Thorn d-4

by Fred Saberhagen

  "It has a bearing. Wait. Well . . . one of the girls there was saying that her brother had been out this way recently, deer hunting, and there were some people living here in the old buildings." Judy stalled there. Invention had flagged, because of the way Gliddon was looking at her.

  This time the cigarette came all the way. And it didn't withdraw until she had screamed, twice.

  "Deer hunting in the spring," the man said then. He let her go, and leaned back against the wall, looking at her thoughtfully while she sobbed.

  "You know what I think I'm going to do?" he said at last. "That young guy who gave you the ride, as you say. I haven't talked to him yet. I think I'll bring him in here and talk to him. As soon as either one of you tells me another funny story, I'll pop out one of his eyes. I have a way of doing it with my thumb, just like this." Gliddon demonstrated in mid-air. "Then we can talk some more about deer hunting in the spring, and I'll take out the other. I'll use him up a little at a time—"

  "All right, all right! We know about the painting. I mean I know about it. Bill doesn't know a thing."

  Her interrogator sighed. It was an angry sound, but Judy realized, slowly and with fearful relief, that the anger this time was not at her. Gliddon stared at the adobe wall for a time, as if he were looking into the distance. Then his attention came back to her. "You were all at one of Del's parties tonight, right?"

  Judy nodded agreement. She had no real idea of what she was agreeing to, only that agreement was the expected answer, the believable answer, the answer that would at least postpone more pain.

  "I thought so. At Ellison's house in Santa Fe?"

  Judy read the question as well as she could, and nodded her head again.

  "Yeah, I thought so. And for once the old asshole got stoned himself and talked too much. One time when I wasn't there to look out for him. How many other people were there, besides you four that I've got?"

  Judy paused. Thought, hoped, prayed. "No one."

  "You know what I think? I think you're lying to me again."

  "No. No I'm not. No."

  Gliddon sighed faintly. Basically he believed Judy. Hurting girls was something that he enjoyed very much, but right now he had one more person to talk to. First, though, he meant to take a short break and grab something to eat.

  * * *

  For Pat, being left alone with his imagination under present circumstances was almost as bad as being worked over. Almost. He had been worked over seriously a time or two in his life, and he understood how lucky he had been to survive those occasions without permanent damage. He feared that this time he was not going to survive at all. When the man called Ike had taken him out of his cell, Pat had feared that he was going to be killed at once. Then when that hadn't happened, he considered trying to seduce Ike. But in Pat's experience in rough situations such efforts only tended to make things worse.

  Back in his cell, crouched shivering again in his adobe corner, he could imagine the worst of everything that was going to happen to him. He almost welcomed the shivering that shook him and made his teeth chatter. Maybe if he was lucky he would freeze to death before Gliddon got around to him again.

  To Pat it seemed now that he had always known that he was going to end something like this. There had never been any use in hoping for some other outcome. Life as he had known it had been basically like this all along. A few bright intervals here and there. But he seemed to have spent an awfully high percentage of his lifetime alone in the dark.

  But this time he wasn't left alone in the dark for long.

  After the glare of first Gliddon's lantern and then Ike's, it was hard to see anything in the dim cell. But as soon as Pat's eyes became accustomed to the gloom again he could see, or thought he could see, someone standing just inside his door.

  He could have sworn the door hadn't been opened again, but . . . and then he saw that it was Helen. Her hands were free, and she was looking at Pat gleefully, like some small girl triumphant in a game of hide and seek. Pat knew a relief so great that it made him feel for a moment as if he were going to faint.

  Helen put a finger to her lips—as if Pat might need any warning to keep silent. Then with an impish smile she stepped close to him and squatted down. "I fooled them," she whispered. "They thought I was sad because I was crying."

  Pat wanted her to get to work at once on his bound hands. But she just squatted there. She added: "They're going to be mad—I already set Bill loose." She continued to look at Pat fondly, as Annie had used to do sometimes. But Helen was doing nothing helpful.

  "Helen," Pat pleaded at last, in quiet desperation. "Help me get loose."

  "In a little while. I want to kiss you, first."

  "Not now, not—"

  She was leaning toward him, and now her lips stopped his. Her lips—Helen's lips?—felt cool. In another moment Pat had recognized their touch, even before they left his mouth and moved down toward his throat.

  "Annie." His own whisper was still very soft. But it carried the astonishment of a shout.

  "Hush, lover, hush," the girl murmured against Pat's neck. Her brown hair brushed his face. Only Annie had ever really bitten him in making love. And now he felt her teeth again.

  It wasn't pain. But as he had known it with Annie a dozen times before, it had the intensity of great pain. Never, with anyone else, anything like this . . . it went beyond, unimaginably beyond, anything that he had known of sex.

  Pat moaned. He couldn't help it if the sound was loud. He forgot his bound hands and even the threat of death. He couldn't tell how long it went on. He never could. He knew only that at last it ended, and that the moment Annie took her mouth from his throat and let him go the shivering came back, even stronger than before. Pat felt he wasn't going to be able to go on living in this condition. Something was going to have to happen soon to end it, one way or another. He felt so weak now that he wondered if he was dying. But the idea conveyed no fear.

  He was miserable, colder than ever, very weak, but no longer afraid as he slumped back again in the angle of the wall. The adobe behind his back felt soft and crumbly. "Annie, don't leave me." As long as she stayed with him, he wasn't even going to worry about how she had managed for a time to look so much like Helen.

  "You can call me Annie," her soft voice answered. "For you to is all right." She was standing up straight again, in the middle of the little cell, and despite the darkness Pat could see her a little better than before. "Poor Pat. You don't look good. But it's going to be all right, Annie knows what to do for you."

  "Annie."

  "Or you could call me Helen. I was Helen once before . . . a long time ago."

  With crossed arms she grasped her loose pullover shirt at the waist. In a quick motion she slid it up and off over her head. Her upper body, completely uncovered, was slender and pale in the darkness.

  "Annie . . . help me . . . get me out of here."

  "Don't faint now, Pat. Don't, my lover. Here." And what the pale girl in the darkness was doing now seemed very strange; even Annie had never done anything quite like this before. With her left hand she cupped and lifted one of her small breasts, and with the nail of her right forefinger she drew a line just underneath. A short dark line appeared on the pale skin. Annie was bending over Pat, bringing the dark line closer and closer to his face. "Here, lover. This'll help. This'll help a lot."

  He understood now what was expected of him. In a moment it no longer seemed strange at all, and his lips parted, hungrily.

  A little later, when the shotgun fired at the other end of the building, Pat didn't hear a sound.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Gunfire and uproar brought Gliddon running, cursing through the fragments of sandwich that he spat out of his mouth, grabbing up his shotgun from where he had left it leaning against the stacked crates of food. At the far end of the building, Ralph reported to him that the prisoner as yet unquestioned, Bill Bird, had somehow got loose. Ike had seen him, with unbound hands, sneaking out a door and th
en making a break for it. Ike had fired at him, evidently missing completely; and then Ike had gone in hot pursuit.

  "Get him!" Gliddon snarled, shoving Ralph toward the door also.

  "He could maybe try something like doubling back, to get the Jeep—"

  "I hope to hell he does. Get him!" And Ralph ran.

  Gliddon drew a deep breath, let it out. Well, all right. He had pretty well made up his mind anyway that he was going to have to cut out alone, and probably tonight, sometime before dawn. So anything that got Ike and Ralph out of the way, kept them from raising any objections, might well turn out at this stage to be an actual advantage.

  He trotted toward the shed where the aircraft was kept, at the other end of the building from the Jeep. Should he stop on the way and finish off the people left in the cells? No, first things first; it looked like there was a good chance of one witness getting away anyway. First make sure of the painting and the plane.

  He reached the aircraft shed, which was attached to the north end of the building. He, Ike and Ralph had built it carefully out of old lumber so it wouldn't look strange from the air. Now at once Gliddon dragged open the wide doors. In the moonless night the section of abandoned road which served as runway was vaguely visible. Lantern still in hand—now was no time to worry about showing a little light—Gliddon then turned back toward the deep end of the hangar-shed, where he had stashed the packaged painting in the middle of a stack of rotted lumber, studded here and there with rusty nails.

  And as soon as he had turned, he stopped. In the beam of his lantern stood the slim young girl, Helen, bending over the pile of old boards and timbers. Her hands were free, and now she was down to wearing nothing but her jeans.

  "God," said Gliddon, speaking aloud but to himself. "They're all loose." And any one of them could finger him for kidnapping, at least.

  "Don't you point that gun at me," the girl said, straightening up and turning, a hand on one hip. She put her other hand on a flimsy table that Gliddon had brought into the shed when they were doing some maintenance on the aircraft engine, as a place to set down tools and parts.

  And Gliddon paused for a moment, struck by her face. It was suddenly different. And her voice . . . maybe he was starting to go crazy himself, he spent so much of his life around nuts of one kind or another.

  She was starting to say, again, "Don't you—" just as Gliddon fired. And at the same moment, somehow, the table she had been holding came flipping up into the air toward him. As if the girl had tossed it, though no little girl could possibly—and the charge hit the table in midair and blew the middle of the table into fragments. The legs and various splintered parts of the top went flying everywhere. The thin wooden tabletop was not enough to save the girl, of course, not at close range like this. She went down at once. Gliddon shone the lantern briefly on the bloody mess, then set it down so he could rub his right forearm. One-handed wasn't a good way to fire a twelve-gauge, even if you did have a powerful grip. Anyway, he hadn't broken any fingers, though one had been torn slightly by the trigger guard in the recoil.

  He set the weapon down too. Then it took him a minute to dig through the lumber pile and get the painting out, bulky and heavy inside its special protective crate and wrappings. Grunting, he wrestled the package over to the Cessna, got the cargo compartment open and worked the package inside. A tight fit; carefully planned by the Seabrights, probably, even as far back as when they bought the aircraft; give them credit for being planners. That was one reason Gliddon didn't want to ride with their plan to the very end, not once it had become obvious that they were keeping important secrets from him.

  He reloaded his shotgun—he liked a simple double-barrel for reliability, two shots were enough if you knew when to use them and could put them where you wanted. Then he headed back into the building to finish off the two live witnesses he could still reach. In passing he glanced down once more at the dead girl. He thought she had moved amid the blood. Even so, there didn't appear to be any need to waste another shell on her, but he would check again on his way back.

  Tonight everything was one surprise after another. Looking into the room where he had left the punk called Pat, he saw that the kid appeared to be dead already. Pat lay still, on his back, bound hands underneath, with open, unblinking eyes and some kind of bloody mess around his parted lips. Beside him lay the sweatshirt Helen had been wearing. Well, whatever, the kid looked dead. Making sure, Gliddon knelt down, felt a forehead that was already cold. No heartbeat under the shirt. He flicked an eyeball with a fingertip and got no reflex blink. No need to waste a shell here, either.

  With a growing sense that speed was necessary, Gliddon turned away. He had to make sure that the last prisoner, the girl called Judy, was still where she was supposed to be.

  Indeed she was, though she was working to get the door of her cell open when Gliddon got there. She was alive and still hand-tied, and satisfyingly terrified. It was reassuring to find at least one person behaving as they ought.

  Gliddon would have loved to play with her for a while, but there just wasn't time. He set down his lantern and raised his gun and grinned. "Sleep tight," he said.

  And whirled round, on nerves that had become hair-trigger, at the ghost of a small sound just a few steps behind his back.

  The small brown-haired girl with the bloody torso stood there, seemingly ignoring her great red wound. In the reflected lantern-light the wound now looked more like scar tissue than like hamburger. Gliddon's eyes must have played him tricks a minute ago, the flimsy wooden tabletop must after all have saved her life. Temporarily.

  "Gliddon, Gliddon." She didn't even sound hurt. Her little-girl voice held a tone of soft reproach, and it appeared that she was smiling at him.

  Gliddon's nerve might have held up, would have held up, if she had been yelling, or attacking him, or crying out in pain for mercy. But he couldn't take this kind of a reality just now. He fired both barrels right in her face. The girl's hair blew back in the wind of the blast, but her face remained untouched. The wall behind her cratered widely and shallowly, and a choking cloud of brown adobe powder burst into the air. The girl stood there with her lovely, smiling face untouched.

  Gliddon dropped the emptied shotgun, grabbed up the lantern again, and at the same time drew his pistol. The lantern's beam shining through the cloud of settling dust showed him Helen's dazed and gentle smile. The great red scar along her ribs and belly looked almost superficial, like an old, half-healed burn or scrape.

  "Gliddon, no, you shouldn't. Uncle Del's going to be awfully angry with you. He loves me, I'm his niece. I'm just like his very own little girl, he says."

  Gliddon couldn't think any longer. He triggered his revolver at the figure, and behind it wood and adobe shuddered and burst, gave up flying fragments to the air.

  There was something else in the air, at Gliddon's elbow. He sensed another presence, saw another human figure starting, trying, to take shape. He turned and ran, fleeing by instinct to the aircraft shed.

  * * *

  Judy, gazing at the new apparition, almost broke down in her near-hysterical relief. "You're here, you're here, thank God. I was . . ."

  Her voice trailed off. The figure of the vampire taking shape before her eyes was not that of the man she had been expecting. She stared as the form solidified. It was that of a huge man, massively built. He looked quite young—she knew how deceptive that could be—and Judy was sure that she had never seen him before.

  He was looking at Judy oddly. In a bass voice he asked her: "Who did you think I was?"

  Before she could answer, another man's voice screamed outside in the night, a hundred yards or more away: "Ike! Gliddon! Help!"

  Judy slumped, knowing behind closed eyelids a sudden vision: white teeth quenched in red blood. The help that she had waited for had come.

  * * *

  In the aircraft shed, Gliddon hurled himself into the Cessna's cabin. The engine would be cold, but he had kept everything as ready as possi
ble. He was going to make it now. Mexico, here we come.

  He grabbed for the electric starter. The engine caught on the first try . . . then coughed, and died. He tried again. The pale figure of the girl was following him. Here she came, walking toward the aircraft through the dim shed, and in the restored silence when the engine died again he could hear her softly calling.

  Any moment now he was going to wake up. But no, this time the engine caught and held. He released brakes and grabbed the throttle, and now he was rolling for the doors . . .

  The slender blue-and-white figure of the girl in jeans came sleepwalking right into the path of the rolling aircraft. Gliddon could see the disaster coming but it was too late for him to do anything about it. Just at the moment of catastrophe everything seemed to be happening at once, and he had not even time to perceive it all; but he had the distinct impression that at that very moment there was yet another person in the shed. A dark-clad man with a pale face, standing near the girl and in the act of reaching for her with one outstretched arm . . .

  . . . Gliddon's right hand had hit the switches, and was reaching for the throttle, but too late. The sound of the blow had elemental power, and Gliddon knew the wooden prop must have been sprung if not completely shattered. The aircraft shuddered with the impact, the engine dying finally in a great cough. Gliddon had a door open and jumped out of the cabin again almost before the Cessna had stopped rolling. Something lay on the floor, but he was not going to stop to decide what it was. If there had really been two people in front of the propeller, quite likely it had hashed them both.

  Moving in desperate haste he wrenched open the cargo compartment again, pulled out the awkward package and ran with it, stumbling, arm muscles quivering, out of the shed and through the passage that led to the other shed where the Jeep ought to be parked. The Jeep was there.

  Gliddon wedged the encased painting into the back seat, then sprang into the driver's seat and started the engine with a roar.

  The Jeep bounced out of the shed and away into darkness, following a route that twisted among dimly visible boulders and over tiny hills. Next Gliddon headed down into a breakneck ravine that took long minutes to work through, at walking speed, even with the four-wheel drive. At the bottom end of this ravine a small stream murmured almost invisibly. Otherwise the night had grown quiet; so far, there was no pursuit. Tires splashed, and then the Jeep was working its way uphill again. Gliddon drove out of the rough at last on the old road, not far from the point where the punks' cars had been stalled. Only a few more miles and he'd be on highway. Then he'd head south. He had in mind a place or two where it ought to be possible to steal another plane.