As far as Zolan could see, he and Phillips were the last two humans below plateau safety that were alive. This, too, would shortly be changed unless a miraculous rescue was somewhere in the near future.
Desperate, Zolan reached down, picked up rocks and began hurtling them at the advancing vampires. After a moment, though, he felt absolutely ridiculous.
A welcome bark rang out overhead.
Zolan's heart nearly jumped out of his throat as he saw the Birdog hover over the mob of approaching vampires. The deadly tail swiped downwards and ,played havoc, but Zolan could still see that two or three of the monsters would not be dissuaded from coming his way. The Birdog worked as quickly as possible, easily whipping her prey to death, but even she could feel that her endeavors would be in vain to save her friend. She whimpered while she worked, but realized that to attempt another strategy would cost precious seconds of what she knew already was the most effective use of Birdog power. Zolan would have to fend off those vampires she missed as best he could until she finished her job with the majority.
Zolan dragged Phillips back to the edge of the precipice, then looked down into the cavernous mouth of blackness. The gap was only five feet wide at most, but for Phillips it might as well have been a mile. Zolan knew that he could save himself in an instant; but to leave the old man undefended against the vampires would be nothing short of murder.
"Phillips," Zolan gasped, keeping his eyes on the fighting Birdog, and the one or two vampires still approaching intently which she had failed to stop, "Damn you, get up!"
But Phillips had slipped into unconsciousness. Zolan breathed deeply, took one last look at his one and only way to safety, then returned his stare at the Redeyes now only fifty feet away.
It was funny, he would remember later, how much at that moment he cared so little about dying. Resigned, but with a strange - and previously unfelt sense of calm - Zolan stood up to meet the instruments of his destruction.
* * *
She could feel that his time was near -- as was hers.
She had wanted to say good-bye, to explain so much to him, and to assure him that everything in the end would be much better. But it was now too late. He would die soon; she could see that much already. Fortunately, his death would not be in vain. She smiled inwardly at this, and shared her thoughts with her new comrade in arms.
The Rover also seemed to admire the impending sacrifice.
"He was my father," Valry relayed to the Rover's brain. The ship flashed its dim lights in understanding - and now, with sympathy as well; a gift from Valry that the ship had not previously possessed.
"A great man," the Rover acknowledged warmly, after taking several seconds to peruse all of its Earth data banks on the man called John Phillips. "He will be remembered. Like you, Valry."
Valry absorbed the compliment in silence. Then: "Like us, Rover," she corrected gently, "like us."
"How soon?" the Rover asked.
"It has already happened."
"And Zolan?" the ship insisted.
Valry did not answer for several seconds. When she did, it was in a tone of voice that the Rover had never heard before. "He will have to be patient."
The Rover asked no more questions. Instead, it began its descent over the tall mountain ahead.
* * *
The Resistor smiled.
Everything was going very well indeed.
He was miles away from the scene of battle, near the entrance of the Redeye city; yet he could see everything that had taken place thus far.
The Stingers were defeated, or were at least rendered useless and the last motes of humanity were about to be extinguished forever. It appeared at last, that the triumph he had dreamed of, waited for and anticipated for ages uncounted, was about to be realized within the hour. It was a time of celebration.
He would make his victory entrance shortly, but first there was a chore to attend to.
The day had been good, but there were of course a few disappointments. Nothing serious, though. The final victory over mankind would more than make up for these almost petty aggravations.
FORTY-SEVEN
The enemy he had captured from the old fool of Earth's past had escaped and could not be found. A pity. She would have made an amusing plaything for a time; later he would have had to destroy her. He did not really care what had become of her; for no power in the world could sway his plans now. Still, the frustration (and was it also a twinge of nervousness? he wondered momentarily) remained in losing her. And the thought that His will had been defied so grossly made the Resistor bristle.
Now, however, there was one feeble source of gratification that the Resistor would extract to make up for that sacrilegious disobedience. Holding the limp figure between his giant fists, the King spoke gently and horribly.
"A foolish thing you've done. I gave you so much and you betrayed me."
His victim remained quiet, hanging helplessly in midair as the Resistor slowly began to change.
"You helped her, didn't you?"
Ten feet the Resistor grew. Then twenty. Thirty. . "You! Why?"
Within minutes, the pathetic victim was no longer being held in cruel fists. It was now resting in what appeared to be an enormous, black palm. The doomed Redeye stared up at the awesome Resistor, now mountain-size and omnipotent. It blinked in fear and horror, croaking inaudibly to itself.
But it also had understood what the King had said. The girl had escaped Him!
And that was all that was important.
Suddenly, the Resistor closed His palm and squeezed. He was no longer smiling. A vague, sick crunching filled the air. The Resistor opened his hand and let the crushed pulp of the Redeye drop into the putrid sand below.
The Resistor stared at the corpse in disgust. But a wave of inexplicable disquiet passed through his ageless soul.
For the first time in a long while, the tortured remains of Cathy Phillips had finally been put to rest.
Perhaps it would have been of some consolation to her that her own destruction took place exactly at the same moment as her husband's -- nearly 40 miles away.
FORTY-EIGHT
It was no longer a conflict; only a great wash of violence and death. The Stingers realized that they were achieving nothing now, as the valley filled up beyond its capacity with the bodies of the ferocious Redeyes, and persistent Jumpers. In joint agreement, the Stingers extricated themselves from the heavy mess of rat corpses and screaming vampires, retreating far up the mountain slopes almost to the very plateau that kept the tribe thus far shelved and safe.
Knowing that time was now more of an enemy than the actual Redeye army, the Stingers raced passed the vampires also scaling the mountain, positioning themselves sporadically at various points on the craggy cliff faces. Halfway up the slopes, the bulk of vampire and Jumper forces were only five hundred feet from the actual tribe sanctuary. It was becoming very clear that soon, even this elevated vantage point would have to be abandoned for higher ground. This is where things would start to get tricky. For the climb up the rest of the ten thousand foot peak was nearly at a vertical, with few spots on the slopes for the massive Stingers to gain footholds. They could of course scale it individually, but with the extra baggage of piggy-backing humans, the danger that both Stinger and passengers would at some point go plummeting earthward was extremely plausible. And while the Thelericks would no doubt emerge unscathed from such a foreseeable event, the same could not be promised for the fragile. tribe giants.
Thalick looked further down the mountain, at a point only fifty or so feet away from the advancing wall of bloodsucking death. Five hundred yards further were the one or two canyon passes that joined this valley with the one where he had earlier conducted the Fuzzy hunt with Valry. With a hiss of disappointment, Thalick regretted not having instructed Green Belly to direct the tribe's retreat through these narrow routes earlier rather than allowing him to lead it up the central peak. The Stinger realized of course that he and the other Thelerick
s were expecting a more protracted engagement, which would have allowed a rather leisurely exit through the concealed passage ways of rock and sand for the tribe itself. They had not expected - nor imagined - an all-out offensive of vampire strength, which appeared to include the entire Redeye population on the planet. Indeed, their acute senses could clearly make out an endless ocean of monsters stretching into the desert and beyond the horizon. It was an unbelievable - and almost frightening - vision, even from a relative cool Thelerick point of view.
As he surveyed the mess before him, and once again regarded the passes beyond, Thalick recognized that perhaps moving the tribe through those natural gulleys would have proved even more disastrous. The adjoining Fuzzy valley was hopelessly flat, without even a hill or tumulus to gain a level of advantage for attack. The bare, naked and horrible truth of the matter was that whatever course of action the tribe and its allies would have taken, would have concluded in the same manner, regardless of a more cautious or thoughtful stratagem.
The enemy was countless in number. Whether in the vulnerable flatlands of the furry tortoises, or a thousand feet up with the deceptive handicap of possessing the high ground, the fate or the tribe would not have been changed had one course of action been substituted for another. Even now, had the Stingers decided on a rash bolt for the nearby passes, with humans in tow, they would still be forced to deal with an inevitable confrontation once they were on the other side. Furthermore, they could not count on the fact that more Redeyes were not already amassed in the Fuzzy valley from the city Thalick had discovered on the beach.
Now, with only minutes remaining before their precious tribe succumbed to final extinction, the insurmountably optimistic Thelerick Stingers concluded that the hopes for mankind's survival looked very bleak indeed.
Turning away from the canyon passes beyond, Thalick's senses stopped at the edge of the mountain slope. Some two hundred feet below him, almost invisible from the angle he and the other Stingers had now taken below Green Belly's plateau, was what appeared to be two men. Thalick hissed with recognition, as he spotted the prone Phillips and the strangely inactive alien human called Rzzdik standing before several Redeyes, with the main body of their army raging not far behind.
Thalick was about to leap forward and make a timely entrance on their behalf when something else distracted him. For half a second, he remained frozen in space, listening and probing the noisy, shrieking night air around him. The other Stingers also tensed up with surprise and curiosity.
Something was happening far out on the desert horizon.
Puzzled, the giant aliens raced through their collective sensory assessments, trying to identify the source of this new, unwanted distraction into their already disastrous state of affairs. Thalick kept one eye on the helpless figures of Zolan and John Phillips below him, but the more perplexing phenomena crackling through the air and tickling his antennae could not be dismissed so immediately - even though seconds may well have meant the difference in saving the two mens lives.
Suddenly, the Thelerick Stingers were no longer mystified. A moment later, and the screaming fury of the charging Redeyes and Jumpers also decrescendoed into respectful obeisance. The night quickly seemed to grow colder, and if at all possible, even darker than before. An eerie blast of air whistled through the valley and up the main slope where the Stingers and Redeyes were squared off for a final confrontation. Below, the piddling remnants of the forest fire set earlier at Phillips command puffed out in an instant.
The world was suddenly as dark as pitch, and only the terrible glow from the vampires eyes twinkling through the night like the once innocent fireflies provided any light to the startled Stingers, and petrified humans further above them on the plateau.
The outline of something enormous started to form over the distant desert. It wavered at first, then came to a definite shape and size. Numb Stinger senses could determine still that the figure must have stood several thousand feet tall, with a girth between what appeared to be two feet of over half a mile. The head was almost formless, though two green eyes sizzled and sparked with frightening intensity. The arms of the phantom were thick in diameter, though the flesh on them, and indeed on the entire body, seemed to be absent, as if the thing had been produced from a holograph.
It was a vision from all possible hells from all possible universes, and even the mighty Stingers crouched in startlement. In this moment, they felt humbled and small, insignificant in the face of a power they did not understand, or even believe capable of existing. They felt deep within their gentle souls that nothing in their billion year history had ever prepared them for what they were now witnessing. Logic had no place here; reason was a thing to be abandoned. For the first time ever, the Thelericks admitted among themselves that something was happening within their beings which they had heretofore never experienced before.
They were afraid.
* * *
Before a man is about to die, a funny thing happens.
The memories of his life no longer follow a sequential line of recollection; events, dates and highlights of the past become chronologically invalid. Instead, a man's life is suddenly witnessed as a whole; like an enormous wall mural within a circle that cares nothing for time. All experiences, all trials and triumphs, sad or happy become magnified and viewed as an entirety of motion. Nothing is missed or misplaced in the mind at this point; it is as if the entire brain is momentarily cleansed and awakened, only to be put to rest within seconds for the unconscious span of eternity. And the pictures of the past are simply fused together for one, last vision of what took place between a sleep and a sleep.
For Zolan Rzzdik, the portrait of a lifetime could well have coalesced into a wash of grey; a misjudgment of nature, Zolan compounded the error by nurturing failure at nearly every point in his existence. A bitter, intricate organism of warped compassion and hates, strengths and weaknesses, Zolan Rzzdik could well have died a complete non-entity within the cold, immense, and uncaring void of time and infinity. And though perhaps - if there are such things as souls - Zolan Rzzdik had further adventures ahead of him, his occupation in the present universe would have passed as undistinguished and insignificant as any grain of sand, on any world, on any beach.
Yet, while some men are remembered for their deeds, or for their character, or sometimes, even for their mistakes, Zolan Rzzdik would be held in great esteem by fate for reasons other than the execution of some great feat or fiasco. Destiny would be infinitely kind and cruel to Zolan Rzzdik simply for what he was -- a child of chance; a luck filled and luckless pawn of the cosmos, indiscriminately selected for greatness by the unseen forces of nature.
He would do nothing heroic; yet he was a hero. He had never been kind; yet, he would never be cruel. And while he had always doubted before, until the end of his days, he would never know anything but surety.
Zolan Rzzdik -- a man about to die, yet who would never really know death; a man protected by whatever gods may be.
The comwatch on his wrist blinked once, then twice; Zolan lowered his eyes away from the glaring vampires only inches in front of him and stared.
Now, what the hell .
"Good to see you again, Zolan. You had me worried there for awhile."
Zolan felt the sweat grow cold on his body. "Ro...Rover?" he stammered. "Is that you?"
"Of course."
Zolan was now completely absorbed by the comwatch. He neither noticed the distracted vampires ahead of him now -- or the thing materializing in the valley. His eyes were perhaps the only ones, vampire, human or Stinger, that were not completely focused on the mountain-size nightmare ten miles away.
He could think of nothing to say for a moment. His throat tightened up, and he felt dizzy, though he knew this time the Dark was not responsible for his malaise.
"I...I thought you were-" Zolan whispered intensely, almost petting the small red bulb on the wrist communicator.
"I thought the same about you Zolan," the Rover Starglide int
errupted gracefully, "I'm glad we've both discovered how wrong we were."
Zolan laughed delightedly.
He then raised his head and looked out into the darkness.
"My god..." he choked, dropping his wrist to his side. The oval moons of green that lit up the blackness stared with terrible intent toward all battle participants on the mountain. The vague outlines of a nose and mouth of the hideous face were less discernible from such a great distance, but this was of little consequence. The eyes said everything. They were more than supernatural; it was as if the very fires of damnation and creation had come together to produce a single entity that was superior to both lights in every respect.
Zolan was as stunned and humbled as every other creature near him, yet he was able to focus once again on the comwatch when the Rover began speaking.
"I see it, Zolan," the Rover anticipated the man's unspoken query, "I've been watching it for some time now. I wouldn't worry, though; His time is limited."
"The Resistor," Zolan sighed in amazement.
"Or whatever you please to call the core of evil. Look at it, Zolan," the Rover urged in customary scientific amazement, though now, Zolan thought, with an odd touch of humanity he had not remembered the ship possessing before. "Unchecked, and He would spread over this planet like a fungus, inflicting as much agony on those few species of life that could tolerate the abuse for as long as possible. Then, once tired, He would look to the stars for further conquests."
Whatever Gods May Be Page 33
