Invaders

by Brian Lumley

  Or perhaps not. For as the blood is the life, so there was plenty of hot blood in these two men. And without warning, suddenly Julie caught herself licking her lips in anticipation. At which she knew that it was too late for her, and that it always had been. But strangely—and as swiftly as that—she no longer cared, for she was now awake! As for what had awakened her:

  Perhaps it had been the sight and salty smell of Alan Manchester’s blood, or that of the soldier whom he’d shot with his speargun, or both. Which- or what-ever, it had acted on Julie as a catalyst, and now the “good fight” was over. She was what she was and would do what she must do. She moved like a wraith toward the two men, got behind them where they crept carefully forward, making for the villa’s lights.

  She got closer and closer to them, her hands raised, with nails like poisonous claws—indeed they were poisonous claws—poised and ready to strike … .

  . But in that same moment Julie found herself betrayed, and by three things:

  One—the full moon, emerging from behind fleeting clouds to sweep a silver swath over the sea and the land. Two—by the sharp stutter of automatic gunfire, sounding from a short distance to the west. And three—by a watchful, dragonfly spy-in-the-sky, hovering on high as it sent an urgent message to Julie’s would-be victims:

  “Central team. Why are there three of you? Do you have a tail?” Fading in and out, the pilot’s words were hard to read.

  Lardis didn’t understand the message, but Jake, startled by the gunfire and the near-distant cries that accompanied it, turned and saw …

  … A girl? A distraught, naked girl?

  For seeing him beginning his turn, Julie had drawn back, shrunk down into herself, begun to sob and scream. “I was in the house,” she sobbed, trying to cover herself as if ashamed of her nakedness. “They kept me prisoner there. But when they heard your helicopter they stopped watching me, and I … and … I … oh!”

  She feigned a swoon, and Jake—forgetting all that he’d seen, all that he’d been told—put up his weapon and stepped forward.

  She clung to him for a moment, this beautiful girl, who was naked and frightened and so pale in the flooding light of the moon … so pale and so cold. This girl whose grip on his combat suit was like iron, and whose nose was suddenly wrinkling suspiciously as she smelled garlic, and whose eyes were a reflective yellow, sulphurous in the night!

  Julie held the front of his jacket bunched in one hand, drew back the other hand until Jake saw its nails, sharpened and bevelled to gouges that would cut bloody channels in his face as easily as a routing machine! And her awful smile: the way her lips curled back from gleaming teeth.

  Jake tried to bring his machine-pistol to bear, to centre its muzzle on Julie’s body. But she was faster; she knocked it away, out of his grasp. And now her “smile” was a fixed, nightmarish grimace—but of horror or pleasure in her own terrible strength, Jake couldn’t say. Nor could he do anything about it.

  But Lardis could.

  An “old man,” Lardis Lidesci had been ignored and almost forgotten by the girl. A mistake, for he was an old man with a difference. He was the Old Lidesci, and not nearly as naive as Jake. Not in the ways of vampires.

  Jake saw that slender, incredibly strong hand lift up before his face, tried to draw back from it and couldn’t. He saw the fingers crook, could almost feel their rake, and knew that he was going to feel it. But then, in a moment, the look on her face changed. And she sighed.

  She sighed, then smiled again, but a real smile now. And a dribble of blood spilled from the corner of her mouth. Her hands straightened out—reached out to touch his face—but just a touch, almost a caress. Then her grip relaxed, her eyes rolled up, and she toppled away from him.

  Lardis Lidesci stood ten feet away, but his machete stood much closer than that; it stood up from the girl’s back, where it had split her spinal column.

  “Get your gun,” Lardis growled, and Jake began to breathe again after what had seemed like an hour of holding his breath. “Get your gun and put it in her mouth … and finish it.”

  Jake was numb; his hands were numb as he took up his machine-pistol. “But—” he started to say.

  “But nothing!” Lardis snarled. “Do it, and be sure to turn your face away.”

  Just before Jake did it, Julie stopped her fitful, agonized writhing, saw the weapon’s muzzle approaching her face, said something that Jake couldn’t hear, just a breath of air. But he was sure that her lips formed the words, “Thank you … .”

  By then there was plenty of shouting and shooting, the hissing of flamethrowers, great gouts of fire and columns of smoke, all of it toward the centre of the promontory, at the villa itself. And full moon or none, it would have made no difference; bright orange and yellow flames were leaping, and all the shadows cast back in Jethro Manchester’s gardens and rockeries.

  Lardis and Jake were the last to get there, but two of the SAS men would never get there. Close to the house, itself burning, they came across W.O. II Joe Davis and one of his men. The NCO had a flamethrower and was watching the house. Davis was on one knee, looking at a pair of crumpled figures. His hands kept reaching, and drawing back without touching. And his hands were trembling.

  “Get up from there,” said Lardis. “Back away. Let me see.”

  Davis looked up at Lardis through moist eyes; he was holding on, but only just, to would-be runaway emotions. His Adam’s apple rose and fell, rose and fell, as he fought not to betray himself. “Old man,” he said, his voice on the point of breaking, “I trained this man, this boy. He was one of mine. But I didn’t train him for this.”

  Lardis pulled him away, muttering, “What could anyone have taught him? There is no training for this kind of thing, except on the field of battle. The trouble with that is we only learn when we lose.”

  He looked at the mess on the ground. Part of it, the body of a mature woman in a once-white dress, was a mound of raw red flesh. Riddled with bullets—some of which had exploded—she had been torn apart from within. Her face wasn’t there, and her lower body seemed to have burst outwards. Lying under her where she’d fallen, a young soldier in combat clothing stared blindly up into the sky. His brains had been split by a bright shining cleaver that was still buried in his skull.

  But even as Lardis looked, the woman’s arms twitched where they clasped her victim, and one foot shuddered and vibrated in a shoe with a broken heel. Jerkily, spastically, her chest rose and fell, as bubbles formed in the liquid red mask of her face.

  “Did you touch … any of this?” Lardis looked up at Davis. The other shook his head. Then Lardis stood up, stood back, and turned to the man with the flamethrower. “Burn it,” he said.

  The man looked at his leader, who in turn looked at Lardis almost pleadingly. And Lardis said, “Their blood is mixed. Your man’s corpse is contaminated. Take no chances. Burn it all.”

  As they moved away from the heat and the stench, Davis got hold of his emotions and said, “I’ve got men on both sides, in front and at the back of the house. No one’s getting out of there. As far as I know that woman was only our second kill. My kill. God help me, I did that to her!”

  “No,” Lardis shook his grisly head. “Don’t ask your god for help. She needed help, and you gave it to her. Also, it was the third kill. We’ve done one, too. A girl, back there in the garden. So you’re not the only one who’s feeling sick.”

  And Jake said, “Who was the other?”

  “When I killed … that one,” Davis answered, with a glance over his shoulder, “there was a scream from the house. A man in a gable window; he ranted and raved at us, tore his hair like a madman. Can’t say I blame him. I think the woman must have been his wife. One of my lads fired a grenade in there with him, and it blew the gable to hell. Whoever he was, I’m guessing he went with it. But if he didn’t he’ll burn anyway. Look.”

  They looked back, and by then the front of the villa was an inferno. “It’ll be the same at the back, said the warran
t officer.”They have orders to raze it.”

  “But that still leaves three to go,” said Jake.

  “Two,” a voice called out, as a man came stumbling from the shadows. He was very pale, and he was carrying his own weapons, someone else’s, and a flamethrower. “I got a young guy—I blew the fucker’s head offl-but not before he got Bill Powers. My old mate’s dead! … But there was a girl, too. She got away.”

  “No,” Jake shook his head. “She didn’t.”

  “Two to go,” said Lardis. “But where are they?”

  Right on cue, their radio headsets came alive in a crackle of static like frying bacon. And: “Shit, shit, shit!” a frantic voice called. “Can’t anyone fucking hear me?”

  And Davis said, “Hawkeye, this is Road Runner. Where’ve you been?”

  “Where’ve I been?” the pilot at once came back, his relief plainly audible, despite that his voice kept fading in and out. “I’ve been sitting up here listening to you! The radio’s on the blink. I’m receiving but having difficulty sending. Now listen, I’ve also had problems with the thermal-imaging … the heat from that bonfire down there. I sorted that, but now there are life-signs at the boat, two of them. If they’re not your people, they have to be the ones you’re looking for.”

  “Show us the way to the yacht,” Davis snapped, now fully in command again. “But if it gets away from us and makes a run for the sea, take it out. Bomb the bastard right out of the water!”

  “Roger that,” and the signal faded to nothing—

  —But in another moment searchlight beams lanced down from on high, pierced the night and converged, swung west, and traced a path along the channel to the sea … .

  In Xanadu, fifteen minutes earlier:

  Malinari had been tempted from the moment Chopper One descended into the garden. The way it hovered, mere feet above the ground, with its pontoons occasionally touching down, while its task force contingent rapidly disembarked, regrouped into pairs and fanned out toward the casino; all it would have taken was a little pressure—literally the flip of a switch—and Malinari’s worst enemies in this world would have been gone forever. Or most of them. Only the group from the vehicle would be left alive, to be dealt with at his convenience.

  The way his fingers had caressed the array of switches—almost lovingly, certainly lustfully—it had been a moment of great temptation, yes. But no, it would have been too easy, and this Trask and his men would have learned nothing of terror, or the merest moment of terror, perhaps, before oblivion. And that just wasn’t good enough.

  Malinari wanted them to understand something of his superiority, wanted them to know they were trapped, even as they had thought to trap him. Then, if there were survivors of his holocaust, and when the flying machine returned to pick them up … time enough then for the grand coup de grace, the final stroke of genius.

  And meanwhile, things had progressed more or less as planned, and Malinari employed his mentalism (but as little as possible) to stay in touch with events as they unfurled.

  For his telepathy wasn’t without its own problems. Indeed, it was a twoedged sword. For one thing, it brought pain: listening to the thoughts of others was painful. And for another—and most importantly—Lord Malinari himself, his location in the face of the mountain, might be detected and jeopardized if he were to give full rein to his mentalism. For he had learned something (not enough by any means, but something) of the esoteric talents of Trask and this E-Branch from the Föener woman before he’d killed her in the sump of that watercourse. And he had found out a lot more since then, mainly by trial and error.

  But it had been a great error to open his mind and accept Bruce Trennier’s agonized communication—his final communication—when these people tracked him down to the Gibson Desert. For even as Malinari had felt the heat of his lieutenant’s funeral pyre, so he’d known a different kind of heat: that of discovery, when a probe reached out from halfway around the world to seek him out, zeroing in on him like a Starside bat searching for a juicy moth, or a Sunside hawk stooping to its prey.

  A mind had touched his, and left its fingerprint, its signature there, so that he would know it again. And in this last few days he had come to know it only too well. Now it was here in Xanadu, but if he studied it too closely, and if it were to lock on to his location—

  —That flying machine, that jet-copter, was equipped with armaments that could cut through the false facade of this hollow chimney like a battle gantlet through the ribs of a disobedient thrall! But it all added to the excitement, the thrill of the game, what little it afforded him: their weird talents, and their puny human minds, against The Mind himself … .

  So, this seeker, bloodhound, locator, or whatever he was, was one problem—and his talent was one that Nephran Malinari understood readily enough, for he had used just such skills in Sunside four hundred years ago to seek out the Szgany in their hiding places—but the locator’s wild talent wasn’t the only one that this E-Branch commanded, and it wasn’t the only problem. Zek Föener’s mind had been full of such things.

  A man who could see the future, for example (though obviously he couldn’t see it too clearly, else he would never have come here to die,) and Trask himself, to whom a lie was like a slap in the face … there would be no deceiving that one! And as for mentalists: no lack of those. Well, that last wasn’t so rare; even the Szgany had something of that in them. It was in their blood, a legacy of their centuries under Wamphyri domination. But these E-Branch people weren’t Szgany. No, they were adepts, much as Malinari was an adept, but lacking the advantage of his several … refinements? And of course without the ultimate advantage of being Wamphyri!

  Take Zek herself, for instance. What? A woman who could reach out her thoughts across the whole world with such crystal clarity as to be able to speak to a man like Trask—not himself a mentalist—and make him to understand? Oh, he was a loved one, and so there had probably been an element of rapport in it, such as is found in twins. But still and all, that was a talent!

  Or it had been …

  Adepts, rivals, enemies, and bloodhound trackers who would never let go. All the more reason why they must go, and tonight. But it would have been so useful to know more about them first. Such people as this precog, and this locator, and Ben Trask himself … and this girl.

  The girl, yes …

  She wasn’t an adept, not yet; she hadn’t attained Zek Föener’s level of achievement. But to another telepathic mind (for instance, Malinari’s mind) she was like a small flame guttering in the psychic aether, and he had sensed her there from the moment these people arrived in Brisbane. But at such close proximity—because she was close now, and inexperienced—he might perhaps intrude for brief periods without fear of her detecting his presence. Of course, that would leave him open to the locator. But only introduce some small diversion into the game, and that would take care of that. Men, even talented men, when they are concerned for their own skins, have little time for casting about with their minds. Except that they look for boltholes, of course.

  Very well then, a diversion. For in any case, the game was moving far to slowly.

  From his high vantage point, Malinari looked down on Xanadu and the Pleasure Dome Casino (dark in the night but clearly visible in every detail to him) and chose a switch on his array. Down there, his enemies had deployed into first-phase positions. There were men held in reserve, four of them, evenly spaced out at the rear of the leisure area of gardens and pools that surrounded the casino. These four would believe they’d “secured” or “made safe” their strategic positions behind low walls just forward of the innermost circle of chalets. Equipped with superior, heat-seeking, image-enhancing weapons, they would consider themselves “ideally situated” to engage an enemy in flight from the central area.

  And so they would be—if not for the fact that two of the four locations were mined.

  Malinari’s hand lingered over the chosen switch, while his scarlet night-vision eyes swept over, sca
nned, and committed to memory the second phase of the enemy’s deployment.

  In the last few minutes a large vehicle—an articulated truck marked with the symbols of a well-known beer manufacturer—had climbed the access road, entered through Xanadu’s gates, turned about, and hissed to a halt in the otherwise empty parking lot. A party of four heavily armed men had issued from the rear of the truck and were hurrying forward into the resort in the direction of the Pleasure Dome.

  Inwards—at the inner edge of the gardens toward the casino—five NCOs from the helicopter fanned out to surround the huge rotunda of the central dome itself. The men from the truck were now replacing the four in their rear-guard positions behind the low walls, which allowed them in their turn to move forward and reinforce the assault force around the dome’s perimeter.

  Now, or when they were so ordered, three of these Special Forces men would go in through the Pleasure Dome’s main doors; the rest of them, dispersed around the perimeter, would create individual points of entry. The casino’s curving facade of interlocking concrete panels, glass, and reinforced plastic would scarcely suffice to stop them, Malinari was sure. It was after all a Pleasure Dome, not a fortress!

  So much for the fighting men. And Malinari presumed correctly that their commander would be with Trask’s E-Branch party where they were now gathered in a group behind the smaller vehicle on the main esplanade some seventy or eighty feet in front of the steps to the casino’s canopied entranceway. He knew that this was they because of their mental emanations. Hab! But They might as well be carrying illuminated signs! They were as “visible” to him as they must be to the pilot of their flying machine … as indeed be would be, if he were down in the resort.