War Weapons (15 page)

When they were completely out of view, Meyra rose again and pulled Stone to his feet.

“Sorry,” she said with just a glimmer of a smile flickering across her face. “I had to shut you up.”

“You can shut me up anytime you want,” Stone whispered back, his throat hardly capable of speech now, as the cold completely
swelled up the damaged cells that had been broken by the beatings. She dragged him on for what seemed like miles, Stone feeling
more dead than alive but aiding her with every bit of remaining willpower he had. He knew that if he faltered or fell, he
was a dead man. And he didn’t relish another meeting with his ant buddies back there, nor to see her graceful face eaten away
until it was blood-splattered bone. And those thoughts gave him the energy to go on. Stark terror is a strong motivator.

At last she stopped, and he felt himself leaning on something, something quite pungent. He opened his eyes and saw a horse—more
likely a mule, as its shoulders were lower than his.

“Get on,” she said, still whispering, as if she were afraid they’d be heard out there in the middle of nowhere. He leaned
toward the skinny thing and tried to climb on but just couldn’t muster the strength in his legs or arms for the job. He felt
embarrassed, stupid. A man always wants to be strong, particularly in front of a woman he finds attractive. And Stone could
hardly move a muscle. A three-year-old child would have beaten him at arm wrestling at that moment.

“Come on, big boy,” she said with a trace of amusement in her voice. “Let’s try to get this load on. After that you can rest.”
She grabbed him around the ass, taking a good handful with each hand, and started hoisting him up on the thing.

“Goddamn fucking son of a bitch, mother—” Stone snorted under his breath like a madman, so furious was he at his super-weakened
state. But as she pushed and he grabbed hold for all he was worth with his half working arms, fingers gripped around the mule’s
scraggly mane, somehow he made it up and onto the creature’s narrow back. Stone was draped right over the thing, its pointed
backbone poking into his stomach, which didn’t need any more work done on it right now. She took the reins and led the animal
forward, and the rocking, up-and-down motion instantly made Stone feel like his guts were on fire. But he knew he couldn’t
even raise himself up. Hardly able to breathe, his face turning red, he lay draped like a blanket, his face staring straight
down at the cold, brown dirt passing by below him.

Stone had totally lost track of time, so he had no idea how long they bounced along like this. It felt like centuries, but
it just as easily could have been hours or even minutes. But at last they came to a complete stop, and Stone felt several
pairs of hands peeling him off the back of the exhausted pack mule. Then he was being carried hand and foot into some sort
of tepeelike structure and laid down on a soft bed made of furs, warm and comforting like a woman’s arms. Stone felt his stomach
relaxing, ever so slightly, for the first time in hours. The others disappeared from the conical-shaped buffalo-hide structure,
and she closed the flap behind so they were totally sealed in. She struck something in the center of the floor of the tepee,
which was a good twenty feet wide at its base, tapering to about two at the top, which was opened up for the release of fumes
and smoke. A fire burst into being, and the warm flames instantly fell against Stone’s face some eight feet away.

“Now, let’s see what the bastards did to you,” she said, coming over to him and standing beside the bed. As if he were a sick
and limp child, she took off first the long coat, then the deerskin pants and moccasins she had clothed him in on the desert.
He vaguely knew what was going on, as a deep gray ness had now descended on him. The heat of the fire relaxed him more and
more. And he could feel her hands moving over him, up and down. She seemed to be washing him with something, then drying it
off. Then putting an ointment over him that instantly felt soothing and cool. In a way Stone felt embarrassed being naked
while she worked all over him. But then he had always been proud of his strong swimmer’s body and his well-endowed other features.
Still, he didn’t know what he looked like anymore, after the beatings and the ant picnic on his chest and face. And for some
reason, in the midst of all the madness and death around him, Stone found the most important thing was that he wouldn’t be
hideously ugly—like the monsters he had seen out there.

Then he did at last fall into the darkness again. But this time it was a loving darkness. A darkness in which the hands continued
to run across him and the warm fires caressed him, and the furs beneath his back felt so warm and endlessly soft, as if he
could swim in them. And Stone wondered in his dreamy state if perhaps he’d died and this was heaven.

But as he did fall into a deeper, almost comalike sleep, the heaven turned to hell, as the ants were upon him again. Only
this time he was both in his body feeling it all and ten feet above it, floating there like some kind of bird, as he watched
himself slowly disappear beneath the churning jaws of the carpet of blood-soaked ants. He could see his outer layers of skin
disappear, then the muscles beneath. Then his raw, pumping arteries and organs were attacked and eaten by the things one tiny
bloody bite at a time. Until he was just a single beating heart lying on the prairie floor surrounded by ivory bones that
glowed in the moon-carved night. And then the ants closed in on the heart as it seemed to almost roll away from them, propelled
on little arterial feet. But they caught it, and they bit into that too. And when the last bite had been taken, mere was nothing
left. And Martin Stone floated in his dream above the nothing that was now himself. And he felt himself crying that he was
dead—more that this body was gone and he wouldn’t have a burial, wouldn’t even sink into the dirt and become flowers and trees.
And the tears fell and watered the ground where his body had been, wetting the bones with little waterfalls of liquid silver
that danced across them.

Suddenly he was awake again. She was sitting next to him and stroking his face slowly, with such delicacy and grace that it
sent goose bumps up his spine, an electric sense of her presence and warmth.

“You were crying in your sleep,” she said softly.

“I—I—” Stone started to protest, not even knowing what it was he was protesting.

“Shh,” she said, again laying her fingers across his lips. “Don’t protest. All men—especially the men of my tribe—are afraid
to cry. But it releases the poisons, the toxins. It is the body’s way of healing from the inside, as I try to heal you from
the outside.” She pulled back the blanket that had been half covering him and reached down for a gourd filled with a green
paste.

“It is just as well you awoke,” she said. “It is time for me to put another layer of medicine on you.”

“What is it?” Stone asked, his one good eye looking up at her and trying to get her in focus in the flickering rays of the
fire that burned calmly in the center of the tepee. His mind felt a lot clearer than it had before—at least he could remember
his name, knew vaguely where he was, and probably could have added up two and two, which was a hell of a lot more than he
could have accomplished just hours before.

“I wonder if you really want to know,” she said, smiling down at him, and he saw that she was even more beautiful than he
had thought. She took a handful of the strong but not repulsive-smelling stuff, slapped it down on his chest, and then began
smearing it off in all directions as if fingerpainting across him. “It’s rattlesnake liver, cactus pulp, lizard tails, bat
saliva, and two kinds of poisonous plants, fatal if eaten. Satisfied?”

“I shouldn’t have asked.” Stone smirked, remembering as he did so that he shouldn’t smirk, for an electric jolt of pain shot
across his jaws and mouth.

“You have a beautiful body,” she said softly as she continued to spread the ointment across him. She looked coyly at him.
“Does that embarrass you?”

“It embarrasses me because I keep thinking they really fucked me up—that I look like hamburger. Tell me, do I have all my
teeth? Does my right eye work, or is it … gone?”

She burst out laughing and slapped him on the chest, which sent waves of pain through his whole chest and stomach. “Sorry,”
she said, suddenly putting her hand over her mouth as she realized she had hit him. “I laughed because—no, you have not lost
anything, as far as I can see. You were beaten up—that I can see—badly. Every part of you is black and blue. And those ants,
they just started in on you, but I got there pretty fast, once I saw them lay you out.” Stone felt himself growing dizzy again,
but he struggled against it. He was getting tired of heading for dreamland whenever he got a little breathless.

“Who—who—are you?” he choked out, suddenly coughing, and she raised his head and fed him some strong herb-flavored water that
soothed his throat almost immediately.

“I am—we are—Cheyenne,” she said, her face taking on a proud, defiant look. “There are few of us left now—very few. But those
who are, are tough—and we survive.”

“Why—did—you save me.” Stone asked, suddenly able to speak slightly louder as the Cheyenne throat medicine seemed to smooth
things out in mere a little.

“We—hate Patton,” she said bitterly, getting a look on her face that Stone was thankful was not directed against him. “He
has killed many of what few of my people are left,” she said, her eyes going from calm brown to storms of hate. “We lived
not bad lives after the disaster that befell the country. After all, we had little to lose compared to others—to the white
man. And as we gave up our reservation life and readapted to the hard land, we got strong again. Those of us who survived.
But when Patton showed up a year ago and built his fortress, at first we thought that perhaps the government would be friendly
to the Cheyenne even if no one else would. And those who went to meet with him were tortured and killed—every one of them.
One was my father, Fighting Bear, a strong and gentle man. Then he hunted us down, sent out unit after unit to get us. Tanks,
shooting Indians off horses, cannon blowing up tepees and children. It was like the good old days all over again,” she said
bitterly. “Like the first massacres when this land was stolen from us.”

“I know,” Stone said, looking up sympathetically at her. He knew what it was like to lose those closest to you, to say the
least. “I guess Indians are on his extermination list too.”

“We saw your tanks come into the valley—we see everything that goes on for miles around. And the battle—the trap you were
led into. When I saw them bring you out of the fort, I knew you were the leader of the strike force. They would never waste
all their time, have General Blood himself come out for the occasion. So I helped you.”

“We’ve got to get out of there,” Stone said, suddenly rising up on his elbows, or trying to, as both appendages collapsed
instantly beneath him like ropes. “The bastard has an atomic missile. When he finds out I’m gone, he’ll—”

“Shh,” she said again, pushing him back down with the palm of her hand. “It will wait until morning. Even death has the etiquette
of letting a man get a good night’s sleep.”

M
EYRA LIT a stick of strong-smelling herbs that made Stone feel as if he were floating even higher than he already was, and
then she spread the Cheyenne healing paste down over his arms and chest and stomach. When she reached his manhood, she didn’t
pause but spread the green stuff there, too, and Stone, being a man, began to stiffen. He sensed her breath coming more quickly,
the heat of her body just inches away from him. She held him in her hands as he grew like a tree in time-lapse photography.

“Oh,” she moaned between suddenly clenched teeth, looking down at what she held. And then it was as if she entered another
realm of herself, for her back arched like a cat’s and she moved alongside him, groping frantically with both hands at Stone’s
organ. She groaned again, and Stone heard himself make a similar noise as she ran her hands and fingers all around the fleshy
staff like it was something mystical, a wand of power from some magic kingdom. She began running her hands from the base to
the tip, over and over, making him even bigger and thicker so that he felt his own hips thrusting up in involuntarily animal
motions. Suddenly she was bending over him, and her hot lips and mouth enclosed on the enflamed knob. Stone felt himself sink
nearly all the way into her, and he could hardly take the sensations. His body still ached in every spot from the experience
of the last twenty-four hours, yet her burning fingers and mouth were driving him into a frenzy. And somewhere inside of him,
at the deepest part of the sexual motor that drives a man, a wave of desire and lust and the will to live overtook him. And
he wanted her, desperately. Wanted the strength to take her as a man should.

He commanded his sore, bruised arms to rise, and somehow, as if he were pulling the strings of a puppet—only the strings were
made of rubber and the arms just sort of dangled—Stone made the half dead limbs move. He raised them forward through the air,
made the fingers reach for her firm, hanging breasts, which fell over his stomach as she moved up and down on the long, stiff
shaft, emitting groans and whistles of animal desire and sexual hunger. He cupped one of the firm, copper-colored breasts
in his hands, and the nipple seemed to harden and rise up between his fingers. He squeezed it hard, and she groaned and took
him even deeper into her throat, opening up for him, the way a woman does for a man she wants. Then he was just kneading her
breasts with both hands, squeezing them back and forth, almost like a child squeezes its mother.

Then he wanted her. He let his hands fall down around her waist, and he pulled her up toward him. Slowly she came at his command,
and he lay back down on the bear furs as she was now kneeling on top of him. She rested the palms of her hands on his chest
and then sank down on top of him, letting her lips slowly rest against his. She kissed him softly over and over, her hips
pushing against his. He could feel the heat coming from between her legs, and in the throes of passion that Stone could hardly
believe he was experiencing in his racked and torn body, he reached down and cupped her around the furry slope that was releasing
its own perfumes. She groaned again and seemed to buck beneath his grip, then spread her legs wide, giving him access to her.
She slid her garments off as he touched her and opened her with his fingers.