by Brian Lumley
‘But you must have read about it, seen it on TV?’ ‘I told you, I was doing my own thing. On the Continent.’ ‘Yeah,’ Harvey agreed. ‘About the only place in the world where the weather was moderately normal. You were lucky. But in England it rained, and rained, and rained! And as for declining water tables: forget it. There’s been no shortage of water ever since. Anywhere below sea level turned into a swamp. The Thames Barrier failed, and high tides combined with a flooded river to drown the city six feet deep. Through July, August, and September — shit, there were gondolas in Oxford Street! Okay, so I’m exaggerating — maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as all that, but it was bad enough. And I could go on and on. Except…’ He paused again.
‘Except that was the UK,’ Jake helped him out. ‘And the
people had plenty of warning, and there was little or no loss of life. Yes, I remember it now. But we were talking about Brisbane, not quite so close to home.’
‘Not just Brisbane,’ the other told him. ‘In 2007 it was Australia as a whole. Now, you’ve got to remember that in Australia the climate works backwards to how we’d expect back home. It’s way hotter in January than in July: the difference between summer and winter, right? Oh, really? Well, in 2007 everything went wrong. From February on the summer weather held, there was no winter and it didn’t get any colder. Just like now, in fact exactly like now, they had the freakiest of freak weather.’
Turning his head, Harvey gazed out through the limo’s one-way windows at suburbs becoming city. ‘I mean, just take a look out there.’
Jake looked, lifted an enquiring eyebrow. ‘Well?’
‘Dry, brittle, parched. Those gardens that should be green are more like miniature deserts. The grass is withered to straw and the leaves are dead on the trees and bushes. Almost all the swimming pools are empty, and you won’t see anyone watering any lawns. It should be a maximum of sixty, sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit out there, but it’s well over eighty, and this is late afternoon. And naturally, it’s an official drought. Perfect!’
‘Perfect for what?’ Now Jake was really puzzled… not to mention tired of this circuitous route they were taking to the Great Fire.
‘Earth Year!’ said Harvey. ‘The big conference that starts tomorrow right here in Brisbane, billed as the ultimate ecological summit meeting. Synchronicity at work again, or maybe not. Naturally they chose this place, because of the fire.’
‘Well, you’ve lost me again,’ Jake told him. ‘And we still haven’t got to the fire itself.’
The other shrugged apologetically. ‘I’m sorry — it’s this grasshopper mind of mine. Start me on a subject, it devours me. Okay, the fire:
‘It was the weirdest thing ever — a one-of-a-kind sort of thing, or at least everyone hopes so. 2007, and we thought we’d seen it all: the worst tornadoes the USA had ever suffered, the worst floods, the strangest fluctuations and reversals of climate right across the world, with Australia taking the brunt of it. But no, we hadn’t seen it all.
‘Brisbane was like a tinderbox. The whole east coast from Rockhampton to Canberra — normally a green strip in the lee of the Great Dividing Range, with no water shortage and an excellent annual rainfall — was bone dry from this drought that had lasted for eighteen months. Oh, they’d had rain, but all of it had fallen on the wrong side of the Great Divide! And daily the temperature was up in the hundreds.
‘And it was then that it happened. It was like… what, a tornado? An almighty tornado, a whirlwind, yes. But a whirlwind of fire! Ma Nature, Jake, getting all hot under the collar. It started in the Gidgealpa and Moomba oil and gas fields, but how or why it started, no one knows. There are various theories but, like I said, no one really knows. Though miles apart, suddenly the oil wells and gas installations became the epicentre of an enormous fireball. That in itself was a disaster, but nothing like what was to come.
‘A fireball, vast, hot, rushing up on its own thermals, and sucking in the air to fuel itself; sucking the air into a self-perpetuating spiral, a superheated whirlwind. It swept east out of the Sturt Desert, its base widening out as it came, a column of fire five and then ten miles across. At more than a hundred miles an hour it hit a place called Dirranbandi and burned the entire town, just took it out. And everything it burned fuelled the fire, that got hotter and hotter. And on it came. The thing moved like a drunkard — never in a straight line but just exactly like a tornado — a pillar of fire reaching up through the clouds. ‘Of course it was monitored, thousands of people reported seeing it. It came terrifyingly close to some towns, scorching them but leaving them intact; then again it seemed to swoop on
others, tossed them into the sky in blazing rags. Firefighters tried to plot its course from the air; some airplanes flew too close and got sucked in, incinerated. And rotating ever faster, it rushed east to refuel itself on the Alton oil field…
‘So it goes, and I can’t remember all of it. But who would want to? Anyway, the whole thing was on every TV channel. Every Aussie there ever was watched it happening, couldn’t do a thing about it. The authorities thought the mountains would stop it — they were wrong. It blazed across the Divide, leaving a smoking track twelve miles wide in its wake, with secondary fires still ranging outwards. The latter would burn for weeks until torrential rains stopped them.
‘And with only an hour’s warning to the people of Brisbane — an indefinite warning at that, for no one could say for sure what this thing would do — finally it hit, this firestorm from hell, such as the world had never before seen. Never before and never since, thank God!
‘Everything that could burn burned. If it couldn’t burn it calcined. And if it couldn’t calcine it melted. As for the Brisbane River: forget it. It was running at a trickle and had been for a nine-month. The firestorm took what was left of the river water, turned it to steam in a couple of seconds and kept right on going.
‘And that was it: a one-hundred-miles-per-hour blast furnace had killed a city and everyone it it who couldn’t or hadn’t tried to get out following the warning. They hadn’t all died by burning; a great many people, gone underground or into cellars, suffocated because the fire needed their air. All of it. Then:
‘The thing hit the sea and sucked up a waterspout into its raging funnel. The water put the fire out, turned to steam, and formed clouds. The clouds drifted inland and rained on the raging inferno that had been Brisbane. Finally it was over. End of story…’
… And after a while:
‘Christ!’ Jake said, under his breath. And a moment later:
‘That is some encyclopedic memory you’ve got there, Jimmy. What are you, an authority on world disasters?’
Harvey shrugged a little selfconsciously — perhaps sheepishly? — and said, ‘Me? No — but I know a woman who is. Before we broke camp, I had to talk to HQ about a couple of communications problems. Millicent Cleary was on Duty Officer. She’s our current affairs lady; she has that kind of memory, keeps a mental record of just about everything that’s going or gone down. As lan Goodly knows the future, she knows the recent past; but of course she has a big advantage: like, it’s already happened. And unlike lan’s her knowledge comes in amazing detail. So when I told her we’d be setting up next in Brisbane, she clued me in on the city, the fire, the Earth Year Conference. And there you have it: the fire’s still fresh in my mind from my conversation with Millicent Cleary.’
Harvey sat back and looked out of his window. After a moment’s silence he said, ‘But actually, I wish it wasn’t…’
In the other limo, the episode of the tall, thin plane-spotter (if that was what he had been) had been forgotten by everyone except Liz Merrick. She, too, was trying to put it to the back of her mind, but knew she’d be able to recall it if or when it was required — His silhouette etched on her memory: his angular shape. And the tilt of his broad-brimmed hat, that kept the sun out of his eyes. The way his binoculars were trained on… trained on what, a mainly empty sky? That was what had been bothering her! That, and the way th
ose glasses had suddenly dipped., turning towards the limo.
That was when Liz’s mind had been closest to his, the moment when she’d sensed his interest in the vehicle and its occupants…
‘So how about it?’ said Ben Trask, causing her to start as he reached over her and switched off the intercom connection to their driver.
‘Eh?’ she said. And: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Ben. I must have been daydreaming. How about what?’
‘Jake, on the chopper. What was going on? Did you get anything?’
And now the image of the thin man with the binoculars vanished completely from her mind as the other question arose, the one Liz had known she would have difficulty answering.
At first it had seemed simple, even exciting in a strange and morbid sort of way. The answer to not just one question but many. But after thinking it over she had seen the enormous hurt it might cause, so that now she had to find a way around it. If Trask would let her.
‘But I thought we had an understanding on that,’ she said. ‘I don’t like spying on Jake, and—’
‘What?’ He cut her off. ‘But on the chopper you seemed to indicate that you’d got something. So why are you holding back, Liz? What the hell is going on here?’ The look on Trask’s face was one of incredulity; he’d been sure they’d hammered this out and from now on it would be plain sailing. So what had happened to change her mind?
‘I… I’m not sure what I got!’ she blurted it out, lying so unconvincingly that even without his talent Trask would have known. And she saw in his eyes that he knew, and in the way his lips tightened. ‘But… but he’s my partner!’ She quickly went on the defensive. ‘He’s got to be able to trust me. He saved my life, and—’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake spare me!’ Trask barked. But before he could say anything else:
‘Damn you!’ Liz snapped. And then more quietly, even desperately: ‘Can’t you see? I’m trying to spare you, Ben!’
Which set him back a little, because he saw that that was the truth, too. And despite that Trask was still frowning, his tone was less severe when he said: ‘All right, so don’t try so hard.’
And after a moment, when she remained silent, he went on, ‘Look, whatever this is, there’s only you, me, and lan here to share it. So let’s have it out in the open here and now, while we can still deal with it in private. For if it has to do with me — and if it’s got anything at all to do with the Branch or the job in hand — then obviously I have to know.’
‘But it’s so very little,’ she answered. ‘And his shields were up, like a blanket covering his mind, and—’
‘Liz, I have to know!’ Trask insisted. ‘It doesn’t matter how small a thing it might seem to you, it could be all-important to everyone else.’
‘In its way, I’m sure it is/ Liz said. ‘It’s just that I would have liked to find a way to tell you — I mean a different way to tell you — without this.’
‘This what?’ said Trask. ‘And Liz, if you lie to me again I’ll know.’
She looked at him, looked at lan Goodly, sighed and shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to hurt you either. You see, it’s.where Jake was — in his dream, I mean — and it’s who he was speaking to.’
‘Go on,’ Trask nodded.
‘He was down in the wrecked sump of the Romanian Refuge,’ she blurted it out. ‘But Ben, it had to be much more than just a dream because from what I saw of it — despite that it was so dark and shrouded — it was all so very real.”
“The Refuge?’ Trask repeated her. ‘Jake dreamed he was in the wrecked sump? And he was… speaking to someone?’
‘To more than one,’ Liz corrected him. And now that she’d got started, she quickly went on, ‘But you know how dreams are supposed to happen in the last few minutes before you wake up? Well, not this one. It started the moment he fell asleep, went on until he woke up. And it was more than just a dream, Ben.’
The other’s face was grey now, gaunt with the sudden, sure knowledge of what Liz was about to tell him. He knew, but asked her anyway. ‘Who was Jake talking to?’
‘To Harry Keogh,’ she answered, ‘and to someone else who I didn’t know and don’t want to know, ever. I couldn’t read him — he was a complete blank — but I could sense his presence like a sick taste in my throat. And just the opposite to him, a little
earlier there’d been a third presence like… like a breath of fresh air. She was someone I’d never known, who I wish I had.’
‘It was Zek!’ Trask groaned. ‘He was talking to Zek. Jake was talking to Zek, through Harry.’ And clasping Liz’s hands in his: ‘Liz, what was she saying? What did Zek say?’
‘I don’t know,’ she shook her head, wanted to put her arms round him but couldn’t for fear it would crack him up. And anyway, they wouldn’t be Zek’s arms. ‘I got something of what Jake was saying — though very little, because he didn’t say much — but nothing of what the others actually said. That was a void.’
lan Goodly said, ‘Of course it was. You heard Jake because he’s alive. That was your telepathy working, Liz. But Harry and the others… they’re a different category, and they were in a different mode.’
‘Deadspeak, yes,’ Trask murmured, gaunt and visibly shaken where he let his head flop back against the seat’s headrest and closed his eyes. ‘And whether I like it or not, it looks like I now have to accept it. Jake is our new Necroscope, and Harry is introducing him to… to people who’ll be able to help him. As for this numbers thing that Jake was talking about when he woke up — the difficulty he seemed to be having — I think that can mean only one thing.’
Trask looked at the precog and Goodly nodded his confirmation. ‘Despite that Jake’s future is beyond me, uncertain now,’ he said, ‘still I can only go along with you. It was the Necroscope’s sidereal maths, his numbers, that gave him the edge. And now it looks like the old master is trying to teach his apprentice the tricks of the trade…’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Synchronicity Again
The safe house set aside for E-Branch use was in the New Marchant Park district, north of the city. An ugly two-storey affair, it had aluminium cladding designed and painted in a rather poor imitation of timber; Brisbane no longer favoured wooden structures of any kind.
The house was set back from the road up a short palm-lined drive; its gate was remote-controlled from inside the lead limo and opened into a featureless garden. Two medium-sized, innocuous-looking saloon cars stood on a gravel drive in front of the house. In fact they were fitted with bullet-proof windows, heavily-plated bodywork, hidden roll-bars and other anti-crash/anti-terforist devices. Short of a bomb-blast or a head-on collision at speed, no one was going to come to harm driving one of these vehicles. They were for the use of Trask and his people.
Laid to lawn and enclosed within high stone walls, the garden was on a level and surrounded the house on all sides; every inch of grass (or straw as it was now) was clearly visible from the windows of both storeys. Of the house itself: it had bullet-proof, heavily curtained windows, and a security/intruder warning system second to none. In plan, the ground floor consisted of four long rooms, one on each side, each furnished and decorated in a slightly out-of-date style, with little or nothing to show that the place was anything other than a fairly expensive private dwelling house. The central room, however, which wasn’t visible from the gardens, was an operational and communications nerve centre of screens and computerized equipment.
The sleeping quarters (in fact a pair of cramped dormitories with beds for up to fourteen people, or maybe eighteen at a push, and a handful of curtained-off, cell-like units for VIPs) were upstairs. And overhead on the roof, a bank of ‘solar-heating panels’ (tinted windows) concealed an array of hi-tech communications aerials and dishes.
The agent-chauffeurs showed Trask and his crew of six over the house, asked how they could help them settle in or if there was anything else they needed. Trask checked with Jimmy Harvey and Paul Arenson — in their element
as they switched on and got acquainted with the gadgets in the ops room — and Arenson told him:
‘We’re fully compatible throughout. Give us ten minutes to hook our stuff up to this lot, and we’ll have the HQDuty Officer up there on that big screen so clear you’ll think you’re in London.’
‘Scrambled?’ Trask wasn’t that easily satisfied.
‘As per SOPs, yes,’ said the other.
At which Trask thanked the ASI men (Australian Special Intelligence), who headed back to the airstrip to connect with incoming Chopper Two’s military commanders and three more members of Branch ground staff. Once they were in, and until the slower back-up squads of Australian SAS types had arrived and taken up their tactical locations, the advance party was on its own…
In fact, it took the technicians half an hour to complete their hook-up. Meanwhile an uncharacteristically subdued Liz had brewed a pot of Earl Grey for Trask and herself, coffee for Jake and the others. Goodly had taken his coffee through into ops. Trask was enjoying his tea in one of the living rooms while poring over a small-scale map of the Queensland/New South Wales border areas. It was somewhere there, in the vicinity of the border, that the locator Chung had detected mindsmog, probably due to the mental activity of a master vampire, Wamphyri! Probably, but not definitely, not with one hundred per cent certainty; the Branch had long since discovered psychic ‘hotspots’ where a proliferation of lesser, human ESP talents could produce the same result. It had been David Chung’s ‘hunch’, however, that this time it was the real thing, which the synchronous ‘coincidence’ of vampire lieutenant Bruce Trennier’s death had seemed to confirm.
Jake took his coffee over to where Trask worked, watched him use a red highlighter to plot a dotted line along the border from Stanthorpe to Coolangatta, then circle the whole area in a ring of pale red ink. As Trask looked up from what he was doing, Jake lifted an enquiring eyebrow.
‘If our target is here/ Trask explained, ‘and if he has established himself, then he’s somewhere inside this ring. Personally, I fancy he is. I’ve known David Chung for a long time and he doesn’t make too many mistakes. It was Chung who discovered Trennier. Once we had an approximate location, we checked with the local police and picked up on a handful of disappearances — Trennier’s recruits, those creatures we killed at the Old Mine gas station. That one was fairly easy; in a region as thinly populated as the Gibson Desert, people are wont to take notice when their kith and kin cease to exist! But here in the east, on the coastal strip…’ He paused, glanced again at the map, shook his head.