Warlord's Revenge by Craig Sargent

Author:Craig Sargent [SARGENT, CRAIG]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780446566476
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-25T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Stone didn’t even pause to take a breath until they’d gone ten miles. The thought of the blanket of little squirming brown creatures did something to the center of his guts. Like his dog, Stone had problems with the idea of being eaten alive by insects too. But apparently that had just been a pocket of them, as they weren’t swarming out from every tree. Still, Stone realized he’d been seeing more and more of the little bastards since the bomb had gone off. The radiation either forced them from their burrows—or perhaps they were attracted by the multitude of dead things to eat. Carnivorous cockroaches. It made him shudder. In a few more years, if things kept going the way they were, there would doubtless be only roaches, sharks, and rats left on the damn planet, anyway. And they’d look around one day and realize that all their victims were gone. And they’d turn and stare at one another—and then go at it tooth and nail, until there was nothing left on the planet. Not a single living, breathing thing.

“There I go again,” Stone said, berating himself as he eased back in the seat a little. “I must have the most fatalistic brain this side of the torture chambers.” But when he thought about it, the sheer fact that he was alive and not in the gizzards of an entire suburb of roaches was something to cheer about. They drove on what was fairly flat land for about twenty miles, and Stone made good time. Then the two-laner turned to an asphalt one-laner that seemed to have been in the wrenching hands of an earthquake or something. As he rode along it, the road got so bad that, in disgust, Stone at last just rode right off the road and through the meadows and meandering hills.

But by twilight the sloping rises had turned to foothills, and the going got rougher and rougher, the trees in thicker bunches so that he kept having to skirt dense sections, zigzagging all over the damn Rockies. He tried to push it as night fell fast but found it almost impossible to keep going, so rough was the terrain; so dim was the light that soon they were moving just a few miles per hour, bouncing up and down like yo-yos as the bike’s tires went over ditches, bumps, every damn thing that mottled the flesh of the hills.

At last, exasperated and wanting to keep going but knowing, after his experience that morning, how easy it was to die if you didn’t watch your ass, Stone came to a stop as he spotted a bunch of boulders side by side at the foot of a thousand-foot slope off to the left. He pulled the Harley right up to the edge of one of the high boulders and, taking a few supplies along, hauled himself up the ten feet or so to the top, where a fairly flat space about six feet in diameter would make passable sleeping quarters.

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