Last Gasp

by Trevor Hoyle

  His throat tightened, but instead of a scream a throaty animal sound came out as he saw the hurrying cluster of figures pass through the main gate and enter the brilliantly lit stage set of the inner compound.

  Rolsom, because of his height and color, he spotted at once. After a brief heart-stopping moment of doubt he picked out the slight frame and sharp features of Madden, made to seem even less substantial in a short-sleeved tan shirt and white loafers.

  Fonkle, poor bastard, was making a valiant attempt at explaining what he himself plainly didn’t understand. There was some insistent questioning and unsatisfactory replies, after which Madden turned and stormed toward the main building, issuing orders that Skrote couldn’t hear. The others followed and passed out of sight.

  Dry-mouthed, Skrote stabbed a button and picked up the group as it entered the building. What would Madden decide to do? Head for the control room or go to Section M? Go to Section M, Skrote screamed in his mind. Section M!

  Madden was pointing. Three of the guards broke away and came toward the stairs leading up to the control room, while Madden himself, Rolsom, Fonkle, and the two remaining guards turned in the other direction.

  Skrote wiped his greasy palms, unbuckled his holster, and placed the automatic on the panel in front of him, making sure the safety was off. A diagrammatic layout under a sheet of plastic told him the locations and relevant numbers of the cameras throughout the complex, and he sat back and observed Madden’s progress toward the center of the web. He saw the group pass through the complicated system of steel doors into Section M and take the corridor leading to the ward where the Meeks lay gasping their last. He felt happier now that his prey was inside Section M, and happier still when he had closed the electronic circuits, sealing the doors of Section M behind them.

  Boots clattered in the corridor outside the control room. Without taking his eyes off the screens, Skrote picked up the automatic and curled his finger around the trigger.

  Madden, Rolsom, and the others were approaching the final barrier that led to the Meeks’ ward—a steel-barred gate. On the diagram it was numbered forty-three. Skrote punched up the picture on the screen and at the same time closed the electronic circuit. One of the guards inserted a key, turned it, and nothing happened. Madden shouldered him aside and tried it himself. When the gate refused to open he turned in a slow circle, the first pucker of doubt beginning to show on his face. Skrote could read his mind, and he smiled. Madden and Rolsom had gloated over him during the bleakest moment of his life and now it was his turn to watch and gloat....

  Fists pounded on the door and a voice shouted Hyman! and repeated it several times, baffled and angry.

  Still smiling, Skrote was looking with glassy intent at Madden’s face on the screen, which was pointed and peaky in the caged lights of the corridor, and the smile didn’t waver when a rifle butt splintered the door panel behind him. Another shuddering crash almost knocked the door off its hinges. An arm appeared through the splintered gap and for the first time in his life Skrote aimed a gun at a human being and blew the arm off at the elbow.

  There was a choking scream and the bloody stump vanished.

  On the screen Madden was debating what to do. He had a number of choices. Farther progress to the Meeks’ ward wasn’t possible, so he could either return along the main corridor to the entrance or take one of the side corridors to an emergency exit. The problem (and Skrote could see the indecision, born of reluctance, working in his face) was that the side corridors were lined with confinement cells. The confinement cells housed all kinds of creatures. Moreover the security system of Section M was foolproof, designed to keep the inmates safely locked away. Both Madden and Rolsom had had a hand in making it totally secure and it must have occurred to them that it was just as effective in containing them as the inmates.

  An automatic weapon stuttered like a tractor starting up, and what was left of the control room door was pulverized in a cloud of flying splinters.

  Skrote spun around in the swivel chair, gun at arm’s length, and pumped three shots into the first man through. At such close range his ineptitude didn’t matter. Two hits and a miss: one passing messily through the man’s throat and out the other side, the other smashing his rib cage and making a dog’s dinner of his innards.

  The anatomical destruction was so violent and spectacular that Skrote was surprised, until he remembered that the shells were of the percussion exploding type that spread on impact, reducing everything to jellied pulp.

  Three guards had been dispatched to the control room, and with one dead and the other disabled, the third would have to be nothing short of an imbecile to try it on his own. He wouldn’t dare toss a grenade, even of the stun variety, because it would wreck the control room and transform all this fancy and expensive electronic gadgetry into a heap of junk.

  For the moment, Skrote reckoned, he was safe. He prayed there would be enough time. Just a few more minutes, that's all I ask. You can’t refuse a dying man his last request.

  Madden and the others were moving back along the main corridor, hurrying now, almost running. Skrote switched cameras in time to see them arrive at the steel door that gave access outside. That too, they discovered, was electronically sealed. So the way forward and the way back were barred. Which left only the emergency exits—and to reach those they had to pass the confinement cells.

  The trap was closing.

  It was only now that Madden raised stony eyes to the surveillance camera. Then with an abrupt gesture he led the way to the gate of Block 6. Fonkle tried it with his key and of course the gate slid open.

  Skrote switched viewpoints and picked them up as they entered the smaller corridor lined with cell doors. He wondered why Block 6, and then he knew why. The control room was on the floor above and there was a stairway past the emergency exit leading up to it.

  Madden was moving to the offensive.

  There was a sound behind him and Skrote swiveled, the automatic ready in his hand. The guard he had cut to pieces was lying like butchered meat, legs splayed, in a lake of blood. Had the last guard summoned reinforcements and were they grouping for an assault in the corridor? Skrote had been too busy with the other screens to notice. Perhaps he didn’t have minutes, only seconds—

  Snapping his attention back to the panel he closed the circuit on the Block 6 gate. Madden’s range of options had narrowed down to one— he had no choice now but to pass along the Block 6 corridor to reach the emergency exit, which like every other door in Section M was electronically controlled.

  The bank of screens were little capsules of deformity. The guards would kill some of them, many of them perhaps, but they couldn’t kill them all. Because he was going to release every single inmate in the entire complex. Soon there would be several hundred of them roaming freely through Section M. It occurred to Skrote that Madden and Rolsom ought to be grateful to him for providing this opportunity to see their handiwork at such close quarters.

  Footsteps and muffled whispering in the corridor outside: They were preparing for the next, and final, assault.

  Skrote ran the heel of his hand along the row of switches, and the next row, and the next, and the next until he had released the locking mechanism on every cell door in Section M. Madden and the others heard the mechanism operating. Skrote couldn’t hear, but their expressions and frantic mouthings made that fact clear. The guards drew their weapons. They backed along the corridor, shoulder to shoulder, as the cell doors began to open.

  First to reach the steel door at the end of the corridor, Madden banged on it impotently, his eyes slitted and black in an ashen face. Fonkle tried the key. The door was immovable. Madden yelled something and the guards clustered around, but instead of shooting the inmates as Skrote had expected, they started firing at the steel door, wasting ammunition, while behind them things were crawling from the cells and blocking the corridor.

  Skrote now released the circuits on the internal barred gates, allowing the inmates from the other
blocks to move freely within the complex. His work was done. The trap had been set and sprung. All that was left to do was watch and enjoy....

  Viewing it on the large screen was an eerie experience, like watching a horror movie with the sound turned off. Having at last realized the futility of shooting at two-inch-thick plate steel, the guards were killing inmates. They killed quite a lot of them. The pale green walls were spattered with red and the floor was a swamp. After less than a minute the ammunition ran out, having been mainly expended on the door.

  The sound of firing and the general commotion had attracted the inmates in other parts of the complex, who now came lurching, stumbling, slithering, and dragging their deformed bodies through the open gate in Block 6. The corridor filled up. The packed deformity moved forward. Many of them had enough glimmerings of comprehension left to recognize the director, and the guards were familiar symbols of oppression.

  They tore the five men apart. Hair was torn out at the roots and eye sockets gouged clean. Those inmates who were either limbless or lacked functioning arms and hands used their teeth. Engulfed, the five men disappeared from view, which disappointed Skrote, though he caught glimpses of bits and pieces of them, bloodily ragged and barely recognizable, which had been wrenched off and flung aside. Other parts, such as their genitalia, were ripped off by force, chewed and spat out. Noises filtered up to Skrote’s ears from below, screams and grunts and howls: a muted sound track from the underworld.

  He didn’t bother turning his head when the guards came through the door. In any case he was preoccupied with releasing the electronic locks on the emergency exits. The inmates had the double perimeter fence to scale before losing themselves in the luxuriant flora of Starbuck, but maybe a few would make it and contaminate the island with their virus-rich bodies. Undetected, they might even breed and produce a race of monsters.

  Skrote would never know how successful this latest experiment would turn out to be, for he died almost instantly as the combined impact of seven bullets lifted him bodily from the chair, a smile and a soundless name on his lips.

  Natas—!

  Baz Brannigan’s eyes were wide and blue and mad. His corn-colored hair was in disarray, as if he’d just that minute woken from a sweating nightmare. The hands gripping the rifle were as tight as claws.

  “Sure! Take who you want and get the hell out—only Dan stays here. He stays here for good, whether you like it or not, Mr. Chase.” The polite use of his name sounded like a slur.

  “Doesn’t your father have a say in this?”

  “I don’t take orders from nobody.” Baz jerked his head to include the group around him, all in their late teens and early twenties, all carrying weapons. “We run the settlement. We say who goes and who stays. There’s a war on, or maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

  Chase frowned. “War?”

  “You’re dumb, plain dumb. Survival of the fittest, dummy, and we’re the fittest. The outsiders are scum, vermin. They bring disease from the south and we don’t intend to let ’em through. We gotta keep ourselves pure.”

  The trouble was, he seemed perfectly serious. Chase looked across the square to the stores and the wooden schoolhouse. Baz had taken the council hall as his headquarters, a self-styled guerrilla leader with delusions of grandeur. He saw the Goose Lake settlement as the last outpost holding out against a tidal wave of corrupt humanity. The irony was that the worm was gnawing away from within. Their “pure” community was rotten to the core.

  Chase tried to tell him as much. “What’s happening in the south is going to happen here. You can’t keep it out with guns, Baz. This disease you talk about is in the atmosphere, it isn’t caused by the people who are suffering from it. Cheryl caught the disease and she’s been here for five years.”

  One of the other young men who’d been with Baz on the road eased himself off the porch rail. “Then the sooner you and her fuck off, the better. And take the woman you came with and get out. Now.” He levered the bolt back and swung the rifle around so that it was pointing at Chase’s head.

  “Not without my son. You’ve no right to hold him.”

  Baz sniggered. His eyes were huge and round, the pupils dilated. “Are you going to take him, Mr. Chase? One guy against thirty?” He made the same sound and glanced around. “I said he was dumb.”

  “He did something that was very wrong,” Chase said, facing them. “I’m not excusing that. But you’re not the law around here and you don’t dispense justice. You were partly to blame, in fact, for giving him the drugs.”

  “Dan wanted a piece of ass and so he took it,” Baz said indifferently. “That stuck-up bitch got what was coming to her. What’s all this crap about justice? You must have been living in a cave or in some goddamn ivory tower.”

  “Then why are you holding him?” He couldn’t make sense of this. Perhaps the only sense resided in the convoluted workings of Baz Brannigan’s drugged brain and it was futile to expect a logical explanation.

  “Tell him he can go screw himself,” said a slurred voice from the group. “We don’t have to take this hassle.”

  “Damn right, we don’t.” Baz raised his rifle and Chase saw that several small notches had been cut in the polished stock. A tally of animal—or human?—kills. “Get your gear together and get out. I want you off the settlement by sundown, and take the sick woman with you.”

  Chase stood his ground. “I demand right now to see my son. I have a right—”

  A spasm of insane fury broke across Baz Brannigan’s face, which under its ruddy tan had a gray pallor. “I’ve told you what to do and I’m not going to repeat it. I’m all through with words. From here on we talk in bullets.”

  “It’s impossible, you can’t reason with them,” Nick said later in the cabin. “In the end it all comes down to brute force. What are you going to do?”

  “What about you?” Chase said, looking out at the majestic sweep of mountains to the north. Was Boris still out there somewhere? “Are you coming with us?”

  Nick leaned against the stone mantel, hands in pockets, and stared down at his shoes. “This place isn’t going to last much longer, not with Baz and his cronies running things.” He glanced up. “We’ll come with you if it’s possible, but there’s the problem of getting out—there isn’t room for all of us in one jeep.”

  “There must be other transport.”

  “There is, a couple of pickups and an old truck. They’re parked around the back of the council hall where Baz can keep an eye on them. We’ll have to try for one of the pickups, though how we do that without getting our heads blown off I don’t know.” Nick added reflectively, “And I’ve grown attached to mine.”

  “We need something to divert their attention,” Ruth said. “A fire; anything to keep them occupied.”

  Chase nodded, but he was thinking of their other problem. Stealing the pickup would be easy compared with getting Dan out. He looked at his watch. “Whatever we decide it’ll have to be quick,” he said. “Baz wants us off the settlement by sundown, which gives us four hours. We’ll have to start making preparations right now. How soon could you be ready to leave?” he asked Nick.

  Nick surveyed the room and sighed. “Well, there’s not a lot we can take with us. About two hours, I’d say, to get our personal stuff and supplies for the trip together. Jen?” His wife nodded her agreement. “Have you got a gun?”

  “Two rifles. Jo’s a crack shot. Better than me.”

  “Four weapons,” Chase said. He kneaded the bruise on his ribs. “If they’re unprepared for us that might be enough.”

  “How are you going to do it?” Ruth asked, her eyes liquid and dark beneath the swathe of white bandage. “We can’t start a gunfight with Cheryl in the middle of it, and she’s in no shape to be moved quickly.”

  “Cheryl won’t be there and neither will you.” Chase stared into space, thinking it through. “The three of us will leave in the jeep before sundown, exactly as Baz wants us to do. That should relax him and set his
mind at rest—if that’s conceivable. We’ll find a quiet spot somewhere off the road where you and Cheryl can wait in the jeep while I double-back on foot. Then Nick and I will get Dan out, take the pickup, and rendezvous with Jen and Jo down by the lake.” He looked at the others.

  After a moment’s silence Nick said, “The first part sounds simple— the three of you leaving in the jeep. It’s the rest of it that worries me. Baz has Dan under guard night and day, and there’s probably someone watching the pickup too. If shooting starts we’re outnumbered twenty to one.”

  Chase gave a wan smile. “Baz already made that point and I haven’t forgotten it. As Ruth says, we need some kind of a diversion to draw them away from the council hall. Do you know which room they’re holding Dan in?”

  “He was in the library stock room,” Jen said, “if they haven’t moved him.”

  “Let’s hope they haven’t. Has it got windows?”

  Jen nodded. “I used to help out in the library. It’s a corner room with two windows.”

  “How many doors?”

  “Just one. I’ll draw you a plan.” She clenched both fists.

  “What is it?”

  “Next door to the stock room there’s a small kitchen with a trapdoor into the loft. If you could get into the loft from outside you could get in without being seen. Maybe they’re not even guarding the stock room, just the main door.”

  “Can we get into the loft from outside?” Chase asked Nick.

  “I don’t know. There’s an outhouse, a kind of lean-to shed at one end, so we can get onto the roof quite easily.”

  “Okay, that’s a possibility we’ll have to keep in mind.” Chase paced up and down the small room.

  Jo appeared at the door and said apprehensively, “Ruth, Cheryl’s having trouble breathing and there’s that stuff on her lips. Can you come?”

  Chase turned anxiously, but Ruth held her hand up, moving quickly to the door. “It’s all right, I’ll see to her. You’ve got enough to be thinking about.” She followed Jo out.