“I had twenty-five men following me at one time.” “And you betrayed them,” Ronald said. “They trusted you, and you betrayed them. Now what do you have?”
Ellis glanced wildly around the room. “He promised me!” he screamed. “He said if I led those men to him he’d make me a powerful man once the Visitors took over for good.”
Sarah’s face clearly showed her revulsion.
“And he said—he said if I led him to the mayor, he’d give me—” He gazed imploringly at Sarah. “—he said he’d give me you.”
He seemed to shrink under her icy gaze, a man who had squandered his talents on vicious dreams of power. He pointed at Willie.
“He’s no better than me!” he shrieked. “Look at him! He’s a traitor to his people too!”
“There’s a difference,” Sarah said.
“A difference? What difference?”
“Willie came over to our side as an act of conscience. You did it out of pure greed.”
The desperation in John Ellis’ eyes was pathetic. He knew now that Ronald had only used him, that his hatred and resentment had been like blinders. It had been so simple for the alien to manipulate him. Now he felt nothing but shame.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
But he could see from the expression on Sarah Foley’s face that it was too late. The game was over for him. His head dropped onto his chest in abject misery.
“Enough breast beating,’* Ronald said. “Go now.” Ellis felt the blood pounding through his head. He crouched low as he made his way past Willie, Sarah, and Ronald. And then he bolted through the open doorway.
“Another miscalculation on my part,” Ronald said. “Though he served his purpose well enough for a time.” “Pity him,” Willie said, “if you know such an emotion Ronald.”
“I have heard of it,” Ronald responded dryly. “But I admit 1 have little use for it.”
Willie went to Sarah and put his arm around her shoulder. “Did he hurt you?” he asked.
“Not very much. I never knew he was such a frightened little man. I do feel sorry for him, Willie.” “It is good that you feel compassion for him, for he is sick in heart and spirit.”
“Spare me,” Ronald said. “You think you’ve won, and perhaps you have. Somehow, though, I don’t believe it. It seems to me that there might yet be living someone who has knowledge of that elusive toxin.”
Willie felt Sarah's trembling.
“No,” Willie said. “You heard him say that even he could not reconstruct the formula easily.”
“It would have come back to him, given the proper incentives, and it might yet be possible to obtain the formula.”
“You’re dreaming.”
“Yes, and my dreams are quite vivid, Willie. As are yours.”
Ronald came toward them, a powerful, looming figure, his frontal ridges protruding like the horns of a demon.
“Our methods must be crude, unfortunately,” he
rasped, “for the time is short before we board the sky fighter.”
“The skyfighter? Why?”
“We will use it to attack the village. There must be no survivors to tell that we have acquired the new toxin.”
Chapter 42
“But there is no reason to kill the people in Cutter’s Cove,” Willie said. “The formula is no more.”
“I suspect that is not entirely true,” Ronald observed. “But what good will it do to slaughter them?” Sarah cried. “If you get the toxin, the resistance will figure out why you killed them.”
“Not if we convert a survivor to tell them that we did not find it. That they still have a weapon to use against us. We will have taken another step toward the complete subjugation of your planet.”
“And if you don’t get the toxin?”
“Then humankind will have another reason to fear us.”
“So you’re going to wipe out Cutter’s Cove no matter what,” Sarah said. She thought of her mother waiting for her to come home, alone in that big old house. “You’re going to kill them all.”
“It would seem the expedient thing to do.”
“My God.” Sarah broke down and wept, a human habit during stress that Willie found curiously moving.
“How can you be so heartless?” she sniffled. “How can you and Willie be so different?”
“He is not bred for war, as I am,” Ronald said matter-of-factly. “I had little say in becoming what I am.” “But you have a free will. How can you do such monstrous things?”
“It is for the best,” Ronald said. “For my people,
there is not enough water and protein. The conquest of Earth will solve that problem, at least for a while.” “Why can’t you just change your ways? Do you really need to rape our world for your needs? Why didn’t you ask us to help you?”
Was that an ironic gleam she spotted in Ronald’s eye? “We observed much about your planet before we came here,” he said. “Kindness toward strangers seemed a rather rare commodity here, even before we came.” Sarah shook her head. It was no use arguing with him; he had an answer for everything. There were many different forms of truth, as Ronald had said, and his was not the same as the truth she knew.
“Enough of this pointless discussion,” Ronald said. “I have something for you, young woman, something to refresh your memory.”
Ronald’s left claw reached under his protective vest and withdrew a pointed device.
“No!” Willie cried. He tried to move toward Ronald to stop him, but he was restrained by the guards.
Ronald squeezed the device and a green wave emerged from its tip. The wave seemed to bend the light that passed through it, distorting what could be seen through it.
Sarah was enveloped in the light, wrapped in an emerald cocoon. For a moment, she didn’t seem to realize what had happened, but then her eyes opened wide.
She screamed in pain as her central nervous system was charged with a burning energy field. Willie watched in helpless horror as she writhed within the field, unable to escape its powerful hold.
Ronald wielded the pain wand for over a minute before he allowed Sarah a respite. Suddenly the green light vanished, and she sank to the floor, shaking from head to toe.
“Please,” Willie said. “Such a primitive use of physical pain is unwarranted.”
“Is it?” Ronald said. But the question was rhetorical, Willie saw as the cruel Visitor captain once again turned the wand on Sarah.
“For the sake of Amon,” Willie cried. “Please stop. Have you not seen enough suffering, Ronald?”
“Perhaps,” Ronald said, “she will reconsider the possibility that the formula remains extant even after the death of Dr. Brunk.”
Sarah’s screams smothered much of what Ronald said, but his meaning was clear. He inflicted pain coolly and efficiently, as if he had done it many times before. Indeed, he seemed to enjoy his work.
“Turn it off,” Willie said. “She will talk.”
“Do you think so?” Ronald fired one last jolt at Sarah and then shut off the wand again.
Sarah was turned faceup, her back arched, mouth opened wide in a silent scream. Her body collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been severed. She lay gasping on the floor as Ronald stood over her.
“The formula,” he said. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah moaned.
“You irk me,” Ronald said. “Both of you. But you, Willie, will have to wait for your reward.”
Ronald applied the wand again, this time increasing its intensity. The emerald field brightened, a long, tortured wail emerging from the obscured image of Sarah within it.
“You have already killed the man who could have helped you, and you got nothing out of him,” Willie said. “Will you also kill the girl?”
Ronald distractedly tormented Sarah for a few more seconds, and then he shut off the wand again.
“You are quite correct, Willie,” he said. “You are a remarkable fellow, you know.” He showed his fangs.
<
br /> “The young woman seems to have grown quite fond of you. Let us see how she reacts to the sight of you being tortured.”
The tip of the wand glowed, throwing a glittering emerald web over Willie before he could even speak.
Chapter 43
Willie told himself at the deepest level he could reach that the pain was not intolerable. This he had learned from the preta-na-ma. It remained a great challenge, a challenge he had forgotten when the toxin was thrown in his face.
A million needles pierced him, green and crackling with sinister energy. He willed himself to feel nothing. For a moment all sensations were blotted out. But they slowly emerged. Like water seeping through a crack under a door, they spilled into his consciousness: the sparkling emerald field, the low humming sound, the odor and taste of ozone—and the agony as his nervous system was savaged.
Redoubling his effort to fight the pain, Willie pushed his senses back under the door of his perception. But he was so weak from his earlier ordeal that he could barely remain conscious. He felt his energy draining away from him, the pain seeping through again—more of it than before. The door threatened to brust from the pressure on the other side. . . .
Somewhere beyond the hum, he heard Sarah scream.
Walking slowly through the woods, his gun left behind at the cabin, John Ellis wondered what would become of him now. He couldn’t go back home. He couldn’t face his neighbors, not after this. How could he have done such terrible things? All those people dead, and for what? Ronald had never intended to give him any power.
What a fool he had been. Ronald wouldn’t let him go home now anyway. He knew too much. The only reason the lizard hadn’t killed him back there, John supposed, was that he was too preoccupied with getting the formula, not to mention torturing Willie and Sarah.
All the guards were back at the cabin. If he knew how to fly the skyfighter, he’d take it and get the hell out of the state of Maine altogether. That was out of the question, though. But there was the boat Brunk and Sarah had rowed out here. It was only a little over a mile to the mainland. He could do it before they noticed he was gone. He’d go home, get a bus out of town, go to Portland or Hartford or even Boston. Nobody around here would ever see him again.
He heard a rustling in the bushes.
Maybe he hadn’t counted all the guards at the cabin. Could he have missed one? The way he was thrashing around in the bushes, John doubted it.
It was probably those two New Yorkers. Of course. He could hear them talking now, “dese” and “dose” New Yorkese clearly audible. Some hunters—they would scare away any game that came within a mile of them.
John waded into the bushes, thinking that he would take their guns. That way, if he ran into any trouble with lizard guards along the way, he could shoot first.
The last of the bushes crunched underfoot as he emerged into a tiny clearing. There they were, looking the wrong way, wondering what was making all the noise and where it was coming from.
“Over here, boys,” said John Ellis.
Jake and Charlie turned around, fear etched in their faces. Before they could see who it was, Charlie’s gun went off.
It was pointed directly at Ellis’ chest.
* * *
The recoil nearly knocked Charlie down. The rifle had been down at his hip, and the butt had bruised him badly, but he was still standing.
John Ellis wasn’t. He had been blown back into the bushes as the bullet passed through his chest. Charlie hadn’t realized the safety was off. He stared down at it now in disbelief. Smoke curled from the barrel.
“I shot him,” he murmured.
“Yeah,” Jake agreed, “you sure did.”
“Christ, I killed him.”
“Looks like it, but you’ve got to admit the bastard had it coming.”
“Maybe so,” Charlie said, his eyes widening, “but he was Ronald’s main man. You think that lizard is gonna like it?”
“He’ll get over it,” Jake said uncertainly. “It was an accident.”
“It won’t be any accident when he gets his hands on me,” Jake opined.
“Well, maybe we can hide the body.”
“Right. Or feed it to the bear.” Jake began to take heart. “If we feed him to the bear, Ronald will never suspect we had anything to do with it.”
“Let’s pull him out of those bushes and drag him over to the blueberry/ patch,” Charlie said. “The bear’s sure to find him over there.”
They stepped clumsily into the bushes, cracking the branches underfoot as they labored to free Ellis’ body. The shot had passed through him cleanly, so they didn’t have to contend with much blood as long as they pulled him by his arms and legs.
Breathing heavily, they managed to get him out onto the leaf-strewn clearing.
A voice said: “Hold it right there.”
They looked up into the barrel of a shotgun.
Chapter 44
Pythias Day looked down the sight of his scatter-gun at two men dragging a dead body.
“Looks like you fellows have got some explaining to do,” he said.
“He was our guide,” Charlie said, trying to explain. “Was that any reason to shoot him?” Pythias demanded.
“No, of course not. It was an accident. He turned us over to the Visitors, and—”
“That’s John Ellis,” a woman’s voice noted. Jane Foley stepped out of from behind a tree, a pistol in her dainty hand. “They’ve done the world a favor.”
“I thought he was that bear,” Charlie said. “I didn’t know it was— What did you say?”
“I said you’ve done the world a favor. This man was a traitor.”
“Yes, he was. How did you know?”
“It’s a long story,” said Jane. She whistled, and suddenly people started to come out of the woods. They were all armed, some only with knives, one or two with tools and farming implements, but most had guns. That wasn’t their most striking feature, however. There were only a handful of men, and the rest were women and youngsters.
“I’ll be damned,” said Jake.
“We might not have the weapons the Visitors have,” Pythias said, “but we’ve got them outnumbered.”
“How did you get on the island with all those lizards crawling around?” Jake asked.
“We kept a close watch on the place, cruising by the nearest islands and keeping out of sight. A little while ago they all abandoned the beach and went toward the interior of the island. We think we know why.”
Jake and Charlie glanced at each other. “We’re free,” Jake said.
“That’s right,” Pythias told them. “You can wait it out while we go after them—or you can join us.” They both nodded. “We’re with you,” said Jake. “This planet belongs to all of us, so I guess that makes it our fight as much as yours.”
Pythias flashed one of his rare grins. “Welcome aboard.”
“What do we do to help?” Charlie wanted to know. “Somewhere on this island there’s an old cabin. A doctor who’s developed a toxin to fight the Visitors is hiding there. He has a young woman with him, his assistant. They went there because the place is secluded, hard to find. A good idea, until the Visitors caught up with them.”
“So we have to find the cabin and make like the Lone Ranger, is that it?” The prospect seemed to please Jake. “What are we waiting for?”
They fanned out, a search party nearly forty strong. Pythias and Jane went together, both of them praying that Sarah was still alive.
Willie dropped to the floor, retching and quaking violently. He could no longer fight the pain; he was simply too weak for such an intense concentration. Ronald had been torturing him for what seemed an eternity, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse. “For God’s sake!” Sarah screamed. “Stop it!” “God?” Ronald mused. “What god? Yours or Wil
The New England Resistance 161
lie’s?” He gave Willie another jolt with the wand, lifting him to his feet against his will.
W
illie’s tongue snaked out of his mouth involuntarily, flecks of foam dripping from it. Ronald moved the wand slowly from left to right, forcing Willie to shamble in a grotesque parody of a dance. His body twisted into positions no human being had ever seen before, and Sarah couldn’t take it anymore.
“Please,” she said. “If you stop it, I’ll give you what you want.”
The green light was switched off, and Willie collapsed once again.
“I knew you could be reasonable,” Ronald said, “given the proper incentive.”
“Thank you,” Willie gasped from the floor, “but you shouldn’t have capitulated.”
“I couldn’t let him kill you,” Sarah said. She tried to go to him, but the guard restrained her.
“Let her go,” Ronald commanded.
Sarah knelt and gently placed Willie’s head on her lap. “Are you all right?” she asked tenderly.
“Yes, I will recover, but you should have let him kill me.”
“I couldn’t let you sacrifice your life, not after the courage you’ve shown.”
“How maudlin,” Ronald sneered. “Enough of these histrionics. Where is the formula?”
“It’s not here,” said Sarah.
“Where, then?”
“On the mainland,” she lied, “at my home.”
Ronald took a step forward, looming over Sarah and Willie.
“If you are lying—and we shall soon know if you are, for my soldiers await my orders to assemble for the final attack on your village—if I find that you are lying, it will go very badly for you.”
“It’s the truth.” She had to stall for time, and it was the only thing she could think of.
Ronald’s claw grasped her wrist, dragging her to her feet. Willie propped himself up on one elbow, trying to get onto his feet, but it was no good. He fell back onto the floor.
Ronald turned toward the door. At that moment, one of his soldiers appeared in the empty door frame, speaking wildly in the alien tongue.
Before Ronald could answer him, a gunshot rang out and the soldier clutched his head, falling across the threshold dead.
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