Free The Damn Disciples by Craig Sargent

sure, Stone thought darkly. In the game of life and death, it was only
one
strike and you were out.

EIGHT
    Stone’s heart didn’t slow down to something approaching normal for a good three hours and a hundred and fifty miles. Being
     attacked by psychotic sports teams was something new even for Stone, who thought he had seen just about everything by now.
     But that was far from the case, he saw as he came around a curve on the interstate and viewed a sight to freeze any man’s
     eyeballs. Two immense H-bomb craters were set about a mile apart. They were gargantuan, towering up into the skies like some
     sort of mythical creations; the land around them was relatively flat. They were a half-mile in diameter, and their circular
     craters rose up a good thousand feet before cresting out to a twenty-foot-wide ridge and then sloping back down inside again.
     Monuments that would survive long after the men who had created them were dust in the ground. Mountains to madness. Towers
     marking the fatal flaw of man—his genius at creating death.
    Stone eased down on the throttle. The craters stood on each side of the interstate, their very lower edges almost touching
     the side of the road, coming to within yards. Stone wasn’t sure just how close he wanted to allow himself to get to these
     atomic anthills. He had no way of knowing how radioactive they were or weren’t. But as he drew closer to the twin craters,
     Stone’s nervousness about proceeding increased with every yard the bike rolled forward. Both craters, he could see now as
     the sun was falling from the sky and bluish darkness was setting in above, were glowing. One was a bluish color, the other
     green, as if they had been hit by different types of bombs or radiation. Stone’s eyes grew wide as he turtled on ahead, for
     the craters were different in another way as well. The right-hand crater was dead, black as the dark side of the moon, pockmarked
     and covered with a volcanic ash. But the other was…alive…or something. It was the “or something” that Stone didn’t like. For
     every second that he drew closer, he could see what looked like numerous wriggling and slithering things nearly covering the
     whole slope of the skyscraping crater.
    He stopped the bike and took out his field binoculars from a box behind him as Excaliber snorted nervously on the seat. The
     pit bull kept sniffing at the wind, taking deep breaths and then making a strange expression. Something was up. God knew what
     it was. Once Stone got the crater, only about a quarter-mile off, in focus, he felt like vomiting. For the undulating worms
     that covered the whole side of the bomb crater were like nothing he had seen in his life. And he wished he hadn’t seen these.
     They didn’t look like they belonged on this earth. They ranged from two to five feet long, about a foot in diameter, and were
     covered with spikes and quills and all kinds of ugly stabbing things. Stone didn’t know if they were animal, vegetable, or
     a combination of both. The tubular things seemed more or less anchored to the ground. But they sure as hell could bend all
     over the place, reaching out with long grasping snouts that appeared—though he couldn’t see clearly in the twilight—to have
     rows of teeth that hooked backward like sharks’. They kept vacuuming down along the ground around them all over the crater.
     Stone could barely see some little creatures moving down below along the slope, though what in God’s name could be up there
     he didn’t think he wanted to meet either.
    Suddenly one of the tubes that he happened to be focused on caught something and lifted it up, holding its prey in its spiked
     snout. Just before it chewed down hard, Stone got a good look at its catch. It looked something like a frog, a frog that was
     bloodred and had two reptilian heads and long hooked claws instead of webbed feet, and numerous other revolting features.
     But even as Stone watched, the thing exploded