by John Pelan
He glanced into the rear-view mirror a third time. There was still nothing behind him. Ahead, the road wound steadily on. And then… everything seemed to happen at once. Nick detected movement in the corner of his eye and glanced sharply left. Through breaks in the trees, he saw an alarming shape bearing down over the sloping meadowland toward him. It was a horse, a fine roan mare, with a girl on its back … a girl in boots, riding slacks, and a white silk blouse, blond hair streaming behind her. She was carrying something. It looked like…
There was a loud crack, a deafening whine… and the passenger window exploded inward.
Nick felt the bullet zip past his ear. He jammed his foot down as hard as he could, though on a winding road like this, that in itself was perilous. The SUV screamed and skidded along the curbs, dragging vegetation with it. A second shot struck it in the flank. The entire chassis shivered. The horsewoman now came into view behind. She was framed perfectly in the mirror, galloping furiously. Clearly she was an expert, for even at this speed she was in full control of her animal and again taking aim with the rifle.
Just at the wrong moment, the SUV ran onto a straight and open stretch. Frantically, Nick hauled the steering wheel right, then left, zigzagging. The rifle bucked in the girl's grasp, but the slug whistled harmlessly past. Unfortunately, the tricky maneuvers also cost Nick speed. The huntress had been forty or fifty yards when she'd fired the first time; now she'd closed the gap to twenty. She wouldn't even have to be a good shot from that range.
Again Nick straightened up and floored the accelerator, pushing the needle toward fifty. Again the horsewoman fell behind, but he knew it wouldn't last… not on this road, unless he did something quick.
The chance came sooner than expected. He'd no sooner taken a tight leftward bend and briefly lost sight of the girl, when a road sign came up, indicating a right-hand turn to the Gilderdale Mining Company. It was a dusty access road, leading away into the woods, but it had been widened to accommodate trucks and heavy machinery. And it would serve.
Nick jerked the wheel over and yanked at the hand brake. With a screech of tortured rubber, the SUV lurched right and spun around on its axis almost 180 degrees. Checking his seat belt, he knocked the car back into first and hit the gas as hard as he could. Ten seconds later, when the horse and its rider rounded the bend, the SUV was in fourth and blazing at fifty. A collision was inevitable.
The cop caught a fleeting glimpse of the rider's panic-stricken face, her rifle spiralling from her hands, before the horse reared, and the speeding vehicle smashed headlong into it. The shock was phenomenal, the impact like a hand-grenade detonating. Nick was thrown against his seat belt with neck-jarring force. Shattered glass exploded in on him. Then he was upside down, sliding at terrifying speed into the roadside undergrowth. There was a crack of branches, a rending and tearing of metal. A welter of leaves and mold poured in, enveloping him, filling his eyes and mouth. More bangs, more jolts, another frightful impact as the slewing vehicle struck some unyielding object… in the event of which, incredibly, it righted itself onto its tires again.
Nick sat there, dazed, clutching the steering wheel, his face filthied and riddled with cuts. Several moments passed before he could breathe. His ears were still ringing, his hands still shaking. Warily, he began to feel up and down his body, not yet convinced he was totally intact. It was quite a surprise to find that, aside from the nagging pain in his chest, and now a growing stiffness in the neck, he was relatively unharmed… which was more than could be said for the SUV. On all sides of him, it was bashed in; every one of its windows broken; the driver's door, crumpled out of shape, would only open half a foot or so, and Nick had to squirm his way out, snagging his clothes on shards of twisted metal. From the outside, the vehicle proved to be in an even worse state, the oncegleaming bodywork pulverized, the hood almost torn from its hinges, though astonishingly, the engine was undamaged and chugged happily away as the man stood gazing at it.
A moment passed, then Nick looked back over his shoulder. His passage through the undergrowth was clear … a meandering alleyway of flattened stems and crushed leaves. He walked cautiously along it until he reached the road, where the horse and its rider lay still, about twenty feet apart The animal was clearly dead, its legs broken and tangled in knots, its neck at a grisly angle. Cora Maynard wasn't so visibly injured, though she appeared to be unconscious. The rifle hung by its strap from a roadside bush. Nick strode over and took it. It was the Dragunov that Kurns had been using.
As a rule, Nick hadn't carried firearms during his career, but he was well enough trained to identify and use them. The Dragunov was a case in point. Russian-made, it fired a lethal 7.62 round and was ideal for the urban warzone. What it had been doing in the hands of a drunken headcase like Jimmy Kurns was anybody's guess, but the thought alone sent a chill through the detective.
He looked back at the body of the girl … to find that she was now sitting up, watching him. Instinctively, Nick leveled the rifle on her. She smiled, toothily.
“Don't you bloody move!” he snapped, but he knew she wasn't going to listen, and indeed she didn't.
Her grin broadened further… and further, to impossible width, literally from ear to ear. Her eyes became black beads. There were more teeth in her mouth than it was possible to imagine. Nick felt the sweat break on his brow. Involuntarily, his finger tightened on the trigger.
“I'm warning you,” he said, but she—if—wouldn't be warned.
Her entire form began to waver before his eyes. Where once she'd had fingers, now there were tendrils—suckered like a squid's, writhing frenetically. With a loud rip, her blouse split open, and leprous yellow flesh puffed out. More eyes opened, in her cheeks, in her forehead, but Nick had seen enough. He fired once, twice, three times… each payload striking the creature in the head with sledgehammer force. Her transforming skull imploded, blood and brains thrown clear across the road. As the third slug ploughed home, what was left of the head was sheared off completely, and her torso slumped lifelessly backward.
At first the hybrid thing lay still, a goiy lake spreading around it, but then, before Nick's unbelieving eyes, all signs of transfiguration receded. Tentacle suckers were reabsorbed; gross, puffed-out flesh shrank back onto the human frame beneath; new eyes and new mouths closed and were sealed; the yellow-green tinge faded and ran, flowing at last into the delicate pink-white of normality. At last, nothing more mysterious than a young woman lay there. A young woman whose head had been brutally blasted to pieces… which, of course, was potentially problematic if someone now happened along.
Nick hesitated for a moment, then stumbled across the road, into the devastated underbrush. The engine of the Toyota was still running… whether the thing would drive was another matter, though. Nick threw the Dragunov into the back, then slid in behind the wheel, knocking the vehicle into reverse and applying the gas. Laboriously, with much shaking and grinding, the SUV began to move. More twigs snagged on it, but at last it was back on the road. Warily, Nick put it in first, then accelerated slowly up the access road tc the quarry.
He'd traveled about a mile when he came to a clutch of dingy prefabricated buildings, with several trucks and muddied bulldozers parked to one side of them. Further along the road, Nick saw the tall framework of an open-cast washery, though padlocked gates closed off access to that area. He slowed and braked, the SUV rattling as if fit to fall apart. In fact, there were dropped-off pieces trailing all the way behind it down the access road. A workman came curiously out from the first building. He was a broad, burly character in boots, jeans, and plaid shirt, with a beefy red face under his white hardhat.
“What the hell happened to you?” he said, staring at the trashed car.
Nick climbed painfully out, fishing his warrant card from his tattered pocket. “Police officer. I've got a serious emergency. I need some explosives.”
The workman looked stunned. “Eh?”
“I need some explosives,” Nick replied. “Look
… you must have plenty here?”
The workman shook his head, bewildered. “I can't give it to you just like that.”
“I told you I'm a police officer.”
“I don't care who you are, you'll need proper authorization.”
Nick leaned back into the car, grabbed the Dragunov, turned around, and leveled it on the workman's chest. “How's this?” he said, and to emphasize the point, he cocked the weapon.
The workman swallowed. He looked hard at the gun, then glanced up at Nick's bioodied face. It was a toss-up which was the more intimidating. “Just—take it easy,” he said.
“Don't give me advice; give me the explosives,” Nick replied quietly. “Believe me, I'm desperate enough to use this thing.”
The workman nodded. He eyed the gun again, then turned and led the way into the prefab. Five minutes later, they were in an outbuilding at the rear of several cluttered offices. The workman opened a small safe and handed Nick two cubes, each one about the size of a tea caddy, both clad in waxed paper.
“That's Noma 4ED dynamite,” said the workman. “It's all we've got at present, but it's a high-density gel. There's enough there to shift a mountain.”
Nick nodded and licked his broken lips. Even after everything else he'd been through, he was wary of handling material like this. “How volatile is it?” he asked.
“It isn't,” the workman said. “It's nitroglycerine-based, but it's specially compounded to be shockproof. That's why we use it. You need to fire an electric charge through it to create ignition.”
“So how does it work?”
“They'll string me up for this.…”
“No one's going to get hurt,” Nick assured him.
“Even so, I'm breaking every law there is.…”
“I haven't got time to argue!” the cop cut in. “I think you can see I've got a real crisis on my hands.”
The workman gazed at Nick, not sure what to believe.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Nick added, “the moment I've gone you can call the police. In fact, call the army as well, and the air force, call everybody. Get the world and his brother here. I think we're going to need them.”
“What the hell's happening?”
“Never mind that—just tell me what I have to do to set this thing off.”
The workman turned to a cupboard on the wall. Opening it, he took out another object, this one sheathed in hard, clear plastic and shaped roughly like a car battery. “You need a full detonator assembly,” he said, handing it over. “This is the charge box, and these — “ he also handed over a reel of red and blue cable “—these are your fuse-cords. You'll need both.”
“Positive and negative, yeah?” Nick said.
The man nodded. “It's like jumper cables on a motor. Red's positive, so plug the red socket pin into the positive port on the charge box, and the blue into the negative.”
Nick examined the two cables. The socket pins were visible at one end; at the other, there were two small electrodes. “Presumably these go in the gel?”
“Yeah… but listen, you make sure the charge box is switched off while you're inserting them.”
“Or else boom?” the cop said.
The workman nodded. “They're water- ard static-proof, but to be safe, keep them dry and away from any other electrical source.” Again, extreme doubt appeared in his eyes. He reached out halfheartedly, as if to take the items back. “Look, mate, give 'em back, hey? I can't let you walk out with this gear.…”
“You haven't got a choice,” Nick replied, stepping out of reach. “Interfere and I'll shoot you. What I'm doing here is going to save all our arses.”
The man just shook his head, perplexed but also horrified at what he was party to. In fact, his ruddy features were draining of color, a milky pallor replacing them. The muscles in his neck were visibly tensing. Nick realized the guy was about to try something. And why not? In this worrying age of random gun massacres, anything was better than letting some maniac walk off with an armful of high explosives.
Nick considered this, and nodded. Then he pulled the trigger.
Just once.
A single slug ripped through the workman's right thigh. The guy went down in a heap, with a strangled gasp. Immediately, blood came pulsing between his clawing fingers.
“Sorry about that,” Nick said, “but at least no one can blame you now.”
9
An eerie dusk had settled on Long Meg and Her Daughters. The woods and hills were turning purple, the sky a misty metallic-gray. The great stone obelisks became twisted, tortured shapes as a spectral miasma rose from the surrounding grassland. There was neither sound nor movement.
Nick stood silently by the wrecked Toyota, watching. It was miraculous the SUV had gotten him this far, though he doubted it would go any further. Not that it mattered. Only one thing mattered now: The gateway was still closed, and that was how it had to stay, by fair means or foul. He moved forward, the rifle slung at his shoulder, his arms loaded with the explosives and their detonator kit. A moment later, he was kneeling beside the inside face of the nearest megalith. Break the circle, Cusani had said. Break it.
As carefully as he could, Nick peeled the waxed paper away from the two blocks of dynamite. A brownish black substance was visible beneath, clammy and plastic to touch. Nick wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow, then gingerly compressed the blocks together, melding them into a single glutinous blob. Once he had done that, he pushed it into place at the base of the megalith. God alone knew how much the piece of granite weighed, but his much dynamite ought to blow it to smithereens, to completely erase it from the English map.
Next he unraveled the detonator leads. There was more of them than he'd imagined… eighty yards at least, which gave him some idea how far away he'd have to stand once he threw the switch. He checked to make certain the socket pins weren't in contact with the charge box, then inserted the two electrodes into the gel, and, paying out the cable as he went, began to retreat across the circle.
He'd reached halfway when something stopped him.
A voice.
“Nick?” it said, baffled.
Nick turned sharply. Andy McClaine was standing there, hands in his coat pockets, gazing at his colleague with something like total bewilderment. “What's going on?”
Nick walked around him, continuing to lay out cable. “Can't tell you, Andy. Just trust me.”
It briefly occurred to him that he must look an incredible sight… wild-eyed, filthy, ragged, bleeding from a dozen gashes. It was obvious that Andy's incredulity was growing steadily. He was gazing at the detonator cords. “There's been a nasty robbery,” he said slowly. “The watchman at Gilderdale Quarry got shot, the blackguard made off with a pile of…” His words trailed away.
“Good news travels fast,” Nick grunted. “Came over the air, did it?”
“Mel … Mel Toomey told me.”
Nick laughed crazily. “Don't trust a word that bitch says!”
“Nick—what the fuck's going on?”
“What do you think?” Nick snapped. “While you've been swanning around the country, I've been trying to sort things out.” He continued to lay out cable.
“What… er, what's this for?”
“Just get over there 1o the SUV, where you'll be safe.”
“Why shouldn't I trust Mel Toomey?”
“Why don't you ask her?”
Andy nodded. “Alright. Why shouldn't I trust you, Mel?”
It took a second for that to strike Nick, then he whirled around … to find the policewoman standing directly behind him, a thin smile on her pretty lips. “Killing Cora Maynard was a mistake, Sergeant Brooker,” she said quietly, drawing her cuffs and baton. “I'm going to have to take you in.”
Nick threw the charge box down, grabbed the rifle, and aimed it between her eyes. “How about if I kill you?”
“Nick!” Andy protested. “What the hell …?”
“You've got to trust me, Andy!” Nick
roared, his finger tense on the trigger. “Well?” he said to the woman constable. “What if I kill you?”
“You can't kill her, Sergeant,” came an imperious voice, “not with so puny a weapon. Surely you've realized that by now?”
All three turned … to find Lady Langdon on the outer rim of the henge, framed between the two slabs that formed its entrance. Unlike Toomey, she still wore her white druidic robes. Her eyes still shone blissfully. Almost casually, in a nearly Christlike gesture, she held out a hand… and from around the left slab came a stumbling, jerking, and truly hideous figure: a body without a head, a girl's body, naked, grimy, streaked with clotted blood, its neck terminating in a jagged crimson stump.
Andy McClaine's jaw fell open, a scream of disbelief locked in his throat.
Nick, on the other hand, knew that he was unlikely ever to disbelieve anything again. Swiftly, he turned the rifle from the policewoman to Lady Langdon.
“So what about you?” he shouted. “You're human. One shot will drop you like a blade of grass.”
The priestess gave a careless smile. “I've performed my task. Once you are fully anointed, my earthly use will be finished.”
“Let's test the theory,” Nick said, but before he could fire, Toomey lunged, flinging her baton in a blurred flash of movement. What it had in speed, it lacked in accuracy. Too fast for the eye to see, the missile spun clean past Nick and hit Andy square on the temple. Nick whirled around, pumping the trigger. Five shots tore into the policewoman, sending her tottering backward. In the same instant, the Cora-monstrosity came lumbering forward. Nick swung the rifle round again, still firing. Another three rounds slammed into the creature, punching fist-sized holes in its chest, hurling it to the ground. The moment it struck the grass, however, it began to quiver and writhe and… slowly to transform.
