City Of The Living Dead rb-26

by Джеффри Лорд

  City Of The Living Dead

  ( Richard Blade - 26 )

  Джеффри Лорд

  Роланд Джеймс Грин

  City of the Living Dead

  Blade 26

  By Jeffrey Lord

  Chapter 1

  Richard Blade sat down in the chair in the glass booth far below the Tower of London. He felt the rubber of the chair's back and seat cold against his naked, grease-smeared body. He tried to relax while Lord Leighton scurried about, fastening cobra-headed metal electrodes to every part of Blade's skin. Twenty, fifty, a hundred of them. Each one was connected to a wire, and each wire led off into some part of the vast computer that filled the whole rock-walled room. The gray crackle-finished consoles towered above Blade, pressing their tops against the ceiling. Blade always thought it would have seemed more appropriate if the computer had been the master here and the men its servants, instead of the other way around.

  Lord Leighton was the master nonetheless, the man who had created the computer out of his own genius and many millions of pounds sterling. In a few more minutes he would use it to send Richard Blade hurtling off into Dimension X. Dimension X was a previously unknown realm of existence discovered by a lucky accident and now being systematically explored by Richard Blade-and Richard Blade alone. There was no other living human being in the world who could travel into Dimension X and return alive and sane.

  Lord Leighton finished his work and gave Blade a final inspection. Then he stepped over to the main console for the whole computer and stood within easy reach of the red master switch. Blade followed the white-coated figure with his eyes, about the only part of his own body that he could still comfortably move. Lord Leighton's movements were as brisk as ever-astonishingly brisk for a man past eighty with his spine bent by a hunchback and his legs twisted since childhood by polio. But then Lord Leighton had always ignored the limitations of his body, just as he'd always ignored the wishes and preferences of other people. Neither his own frailties nor the opposition of others had ever been allowed to stand between him and what he wanted to achieve.

  Blade looked to one side of the console. The spectator's chair was still folded up into its niche in the wall. It didn't look as though J were going to make it down here in time. A pity, and J would regret it, but it couldn't be helped. The old man had always been busy when he was head of MI6 and Richard Blade was one of his crack agents. He was still busy, now that he worked with Project Dimension X. Things were always unexpectedly coming up to drag him away or chain him to his desk.

  Blade turned his attention back to Lord Leighton in the exact moment the scientist's hand gripped the master switch. In a single, smooth motion, he drew it down to the bottom of the slot. Lights danced across the control panel in a continuous ripple of color, and pain swallowed up Richard Blade.

  He'd felt pain before-wounds, torture, the pain that exploded and thundered in his head when it was time for him to return to England from Dimension X. Pain was never a friend and could never be one, but it was an old, familiar enemy. At least it had been familiar until now.

  This pain was different. This was pain that gripped every part of his body from his scalp to his toes in white-hot pincers, rending and clawing, stripping away the flesh from the bones and tearing one bone from another. The pain blinded him, searing his eyes like molten metal. He couldn't look at himself, but he knew that if he did he would see flesh blistering and blackening and his blood boiling away before it could flow, his exposed bones cracking, his fingers and toes curling up like dead leaves and dropping to the floor. Lord Leighton would be staring in horror, torn out of his scientific detachment. Something had finally and fatally gone wrong. The computer wasn't sending Blade into Dimension X. It was slowly and agonizingly killing him.

  Then the computer hurled Blade down into blackness, and as he plunged, Blade felt his body shredding apart, until all that was left was a dimly conscious mind hurtling down through darkness. Then the last dim consciousness vanished, and there was only blackness.

  Blade drifted slowly back up to consciousness. He felt a yielding surface under him, then something over him slightly restricting his movements. Some unknown time later he realized he was lying on a bed with a sheet and blankets over him. Suddenly he knew that he was lying safely in his own bed in the bedroom of his own West End flat. His pajamas, the pillow under his head, and the sheet under him were all soaked with sweat.

  The nightmare of blazing pain had been just that-a nightmare. He looked at his watch. He would really be on his way to Dimension X in another twelve hours. For the moment he was safely at home, in no danger of anything except falling out of bed. The underground room, Lord Leighton, the computer, the electrodes, the pain-they'd all been creations of his sleeping mind.

  Blade suddenly found that he was incredibly thirsty. He threw back the covers and climbed out of bed. He was relieved to discover that he was steady on his feet. He wouldn't expect a nightmare to affect his coordination, but it wasn't impossible. Since he'd entered Project Dimension X, impossible was a word Richard Blade refused to use.

  Twenty-five times he'd sat down in the chair and been wired into the computer. Twenty-five times Lord Leighton had pulled a switch. Every one of those times the computer had twisted his brain so that all his senses now registered some part of that vast unknown called Dimension X.

  The first time it had happened by accident. All the other times it had been deliberate. There was an incredible wealth of knowledge and resources lying out there in Dimension X. If that wealth could be tapped for Britain's use and the secret of Dimension X kept in the meantime-well, all the wealth from the North Sea oil fields would look pitifully small by comparison.

  If that wealth could be tapped, if the secret were kept, and of Richard Blade remained alive and sane long enough.

  How long would be long enough? Nobody knew. So far there was nobody else alive who could make the round trip. The search for such a person was still going on, but no one expected quick results.

  Fortunately, Richard Blade was one of the most perfect specimens of physical and mental development alive. He was very likely the most unkillable human being in the world. He'd faced wild animals and still wilder peoples, both savage and civilized. He'd faced wind and waves, icy cold and searing heat, a dozen kinds of monsters, even an intelligent race of aliens from somewhere far out in interstellar space. He'd survived them all. He was quite prepared to go on pitting himself against the perils of Dimension X as long as he was needed.

  Yet what if his own brain were beginning to turn traitor?

  Blade knew perfectly well that no human brain was really adapted to being twisted completely around twenty-five successive times. Not even his. The Project had given him psychological problems before-a prolonged period of impotence, a shorter period of excessive drinking. Was this nightmare the first sign of some new problem?

  Blade didn't know. He would mention it to Lord Leighton and J, of course. They would pass it on to the Project's staff of psychologists. Meanwhile Blade would be off to Dimension X. One nightmare, however gruesome, wasn't enough reason for canceling a trip. A gamble? Yes, but every trip into Dimension X was a gamble that would have given a normal person not just one nightmare but fifty.

  Richard Blade wasn't quite normal. He was too fond of matching his own skills against great danger to be a very comfortable citizen for any peaceful twentieth-century country. Field intelligence work had been the most rewarding career he could find-until Project Dimension X came along.

  At times Blade grumbled over Lord Leighton's latest whims and fancies. At times he felt like a beast of burden. He was never happy over
the innocent people who got caught up in his battles and adventures to end up dead or mindless. Yet he could never imagine leaving the Project entirely. It was too important to Britain-and too important to Richard Blade.

  Blade went to the kitchen, poured himself a tall glass of beer, drank it, and went back to bed. It was several more hours to dawn, and the best thing to do with those hours was sleep: His first few days in a new Dimension were usually rather busy, and it helped to be as well-rested as possible.

  Blade's alarm woke him at eight-thirty. The housekeeper appeared and produced the large breakfast that Blade always ate before a trip into Dimension X. Like sleep, food was sometimes rather hard to come by at first in a new Dimension.

  Filled with porridge, bacon, eggs, toast, marmalade, and coffee, Blade left the flat and hailed a taxi. The taxi carried him through the traffic-clogged streets of London to the Tower and left him there. The Special Branch men guarding the entrance to the underground complex checked his identification and passed him through. The elevator took him two hundred feet down in a few seconds, and when the door whispered open at the bottom, J was waiting for him. Blade couldn't help blinking. The memory of the nightmare was so vivid he'd half expected J not to be on hand for today's departure.

  They shook hands. «You look rather surprised to see me, Richard,» said the older man. J was nearer seventy than sixty, but the gray eyes in the long aristocratic face missed very little. They never had, one reason why J was still alive.

  Blade explained the nightmare as they walked down the long central corridor toward the computer rooms at the other end of the complex. J listened without comment, his face expressionless.

  «You think there's no risk to you in going ahead?» he asked, after Blade finished.

  «I can't be certain, of course, but I doubt it very much. One nightmare, after all…» he shrugged.

  «I hope you're right,» said J. His face was no longer so expressionless. Blade knew that J loved him like a son and was always troubled at the thought of him running unnecessary risks.

  They approached the door to the computer rooms. The last of the electronic monitors scanned them, identified them, and opened the door for them. They passed in through a series of rooms packed with auxiliary equipment and the small army of technicians needed to run it and reached the door to the room holding the main computer. The door slid open, and Lord Leighton ushered them into his private sanctum.

  The scientist looked exactly as he had in the nightmare, exactly as he had since Blade first knew him. His lean, twisted frame was enveloped in a ragged laboratory coat that might have been white once, after its last cleaning years ago. His white hair stuck out in the same disorder as always, and his bushy eyebrows seemed as ready to drop like a curtain over the dark, intensely bright eyes.

  Blade let J describe the nightmare, while he himself went off to the changing room carved out of the rock wall. At this point in the proceedings, he always disliked waiting one second longer than absolutely necessary.

  A few minutes later he stepped out of the changing room, naked except for a loincloth, smeared from head to foot with the black grease that was supposed to prevent electrical burns. It or something had always worked. He hadn't been burned yet-except in his nightmare.

  Lord Leighton and J had apparently finished their discussion of the nightmare. Lord Leighton seemed to accept that there was nothing to worry about, or else he was simply in one of his untalkative moods.

  Blade walked to the center of the room and sat down in the chair inside the glass booth. From then on events marched swiftly, following exactly the same path they'd followed twenty-five times before in real life and once in the nightmare. The only difference between today's reality and last night's ghastly dream was J's presence. Blade sincerely hoped there would be other differences!

  In spite of what his reason told him, Blade was tense by the time Leighton stepped up to the control panel. He forced himself to breathe deeply and not stiffen as Leighton's hand came down on the master switch. Then the switch slid down its slot and reached the bottom.

  A terrible shrieking and roaring filled the room, like a hundred factory whistles all sounding together. The sound tore at Blade's ears, but there was no pain. An immense wave of relief washed over him, relief that there was no pain, relief that his nightmare was not becoming reality.

  Then the floor of the chamber cracked open, and a darkness like liquid tar flowed up around the feet of Blade's chair. He saw it reach his ankles, his knees, his waist, but he felt nothing. He sat motionless, taking deep breaths to fill his lungs, as the liquid darkness rose to the level of his chest. He took a final breath and held it as the darkness rose up to his chin. It rose to cover mouth and nose. He closed his eyes and felt a faint tickling on his eyelids as the darkness rose up over him. It was like being brushed with tiny feathers.

  He sat motionless, holding his breath until his chest began to hurt as if white-hot bands of iron were tightening around it: He held his breath for a moment longer, until both head and chest seemed about to disintegrate into hot dust.

  Then he breathed in. The blackness that was outside flooded in, and as it flooded in, it drowned all his senses at once.

  Chapter 2

  Blade awoke with a more than usually violent pain in his head and the feeling of something hard under it. He ignored the hardness and lay still. His head always hurt after he'd passed into Dimension X, and there was never anything to do about it, but wait until it stopped hurting.

  Blade kept his eyes closed, breathed regularly, and gradually felt the pain fade from a pounding agony to a dull, distant ache. At that point he opened his eyes and sat up.

  All around him was a dull, gray twilight. He was resting in the lee of a house-sized boulder, dark blue with layers of red in it. Around him were strewn a number of other rocks that looked like quartz.

  Straight ahead the ground rolled gently away into the distance, covered with waist-high bushes that bore only a few tufts of brown, spikey leaves. Far away a sharp ridge cut off the horizon. Blade rose and headed toward the ridge. It was the only break in the whole dreary landscape around him.

  It turned into a race between Blade's march toward the ridge and the coming of darkness. There was barely enough light to see by when he finally reached the top. Below him the ground plunged away into a tortured, rugged slope of bare rock dotted here and there with stunted shrubs. The slope dropped nearly a thousand feet to a level floor of more bare rock. Far off in the gathering darkness rose the other wall of the valley.

  A patch of silver-white among the rocks halfway down the slope at his feet caught Blade's eye. He looked more carefully and saw a thin line of silver winding down the slope below the patch. He scrambled down the slope toward it as fast as he dared.

  In spite of his care, he twice fell hard enough to get bruised. Several times rocks came loose under his feet and rolled off down the side of the valley, crashing and banging like small cannon. Blade ignored everything, until at last he slide down a near-vertical pitch eight feet high and landed on hands and knees beside the spring.

  It gushed from the rock as if it were coming from a fire hose, forced up and out by the pressure underground. It made a twenty-foot arc in the air and splashed down hard enough to throw up the cloud of spray that Blade had seen first. Over the centuries the spring had worn a pool for itself in the rock where it fell. Blade crawled over to the pool and began scooping the water into his mouth. It was lukewarm and tasted faintly of minerals, but it was drinkable.

  By now it was completely dark. Blade realized he might be wise to find some place where he'd be invisible both from the ridge and from the floor of the valley. On the other hand, that would mean roaming about among the tangled and treacherous rocks of the valley wall in the darkness. He'd probably be safer staying where he was.

  Blade found a flat spot only a few yards from the pool and lay down. The rock was not a particularly soft bed, and he suspected that he'd have a whole crop of fresh bruises in
the morning. That hardly mattered. He'd found water, and the weather seemed tolerable.

  For the moment that was quite enough-much more than he'd started with in some Dimensions, in fact. He could seek out what else this Dimension held when there was light to see it.

  Blade awoke in a chilly dawn to feel a breeze on his bare skin. He stood up and went through a series of brisk exercises to restore his circulation and get any cramps or kinks out of his muscles. When he'd finished, he felt about as ready to face a day's traveling as he could, considering that he still had no clothes, footgear, food, or weapons.

  He was bending down to drink when he heard a distant noise that was neither the wind, the water, nor rocks rolling down the valley wall. He straightened up and listened. With tantalizing slowness, the sound grew louder and took on recognizable forms. Blade heard the blare of trumpets and the thud of slowly beaten drums echoing among the rocks. Then he heard the sound of many feet moving steadily.

  Blade scrambled down the slope toward the valley floor, keeping low and looking for a place where he could see without being seen. He found it-a shallow depression in the ground, screened from the side by two large boulders. He dropped flat and stared downslope just as the approaching men emerged out of the mist eddying across the valley floor.

  It was quite a procession-three hundred men at least, with two hundred animals and more than thirty wagons, carts, and litters. As he got a better look at the party, Blade realized he'd better be particularly on the alert. If this weren't a military expedition, he'd like to know what else to call it.

  Ahead, behind, and on either flank rode forty men mounted on almost comically misshapen beasts. They looked as though someone had started to draw a horse but got so drunk while doing it that the rear end came out very different from the front.

  The head could have belonged to a horse, except for the enormous protruding ears. The forelegs were double-jointed and ended in three sharp-clawed toes, and the body was thinner than any horse could ever be without starving to death. The hind legs looked as if they might have been borrowed from a kangaroo, long, heavy-boned, and immensely muscular, with sharp, jutting spurs. The creature trailed off into six feet of flattened tail, ending in a mass of bone. Blade noticed that the tails were strapped tightly in place. Doubtless they were unstrapped in battle, so the beasts could use them as weapons.