Necroscope: Avengers

by Brian Lumley

  And Liz—cursing under her breath while hopping from one foot to the other—was unable to shoot at Szwart for fear of hitting Millie. There was no knowing which one was which; they were almost as one!

  Then three muffled shots sounded and Szwart’s blanket body flew open, expelling Millie who at once fell to the ground, her smoking gun spinning from her grasp. Szwart’s mantle was smoking too, where her last-effort shots had singed him.

  All three of Liz’s friends were down, and she herself left standing. But both Szwart and Malinari were in her sights, and her hands firm on the weapon she held at arm’s length. It only required a twitch of her trigger finger—or two, or three, or as many as it took to empty the clip—but the opportunity was too fleeting and she didn’t get the chance.

  For Vavara was there, rising up dark in the darkness, a hag out of hell with eyes like lanterns and a claw hand that almost broke Liz’s wrist as it struck the gun from her grasp. And:

  “There, my pretty!” that monstrous female croaked, striking again—this time at the side of Liz’s head—and toppling her into a black well of unconsciousness. “And so we meet again.”

  “Enough!” said Malinari, quickly glancing all around.

  Lardis lay still where he had fallen…Gustav Turchin was scrambling backwards, silently mouthing his terror and holding one hand up before him, and Millie and Liz were down and out.

  “We should finish them,” Vavara snarled.

  “Which would be a waste of time and effort,” said Malinari. “For these are the weakest and pose no great threat. But those others up there,” he inclined his head, let his eyes sweep the windmill’s wall to its high windows, “they have the real power. And that one—that Jake, that Necroscope—in particular. If he escapes this time…then I’ll know for certain I am right and he can make us invincible. Wherefore there’s time only for this—”

  And loping to the leaning door, he reached inside, took up a jerrican of petrol from where it was hidden under a stack of sacking, and lobbed it inside onto a pile of grain. And taking out a Keramique from his tattered clothing, he backed away and took aim, firing once, and once again to get the range, then a third shot directly at the target.

  The force of the explosion surprised Malinari. By no means expert in the dynamics of combustible liquids, he had splashed the interior walls with a little kero and now used gasoline to ignite the whole. The resultant blast wrenched the windmill to its foundations, bowed two of of its five facets outwards, and hurled shattered boards in every direction. The great door was blown off its rusted hinges by a huge lick of fire that erupted from the doorway, and Malinari and the others had to duck down and shield themselves from heat and flying debris.

  Inside the damaged structure, fire raged everywhere, billowing upwards, climbing the wooden stairs, glowing yellow, red, and orange through gaps in the boarding. And:

  “There,” said Malinari, with a curt nod as he straightened up, acting as if all had gone exactly to plan…which in the main it had. “And now we can go. Bring the girl.”

  “Good!” said Lord Szwart. “The light of that great fire is painful to these eyes of mine, and this flimsy structure could come tumbling at any moment. So by all means let’s be gone from here.” And he coiled up the unconscious Liz in two ropy appendages.

  But pausing near the minibus, Malinari grinned monstrously, aimed his Keramique, and blew a gaping hole in the front right tyre. “A simple precaution,” he said. And then, moving swiftly round the vehicle, he aimed at the rear left and fired again—only to hear his gun make a clunking sound as the breechblock sped by an empty magazine.

  “Huh!” Vavara grunted. “By no means as reliable as a gauntlet, eh, Nephran?”

  “You have a point,” he said, drawing back his arm and hurling the weapon away. “But no matter. It served its purpose.”

  As they left, flowing swiftly, silently into the flickering shadows and then into the night, Lardis Lidesci and Millie were still lying motionless, dangerously close to the burning building. And the Russian Premier, having hidden himself away in one of the derelict outbuildings, was nowhere to be seen…

  Just three minutes earlier, Trask and his party had engaged the four surviving vampire girls. But they hadn’t survived for long. Under a hail of devastating firepower, riddled by silver-plated steel, they had gone down one by one until the last of them had been found in her hiding place, crouched in a cobwebbed corner.

  Despite that her “terrified” screams had been pitiful, terrible to hear, Paul Garvey had known better. Yes, he pitied her…but no, he wouldn’t spare her, for her thoughts were bloody beyond redemption. A single silver bullet from his gun had been utterly pitiless—yet paradoxically merciful—where it shattered her forehead and blew her brains out through her ears.

  By which time the uppermost level of the windmill had been empty of life—or undeath—but the men from E-Branch hadn’t known that. And this time it had been Jake who headed the climb up that final flight of stairs; but very calmly, coldly, with a fragmentation grenade dangling from its ring in his teeth, and his flamethrower hissing its readiness in his hands.

  Up there the night breeze had blown in through windows open to the stars; Goodly’s torch had swept the room, a much smaller room than the others; red rays had crisscrossed, seeking flesh-and-blood and inhuman targets, and the Necroscope had even sent a tongue of fire into the darkest corners, for by virtue of the ventilation the air was less musty, the atmosphere less incendiary here.

  But there was nothing, no one.

  And it was then…then, that they had known.

  Trask, hearing muffled gunshots, had rushed to a window. In the darkness down below, figures moved, collided, sprang apart. But more than four of them.

  “Damn it all to hell!” Trask turned to the others, his face a parchment mask. “To me, all of you! Jake, quickly. I want you to—”

  Which was as far as he got before the floor lurched and the walls shook, and dust and cobwebs came streaming down in answer to the blast from below. Scorching thermals rising from the inferno came rushing, roaring, whooshing up through the stairwell and central shafts; shimmering jets of pressured, furnace heat, they bore a certain reek. And clear-minded at last, Trask knew what his mysterious smell had been: kero, or gasoline—or maybe a mixture of both—but masked by the aura of Vavara and the mentalist mind of Malinari.

  Jake was crossing the floor toward Trask, but he was moving quickly, carelessly, and stepped too heavily on a rotten board. His right leg went through, toppling him sideways, and he cried out as splinters of brittle wood shot deep into the back of his thigh, just above the knee joint. A moment more to recover from the senses-numbing agony, and letting go his weapon, taking his weight on both hands, he tried to push himself up and free.

  Seeing Jake’s situation, Goodly and Garvey went to his assistance; but timbers groaned, and once again the floor lurched, throwing them off balance.

  Ben Trask got to Jake first. And furious with himself, the fact that he’d let himself and his people be lured, fooled, and trapped yet again—but at the same time panic-stricken, galvanized by thoughts of what might be happening below, to the women and the others—the older man let his passions fuel him, took Jake under the arms and hauled him up out of the grinding, warping tangle of screeching boards. His strength was phenomenal as he dragged the Necroscope free and hoisted him to his feet, so much so that he could scarcely believe it himself.

  Flames were now shooting up the stairwell, and a pillar of fire leaping from the central shaft in a fat stem that hit the domed ceiling and splayed out and down, opening like the blooming of some alien, fiery orchid. Cringing from the searing heat of its red and yellow petals, the four men came together. And:

  “Do it!” Trask cried. “Jake, take us the hell out of here, down to the others, before this whole bloody place collapses!”

  All four, they huddled together, arms locked around shoulders and necks, and Jake conjured a Möbius door. “Now back away from
me,” he yelled over the roaring of the fire, as he pushed them out of the known universe.

  Instant darkness and weightlessness…the sudden shock of drifting free in the one absolute void, the great and infinite nothingness of the Möbius Continuum—

  —But a moment more found them stumbling, their legs like rubber as gravity returned. And Jake actually fell; for as his knees bent a little under his weight, so a cluster of six-inch splinters, like so many wooden daggers, drove even deeper into the back of his thigh.

  They were down on the ground between their vehicle and the burning windmill. Millie lay where she had fallen, and the Old Lidesci was shielding his face from the blaze with one arm and hand, and trying to drag her away from the fire with the other. Fortunately the night breeze, grown to a wind now, was driving the flames away from them, but still the heat was unbearable.

  Paul Garvey rushed to help Lardis, and as they drew Millie from danger she showed signs of recovery.

  Trask was at her side at once, asking, “Millie, what about Liz? Where’s Liz?”

  But Millie could only lick her lips and stare dazedly into the night.

  Goodly was in the minibus’s driving seat. Starting her up, he called from his window, “Get in, all of you—quickly! The windmill’s going to topple!”

  And because he was the precog, and rarely wrong, they knew better than to argue with him…

  25

  Revelations, Reservations, Resolutions

  LAST TO REACH THE MINIBUS, PAUL GARVEY came staggering, carrying Jake in a fireman’s lift. Normally the Necroscope would use the Möbius Continuum, but such was his pain as jagged splinters raked naked nerve-endings and threatened to sever his hamstring tendon that his mind wouldn’t focus.

  Garvey reached the rear door of the vehicle in time to hear the precog’s warning yell, “There she goes!” He meant the windmill.

  And as eager hands reached from within and grabbed at Jake, there she went.

  Trask’s earlier warning to Jake, that he be careful how he used his flamethrower, was now seen to have been almost as potent a premonition as anything foreseen by Goodly. On the first floor of the windmill, the heat had dried out the old piles of grain to set them swirling, and as the perfect conditions were met so a second explosion blew out the walls of that floor and hurled blazing debris in all directions.

  A heavy board came whirling, whup-whupping through the air. One end hit the ground; the board flexed and bounced, vibrating as it sprang aloft again, before clipping the Necroscope on the back of the head in passing. So that when Trask and the Old Lidesci snatched Jake from Garvey’s athletic shoulders and dragged him inside the minibus, he was already out cold.

  Then, with Garvey performing a headlong dive in through the rear doors, the precog hit the accelerator, setting the vehicle fishtailing as he turned away from the burning building. Behind them the upper floors collapsed into the ground-floor cauldron, and the structure fell on its side precisely where they’d been, spilling blazing rubble over a wide area.

  But the minibus was limping, and Ian Goodly said, “As if we weren’t in enough trouble, I believe we also have a puncture.”

  Away from the blaze he drew the vehicle to a halt, even as Premier Turchin came staggering, waving his arms, ghostly pale in the headlight beams.

  “Lardis,” said Trask, stepping down from the rear. “Do what you can for Jake and Millie. Paul and Ian…we have to change this flat. The fire will be seen for miles around. I don’t want to be here when people come to investigate.” Then he whirled on Turchin. “You—where the hell were you? How come you got away when the others were in trouble and…and what about Liz!” He gazed wildly all around. “Did you see what happened to Liz?”

  “Liz was taken,” Turchin babbled. “And yes,” he nodded, “I got away. If I hadn’t I’d have got dead! I didn’t know what you were up against, Trask. I had no idea—couldn’t possibly have guessed—what those creatures were like. It’s one thing to be told about them but quite another to be confronted by them! And I panicked, I admit it.”

  “What about Liz?” Trask grabbed and shook him, and stockily built as Turchin was, he was actually shaken. Also—staring at Trask’s face, feeling the anger transmitted through his hands—the Russian Premier visibly blanched.

  “They…they had a big car,” he said. “A limo, I think it was, hidden in an outbuilding. I heard the car start up, saw it drive into the open, saw them bundle Liz inside. By God, Trask, that car was like a hearse!”

  “It is a hearse.” Trask let go of him. “And Jake’s hurt—Millie, too—and those black-hearted bastards have escaped me again and taken Liz with them.”

  Meanwhile, Garvey and the precog had removed the spare from its housing at the front of the vehicle and were working to get the minibus jacked up. And as Trask turned away in disgust from Turchin, so Millie climbed unsteadily down from the back of the vehicle and almost fell into his arms.

  “Thank God you’re all right!” He hugged her—but carefully—like the oh-so-very precious thing that she was. And, “Lord,” he sighed, “it’s bad enough Liz has been taken, a bloody disaster, but if it had been you…I just don’t know what I’d have done, not a second time.”

  “Liz?” came a dazed-sounding, anxious mumble from the open rear doors. “I didn’t see Liz. I thought maybe she’d got away.” And then, angrily: “Ben Trask, is it you out there? What about Liz, Ben?”

  Trask stepped to the back of the vehicle and looked inside, at Jake and Lardis. The Old Lidesci was sitting well away from Jake—sitting very quietly, in a corner up front—almost as if he didn’t want to be noticed there, didn’t want to be there. And the Necroscope had ripped open the back of his black track suit’s right leg, and was sitting there with his leg up on the benchlike seat opposite, pulling long, bloody daggers of wood out of the torn flesh above and behind his knee.

  But the look on his face—the very different look of him as he worked—was something else. Jake’s hair at the temples was almost white now, giving him a sleek, wolfish look where it was swept back into a short, brown-and-white, four-ply braid at the back. His face seemed leaner, more angular, and more angry. Beads of silvery sweat stood out on his brow, and his lips were drawn back from teeth that were clenched in the right-hand corner of his mouth. But one by one, as those long, brittle splinters were tugged free and let fall to the floor, he only sighed his relief and showed no other sign of the pain that he must be feeling.

  Or maybe he wasn’t feeling it but staving it off. And Trask found himself thinking, They can do that…can’t they?

  And then there were Jake’s eyes, his luminous eyes…!

  Millie was beside Trask; she saw what he had seen, thought what he’d thought. And looking at them suddenly, sharply, Jake saw their expressions and nodded his understanding. Then, grinning wryly, mirthlessly, he drew the last splinter from his raw red flesh and said, “Oh, really? So you’re thinking I’m looking a bit odd, eh? Well, let me tell you something—you should see yourselves!”

  And Trask and Millie, they both knew it would do no good to deny it. It was the strife, the fighting, the passion, that had brought it on…

  Gustav Turchin had been standing nearby. Now, very quietly, he went to where Goodly and Garvey were tightening the last few bolts on the front right wheel. And he couldn’t help but notice that they, too, were looking apprehensive—no, they were looking hag-ridden—where they worked with frantic speed yet much too quietly. Working together like this, on their own, had provided them with their first real opportunity to talk in private.

  Then, as they finished up and wiped their hands on a dirty rag, Trask, Millie, and Jake appeared from the rear of the minibus; and behind them the Old Lidesci, holding his damaged ribs with one hand…and his machete in the other!

  “People—” Trask began to speak, only to pause abruptly as Garvey leaned into the front of the minibus and brought out two machine-pistols, one of which he handed to the precog. And:

  “Right,�
�� said the telepath, his voice trembling, uncertain, and very frightened. “You said ‘people,’ Ben, by which you mean me, Ian, Lardis, and Premier Turchin. We are people, all right; that’s sort of plain to see—but it’s equally obvious that you three aren’t! Not any more. And we’re pretty damn sure that Liz wasn’t, either.” As Garvey talked, the Old Lidesci gave the one group a wide berth, sidling carefully around them to stand with Garvey and the others.

  And for several endless moments there was silence…until Millie said, “Well, go on then—get it over with.” And she was so calm, so quiet, that her words sounded like thunder over the pop and crackle of burning timbers.

  Then Lardis spoke up, and said, “If you’ll just let me walk away, I think I would rather do that. And gladly.”

  Trask looked at him and said, “You? I would have taken bets that after all you’ve seen and done, you’d be the first to act. And while I wouldn’t like it, I’d certainly understand it.”

  Sheathing his weapon, Lardis answered, “Aye, I’ve known bad times, but there were good times, too. And I remember Harry. He was different.”

  “I remember Harry, too,” Trask replied. “And I know he wasn’t all that different, not at the end. But I let him live.”

  And then the precog spoke up. “All my life,” he said, “I’ve considered this talent of mine a curse—until now.” And turning to Garvey he went on, “Put your weapon down, Paul. You seem to have forgotten—even as I had momentarily forgotten—that we’re all going to be in this to the end. All of us together.”

  “But I want to stay the way I am,” said the telepath, shivering for all that he could feel the warmth of the fire.

  “Then read our minds,” said Trask. “And if you discover any positive threat in what we’re thinking, pull the trigger.” Then he turned to Millie, hugged her again and asked her: “How is it you are so damned eager to die?”

  “I’m not,” she answered. “But how will we live? And if this is the end of us as we were—and if we have to go—then I’d like to go cleanly.”