the firepower and other resources to fight back.

Not that it looked like he was going to be running around too much. In fact, as he swooned and had to catch hold of the chair
in front of him he realized with horror that he didn’t have any time at all. If he went out, from loss of blood, shock, whatever,
he wasn’t coming back. And as much as the dog had helped him a number of times, the mutt wasn’t a fucking surgeon capable
of giving him IV’s and making the incisions to remove the festering flesh along one leg. Which meant Stone was going to have
to do it.

He sat down in the pneumatic work chair and clicked on the computer terminal. The whole system was designed to be UUF—Ultra
User Friendly, meaning he hardly had to know shit about the thing to use it. Stone had already obtained information from it
on tank formations when he had been involved in a tank battle months before—and on the location of some missile sites in Utah.
Again the Cray had been right. Now he needed info of a different kind. To say the least. Tank formations were nothing compared
to…operating on himself.

YES? the computer lit up, the words scrolling across the screen.

MEDICAL, Stone typed in on the keyboard. Instantly the screen switched to a list of medical subcategories from diseases to
surgery. Stone slammed in the choice and the screen listed more specific types of injuries. Soon he had it narrowed down to
about the situation he was in—SURGERY FOR BROKEN LEG WITH POSSIBLE GANGRENE DEVELOPMENT. A three-dimensional representation
of a leg appeared on the screen and began turning in several directions at once, giving him different views from every angle.
The leg was all charted out with a grid so he could indicate just where the injury was and the approximate direction and extent
of the break.