Invaders

by Brian Lumley

  “—Thanked Him, as I somehow managed to wind my window down and drifted out and up and free. But as the car went down and I floated up, buoyed up in an eruption of big bubbles, I saw Natasha in the back of the car! Her face … her hair floating … her eyes wide open … her mouth gaping. And her spread fingers flattened and white, the hands of a corpse—I hoped!—against the curved back window.

  “But dead? I didn’t know, I still don’t know to this day if she was dead or alive. But I’ve got to keep telling myself that she was dead, because that’s the only way I can bear it. And in any case, I couldn’t have done a thing about it. Weak as a kitten, I felt half dead myself! My lungs were bursting—my ears too—we were that deep. And I drifted up oh so slow, while the car went down, disappearing into the deeps. And this girl I had loved, still loved, Natasha disappearing with it …”

  This time it was a while before Jake could go on. He was like a man apart from reality; he started and sat up straighter in his chair when the Old Lidesci coughed, and looked around for a moment as if wondering where he was.

  “Are you okay, Jake?” Liz asked him.

  A nod was his only answer, until he was able to continue.

  “Don’t ask me how I got back to Marseille,” he finally went on. “I can’t for the life of me remember. But I did, and I laid low with a trusted friend. By then my earlier plans for revenge were firmly back in place. Before that, however, I actually considered going to the police. Then I remembered what Natasha had told me about the police being in Castellano’s pocket and decided against it. I would wait it out, see what happened.

  “I didn’t have long to wait. It was in the newspapers home and abroad. My car had been found in the Verdon River where it comes down from the Alps of Provence near Riez. Locals had been alerted by a hole in the wall of a stone bridge over a torrential gorge. Natasha was still in the car, along with a quantity of illicit micro-drugs and other evidence that she’d been a bad lot. As for me: well, with my past record I would have been a wanted man—her partner, obviously—except they assumed I was dead.

  “But I wasn’t dead. And now I had absolutely nothing left to lose. Also, I knew a few things about Castellano’s people, where they hung out and who with, and I wasn’t about to waste any more time.

  “There was one thing I had been really good at during my couple of years with the SAS: sabotage. Sabotage, booby-traps, and demolition. And I still remember—and I cherish the memory—of the night I found Jean Daniel drinking alone in that discreet little bar that I knew so well. I was there, watching the place, when he arrived, and I was there when he left.

  “It was a rainy night. As he got in his car in the alley, I stepped out of the shadows maybe twenty-five yards in front. I stood there with my legs spread like an inviting target, and I waved at him. And I started oh so slowly to walk towards him. He saw me; I saw him flinch, knew that he’d recognized me. Then he turned the key in the ignition, and I knew exactly what the bastard was thinking: that he would run me down.

  “By then I’d turned my back and hit the deck just in case. But no, there wasn’t much of a blast; what little there was of flying glass went over my head. So I got up, walked to his car and looked in through the shattered window. I knew pretty much what I’d see, for I’d been determined to make the best kind of job of it. And I had.

  “I had taken a small hacksaw and cut halfway through the four spokes of his steering wheel close to the column. And I’d fitted a trembler to the highexplosive charge that I’d placed under the plastic casing where the column was jointed for adjustment. It was a hellishly sensitive mechanism, far too sensitive to ignore the vibrations of a revving engine.

  “The blast had driven the steel core of the steering column through Jean Daniel’s middle, stripping its plastic casing as it went. The core had broken his lower ribs and torn through his stomach, and done a lot more damage along the way. Yet somehow it had missed severing his spine. He sat there—alive but barely—pinned to his seat with this fat cylindrical rod right through him; sat blinking at me, the steering wheel still gripped in his spastic hands.

  “‘This is a different kind of rape, Jean Daniel,’ I told him, watching as blood filled his mouth, and his eyes began to dim, and his twitching gradually stilled. ‘My own special version.’ And then, just before the bastard died. ‘So now you know who hits the hardest.’”

  6

  MORE OF JAKE’S STORY

  Ben Trask, Ian Goodly, and the Old Lidesci were first away from the gutted, smouldering remains of the vampire enclave; Liz and Jake followed behind Trask’s commandeered transport in their own vehicle. They would be taking it easy, so it shouldn’t be a problem that they’d lost the windshield. If they kept well back from Trask, the dust thrown up by his Land Rover wouldn’t bother them. And the cool night air would be a definite bonus.

  Just as they rolled onto the ramp cut in the steep face of the bluff, Jake slowed almost to a halt and looked back.

  Apart from the smoke there was very little to show for the earlier activity. Several members of the team, dressed in fresh combat clothing but no longer armed or gas-masked, were hammering sharp signposts into the stony earth. One such post carried a legend only just visible in moon- and starlight:

  HEALTH HAZARD!

  TOXIC WASTE! KEEP OUT!

  E-Branch took no chances.

  “What next?” Jake jerked his head to indicate the scene of recent devastation. “For this place, I mean?”

  Liz shrugged. “The mine’s sealed, there are no life signs. Tomorrow the sun will come up and scorch the bluff clean. Maybe they’ll bulldoze the surface and dynamite the ramp, eventually. But there’s no real hurry now. The main man was Bruce Trennier, as yet a lieutenant but a would-be Lord. If he had got away …” Again her shrug. “Tomorrow they’d be back to tracking him down again. As it is, the operation was a complete success.”

  “And this was the first time you’ve seen this kind of action?” Jake slipped the Rover into third, let gravity draw them down the dusty ramp. “How come you know so much more about this stuff than I do?”

  Liz tossed her hair back. “I’ve had a little time to study what they do—the Branch, I mean—and I’m ‘aware’ of my own talent, which makes their talents so much more acceptable. Once you begin to realize that all the weird stuff is real, it’s not so difficult to believe the weirdest stuff of all.”

  But Jake only wondered, And that’s a good thing?—to actually believe in all of this? But still it was hard to deny his own five senses. Assuming they were his own, of course.

  Down on the level, he turned onto the old road. A quarter mile ahead, Trask’s taillights glowed red. “I still can’t accept that we were simply thrown in at the deep end,” Jake said.

  “It was a test, as Trask told you,” Liz answered. “I guess he knew that once we’d actually experienced it, gone up against the plague itself … well, that we really would accept it.”

  “So why don’t I?” Jake wanted to know.

  For a while she was silent, letting the wind blow her hair back, breathing the night air. Then she said, “Jake, about your story tonight, in the ops room. There are terrible experiences, and there are terrible experiences. There are monsters and monsters, and I don’t know which ones are the worst. But your life has been one of extremes. Maybe if mine had been messed with as much as yours, I’d start to wonder what was real, too. But this talent of yours, that’s really something else. I mean, what you did tonight was—”

  “—Wasn’t me!” he said sharply, cutting her off. And with a shake of his head: “I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “Try,” she said. “If we are to be partners, surely you can try? Look, this isn’t something I suggest lightly—the Branch has its own internal code of conduct for espers, telepaths, empaths, and such—but if you’ll just let your thoughts flow free, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” he looked at her. “Read my mind? See if I’m as messed up as you suspect? Well, I proba
bly am. Probably have been ever since … since Natasha died. The way she died.” Then he sighed and relaxed a little. “On the other hand, you could be right. My life has been a mess, and fate seems bent on screwing me around more than my fair share. So is it any wonder I have a problem sorting out what’s real from what’s fantasy? And as for E-Branch,” Jake shook his head wonderingly. “Gadgets and ghosts—yeah!”

  “And they want you for one of their gadgets,” she said.

  “Huh!” he answered. “Maybe one of their ghosts, if things had gone wrong tonight!”

  “You’ve changed the subject,” Liz accused. “Look, back in the ops room you started to tell your story. A good start, but you didn’t nearly tell it all. Now me, I’m a hell of a listener. And right now, right here, there’s just the two of us.”

  “Oh, really?” he said. “A good listener—and bloodthirsty with it? Like one of those things we destroyed tonight?”

  “That’s not fair,” Liz answered. “And that’s not the part that interests me.” She gave a little shudder. “I mean, I know you killed all of those men—”

  “No, not all of them,” Jake said, coldly. “Castellano and one other, they’ve still got it coming.”

  “—And that your methods were … extreme, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’ve heard Ben Trask going on about the way you use what he calls the Möbius Route. That’s your talent, right, Jake? It’s how you moved us to safety back at the lair.”

  He nodded, growled, “And that’s what I keep trying to tell you. It’s not mine! It’s like—I don’t know—somebody else? Someone who gets into my head, anyway. Someone who’s living in there like a bloody squatter. Trask keeps mentioning this Harry Keogh. Well who is this Keogh? Some kind of telepath? And if so, why is he so damned keen to mess with my mind? Why not pick on someone else, someone more receptive? No, I can’t see it. Maybe it’s a part of me that this me—I mean the real me—doesn’t recognize. Like I’m a … a split personality or something? God, maybe I really am crazy!” He banged on the steering wheel with the flats of his hands, stamped his feet and set the Land Rover to swerving.

  Liz gave him time to cool down, then said, “Jake, how can I get through to you? This isn’t just for me, nor even for Ben Trask or his people; it’s mainly for you. I wish you’d tell me about it: how you escaped from jail and all, and ended up with E-Branch. I know it happened, but not how it happened. So what do you say? Will you tell me?”

  And he knew she wouldn’t let it go until he did … .

  “I got sloppy,” Jake began. “When I killed the third and last but one of Castellano’s men—of the men who had been present at the villa that night—it was a sloppy job. A case of familiarity breeding contempt?” Glancing at Liz, he shook his head. “I would really hate to think so; hate to admit that I was getting used to it. But who can say? Maybe I was at that.

  “Anyway, he was an Italian and I killed him in Italy. And I got caught there, too. Maybe they were waiting for me. After all, I had been working down a list, like a serial killer, you know? Of course, Castellano must by then have made the connection—must have figured out that this wasn’t just another gang war—and it’s possible he had tipped off the authorities, the police. When I thought it out, it was even possible he’d sent that last victim out of France to put distance between himself and me! If so, then I’d actually managed to get to the bastard—I’d worried him considerably—which felt very good. But in any case:

  “I was tried and convicted in Italy, and there was no hope of extradition. Having dual nationality—English and French—only made the legal side of it even more tangled, complicated, hopeless. And to put the cap on it, current European law made it imperative that I was tried ‘in the country where the crime was committed for any serious offence against nationals of the said country.’ Well, you can’t get any more serious than murder, which was their term for what I’d done, even if I called it an act of justice. And finally, if found guilty—which of course I was—I had to serve out my time in that same country.

  “That’s why I think it was Castellano who set the trap for me, and baited it with his own man. Castellano’s a Sicilian, or an Italian if you like. And it’s like Trask says: the gangs are highly organized now—computerized, integrated and all—and as always they have their fingers in every pie.

  “So, why do you reckon this bastard thug wanted me in an Italian jail? Obviously, it was one of those pies in which he had a finger! Jake Cutter was a dead man. If not immediately, soon.

  “But to me the hell of it was I’d never been able to get a sniff of Castellano himself. The villa in Marseille was always guarded to the hilt, and if he’d ever left it … well, I certainly didn’t know about it. How could I? I still didn’t—still don’t—even know what he looks like. This is one secretive son of a bitch! But I will find him one day, and when I do—”

  “But not while you’re working for E-Branch,” Liz broke in. “The one thing you mustn’t do is compromise the Branch. They’re your protection, Jake. And you’ve got to remember: Trask is the only thing standing between you and a return visit to that cell in … where?”

  “In Torino,” Jake answered. “Turin, where they’re alleged to have found the Shroud, and where I was being fitted for one! I tell you, Liz, there were some hard men in that jail. It took me maybe—oh, twenty-four hours?—to figure out that I wasn’t getting out in one piece. The looks, the nudges, the winks. But what I said earlier about the size of my … er, you know what, that wasn’t true; could have been but wasn’t. No one came sidling up to me offering their protection for a little buggery on the side; I guess because the word had gone out that I couldn’t be protected, and that anyone who tried it might well need some protection himself.

  “And there were a couple of narrow squeaks. Knife fights I wasn’t involved in, that I somehow got involved in. And once in the prison hospital—I was in for abdominal bruising and a suspected fractured rib … yes, another one—someone tried to inject me with a hypodermic full of human shit.

  “Anyway, I’d been in there for eleven weeks when this guy—just a guy, no one sinister, I thought, but someone who probably pitied me—got me on my own and told me that it was coming. And when it was coming. I had a week to live, he said. And no good going to the prison staff; they were in on it, and the governor was a man who knew which side his bread was buttered.

  “Then a funny thing. This same little fellow said he was working in the machine shop. He gave me a rough key—just a strip of metal, realty—showed me how to make an impression of the lock on my cell. This was an old, old prison, Liz. Not like the home from home you’ll find in a lot of modern English jails. Anyway: ‘You take the impression,’ he said, ‘and I make finish the key.’

  “So what was in it for him? He already had his own key, he said, and a plan. But he couldn’t do it on his own. And he figured I might be just desperate enough to go along with him. Oh, he supposed I had seen those old prison movies—of the double double-cross kind—but hey, it was his life, too, wasn’t it? Did I think he was suicidal or something? So maybe he was, but he’d got one thing right at least: I was desperate enough.

  “Okay, my reasons for wanting to escape were plain enough: I wanted Castellano dead, and couldn’t do it from inside where my own life seemed destined to be a pretty short one. But what about my new-found friend’s reasons?

  “Apparently it was for a woman. ‘A dear old friend of mine, he fucking my Maria,’ he told me, grinning emotionlessly. ‘The last man who did that, he dead … is why I in here. This time I going fuck both of them, Maria, too. After that I not care.’

  “Funny thing is, I understood him well enough. Just didn’t realize how far he’d go to clear this little matter up, that’s all.

  “Came the night. We got out into the exercise yard way too easy and I felt it was all wrong, all fixed. But it was far too late to go back and lock myself in … and what if I was simply being paranoid? I mean, this was my one last chance. It was h
is one chance, too, this bald, scrawny little Italian murderer who made the keys.

  “His plan was simple: he had a length of chain he’d welded hooks to. Between us and freedom there was a twelve foot wall, barb-wired at the top. He was a little guy; he would get on my back, use his chain like a grapnel to grab at the barbed wire. He’d tried it in the workshops and it worked. By God, it also worked out there in the exercise yard!

  “So Paulo scrambled from my shoulders up the chain, took a prison blanket from around his neck and tossed it over the barbed wire, which his weight had pulled flat. He balanced himself up there with a leg over the wall, stretched out a hand for me. But when I was on the chain and as I was reaching for his hand … he withdrew it! And I saw his eyes, looking beyond me into the night. I glanced over my shoulder, saw them:

  “Prison guards, armed and taking aim! I looked up at Paulo, his face staring down at me. ‘I sorry, Jake,’ he shrugged. ‘But they promise me—’ And then, cutting him short, the crack! of a rifle shot.”

  Jake paused, swerving to avoid a pothole, and Liz took the opportunity to ask, “Is that when it happened? When you … moved?”

  He shook his head. “Not quite. But Liz, you know how they say you don’t hear the one that kills you? Well, it’s true. I know because I beard the bark of that first shot, but I didn’t feel a thing. Paulo, on the other hand … His blood splashed me as his right eye turned black. Then he was falling, and taking me with him. It was only a few feet, but with him on top of me I hit the ground like a ton of bricks. Just as well because there was more shooting, shouting, the flash of bullets sparking where they spanged off the wall.

  “That’s when it happened. But exactly what happened, I don’t know to this day. And something very weird: if you don’t hear the one that kills you, how about seeing it? I mean, did you ever hear of anyone actually seeing a bullet in flight? Of course not; and please, no cracks about phoney stage magicians who catch them in their teeth!