Last Ranger (13 page)

“What the hell’s going on down here, Dwarf? Who are the others? What—”

“My, you are an inquisitive fellow, aren’t you?” Dwarf replied, pointing his right stump at Stone. “But all in good time,
my man of honor. We have many, many things to discuss. We shall dine—tonight or tomorrow perhaps. I’ll have to check my schedule.
I didn’t know for sure just when you would be arriving, you understand. But meanwhile let me have our men make you comfortable,
let you freshen up a little. Take him.”

The guards grabbed Stone under each arm and began dragging him away from the Tribunal chamber. He struggled furiously, his
mind a boiling red rage of fire and fury. He wanted to kill the bastard, with his bare hands if he could. But what drove him
to the point of total despair was the fact that April was so near, maybe just behind the wall. And he had no way in hell of
reaching her.

I
T could have been Frankenstein’s laboratory. Stone didn’t like the looks of the place the moment the guards dragged him roughly
inside. The place had clearly been designed as a medical facility from the start, nothing makeshift about this. The walls
were all stainless steel, glistening and mint. There were beeping life support systems, tubes and wires, operating tables,
rows of scalpels and cutting implements, like a surgeon’s warehouse. The place had been built for the rich and powerful of
America who had hoped to survive down here. They hadn’t, but their medical facility taking up an entire twenty thousand square
foot level of the place had.

“Face forward, scum,” one of the guards screamed, slamming the butt of his weapon into the side of Stone’s head. Only because
he was able to pull his head with the blow did Stone avoid a serious injury, but it hurt like a bitch and his eyes clouded
up for a few seconds as if he’d been sniffing onions. When they cleared again he knew he was in trouble.

As they passed into a second operating room with five operating tables set up around the rounded, brilliantly lit chamber
Stone saw that bodies were lying on each of them. And they had been cut up terribly, sliced into parts and then reattached
with thick thread. He could see immense stitches around shoulders, elbows, knees, even a neck. War victims? Transplants? He
could barely try to imagine what it all meant. But it was hideous, as if someone was cutting up human bodies like they were
paper dolls to be twisted and mutilated.

All of them were in terrible agony, moaning and tossing their heads this way and that as if undergoing the most exquisite
tortures imaginable. Clearly whatever was occurring here had been going on for a while. Some of the stitches looked many months
old. And as he walked on, his eyes clearing a little more, Stone saw that it was worse than he had first realized. The limbs
were all twisted around—elbows on backwards, knees pointed to the inside. Stone saw that one of the poor bastards had had
breasts implanted onto him, another an extra arm that had been sewn to his abdomen. The groans of these had an extra element
of suffering in them.

Stone thought he was going to puke. But even as he felt the bile rising he told his stomach that his head was going to get
hit again for sure if he upchucked all over the nice green suits. And his head wouldn’t like that at all. His stomach subsided.

“Here, scum,” the guard behind him said as they entered another room. This one was as large as the operating chamber, but
it contained electrical equipment, all kinds of implements that looked as if they could be used for torture. “Welcome to your
little personal entertainment center,” the greenshirt laughed. Stone was led to a long stainless steel table that had no one
on it. They pushed him into a sitting position and then slammed him back down on it, reaching out and tying his hands and
ankles at each corner of the thing. They then stood back, letting their weapons lower now that he was immobilized.

“Ah, you’re here, my timing is excellent,” a voice suddenly spoke out from behind the guards, who quickly stepped out of the
way and snapped to attention. They were clearly scared of the man by the sheer speed of their move-ments. But then, who wouldn’t
be scared shit of a bastard who ran an operation like this.

“Usually I’m late for things, I don’t know why, I try to be on time. But it’s a fact that all great men have always been a
little absent-minded about details.” Stone squinted as he tried to see the speaker against the bright lights, which filled
the ceiling. Pain was so much better when lit up. Whatever Stone had been expecting to look into view was not what ended up
standing before him. He didn’t even loom, being only about five feet and an inch or so tall. He looked more than anything
like an accountant, bland-faced, tightly combed hair, suit just so, brown and boring, everything so innocuous it was as if
he might just sort of slip away and vanish against the apparatus around him. Hardly menacing.

“Allow me to introduce myself. I do believe a doctor and his patient should know one another, don’t you?” He smiled a tight
quick smile that made his eyes twitch a few times. Stone didn’t return the gesture.

“I’m Dr. Wolfgang Kerhausen, head of surgical—and other procedures here in NAUASC. You and I will doubtless get to know each
other quite well.”

“Tell me, where did you learn how to inflict so much pain, bastard?” Stone asked, his face filling with flushed anger. “What
you’ve done to those men out there is—”

“Is science Mr. Stone, science. I am a man who is trying to advance the course of medical knowledge, of man’s ability to transplant,
to even grow new limbs.”

“But the suffering you’re putting those men through—it’s not justified. Nothing can justify that.”

“Ah, but you’re wrong there,” Kerhausen went on, as he motioned for his guards to get something and three of them rushed off
toward the far side of the room. “All is justified in the name of progress. I learned that well at an early age from the greatest
of teachers—the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. He understood that the use of war prisoners and Jews for medical experimentation was
progressive—even humanitarian. I was a young doctor then with the medical corps. I was lucky enough to be drafted into Dr.
Rulger’s Jew Dissection Unit, where we were given all the living bodies we could handle for years. It was in the early days
of microsurgery and transplantation—and damn, we learned a lot. Oh, I won’t admit we didn’t have our fun as well. There is
much fun in pain.”

“Not for me,” Stone said, pulling slightly at his bonds to see if there was the slightest chance of escape. There wasn’t.
He was held down with steel wire that looked like it could contain a raging bull.

“Ah, but you like the others have no choice. That is the way it all works. The great universal system of master and slave.
Some were meant to rule, others to be ruled and give their lives for and to the state. Some were meant to experiment, others
to be experimented on. It is all part of God’s plan.”

“I don’t think God has anything to do with your ‘experiment,’” Stone said bitterly. “And I think when you die, you might be
in for a big surprise.”

“Yes, I probably will, won’t I? I
am
looking forward to that. Quite curious. Anyway, we must get on with it. First of all, Mr. Stone, just so you understand what’s
going on. You’re not going to die. Not right now anyway. The Dwarf has his own plans for you. But I am allowed to play with
you for my own amusement, an appetizer before the main course. And knowing that you
won’t
die,
can’t
die, because the pain being produced is being controlled so precisely that it can bring you to within a fraction of an inch
of going over the abyss, but it doesn’t—oh, you’ll see quite soon.”

Guards wheeled a huge contraption with dials and hookups and cords with suckers on the ends of them. It looked crazy.

“I’m so proud of this machine,” Kerhausen said, as his white-gowned operatives cut Stone’s clothing free with scalpels and
then attached the appropriate suction pads and clips onto him. “It’s really quite amazing,” Kerhausen went on as he walked
slowly around the operating table looking down at Stone’s naked body like a banker counting money in his vault.

“This is a new generation in pain production equipment. It’s something I’ve been working on myself for the last four years,
since the Council of Ten installed me as the head of Medical and Information Collection facilities. It’s an all-purpose torture
machine. That is, it will affect every part of your body, Stone, not just the skin or flesh, but every part—you’ll see.”

Stone wriggled around as they hooked him to the thing but it was a futile struggle. They had him tied down like a calf at
a rodeo. They put a helmet over his skull which covered over his whole head down to the neck. Inside were earphones on each
side of the thing and a kind of screen built into the helmet just inches in front of his face which he could barely see by
the dim blue light it gave off. Electrodes were attached to various parts of his anatomy, including his testicles. Stone had
to admit he felt fear, down to the very core of his guts.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Stone?” Kerhausen’s voice came through the speakers inside the helmet, booming out. Stone didn’t answer.
“Hold onto your synapses.” Stone dimly heard the click of a switch and then he was thrust straight into hell. Everything was
exploding in on him. Sounds were booming and screaming like sirens and bombs all going off at once. Brilliant multi-colored
lights were being flashed onto the screen directly in front of his face, causing his eyes to instantly feel as if they were
on fire and burning horribly. But as bad as all that was, the pain shooting through his every nerve from the electricity being
delivered to him at two dozen points was absolutely overwhelming. Especially his testicles. He could feel his whole body jerking
violently around as his muscles pumped like mad, but because he could only move a few inches he kept slamming against the
chains, which ripped at his wrists and ankles and throat.

There was no time with such pain. Just radiating torture pouring through everything in a flood. Stone tried to keep his eyes
closed to at least protect them but the light was so intense that it went right through his eyelids like the rays of an atomic
bomb. The sounds seemed to grow, getting higher pitched, screeching out with feedback and the shrillest of sounds. He thought
his eardrums would surely tear under the wear. The agony was so intense, as Kerhausen had promised, it was hard to even know
where to feel the pain first. It was as if his mind darted from spot to spot searching for escape but finding none.

Suddenly the device was stopped and his body collapsed back down onto the cold steel table, every pore sweating out sheets.
He lay there quivering while his mind echoed back and forth in some other dimension, slowly coming back into this world. The
helmet was lifted from his head and Stone was relieved to find that at least that was all for the moment. As his eyes painfully
readjusted to the room light and he was somewhat amazed to discover that he could still see, Stone’s heart sank down against
his backbone. Now the bastard was standing next to a wheel-bottomed cart with Excaliber lying on it strapped down. The doctor
was smiling that same razor-thin smile. The bastard truly did delight in giving pain—to men, animals—the slime probably choked
daisies at night in his bed.

“And what did you think of our little multimedia light show, Mr. Stone? Did it live up to your expectations?” Kerhausen seemed
genuinely interested in the answer as he clearly loved his pet torture machine.

“Don’t hurt the fucking dog,” Stone managed to croak out through cracked bleeding lips that didn’t want to move.

“Oh, how sweet. He shows more concern for the animal than for his own flesh. A classic altruistic personality type. Just the
kind the Fuhrer was trying to exterminate. Come, little poochie,” Kerhausen said, scratching the unconscious animal under
the chin as he pushed the cart it lay on. “Let’s go to my animal lab for your own individualized treatment.” As he walked
off the white-robed lackeys reached over and placed the helmet back on Stone’s head. Oh Jesus, no, he prayed silently, feeling
his heart speed up in fear. The helmet was clamped shut and Stone lay there shivering against the cold steel beneath his back
and thighs and naked buttocks, wondering just what the hell he had done in a past life to deserve all this. Then the click
came again. And the pain with it.