by Alan K Baker
Capone was right in his assumption about the vampires’ next move. While the rain of bullets continued from one car, the other dropped back a few feet and began to swerve into the limousine’s rear end. The car jerked and shuddered with each metallic clank, and Tony fought the steering wheel in an effort to keep on a straight course. Fort had been worried about other cars being shunted off the elevated section of the Expressway; but now he realised that the vampires were trying to do precisely that to the limousine. He guessed that they were about fifty feet up. If the limo went over the side, he didn’t give much for their chances of surviving the fall.
‘Okay,’ said Capone suddenly. ‘I’ve had just about enough of this shit.’
With a hiss of pistons he leaned forward, reached under his seat and brought out what looked like a Thompson submachine gun – although the distinctive drum magazine was twice the normal size.
‘I don’t think that’s going to be much good against a bunch of vampires, Mr Capone,’ observed Fort, as another shunt from the car behind nearly threw him to the floor.
‘Correction, Charlie boy,’ replied Capone as he cocked the weapon with a loud click. ‘Your normal Chicago typewriter carries .45 ACP cartridges, which have about as much effect on a nightwalker as bad language; but this baby has rock crystal shells full of holy water – and that’s a different story!’
‘Chicago typewriter?’ said Lovecraft.
‘It’s a nickname for a Tommy gun, Howard,’ Fort replied.
‘Oh… I rather like that.’
‘Glad you approve, librarian,’ said Capone as he reached up and pressed a button set flush with the ceiling of the passenger cabin. A large panel in the ceiling slid forward, and Capone stood up so that his head and upper torso were poking through the opening.
The pistons mounted where a human’s hips would be hissed and flexed as the Diesel-powered Gangster pivoted around and brought the modified Tommy gun to bear on the vampire car which was still in its flanking position at the limousine’s side.
‘Hey, dumb fucks!’ he shouted at the top of his artificial lungs. ‘Get a load of this!’
He began firing through the open windows of the vampires’ car. Fort and Lovecraft could hear the resulting screams even above the roar of the limousine’s engine and the stutter of competing gunfire. The car behind ceased its attempts to shunt the limo off the road. Fort guessed that the drive had been taken by surprise at this new turn of events.
The arms holding the machine guns, black-sleeved and gloved, began to jerk violently, so that the bullets flew in all directions. One uncontrolled volley struck the rear end of a large delivery truck in front of the limo. Several bullets hit the tyres, which exploded with loud rubbery bangs.
The truck began to swerve back and forth across the road as the driver fought to control the wheel. It took just a few moments for him to lose the battle with his vehicle’s high centre of gravity. The truck threw itself over like a child having a tantrum, spilling its contents across the road and sliding along the asphalt in a shower of sparks.
‘Oh shit,’ said Tony as he tried to avoid the wreck, but the driver of the second vampire car had seen his opportunity and accelerated sharply, ploughing into the rear of the limo and shunting it forward just as the zombie driver spun his steering wheel to the left. The huge vehicle slewed across the road, its oversized tyres screeching in protest.
‘Hold onto your hats, boys,’ said Capone as he ducked down and dropped onto the rear seat, crushing one of his zombies to a stinking pulp as he did so. ‘Oh… sorry, Pauly.’
‘Dat’s okay, boss,’ the zombie gurgled, just before his head fell off and rolled messily onto the floor.
With a sickening crunch, the limousine hit the upended delivery truck side-on. Fort, Lovecraft and the other zombie were thrown violently to one side of the cabin by the impact, and then to the floor. Fort’s head collided with that of the crushed zombie.
‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Pauly.’
‘Dat’s okay.’
Still brandishing his modified Thompson, Capone flexed one piston-driven leg and kicked the rear passenger door clean off its hinges. It skittered across the scarred asphalt towards the two vampire cars, which had come to a halt behind the limo.
The cars were Duesenbergs, their styling aggressive and elegant, and entirely in keeping with the nature of their occupants. Their black paintwork glinted in the sunlight, as did the highly-polished chrome of their radiator grilles and headlamps. Their heavily-tinted windshields were like the black sunglasses of implacable assassins.
Capone climbed from the limousine and stood before them with his steel legs planted firmly apart upon the road, ignoring the honks and squealing tyres of the oncoming traffic that swerved to avoid the wreck. ‘All right, you nightwalkin’ cocksuckers!’ he shouted. ‘You wanna dance? Then let’s dance!’
The doors of the Duesenbergs opened, and eight vampires emerged. They were dressed entirely in black, right down to their shirts and ties, and each wore a black leather mask which completely covered his head. Their eyes were hidden behind goggles as heavily tinted as the windows of their cars. From inside the limo, Fort could see that a couple of them were standing awkwardly, half bent over. They must have been the ones who were hit by Capone’s shells: the holy water must have seeped through the fabric of their suits, eating into their skin like acid.
‘Buncha deadbeats!’ shouted Capone. ‘Think you can take me, huh? Then let’s go!’
‘What do you think our chances are of emerging from this altercation alive?’ asked Lovecraft.
Fort glanced at him. ‘Not great, Howard. Not great.’ He hesitated, then added: ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s my aunts I feel sorry for,’ Lovecraft replied. ‘My death will hit them very hard.’ There was sadness and resignation in his voice, but no fear. Fort gave him a longer look but said nothing.
They returned their attention to the scene outside the limo. Capone had trained his weapon on the vampires, who had in turn brought their Thompsons to bear on him. Fort noted that they were aiming high: when the shooting started, they would go for headshots, since it would be futile to fire at Capone’s massive, armoured body.
As far as Fort knew, Capone’s head was as vulnerable to injury as his body once had been. He didn’t give much for the Diesel-Powered Gangster’s chances against the vampires: bullets filled with holy water was a good idea on paper, but in practice all it seemed to have done was piss them off even more.
And when they were done with Capone…
Fort glanced again at Lovecraft. ‘It’s been nice knowing you, Howard,’ he said.
CHAPTER 13
The Telaug Machine
Rusty Links had been mistaken when she assumed that Crystalman was in danger from the Deros. It was understandable enough, of course, since he had not been strictly accurate when he told her that he was simply occupying caverns that they had long ago abandoned.
The fact was that he had taken these upper chambers from them, and they had capitulated without a fight. They were well aware of his reputation, not to mention his true identity: the penetray machines which they kept in the deeper caverns and through which they observed events in the upper world told them that it would not do to make an enemy of Crystalman.
His reputation had preceded him, even into the nighted realms of the Inner Earth.
The Deros had left behind much that was useful to Crystalman when they had departed these upper chambers, including several of the fantastic machines which were their inheritance from the long-vanished civilisation that had spawned them. One of the machines contained the thought-records of the Atlans, the spacefaring race that had come from the uncharted interstellar gulfs to colonise Earth in the far-off night of prehistory.
For countless millennia, the Atlans had lived in peace and utopian splendour upon the Earth, which they called Lemuria, making t
he world their own and raising beautiful and mighty cities on its surface.
Then, five million years ago, something had happened to the Sun. The nature of the catastrophe was not explained fully in the thought-records of Lemuria, and Crystalman guessed that so utterly appalling was the event that the Atlans could not bring themselves to set it down in the great chronicle of their civilisation. As far as he understood it, the chemistry of the Sun had undergone a radical change, as if the star had succumbed to some terrible disease, and had begun to radiate a form of energy that was exceedingly harmful to the Atlans, and which they called disintegrant energy, or de.
Their civilisation under threat, the Atlans excavated gargantuan caverns and tunnels far below Lemuria’s surface, in which they built enormous cities which would have dwarfed any human city of the present. These subterranean realms shielded the entire Atlan population, some three billion individuals; however, the underground cities did not prove a permanent solution, and 20,000 years ago Lemuria/Earth was abandoned in favour of younger, cleaner star systems.
Many Lemurians had already fallen victim to the debilitating effects of the Sun’s harmful radiation and were forced to remain in the cavern cities of the Inner Earth, where they degenerated into the race of disfigured, idiotic and malicious beings known as the Dero. This name was a contraction of the Atlan word abandondero, a compound word meaning negative and subservient. Hence the Deros were, literally, controlled by negative forces.
These fiendish, sadistic and perverted beings abducted thousands of surface-dwellers every year and took them into their cavern cities, where they were tortured, used as slave labour or eaten. Although fundamentally stupid and brutal, the Dero nevertheless knew how to use the fabulous machinery left behind by the Lemurians, and were able to spread evil and destruction throughout the world by means of their dis rays.
Many governments, including that of the United States, had sent military expeditions into the cavern systems to try to solve the Dero problem. None had returned, and the League of Nations had decided unanimously that, while an all-out confrontation with the cave-dwellers was both necessary and inevitable, it would have to wait until humanity had reached a level of technological sophistication which would allow it to destroy the enemy completely once and for all.
When that day would finally arrive, no one knew, save that the future of humanity depended upon it.
Crystalman walked across the stone floor of his singular drawing room and climbed into the strangely-curved vehicle which sat upon its single rail. He pulled a lever, and the vehicle moved smoothly and silently off across the cavern, gradually picking up speed as it approached the tunnel mouth in the far wall. The vehicle was one of the many relics of the once-mighty Atlan civilisation; the rail upon which it travelled was part of a planet-wide network, much of which was now in hopeless disrepair, but which had once linked every continent on Earth through tunnels winding endlessly through the living rock of the world.
The vehicle followed the track as it curved through the tunnel, the darkness relieved by the single headlamp which cleaved the eternal night of this subterranean realm. Presently, the vehicle emerged in another, smaller chamber, an excavated cube perhaps eighty feet on a side, which contained nothing from the human world of light and sanity.
Like many chambers of the Inner Earth, the walls were decorated from floor to ceiling with bas reliefs depicting scenes from the life of the Atlan civilisation. The bas reliefs were sweeping in scope and exquisite in execution – although the ones in this chamber had been largely defaced by the malicious and idiotic Dero, who saw no sense in beauty, and for whom the illustrious history of their ancestors was but a cruel and mocking reminder of all that they had lost.
Crystalman brought the vehicle to a halt, climbed down and regarded his hoard of ancient and outrageous machines. Some had long ago fallen into complete disrepair, so that even their functions were now a mystery… but others were still in working order, and it was towards one of these that Crystalman carried the Martian Falcon.
The Atlans had called it a telepathic augmenter, or telaug, and it was a miracle of their arcane and long-forgotten science. In appearance it was as bizarre as any of their other devices: it gave the impression of having been melted, drawn away by intense heat from its original form, so that it was now warped and etiolated, a painterly smear in three dimensions, a confusion of sweeping curves and iridescent bulges that stood upon the floor of the chamber like an idol devoted to some incomprehensible alien god.
Its purpose was to transmit thought. Once an individual’s brain patterns had been recorded, the telaug machine acted as a powerful transceiver which would allow instantaneous telepathic communication. Crystalman had found the device extremely useful on more than one occasion. Over the last few years, several high-ranking figures in politics, industry and law enforcement, in America and other countries, had been Crystalman’s guests here in the upper caverns of the Dero. Of course, they had been sedated at the time, and had no memory of their temporary abduction, or of the recording of their brains’ electrochemical impulses, as distinctive and unique as fingerprints, which allowed Crystalman to step inside their heads whenever he chose, and to read their minds at his leisure. Their every thought and plan, their every intention and secret (dirty or otherwise), were his to peruse as easily as one might scan the pages of a newspaper. Through the subtle manipulation of the person’s will, he guided some plans and intentions towards fruition when he decided that they would be beneficial to him; others, those he considered contrary to his interests, he caused to be abandoned.
The telaug was indeed a wonderful device, by far the most useful of Crystalman’s many useful possessions, but today he hoped it would surpass itself.
Today, he hoped it would allow him to divine the true nature of the Martian Falcon.
The telaug sensed his approach and slowly opened its maw, the misshapen metal of its flank splitting apart to reveal the twitching, cilia-like sensors within. Crystalman placed the statuette inside, stepped back and began to manipulate the machine’s controls, bringing the sensors to full awareness. A low hum slowly spread through the cavern, like tendrils of ink exploring a piece of blotting paper. A myriad of glowing, crisscrossing lines appeared in the bulbous, asymmetrical monitor screen above the controls.
Crystalman frowned and leaned forward to examine the strange pattern more closely. It was no surprise, of course, that the pattern was so unusual, so utterly unlike anything he had ever seen before. The important thing was that there was a pattern at all. He gave a shallow sigh of satisfaction. There was something inside the Falcon, some form of energy, an invisible matrix of information coherent enough for the telaug to detect and record.
The lines on the screen twisted and writhed, glowing an ugly shade of green – the green of disease and decay, the green of rotten meat, of the sky before a thunderstorm.
An indicator light told Crystalman that the process was complete, that the energy signature of whatever was inside the Martian Falcon had now been recorded. He manipulated more controls, calling up his own brain pattern from the depths of the machine’s memory. His gaze fell upon the lever that would connect the two patterns, placing him in direct contact with the pattern inside the Falcon.
He hesitated, glancing again at the green tendrils that writhed across the monitor screen.
He pulled the lever.
He gasped, his mouth open wide behind his quartz mask. He reached up with hands that had become desperate claws and tore the mask from his head. It skittered away across the stone floor of the chamber as he fell to his knees, panting, his eyes tightly shut.
He groaned, and somewhere in the depths of his mind the realisation came to him that the voice was not his.
A series of sense impressions flooded his awareness.
Confinement… aeon-long and terrible beyond enduring.
The stillness of stone, the silence of ages, trap
ped within an implacable polymerized lattice of volcanic glass, coughed out of Mars when the planet was still young.
And rage… rage as powerful as the great volcano that had birthed his prison, powerful enough to smite worlds and scrape the screaming life from them.
Crystalman gasped again, dragged himself to his knees and reached with a violently-trembling hand towards the lever that would shut down the telaug machine. He pulled the lever and fell onto his back, once again feeling air surrounding him instead of stone, once again feeling limbs, skin, bone and senses instead of the unendurable stillness and darkness that had enclosed him.
Panting, he turned his head to look at the Martian Falcon, standing still and serene within the telaug.
Still, serene and silent.
And containing something that wanted out, something that wanted out very badly indeed.
Crystalman took the Falcon, walked unsteadily back to the railed vehicle and returned to his ‘drawing room’ in the immense cavern beneath the house. Still breathing raggedly, still unsteady on his feet, he crossed the floor and sat in an armchair.
There was something powerful inside the Falcon – no doubt about it. A raging mind, a soul in torment, anger and terror fused into a terrible new alloy… but behind it, beyond it… yes, there was something else, somewhere else, something far worse… and it was that which had thrown Crystalman to his knees. He had touched it for the briefest span, and the touch had nearly annihilated him. He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe more evenly.
‘The power of it,’ he whispered. ‘Yes… the power. When the time comes, I will need to forsake this body, this fragile flesh; I will need to return to that of which I am the merest fragment. And then…’ He smiled and looked up at the ceiling of the cavern far above. ‘I know what you are… and I humbly send you greetings.’
CHAPTER 14
