by Brian Lumley
Meanwhile someone—or something—back at the shack had started up the Land Rover. Its lights came on, cutting a bright swath through the darkness as it bumped over the rough terrain. Whoever was at the wheel, Liz guessed he’d be looking for Jake. Since hiding or disguising her talent was no longer of benefit, finally she opened her mind to seek her partner’s thoughts and perhaps discover his whereabouts.
Liz couldn’t send, could only receive, but she knew that other minds—and especially enhanced vampire minds—might be able to detect her presence if not read her thoughts; this was a result of the germ of telepathy that was present in a majority of them. Thus vampires were frequently “spotters.” Indeed, the best (or worst) of them could smell out an entirely human being much in the same way as a great hound. But what the hell … they already knew she was here.
Jake’s mind was immediately accessible:
Fuck! he was thinking. Oh, Jesus, they’ve got the vehicle! They’re after me! And yet even now there was very little of any real panic in him. He’d been in too many tight spots before.
But: Do it! Liz tried to send, to will him into action. Do it now, for God’s sake! (Or if not for His sake, for Liz’s most definitely!)
He couldn’t hear her, of course not, but surely the other Jake, that other facet, would have to emerge now? Well, apparently not. And behind Liz her pursuer’s footfalls sounded loud and clear, pebbles clattering as they squirted out from under his pounding feet.
She put on speed (one final burst, for her strength was on the wane now), took in great gulping drafts of air through her mouth, headed in the rough direction of Jake’s thoughts, where they had led her to believe he was … .
Jake, too, was feeling stressed, but obviously insufficiently as yet. The nose plugs were killing him, but he’d been warned about the dangers of removing them. All well and good, but his throat was raw from drinking in dry, dustladen air, and since he’d probably been splashed with blood it seemed likely he was already contaminated. God, how he could use a beer now, even a warm one—except he probably wouldn’t have time to drink it.
The Rover was on his tail, right behind him, when Jake saw a flat-topped boulder. He spun to one side and the vehicle skidded and threw up a cloud of dust as its driver hauled the wheel over. Jake knew that if he had failed to get out of the way the Rover would have hit him. Not hard enough to kill him, maybe, but hard enough to put him out of business, certainly. This big boulder was his only chance.
Leaping onto the rim of the rock, he scrambled to its flat surface as the Land Rover came to a halt. There were two men in the vehicle; he could think of them as men, anyway. One seemed a little dazed: he must be a recent convert, recruit, or thrall. But the other, the driver … that one wore a grin like Satan himself. A lieutenant? Jake couldn’t even even hazard a guess. This was Jake’s first time. In at the fucking deep end!
The driver was out of the vehicle in a flash, ducking and disappearing beneath the rim of the boulder before Jake could get a bead on him. The other was slower and Jake’s first shot hit him in the head. Well, who or whatever he was, he wouldn’t be getting back up on his feet again.
As for Jake: even with his record, still he felt sick knowing that he’d killed another man. Except this one hadn’t been a man, not any longer. But the sight of the vampire’s head exploding like that—the red wet spray, and whatever other colours there had been—just so much black slop in the moonlight …
… And then Jake asked himself, what moonlight? A cloud, just one damn cloud in an otherwise clear night sky, had drifted across the moon’s three-quarters grimace. Just as quickly as that, the night was black as pitch, and the Rover’s headlight beams were pointing the wrong way. Darkness favours the vampire, and Jake knew he had to make his move now.
There was room for just two short paces along the flat surface of the boulder. Jake took them, lifted his feet, and hurled himself up and outwards towards the Rover, his arms stretched forward for balance. But even as he cleared the boulder’s rim a powerful arm and hand shot up, grabbed his left foot. Jake’s impetus carried him forward, his balled-up body turning like a pendulum at the end of that oh-so-strong arm. And when he hit all of the wind was knocked out of him. He felt his nose plugs eject, trailing streamers of gritty snot, as his Browning flew from momentarily nerveless fingers.
Then that nightmare figure was standing over him, leering down at him, going to one knee and reaching for his throat with long, mantrap hands. “That’s it,” the thing that had been a man said. “The fun and games are over, friend. Well, yours are, for sure.” With which he drew Jake effortlessly to his feet.
“But yours first!” said a small but resolute female voice. The moonlight came back, and Jake saw the vampire’s yellow eyes go wide. As Liz stepped closer, the monster snarled and turned his awful head towards her. The muzzle of Liz’s tiny weapon was almost in his astonished, gaping mouth when she pulled the trigger. In that same moment Jake turned his face away, but in any case the debris went the other way.
“The Rover!” Liz was pale as a ghost, stumbling where the moonlight picked out her softly feminine curves. She managed to run a few paces, but Jake caught up with her at the vehicle and almost threw her into the passenger seat. He had seen a handful of silent, flame-eyed figures approaching from the direction of the shack. They were the most immediate problem, obviously, but as yet Jake wasn’t aware of the lone pursuer tracking Liz. She knew she hadn’t lost him, however, and continued to urge Jake: “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
“Seat belts,” he snapped. “It’s going to be bumpy!”
Then the engine was roaring, the gears grinding, the Land Rover kicking up dirt as it wheeled for the service road. Which was when Liz’s lone pursuer came aboard.
He came from the side, came vaulting into the rear seats in the moment before Jake picked up speed. And off-balance he staggered there, his eyes like hot coals in the night. Jake and Liz had seen him; Liz twisted her body, tried to fire her Baby Browning point-blank, and heard the click as the firing pin fell on a dud! The vampire grinned and reached for her, and Jake cursed, changed down, and floored the accelerator. In the back, the vampire was taken by surprise and thrown off-balance again, if only for a moment.
Then, falling to his knees on the back seat, he leaned forward, put his head between theirs, grinned first at Liz then at Jake—before taking the backs of their necks one in each hand. Which was exactly what Jake had hoped he would do. And:
“Hang on!” Jake yelled, and literally stood on the brakes.
Mercifully Liz had seen it coming; she leaned to the right even as Jake leaned left. And the loathsome thing gurgled, “Eh? What?” But the explanation was already forthcoming.
As he flew between them, he released their necks, tried to bring his hands forward to protect his face, didn’t even nearly make it. With his arms forming a V behind him, he hurtled forward and smashed face-first through the windshield.
“Godawful—damn—thing!” Jake choked, slamming the Rover into first and crunching forward over something that was trying to stand up. They heard its body grinding and thumping, mangled between the Rover’s underside and the stony rubble of the terrain.
“My God!” Liz gasped. “I think we might actually make it!”
“Never doubted it,” her partner told her, lying for all he was worth.
Just as they turned onto the service track and headed for the ramp, a light commenced flashing on the dash. “Radio,” Liz said, reaching under the dash to grab a hidden mike. Thumbing the transmit button, she said, “Hunter One for Zero. What kept you?”
“This is Zero One,” a gravelly voice answered in a stutter of static to match the sudden throb of a chopper’s rotors. “Is that you mobile down there?” And a searchlight beam swept down from above.
Jake leaned over and spat into the speaker, “Only fucking just! Zero—Trask, is that you?—we could use some help.”
“Do you have a target?”
“If it’s behind us a
nd it’s moving, it’s a target,” Jake said, straightening up in time to avoid a pothole. And as the adrenaline began to recede and his skin stopped prickling, he eased up a little so as not to send the Land Rover nose-diving off the rim of the ramp.
Then Liz said, “Stop!”
“Stop?”
“Stop the vehicle. I want to see.”
“Feeling bloodthirsty?” Jake looked at her, frowning as he cautiously applied the brakes.
“Not me.” She shook her head, shuddered her relief as she thumbed her nostrils one after the other to blow out her plugs. Then she half turned her head, inclined it to indicate the dark shelf of rock that they’d left behind. “And not them, not after this.” And now her voice was a sigh.
They looked up and back. First at a sleek, black dragonfly shape under the gleaming blur of its fan, a shape that blotted the stars in its passing and turned the night to a whirling dervish dust-devil with its downdraft as it sped overhead, then at the torpedo-shapes that tumbled lazily, end over end, down from its belly like so many elongated eggs.
“Jesus!” Jake’s sigh matched Liz’s.
“Let there be light!” she said.
And there was light. The napalm hit a little way back from the top of the ramp. It lit up a widening path all the way back to the knoll, roared with the thunder of its all-consuming passion, washed the wall of the outcrop like a tsunami of fire. In the space of a few short seconds the scene might well have been that in the caldera of an active volcano; a small mountain burned in the night, with man-made lava flowing down its flanks.
For long moments there were running, leaping, screaming figures in the roiling smoke, blackly silhouetted against terrible balls of fire that seemed to roll across the shelf of the rocky outcrop with lives of their own. The spidery figures were there … and they were gone, cindered, rolled under … .
The unit was made up of two choppers, a giant support truck and various smaller vehicles, mainly Rovers. The truck and lesser vehicles wouldn’t get here for some time yet. They had miles of rough road to cover.
The choppers landed on the shelf itself, one to the north and the other to the south. In half an hour their combat-suited, gas-masked, heavily-armed special forces crews were moving forward into the scorched zone. Meanwhile Jake and Liz had joined up with Ben Trask in charge of operations, also with Ian Goodly his second in command, and a “civilian,” Peter Miller, of Australia’s Rudall River National Park Administration—or “Mister” Miller, as he insisted on being called.
Obviously Miller hadn’t been told too much, which was perfectly understandable; it was all on a need-to-know basis, and when E-Branch went out into the world it was standard procedure to avoid unnecessary rumourmongering and the panic that might ensue. Miller was small, round and bouncy as a rubber ball; he was very excitable and utterly confused. And like many another small, insignificant man in a position of assumed “authority,” he made a lot of noise. Right now he raved on at the tall, unflappable beanpole that was Ian Goodly, who kept steering him away from Ben Trask so that Trask could talk to Liz and Jake. But still Miller’s yappy, little-dog voice could be heard over just about everything else that was going on. Right now he was flapping his arms, yelping about:
“ … This uttermost devastation? Damn it all, Mr. Goodly, I know that this is a wasteland, a useless desert region that you can’t damage any worse than Nature herself. But … there were men in that blaze! I saw men burning in those hell-fires! What was that stuff, napalm? But in any case, what does it matter? What happened here tonight was sheer murder! There is no other word for it. I … I still can’t believe what I witnessed here … cold-blooded murder, Goodly! And someone will be called to answer for it. In fact I demand an answer, right here and now!”
“Who is he?” Liz asked.
Trask frowned. “He’s supposed to be our local liaison officer for the Western Deserts Region. A handful of top men in the Aussie Government know what we’re doing, just how important our work is. Even so they couldn’t simply let us loose, give us carte blanche to get on with things. We were obliged to accept an observer. But that doesn’t make him one of us, and I’ve managed to keep him out of it … well, until tonight. Even now I don’t intend to waste time with him on long explanations. What we’re doing is impossible to explain anyway—not if we expect to be believed. But whether we want Miller or not we’ve got him, and maybe the best way to keep him quiet will be to let him see for himself something of what’s going on.”
“Well, he’s seen it,” Jake growled. “But he isn’t quiet.”
“He hasn’t seen everything.” Trask’s face was grim. And to Liz, “What do you reckon?”
Knowing what he meant, she opened her mind, gazed intently through the smoke of the remaining fires at the burning shacks where they slumped in the lee of the knoll. And as lines of concentration formed on her brow, she said, “The worst of them—the ‘old man,’ Bruce Trennier—is still alive. Alive, afraid, and angry. He’s still very dangerous, very clever, too. Despite that he tries to hide his thoughts, maybe because of it, I know he’s there. His—what, mindsmog?—is as thick as the mist on a swamp, and it stinks a lot worse! He’s the boss, but he isn’t alone. Back where the fire couldn’t reach, in the depths of the old mine, there’s a handful of others. They’re waiting for us.”
Trask nodded. “Well, let’s not keep them,” he said, his lips twisting in a cold, cruel grimace and his eyes lighting with a vengeful fire of their own. And: “Mr. Miller,” he called for the small and small-minded official. “If you will please accompany me? I hope to be able to answer some of your questions … .”
3
FIRESTORM
Looking at Ben Trask, Jake Cutter found himself wondering what it was about the man. He knew some of it—that Trask was the head of a British Secret Service organization called E-Branch, based in London but with many other branches, affiliations, and powerful friends throughout the wortd—but not everything by any means. One thing seemed certain, however: Ben Trask was a driven man. Moreover, Jake thought it likely that whatever was driving him was the same thing that caused him to look so much older than his years.
Not that Trask was young; in fact he could have been anything between fifty-five and sixty years old. But while his mousey hair was streaked with white, his skin pale, and his aspect in general aged and maybe even fragile, still the man inside, the mind, soul, and personality—the id itself—was diamond-hard. Jake sensed this, and felt a certain empathy for Trask, felt that he knew him, despite that the man had only recently become a factor in his life. But one hell of a factor!
For his height of about five-ten, Trask was maybe a couple of pounds overweight. His broad shoulders slumped just a little, his arms tended to dangle, and his expression was usually, well, lugubrious? Or maybe that, too, was as a result of … of what? His loss? For that was the impression you got if you caught him unawares: the feeling that something had gone out of him, leaving him downcast, empty; his green eyes strangely vacant or far away, his face drawn, and his mouth turned down at the corners. As if he’d suffered a loss too great to bear. And Jake thought he knew something of how that felt.
On the other hand, if what little Jake had been told about Trask was true, then he might well be misjudging him; Trask’s pain could have its origin in something else entirely. For in a world where the simple truth was becoming increasingly hard to find, it would be no easy thing to possess a mind that couldn’t accept a lie. And that, allegedly, was what Trask was: a human lie-detector.
E-Branch: E for ESP. Telepaths, empaths, locators, precogs … psychos? That’s how Jake had thought of them just five days ago: as raving lunatics. No, as very quiet lunatics. For nary a one of them had actually raved. But that was five days ago, and in between he’d seen some stuff. And anyway, who was he to talk? What, Jake Cutter, who went on instantaneous, hundred-mile-long sleepwalking tours in broad daylight, and suspected that someone was hiding in his head?
All of these though
ts passing through Jake’s mind as he and Liz followed Trask, Goodly, and Miller—who in turn followed a team of four armed-to-the-teeth special agents—between the stinking fires and towards the slumping, blazing ruin that had been the main shack. The lone pump had disappeared; now a column of shimmering blue fire roared its fury at the sky as fuel from the subterranean storage tank burned off. And as Trask’s party advanced on the shack, so Miller went prattling on:
“Do you think there can ever really be an answer to this, Mr. Trask? Good Lord, man! But who gave you the authority to do such as this? I mean—look!” And his hand flew to his mouth. “A b-b-body!” he stammered. “For God’s sake! A cindered body!”
In the lee of a clump of hip-high boulders where the blackened, smoking skeletons of cactuses and other once-hardy plants oozed bubbling sap, the clean-up squad had missed something. It was an arm and a hand, protruding from the molten mess of vegetation like a root among all the other exposed roots. Obviously someone had tried to escape the fire by diving for cover in the foliage … any port in a firestorm.
Or rather it bad been an arm and a hand. Now it was a smoking black twigthing with four lesser twiglets and the remains of an opposing thumb. Yet even now it was twitching, vibrating, showing signs of impossible life, and the vile soup within the nest of rocks was heaving and bubbling.
“You there—you missed something,” Trask called out. And one of the specialists came back with his flamethrower, playing its bright yellow lance on the shuddering mess until it seethed into a black liquid slop.
In the meantime, Miller had been sick. Trask looked at the little fat man unemotionally where he stood trembling, holding a handkerchief to his mouth, and said, “Best if you stay here.” And to Liz and Jake, “You two keep Mr. Miller company. But make sure he gets a good look at it if … if anything happens.” He turned away, moved off with Ian Goodly. Both of them were equipped with vicious-looking machine-pistols.
