Free Warlord's Revenge by Craig Sargent Page A

as she realized she
     had let her guard down. Leaping Elk, all six-feet-four of him, suddenly moved forward like a charging bull, his long blade
     slashing out at her.
    “She demanded it,” Shining Eagle said. “She was the one who demanded the Trial of Knives. They must be allowed to—” But Stone
     wasn’t listening. Not when the Cheyenne woman was about to join her ancestors in a hurry.
    “Fuck that shit,” Stone spat out with the simple but eloquent words of someone who wasn’t about to be stopped. He gripped
     both of his hands together and in a flash slammed back and forth with his elbows into the faces of each of the Cheyenne braves,
     who staggered backward in a total daze. Bringing his arms forward with the reverse motion, Stone used the energy to launch
     himself ahead so that he shot forward the twelve feet separating the battling Cheyenne from himself like a projectile. Even
     as Stone moved, his mind thinking at lightning speed, he calculated in millisecond computerlike debate whether to reach for
     his pistol or knife, which were equidistant from his right hand, since he would be upon the fight by the time he got either
     of them out.
    In a quarter second Stone decided to go for the knife, and his hand snapped down toward the hilt, gripping it hard. By a half
     second he had it coming out and up in a tight arc. Then everything speeded up like a film coming loose from its sprockets.
     At the last second Leaping Elk, whose blade was almost at Meyra’s throat, somehow sensed Stone coming. His attention was pulled
     around as he slackened his attack for a second. That was Meyra’s opening. With the speed and power she had learned first from
     her father, one of the finest Cheyenne fighters in the territory, and later from her brother, the indian woman, barely twenty
     years old, snapped her right leg up with all her strength.
    Leaping Elk took the kick full in the stomach and it sent him flying backward so he careened right past Stone, who didn’t
     have time to react either. The Indian somehow caught himself from falling and came to a stop about three yards back. He sneered
     at Stone.
    “You. You think you can get me? You’re a fool.” The Indian laughed that crazy laugh again. And Stone saw that the foam around
     his mouth had increased so that it now covered his lips completely. His radioactive hand, the one not holding the hunting
     blade, was nothing but a dripping mass now, a gelatinous blob of red and purple that no longer even had fingers or much of
     anything except a bulbous shape, with pus that oozed out and fell from scores of grape-sized boils.
    “You can walk away,” Stone said as he let his knees relax and sink and, slowly, as if hardly moving, began angling himself
     to prepare for the brave’s attack. “And I won’t follow. Just walk, man—walk
now
!”
    “Walk?” The Cheyenne laughed again, and blood began streaming from his nose, mixing with the white foam like shaving cream
     around his jaws. “Why walk when I have the magic hand?” The brave laughed again. Every time he laughed now, it seemed to send
     a little geyser of blood out of his nose, or his ears, or some part of his being. It was as if the body was actually decomposing
     from within, the radio cative poisons he had breathed in, eaten, burned into himself had gone to work with a vengeance. He
     was dissolving inside, just a dammed-up wall of blood and cancerous cells ready to burst.
    “The magic hand!” The Cheyenne laughed again. He held the diseased, rotting stump-claw up and waved it at Stone. Little pockets
     of slime and red and brown liquid glistened in the flickering rays of the fire as they sprayed into the air. Stone jumped
     back, as fast as a jackrabbit. He sure as hell didn’t want to get any of that radiocative stew on him. He had just decided
     to reach for his gun, now that he was slightly out of range, when Leaping Elk charged with such speed that Stone was taken
     by surprise. He stopped his