V 16 - Symphony of Terror

by Somtow Sucharitkul (UC) (epub)

  “There is a terrible battle to come.”

  CB spoke up. “It looks bad, you guys, real bad. They’re gonna invade through the new shopping mall—it’s really a secret lizard installation—and then they’re gonna capture all the distinguished guests.”

  “So much for the brotherhood of man and alien!” Matt said. “We’d better warn the ambassador.”

  “No need,” Andrescu said, stepping forth from the front door of the mansion with Tedescu in tow and Tomoko following close behind. Tomoko was overjoyed to see that the kid was back and that they were all gathered together in one place. The ambassador went on, “I do not intend to sit around like a sheep while my friends battle the evil that is about to beset us.”

  They went inside and sat down in the living room: a small, intense group. We’re all resistance fighters, thought Matt. Ambassadors and geisha girls, butlers and kids. This whole thing may bring humanity together yet.

  Weak from his imprisonment, CB started to explain everything he knew about Dingwall’s plans. The blue ninja interrupted now and then to comment on things that he had discovered in his clandestine explorations of the papinium labyrinth.

  “They have an entire underground nation of slaves,” he said, “who are kept in subterranean pens and have been toiling to expand the labyrinyth for months. They work them to death and then mince them into hamburger ... a fiendishly efficient procedure!”

  Setsuko stood up now, brandishing a petri dish full of what looked like a quivering mass of metallic blue jello. She said, “Then it’s fortunate that I have been able to synthesize this bacterium in time!” She waved at the blue ninja to be careful. “I won’t open this petri dish now, or my ninja friend will die horribly, I’m afraid. This is a culture of papinium-fixing bacteria that I’ve created with the help of the aliens’ own technology, a machine that someone was able to salvage from that terrible Florida Project.”

  “What does it do?” Matt said. “It doesn’t seem possible that a small dish of Jell-O could destroy an entire lizard invasion!”

  “Please trust me,” Setsuko said. “I am a scientist, and occasionally I am able to see vast possibilities in little things. Who would have thought that the atom bomb that once destroyed Hiroshima

  could have been powered by the release of energy from a piece of uranium no bigger than a dime?” “Why, that’s true,” Professor Schwabauer said. “Very perceptive of you.”

  “Well, we needn’t throw bombs at the papinium-coated tanks. We just have to throw this blue jello at them. A tiny bit will do. The presence of papinium will throw the bacteria into a frenzy of multiplication, generation after generation, thousands in seconds. The tight structure of the papinium layer will be dissolved . . . and the omnipresent red dust will be able to seep in and attack any Visitors within.”

  “Totally awesome!” CB said.

  “I will have my own way of dealing with the nosferatu,” Ambassador Andrescu said enigmatically. “It is according to the traditions of my country. But now I will telephone all my friends, the ones who agreed to attend the opening of the shopping mall ... we must all fight, no? It will be splendid. At last I shall feel that my presence here is justified.”

  “We still have a couple of hours,” Matt said. Andrescu left to make phone calls; Setsuko went to bring more petri dishes full of the blue bacteria.

  In the flurry of activity, no one noticed that the butler, Tedescu, had slipped away . . . that he had started the car and gone off somewhere.

  Tedescu drove like a maniac down the deserted George Washington Parkway. He didn’t notice the Potomac, bordered by trees with russet leaves; he didn’t see the Washington Monument or the Lin-coin Memorial as they rose from the opposite bank of the river, their marble dyed pink by the setting sun.

  All he was thinking of was Dingwall . . . Dingwall’s eyes . . . crimson, hypnotic, and the pain of the conversion process.

  He had to warn him! He had to warn the master!

  The parkway became Washington Street, the main thoroughfare of Old Town. He knew where Dingwall’s townhouse was, because he had been taken there for conversion almost a year before.

  He parked in an alleyway and knocked loudly on the back door. He pounded until his fists bled. There was no answer. But he had to warn him. In the back of his mind the words of his condition echoed and reechoed: You will always warn the masters of danger, even if it means your own life. You are nothing. The masters are everything. You are their servant. Obey, obey, obey.

  Where was the master? If he didn’t obey the conditioning he’d have to stay by the doorway . . . maybe until he died of hunger. It was all right to die, of course. It was a joyous and honorable thing to die in a master’s service. That was so obvious it hardly needed saying.

  He continued to beat methodically on the door.

  Until he noticed that there was something wrong with the lock. It was crooked. There were scratch marks on it. Someone had broken in! Was the master in danger? If so it was his duty to save him, no matter what the cost.

  He started to pry the lock with his fingernails.

  Suddenly it gave way and he entered the house.

  There’d been a secret room in the basement. That was where the master usually remained.

  He went down the stairs.

  Turned on the light—

  And screamed! A young girl’s corpse was lying across a coffee table. Blood was dribbling from a wound in her side, a wound so perfectly shaped it could only have come from a laser blaster—

  The corpse of his own daughter!

  He fell down beside the body and clasped it in his arms. He wept. Had the masters truly done this? But they’d promised . . . they’d sworn that in exchange for his service, he and his daughter would be safe from their appetites . . . hadn’t they sworn it? He’d only done it to save his little Nadia, his one treasure ....

  He buried his face in cold flesh. Hot tears burned his eyes.

  To serve the masters—that was his duty—yet, yet—

  What was happening to his conditioning?

  Soon the ambassador’s friends began to pull up in their impressive cars: Sir John Augustine, in his Rolls, was one of the first to arrive. When the situation was explained to him, he rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said, “Good God! Jolly rotten of those lizards, what! When I was a young officer in India, I remember a maharajah who used to—” “No time to be regaled with one of your lovely anecdotes, I’m afraid, John,” Andrescu said urgently. “How are you with throwing things?” He showed him one of the petri dishes.

  “Oh, I say! We’re going to give those papinium tanks a christening they’ll never forget,” Sir John said grimly. “It’ll be like the siege of Bhaktipore all over again!”

  “Tedescu!” the ambassador was shouting. “De unde esti dumneata? That confounded servant, he is nowhere to be found . .

  “Uh oh,” CB said. “Did you know Nadia was a convert?”

  “Surely not,” the ambassador said in alarm, “not in my own house!” But he remembered, suddenly, how strangely Tedescu had acted sometimes. Was it possible that he had gone away to warn the aliens? Was there no limit to man’s treachery?

  “There’s no time for conjecture about one man’s possible betrayal,” Schwabauer said. “There’s no time for anything at all. There is time only for action.”

  More were beginning to arrive now, including Setsuko’s cousin Dr. Yogami. There was the affluent, affable Bill Middendorf, an amateur composer of some stature; there were a couple of superannuated cabinet ministers; there was an ambassador from a central African country, resplendent in his traditional robes.

  “Well!” Sir John said jovially, “Do you really think a bunch of tired old codgers like us can fight the most terrifying military machine human beings have ever encountered?”

  “They’ll be singing another tune by nightfall,” Middendorf said grimly. “We’ll strike a blow for the free world.”

  Andrescu saw that many of his friends were stooped with age
, and that they were in no condition to battle aliens. He knew that many of them, the diplomats especially, had been trapped in Washington by the partitioning of America; that they had been sitting around in their splendid mansions, being ferried back and forth to receptions and parties by their chauffeurs, standing helplessly by while their very planet was ravaged by the forces of darkness. He was moved that they wanted to fight, and he drew courage from their bravery.

  “We will never surrender,” he said fiercely.

  Then he looked at the ones who had only last night been refugees, desperately fleeing across the lawn of the residence. If it hadn’t been for that Dingwall fellow they would be dead already. But Dingwall was an alien, and his reasons for stopping the attack had turned out to be hypocritical ... it was clear that he hadn’t wanted anything to get in the way of his assault on the shopping mall! Was there no end to these reptiles’ perfidy?

  But the blue ninja was a reptile too ....

  Andrescu told himself: I'm too old to believe in absolute good and absolute evil. I know better. Don’t I? The aliens have been seduced away from the truth by a few power-hungry ones; that is the way with all atrocities. He remembered Cambodia ... the Germans . . . the Russian prison camps, to which he had almost been consigned once.

  Their group: an alien ninja, a martial arts teacher, two women and a boy . . . and these at the head of a motley crew of ancients with a desperate need to mean something in the battle to control Earth . . . the green, lush, watery planet that the aliens coveted so.

  “Are we ready?” he said.

  A ragged yes came in reply.

  “Well, let us go, then.” Andrescu waited for Setsuko to distribute the last of the petri dishes, and then they trooped outside to their waiting limousines.

  As they stood in the driveway—

  A screech of tires. A car had rammed into a tree. The chauffeurs running to see what had happened.

  “My car!” Andrescu went to where his car was burning. They were pulling someone out. That person moved still, though his face was charred and his lips blistered.

  “Tedescu,” said the ambassador softly. “Were you loyal to me after all?”

  The dying man clasped in his hand the hand of a young girl—

  Dead. Her body ripped by a laserblast.

  CB, running up, cried, “Nadia’s—”

  They stood in a circle around the burning car. “Get back!” Andrescu shouted. Unless you want to be killed.”

  Tedescu murmured, “I forgot ... my true nature . . . but I found it again . . . they killed my daughter .. . .”

  Andrescu looked around. He saw the boy’s face contorted with rage. The boy cried out, “But Nadia, we almost made it all the way back from the dungeon . . . you almost made it home.”

  Tedescu died.

  Andrescu turned and said, “There is one thing I must get.” He stalked back into the house and up the stairs. He pulled open an antique chest—the one where he had kept his wife’s jewels. He threw everything on the floor: jewelry, satin scarves, frilly lace garments caked with dust.

  At the bottom of the chest was what he was looking for.

  A wooden stake and a mallet.

  He took it out and stared at it for a long time, wild with grief. “I will have my own way of dealing with the nosferatu, ” he told himself, repeating what he had said, half in jest, to the assembled others less than an hour before.

  He had kept the mallet and the stake for sentimental reasons. Once, remarking on his resemblance to Bela Lugosi, a Hollywood producer visiting Washington had presented him with the two items as souvenirs. They had once been used as props in an actual vampire movie.

  Of course, Andrescu had laughed about it, and had informed the Hollywood producer that not only wasn’t he a direct descendant of Vlad Dracul, “The Impaler”, but that that worthy was considered something of a national hero in his country.

  But maybe wielding them would have some symbolic value, childish as it sounded.

  He took both objects, tucking the stake carefully under his arm, and went to join the others.

  Chapter 24

  Tomoko sat in the back of Dr. Yogami’s battered station wagon, next to the alien whom she had thought dead. It was a tight squeeze; they followed the convoy of limousines that wound its way along the meandering, narrow Old Dominion Drive. They didn’t speak much. They had been through all this once before, when they had traveled to Osaka Castle to battle Lady Murasaki and her army without souls. She looked into the eyes of the alien who had once told her he loved her. They were distant and unfathomable. The blue papinium-steeped fabric enveloped him utterly. At last she reached out and tried to touch him.

  She wondered whether he still loved her.

  Matt couldn’t help sneaking a glance behind and seeing the two of them. He tried to feel jealousy for the soulful stares that his wife was giving the alien, but he couldn’t anymore. She and Matt had been through the ritual of Zon together, and now he knew the love for him which she held in her heart . . . even if she herself did not know it. Perhaps they were all going to die soon. He wasn’t

  angry anymore. He felt, instead, forgiveness. He was at peace.

  At last Setsuko whispered something in his ear. “What?” he said.

  She said, holding his hand, “I’m afraid for you, Matt. You have in your eyes the look of one who has seen his own destiny.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She said, “I understand you, Matt. They love each other, don’t they?”

  “I think so.”

  “I was his mistress once. But one day, after his astonishing resurrection, in the small house in Tokyo, when we were making love, I heard him murmur Tomoko’s name.”

  They had speaking in such hushed voices that Matt was sure that Tomoko and the blue ninja had not heard them. Dr. Yogami drove on down the beltway now. The road was empty. It was not entirely true that commerce and prosperity had been restored to the free states; that was more the pronouncement of politicians and optimists. Beside the beltway the walls that had been put up to protect suburbia from the noise of traffic were broken in many places; some bore the scars of battle. Beside the road there were abandoned cars . . . here a twisted, elephantine mass of wreckage where a dozen cars had not been cleared away.

  Setsuko said, “They are so happy to have found each other again. We should not destroy that happiness, should we?”

  CB, who was crouching in the very back of the station wagon, pointed at the Spring Oaks exit.

  “We’re there,” he said.

  They pulled in and parked beside the other cars. It was kind of incongruous to be next to so many official diplomatic vehicles, but then the war had brought so many incongruous people together, hadn’t it?

  Ambassador Andrescu strode on ahead, his evening clothes crammed with the sealed petri dishes that contained the still-dormant papinium-fixing bacteria. His stake and mallet were safely tucked in the folded coat that he carried on his arm.

  The much-vaunted Spring Oaks shopping mall loomed up ahead, a two-level building of brick and concrete. It was an ugly place; he had imagined it would be more spectacular, but doubtless it was the best that could be done with the free states’ fast-dwindling resources. So this was the great symbol of man’s return to prosperity, the sign that humans could build on the poisoned gift of lizard technology! He was afraid.

  Professor Schwabauer caught up with him.

  “Ah, Ambassador,” he said. “You are as scared as I am?”

  “Very scared.” Andrescu smiled wanly, feeling the clink of petri dishes in his pockets as he walked.

  “But you and I are old enough to remember many things, hard things.”

  “Yes,” Andrescu thought of the past. He had not been able to save his family. But now, in his old age, he could do something. A supreme irony had brought him from his ancient land to this one —had stranded him amongst strangers and aliens

  —had forced him only now to release himself from his g
rief-haunted past.

  They reached the grand gateway, over Vhich hung pennants that proclaimed:

  WELCOME TO THE

  SPRING OAKS SHOPPING MALL

  There were many flags hanging from over the entryway, representing the free states of America and many of the countries of the world. But to his chagrin Andrescu saw that there was also a red flag blazoned with the emblem of the Visitors.

  “What is that thing doing here?” he asked.

  Schwabauer said, “Save your anger for the aliens.”

  And they walked into the mall itself.

  And CB followed, whispering to Tomoko, “I can’t believe it! The first girl I meet in this so-called ‘free zone,’ and she gets killed by a lizard!”

  “We’ll get ’em,” Tomoko said, to mask her trepidation.

  “Oh, it’ll be just like the siege of Bhaktipore,” Sir John Augustine was saying as the group walked down the hallway.

  Ahead, the sounds of an orchestra tuning up. A confluence of corridors; a sunken pit in which the youth orchestra sat. Perhaps a thousand guests were present, sitting on canvas chairs or on the steps that surrounded the pit.

  “Even the old Prez made it,” Sir John remarked to Andrescu, pointing out the smiling face of a former president of the United States.

  Andrescu said, “We’d better separate now, and find separate seats. We don’t know where or when the attack will occur.”

  “Interesting decor,” someone said from the back.

  Sir John looked around. “Metallic blue walls. Pretty.”

  “Deadly, you mean!” said Matt. “That happens to be the monomolecular papinium shield that will protect the lizards when they take over the mall. It’ll be impregnable—a fortress. And they can send in more manpower whenever they want, riding the subway through the papinium labyrinth.”

  Dingwall and Medea watched the gathering crowd from an upper level. “Look at it all!” Dingwall gloated. “And it will soon be ours.”

  Medea said, “Look! A pet store. Perhaps we could—”