Free Warlord's Revenge by Craig Sargent Page B

motion in midair and, realizing he didn’t have time to regain his balance, fell down backward
     just as the Indian’s knife hand descended from the sky like the cleaving sword of the great Cheyenne war gods.
    The blade passed less than an inch away from Stone’s left shoulder, but Stone, as he fell to the ground, slammed the point
     of his fourteen-inch Randall custom bowie straight into the Indian’s chest. The knife went in sideways, slipping between two
     ribs right at the top of the rib cage. Stone slid the length of the Cheyenne’s chest, letting the full weight of his own body
     falling bring the knife straight down. Like a butcher’s cleaver, the long hunting blade cut straight down and through the
     chest and stomach, splitting the entire mid-section of the Cheyenne open like a gutted steer. The heart, intestines, organs,
     every damn thing that pumped and churned away inside the Indian’s body, exploded out as if shot from a slingshot. The fleshy
     debris filled the air in a tornado of red.
    Stone ripped the knife out as it reached the Cheyenne’s pelvic bone and continued his own fall so that as the exploding body
     organs erupted forward, he was going in the opposite direction. He rolled along the ground in a tight ball. When he came up
     to his feet and spun around, the Indian had already fallen straight forward, stretched out full-length. He lay motionless
     in the garbage dump of his own organs, heart sliced in two, each side still desperately pumping away like a fish out of water,
     though nothing was sucked into their gasping ventricles but red dirt.

Chapter Seven
    A s Stone walked carefully around the spreading swamp of body organs, the rest of the audience looked at him like he was the
     last actor left in a Shakespearean tragedy in which everyone else had just been killed. Their eyes were filled with an equal
     mixture of amazement, anger, relief, fear—every goddamn emotion know to men.
    Stone didn’t pay them any heed once he saw that no one else was going to launch himself at him—at least for a second or two.
     He made his way around the butchered corpse and over to Meyra, who was just starting to rise from the ground. She had her
     hand over her right breast, and a scarlet stain had spread out nearly six inches in diameter right through her buckskin jacket.
     But her eyes looked clear, and her face still had color in it as she rose.
    “Are you all right?” Stone asked with concern as she stumbled for a second, holding on to his arms for support.
    “Yes. Yes—I think so.” The Cheyenne woman gave a frightened smile at the man who had just saved her life. “Thank you, Martin
     Stone. Whether or not you should have interferred,” she said softly, “I don’t know. But I do know I would have been dead in
     a few seconds at most. I don’t want to die. So thank you. Though I know it was my fault to demand the Challenge of the Knives.
     But after you left, after his balls pulled themselves back into place, he came back out from his hole and started bothering
     everyone again, waving that horrible hand around. I couldn’t stand it, I just couldn’t. No one else would do anything.”
    “It’s all right. It had to be done,” Stone said, comforting her and holding her shoulder in his hand. “The man wasn’t just
     a bastard—he also had radiation poisoning. It can drive men to complete madness before it actually kills them. Then they must
     be destroyed like rabid dogs.” Stone turned toward the nervous men. They all looked uptight. The Indians because Stone had
     apparently just broken a sacred Cheyenne rule—and because they seemed to have quite unsettled feelings about allowing a woman
     to lead them now. Stone’s own NAA men—Bull and the three other young recruits—looked concerned about the Cheyenne, who glared
     at them now, their ever present but usually hidden deep mistrust of the white man broken through in near vengeful fury. Though
     they had all hated Leaping Elk,