He lowered her to the floor, looking up to see the flitting shadows and burning eyes of bonesnappers about to close in. He fired his gun, the flashes lighting up the many monstrous, snarling heads. It scared them away and they retreated. For now.
He shouldered Keegan’s fallen automatic, took a firm hold of Keegan’s wrist and dragged her bodily across the ground, firing the gun as he did so whenever a bonesnapper got too confident and sprang towards them, snapping at the air.
‘Linda, can you hear me? Now would be a good time to come round. You’re heavier than you look!’
She was out cold, her face pale, deathly white. The terrible thought struck him that she was dying. Or already dead.
‘No!’ he said, stopping and checking her pulse. It was weak but still hanging in there. ‘Don’t do this to me now, Linda…’ he said, resuming his dragging of her and emptying the magazine clip in his rifle. He tossed the gun away and brought Keegan’s to bear on the encroaching bonesnappers, their confidence growing. He was fast running out of ammo and had no idea how many more bullets remained in the clip.
Finally Keegan gave a choking cough, as if she’d emerged from a deep pool and had swallowed too much water. She flapped her arms wildly, her eyes looking upon another scene entirely. When she looked up at him she didn’t appear to recognise him.
‘Linda, it’s me. You okay?’
Her senses returned gradually. ‘Yeah, I’m… I’m fine…’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know.’ She attempted to get to her feet, but her legs buckled and he had to support her. ‘Did I blank out?’ She suddenly remembered the pain in her side and put her hand there. ‘I was shot…’ she said. ‘Right here…’ But there was nothing to be found.
A series of loud howls brought her to her senses double quick.
‘Get inside,’ he said. ‘Go on, I’ll keep them at bay while you get on board.’
‘I can’t leave you!’
‘You’re the only one who knows the way, Linda. Please. They need you. I’ll cover you.’
As if to illustrate his words a bonesnapper made a dash out of the encroaching darkness straight for Keegan. Wade twisted and fired into the beast. It tumbled head over heels in the dust as Keegan skipped away from it and reached the safety cab door. She grimaced at the torn corpse but steeled herself and pulled the dead Sentinel out of the cab, averting her head from the sight. He fell limply to the ground. A snarling made her spin round to see another bonesnapper lunging for her. She kicked at its head with her boot and hauled the cab door shut on its manic scrabbling, its claws raking the metal.
Wade took aim and shot it dead. But he found there were more Bonesnappers coming round the rear of the vehicle, some around the front, cutting him off from the door.
‘Wade!’ Keegan screamed, hammering on the windscreen. She scrambled through a door in the back of the cab that led to the trapdoor in the top of the vehicle and up to the roof-mounted machinegun.
The creatures were encircling the vehicle now, more of them massing at Wade’s back. He watched as Keegan opened the trapdoor and took up position behind the machinegun. She turned on a spotlight, trapping the helpless Wade in its harsh beam. ‘Wade! Get over here!’ she cried desperately.
The machinegun opened fire, sending some of the bonesnappers scrabbling for cover and killing others. But yet more of them took their place in encircling the vehicle, wrapping around it like a grotesque woollen scarf, a number of them leaping effortlessly onto the roof and forcing Keegan to abandon the machinegun and drop down below again, slamming the trapdoor shut on them.
‘Wade!’ she shouted through the cab window again. She put the truck into gear and started to drive towards him, ploughing through the bonesnappers, plainly hearing their bones crunch beneath the wheels and tracks like so much cereal in the mouth. But a mass of bonesnappers clambered onto the cab and blocked her view. She lost sight of Wade altogether and was driving blindly.
‘No, Linda! Not this way! They’ll swamp you! There are too many of them!’ But of course she couldn’t hear him. They’ll never get away, he thought. He turned. A solid wall of bristling fur was at his back. She was headed into a hundred more.
Unless I draw them off, he thought determinedly.
He ran towards the vehicle, waving his hands and shouting, firing his gun at the creatures. One by one they slid from their perches and crawled in his direction. He backed off, firing as he did so, short bursts, trying to save ammunition.
At last, with the windscreen clear, Keegan saw him waving at her, telling her to head in the other direction, away from them, at the same time walking backwards, further away from her. Saw also the thick black mass of bonesnappers rising like a dark tsunami behind him. She knew he was lost. She could never reach him in time, and to even try would probably mean the end for all on board as the bonesnappers overwhelmed the truck by sheer weight of numbers.
‘Wade!’ she sobbed. ‘Sam!’ Her hand pressed against the blood smeared windscreen as if to reach out to him.
But with a yell of despair, tears stinging her eyes, she swung the wheel round and bore quickly away from the hellish scene.
Samuel Wade watched as the vehicle slewed to one side, knocking over bonesnappers as it did so, hoping he’d done enough and they would all get away safely.
The smell of the bonesnappers seemed to wash over him like a wave of rotting flesh, their great loping bodies encircling him in a fluid, weaving, and restless flurry of vile black hatred. He fired his gun till it clicked on empty, and he threw it at the nearest bonesnapper.
In his last moments he closed his eyes and thought about his wife and daughter.
39
Passing On
Melissa Lindegaard was dead. Her pulse and heartbeat were no more.
Robert Napier sank to his knees, overwhelmed by grief. He’d known she was dying. It was inevitable. But she had a few weeks of life left and he’d been denied sharing that last little luxury with her. Denied by that bastard Lindegaard.
His grief was soon swamped by a tumultuous wrath and he rose from her lifeless body and stared fixedly at the groaning figure of Dale Lindegaard, who was starting to come round.
Then his eyes caught the sight of something on the floor. The VDU had sparked back into life and data threads were blazing across the screen once more. He frowned, bent down and gently picked it up. That couldn’t be possible, he thought. That was impossible.
But the data confirmed it. The avatar that was Lieutenant Keegan was still operational, still alive and well.
Melissa was still alive!
With hope firing through his chest like a blazing light he went back to Melissa and grasped her wrist, felt for a pulse. It had to be there, he thought. It was so weak he was missing it somehow. So he checked her heartbeat, and couldn’t locate that either.
Minutes later, he had to concede that Melissa was indeed dead.
But that she somehow lived inside Lieutenant Keegan.
He marvelled at the implications for a second or two. Did it really mean that if your body physically died while you were inside the Heights you were somehow reborn into the avatar you were occupying? Like a soul passing on from Earth to Heaven. Was that even possible?
Life after death?
Ironic, he thought, that the opposite was true that without the expiration inhibitor, should your avatar die in the Heights then your physical body died, too.
He watched the data threads, the signals that told him his wife was still alive, but now trapped forever inside a living hell. He stroked the VDU tenderly.
Could he ever get her back?
40
Sacrifice
She was inconsolable for far longer than she ever thought she would be, driving long into the night, hardly noticing how many hours she’d been travelling. In the beginning Samuel Wade had been a mission, one of many. Nothing more than that. But he proved to be special, in more ways than one. And as the sun began to rise, cleansing the land of t
he dark, she began to wonder at what had happened to her back there. Why did she pass out like that? What had happened? She felt different. How, she had no idea. She could not explain it. But she felt more alive than she’d ever experienced in the Heights. Had Samuel Wade been responsible for that? The same way he was responsible for bringing on sentience in others where there had been none before?
Yes, he had indeed been special.
Before the sun baked the land too hot, Linda Keegan stopped the vehicle and let the others out for a breath of fresh air. The desert at this time didn’t look half as bad, half as menacing, she thought as she watched them stretch their legs.
‘Where’s Sam?’ asked Amanda Tyler when she realised he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
‘He’s dead,’ said Keegan, suppressing her emotions.
‘Oh God no!’ she said. ‘Poor Sam.’
‘He’s dead?’ Jack Benedict said. ‘You can’t be serious. Not Sam Wade. Are you certain? Maybe we ought to go back for him.’
‘He’s dead,’ she reiterated.
‘He said he’d protect me,’ said Cheryl, fear giving an edge to her wavering voice.
‘He did,’ Keegan explained. ‘He died trying to save us. If it hadn’t been for him we would all have died last night.’
Cheryl hung her head. ‘Died to save us?’
Keegan stared back across the desert, towards Cain’s Territory, lying somewhere beyond the silky haze.
‘The greatest sacrifice anyone can make,’ she said, trudging back to the cab to retrieve food and water.
The greatest sacrifice a human can ever make, she thought.
41
Somewhere Appropriate
Robert Napier lifted Melissa Lindegaard’s feather-light body out of the chair and carried it through to her bedroom, where he put her on top of the bed, stroking back her hair from her bloodless face and placing her hands across her chest.
He spent a few minutes studying the woman before him. It’s a shell, he thought. The body simply a shell and her soul is out there somewhere.
With a determined flexing of his neck and shoulders he went back to find Dale Lindegaard, who was trying to rise onto his elbow, gasping aloud as the pain from his broken wrist started to bite into his newly awakened senses. He looked up to see Robert Napier striding up to him and as he did so he caught sight of the inhuman shape that was Jungius, his face no longer recognisable, blood and white froth bubbling from his mouth, his jaw having dislocated with the fit. He was very still and quite dead.
Napier grabbed Lindegaard and hauled him to his unsteady feet.
‘What are you going to do to me?’ Lindegaard said falteringly.
With one push, Napier had thrown Lindegaard into the leather chair recently vacated by Melissa, and was tying Lindegaard’s arms down with leather straps.
‘What are you going to do to me!’ he yelled, but he was unable to break free of his bonds. He watched as Napier took a bottle of tremethelene and filled a syringe from it. ‘No, not an overdose!’ Lindegaard cried. ‘Please, not that!’
‘Don’t worry. It’s not an overdose.’ He rolled up the sleeve of Lindegaard’s cream jacket and jabbed in the needle. ‘It’s not going to be that easy for you.’
Napier went to the computer and punched in data, coordinates.
‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Sending you somewhere nice,’ he said. ‘Somewhere appropriate.’
Lindegaard’s vision began to swim, a soft velvet cushion pressing down on his brain. It should have been relaxing, but he felt fear. He tried to resist, fighting the effects of the drug, but it was no use and he knew that. From here on in the tremethelene had him in its seductive clutches.
42
Home
They got back inside the armoured personnel carrier, already the heat beginning to crank up, the feel of the metal hot to their touch. Keegan started up the engine. It gave a throaty, reassuringly solid roar, and she checked the fuel gauge. Enough to get them there, she thought. She squinted at the bright skyline.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Jack Benedict who was sitting by her side, riding shotgun.
She thought he looked different. The recent experiences bringing out the real man in him.
‘To Erewhon,’ she replied, finding first gear.’
‘Erewhon? Where the hell is that?’
‘Somewhere safe,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘It’s going to be home for a while.’
‘Where are we?’ said Benedict. ‘You know where we are, obviously.’ He looked at her expectantly.
‘Now’s not the time, Jack. But later, I promise.’
She hit the gas and the armoured vehicle drove off, throwing up a red cloud of dust in its wake.
43
Waves of Pure Evil
Dale Lindegaard opened his eyes. He didn’t know where he was. It was dark, very dark. And so cold. Why was it so cold?
The moon crept out from behind a lacy band of cloud and lit up the scene around him.
It looked like he was in a desert…
He was in Armageddon Heights!
His first instinct was to want to run, but he couldn’t, because his hands and legs were tightly bound together, and he was strapped to a chair, a gag fastened around his mouth.
He was naked and strapped to a chair!
What was going on? His fevered brain could not take it all in, make sense of it.
What was that in his hands? Something cold and metallic. A grenade. He was holding a grenade – with the pin pulled out.
He began to shake, to struggle against his bindings, trying to loosen them.
Blood curdling growls from somewhere out there in the darkness made him stop, hold his breath.
The realisation of the hopelessness of his predicament hit him like a punch to the gut. He felt hot, wet urine flow between his legs and puddle on the sandy soil.
Two fiery eyes burned green in the black void, joined by another two, and another two, till there were many twinkling sets of eyes, like stars in the night sky. By the light of the moon he made out the large shaggy heads of bonesnappers, creeping stealthily towards him. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t, his cry for help held back by the dam of his gag. Tears began to stream down his cheeks. He could smell their rank, foetid breath and feel their primitive hunger wafting over to him on waves of pure evil.
A bonesnapper lunged at him.
He let the hand grenade fall.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for purchasing ‘ARMAGEDDON HEIGHTS’.
It’s been late in coming, I know (I really had to get with the times), but you can now follow me on Facebook, and D M Mitchell at Twitter @dmtheauthor for news on latest releases, free book offers and general stuff! I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Yours,
Daniel M. Mitchell.
By D. M. Mitchell
Novels:
Max
Silent
Mouse
Blackdown
After the Fall
The Soul Fixer
Flinder’s Field
Pressure Cooker
Latimer’s Demon
The Domino Boys
The King of Terrors
Armageddon Heights
Archangel Hawthorne
The Ashenby Incident
The House of the Wicked
The Woman from the Blue Lias
The First D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
The Second D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus
The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double Bill
Short Stories:
Rabbits
Mulligan’s Map
The Pen of Manderby Pincher
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at www.dm-mitchell.com for more information on books, blogs and author biographies
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Armageddon Heights (a thriller) Page 32