The Damn Disciples Read Online Free PDF Page B

the doors. For five fucking years.
    Stone could feel their ghosts. He always could. It was as though they were right there. His sister, playing with her Maclntosh
     computer by the glowing logs in the fireplace, glowing electric the moment Stone entered the room. There was his mother knitting,
     her forehead pinched together as she thought about this or that design she was working on. And his father, down in his computer
     room, that ran the whole place. Doing God knew what—for five years. A great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live
     there. Only, Stone had.
    Ghosts! They were moving around now. In his fever and increasing delirium, Stone swore he could see their faces—his father
     all blue from his heart attack, his mother raped and mutilated by bikers only hours after they had left the place. His sister
     April—he couldn’t see her ghost. That meant
she
was still alive. But for how long?
    He headed past the plants still blooming, fed by hydroponic units, the goldfish off to one side, given food, oxygenated, every
     damn thing. The whole world on auto. Stone had a sudden bizarre thought as he wondered whether the fish got lonely. Cared
     for completely by machine. Not a human hand ever tapping the glass, eyes looking down. It was weird. He took the mutt to the
     kitchen, knowing it would drive him crazy for the job that lay ahead of him. A task that would be hard enough without some
     animal barking up a storm and tearing down the place. The dog’s hunger on top of the food smells in the kitchen made it go
     half mad with excitement the moment they walked inside. It leaped up and around in the air in a corkscrewing motion like some
     kind of dolphin out of water.
    “Cool it, garbage barge,” Stone said sharply. All he needed was for one of the animal’s leaping nips to take off his nose
     or chin or something that he’d rather keep. He’d seen what the canine’s dagger jaws could do. It was like standing next to
     a spinning propeller. Stone pulled out some cans at random from the well-stocked shelves above. His mother, who liked to cook,
     had been, in a claustrophobic sort of way, in heaven. With twenty years’ worth of sup-plies, canned food, frozen meats, and
     vegetables. Every-thing, even a gourmet chef would have been proud to use. Post—Collapse of Civilization chefs, anyway.
    But Stone wasn’t serving any flaming horse meat tonight. Wincing with pain as he held up one of the cans to the electric opener,
     Stone opened tuna fish, then undid a bottle of pickles, then pulled a frozen steak out of one of the freezers and threw it
     all down in a big Tupperware bowl.
    “Now eat slow, big boy,” Stone said with a smirk, knowing that was the last thing in the world the animal was likely to do.
     The dog tore into the feast like a great white shark hitting into a sea lion. Pickle chunks, frozen meat that shattered when
     the dog clamped into it—all flew off in different directions, splattering the floor and the side of the refrigerator.
    “Oh, God,” Stone muttered to himself, turning and limping off. Well, the dog would just have to lick up all that it had just
     centrifuged off—because Stone might not be around for a while. He hobbled back out to the connecting hall and down to the
     end of it. He keyed in a code on a small inset keyboard and a steel door slid open, allowing him entry. The place never ceased
     to amaze him. He walked into his father’s computer/communications/scientific lab—the thousand square feet of space where he
     had spent the last five years of his life, never allowing any of them to enter. Stone hadn’t ever seen the inside of the room
     until after the major’s death.
    And he had been in for a shock. For among the many things the major had been doing was filling a computer full of information.
     Everything that he had learned in his long career as a fighting Ranger in four different major wars—and he had lost track
     of how many minor, secret,