by Brian Lumley
But snatching the walkie-talkie from Korolev’s hand, Galich answered that one himself. “No,” he growled. “Do not interfere. We have it in hand. Oh, and incidentally, we also have your VIP bosses in hand. So keep your fingers off those triggers.”
Meanwhile the snowplough, with a driver and three armed men aboard, had left the ramp, rumbled up onto the canopy, and come to a halt near the wrecked Scimitar. Just a moment ago the four had climbed down from their vehicle and entered the plane via a sprung hatch.
Now everyone on the ramp in front of Perchorsk’s doors fell silent, waiting to see what would happen…
Trask and his team were waiting, too. And Paul Garvey said, “I can’t see the Wamphyri being much hurt by that crash. The crew, probably, but not the Wamphyri.”
“Not a hope in hell,” said Trask.
“But what about Liz?” Jake muttered.
“Just try to stay calm,” Trask advised him. “If your nerve-endings feel as raw as mine—which means they’re almost bleeding—then I know exactly how you feel. But don’t try anything rash. Those four men who just entered that plane…that’s what I call rash!”
“Look,” said Goodly. “What’s all this? A survivor?”
The four figures, seeming inordinately bulky in their heavy parkas, had reemerged from the sprung hatch. The one in front, the smallest of the four, seemed to stagger; he could have been shocked by what he’d seen inside the wreck. But the figure immediately behind him was holding him up, apparently guiding him. The last man, the biggest of the four, moved effortlessly despite that he was carrying someone. Goodly’s survivor? Liz? Jake had to hope so.
But while Goodly was the precog, he wasn’t a telepath. That was Millie’s department. And now she gasped:
“That’s them! Those four men…they aren’t! I mean, only one of them is a man. And the others are—”
“Wamphyyyri!” said Lardis Lidesci.
“Is that Liz that one’s carrying?” Jake was shifting his weight from one foot to the other and back again. A feral yellow glow, escaping from behind his dark glasses, suffused his upper cheekbones.
“Take it easy, Jake,” Ian Goodly warned him. “And like Ben said, don’t do anything rash. This isn’t the time. And it certainly isn’t the place.”
“If it is Liz,” said Millie, “she’s right out of it. But I can’t scan too close or they’ll sense me. The only reason they haven’t so far is because they’ve got other things—more important things—on their minds.”
“But who’s the one in front?” said Trask.
“A victim,” Millie shuddered. “I can’t feel any mind there at all, only pain.”
“Then the one behind him must be Malinari!” The words came grinding out of Trask’s mouth. “Nephran Malinari, stealing all he can straight out of that poor bastard’s head!”
“And the one with Liz must be Szwart!” the Necroscope growled, a rumble low in his throat. “I could be down there before they even knew it…”
But again the precog said, “No!”
And Trask said, “For Christ’s sake let it be, Jake! Everyone down there is armed. You are…what you are, we know. But a bullet in the brain would pay no mind to that. It would stop you dead, the true death! And what chance for Liz then?”
The five figures had got aboard the snowplough; with Malinari at the controls, it now headed for the defended blockhouse. At first jerking, stalling, slewing this way and that, finally the vehicle answered to his touch and ran true. And since Malinari’s victim—one of the ex-convicts from the complex—was of no further use, he simply bundled him from the driving platform. As he fell, the brain-drained man’s flopping left arm got caught in a clanking track. Immediately dragged under, he burst like a grape from the crushing weight, and his shattered corpse was chewed by churning metal. Flayed and flattened as the vehicle surged on, he left a hugely spreading stain on the concrete and a thin black trail that followed the plough to its target.
Its target, yes: the blockhouse that controlled Perchorsk’s power supply!
But aroused by the blood and the action, hothead Vavara had given the game away. Hurling aside her parka she stood erect in the cab of the plough, aimed a machine-pistol at the men on the ramp and let rip with a hail of lead! Her insane laughter could be heard even above the chatter of her weapon and the vehicle’s howling engine. But unused to the weapons of Earth, her aim was off; her bullets struck sparks from the face of the cliff above Perchorsk’s huge doors and sent men diving for cover, but other than that they did no harm.
Still not knowing what was happening, but knowing what they must do to stop it, the men on the ramp answered fire with fire. And they were more accurate. Metal on metal, the automatic gunfire from Perchorsk’s defenders left dents in the blade of the snowplough, scarred its sides, and had Malinari and the others cowering from the buzz and spang of ricochetting bullets.
It lasted for a moment only, before the snowplough crashed headlong into the blockhouse.
A wall crumbled and collapsed; figures came scurrying from within, some from the gaping hole in the wall, others from the door. They, too, were firing guns. But unnerved by the suddenness of the attack and blinded by flying debris, their efforts made no impression. Vavara, on the other hand, had the hang of it now; she used her weapon like a scythe, slicing among them, cutting them down. In another moment all three of the Wamphyri had abandonded the snowplough and were inside the blockhouse—and Liz Merrick went with them, like a loose-limbed doll, flopping on Szwart’s shoulder.
From inside, more gunshots as the lights in the blockhouse were extinguished…then a row of spotlights in the walls of the ravine…finally the lights in the service bay, blinking out one by one as the last whining dynamo died.
Then, instantly, the shadows of the ravine walls seemed to come alive, crawling blackly over the concourse, the shattered blockhouse, the face of the dam, and the entrance to Perchorsk. Which left only the streaming moonlight to save the scene from total darkness…
28
Opening skirmish
THE MOON WAS UP BUT STILL CLIMBING. AS YET it silvered only one side of the gorge, which left the complex side in multilayered shadows that changed from moment to moment, shrinking or lengthening, growing lighter or darker, every time a wisp of drifting cloud cleared or veiled the lunar orb.
And in the streaming, changing moonlight, smoke was issuing from the wrecked blockhouse, flowing over the dam’s superstructure and eddying towards the complex.
Meanwhile, a second snowplough had set out from the service bay. Loaded with heavily armed men who clung to every available space, its headlights cut a swath through the smoke as it churned for the crippled VTOL. Once the vehicle’s crew had deployed there, the men in the blockhouse would be caught in a crossfire from both the Scimitar and the service bay.
But now the smoke from the blockhouse was spreading in that direction, too—towards the Scimitar and the jetcopter—its eddies uncoiling in an almost sentient manner, like the arms of some immaterial octopus.
Almost sentient?
On the ledge in the hollow cliff under the overhang, Lardis Lidesci started and said, “Eh, what’s this? Smoke without fire? Ah, but I’ve seen just such ‘smoke’ before, and far too often.” The old man’s Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively, but after swallowing to moisten his throat he went on, “Ah no, my bully boys and likely lass, you can’t fool me. That isn’t smoke, not a bit of it. It’s your mist, your vampire mist—and just look at it go! Aye, and in a moment you’ll go, too, hidden in the heart of it.”
The mist had reached the jet-copter; it swirled, thickened, put out other tendrils that reached for the wrecked VTOL. And:
“Now!” said Lardis. “Now!”
He was right. Barely visible shapes, fleeting figures, went loping through the mist, making away from the blockhouse towards the jet-copter. And again there came bright bursts of fire from the men now sheltering behind Perchorsk’s half-open doors. They tried, but it was like shootin
g at shadows and had just as much effect.
The second snowplough had reached the Scimitar. Its passengers leaped free; scattering, some took up positions behind the fuselage, while others went inside. And in just a moment one of the latter used a walkie-talkie to speak to Galich:
“Three of our men are dead. The other one is missing. Probably that mess on the canopy. But God, Karl, you should see the shit in here! Our boys, and the flight crew—they’ve been cut to fucking pieces!”
Galich cursed and answered, “Those bastards who wrecked the blockhouse, they did this. Now they’re headed your way. Get out of that plane and take command of the men. Hold your fire until you see those mothers coming, and then fire into that smoke, or mist, or whatever it is. Whoever they are, I want these fuckers dead!”
And Korolev, too, was back on his walkie-talkie, talking to the crew of his jet-copter. “The stuff from the blockhouse is a smokescreen,” he was shouting. “It’s giving cover to a force of men who are heading your way. They have to be special forces of some sort, enemy forces. So anything you see moving between you and that blockhouse, take it out! Use those cannons and blow it straight to hell. You should have them on your thermal imaging, in which case you can open up on them right now.”
In the red light from the blazing brazier, Karl Galich spat his disgust onto the floor of the service bay, stared his loathing right into Korolev’s face, and said, “You’d murder your own men just to uphold a lie and save your own miserable life? Well, I reckon you’re right and they are special forces. They’re your special forces!”
“And you are a crazy fucking crab-louse!” Korolev told him, then turned his back on him in order to follow the action as it developed beyond the doors.
It was the final insult, and a fatal error. For unlike Mikhail Suvorov, Korolev knew nothing of Galich’s past: his record of blind rages and serial killings, against men who had done no more than scorn or laugh at him. And twice now Korolev had cast doubts on Galich’s sanity. Effeminate and feline the ex-convict might be, but cats have claws, and big cats have big claws. And almost all cats are wont to strike without warning.
Casually handing his machine-pistol to one of his men, Galich unhooked a small steel handaxe from his belt, weighed it in his hand, and without further pause sank it to its haft through Korolev’s leather coat and deep into his back.
Amazingly, Korolev didn’t die immediately but simply stood there shuddering, trying to reach behind himself with a spastic hand that couldn’t quite grasp the axe’s handle. Finally, falling to his knees in a flailing, agonized pirouette, he gazed up into Galich’s eyes and blinked twice, his jaw hanging open.
And Galich took back his machine-pistol, stuck its stubby barrel in Korolev’s yawning mouth and pulled the trigger. Blood and brains sprayed the door in the instant before Korolev slammed into it and sat there, his head falling forward, with blood flowing over his shoulders, turning his brown leather coat red.
Only a few paces away, Igor Gurevich and Maxim Aliyev dropped their sidearms, backed away and huddled together, as Galich and his men turned their attention on them. “I know nothing—I mean, absolutely nothing—about any of this!” the rodentlike Gurevich squealed. “Whatever is going on here, I had nothing to do with it!”
“Nor I,” Maxim Aliyev could scarcely croak his denial. “It must have been Korolev. We never could trust him. We only ever wanted to do whatever was best for everyone concerned.”
“Is that so?” Galich came forward, grabbed Gurevich by the scruff of the neck and spun him toward the open doors. And the pockmarked giant Sol Kreisky did the same to Aliyev.
“Wait! Wait!” Gurevich cried. But:
“Here’s your chance,” said Galich. “A wonderful opportunity to prove your good intentions. Get out there and fight for us!” And he kicked Gurevich out through the doors. Sol Kreisky followed suit, and with another kick sent the pair’s sidearms skittering out onto the ramp after them.
Meanwhile, the men at the wrecked Scimitar hadn’t been able to fire a shot. The sinister-looking jet-copter, standing halfway between them and the blockhouse, obstructed their vision no less than the tendrils of mist that seemed intent on blanketing and blinding them.
And as for the jet-copter’s crew:
In Chopper One, the pilot had penetrated the now dense mist with his thermal imaging, but too late to do anything. Fleeting figures had vanished from the viewscreen before he could adjust the range and coordinate his fire. Whoever these special forces were, they were already too close to the jet-copter to be visible on the plane’s scanning devices.
Now, receiving no answer from Korolev to his frantic questions, the pilot cursed and brought his engine into whining life prior to takeoff. But again he was too late.
Someone—or some monstrous thing—had clambered up onto the chopper’s nose in front of the black windows but behind the armaments. And now that something was pressing its face or what passed for a face to the one-way window as it tried to look inside. But Jesus Christ, the pilot felt as though it was looking inside, as if it could see him!
“Oh, shit! Shit!” said the copilot, having also seen that terrible face. And once more: “Shit—oh, shit!” as he saw the muzzle of a machine-pistol turning toward the allegedly bulletproof windows at point-blank range.
The first burst of fire sounded like a dozen hammers striking so close together they were almost one; the glass vibrated, buckled, and as if by magic a starbust of fine cracks—like a pattern in thin ice struck by a stone—appeared on the window. Then a brief pause, before the second burst shattered the glass inwards in a spray of myriad tiny cubes.
In the silence that followed when the firing ceased and the chopper’s rotors whup…whup…whupped to a halt, the pilot could barely believe he was still in one piece. Almost deafened by the sound of ricochetting bullets—ricochets that had shut off the copilot’s gibbering and reduced the flight controls to so much smoking electrical ruin—all he could hear was his own pounding heart.
But then, when finally he summoned up the nerve to take his trembling hands from his face, hands that were warm and sticky with his copilot’s blood, the first thing he saw was Szwart’s hideous “grin”—his entire face, melting and re-forming—as the Lord of Darkness came flowing in through the shattered window to take him by the throat…
By then, having left Vavara outside where she continued to make mist and watched over the unconscious Liz, Malinari was up into the near-claustrophobic fuselage. Tearing the cockpit door from its hinges, he came upon Szwart about to bite the pilot’s neck.
“No!” he said. “Here, take this one while his heart’s still pumping. But we need that one.” He grabbed the copilot’s loose body and dragged it through into the passenger area.
Very reluctantly, Szwart released the pilot and flowed past Malinari, who in turn climbed into the cockpit.
The pilot was trembling like a jelly, massaging his bruised throat, trying hard to shrink down out of sight. “Oh mother! Oh my God!” he managed to gasp. “Who…who are you? I mean, what the fuck are you!?”
“I’m the man who will kill you,” Malinari answered, “if you don’t do exactly as I say. You see that wrecked airplane?”
“Yes, yes, I see it. What of it?”
“Turn your weapons on it,” said Malinari. “Do it now.”
“But…there are men from the snowplough there!”
“I know there are men there, you fool!” said Malinari. “And I know they want to kill me. But…very well—” His patience used up, he grabbed the pilot’s head between his sucking hands. And as knowledge flowed from the pilot to the vampire Malinari, he absorbed what he needed and discarded the rest.
The targetting device was shot but the cannons remained in working order. Malinari used the manual controls to swivel the blast-shielded muzzles toward the VTOL. Notch by notch, making rapid, dull-sounding adjustments—ker-chunk, ker-chunk, ker-chunk—he lined the cannons up on their target something less than fifty feet away. No
t quite point-blank but close enough.
Then he called back into the cabin to his grotesque colleague, “Lord Szwart, make finished in there. When I’m done with the Scimitar, we’ll make a run for that second snowplough. Its heavy blade will be our shield when we drive in through what’s left of those great doors.”
Szwart’s bloody snout rose up and he grunted, “Those doors look solid enough to me.”
“But not for long,” said Malinari. “This jet-copter points in the right direction, and she has more than mere cannons!”
And then he fired on the Scimitar.
A private aircraft with no armour, made even weaker by its fall, the VTOL’s shell offered no protection to the men taking cover behind it. Explosive cannon fire blew the wreckage apart, punching holes through its fuselage as if it were papier-mâché. And as the survivors ran, so Vavara was there to cut them down. For she could see through her own mist as if it were broad daylight.
And with technical skills stolen from the pilot—who now slumped drooling in his seat—Malinari armed and fired one of the chopper’s air-to-air missiles.
In the service bay, a squad of desperate men was trying to close the doors when the missile hit. Half of them were killed outright as one of the doors was blown off its rollers in three massive chunks and hurled back into the bay. Sprung bolts ricochetted like bullets, and shards of sharp metal went buzz-sawing in every direction.
It was more than enough for the remaining defenders. Coughing and choking in the smoke and cordite stench, they retreated to the rear of the cavern where they took cover guarding Perchorsk’s access routes…
On the opposite side of the ravine, the Necroscope was now more than ever concerned for Liz’s safety. “If I could only see her, catch a glimpse of her through that bloody mist,” he said, “I’d go to her. If she would only wake up and call me, I know I’d be able to find her in a moment.”