Avengers

by Brian Lumley

  “You talk about Trask and revenge,” said Jake, who accepted the principle of revenge well enough, “but at least Trask has a real reason for doing what he’s doing. He’s saving the lives of people—perhaps all of us—while you’re planning to kill men for political reasons.”

  Again Turchin threw up his hands. “If that’s how you see it then I can’t any longer argue with you. I’ll stay in England as a defector, my enemies—if not the three who know about Perchorsk, then others—will take control in Russia, and the world will go to hell when more vampires come through from Starside!”

  Jake shook his head. “That isn’t going to happen. It seems that Nathan has won the war on Starside.”

  “So Ben Trask has informed me.” Turchin gave the impression of shrugging it off. “Ah, but as we’ve discovered, history has a nasty habit of repeating! This wouldn’t be the first time Trask misjudged or underestimated the dangers of the Vampire World.”

  Jake had to agree. “You have a point,” he said.

  “Yes, I have,” the Premier snapped. “And the point is, will you let the Gate stand open or will you close it for good? It’s out of my hands now. The problem is all yours. I have the package and you can make the delivery. But without that we work together the status quo—and a very unsatisfactory status quo at that—will prevail. At least until we’re toppled into a worldwide disaster.”

  “You sound just like Korath,” said Jake.

  “Who?”

  “Oh, an old friend of mine. He was even more dangerous, and much more convincing, than you. But he’s been neutralized, made safe—well, more or less.”

  Turchin stood up. “We’re getting nowhere, and I’m expecting a message from my people back home. Twenty-four hours after the message comes, it could be too late to put my plan into action. If you’re able to contact Trask, I would like to suggest you do so now and see what he says about all this.”

  “I’m waiting for Trask to contact me,” said Jake. “But like I said, I’ll think over what you’ve told me.”

  “Well then, for goodness sake think quickly!” said Turchin.

  “First I’ll be finishing my coffee,” said Jake. “Then I’ll talk to John Grieve, and then I’ll think about it.”

  “Huh!” Turchin snorted, then turned and walked away…

  Jake took the elevator back up to E-Branch HQ and called in at the Duty Office. After telling John Grieve what had transpired, he asked for his advice. “What do you reckon?”

  “I knew Trask and Turchin had something going,” Grieve told him, “but I wasn’t too sure what it was—not until now. I did do interpreter on an iffy telephone call from Turchin to Trask, but even with my talent it wasn’t entirely clear what was going down. I can well understand, however, why Trask hasn’t reached a decision yet. It seems a very risky business.”

  “What does?” said Jake, whose mind was already wandering in other directions.

  “Eh?” said Grieve, frowning. “What does? Are you kidding?” And again he enquired, “Are you sure you’re feeling okay, Jake? I mean, doesn’t it speak for itself? Exploding a nuclear device on someone else’s territory—now that’s what I’d call a risky business!”

  “Oh, that!” said Jake, feeling foolish. “I thought you were talking about the other stuff: him wanting to show me the bomb, telling me how to prime it, checking out the schematics for the Perchorsk complex…that sort of stuff.”

  The frown lifted from Grieve’s face, but slowly. “Well, as for the latter: you can do that any time you feel inclined. We have schematics going right back to Perchorsk’s early days. We got some of it from Zek Foener, a lot more from Ian Goodly and Trask himself—after they spent a little time there courtesy of Turkur Tzonov—and a great deal more from Harry and Nathan. Unless there’s been any big changes, we have the complete layout.”

  “Yes,” said Jake, looking at Grieve—no, looking through him, as the Duty Officer now realized. For Jake’s eyes were on something else; his eyes and mind both, they weren’t here. And feeling fully justified, Grieve broke one of E-Branch’s oldest rules and directed a telepathic probe straight into the Necroscope’s mind.

  Jake’s shields were down; strange memories stirring—not his but some other’s—and scenes unravelling in his mind. The Perchorsk complex, yes. But schematics…no, not a bit of it. No draughtsman’s blueprint this, but the real thing. Better far than any chart or plan drawn to scale, this actually was, or it had been, Perchchorsk itself. Had been—in Harry Keogh’s time—but as Jake now “remembered” it!

  Grieve saw it for himself:

  That huge area above the Perchorsk dam, with its incredibly massive lead shielding. The dam itself, which powered the complex’s turbines; great spouts of water jetting out from the dam wall and curving down into the old riverbed. The road through the Perchorsk Pass, with a slip road winding down the mountainous contours to the complex’s entrance, where great metal doors stood open on their rollers, and a fluorescent glow from within bathed the walls of the ravine in a blue light.

  Grieve followed Jake’s thoughts—tracked his thoughts and Harry Keogh’s memories—into the Perchorsk complex. But a mere complex? More a labyrinth, surely? Roughly circular in plan and six levels deep, why, it might easily house a thousand workers, which it had in its heyday, before the experiment backfired and fried so many of them.

  Evidence of that backfire was everywhere:

  In a gently curving, tubelike corridor floored with rubber tiles, the ceiling and arching walls were scorched black. Great blisters were evident in the paintwork, and in places where the external bedrock had melted, the ceiling had buckled and fractured, letting molten rock squeeze through to solidify in great ugly lava blobs on the cooler surfaces of inner walls. The rubber floor tiles had burned right through to naked metal plates, many of which were buckled out of alignment. In the first moments of the accident, blow-back, meltdown, whatever, this area of the outer perimeter must have felt like a pressure cooker.

  “Proceeding” rapidly along the corridor, Grieve saw that a number of lesser conduits leading inwards like spokes from the principal corridor were hung with triangular radiation-warning signs or white-on-black skull-and-crossbones discs. These were no-go areas, “hot spots” where radioactivity was so intense as to be lethal. So the heat here had been more than merely thermal. Indeed, it had been an entirely different kind of heat.

  As that thought occurred—not to Grieve but to Jake, and through Jake to Grieve—so it conjured an instantaneous, wrenching shift in locations: to Perchorsk’s magmass levels.

  And Grieve found himself drifting down a wide, heavy-beamed wooden staircase into a region of sheer fantasy, where on every hand he peered into the dim recesses of a maddening confusion, a weird chaos. The lighting was only poor here, perhaps deliberately so, for what little could be seen was very disquieting and even frightening. Down through a tangle of warped plastic, fused stone, and blistered metal Grieve passed, where amazingly consistent smooth-bored tunnels some two to three feet in diameter wound and twisted like giant wormholes through old timber, except they cut through solid rock and crumpled steel girders. And Grieve knew—even as Jake knew—that something, some vast force, had attempted to bring about an alien homogeneity here, had tried to bring everything together in one similar form, or else to deform it utterly.

  It wasn’t so much that the various materials had been fused by great heat and fire; rather they seemed to have been folded in, like the banded ingredients of marbled cake, or multitextured plasticines in some monstrous child’s hands…and Grieve saw that it was getting worse.

  Beneath the timbers of a level walkway the floor was chaotically humped and anomalous, where many different materials had so flowed into each other as to become unrecognizable in their original forms. And through all the solid mass of this earthly yet unfamiliar material, those irregular wormhole energy channels ran like the indiscriminate burrows of rock-boring crustaceans in the sea, but on a gigantic scale.

 
Now Grieve found himself moving toward a dark region which he knew (because Jake knew it) that he wouldn’t much like. But because Jake had to look, so must the telepath. Either that or break off contact at once. But this “guided tour,” as it were, was so morbidly fascinating that Grieve stayed with it…and a moment later wished he hadn’t.

  For in a warped, nightmarish cavern like a lunatic’s dream of hell, suddenly he saw that metal, plastic, and rock were not the only materials which had fused together inseparably in the uncontrolled blast of alien energy that had wrecked the Perchorsk Project. No, for there had been men, scientists down here, too. Pompeii must look somewhat similar to this—if only from a limited and perhaps paleontological viewpoint, that of someone examining fossils—but at least the tortured figures at Pompeii had remained recognizably human. Not twisted, compressed, elongated…or even reversed, with all of their organs visible on the outside!

  But such were the moulds in the magmass. At which the Duty Officer had had enough…

  Seated upright behind his desk, Grieve snapped back in his chair, cut himself free from Jake’s mind like a piece of suddenly released elastic. And:

  “Jesus!” he said. “Jesus!” And no sign of the ex-army officer, the oh-so-phlegmatic English gentleman now. “You…you…you know that place!” he said.

  And returned to the present of his own accord, Jake nodded. “Yes,” he answered wonderingly, his eyes wide and staring. “Yes, I do. And I know the coordinates, too.”

  “Was it in the files?” Grieve pulled himself together. “It must have been in those files.”

  “Something of it,” Jake answered. “But not like that. That was the real thing. Little by little, I seem to be remembering, that’s all.”

  “Remembering what Harry knew?”

  “It has to be,” said Jake. And then he, too, pulled himself together. “Don’t waste your time trying to figure it out, John. Myself, I gave up on that a long time ago. Anyway, you said you wanted me to see something that came in overnight?”

  At which the Duty Officer opened a drawer and handed Jake a decoded copy of the Minister Responsible’s memo to Ben Trask…

  22

  News from Porton Down—the End of Things—Jake: Remembering…

  AT A BULGARIAN GAS STATION-CUM-RESTAURANT and rest rooms midway between Topolovgrad and Jambol, still following the Tundźa in a direction due north, Ben Trask and his task force had paused to take refreshment and dust themselves off. The sun was high in a blue sky and the day had turned quite warm. It was Trask’s best opportunity to read the Minister Responsible’s deciphered message without the constant interruptions of the minibus’s jarring motion—or so he had reckoned. But as for interruptions:

  As his party sat down at a wooden table with a sun umbrella in the restaurant’s beer garden overlooking the river, a waiter bustled into view and enquired, “Do we having a Mr. Trask?”

  Trask answered, “I’m Trask. Is there something?”

  “Telephone,” said the other, smiling. “I having the number. You should please be calling, er, a Mr. Burdur?”

  Trask looked at the others and said, “Ali Bey. It could be important. Order something for me, will you?” And then he followed the waiter indoors to the telephone.

  Burdur was waiting for the call. The phone at the other end was snatched from its cradle at the first ring, and: “Mr. Trask? Ben, is it you?” Burdur’s voice; Trask sensed his excitement.

  “Yes, what is it?” he said.

  “Ben, last night another vehicle stolen. Being seen heading toward border post. I thinking this your, er, quarry?”

  “Good!” said Trask. “Do we have the make and number?”

  “The number, yes,” said Burdur, and Trask quickly scribbled it down. “As for the make…it is unmistakable. Forgetting the make, my friend, because you are certainly knowing this vehicle when you seeing it. Knowing it at once, immediately. It is the big black hearse!”

  “A hearse?” Trask repeated the Inspector, and pictured the vehicle in his mind’s eye. A long, broad black car—indeed a limo—with benchlike seats in the back for the pallbearers, and windows curtained in black velvet. Such a conveyance would be ideally suited, certainly to the needs of Malinari, Vavara, and Szwart. And it would be just spacious enough—if a little cramped—for their recent recruits, the girls from the vampirized cruise ship. Then again, if that troupe had been in any way diminished…there would be more than sufficient room.

  “Ben?” Burdur’s voice came again. “Ben Trask, did you hearing me? It is the funeral vehicle, this stolen car.”

  “I heard you,” Trask nodded, if only to himself. “A hearse, and very much in keeping, too.”

  “I wishing you luck, my friend,” said Burdur then. “And I hoping my problems are going with—” and here his voice sank low, almost to a whisper, “—going with the vampires!”

  “I hope so, too,” said Trask. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” Burdur answered, and Trask heard his telephone go down…

  Back at the table in the beer garden, after Trask had told the others about his conversation with Burdur, finally he was able to read the Minister Responsible’s message.

  And at E-Branch HQ in London, Jake Cutter, Necroscope, was reading it at almost the same time:

  Trask—

  Just in from Porton Down, where they have had every available microbiologist working on it since square one, the following information:

  (1) Their initial assessment was only partly correct. Large doses of plague bacteria will destroy these creatures, but only after an extended period. The first tests were carried out on incomplete samples—such as the one you obtained from the Evening Star—and that was where the error occurred. Tissue separated from a carrier (ergo, without will) succumbs much more readily and totally.

  (2) The sleepers we saw at Bleakstone: one of them was a lawyer, and rather than suffer his threatened lawsuit the idiot psychiatrists let him go! He is still at large. The other sleeper, when he began to react to our recommended agents, was sent to Porton Down, making him the perfect test medium. Sorry if I sound less than sympathetic toward him. He is in any case alive, but highly dangerous now and caged.

  (3) Unfortunately, however, he is not the only one at Porton Down. As you are aware, the Civil Authorities are on this now, and in the last twenty-four hours have discovered a great many more sleepers—and worse! Here once again, however, we were mistaken in our understanding of the problem. Some of the “sick” people we’ve discovered have not “slept” at all, while others slept only after considerable amounts of time had passed since they were in the city’s underground tube system where we must presume they contracted their conditions.

  (4) Worst of all, we now have our first cases of—forgive me if I still refuse to use what must eventually become the official term—transmission, human to human. They are biting, Ben, and passing this thing on. And not only in the UK. I’ve been in contact with our Australian friends and they are reporting cases, too. Also, Mr. Papastamos has voiced his further suspicions about Krassos. I can only assume that eventually we shall hear from Turkey and wherever else you are obliged to pursue the instigators. But pursue them and destroy them you must, for they are the source of this scourge.

  (5) Finally, with reference to Note (1) above. Until now we had thought we were safe with our anti-Pasteurella pestis shots. This is no longer the case. The presence of the antidote in your bodies may well deter the enemy, but it won’t stop him and it certainly won’t incapacitate him. Moreover, with regard to those shots, they weren’t always reliable. Quite apart from the defective batches, perhaps twenty percent of people treated don’t have a reaction—they simply don’t take. The easy way to check is to think back and ask yourself, “Did my shot raise an itchy blister and leave a tiny scar?” If it didn’t, then it didn’t take and your blood is pure…and delicious.

  That’s all for now. I have nothing else for you. If you have anything for me be careful how you deliver it. Not all
of the world is as stable as we like to believe we are…

  Good hunting—

  M. Res.

  Trask read it again, this time out loud albeit in muted tones, so that he wouldn’t be overheard. And slowly the implications began to dawn on him, and on the others…those of them who were still seated at the table.

  “Where’s Liz?” he asked then, noting her absence.

  And inclining her head toward the riverbank, Millie said, “She’s behind those trees there. She wanted a little privacy, in order to contact Jake…and here they come right now.”

  “What?” said Trask, frowning as he glanced in the direction Millie had indicated. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Neither do I,” Millie answered, matching frown for frown. “I don’t see them, but I do hear them. She’s no longer alone.”

  And as Liz and Jake came into view, Paul Garvey looked at Millie and said, “Damn, you’re good!”

  But still frowning, she didn’t answer him.

  They all greeted Jake in as reserved a manner as possible, and he took a seat with them. Liz had obviously explained something of the situation to him, because the first thing he said was, “So, you’re hot on the trail again.” He sounded something less than enthusiatic about it.

  “Very hot,” said Trask, “and it’s time we weaponed up. Not here but in some quiet lay-by a little farther up the road. If you ride with us you’ll have the coordinates without having to rely on Liz.”

  “Right,” said Jake dully.

  “Is something wrong?” Liz said. She wanted to read him but knew better; he had asked that she respect his privacy before, and anyway his shields were up in force. But why were they up, in the presence of so many friends?

  In the next moment Liz knew why—guessed something of it, at least—when suddenly Jake said, “Did you get the Minister Responsible’s memo?”

  Trask nodded. “Oh, we got it,” he said, grimly. “The world is going up in flames, and all we’ve got is a bucket of water. Well, at least we’re no longer alone. Slowly but surely everyone is going to have to be put in the picture. And who can say—maybe they should have been told right from the start.”