Last Ranger (6 page)

Suddenly April’s mouth flew open and a geyser of vomit spewed up into the air as she flew back and away from the outstretched
stumps. A spray of the stuff landed on the Dwarf’s face and shoulders as she collapsed onto the floor, her overloaded nervous
system unable to cope with the love affair. The Dwarf stared down at her, his face a mass of quivering rage as underlings
rushed forward and dabbed at the puke with wet cloths. He was ready to kill but pushed it down as he didn’t want even those
“closest” to him to see. He especially didn’t want them to see. He laughed loud and shrill, setting even the dullest of ears
on edge.

“She loves me so. Ah, she is overcome with emotion and tenderness. Ours will indeed be a fruitful union. Take her things to
be sewn, we will move on with the wedding plans at full speed,” the Dwarf commanded his lackeys. They quickly dressed April,
putting a loose fitting pajama-type outfit they had been marching her around in for the last week since the Dwarf had taken
her prisoner and become engaged to her all in one fell swoop.

“Give her more drugs,” he whispered, gritting his capped teeth. “She needs more.”

“Yes, Great One,” the three-armed man replied, saluting with all three arms at once. “More drugs. We shall bring love to her
heart through the molecule, not the myth.”

“What is the union of pure blackness and perfect light?” the Dwarf asked the three-armed man.

“Gray, excellency, it can only be,” the three-armed servant replied, bowing slightly as no one could look him directly in
the eye. Not that anyone wanted to.

“No, it is a blackness that can absorb the rainbow. A blackness with the qualities of white. A master color, Skarnoff. A color
above all other colors capable of absorbing all of them as well. A ruling color, Skarnoff.”

“Yes excellency, I understand.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” the Dwarf laughed. He needed Skarnoff for he was the most intelligent among the Dwarf’s underlings, and feared
him as well, for he was immensely powerful. And fear was not permissible in the Dwarf’s world. Yet he didn’t wish to kill
him, for the man had been loyal and obedient. He had helped the Dwarf kill many men and would doubtless kill more. As long
as the man didn’t flinch when Dwarf looked at him, didn’t betray the slightest aura of traitorousness, he would let him live.
And the Dwarf could tell when they were lying. He could always tell.

“But now,” Dwarf said, slamming his left stump into the panel of the chair so it swiveled around and headed toward a large
list that had been spread out on a table. He came to a stop in front of the thing and rose up on his stumps leaning forward.

“Yes, meats, wines, fruits, drugs—all is here, excellent, excellent.” Suddenly his eyes froze on one of the pages.

“What’s this here?” he asked, his voice rising. “There are no doves here to release as I requested. In my dream, there were
always doves. There must be, you hear me,” the Dwarf was shrieking now at full pitch, his thin veneer of patience gone. “If
you have to catch pigeons and paint them white do it and don’t tell me, but there’d better be some fucking white doves at
my wedding—or your heads will have feathers glued onto them and be thrown into the air.” The dove procurers went fleeing from
the chamber like they were running from the devil himself.

D
RIVING nonstop through the night Stone figured he made a few hundred miles which wasn’t bad considering. He hopped a few back
country roads, but couldn’t hook into anything big or that lasted for very long. Most of the time it was over bumpy and fissured
prairie land which seemed to stretch off forever. It was just nearing dawn, the sky starting to turn an ocean blue, when he
saw a sign toppled to one side of the two-laner he had found and been cruising for an hour.

“
WELCOME TO THE LONE STAR STATE OF TEXAS
.” And something else greeted him within minutes as he drove on into the state of giant everything—giant craters standing
on each side of the road like an apocalyptic welcoming committee. Stone shuddered, he hated the damn things, not least because
there was no way of knowing whether or not they were still radioactive. That was the thing about the stuff—it was invisible,
yet could kill you as surely as a bullet or a knife, only worse. Still, these were far enough off the road, each at least
two miles away, so that Stone figured he’d just move fast through it all and hope for the best.

But within another ten minutes of driving he saw that there were craters dotting the whole landscape. This part of northwest
Texas looked like it had been hit with a fucking barrage of the things. Stone knew there were air force bases out here, and
other military complexes. But it looked like overkill to say the least. As he scanned the land in the light of the hesitantly
arriving dawn he could count ten of them within his range of vision in all directions of the compass. Maybe someone had the
bright idea of setting the oil fields of Texas on fire. All of them—and sending the whole damn state up in a blast of black
smoke that would have been visible from the moon. But though they had bombed the shit out of everything in sight, no super
oil fire seemed to have erupted.

Stone drove on, keeping on the road because it gave him much better time than the bumpy wastelands. But he grew increasingly
nervous about the craters as another one just ahead seemed to come almost up alongside the two-laner. He slowed down as he
rounded a bend and saw the thousand-foot-high mound of rock and dirt like something from the dark side of the moon sitting
just ahead about five hundred yards from the road. It towered over the roadway impossibly big and thick, and clearly man-made,
for nature in her worst disasters never made things that looked quite like this, filled with an aura of death, the scent of
it riding on the wind.

It was with disbelieving eyes that Stone saw a shack built just off the side of the road, right beneath the shadow of the
great crater. He slowed the bike down and looked with even more amazement when he saw that people lived there, kids and dogs
jumping around in front of the place. And a big sign hung lopsided up on the caved-in roof.

“SAM’S STORE.” And beneath that in smaller letters, apparently the store’s motto: “You want it—we ain’t got it.” He pulled
into the place, figuring he could afford a minute or two in the proximity of the crater to see what the hell was going on.
Stone could see one thing instantly as he drove in and put both feet down on the ground coming to a full stop. The kids were
dying. They had all kinds of cancers growing on their skins, teeth missing, hair gone in big clumps from their small heads,
leaving bloody gouges up top. Stone felt his Spam dinner rising up like a steer coming out of the gate. Even the dogs, running
around like the playful animals they were, were missing huge clumps of hide, one had no ears, another a toothless mouth with
oozing gums. How the hell could they all live this way? Didn’t they understand the reasons for what was happening to them?

“Howdy mister,” a voice said from out of the doorway of the shack and a figure walked out. It was a man about Stone’s size
who looked even more fucked up than the kids. He couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, and had sores covering every
bit of his exposed flesh. Not a strand of hair remained on his head, just thousands of little red dots where hairs had once
been. A single tooth remained in the middle of his mouth. Yet somehow the mouth was smiling and the man walking toward Stone
acting as if everything was just fine.

“Need anything, stranger? We ain’t got a hell of a lot in stock to be perfectly honest with you, that’s why we got the sign.”
He grinned. “But what we do got ain’t rotten, broken, or dying. And we got the best prices in the North Texas region. That
I swear to you on a bible.” Up close Stone could see the guy was completely falling apart. It was as if his very flesh was
rotting at the seams, as if everything inside might just burst out some day pretty soon right now.

“Say, I know this is probably a dumb question,” Stone said with a shy smile as he sat back on the bike, letting his hands
fall from the bars, but keeping the engine running. “But did you ever notice that you were living right next door to an authentic
atomic bomb crater? And that you— and your family—seem to have developed a few medical problems from it?”

“Oh heck, that,” the man said, waving his hand at the crater like it was some old horse from the next county come to eat his
garden. “Shoot, them things is all around these parts as far as a man can ride. These bumps and stuff,” the man said, running
his hands over his diseased flesh. “Everyone roun’ here got em. That’s just the way we all is now. Everyone.”

“I see,” Stone said numbly. What could he say? Or do. The world was far beyond his ability to influence more than a few micrometers’
worth, if that. Who was he to even judge? These poor bastards had to adjust to what they had. And they had. So what if their
lifespans were ten years or less. Or that their bodies were dripping swamps of ooze. People seemed able to get used to just
about anything.

“So what kin I do you for mister? We got some good deals on cans of lima beans, three of them and not one rotted open yet.
Got a jar of mustard—unopened,” the man said proudly. “Got a can of genuine Budweiser beer. Was opened years ago, but we sealed
it up again, you can still taste the original flavor. Whole can for a buck, a sip for a dime. We got—”

“Thanks,” Stone said, shaking his head from side to side. “But I don’t think so.” The very thought of eating a single bite
of the super-irradiated food, which had been soaking up God knew what for years now, was not something that Stone was about
to pay money for. “Tell me, am I on the right road to Amarillo? I’ve got—some business there.”

“Sure the hell are. Jes’ keep going straight ahead ‘bout thirty miles or so. Then you’ll see this big ol’ highway. It’s busted
up pretty bad in places, but with a cycle you could probably get through. Amarillo? Jeeez.” The man seemed impressed by the
idea. A mythical place far beyond anything he would ever reach again in his short moist life. “I was there once, can’t even
remember when now. But it was a big damned place, I remember that.”

“Well listen,” Stone said, revving up the bike. “You all take care now.” He smiled at the kids who grinned shyly back. They
were cute in a grisly sort of way beneath the sores and the flaking flesh and the cracked lips. Kids were kids, even when
they were radioactive.

Stone could hardly bear to look at the entire assemblage all staring at him. One of the dogs jumped up to be petted but tumbled
back to the ground, hardly able to get up the energy. It fell over on its three working legs, the fourth a shriveled up little
leathery thing, and squirmed around the ground pushing itself in a circle but unable to quite rise. Stone closed his eyes
for a second and then opened them and started forward. He didn’t look back.

As he drove along he saw others as well. The region was actually quite well-populated considering he hadn’t seen a soul for
about a hundred miles. And they all had the same radioactive afflictions covering their bodies. Shacks along the roadway were
selling all sorts of things—foods, skins, artifacts from the past. And all of them were burnt and half destroyed—pelts hanging
on a wall were actually burned through with holes in some places. Yet people were buying the stuff. To this crew it was all
normal. A whole society based on the acceptance of radioactivity in everything, even themselves.

Stone wondered what happened to them when they died as he didn’t see a single body lying around anywhere. With this bunch
one would think death would be an hourly occurrence. But as he drove on past three more craters about five miles apart he
came upon a line of several dozen of the dying. They were marching along slowly as if they had all the time in the world—which
they didn’t, seeing how they were rotting as they walked. These were even worse off than the ones he’d already passed, skin
hanging off bone, faces dissolved down to the skeletal core. Drops of red and brown dripped from tears in their clothes, which
were numerous. They had their arms atop the shoulders of the one in front of them like the blind leading the radioactive blind.
And some clearly were without their sight anymore, with sockets filled with pink and black custard.

They took not the slightest heed of Stone as he drove slowly by them. The leader of the group looked the most diseased of
all with no face whatsoever, just a mass of raw flesh and some holes where a mouth and nose and ears should be. Yet he led
them forward with purpose, one shrunken leg slamming down, then the next. Stone gulped and turned away from the face which
did not deign to look toward him. They were of two different worlds, heading in different directions.

Stone wondered just where the hell these guys were in such a mind to get to, but as he drove ahead about two miles he saw
where they were going: to their burial ground. This was the field alongside the road where their ancestors had already marched
the same trek. The dead fields on which not a thing grew were filled with bones and still-rotting corpses. There must have
been hundreds of them, with their bones spread out for an acre or more. Some of the skeletons were in the shadows of the rocks
that rose here and there, and Stone could see in the dimness that they glowed. The place must have been a sight at night,
with all the remains glowing up a storm. A man could open an amusement park, or a restaurant across the road. The Eat By The
Light of the Radioactive Dead Chow House. He wondered if he was cracking up.