The Damn Disciples Read Free

raisin, black and hard like a fragment of coal. The ripped and
     torn creature inspired fear in even the largest of the other rats, who dared not look straight into the scarred, misshapen
     face.
    Its right eye worked just fine. The Leader stood up on a rock so that it was a good five feet above the squealing masses,
     always almost out of control—almost. But under its direction they moved like an army, letting nothing stand in their way.
     When it was gone … who could say. But such things rats didn’t worry about. Just the next meal. For as the Russian czar had
     learned in the Revolution of 1918, “a lack of bread to eat is the fire of revolution.” The Leader was trapped too. It had
     to feed them all, make sure the ravenous hordes didn’t turn—on him.
    The Leader made motions with his paws, commanding the army of rats, brown and black and gray, sleek and fanged with long tails
     dragging behind them, into two flanks. He would scout straight up the center, and when he called, they knew to come. He was
     the general. His strategies had worked time and time again. Food was the reward they got in return for their loyalty, their
     willingness to fight, to die for the Leader. He delivered. And it was eating time. Bring on the hot stuff. The human meat
     that tasted so sweet. A rat’s greatest delicacy.

    Martin Stone walked down the deer path along the edge of some thick woods supporting himself on a homemade crutch fashioned
     from a V-topped branch, cursing every step of the way.
    “Fuck, shit, piss. Goddamn leg—can’t even walk or do anything anymore. A man can’t even trust his own body parts—who the hell
     can he trust? I ask you fucking that.” Though he didn’t actually address the leg, keeping his eyes ahead looking for groundhog
     and snake holes, as he had already fallen twice in the last hour and didn’t feel like doing it again. But the leg damn well
     knew who he was talking to. Ever since he had broken it in a fall two weeks before, it had been causing him all kinds of trouble.
     First it had swollen up to the size of a balloon. Then, with herbs and cauterizing it and setting it with a splint, it had
     seemed to go down again. He had thought maybe it was actually going to heal, and everything would be all right.
    Yeah, right. Only, the leg was swollen again, and a very strange color along the whole side of his thigh. He could feel a
     pounding in his heart—and knew he was getting blood poisoning. Stone had been having hallucinations for the last few hours.
     Things crawling along the edges of the woods, always just out of his sight. It wasn’t that far to the bunker. He just had
     to make it to his late father’s mountain retreat, built into the side of a mountain, and equipped with the most modern equipment,
     computers, even medical supplies. Somehow he would have to treat himself, cut the leg open and … But he’d worry about that
     later. First he had to even try to stagger the next five miles to the mountain at the north end of Estes National Park in
     northern Colorado—then go straight up the side of the thing for another mile or two.… He prayed he had enough left in him
     to make it. He was on his last leg.
    There was a low growl at his feet, and Stone looked down as he almost tripped over the furred shaped that kept walking back
     and forth in front of him.
    “Watch it, dog, will you, for Christ’s sake,” Stone muttered, in no mood for even the slightest bit of bullshit on a cold,
     painful morning like this one was turning out to be. He looked down and into the almond-shaped eyes of the ninety-pound pit
     bull that was trotting along looking up. It appeared to be pissed off as hell, its face all squinched up and glaring at Stone
     as if to say, “We haven’t eaten diddly-shit beyond some acorns and a few berries in the last twelve hours. Dogs can be assholes
     too.” Or something like that.
    “We’ll be there soon fucking enough,” the fighting terrier’s human