Over the pile came the rest of the serfs, their enthusiasm bordering on fanaticism, those in the front laughing the hardest.
Blade saw the gunfighter trying to reload, and he grabbed Hickok's shirt and propelled him backward. Discarding the Marlin, he drew his Bowies and advanced to meet the serfs head-on. Suddenly they were swirling around him, cutting and hacking and cackling, always cackling, thoroughly enjoying themselves. He blocked and countered and stabbed, matching their madness with a frenzy of sheer desperation, becoming a tornado of whirling limbs and flashing Bowies, only dimly aware of Geronimo battling on his right, of the twin tomahawks weaving a lethal tapestry to rival his own.
Incredibly quick, the serfs fought like spitfires, prancing and lancing and thrusting and dancing, always in motion, always laughing.
Fury seized Blade, a fury at these creatures—for they could hardly be called human—who had no regard for life, their own or anyone else's. All that mattered to them was fun, fun, fun, having a good time at the expense of everyone and everything. Work became a game. Killing became a game. Existence was a giant game presided over by an insane games master.
His flesh was pierced and gashed and nicked, but he fought on. His arms flagged and his legs complained, but he endured. The sight of so much blood and gore sickened him, but he let self-preservation take its course and took on all comers.
After a while individual foes no longer existed. In their place was a pale demon of many guises who cackled and popped up here, there and anywhere, wounding him in a score of spots, decorating his clothing with crimson streamers. He killed and killed, and still they came on.
Blade ripped a male from gut to sternum, then severed a woman's neck with a single swipe. He deflected an overhand swing and gave a thrust to the throat in return. A knife bit into his side and he bit back. On and on the combat raged, until all of a sudden he found himself standing alone with a carpet of corpses all about him.
"We did it, pard."
The weary voice drew Blade's attention to the right, where Geronimo and Hickok were back to back, the Blackfoot holding gore-spattered tomahawks, the gunfighter a red-stained axe. Bodies ringed them.
There wasn't a serf alive. They were sprawled in all manner of positions, many coated with blood, ripped and torn and cleaved. And every one, every male and every female, smiled even in death, as if they had played a monumental joke on their slayers, a joke only they comprehended.
"Dear Spirit," Geronimo said softly, "is this what it's really like to be a Warrior? Is this the price we'll pay for protecting our loved ones?"
"I am a mite tuckered out," Hickok confessed.
Blade swallowed and surveyed the slaughter. He spotted Tabitha and Selwyn a few feet to his left, dead side by side, and realized, in horror, that he must have slain them.
"Thank goodness there wasn't any more of those rascals," Hickok said.
"A few more minutes and we would have bit the dust."
"I wonder if I should become a Warrior?" Geronimo asked, a question meant more for himself than his friends.
Blade looked down at the wounds he'd sustained and the blood seeping out. One knife had cut his vest right above the heart but missed the skin.
His cuts weren't life-threatening, but they hurt terribly.
"You murdered our babies, you fiends!"
The youths turned to find Endora Morloek gazing in shock at the serfs.
"You bastards will suffer for this!" Endora raged. "I'll torture you personally."
"Shut your face, bimbo," Hickok snapped, dropping the axe. He began reloading both Colts.
Endora stepped over several bodies and shook her fists at all three of them. "Why couldn't you leave us alone? We were perfectly happy until you butted in. You barged into our castle, sat in judgment on our lives and decided we were evil, decided you had to meddle in our personal affairs."
She trembled in her fury. "You had no right."
Blade licked his dry lips and tasted blood on the tip of his tongue. "We had every right. Evil must be exterminated wherever it's found."
"Who the hell are you to say what's evil and what isn't?"
It was Hickok who answered. "We're Warriors, lady."
"And what is that supposed to mean?"
"It means we know the difference between loving, decent folks and perverts who go around preyin' on people who can't defend themselves. It means you can have one minute to make your peace with your Master."
Both Blade and Geronimo glanced at the gunfighter. "Don't," the giant said.
Endora Morloek snorted in contempt. "My Maker? There is no God, you fool. We are what we are, and that's all there is to it."
Hickok nodded once. "And I'm a Warrior." His right hand swept straight out.
"No!" Blade cried, taking a stride toward him.
The weapons room thundered to the retort of another gunshot, and the lady in white sprouted a hole between her eyes, eyes that conveyed a flicker of astonishment a millisecond before she spun in a graceful pirouette and sank to the floor.
Geronimo dashed over to her and uselessly felt for a pulse. "She's dead."
"What did you expect?" Hickok asked.
"We had no right to kill her," Geronimo said. "How could you, Nathan?"
"Piece of cake," the gunfighter replied. "And we had every right to kill her. She wanted us dead, didn't she? She was goadin' the nymphs on to tear us apart."
"But Warriors aren't supposed to be cold-blooded killers."
"And what do you think Warriors do for a living? Grow flowers? We're trained to kill. That's our purpose in life. Oh, I know we do it to protect the Family and the Home, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, we kill scumbags for a living."
"There's more to being a Warrior than that," Blade said, staring at Endora's oddly composed features.
"Like what, paid?"
"Like adhering to higher ideals of duty and purpose."
"You've been listenin' to Plato again. Ideals are fine and all, but when those nymphs came through the door at us I'll bet you didn't spend one second thinkin' about ideals, duty and purpose. All you were thinkin'
about was stayin' alive and killin' as many of those crazies as you could.
Am I right?"
"Of course, but—"
"I rest my case."
"You didn't let me finish. Yes, we kill for a living, but only when the need arises. We can't go around blowing people away for the hell of it.
There must be a reason."
"How about savin' the lives of lots of innocent folks? Is that a good enough reason for you? The Morlocks have been torturin' and murderin'
people for years. All we're doing is puttin' a stop to it."
Blade dropped the subject. He knew better than to waste his breath trying to persuade the gunfighter to change his mind. Also, the sentiments Hickok expressed matched his own in many respects, but he still disliked the callous way in which Hickok had slain Endora Morlock. It had beem more like an execution than a necessary act of preservation.
"Let's go find the brains of this outfit," Hickok suggested, walking toward the doorway, carefully stepping over the many bodies in his path.
Blade and Geronimo started to follow him.
Unexpectedly, Elphinstone sat up, the armor rasping loudly, then heaved himself erect and surveyed the room. His gaze lingered on the dead serfs and finally on his sister. "Endora?"
The three youths simply watched as the brute sank to his knees and lifted Endora's head into his metal lap.
"Sissie? Talk to Elphie."
Blade could barely stand the sight. Shame saddened his soul, and his broad shoulders slumped dejectedly. Should they just leave Elphinstone to his misery? If they did, he might come after them. Perhaps it would be best to reason with him. "Elphinstone?"
Those dull eyes snapped up, peering through the dented visor, and locked on the youths. "You!" he growled. "You did this to her!"
"Please, Elphinstone," Blade said. "Stay calm."
&nb
sp; "Kill!" the brute bellowed, surging to his feet, his sister's head hitting the floor with a thud. "Kill!" he repeated, raising his enormous fists, and charged.
Chapter Twenty
Blade had the Martin halfway to his shoulders when Geronimo's Winchester cracked twice.
Both rounds were aimed at the visor, one of them flattening against the metal with a distinct ping and not quite penetrating while the second went through the right eye slot, bored through the brute's brain, and pinged a second time when it struck the back of the helmet.
Elphinstone halted, his arms sagged, and he swayed. Although his brain had ceased to function, his body hadn't quite gotten the message. His fingers twitched, as if he wanted to grab something, and his left knee jerked forward as if about to intitiate another step. Then, like a towering tree in the forest, he toppled with a tremendous crash.
"Two down and two to go," Hickok said, departing without a backward glance.
Geronimo slowly lowered the rifle and looked at Blade. "I didn't want to do that."
"I know."
"There was no other choice."
"I know."
"I don't think being a Warrior is all it's cracked up to be."
Blade wheeled and stepped into the corridor where the gunfighter was waiting. "Endora mentioned something about a control room. If we find it, we'll find Morlock."
"A control room for what?"
"I don't know."
A reserved Geronimo joined them and fed new bullets into the Winchester. "Let's get this over with as quickly as possible."
"What's the matter, pard?"
"I may not become a Warrior."
Hickok's mouth dropped. "Why not?"
"I'm not like you, Nathan. When I kill someone, I feel a hurt inside."
"And you think I don't?" Hickok responded, his tone betraying bitterness. "I feel it too, but I don't let it get to me. I control it. I tell myself it has to be done." He turned and walked toward the stairs.
"Nathan?" Blade said.
"What?"
"Why did you shoot her?"
"One of us had to do the job, and it might as well have been me,"
Hickok said and kept walking.
Blade glanced at Geronimo, whose melancholy visibly intensified. "He did it so we wouldn't have to," he stated in a whisper.
"Me and my big mouth," Geronimo remarked.
They hurried to catch up, and the three of them were soon climbing the steps to the next floor. There were no candles lit, no sounds indicating any of the rooms were occupied, so on they went to the next level, and the floor after that, until eventually they reached the uppermost one, ten stories above the ground. An arched, open window gave them a view of the glittering stars and the inky expanse of countryside and explained the breeze they always felt on the stairway.
A sole candle burned next to a partly open door along the left-hand corridor.
"He's mine," Hickok said, leveling both Colts and stalking forward to the door. He kicked it open and darted inside.
Blade and Geronimo were right on his heels. The giant marveled at a large chamber illuminated by two lanterns that revealed banks of electronic equipment aligned along all four walls. There was no sign of Angus Morlock.
"The crud has skipped," Hickok guessed.
"What is all this?" Geronimo asked, moving to a console and studying a series of switches and knobs.
When Blade noticed a dozen blank squares of glass arranged in three rows on the far wall, curiosity impelled him closer to study them. Their shape prompted vague memories of photographs he'd once seen in a book in the Family library, but he couldn't put his mental finger on the exact photos. Two knobs were positioned under each square.
Hickok walked to a piece of equipment and flicked several toggle switches. "I wonder what these do?"
"Maybe we shouldn't touch anything," Geronimo said. "Morlock might have this room booby-trapped."
"No way, pard. He wouldn't want to damage all this stuff," Hickok said and worked another toggle.
Suddenly, from a speaker mounted on the north wall, came the sound of leaves being stirred by a strange breeze, the distant wail of a coyote and the croaking of tree frogs.
"Where the blazes is that coming from?"
"Outside somewhere," Geronimo said. "But how?"
An answer formed unbidden in Blade's mind, and with it came comprehension. "A microphone."
"What?" Hickok said.
"A microphone. It's a device that can hear sounds and relay them elsewhere. There must be a mike planted outside the castle walls connected to this room by an underground wire, or else the equipment in here operates on battery power."
"How do you know all this?" Hickok asked.
"I remember reading a book about the electronic age, as it was called, and all the wonderful devices available before the Big Blast. The people had devices for playing music, washing clothes and cooking food in a minute flat," Blade said, indicating the blank squares of glass. "And unless I miss my guess, these are monitors used to keep watch on the grounds."
He twisted one of the dials.
A screen in the upper row crackled to life and showed one of the gloomy underground passageways.
"See what I mean," Blade said.
"But how could this gear work after so many years?" Geronimo wondered. "Electricity is a thing of the past."
"Not if the Morlocks have a stockpile of rechargeable batteries," Blade said. At least he understood how Morlock had known he entered the castle from the mausoleum.
"Keep turnin' those dials," Hickok advised.
Blade did so, going from monitor to monitor, and one by one corridors and rooms were dimly depicted, all empty. When there were only three screens left, the weapons room materialized with its grisly carpet of pale, grinning corpses.
"Morlock must have seen the whole thing," Geronimo said.
Blade twisted the second to last dial, revealing yet another corridor, and was disappointed at not finding Morlock. Where was the madman?
From the number of monitors, he concluded only the main corridors and some of the rooms were part of the surveillance network. There weren't enough to cover the entire castle. "If the runt saw the whole thing, why didn't he try to help the serfs or sic his walkin' fur rug on us?" Hickok brought up.
"He probably believed we'd be no match for the serfs," Blade guessed.
"And I doubt he expected us to kill Endora and Elphinstone. Like Endora said, he's been taking us too lightly all along."
"His mistake," Hickok said.
Blade twirled the last dial and stiffened.
The last scene depicted was the roof. And there, standing on a rampart and staring grimly directly into the camera, stood Angus Morlock with a shotgun cradled in the crook of his left arm. Somehow, he knew he was being observed because he nodded and made a beckoning motion with his right hand.
"He wants us to go up there," Geronimo said.
"Let's not disappoint the crumb," the gunfighter stated.
Blade didn't like the setup one bit. Why would Morlock blatantly challenge them to go onto the roof unless it was a trap?
"Are you comin?" Hickok asked, moving to the door.
"Yeah," Blade said. He stared at the monitor for a few seconds, then went into the passageway with his friends.
"The stairs stop on this floor," Geronimo noted. "There must be another way up."
"Each of us will take a door," Blade directed.
The youths separated. There were seven doors all tolled and it wasn't until Geronimo opened the fifth one and called out, "Here it is!" that they found a spiral metal staircase to the top.
"Well, this is it," Hickok said, inspecting the chambers in his revolvers to be sure the guns were fully loaded.
"I'll go first," Blade volunteered.
"Be my guest," Geronimo said.
Blade went up a step at a time, tilting his neck so he could cover a wide door above. Once there, he tested the knob, found it rotated easily, and looked ove
r his right shoulder. "Are you ready?"
"I was born ready," Hickok said.
"No, but go ahead anyway," Geronimo said.
Tensing, Blade flung the door open and threw himself outside to roll on his shoulder and rise to his knee with the Marlin sweeping the flat area before him.
Morlock had vanished.
The central section of the roof was level except for the doorway leading to the spiral staircase, which had been constructed as an isolated, elevated island in the very middle and fronted the northern battlements.
Blade glanced at the top of the door and saw the camera mounted on a sturdy bracket, so he knew Morlock had been within ten feet of the door a minute or two ago.
There were four ramparts connected to four turrets, one at each corner, and those turrets were the only hiding places on the roof.
"He must be in one of those beehive kind of things," Hickok whispered.
"Spread out," Blade said. "We'll check the turret at the northwest corner first." He rose to a crouching posture and advanced warily. A cool breeze caressed his face and brought to his nostrils a peculiar, pungent animal scent unlike any other he knew. He surmised the wind had carried the scent from an animal in the woods below but immediately realized such couldn't be the case. And if the smell didn't come from below or above, then there was only one explanation. The thought made him slow up, and his friends passed on by.
It couldn't be! Blade told himself, staring at the turret in mounting apprehension. He would have smelled it before now, wouldn't he?
Hickok was the closest to the three steps leading from the rampart into the shadowed turret. Both Colts were out and ready.
Blade moved forward, chiding himself for letting his imagination get the better of him. The thing was in the forest. Had to be.
The gunfighter had two yards to cover when a bloodcurdling roar rent the night and the monster squeezed through the turret entrance, all ten feet of hair and muscle and unbridled ferocity.
"Grell!" Geronimo yelled.
Hickok squeezed off four shots so fast they sounded like one. But none stopped the gargantuan mutation. He was lifting his arms to fire at the beast's eyes when a swipe of a brawny arm sent him flying over five yards to crash onto his back, dazed.
Madman Run Page 15
