Free War Weapons by Craig Sargent Page A

along the rising mountain road that led to the hideaway. Stone knew it had cost the Major nearly
     a million, maybe more, to build that place. It had been blasted and carved right into the side of a mountain that his family
     had owned, along with hundreds of acres, just north of Estes National Park. His father had started saying ten years ago that
     nuclear war was coming, that the country would collapse. And Stone had thought him a right-wing fool, an ex-Ranger and millionaire
     weapons-manufacturer who believed his own propaganda. He and the Major had fought over so many things in their years together,
     both outside and inside the bunker.
    Five years they had been in there. Five years. It seemed impossible, a meaningless number. Five years of his mother and father
     and sister all living inside walls, in a twenty-thousand-square-foot space equipped with all the most modern conveniences—kitchen;
     sauna; immense living room; separate bedrooms and living quarters; a war room filled with weapons and ammunition; experimental
     quarters, including Stone’s father’s computer center; and a firing range built in the back of the bunker, hacked out of the
     solid granite walls. Stone had hacked them a lot deeper during their firing sessions over five years. As much as Stone had
     resented the old man, in many ways he had come to see that the Major had been right about a lot of things. He had swallowed
     his pride and allowed his father to teach him. So for the first time, inside the confines of the world’s costliest fallout
     shelter, Major Clayton R. Stone had taught his son, Martin, all the tricks in the book—and those that weren’t, as well. His
     father had been the last of a tough, tough breed. The last of the Rangers—the ultra-special forces of the U.S. military services.
     And now he was gone. But somehow what he knew, and had stood for, lived on in Martin Stone. Whether Martin wanted it or not,
     he had been handed the mantle. He had been chosen to be the Last Ranger.
    “Thanks, Dad,” Stone spat out into the night air, which had now turned to an inky blackness as the stars and moon struggled
     to punch their way through the layers of clouds that drifted above the mountains. Stone grimaced as he hunched down lower
     on the bike to protect his lips and face from the now freezing winds. Excaliber sank down behind him, spreading all four legs
     around the leather seat like a starfish around a clam and hanging on with every bit of muscle power he could exert, which
     with a pitbull is enough to require a crane to extract him. Excaliber burped loudly behind him, snapping Stone’s mind from
     his moody wanderings. The dumb dog was always pulling him from depression. “Dog, what did I do before I met you?” Stone laughed
     into the night air, turning his head for a second. Excaliber sniffed back and let out a loud fart, then another, then a whole
     series. Though the bike was moving at about forty miles per hour, the wind streaming past Stone’s face to the back, he still
     got a whiff of the remains of the pitbull’s overindulgence in buck dinner and wished he hadn’t.
    “Jesus stinking Christ,” Stone yelled, turning again. “Keep your ass pointed south, dog—you hear me? I’m going to have to
     start feeding you Turns and Pepto-Bismol.” Although just where he could obtain either of those items in the barbarous, collapsed
     civilization that was now America was a little beyond him. But after a whole series of putts, burps, and little grunts of
     exertion, the dog suddenly spat up a well-browned eyeball of the mountain elk that he had gobbled down too fast. After the
     ejection of the eye, which Stone had the fortune not to witness or he might well have lost much of his dinner as well, the
     terrier settled down once again, trying to lie on its side, as its distended stomach felt hot and boiling with gas. It tried
     to remind itself not to eat so much or so fast the next time. But it knew as it did so