LAST RANGER: THE CUTTHROAT CANNIBALS

Book 8: Last Ranger

by Craig Sargent

Genres: Action & Adventure; Military Fantasy; War & Military

Synopsis

Determined to rescue his sister from her mob captors, Martin Stone must first face the Hungry, a group of cannibals who terrorize the postnuclear ruins of America

Release date: July 1, 1988

Publisher: Popular Library

Print pages: 133

Sample

THE strangest thing about an avalanche is how quiet it is at first. A few pebbles bounce noiselessly down a slope, or a little
ridge of snow from high on a mountain skitters down with no more sound than that of the wind through trees. It is almost like
a dream, at first. A thin veil of rocks or snow fills the distance, then the gray curtain seems to grow and expand in every
direction like a stain spreading across a piece of fabric. A mist shoots up violently from the ground and blots out the sky
above. And just before the moving wall of matter—the twisting maelstrom of dirt and snow and twigs and dead animals that it
has already consumed—strikes, the sound comes. And it comes with a terrible roar.


Martin Stone looked up startled as he pulled back on the throttle of his immense Harley 1200cc. A deafening noise seemed to
envelop his every cell as if a blanket of pure sound were descending on him. He was totally confused for a second as the sound
seemed to come from everywhere, from all around him. But it took only another second for his ears to pinpoint the truth. Then
he saw it—the wall of death coming down like the smashing hand of a jealous god. There was no way out.


“Jesus, mother of Mary,” Stone muttered through suddenly chattering teeth as he saw the waterfall of ice roaring down the
four-thousand-foot mountain slope straight toward him. In his stark and sudden terror Stone did not realize that the statement
he had just uttered was both biologically and theologically impossible.


Behind him there was a sudden low growl from the ninety-pound brown-and-white pit bull that lay clamped around the leather
seat like an oyster around a pearl. The furry head of the canine lifted up and its eyes opened, instantly growing to the size
of well-cooked eggs as the animal saw that it was about to die. But if the avalanche had the slightest bit of mercy in its
thundering soul, it was that it wasn’t going to give them both a hell of a lot of time to worry about it all.


Even as Stone ripped back on the Electraglide’s throttle so hard that the Harley did a wheelie for a second, the wall of white
and gray came down the steep slope like a tidal wave, fifty feet of sheer grinding annihilation. A sound emerged from the
very core of the thing, as if the gods were roaring out in pain. Then, before he could tear a hundred feet along the deer
path he had been driving down, hitting nearly sixty miles per hour in three seconds, the avalanche slammed into the motorcycle
like a million fists made of steel.


Stone didn’t know where the hell he was. In a split second he was out of the normal world and into a grinding hell in which
he was twisting around, as if inside a spin dryer. Somehow he hung onto the bars, gripping at the sides of the Harley with
his thighs. The avalanche lifted the bike right up onto the crest of the crashing wall of white. He was riding a fucking motorcycle
surfboard on an avalanche wave. For a second he heard the shrill squeals of the dog behind him even above the deafening roar
of total destruction. Then the thunder grew so loud he couldn’t hear a damned thing.


Suddenly he could see through the grinding mist that rose up everywhere around him. And he wished he couldn’t. Because riding
at the very forward curl of a fifty-foot wall of crashing ice and heading straight toward a wide ravine ahead was not exactly
Martin Stone’s primo choice of how to spend a crisp Rocky Mountain morning. But then, the avalanche didn’t give a shit about
his feelings. Avalanches were like that.


Martin Stone knew he was going to die. And in a paradoxical way, because he knew he was going to die, he relaxed deep in his guts. He’d known it was coming. That was for damned sure. From the moment he’d
left his father’s ultramodern mountain bunker, Stone had been living on borrowed time. When the major had been killed by a
heart attack and Stone had taken the rest of the family out into the New America—after five years of living behind granite
mountain walls—it had begun. First his mother had been raped, mutilated, and killed by bikers within just hours. Stone had
been beaten and left for dead, only inches from death. Now it was only him and his sister, April. And God knew what would
happen to her or what was happening to her right now, because he wasn’t going to be able to continue on his quest to find
and rescue her. Sorry sis, gotta die.


He seemed to hang up there, suspended on the very forward lip of the great avalanche as if it were the Perfect Wave that all
surfers spend their lives searching for. He must have been a good sixty feet in the air as the avalanche just grew even larger,
like an expanding conglomerate, as it shot down the slope. Somehow the bike was caught in the surging tip of the fall and
just kept plowing ahead, almost as if it were riding the thing of its own free will. The sky and the mountains flashed all
around him as the Harley bucked and shook, rose and fell ten yards at a time. Stone’s face and eyes were peppered with a cutting
ice as the spray shot out like a geyser from the rushing waterfall of frozen debris. It was bizarrely beautiful with the sun
still coming up and the sky all orange and glowing like the face of a Halloween pumpkin, the clouds shining with a luminescent
blue. It was beautiful if you liked dying.


Suddenly everything seemed to speed up into overdrive as the great wave accelerated. The whole world was spinning topsy-turvy,
blue and orange and white, until Stone thought he would vomit from the loss of gravity as he didn’t even know which way was
up. He felt as if he were on the edge of losing his sanity.


He heard the dog let out a piercing yowl behind him and realized he had forgotten that there even was a dog behind him. Suddenly
the bike with both of them hanging onto it like laundry onto a clothesline was sucked down into the lower regions of the pounding
snow. The snow blotted out the sky like dirt being shoveled over a corpse’s eyes, and in an instant Stone was being buffeted
every which way. He suddenly was ripped right off the bike and thrown around like a broken doll, his arms and legs snapping
out wildly in all directions, so powerful was the centrifugal motion created by the crashing ice and snow.


Stone took a deep breath but sucked in only thick slush that filled his lungs with a terrible freezing wetness. Then he was
tumbling end over end and could feel an incredible pressure—as if he was being crushed—coming from every side. The pressure
increased until he could feel his lungs being squeezed in, constricted as if he were in the grips of a python. It was over.
He couldn’t hold his fucking breath any longer, and Stone knew when he opened his lips the next time it would be the last
time. Ice, not sweet air, would fill his throat and lungs.


He ripped open his jaws and gasped, and air came pouring in. Stone threw his eyelids apart and saw in a flash that he was
falling. There was a river below, wide, with foaming brown water rushing along fast. The avalanche had reached the ravine
and tossed him right over. Stone’s eyes searched madly in the air as snow followed down in sheets all around him. For a moment
he thought he saw the dog scampering wildly in the air as if trying to swim. But then it vanished in the mists that were rising
as the snow hit the rapids below.


Stone felt the presence of something just above him and quickly arched his neck to see the Harley, perhaps twenty feet up
and hurtling down like a black missile on his tail. He ripped his head down again. The river was coming up at him like a brown
fist but it was worse than that. He was coming down not into the water but onto the jagged rocks lining the shore like rows
of waiting teeth. Somehow he spread out his arms and legs and quickly twisted his hips again and again, trying to pull himself
back out over the water. If the gods had been messing with him they suddenly gave him a break, for a moment anyway. A huge
load of snow over the ravine suddenly hit the river and sent up a cloud of mist and spray that caught Stone full in his spread-out
chest and legs. It pushed him with the kick of a mule about twenty feet further out from shore. But he didn’t have time to
say any thank you’s.


For the water was there, ripping up at him in a brown blur. He slammed into the rushing river and felt a jolt of intense pain
rip through his body as if he had just been stuck with a cattle prod. After all, he had fallen nearly two hundred feet. Stone’s
brain tumbled into complete darkness as the sheer impact of the fall was too much for his nervous system to handle. It just
went on overload for a few seconds, the timer fuse blowing out and then resetting as his body reached the end of its downward
trajectory about twenty feet deep in the water. The current plus the natural buoyancy of his body ripped him back up again
and he popped to the river’s angry surface like the bobber on a fishing line. Stone’s lungs filled deeply again just as his
head cleared the water and the breath brought him back to half-consciousness.


But, even in his semistupor, Stone could see that he was just out of the frying pan and into the flood. He was floating along
in the center of the swollen river, which was even wider than it had seemed from the air, and rougher too. The river was a
churning brown ocean capped with whiteheads and waves slapping wildly against one another like crowds of overenthusiastic
theatergoers. For just a moment his whole body was turned around in the current and, looking back, he saw his Harley. Broken
into pieces as if a bomb had gone off inside it, it was lying spread out among the rocks, flames licking up from its burst
fuel tanks. Well, I won’t be needing it anyway, Stone thought cynically even as the water playfully snapped him back around
front again, as if it had been showing him his past and now was going to show him his future.


It didn’t look too fucking bright. Ahead, the river got, if anything, more swollen and rough. He could see branches poking
up everywhere and carcasses floating all around, already bloated from the intake of water so they looked as if they’d been
dead for days instead of hours. Stone tried desperately to clear his fogged senses. He felt like he’d been Mickey Finned—everything
was in a fog, a haze of wet grayness. It was as if the curtain that draped over death’s very entrance was falling over him,
a veil from another world.


“Son of a bitch,” Stone suddenly spat out along with a mouthful of water. I ain’t gonna go that fucking easily, he thought angrily. If he had survived the fall maybe he could survive the crushing river ahead. On second thought maybe
not, Stone realized, as his waterlogged clothes began dragging him back under again. He could feel himself going down, and
try as he might there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to stop it. The saturated pants and jacket felt as if they weighed
a thousand pounds, and his own diminished strength, about that of a three-year-old, didn’t help matters any. Not when he was
being carried downriver through swirling currents and whipping foam playing with him as if he were a rubber duckie in a tub.
And even as he frantically tried to pull off the combat jacket he was wearing, Stone felt himself going down.


Then the sky, the light, disappeared from his eyes and he went under, just another unlucky creature swallowed up by the flood-swollen
river. He sank down a foot or so beneath the river’s surface, and for just a second he could see the dimness of the sky above
him through the water. It was like looking through the distorting lens of a broken camera. And just for that instant he swore
he saw a skull, dark and mocking, staring down at him. Then he was sucked down and his own skull was filled with a terrible
bursting pain.


* * *

From out of the jaws of the grinding river a demonic-looking face appeared, like some sort of creature from mythologies past.
It swam with rapid strokes of its four legs, which paddled away beneath the surface like wheels on a Mississippi riverboat.
And through the currents, through the swirling whirlpools that dragged animal corpses down into the river’s black stomach,
through the branches and whole trees that tore downriver smashing everything in their path, the pit bull swam, its eyes fixed
unerringly on the spot where it had just seen Stone disappear. His head bobbed up again for a flash, and even from the thirty
or so yards that still separated them the dog could see that Stone was in bad shape, his eyes closed, face blue. Then the
head disappeared and this time it didn’t come up again.


Like a duck heading for home the dog paddled even harder, shooting sideways through the rushing river. Suddenly it reached
the spot where Stone had gone down and without faltering in its motion curved its body and headed straight down into the water,
like some sort of furred dolphin. It swam frantically back and forth a few yards beneath the surface searching for him, but
could find nothing in the mud-swirling nether regions of the rapids. Then suddenly it saw him, caught in a swift rip current
about six feet down and being pulled fast. The canine shot in that direction, pushing with every ounce of its strength. And
even with that it barely moved an inch or two at a time. It seemed that the animal would never reach him, and it felt its
lungs screaming for air. But it knew that if it rose up it would never see the sucker again.


With a final surge it suddenly became caught in the same current that was pulling Stone. The dog shot forward and slammed
right into his chest. His arms and legs were just flopping around like something dead, but the dog didn’t wait to carry out
any examinations. It opened its jaws filled with teeth capable of snapping through steel plate. The jaws closed around Stone’s
collar and the animal pulled with everything it had. Up it rose through the murky waters, rising as though from a nightmare.
Somehow it broke surface and then headed toward the closer shore, about fifty feet off. The going was incredibly rough, for
the pit bull was trying to deny the very forces of nature. It snorted wildly hardly able to breathe with the heavy package
in its mouth. And Stone, completely unconscious and turning half purple from the water he had swallowed, was no help at all.
He was more like a corpse.


Then just as it seemed that the animal couldn’t go another inch, its eyes nearly popping from the Odyssean exertions of its
task—a sandbar suddenly came into view poking out from the bank about twenty feet off. The dog gave a final lunge, pushing
forward with all four feet at the same instant, and, with Stone’s shirt buried in its mouth, it slid forward up onto the bank
and out of the river’s deadly grasp. The animal pulled forward, never so happy to have been on solid ground in its life. It
dragged Stone, its four paws sinking deep into the watery sand, and after about twenty seconds had pulled him a good forty
feet back, off of the sandbar and onto the safety of the rocky shore. The dog sat back breathing hard, its tongue hanging
out of its mouth, its whole body trembling, chest rising and falling rapidly as it filled its lungs again and again with the
delicious oxygen. And as it greedily sucked in air it stared hard at its provider. But Stone wasn’t moving. Not a twitch.


STONE didn’t move for many minutes as the dog stared down at him, its eyes locked on his face like a priest contemplating the
beyond. Without realizing it, the animal had done perhaps the only thing that could have possibly made a difference to the
half-drowned Stone—it had set him down on his front, on his chest and stomach. The pressure of his own body slowly forced
the water in his lungs to ooze out so that a small trickle of muddy liquid dripped from between his lips and down onto the
sand just an inch below his face, which was turned sideways on the rocks. It was as if gravity itself was giving Stone artificial
respiration as the liquid just kept being squeezed from the saturated lungs until nearly a quart had come out.


Suddenly Stone coughed, a hacking, throat-wrenching sound that made even the dog feel a pain rush through its neck. He sucked
in a mouthful of sand on the intake. Sputtering and spitting, he pushed his arms down hard. They felt as if they were made
of rubber, but were able to generate enough energy to roll him over. For a few seconds Stone thought he was still underwater,
and he clawed at the air like an enemy as his lips drank in the cold oxygen. But then as he realized he was in fact able to
breathe, his eyes shot open, and he saw that he was alive and that a silver dollar of a sun was weakly cutting down through
a misty cloud cover above. To the side of the sun a huge furred face, with a long pink tongue lolling out of it, hovered over
Stone’s face, a drool of saliva pouring down right onto his nose.


“Christ, dog, don’t drown me all over again—okay?” Stone grunted, realizing even as he spoke that the damned dog was alive
. . .