Drakas!

by edited by S. M. Stirling

  "Tomorrow," she said, "you'll bring him to the warehouse at 411 Center Street at three PM. You'll come alone. You'll drop him off and you'll leave. You understand?"

  "Yes," he whispered.

  "Very good. Remember the time. Remember the address."

  "Yes," he whispered.

  She picked up her briefcase, opened the door and left.

  As her footsteps vanished down the carpeted hallway, he pushed the door shut, ever so quietly, and stood behind his deadbolts, breathing so hard he thought he might pass out. He went into the kitchen and opened the drawer where he kept the knives and his service revolver. He took out the gun, put it back and took out a cleaver instead. He went back to the room where the painting was, and slashed at it, breathless and silent until the false vision of the peaceful kingdom was nothing but a stained rag hanging in a wooden frame.

  * * *

  First thing in the morning, he went down to see Rau in the lockup and took him to a soundproof interrogation room.

  Rau took a long look at him. "They came to see you."

  "Yes."

  "They know you have me in here."

  "Yes."

  "They want me back."

  Hamilton nodded, dry-mouthed at the memory. He hadn't slept at all, and his body felt thick and heavy, lagging behind his racing mind. "I have to take you to them," he said. "I can't explain why. I'm sorry, but I have to."

  Rau sat down at the battered interrogation table, which was stained with coffee and scattered with donut sugar. "They're different than us. They have different chemicals in their bodies. Pheromones. They affect you like a strong emotion you can't explain."

  Hamilton nodded and sank into the other chair.

  "When they talk, you can't argue," said Rau. "Did you feel that, too?"

  "Yes."

  "When do you have to do it?" he said.

  "Three. This afternoon."

  Rau put his palms flat on the dirty table. "I have friends who can help you. I was getting weapons for them when I was arrested. It's very important that I not go back with the Draka. We've been working a long time to fight them and now we're almost ready."

  "How?" whispered Hamilton. "How can you fight that . . . that kind of feeling?"

  "From a distance," said Rau. "With scopes and rifles. You understand? You have to help us now, because you understand."

  He didn't understand. He could barely make himself talk about it. To think about the woman in his apartment made Hamilton want to break into helpless sobs. Draka. Was that the word that described this hollow terror?

  "What do I have to do?" he said.

  "First," said Rau, "you have to get me out of here."

  * * *

  That wasn't the difficult part. Rau's psychiatric evaluation made it easy for Hamilton to initiate a transfer to Behavioral/Criminal department at Shepherd-Pratt. Because of the urgency of Rau's condition, Hamilton's supervisor Okay'd immediate transport. When the prison van showed up at the station, Rau, shackled climbed in. Hamilton told the driver he had a phone call, and when the driver was out of sight, he got behind the wheel and slowly drove away. It was ten-thirty in the morning.

  "Where to?" he said to Rau.

  "Turn left," said Rau. "I'll tell you where to go."

  They ended up on the west side of town, deep in the baking, ungentrified ruins of the old city. Treeless, lawnless brick rowhouses loomed on either side of the narrow street. Most of the windows were boarded. Those that weren't were dark, ominous, and framed with broken glass. Now and then a stray dog would trot across the littered street. Ravens topped the high walls like gargoyles. There wasn't a human being in sight.

  Rau leaned forward, still chained in the back of the van, separated from Hamilton by a layer of wire mesh. "It's this block. The house with the blue door."

  The house was just as deserted-looking as its neighbors with boards over everything but the blue door. The only difference was that instead of being flanked on either side by other buildings, one side faced an alley.

  "Pull in there," said Rau.

  There could be nothing more noticeable than a police van in an area like this. Hamilton peered around before he backed into the alley, which ended fifty feet from the street in a pile of trash and scraggly trees. This was heroin territory; crack-factory frontier. It was the part of police work he had avoided for years by dealing with its denizens in his own environment instead of plunging into theirs. The Draka had scared him—surprised him—but the hidden inhabitants of this neighborhood were a known and terrifying quantity.

  "Are you sure we're in the right place?" he said.

  "Positive." Rau shifted impatiently in his chains. "Hurry up. We don't have much time."

  * * *

  The blue door was unlocked, which made Hamilton's heart pound even harder. He'd brought his service revolver, and clenched it in his sweaty hand. Rau pushed the door open and let it swing inward. Except for the spill of dull light through the front door, the inside of the rowhouse was dark.

  Rau said something in a language Hamilton didn't recognize and a tall man with the same hair and similar features as Rau stepped out of the shadows. He was holding a gun that was almost as long as his body, festooned with scopes and gadgets, like something out of a Terminator movie. He swung the gun up in an easy motion and aimed it right at Hamilton.

  "No," said Rau in his soft accent. "This is a friend."

  "Scan him," said the man with the gun, and two more men appeared silently from the darkness. They were as alike to each other as brothers, but it wasn't a family resemblance so much as a racial similarity. White men with Mediterranean features and West African accents. Hamilton tried hard to place the combination and simply couldn't. One of the men pointed a palm-sized device, about the same size and shape as a cell phone, in Hamilton's direction. He examined the tiny screen and gave his companions a quick nod. The three of them relaxed. The gun went down. Rau closed the door and lights came on.

  Normally, rowhouses like this opened up into a small living room and dining room with a door at the far end for the kitchen. This one had been gutted to the plaster walls. In the middle of the former living space was a vehicle parked as though it was in a garage. At first glance, it looked like an ultra heavy-duty SUV, but on closer examination, Hamilton could see that it was armored. The front wheels were sheathed tires of some kind, and the back of the vehicle hunkered on distinctly tank-like treads. The front windshield was only a slit, and the tube-shaped sidelines were open in front, perforated along the tops, like machine-gun barrels. The cap on the back of the truck extended over the cab, where openings like air scoops lay on the roof over the slit windshield. Sharp metal cones peeked out of the openings and those were missiles, Hamilton realized. Whatever it was—tank, or truck, or the latest from Detroit—it was outfitted for war.

  "You're going to fight the Draka with this?" he said.

  At the word, Draka, the three men stiffened. Rau put a finger over his lips. "Come upstairs," he whispered. "I have to explain our situation to them."

  * * *

  Upstairs, the accommodations were Spartan and temporary. There was a card table with half a dozen folding chairs. Blankets and mattresses covered the floor. It would have been a stopping place for the homeless except for the guns in racks along the walls.

  Rau and his companions spoke in low, urgent voices while Hamilton sat in a chair and looked around the room at the collection of firepower. Hand guns, rifles, automatics and semiautomatics. Some looked like Vietnam vintage, some he didn't recognize. The guns covered the walls like a museum exhibit. He counted the folding chairs, counted the men and counted the number of guns. He speculated at the number of passengers the tank/truck downstairs could hold, and came up with a sum total of utter fear.

  What did these men expect? That the Draka—that woman in her heels and briefcase and frightening attitude—would stride toward them through a hail of bullets untouched? Did they imagine throwing down gun after gun as they ran through box
es of ammunition until all they had left to blow her away were the missiles from the top of the truck? How many Draka were there? An image formed in Hamilton's mind of an army of them, so many that an arsenal like this would barely dent their ranks.

  "What are they?" he blurted in the dim room. "Where do they come from?"

  The men, who had been talking in low voices, stopped and turned to stare at him.

  "They're a breed of human," said Rau. "Homo drakensis. They're the future of this planet if we don't stop them."

  "The future?" echoed Hamilton.

  "They're not from this time," said Rau, softly, as though he was afraid of invoking evil spirits. "They've traveled here to find us, and we've traveled here to stop them from ever starting their Final Society."

  "Traveled?" said Hamilton. "From . . . where?"

  "From when," said Rau. "Not where. We're here to change the future. That's all you need to know."

  * * *

  Three o'clock came marching toward Hamilton with dogged determination, too slow and still too fast. At two-fifty-five, he was sitting in the police van in front of the warehouse at 411 Center Street, letting the engine idle as traffic rumbled past. Rau's voice was a tinny whisper through the clip in his ear.

  "Can you see anything?" said Rau.

  Hamilton shook his head, just a little. The warehouse was ordinary. The sign on the door said MODERN PLASTICS. There was no more hint of an infestation of Draka than there had been a suggestion of a tank housed behind the blue door on the west side of town. And where was the tank? He eyed the rearview mirror, but all he could see was a battered Chevy Nova parked behind him and the dirty glass front of an abandoned car dealership on the opposite side of the street. Rau's compatriots had made him leave first, but as he'd turned the corner, heading away from the blue door, there had been an unmistakable thoom of collapsing masonry, and he suspected that they had driven their tank right through the front wall.

  He eyed the warehouse, dry in the mouth, hands sweaty on the steering wheel. What would the Draka woman do when she discovered that he hadn't brought Rau? He thought of his benevolent tiger painted in opaline shades and could only picture its gleaming teeth.

  Three o'clock. His watch beeped twice.

  "Get out of the van," said Rau.

  "I can't," he whispered.

  "Get out," snapped Rau. If you don't, I guarantee they'll come and kill you."

  Hamilton took a breath and obeyed, almost too numb to feel his feet on the asphalt.

  "Go to the door and knock twice," said Rau. "When they ask, tell them I'm still in the van."

  Hamilton made his way to the door. The sidewalk glittered with shards of broken glass. Scraps of old newspaper lay limp in the heat. He came to the door and stopped. He raised his hand to knock in the worn place beside the sign, Modern Plastics, but the door opened before he touched it.

  The Draka woman stood in a rush of cool air from inside. Her perfume. Her pheromones. Her breath of domination swirled around him. Hamilton steadied himself against the side of the building.

  "Where's Rau?" she said.

  "In the v-v-v-van."

  She made a motion to someone behind her and a tall, elegant looking man stepped past her onto the heat of the sidewalk. His emanations were nothing compared to hers. His body language was docile, and he almost scampered to do what she told him. He was like Rau, Hamilton realized. He was a flunky, or worse, a slave.

  The elegant man got to the van and peered through the window. Rau's tinny voice snapped in Hamilton's ear.

  "Two steps back. NOW!"

  Hamilton leaped backwards, eager to put as much distance between him and the Draka as possible. The elegant man turned to tell his mistress that there was no one in the van and at the same moment, the dirty plate glass window in the abandoned car dealership across the street shattered.

  The tank erupted from the building in a cloud of glass and dust and smoke from the missile batteries over the cab. The missile arced over Center Street and Hamilton had time to throw himself to the littered sidewalk. Traffic screeched to a halt as one of the missiles hit Modern Plastics. Hamilton curled away from the heat and noise of impact. Broken glass and mortar showered around him. The tank roared across the street and he looked over his shoulder long enough to see the police van tilt and crumple under its treads. The Draka was nowhere in sight. The tank fired again at point-blank range. Modern Plastics collapsed, roof-first, in a cloud of dirt and drywall plaster. Hamilton picked himself up, fighting the urge to run for his life. The dust fell in a gritty rain, and in the ruins of the building, he expected to see nothing but bent girders and torn bodies.

  Instead, he could see some kind of metallic shielding flush with the ground and just visible through broken masonry and debris. It was immense, like the side of a barn. As Hamilton watched, it moved as though it was about to open. Wind blew grit across the broken sidewalk and Hamilton smelled the Draka—angry, present and very much alive. The hair on the back of his neck rose up. The tank's door swung open and Rau leaned out.

  "Get in!" he yelled. "Hurry up!"

  "You've killed them!" Hamilton shouted back, even though he knew it wasn't true.

  "Get in!" shrieked Rau, and as he did, the metallic shielding in the ruins bulged upwards and parted.

  Every instinct told Hamilton to run. His legs shook. His mouth was dry. His feet would have dashed off by themselves if they could. But as he stood there, frozen with the breath of awful terror that drifted up from the rising metal, he knew he could never outrun what was about to emerge. The instinct to flee would mean certain death. He ran for the tank and crawled in behind Rau, clumsy and awkward with fear. He glanced into the red-lit interior, expecting to see Rau's companions but the back of the tank was deserted except for an immense plastic container.

  "Where the hell're your friends?" he shouted.

  Rau was tensed over a joystick instead of a steering wheel. His right hand rested on a control panel blinking with red and green lights. He didn't take his eyes off the metal door, which had opened to an angle of about twenty-five degrees. Broken bricks slid off as it rose. Plaster dust and fractured floorboards surrounded it like a giant nest.

  "Where are they?" demanded Hamilton.

  "They're right behind us," said Rau in a low, hard voice and he indicated the passenger seat with a jerk of his head. "Sit." Hamilton obeyed, and Rau snared his hand with wire-hard fingers. He pressed Hamilton's thumb next to the biggest of the red-lit buttons on the control panel. "This is yours," he said without taking his eyes off the destruction in front of them. "When I tell you to push that, you push."

  "What is it?" said Hamilton.

  Rau cocked his head toward the back of the tank where the plastic container hunkered in the dark. Hamilton knew without asking that it was a bomb. A big bomb. Probably big enough to blow Baltimore off the eastern seaboard.

  "I can't—" he started to say, but the metal door in front of them was rising, opening onto a black space below the ground, an emanating darkness that clenched in his throat, in his gut. There were Draka down there—he could feel them—and all the punks and murderers and rapists in the world were angels in comparison. He held his thumb over the button, shaking harder than he'd ever shaken in his life. Rau touched a button and the tank shoved backwards as a missile shot away from the roof. The missile plunged through the metal door, leaving a ragged hole. A cloud of smoke blew out—but it was a thin cloud—as though the space below was big enough to absorb the rest of the smoke and the explosion. Rau made an adjustment and fired again. This time the metal door burst apart, leaving a smoky view of a wide, cratered ramp leading into an immense cavern. Rau punched the accelerator and the tank bolted forward.

  Hamilton expected an army to meet them as the tank banged and jounced over what had been Modern Plastics, and held on to the edge of the hard seat with one hand as the tank bounded down the ramp. Rau snapped on a glaring halogen floodlight and the infested space beneath the block—the street—the ci
ty—leaped up in stark contrasts of black and white.

  Like Hieronymus Bosch demons, the Draka minions swarmed below. Their weapons sliced blue swaths through the weird-lit dark as armies of them ran heedlessly into the rain of bullets from the tank and fell like cut wheat. The budda-budda of automatic weapons vibrated through the cab and bullets pinged off the windshield. Voices blared through a tiny loudspeaker while Rau shouted back in his own language. Hamilton turned in time to see one of Rau's compatriots gun down a horde of black-clad lackeys before being mowed down himself in a spray of blood and brain. They had to be lackeys, Hamilton told himself, because the overwhelming, doomish presence of the Draka was too faint.

  The tank surged up a small incline, looming over the Draka slaves, plowing them down as though they were no more substantial than shadows. Their mouths opened in bellows of agony as they succumbed to bullets or the front wheels of the tank, but their shouts were drowned out inside of the tank by the noise of the engine and the rasping static of the radio. Even when Rau's second companion screamed into his microphone and the speaker went dead, Hamilton couldn't hear anything from outside, only the rumble within.

  The tank lurched to the left. Abruptly there were no more soldiers—nothing but a graded dirt roadway that led to some blurrily lit point in the near distance.

  "Can you see that?!" shouted Rau. "Can you see?"

  "What?" Was he supposed to press the button now? But Rau grabbed his wrist.

  "Look!"

  Now he could see it. In the distance, maybe a mile away, was a tower. It rose above everything else in a cocoon of gantries, harshly lit, like a rocket ready for a night launch.

  "What is it?" Hamilton heard himself whisper, but Rau answered as if he'd spoken in a normal voice.

  "It's a molehole," he said. "It's the tunnel between their world and yours." He let go of Hamilton's wrist and gunned the tank, faster and faster down the dark road.