by Jack Yeovil
Lenihan backed towards the door, and fumbled with his cardkey. Rintoon had his sidearm out…
Good, let the Colonel take care of spilling the blood…
Rintoon fired at the Lieutenant, and missed. The doors opened, and Lenihan was running down the corridor.
Lauderdale took a console, and finished feeding Stack’s patterns to the androids.
“Desertion, mutiny,” muttered Rintoon. Lauderdale ignored the mad old man. “Desertion, mutiny, treachery, betrayal…”
Behind him, Rintoon slumped in a chair, burbling to himself.
Lauderdale got on with his business.
III
Chantal knew London Bridge was too obvious, too easy. The fort would have it completely covered. It was probably mined, too. So she headed through the ghost town for the Colorado basin. She ran past the dilapidated row of Olde Englishe Pubbes, dodging mortar fire from the battlements. A red phone box up ahead exploded, and she had to roll behind a Hyde Park Bench to avoid the flying fragments of glass and metal.
She had never been to London, funnily enough. Unless she was careful in the next few hours, she would never get the chance.
A drone made a pass, its beam strafing a row of statues. Noel Coward came apart at the waist. David Niven got it at chest-height. Charlie Chaplin’s bowler-hatted head rolled. Mary Poppins’ umbrella melted. Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker was sheared off just above his beaklike nose. Queen Victoria was not amused. And a chirpy Pearly King grinned at it all.
From what she had heard, London was a drab, gray place these days, full of people complaining about rationing and the queues. Maybe she would give it a miss.
She assumed a position, up on one knee, and followed the drone with her gunsight.
She potted it with her first shot. It cracked apart like a clay pigeon.
All the commotion flushed a sandrat out of his hidey-hole. He had been inside one of the pubs. Still clutching a bottleneck, and wrapped from head to foot in Royal Family commemorative towels, he ran out of The Stoat and Compasses and looked around, obviously annoyed.
“Get down,” she shouted.
The sandrat’s brain must have been completely fried by the sun and his liquid diet, because he gave her the British V for Victory sign and raised the bottle to his lips, dislodging the towel around his mouth so he could take a swig. He had the face of the heir to the throne wrapped over his own.
A shell exploded near the sandrat, and his bottle splintered in his hands. Yellow fluid showered around him. He put his fingers up again, but a piece of shrapnel had gone into his forehead. Prince Andrew’s face soaked up the blood, and the sandrat went down. The Stoat and Compasses collapsed on top of him.
Chantal jumped off the quay, and landed like a cat. There were still rowing boats hanging from the mooring rings in the quay wall, thirty feet above the dry riverbed. It would be a dash across the open to the next cover, the other bank, and then a scramble up to the walls of the Fort.
The Colorado basin stank, its mudflats streaked with rainbow-coloured pollution traces. Quite apart from the dead Trooper lying out there, the riverbed had become the repository for all manner of garbage.
Explosive rounds slammed into the crumbling stone and earth wall behind her, and she pushed herself away.
She remembered Mother Kazuko, and concentrated her thoughts within her body. It was a dangerous sprint. The mud was soft, still damp in places, and there were too many half-buried bedsteads, bicycles and prams over which she could easily trip…
… and if she tripped, she wouldn’t just have a sprained ankle. She would be dead.
She ran like a dancer, on the points of her toes, hurdling the more obvious obstacles.
Her time for the 300 meters wasn’t as good as it would have been on a track. But no one was shooting at you at athletics meets.
Her heart hammering, she shot into the loose earth of the riverbank, and pressed herself flat against the gentle slope. She was close to the fort now. None of the major defences were good against her. If they still poured boiling oil or molten lead, she would have a problem.
There was still fire from the battlements, but the angle was too steep. The best the gunners could do was to place their shots twenty yards behind her.
She elbowed herself up the bank, keeping her SIG out of the dirt, pushing with her toes.
She wondered how Stack was doing in the desert.
Finally, she was out of the river, and, after another sprint, had her back to the wall of Fort Apache. She was next to a sign reading PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS that was incongruously planted in bare sand. The metal was warm, and smooth. She would have to edge her way around until she found a way in.
The cutting lase in Federico would have been useful about now. She would have to prise her way through a hatch with her knife. Or hope someone inside wasn’t too far gone to give her some assistance.
She trusted that the Lord would see her through. But she was prepared to give the Almighty some help.
Another sign, reading THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING, was burning steadily. The melting plastic gave off noxious fumes.
Twenty yards down the wall, an aperture opened.
Chantal, knowing she should favour caution, ran for it, and slipped herself through, into the darkness.
Inside, strong hands grabbed for her.
IV
Stack had been lucky with his first shots, and put a couple of Oscars in the dirt. He had aimed high, and caught their heads just as their durium visors were raising. Where a human being would have eyes, these things had twin lases. Lauderdale would be looking at his prey through the remote cameras in the Oscars’ heads. Stack ran across the soft sand towards Lake Havasu. The heavy androids would have to step carefully or sink. That gave him a chance to get to cover.
A high whine started.
Stack picked up speed.
The noise got louder, painfully so.
One of the Oscars was mounted with maxiscreamers. At close range, within ten seconds, the noise would trigger epileptic fits in those susceptible to them, and make susceptible 7 % of those not previously afflicted. Within twenty seconds, it would cause motor neuron dysfunction, triggering nausea, vomiting, diorrhea, internal and external bleeding, uncontrollable hiccoughs, loss of bladder control. Within thirty seconds, it would crack your skull like a plate and cook your brain like a microwave. By then, Stack would have been dead anyway, because at about twenty-five seconds the pitch would be enough to detonate the slugs in his pumpgun and, more importantly, the ScumStoppers in the rings of his bandolier.
Stack beat any and all of his own personal records over the distance.
Behind him, rocks flew apart as the waves of ultrasound vibrations hit them.
Stack grit his teeth as they began to rattle, and resisted the temptation to jam his hands over his ears. That would just slow him down, and his only chance was to get out of the range.
The maxiscreamer was a riot control device. It was supposed to put people within a few hundred yards out of commission so the mop-up squads could move in. Its drawback was that you couldn’t send anyone or anything into the field while it was turned on. If he could outrace the sound, then he would have a head start on the Oscars.
He felt a trickle of blood come form one of his ears. Later, he would find whether he had a ruptured eardrum. Later… If there was a later.
He was between the half-buried hulks of buildings now. Twenty feet below there would be the street level of old Lake Havasu. The necks of streetlamps stuck out from the sand. The business signs were flush with the ground level.
There would be whole buildings down there for future archaeologists to pick through.
Up ahead, looming out of the sand, was a battered hardboard cut-out of John Travolta, greasy pompadour half-broken away, grin still in place, and rhinestoned arm reaching for the sky. Behind him were broken letters. This had been the Rialto, the local movie-theatre. The curtain must have come down on Havasu during the run of the Grease-Saturday Night Fever reissu
e double bill in the early ’80s.
Stack had heard that John Travolta was out of showbusiness these days. The story was that the star had joined the Josephites and was out there in Salt Lake City. That might have been a smart decision, Stack figured. It didn’t look like the gentiles were going to come out of this well.
The dome behind Travolta was cracked like an egg. Stack squeezed through, dropped fifteen feet and found himself crouched between rows of rotting velvet seats. He was up on the balcony. A withered corpse in an usherette’s uniform, with a tray of dusty confectionary, lay a few feet away. The carpets were thick with sand, ticket-stubs, cartridge cases and used Trojans.
Incredibly, there were pictures playing in the dark. There was no sound, and the silver screen had three long horizontal rents across its Panavision breadth, but the projector was still working.
It was a bizarre assemblage of spliced-together offcuts from late ’70s Hollywood, up-to-date porno, Russian musickie video and newsnet footage. Down there in the stalls, there must be an audience. Stack realized he had stumbled into a sandrat nest.
Clint Eastwood raised his Magnum .44, mouthing “do you feel lucky, punk?” The German hardcore star Billy Priapus—who had bio-implanted horns and goat’s feet—strutted his stuff, slobbering. Petya Tcherkassoff preened to a disco beat. A pair of esperadoes slugged it out mentally in a Puerto Galtieri backstreet, veins popping.
The Oscars would be here soon. He supposed he ought to get out of range before innocent people got killed in the crossfire.
He found the stairs, and barreled down them. People, no more than skeletons in rags, were sleeping in the corridors, huddled against the walls. The foyer was lit by a burning torch. Outside the reinforced glass doors, the sand was a solid wall.
“Have you got a ticket, boy?”
Stack turned, his gun up. An old, old man in what was left of a commissionaire’s coat staggered at him. His eyes were dark voids.
“Quick, how do I get out of here?” Stack asked.
“Can’t get out without a ticket, boy.”
“How do I get a ticket?”
“You pays at the counter. Kids today don’t know nothin’ about respect. You forms an orderly queue and you pays at the counter.”
Stack glanced at the cashier’s box. A bald fashion mannequin was stuffed into it, her ballerina’s tutu fluffed up around her, her stiff arms broken.
There was a commotion outside. The secured doors shifted, and sand dribbled through at the bottom.
“I can’t stand customers who track dirt all over the carpets, you know.”
Sand was being scraped away from the doors. Stack saw the metal face of an Oscar, and the glass exploded inwards. The shards were followed by fifty tons of sand.
“You can’t come in like that,” said the commissionaire. “You can’t…”
Stack barged through the double doors into the auditorium. The Oscar was floundering through the sand behind him. Stack had heard the creak of a lase visor being raised.
The show was over, and the audience—sandrats, gaudy girls, no-hope gamblers, AWOLS, a few Indians—were on their feet, singing.
An MC with protruding cheekbones and a top hat led the chorus in “America the Beautiful, 1999”.
“Oh beautiful, for spacious skies
Oh amber heaps of sand..”
The Oscar was in the auditorium, its lase lashing out like a whip. A row of seatbacks burned through. Some people scattered. Others kept singing.
“Oh poison mountain majesties
Above the blighted land..”
Stack whirled and fired the pumpgun. His shot clanged harmlessly against the Oscar’s durium torso. The android’s head swivelled, trying for a lock on Stack’s heat patterns.
“America, America,
God spat His curse on thee…”
The audience was panicking, crushing through the exits. The MC kept singing, waving his thin arms, keeping the beat with a conjurer’s wand.
“And made it worse
With massacres
From sea to stinking sea…”
There were two more Oscars in the cinema now. Sand pressed in after them like a slow wave. A chandelier fell from the ceiling, and draped around the first Oscar like an incredibly ostentatious diamond necklace.
Stack fired again, and got the machine in its lase hole. The Oscar stood stiff, and fell forwards, smashing seats like balsawood. Its companions came for him.
Stack backed away, towards the screen. There were pictures playing again. Marlon Brando as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. The old sage of the space ways was ranting, cotton falling from his cheeks, at C–3PO, a golden-skinned robot. As a kid, Stack had seen Star Wars twenty or thirty times.
The Oscars came down the aisles. Bitterly, Stack wished all robots could be cute and bumbling like C–3PO.
He climbed upwards, the picture playing over his body. He plunged through the fabric, which parted with a steady rip, turned, and fired again. The shot went wild, mainly perforating the ruined screen. One of the Oscars detached its hand, and threw it. The thing sprouted waspwings and dived at Stack, red lights winking where the electrodes were. Stack knew it was a shock-sticker, and if it touched him he was fried for sure. He reversed his gun, getting a grip on the hot barrel—searing his palms in the process—and swatted at the hand. He connected, and hit a home run. The shock-sticker smashed, sparking and spitting, to the floor.
There was a ladder set into the wall. He climbed fast, gun tucked between his arm and body. The plaster was crumbling and the rungs were loose. If he could make it alive to the hatch he saw in the ceiling, he would have lost these Oscars. With their weight, they would never be able to use the ladder.
A shell exploded in the air near him. The pumpgun slithered free of his arm grip, and clattered on the floor below. Shit, that left him with only his side-arm.
Stack wondered if Chantal was still alive.
He headbutted the skylight hatch, and it flew up. He scrambled through onto the roof of the Rialto. The sun was going down.
V
“You know, don’t you?” a woman’s voice said in the dark. “What’s going on?”
“Yes,” Chantal said.
The lights went up. She found herself in a small room with a rack of guns on the wall. Her arms were being held by the beefy, red-faced sergeant—Quincannon—she had seen excercising the intake yesterday. Her questioner was the Captain—Finney—who had been at the monitor when they traced Stack’s cruiser to Welcome. Neither of them looked happy, and they were both violating Standard Operational Procedure.
“I have diplomatic immunity,” Chantal said.
Captain Finney wasn’t impressed. If she couldn’t get through to these people, Chantal would have to hurt them. She didn’t want to do mat.
“Tell me,” ordered Finney.
“Quincannon? That’s an Irish name, isn’t it?”
“What?” The Captain was bewildered. The Sergeant was surprised.
“Irish. You’re Catholic?”
Quincannon’s grip relaxed on her as he nodded.
“You, Finney. You’re a sufi. You said so yesterday.”
“What does all this have to do with it?”
Chantal had graduated from prisoner to advisor. Quincannon stood back respectfully.
“I’m a nun. I’m on a special mission from the Pope.”
Finney was still off-balance.
“Do you believe in the Devil? In a personalised force of Evil?”
Quincannon grunted an assent. Finney took a deep breath, “well, that’s a hard question for a sufi. You see, we believe the world is composed of balances and…”
“Enough. What has happened here since I left?”
Finney took another deep breath, but was terse this time. “Younger is dead. Rintoon’s gone mad. Lauderdale’s a homicidal maniac. And the computer is doing things computers can’t do…”
“As I thought, Fort Apache is possessed.”
Quincannon crosse
d himself.
“You must take me to a terminal.”
“Possessed?”
“By a demon. I have to perform the rite of exorcism.”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” said Quincannon.
“I’ll take all the help I can get. Are you in?”
The Sergeant saluted, and Finney opened the door. “There’s a conduit through here. We can get into the access space under the Ops Centre. There’s a terminal there.”
“Lead the way…”
VI
The demon was taking a time-out for gas and oil. It wanted to have total dominance of Fort Apache before it spawned again and made a push for the next node. It was hungry for the multiple inputs of El Paso, but it knew the triumph would be all the sweeter if it waited, nourished its own desires, its lusts, its needs…
Defer the gratification, and the blood tastes better.
Lauderdale was an annoying acolyte, a messed-up pissant in blue, pretending to be naughty, gingerly dipping a toe into the Dark but holding back. Deep down, he was just another chickenbelly scared sumpless of the monsters. He lacked the force of will of The Summoner. He was a zeroid waster even set beside the Frogman between whose ribs the demon had nestled. But Lauderdale was serving his masters adequately, and he was sure to be rewarded for his efforts.
Too bad, the demon would have got its rocks off teaching Lawdy-Lawdy-Lauderdale the true meaning of the word torture.
Before the Summoning, it had never been more than a servitor of the Dark Ones, fed with the cast-offs of the Great. The tongue-tentacles of his original ectoplasmic body were scraped raw from asslicking the Big Boys of the Outer Darkness. Here, on this Earthly Plane, it was a Giant, it had found a destiny…
“Destineeeee,” it sang, to the tune of Jealousy, “I got me a destineee…”
The power was building up. It coursed through the channels of the Fort. It sealed off the underground garages, and sucked out all the oxygen in the air. Thirty-eight personnel tried to fill their lungs and collapsed, blue-faced. “Suck on that, airheads,” it boomed over the tannoy as they asphyxiated. Score another bunch of notches for the killer. The demon was riding high, itchy souls wriggling in torment under its clawhorned feet.
And yet it sensed danger. There were still humans struggling against its will. They were trivial. They could be ignored until he was ready to stick it to them. He owed that Swiss Miss a thorough freaking-over for living through their rumble in Welcome, but that could wait. There was something else, something which carried within it the Light that was anathema to the Dark Ones, the burning, cleansing Light that had always banished the Night.