To either side of the driver’s seat there was room for three guards to sit. D had come over from his own galloping steed. After forcing the two men to the far end of the front seat, the Hunter stood like a guardian deity gripping the reins. A sudden change came over the horses—that was the only way to describe the way their speed increased.
“Oh, shit!” Gordo exclaimed in amazement, clinging for dear life to a handle on the wagon’s roof.
“They’re fast. Damn, they’re fast! These horses have gotta be top notch!”
“That’s not it. It’s the driver that’s incredible!”
Ignoring the closely pursuing cloud of gas, the wagon started to pull further and further away, and before long the road ran into a valley with cliffs rising to either side of it. D raced onward. All he had to do was hold the reins and the team of six cyborg horses tore up the turf like thoroughbreds groomed for the honor of the winner’s circle. Even running over the smallest rock made the wagon jolt madly—or perhaps exuberantly.
“Stop it already!” Gordo yelled.
Since D had taken the reins, the man had spent more than an hour clinging to the handle. Along with the wagon his organs had been jolted and his brains rattled, and his bones had been snickering at him. For a whole hour now. The other two gripped the handrails, and the ride was so rough they had all they could do to keep from falling off.
While they were shrieking and groaning, they came out of the valley, the road descended slightly, and between verdant trees the homes of villagers began to come into view. Leaving the shouts and screams of the three men in its wake, the wagon tore into the village of Jelkin. The gates weren’t locked during the day. Ignoring the villagers, who didn’t know what was going on and thus froze in their tracks, they went down the main street and straight into the square. Sparks shot from the horses’ hooves as they struck rocks, and the wagon wheels tore into the earth.
Suddenly, calm descended.
Pushing the hunched-over Sergei off his back, Juke got up. “You okay?” he called up to Gordo on the roof.
“No, I’m dead, you big dope!”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.” Looking down from the front seat, the thought that slipped from his brain was, Oh, damn!
A mob of villagers was closing on them, and every last one of them wore a wrathful visage. Naturally some of them carried spades and mattocks, others sickles and longswords—some even had bows and arrows at the ready. There were cries wanting to know who was in charge and the men looked around with eyes as big as saucers, but there was no sign of D.
Turning to the mob, Juke said in a loud voice, “We’re cargo transporters.”
“So you say, but you sped through here like damn maniacs,” one of the farmers shouted, waving a giant scythe. “Scared my granny half to death, and she nearly threw her back out!”
“What are you gonna do if you scared my chickens so bad they stop laying, huh?” a young farmer said, gnashing his teeth.
“Oh, no!” a panicky voice cried out in the distance. “Yapei’s mother started foaming at the mouth!”
“You bastards!”
“You think we’re just bumpkins and you can treat us like shit.”
“Let’s torch the lot of ’em!”
If Juke and his two compatriots dealt poorly with the villagers crushing forward, they wouldn’t get off easily.
Just then, an indistinct voice that sounded like it surely came from a mouth missing quite a few teeth called out, “Come on. Hold up now.”
Suddenly the lust for blood drained from the villagers. The mob parted, revealing an old man bent over parallel to the ground and seemingly a century or two in age. The cane he used was a thick tree branch that’d been polished.
“Long time no see, Mr. Juke,” the codger said with the same slack mouth. “And Mr. Gordo as well—the other fellow’s a newcomer, I take it? It’s been a good six months since the last time I’ve seen you, but I remember you sure enough.”
“We appreciate it, Mr. Mayor,” Juke said, relieved to the very bottom of his soul.
“You fixing to unload your goods? Okay, everybody, let’s give them a hand.” The mayor made a toss of his jaw.
Who knew what had become of their malice, because the villagers were all smiles as women, children, and old folks alike pressed toward the wagon.
“Keep back!” Juke shouted at them. Perhaps he was used to doing this, because his tone was loud and rattling.
The crowd stopped dead.
“Oh, don’t be so cold. I’m just trying to help you out is all,” said the aged mayor.
“That’s okay. Just step back,” Juke said, letting them see the pistol he wore on his hip.
“Okay, set the goods down. And don’t let anyone come any closer,” he ordered his two compatriots.
__
By the time the goods had been unloaded and they’d received payment from the mayor, it was sunset. Amazingly enough, D had covered a distance that should’ve taken three hours at top speed in less than one. Paying enough to stay for a single night, the trio was preparing to pitch camp when they found that D had come up behind them.
“God!” Juke exclaimed in surprise, inquiring somewhat caustically, “Uh, where have you been up till now, anyway?”
“Why not rent a room in the village?” D inquired.
Where lodging for travelers was concerned, rooms could usually be rented in villagers’ homes in smaller communities, while in larger ones there were full-fledged inns for just such a purpose. If they were to spend just a little more money, there’d be no need for them to sleep on the ground.
“You’ve gotta be joking, D,” Juke said, his snorts resounding through the twilight. “You might be the very top of the heap in Hunting, but you don’t know a thing about anything else, do you? If we gave the folks in this village any kind of opening, they’d pick this wagon clean inside of a minute. Look over there, behind that house and those trees. There’s a couple of people hiding there, right? And every one of ’em is out to get our goods.”
And that was the reason why he’d forced the villagers back when they wanted to help the men unload their cargo.
D glanced at Juke and said, “And yet, you look so happy.”
“Can you tell?”
“Yeah.”
“Being responsible for all this, I’d have to beat the holy hell out of anyone trying to rip us off. But I really like these folks. Out here in the sticks—in a little hick village where you take one step out of town and the place is crawling with monsters raised by the Nobility—they’re living as best they can. Hell, of course they’d wanna steal something. If I was them, I’d have long since lifted half of what we’ve got left. In that respect, they’re kinda thickheaded and kindhearted.” Juke had a tranquil look in his eyes. “Just like my dad.”
But just as he was saying this, Sergei came from the opposite direction and asked, “Could I have just two hours off?”
“Sure—but what are you gonna do?”
“There are ruins on the edge of the village. I’d like to have a peek at them.”
“What?” he exclaimed, teeth jutting from his beard. But glancing at the darkening sky, he told the man, “Be back in an hour and a half.”
Sergei thanked him, and Juke watched the man as he was leaving, his brow furrowed as he said, “He’s a strange one.”
He then turned to look over at D. But nobody was there.
__
III
__
Urging his cyborg horse to run as fast as it could, the man arrived at the ruins in less than thirty minutes. Stretching beneath a sky that nearly had the hue of darkness was a wasteland devoid of a single blade of grass. These were called ruins because of the strange things that poked out of the sand. Things that looked like twisted metal antennas, parts of massive cylinders that called to mind turbines, pieces of intricate machines the true nature of which no amount of head scratching was likely to reveal, and chunks of saucer shapes that were rumored to be aircraft—i
f any archaeologists from the Capital had been there, they’d have been ecstatic over this mountain of treasure.
As Sergei headed into the ruins on his horse, his face wore an intellectual excitement that made him seem like an entirely different person. Approaching a metal form that’d obviously been ravaged by a heat ray, he ran his hand over it, studying it. Circling a half-broken crystalline mass repeatedly, he seemed to bore into it with his gaze. It was as if the Frontier delivery man had suddenly been transformed into a scholar. For Sergei, the better part of an hour spent here was pure bliss.
Looking up at the sky just as the darkness closed over the last trace of light, he clucked his tongue.
“Satisfied now?” D asked from behind him.
Turning, he let out a deep breath and said, “Don’t startle me like that!”
D walked over to stand beside him. “The world of the Nobility will be here in less than five minutes. Better head back.”
“You’re right. I just got so absorbed. Close call.” After looking around once more, he muttered regretfully, “Looks like I won’t find out after all. Damn!”
“Find out what?” D inquired.
Sergei had no way of knowing how rare that actually was—that it was akin to a miracle. Looking like the head of the class fielding a question in his best subject, he replied, “These aren’t really ruins so much as they’re the remains of an ancient battlefield. Just look at the stuff lying around here—the wreckage of giant radar dishes, generators, tanks. The better part of them is underground, and if you were to do some serious excavating out here, you’d probably hit Noble weapons no matter where you dug. And do you know what battle was fought here? This is the site where General Gaskell and forces from the Capital vied for supremacy. Sheesh, it makes my skin crawl. Ah!”
With a snarl like a beast Sergei waved his right hand. On seeing D, he finally returned to his senses.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I got carried away again. Looks like this transporter’s just a big ol’ jabberjaw, eh?”
At that point he tried to avert his gaze, but his eyes were drawn to D’s and couldn’t pull away.
“There’s supposed to be a repository out here that holds an account of the battle,” he confided. The fervor was beginning to sweep over him once more. “The legendary conflict between the general and the allied forces of Nobility. Wouldn’t you like to know more about it than we already do? More than just what the fight was about and what its outcome was? Even among the Nobility this battle was legendary. In fact, no one even knows how it really played out. Buried somewhere in this battlefield is a building made of marble and an impenetrable metal, and inside it the truth is hidden.”
“Quite the scholar, aren’t you?” D said quietly.
“Give me a break. I’m just a delivery man with a bit of an interest in history is all. Okay, I can accept it now. Let’s head back. Even with you along, D, the night still kinda gives me the creeps.”
D moved forward.
“Uh, the village is that way,” Sergei said, pointing.
“Come with me.”
That was all D said, and as he advanced, his horse started to go faster and faster. Like a man bewitched, Sergei drove his horse on, too. The pair galloped full speed into the heart of the darkness, which was like a black cloud.
__
After about ten minutes, D halted his steed. Still in the saddle, Sergei adjusted the beam on a light that he carried. That he’d managed to somehow keep up with D was no mean feat. Having finally set the beam, he looked all around from the back of his horse, protesting, “Hey! There’s nothing out here at all!”
Not replying, D walked forward.
“Say, just where do you—” Sergei began, intent on climbing down and going after him, but the darkness was so deep it put terror in his legs and just as he tried to advance, he tripped.
“Oof!”
As he desperately struggled to rise, his eyes caught something on the ground.
“Hey! This is where you went before, isn’t it?”
And saying this, Sergei got back up and dusted off the front of his trousers.
“Damn!” he exclaimed, hurrying off after D. The young man in black was becoming an inky shape, as if to challenge the very darkness. Sergei didn’t feel like being left alone out there.
“There were footprints. Yours, I take it. You must’ve raced to the village like that because you wanted to come out here, right?”
Now he could understand why D had disappeared when they’d first arrived.
Their walk through the darkness ended before they’d gone thirty feet. D halted. Before him stretched nothing save darkness and desolation. But more than this bizarre situation, it was the view of the beautiful Hunter from behind that left Sergei dazed.
D raised his left hand. Sergei got the feeling he might’ve been gauging the speed of the almost imperceptible night wind, or else checking the weight of the light from the stark moon in the heavens above. And then, from the front of that hand, an oddly hoarse voice was heard to say, “Okay. Accursed repository, open now!”
From the Hunter’s palm, a streak of deep red shot out in the moonlight. It was swallowed by the depths of the darkness far beyond what Sergei could see. When D lowered his hand again as if nothing had happened, not a single drop fell from it.
What in the world? Harboring his doubts, Sergei was terrified both by the fact that he already knew the answer and by the answer itself. Would it come back to life? The legendary thing of which the odd voice had spoken—the accursed repository. Would it?
Through the soles of his feet, slight tremors reached him. The wind pounded him head on, and the pain of it made Sergei put his hand over his face before he could even turn away. Still, he peeked between his fingers. And swallowed hard. His breath froze in his lungs.
A glittering silver cloud that plowed across the earth bore down on him from the depths of the darkness. The only thing that kept him from turning away was the immovable silence of the figure that stood before him. The silvery cloud had already covered both the heavens and the earth, with the ground rumbling noisily. Just as it was about to swallow D, Sergei closed his eyes. Every inch of his body stiffened to meet his fate. Expectations of terror and pain nearly made Sergei pass out. However, he held on to some hope that he’d be all right so long as he was with the young man before him. Incredible air pressure pounded every inch of him—and then stopped.
Sergei opened his eyes. He was scared. Something no one was ever meant to see probably lay before him. He saw D’s back. Relief pierced his chest for a heartbeat.
The immense object that towered before the beautiful young man caught Sergei’s gaze. The silver cloud. It was moving. Its surface eddied without making a sound. And yet, it wasn’t spreading either. Sergei shifted his gaze upward. The silvery cloud seemed to stretch all the way up to the sky. He wasn’t sure when it was that he was finally able to speak, only that it was after he noticed something moving to the rear of D.
“What is that thing?”
“The repository,” that hoarse voice said. Sergei didn’t even have enough presence of mind to wonder whom it belonged to.
“Earlier, the time wasn’t right for it to make an appearance. Okay, come with me,” D said, walking away.
After some hesitation, Sergei followed after him. Rather than be left alone to face the monsters and ghosts of the battlefield, he definitely preferred to go with this young man as gorgeous as the dead and step into the world of the unknown. However, he wasn’t sure whether or not that was really the right thing to do.
The sea of clouds swallowed D’s form. Halting before the whirling miasma, Sergei took a deep breath and then a giant step forward. It didn’t even feel like he was shrouded in fog. Sergei opened his eyes. Blue light surrounded him on all sides. For he was in the heart of the cloud. As D stood stock still up ahead, he had to wonder if perhaps the Hunter hadn’t moved at all from the very beginning.
“Are we—in the middle of that cloud?”
“Where else do you think we’d be?” the same hoarse voice sneered back at him.
Sergei realized he’d been shut away inside a hidden space. The ceiling, walls, and floor were all eddying cloud. They formed a space twenty or thirty feet in each direction, and that was where the pair stood now.
“Don’t stand there like a dolt. Take a look outside. It’s not every day you get to see the inside of a repository.”
He soon learned what the hoarse voice meant by that. Through the sea of clouds, the scene outside was visible. And the space that surrounded Sergei and D had become a sphere and was now on the move. However, what a vast and desolate panorama it was! Even the ancient battleground itself hadn’t been filled with such death, stillness, and nihilism. Dark and black, a plain of steel stretched as far as the eye could see. Despite the fact that darkness crushed his field of view, Sergei could distinctly make out the wreckage of some sort of vehicles and the enormous ruins toppled on the plain.
“This isn’t the same as outside. We’re inside the repository. The ruins are what’s left of defensive systems to guard against invaders, and the vehicles were the tanks and mobile artillery those invaders used,” the hoarse voice said steadily. “Those who came in search of the repository’s secrets weren’t little archaeologist worms like you. They were some of the Nobility’s greatest military forces, and there were visitors from another galaxy as well. From what I see now, the fighting inside the repository must’ve been more intense than it was outside. Look at this ghastly death and destruction.”
But compared to the tone of the voice that spoke, the scenery that flowed steadily under his watchful eyes was a million times more tragic. Collapsed buildings snaked off to the distant horizon, and when occasional flashes that didn’t seem to be lightning palely illuminated the plain, voices that couldn’t be identified as living or machine formed a plaintive chorus. Did they still live, sealed away in the darkness as eternal victims of that light?
“That a shooting star?” the hoarse voice said as something white split the darkness far away. In no time a blue flash shot from the distant terrain, seeming to spread in that direction for the briefest of seconds before vanishing without a trace.
Vampire Hunter D: Dark Road Parts One and Two Page 8
