V 16 - Symphony of Terror

by Somtow Sucharitkul (UC) (epub)

  As though he had been hypnotized!

  But was that possible? Andrescu thought to himself as he watched his butler leave the room, his eyes fixed steadfastly ahead of him.

  Hypnosis . . . that was a power the old nosferatu were said to have ... a power to be used upon their

  victims—before they killed them and sucked their lifeblood from them.

  Could Tedescu have been converted by the lizards?

  Impossible! thought Andrescu, as he went to join his guests.

  Chapter 14

  “Well,” Matt said, “here we are. Now what?”

  They were standing in the cave mouth; Tomoko was looking nervously away from the skeleton on the wall. Ahead of them was a passageway that seemed to tunnel deeper into the earth. There was a stairwell; they descended for a long time, their footsteps clanging on the metal, hoping they would not be discovered. Of course, they were still wearing their Visitor uniforms, but Matt had taken the opportunity to refurbish his clothes from the corpses of the aliens outside; he'd found one whose pants fit him better.

  Ahead: the gloom deepened as the stairwell ended in a long corridor.

  A tunnel: dim light glinting from blue-tinged metal wails.

  “Papinium,” CB whispered.

  Matt ran his finger along the wall. It was cool to the touch. It didn’t feel like metal at all, but a little slick, like the skin of one of the Visitors.

  “Now I understand,” CB said. “If there’s a secret

  labyrinth of tunnels coated with this new metal, then the lizards can travel from place to place whether or not it’s full of the red dust, right? And that means that they can burrow right under the noses of the free states, pop up . . . take over. Like Bugs Bunny, only with monsters instead of cartoon characters. Grody!”

  “Well, if they can use it, so can we,” Matt said. “This is it—our secret way to Washington.”

  “It’ll still take too long if we have to walk it,” said Tomoko.

  “Well, maybe we should get going—whoa! Hold it right there.” Matt saw them now, stacked up in a niche along the walls . . . metal discs, each big enough for a man to stand on, looking remarkably like Viking shields. “Do you know what I think those are?”

  “I think you’re right!” CB said. “Look over there, down the tunnel—”

  “Duck!” Tomoko whispered. They threw themselves flat against the wall as something whooshed by—

  Aliens, not even bothering to wear their human faces, astride the discs and skimming through the tunnels! They were some kind of hoverdiscs . . . they had to work on the same antigravity principle that the Mother Ships worked on!

  The aliens halted abruptly. How could they have avoided seeing the three resistance fighters? Matt decided he’d better try to bluff it out.

  The lizard hissed viciously at him, his tongue flicking to and fro.

  “How dare you speak to me in our native tongue!” Matt said, speaking as harshly as he dared. “You know it is the wish of the supreme commander that we use Earth languages all the time, even among ourselves.”

  The lizard was a bit taken aback, but responded in English, after a cursory examination of their uniforms. “Sorry, chief. I didn’t get a good look at the insignia on your trousers. I didn’t realize you were a lieutenant commander. Of course I obey, sir! Besides, I need the practice.”

  “You certainly do!” Tomoko rasped at him, getting into the spirit of the charade.

  Matt thought: Thank God! I know no one really understands the complexities of the alien hierarchy ... but I am so grateful I decided to change pants with the alien outside, the one killed by the mysterious dart.

  “I trust you will recognize me in the future, and stop this appalling impudence?” he said to the aliens. There were two or three of them behind this one, all gazing curiously at them.

  The alien said, “I’m sorry, but—in those horrifying monster masks that central command forces us to wear, you can’t tell anyone apart. I mean, sir, I could have sworn that the three of you were disguised as males, not as a man, a woman and a child. But these humans all look alike.”

  “Yes, they do, don’t they?” Tomoko said sardonically.

  Matt said, “Perhaps you can direct us to . . . er . . .” he floundered and for a moment panicked about giving himself away.

  “Sir, you gave those orders yourself!” the lizard said, his wattles coloring with embarrassment. “Are you testing me? But the main group will amass next week for Mission Shopping Mall, and the main Washington nexus is—let me see —fourteen branches down and right and seventeen more. Right?”

  Matt grunted noncommittally.

  The lizards climbed back on their discs and zoomed away.

  “Our turn,” said Matt.

  “How do they work?” Tomoko said.

  “Beats me. Trial and error?” He strode over to the stack of hoverdiscs and took one out, hefting it—it was almost weightless due to the effect of the antigravity device—and put it down on the packed-earth floor of the tunnel. Then he climbed onto it.

  “Let’s see now,” he said. “Er . . . SHAZAM! MXYZPTLK! ABRACADABRA! XYZZY! I give up.”

  “Let me try,” Tomoko said, replacing him atop the little disc.

  It didn’t budge.

  Both of them turned to CB.

  “You didn’t ask me,” he said, laughing.

  He jumped up onto one, did a sort of gyrating movement with his feet, and it rose into the air! Then he bent his knees, his whole body curving into the direction of flight, and ... he was off!

  “Wait!” Matt shouted at the tiny figure way down the tunnel, almost indistinguishable in the dimness.

  CB came back, still laughing, and did a swift

  cartwheel off the still-hovering device.

  “How’d you do that?” Matt said, bewildered.

  “I watched,” CB said. “Besides, it’s easy. It’s kinda like breakdancing.”

  “And whoever said breakdancing was easy,” Tomoko said.

  “It’s never too late to learn, you old farts!” CB taunted, and he leaped back onto his disc and was soon doing fancy maneuvers, making it spin and dance and even do a kind of wheel-less wheelie in the air.

  “Well, time for you and me,” Matt said.

  He and Tomoko climbed on, copied CB’s graceful movements, and took off!

  In a few minutes they were drifting smoothly through the tunnels, with Tomoko carefully counting the turns as they sped on. They must have been doing a hundred miles an hour. The tunnels went on and on, only occasionally splitting off. How long had it taken them to build these things? And how had it been done?

  Matt soon found out.

  “Stop!” he heard Tomoko whisper against the windroar of their flying.

  They slowed.

  Then he saw people working on a shaft of the papinium labyrinth . . . human beings. He knew they were human beings because they had been chained hand and foot. A uniformed lizard was actually standing over them with a blaster and a bullwhip. Another was lashing a woman who had collapsed from exhaustion and was struggling to free herself from the chains. There had to be little oxygen down that shaft, but the saurians showed no quarter.

  “She’s sick! She’s gonna die! You gotta release her!” CB shouted at the lizards.

  “Don’t say anything!” Tomoko said.

  It was too late. They had been spotted.

  He heard one lizard bark to another, “There they are—they must be the ones who killed the lieutenant commander and disguised themselves—they actually fooled our friends into thinking they were us! Let’s get them!”

  “Quick! Let’s escape on the discs!” shouted Tomoko, and they were off! “If word is out, they’ll be looking for us!”

  They turned a corner as they fled—

  Dead end!

  And they were face to face with someone Matt knew he had seen before.

  A bloated lizard in a human skin, so fat that the disguise was stretched into a hideous distortion of human
ity, standing at the head of a group of armed, ululating reptiles!

  He recognized her . . . out in the desert, she had been in the patrol truck. He had seen her face, flushed with fury, as it pulled alongside the skyfighter and they escaped—

  “We meet at last, Matthew Jones, the notorious ninjitsu expert!” said the lizard, slime dribbling from her lips. “We shall soon see how your martial arts stack up against laser pistols!”

  Matt turned.

  Five or six more of them stood behind, their lasers aimed. Tomoko cried out. CB was white with terror.

  “Shall I do the introductions?” the reptile said. “1 am Medea.”

  Chapter 15

  They were manacled, led down secret passageways, down stairwells, and finally into a subterranean monorail where they were chained in a foul-smelling train car along with about twenty others—ragged, filthy people covered with sores, with their hair matted and their faces streaked with mud and blood. A lizard overseer stood watch over them while more prisoners were shoved into the car. Tomoko could hardly breathe, although the car had two ventilation slits that admitted some of the dank, dusty air from the tunnel outside.

  An old man coughed up blood.

  The others shrugged.

  They all had that familiar glazed look in their

  eyes.

  “They’ve been converted,” Tomoko said.

  “Are you sure?” Matt whispered.

  “Like, of course they are,” CB said. “Can’t you tell, don’t you remember?” Matt nodded. Sure he remembered, Tomoko thought, and she herself thought of the time they had infiltrated into Osaka Castle and they had seen the hordes of converts,

  soulless and mindless, whom the lizards had created—an army without souls, the heartless Mu-rasaki had called it. Tomoko hoped they wouldn’t get her. I’ll die first, she told herself.

  The monorail hummed. They were moving rapidly now, although the motion was almost imperceptible thanks to the aliens’ high-tech engineering. “It probably works on that antigravity principle,” CB mused. “That’s the only way they could get such a smooth ride out of it.”

  “How can you think of engineering when we’re about to be killed—or worse, converted into slaves to work for their evil ends?” said Tomoko.

  “I’m thinking of a way to sabotage this sucker,” CB said disconsolately.

  She was amazed at his spirit. She herself knew they were doomed, they had to be; no one was going to jump out of the bushes and save them, as the alien swordmaster once had, time and time again—

  But she had seen something out there, outside the cave mouth, climbing the rocky face of the mountain.

  The other passengers said nothing; they didn’t complain, they didn’t even groan from their very evident aches and wounds. They were like zombies. Zombies!

  They pulled in to what looked like an underground junction of some kind. Chain gangs of human slaves were being herded in different directions by bored-looking aliens, who occasionally roused themselves into striking one of their victims. Now and then one of them dropped, his chains were sawed loose by a blast from a laser pistol, and he was left behind. Tomoko saw, coming up the tunnel, a grisly metal cart that moved up and down the aisle, with mechanical arms that cleared away the bodies and piled them up onto itself. It appeared to be grinding them . . . turning them into—

  “Holy shit,” said CB. “They’re making People Nuggets out there. Oh, Jesus. Now I’m scared. I can’t take it.”

  They were led into a large hall in which two or three dozen aliens lounged about on sofas. A metal cage rested on the floor; Tomoko, Matt, and CB were forced to enter it. Then the cage was raised up on a pulley and attached to the ceiling. The hall was carved out of solid rock, and completely coated with papinium, lending it a blue-purple sheen. It was very beautiful, Tomoko thought ... if one did not know its purpose.

  Medea was reclining on a divan talking to a number of other lizard high-ups. On a monitor screen that hung against one wall, they could see a face fifteen feet high . . . the face of Diana herself, leader of the alien forces—the most hated female on Earth!

  And that face was beaming, it was replete with pleasure; its eyes were glittering with bloodlust.

  The other lizard commanders were regarding Medea with bemusement, the cage with hunger and lust, and Diana with awe.

  Diana said, “Eat them! Now! Before they have a chance to interfere with our plans again!”

  Medea smiled. “Look at all that food,” she said, “hanging in the basket over us. How enticing it is.” The others snarled their delight.

  Tomoko shuddered.

  CB said, “Now I know what a hamburger feels like.”

  Matt said, “If we’re going to die anyway, I’m going to say what I want to those goddamn lizards!” He stood up in the cage—Tomoko winced as she saw him pinching the bars with his toes—and shouted down to them, “Hey, you there! You can kill us and grind us up and feed on us, but there’re only three of us, and we’ve already wasted dozens of you guys! You come here with your skyfighters and your laser pistols and you have machines that can take away our souls, but ... all you can do is kill us. Others will take our place. This is our world, damn it. Go home! Go back to your stinking, joyless, desert world where even water is scarce!”

  Medea stiffened at these insults; she got up and motioned for the cage to be lowered so that they were almost eye to eye. Then she stood and peered at them.

  Matt spat at her in the face.

  She licked it off, her tongue swabbing the dermo-plast mask, flicking back and forth like a snake’s, “Delicious,” she said. “Thank you for that little preview of dinner.”

  Then she shot her tongue out at CB.

  Matt was too quick for her. Tomoko watched with admiration as he reached out and grabbed the tongue with a swift twist of the wrist, and began to pull. He started climbing up the walls of the cage, pulling the slimy thing along with it. “Watch out,”

  she screamed, “the venom!”

  Sure enough, Medea was preparing to spew forth venom. She could see the poison glands palpitating as the fangs within released the hideous green fluid.

  The juices were running down the tongue now, droplets of it streaming down the floor and seething as they stuck the papinium-lined surface—

  “Let go, Matt! Or she’ll kill you!” Tomoko shouted. She didn’t dare reach out and grab the tongue herself, but if Matt didn’t let go—

  The lizards were gathering around now, taunting, laughing, when—

  Suddenly a thin pencil of light streaked across the chamber and sliced off part of Medea’s tongue!

  She heard shrieking, heard Medea’s howl of pain. Wildly, she looked around. Matt thrust the still ftbrillating tongue away from him, and she watched in terror-stricken fascination as the thing, still not quite dead, wrapped itself around the iron bars of their cage, seething, wriggling—

  Then the throwing stars started to fly.

  Reptiles fled! Medea, still clutching the outstretched portion of her tongue, which still dripped venom on the floor, was yelping as she staggered out of the chamber. Who had saved them? Suddenly Tomoko saw—

  He was standing in the doorway of the hall, completely swathed in a ninja costume that seemed to have been steeped in papinium, for it shone with the same bluish luster as had the walls of the subterranean labyrinth.

  No wonder they had not seen him before. He had

  blended in perfectly with the papinium of the walls. The blue ninja drew out a sword.

  He leaped. Tomoko would never forget that leap, that tremendous arc of energy with which the blue ninja struck down the cord that held up their cage and sent it crashing to the ground. He ran, sword still outstretched, towards them, swinging the sword left and right in rhythmic strokes, as uniformed aliens tried to rush him on either side wielding an assortment of whips and blasters— Aliens were crumpling to the ground on either side, and above it all was the face of Diana, gazing upon this spectacle with an expression
of ever-increasing consternation.

  Tomoko could hear her voice rasping out above the whistling of the sword and the screams of the struck reptiles. “What’s the matter now? Will someone tell me what is going on? Someone must report to me immediately—or I’ll have them court-martialed and executed!”

  The blue ninja had reached the door of the cage. White sparks flew as he brought the sword slashing again and again on the bolt, rusty from the humidity of the lizard’s lair.

  The three of them ran out. There were still aliens everywhere, though many of them were wounded or dying. One of them rushed Matt, who with a flying leap twisted his neck. CB cartwheeled over another of the aliens and, his hands pointed like daggers, sliced into the chest of one of them, whose blood spurted, green and frothing, over them all. A bagpipe squalling issued from its lips.

  Again and again the ninja thrust ... the swordblade danced in the air ... a sliver of silver of light that lanced the darkness.

  “Come,” he shouted. “Follow me.”

  Tomoko ran, blindly following the blue ninja’s lead. CB and Matt came after, kicking and flailing all the way. “This way!” the ninja rasped, shooing them into a tunnel that seemed to narrow into a mere crawlspace.

  “I’m the only one who can get through this thing,” CB said. They could see a small circle of dim light at the other end.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to,” said the ninja. “There is a control panel at the other end, a master switch that disables the monorail system. This crawlspace pops out at the top of the main computer complex that they use to monitor all that goes on in the papinium labyrinth ... do you see it?”

  CB was already at the other end of the shaft. His voice, muffled and distant, came through. “Yeah. There it is.”

  The ninja said, “Tap the third button . . . the one with the hieroglyph that looks sort of like a squiggly snake.”

  Tomoko heard a rushing noise, thunderous, disturbing. After a few seconds she realized it wasn’t a noise at all—it was silence. For the humming of the underground monorail had never stopped until that moment, and she had become so used to it as to lose awareness of it; its cessation came as a shock.