Free War Weapons by Craig Sargent

the wreckage and toward the boulder barricade. He
     lowered the huge 120-mm and began firing from a hundred yards off and kept firing, so that by the time they reached it, the
     wall had been pulverized and the three tanks were easily able to mount the debris with their thick climbing treads.
    Behind them, those mountain bandits who were left, those who could still move, gathered what was left of their gang and the
     two or three vehicles that still functioned and started heading slowly back to their mountain hideout. Many of the living
     were without hands, arms, legs. They would have to lay low for a while, pull back some of their operations, hide, heal their
     wounds. But for this particular band of cutthroats, murderers, rapists, and mutilators, though they couldn’t admit it to themselves,
     their backs were broken. They would never rule the mountains again. They had been destroyed.

CHAPTER

EIGHT
    T HERE’S SOMETHING about killing that makes a man hungry. Maybe it makes him feel his own mortality and want to fill up on as
     much chow as possible in case he is suddenly called to the great beyond. After all, who knows what’s to eat up or down there?
     Or how long a trip it is. Suffice it to say that when they stopped about four hours later after traveling nonstop on an almost
     perfectly northerly direction on the compass, the men were ravenous and lit into the food that Hartstein, who was turning
     out to be a pretty good cook, threw together from a deer that he had his gunner shoot with his 50-cal during the journey.
     He’d jumped down from the tank, slit its throat and chest to bleed the son of a bitch, and then had just let it sort things
     out on the back of the Bradley for the next few hours. There wasn’t a huge amount of the big buck left after the 50s had done
     their work, but there was enough for nine men and a dog.
    Which was fine with Stone. He wanted them to all be stuffed, too tired even to think. For he was close enough to the bunker
     now to check a few things out. He had three of them help him unhitch the Harley from the back of the Bradley and saw that
     it had taken a few shots in the body. But no lines or electrical connections had been severed, and the bike looked functional.
     Posting two guards, Stone told them he had to check out something ahead and would be back in several hours. They looked bored
     and waved him and Excaliber off as they roasted more strips of the meat. The pitbull was torn between the sizzling juices
     of the buck and accompanying Stone. But he knew instinctively that they were near the bunker and that somehow it was important
     for him to go with Stone. It was, after all, a fighting dog’s responsibility to be with his master at all major battles, wars,
     and reconnaissances. Or so Excaliber and his breed had always felt, since their warrior bloodline had been bred into their
     existence. Besides, there were a few foods that the bullterrier remembered from the bunker that it wouldn’t mind trying again.
     Already it was trying to plot some way of getting Stone to give it some treats.
    Things were going better with the crew than Stone could have hoped. But that only gave him a chance to worry about other things—about
     April. She hovered in his mind like a ghost, an accusing presence that said nothing but stared at him with big, helpless eyes.
     And always blood, blood spouting from her; from her face, her fingertips.
    The Harley flew through the frigid night, its sharp beam lighting up the darkness ahead. The woods on all sides of him grew
     still, menacing, with shadows suddenly dancing around as they were created and stirred up by the passing light of the motorcycle.
     The dog growled beneath its breath as it stared off into a grove of trees. Stone twisted the accelerator a little harder.
     He knew the animal was seeing something, sensing something, that humans couldn’t. Something that wasn’t friendly waiting out
     in those woods.
    But soon they were heading