Warlord's Revenge Read Online Free PDF Page B

time to get going before it slammed into the kings fur-covered chest. At the range of twenty-five
     feet, the shell was traveling at such high speed that it tore through his chest and into his backbone before the detonator
     encountered just enough resistance to detonate. The mountain murderer and his horse were blown in a hundred different directions,
     sending scores of their fellow bandits and mounts flying down like bloody bowling pins. Screams and whinnies of terror filled
     the air even above the cracks of pistols and automatic weapons.
    Stone raised his head just enough to see the ranks of horsemen trying to get a bead on them. He swept the 50-caliber back
     and forth across the bandits—and they fell like moths in a backyard light clumsily to the earth. Here and there the horses
     took shots, too, and reared back, kicking around in the dirt. Others threw their riders and tore off up the valley slope to
     escape. Again the Bradley roared, and Stone found it so deafening that he couldn’t hear a thing. Everything was suddenly occurring
     in absolute silence, so it almost looked beautiful, a ballet of fire and death—the flames and puffs of smoke coming from all
     directions, the shells from the tank going off about thirty yards to the left, dead center of a large formation of the attackers.
    The group disappeared for a moment in an eruption of flame and dirt, and as it quickly cleared, men and horses were flying
     off as if in a race with death, a race most of them had just lost. They tumbled through the air, broken, with missing arms,
     flanks, heads, from the sheer force of the blast. Blood sprewed out from the newly created holes in jets of purest red.
    And just like that, it was over. Half their force dead in ten seconds, the rest of the stunned bandits looked around in terror
     at each other, turned, and ran. They were animals now—without their leader, who lay in flakes somewhere. Beyond pride, beyond
     anything, they just wanted to survive.
    Stone held his arms up as the remaining horses and their riders scrambled up and over the valley slopes, telling his men not
     to fire. The Bradley ceased its thunderous volleys, and after a few more pops, so did the Cheyenne behind him. Ammunition
     was too precious a commodity to waste in the murderous landscape that was America. Within seconds all the bandits were gone,
     and only the dead or pieces of them were left, strewn around the ground as if a picnic of vampires and werewolves had just
     finished using the area.
    “I warned them,” Stone muttered to the afternoon wind as it brought the scent of horseflesh to his already burning nostrils.
     “Don’t say I didn’t warn them.” He looked up at the afternoon sky, which was already growing dark, as if pleading with it.
     The atmosphere was filling with high clouds that seemed to glow in the twilight, the dimmest of electric auras around their
     mountainous shapes.
    Stone started the Harley forward and past the charnal grounds as the rest of the men followed on their vehicles. Not one of
     them talked. The annihilation was too complete, too fast to feel particularly heroic about. Only Leaping Elk, taking up the
     rear, laughed and hummed to himself as he slowed to look at the pieces of bodies, fingers, and eyeballs floating around in
     the blood-soaked prairie sands. He seemed to get a big kick out of it all, chuckling over each little mutilation, each severed
     part. At last, tiring of it, he floored his cross-country and shot out over the puddles of blood, spitting them up in a red
     mist behind him as he moved into the low hills after the others.
    It took only minutes after the battle, after Stone and his men had departed, for the predators to emerge from their wretched
     holes. Hundreds of them at first, then thousands, came up out of countless little tunnels in the earth, brown, wriggling bodies
     that inundated the death grounds with blankets of hunger.
    Cockroaches. Nature’s most perfect creature. The