Robert W. Walker

by Zombie Eyes

  “We have only one chance, Stroud,” the ancient wizard told him. “You are badly hurt, and if you do not join with me, you will die.”

  “Join with you?” Stroud wasn’t sure what that meant. “In the skull? Trapped there to wait for another thousand years, for another chance at Ubbrroxx?”

  “No, if you join with me, I will live in the receptacle of your body. It may be our only chance.”

  “To join?”

  “Are you willing?”

  Stroud knew he had little choice. He was blind now and was losing feeling in all of his extremities. He’d die anyway. Esruad was offering him life for life. “Yes, we join.”

  “The choice is made…”

  Stroud felt bitterly frustrated, unable to see. But he felt the intense fire that suddenly engulfed him, and yet it was not a burning fire. It was a fire of ice and it spread through his body, combating the numbness and deadness and poison inflicted by the serpent which had been just another extension of Ubbrroxx.

  “Damn you, Esruad!” Stroud heard the angry roar of Ubbrroxx as if it, too, were inside him and all around him.

  Stroud felt a calm filtering through him with the coolness of Esruad’s being. He felt a crystal-like strength returning to his limbs and body. He found his blinded eyes opening to a cool, clear vision, and he felt the strength of his ancestors as they insinuated themselves in his every nerve and fiber. At his feet lay the crystal skull facedown, looking like a useless hulk of ice, and no sign of Esruad, for he was inside Stroud now … in his head, his heart, his muscle. His brain was crowded with the souls of those who’d abandoned the crystal skull with Esruad, and it caused a jumble of confusion, noise, voices and sounds unfamiliar to Stroud. He was shaken and fearful of his own body now. For the first time in his life, he’d have settled gladly for the steel plate in his head. He imagined the lunatic, the schizophrenic he would soon become with so many spirits turned loose on his mind.

  “I hope you know what we’re doing, Esruad,” he said to himself, for he, now, was Esruad in the flesh and Esruad was him.

  “We can overcome this evil now, Stroud, as never before.”

  “Destroy it?”

  “Completely.”

  “How?”

  “Take up the empty receptacle and keep it with us.”

  Stroud bent to lift the crystal skull and return it to his shoulder pouch.

  “Talking to yourself down in this hole, too, Stroud!” Sam Leonard’s voice came as a shock, making Stroud think it was coming from the skull, before he wheeled to face Dr. Leonard. The other man had come out of the shadows.

  “Where are the others? Why’ve you come alone?”

  “Sorry, Stroud … I tried to save them … but … but—”

  “Kendra?”

  “Taken off by the fiends!”

  “Wiz?”

  “Dead … dead, Stroud! I knew we shouldn’t’ve tried to follow you. I knew it was wrong!”

  “Get hold of yourself, Dr. Leonard.” It was Esruad talking while Stroud was grieving for Kendra.

  “You say they made off with her? That Kendra was alive when you last saw her?” Stroud pressed for details. He then searched on his person for the communicator and tried desperately to reach her.

  Her voice came over in screams. She was being tortured.

  “We’ve got to help her.”

  Inside his head Stroud heard Esruad tell him it was a trap. But Stroud didn’t care what it was. He couldn’t think of anything beyond helping Kendra out of her pain.

  “We’ve got to go on! This way!” said Stroud sternly, pointing the way. But it was Esruad who was speaking and pointing through Stroud. Stroud wanted to race back in the direction from which Leonard had come.

  “My way,” Esruad was saying. “If I know Ubbrroxx, the woman will be ahead. It will use your woman to get to you. It knows this is your weakness. Don’t allow it, Stroud.”

  Leonard was looking at him strangely, listening to his conversation with himself.

  Finally, Stroud said, “We go this way, straight ahead.”

  “But Dr. Cline is behind us,” said Leonard.

  “The only way to help her now is to destroy Ubbrroxx.”

  “You’re not going to help her? Listen to those screams! How can you stand it?” shouted Sam Leonard.

  “Where’re your weapons, Dr. Leonard?”

  “She is calling for our help.”

  “Your weapons?”

  “Lost, dammit! I was lucky to escape with my life!”

  “All right … stay close behind, and take this.” Stroud gave him his dart gun.

  “What do you propose to use?”

  “Magic.”

  “Good … most comforting, Stroud.”

  Stroud also hefted what was left of the gas in his canister.

  Stroud no longer breathed from the spent oxygen tank, and neither did Leonard. It was likely only a matter of time before Leonard succumbed to the contaminated air. But Esruad’s magic kept Stroud protected, so far. With Leonard following, Stroud continued ahead while in his head Esruad talked to others there about strategy. There, seemed to be some whispering discord over Leonard. Something about his being untrustworthy. Stroud was being given a signal to ditch the poor man. Stroud fought the suggestion.

  “It will use Leonard and the others against you, Stroud. You must be strong and vigilant.”

  Stroud assured Esruad that with their new-found strength and disguise, that he would be stronger.

  Kendra and Dr. Wisnewski had reached the mouth of the cavern where the bow of the ship stared back at them. Strangely, they had encountered no further setbacks or attacks. It was as if the creature was satisfied with Stroud’s life, and that theirs were unnecessary now to its design.

  She tried again to raise Stroud but all she got for her trouble was static.

  “We’re running out of oxygen,” Wiz told her. “We haven’t any choice. We must save ourselves, Dr. Cline.”

  Kendra tearfully assented and they stepped from the confines of the underground world into the predawn where the army of zombies was still held in check.

  As they made their way up the incline, they stopped to stare at the legion of the dead, their thousands of eyes like one eye, the eye of Ubbrroxx trained on them. Firmly resolved, they began the long march through the fearfully silent, stony guards one step at a time, unable to utilize the helicopter that had brought them here. “Journey of a thousand miles,” whispered Wiz.

  Down through the parting rows of zombies, Kendra thought of Stroud, feeling guilty at having abandoned him inside, yet certain that he had met with the same fate as Leonard. Wisnewski, too, thought of the friends they had left behind, and how very little they had accomplished. He took Kendra’s hand in his and their touch bolstered one another amid the zombies standing row upon row, parting like disturbed pigeons to let them pass.

  Commissioner Nathan had seen Kendra Cline and Wisnewski exit the pit via monitoring cameras from above, beamed to his location. He was shaken when he saw that only the two of them had come out alive. It signaled the end of a long and hopeless night and the beginning of a long and hopeless day.

  Nathan was about to send in a chopper to pick up the two survivors when he saw them turn into the crowd of zombies and join them. He believed they had become zombies themselves.

  There was no holding back the Army now. As soon as the first sun ray cut through from out over the ocean, all hell was going to break loose here, and thousands upon thousands of citizens—diseased as they were—would be annihilated to protect those who weren’t. And still no guarantees…

  Kendra’s screams now sounded close as Stroud and Leonard made their way through the dark passageways of the ship, going deeper and deeper to its center. Stroud felt the respiration of the evil Ubbrroxx all around him, and he realized that they were truly in the belly of the beast. Something stood in their way ahead. Stroud lifted his weak light to reveal an enormous crab-faced, molten black form. The beast had smaller, parasit
ic creatures crawling about it, feeding off its black skin, ripping parts of it off, slavering, chewing.

  “Ubbrroxx!” shouted Stroud, lifting his gas canister and firing. “Fire, Leonard! Fire!”

  Leonard froze, not using the dart weapon, instead turning it on Stroud, firing. The dart hit an invisible shield around Stroud and fell harmlessly at his feet, but it made Stroud turn and stare at Leonard’s apparition as it became a giant cat that started to pounce. Stroud swung the gas around, choking the sight and the enormous throat of the creature cat, causing it to writhe in pain.

  “Stroud!”Esruad called in warning.

  Stroud turned back to see long tentacles wrapping about the invisible shield that encased him, pulling Stroud and his shield, and all that was inside it with him, toward the gaping, enormous maw of the crab-faced thing ahead of them.

  Stroud fired all he had of the gas. The monster drew him closer, closer, closer, and in its mouth Stroud saw the bottomless pit.

  “Strike! Strike, Stroud!” his inner ally told him.

  Stroud found the sword of ice emanating from his body and he struck out at the tentacles, slicing through them and sending up a sulfuric, gaseous cloud with the wounds he inflicted on the demon.

  The monster advanced on him with the speed of a flying witch, a banshee howl filling Stroud’s ears, drowning out Esruad’s shout. But Stroud instinctively jumped to one side, realizing how effective the envelope around him was when the huge, fleshy thing slammed into a wall that had been behind him. There was a resultant tearing away of that whole side of the ship and the creature somehow swallowed itself up and disappeared, leaving behind a scattering of the parasites that had been feeding off it.

  “Must keep your wits about you, Stroud,” his counterpart told him. “Leonard was never here.”

  “A trick.”

  “It sends out little parts of itself to form these creatures, and it used Leonard’s image. Leonard is—was—most likely dead all along.”

  “And the others?”

  “Most likely the same.”

  “And Kendra’s cries?”

  “You must ignore them, Stroud. Trust me.”

  “Trusting you has kept me alive.” But Stroud still feared for Kendra.

  “Keep control of your fears, your emotions, Stroud.”

  “I will, if you will.”

  “It feeds on fear, grows stronger in the face of it. It will do anything to unnerve you.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Including using the girl.”

  Stroud stopped to sit down and gather his breath there in the dark, his hand going to his head. All the voices there behind Esruad’s were unsettling. Kendra’s fate, and how little he knew of it, too, was unsettling. And he was supposed to keep his composure.

  Stroud pulled out his communicator and tried to reach Nathan outside, but the signal was weak and all he got in return was static. He kept trying for a moment when once more Kendra’s screams reached his ears. She was now calling out his name, pleading with him to come to her rescue. This made him shut down the radio and get to his feet, determined to carry on. His watch told him he had less than half an hour remaining before they would blow the place to kingdom come.

  “It was him, I tell you.” Kendra had tried to answer the signal Stroud had sent up, but once more it was cluttered with Static. “He’s still alive,” she shouted amid the zombies.

  “But we can’t go back,” Wiz told her.

  “No, but we can get to Nathan. We can plead for more time.” She tried to reach Nathan by radio but it remained jammed.

  They were halfway through the zombies, fearful yet of being attacked by them. Several had reached out to them with pleading eyes as well as hands. Some moaned as if trapped deep within themselves, pleading for release. If the creature wanted to kill Kendra and Wiz, all it had to do was turn these people loose on them, and yet it had not done so. Kendra had wondered why and she’d put it to Wiz.

  When he had no answer, she pushed him for a theory.

  “I should guess that it is reserving all its power to … to combat Stroud and his crystal spirit.”

  “And if that is so, it’s further proof that he’s alive … that the battle down there is still going on.”

  “Yes, yes … that would make sense.”

  “We’ve got to get to Nathan.”

  “Yes, hurry … hurry.”

  They rushed on to the strange beating of an underground heart, the pounding rising in their ears until they felt their very souls shaken.

  -20-

  Kendra Cline’s plaintive cries in the dark were like daggers plunged into Stroud’s soul. Esruad tried desperately to hold him back, to tell him he must ignore the pitiful pleas of the woman, if he were to survive this day. Stroud, unable to listen anymore to Esruad, tore away and raced down the intricate, involved labyrinth now laid out for him by the demon. The walls of this maze were hard-packed clay molded together with the bones of men. Stroud rushed along its narrow and narrowing course to a point where his shoulders scraped the walls and his clothing tore on the outcroppings of bone. He then reached a point where the bones had taken on flesh and life and were reaching out at him, tearing at him as if they belonged to prisoners in cells who just wished to touch another human being.

  Stroud tore loose from the wall of hands and found himself standing before a stairwell of stones. He heard again Kendra’s screams and he rushed up the stones only to have them crumble below his weight, taking him to the floor once again, and now the stones were, one by one, hurled at him.

  Esruad’s shield around him held. He drew on Esruad’s magical strength, making the leap to the next level, pulling himself up as if he were weightless, a kind of angel, he thought, an avenging angel.

  “Let the woman go! Ubbrroxx! Take me, and let the woman go!” he shouted at the darkness around him. In the distance, through what appeared to be a tunnel that went on through eternity, he saw a light, a green, glowing light which touched off a fire.

  “You want the woman … so come for her,”Ubbrroxx said, his voice curled by a laugh.

  Esruad struggled with Stroud to use his head. “Another sacrifice is nothing to ending the power of this evil, Stroud!”

  From the records uncovered by Leonard and Wisnewski, in the very written words of Esruad, Stroud had learned that he must locate the geographic center of the ship. He now stared down the tube of flame ahead of him. “But this is it … this is where it lives, Esruad.”

  Esruad had no argument for this.

  Stroud knew that momentarily he and Esruad would come face-to-face with the true demon…

  No more vile little familiars, beasts with tarantula bodies or tentacles, no more substitute horrors. Once Stroud penetrated the center, Ubbrroxx had no place else to hide and could take no more camouflage, create no more apparitions. It wasn’t anything Esruad had said, nothing that Stroud had learned from the records, only a peaceful inner power called knowledge. The offshoots of the creature, its telepathic powers, its havoc, all emanated from here, and at the very back of this chamber it had Kendra.

  It had come down to Stroud and the Satan of the Etruscans, Ubbrroxx.

  Stroud felt fortified, however. He did not feel alone, not with Esruad within him, cloaking him in his impressive magic.

  Stroud started across the dark interior of the new cell he had reached when out of the dark on his right side a flying creature loped by his head, almost striking him. Stroud saw only the black wings of the beast as it swooped, until his light hit it, and he saw that it was an enormous vampire bat, not unlike the ones that he had done battle with in the caverns outside Andover, Illinois. Stroud heard others screeching in the dark, piercing the blackness with their beady, blind eyes.

  “Ubbrroxx is drawing on your fears, your worst nightmares, Stroud,” he told himself.

  Stroud tried desperately to get a grip, but it was like looking into the graves of the many vampires he had personally driven into eternity with the long-spiked, chemi
cally poisoned stakes he had used. Something roared like a beast to his left and then a den of snapping, snarling beasts rose up in Stroud’s light, approaching. It was Kerac and his band of werewolves, monsters that Stroud had wiped out in the northernmost woods of Michigan the year before, after tracking one of their number from the streets of Chicago. All here, along with the vampires … unreal, and yet so real and threatening. Then they pounced in unison with an attack from the vampires.

  “Hold to your faith in me, Stroud!” Esruad fired his mind with the message as Stroud saw all of the monsters of his mind flattened out against the invisible but powerful shield that Esruad continued to display.

  The werewolves and the vampires came in again and again, trying desperately to destroy the shield, to put a dent in it, but it was useless. “So long as you believe in me,” Esruad told him in a whisper deep within his mind.

  The creatures outside the protecting cube now became people, and in their faces, Stroud began to realize who they were. Ubbrroxx now was sending forth the images of all of the people whom Stroud had come into contact with—innocent people—who had lost their lives around him, some due directly to their association with him, some indirectly. Among them were Leonard, soldiers he had known in the war, fellow cops he had known in Chicago when he was on the streets there, Magaffey, who was so instrumental in helping him uncover the vampire colony in Andover, the band of mercenaries he had paid to die in their effort to help him wipe out the werewolf herd in Michigan. All those who had lost their lives in Stroud’s various crusades now stared in at him, asking him to join them. Even his grandfather’s apparition was among the specters.

  Ubbrroxx was working on a very different level now, but Stroud remained firm in his convictions and his trust in Esruad. He noted that among the dead who wandered about the cube, pleading with him to come join them, there was no sign of Wisnewski or Kendra, and this gave him hope for their well-being.

  “How long are we going to stand still for this?” Esruad asked from within.

  Stroud took his meaning, stepping through the horde of ghosts who had for so long inhabited his nightmares.

  They reached out, flattening their ethereal hands against the cube enveloping him, and where this occurred their limbs disappeared into a wispy mist. Stroud stalked on, shouting, “I’m coming for you, Ubbrroxx! Nothing will keep us apart … nothing.”