Robert W. Walker

by Zombie Eyes

  Nathan turned to Stroud, his wide shoulders heaving with a mixture of uncertainty and frustration. He gave a fleeting glance toward Dr. Cline, but she offered him no help. She had remained in a semi-trance on seeing the deaths of her co-workers. She’d had a chill and Stroud had located a blanket for her shoulders and a cup of steaming coffee.

  “You tried it Gordon’s way!” Stroud said adamantly. “And look what it’s gotten us! Now, for the love of God, man, try it my way.”

  “I’ve got people I’ve got to answer to,” he said feebly. Then he began to pace before them. “What is it you intend to do? What’s Stroud’s way?”

  “I intend to lead an expedition back down into the ship, to face this thing on its own ground.”

  “That’s madness,” he said. “What guarantee do you have you’ll come out alive?”

  “Very little, perhaps none … but this thing, whatever it is … I don’t know why, but I sense that it wants me. And thus far it has come after me on its terms. It’s time I turned the tables, but first I’ve got to gain help from Wisnewski and Leonard, to learn more about this evil. Do you understand that?”

  “And in the meantime?” asked Nathan, banging his fist on his desk. “What about those zombies out there? What do we do to stop them?”

  Stroud had no answer for the commissioner. At a loss for a resolution to the problem, he knew he must gain more knowledge, ferret through the information Wiz and Leonard might provide back at the museum.

  Nathan’s intercom buzzed with an irritating bee sound, and the voice of rancor from people downstairs at the sergeant’s desk spelled trouble. “Commissioner, you’ve got to get out of the building!” shouted someone at the other end.

  “Casey? Casey, what’s going on down there?” shouted Nathan.

  “We’re under attack! The zombies, hundreds of them! Spilling through every doorway, breaking in the win—”

  The line went dead to the sound of gunfire. Nathan looked up at Stroud and their eyes met. “They’ve followed you here! They’re after you, Stroud—you! God damn it all, we could just feed you to them and maybe … maybe this thing would go away!”

  “Maybe … and maybe not, Nathan.”

  They stood staring hard across at one another, Stroud’s steely gaze telling the other man that he wouldn’t go as a willing sacrifice to Nathan or the others. “Or maybe I’m the only hope your city has, Nathan. Think about that. Why has it singled me out for sacrifice? Because it knows something you don’t—”

  “What? What does it know, Stroud?” Nathan’s hand inched toward his chest and shoulder holster.

  “It knows enough to fear me, that I hold the key to its mystery; that I can dispel that mystery in time—if given the time.”

  “They’re at our doorstep!”

  “Then get us out of here!” shouted Kendra, tossing off the shroud around her. “Do as Stroud says! Get him to the museum.”

  Nathan held his ground and slipped out his Smith & Wesson. Outside they could hear the shouting, screams and gunshots as the zombies continued toward them.

  “Get us up to the roof, to the helicopter!” she shouted.

  Nathan hesitated further.

  “With me dead, New York doesn’t stand a chance, not even with the help of the armed forces,” Abe assured Nathan, whose gun hand was shaking, sweat beading about his forehead and wide cheeks.

  “Come on!” he finally said, tearing open the door. The hallway was scattered with bodies, both policemen and zombies. Nathan fired on a wave of zombies coming along the stairs, shouting, “This way! This way!”

  Nathan led them toward the service stairwell, but when they flew through the doorway, it was filled with zombies on the levels above and below. They ascended and descended toward the living as soon as they somehow realized that it was Abraham H. Stroud.

  “Elevators, elevators!” shouted Nathan, backing out, racing around a terrace that overlooked the lobby below where the gunshots had died and the place was swarming with more and more of the mindless army of zombies. James Nathan saw that they were quickly being surrounded on all sides by the zombies, and even he realized it was useless to fire his weapon into the crushing wall of them. Kendra and Stroud pounded in frustration for the elevator to come, but it appeared that it would be too late.

  The zombies closed in on both sides, leaving only the act of leaping down to the horde below in the lobby as an out, and that was no out.

  Then came the ping of one of the elevators and they rushed to enter it, only to find it filled with zombies, backing them away. Another elevator arrived and from it poured more zombies.

  “We’re dead, Stroud,” said Nathan. “We’re better off taking the quick way out.” He lifted his revolver to his eyes and fanned the drum, prepared to take all their lives.

  “Esssssruuu-ad,” said the zombies in unison all around them, and several joined hands and suddenly dissolved into a mire of brown muck from which was formed a devilish form that creaked and quaked as if half formed, the ugly eyes spewing forth frothy brown snakes, the mouth like the hole into Hell. “Esssssruuu-ad,” it said to them. “You see now I can destroy you at any time—any time!”

  “Then get it over with, you bastard mutation!”

  Nathan pulled back the hammer on his .38, his hand shaking. He was poised to use the gun first on Kendra, preferring to see her dead to becoming a victim to the filthy mob of zombies that barred their way, along with the gruesome creature that had been formed from a number of their bodies.

  “Nooooooooo, Esruad,” said the creature, “I want you to come to me, Esruad … and bring your friends.” It ended with a horrible, satanic, croaking laugh.

  Meanwhile the zombies had remained frozen in place, as if made of stone, and these statues could hardly be said to be breathing—all but the several who had been formed to simulate the appearance of the demon. These had coalesced into a horrible and hideous, multitentacled monster with enormous holes for eyes from which squirmed snakes that leaped out and reentered its body below, disappearing into the muck of its outer skin, a kind of brown ooze. The surface was slick with slime and Kendra hid her head in Nathan’s chest, unable to watch the snakes feed from the thing’s eyes. Parts of the zombie men who had gone into forming the creature—their limbs, eyes, ears—could be seen swirling about in the muck that they’d become. It had somehow devoured them whole.

  “What the hell is this thing, Stroud? And why’s it calling you Esruad?” Nathan wanted to know.

  “This is a manifestation of the creature, not the actual creature. It’s taunting us.”

  “Taunting us, or you?”

  “It’s toying with us,” said Stroud firmly. “Damned thing is toying with us. It could simply let the zombies kill us now—”

  “Then why doesn’t it?”

  “Because it wants something from me.”

  “What? What does it want?”

  “I don’t know, dammit! Not yet, anyway.” Stroud sensed that the creature wanted him to return to it, to face it alone, that the creature somehow knew of his special gifts in combating evil, and that, in a sense, the evil thing had thrown down the gauntlet. But how was Nathan or even Kendra to believe or even understand such a concept?

  One of the elevator doors opened and the zombies parted to show them that the car was empty. Stroud instantly understood the maneuver and shouted, “Both of you, get into the elevator car now! Now!”

  The other two didn’t hesitate and Stroud cautiously backed in last. The doors closed on the now fading form of the monster that’d been too hideous to gaze upon for longer than a second.

  “Will this elevator take us to the roof?” asked Stroud.

  “To a floor below. You’ll have to take the stairs from there.” Nathan’s voice then became agitated, his gun still gripped in his hand, as he asked, “Why, Stroud? Why you? Why’d it spare you and me and Dr. Cline just now?”

  “If I could answer that—”

  “And why does it call you Esruad?” asked Ken
dra, her voice shaking with irritation, her breath coming short.

  The elevator door opened on an empty corridor and an observation tower. Stroud saw the sign for the roof and he ushered them along the clear path to safety.

  “Come on, we’re getting out of here,” he told Kendra.

  She stopped, however, and demanded an answer.

  “There’s no time now.”

  “Make time. I want to know what it means: Esruad.”

  “Back at the museum. It’ll all come clear, I promise.”

  Nathan, too, wanted answers. He swung Stroud around as if he meant to strike out at him and Stroud instinctively pushed his hand away, gun or no gun.

  “Answer me, Stroud, why? What makes you immune to this damnable horror? And tell me why I shouldn’t blow a hole through you, suspecting you as I do of somehow collaborating with this bloody supernatural beast.”

  This made Stroud stop and grab Nathan by the lapels, pushing him hard into the wall, Kendra tugging at Stroud to come away. Stroud caught himself up and let go of the other man, who had held firm to his .38 Police Special.

  Stroud rushed on, pushing through a glass door and out into the wind that played over the top of the high rise, sending his hair into a wild gyration. He’d taken Kendra by the hand, bringing her along. He shouted back over his shoulder to Nathan, “Goddammit, Commissioner, I don’t know all the answers! That’s why I need help. I need Wisnewski and Leonard and more time.”

  “Why did it let us live?” pressed Nathan, running to catch up. He had seen a lot of good men die today, and he wondered why he was not among the dead.

  “It wants me to come to it, to freely sacrifice myself, I believe. And when I do, it wants to play.”

  “To play?”

  “Yeah, that’s what it’s doing with us all, Nathan, toying with us … playing with our lives … determining just how much of our civilized veneer it can strip away before we all turn on one another.”

  “It wants you. Has it wanted you all along? And would that end this nightmare?”

  “You don’t really believe you can bargain with the Devil, do you?”

  Nathan thought for a moment. “No, I suppose not … but—”

  “No buts about it. When I do sacrifice myself, I’ll do so armed with a great deal more than I now have, I pray,” said Stroud as he strapped himself into the Gordon helicopter he had commandeered. Some police technicians worked atop the roof and had refueled it. All other police choppers were in service.

  Kendra was helped into the seat beside Stroud by Nathan, who waved them off.

  “Come with us,” shouted Kendra.

  “No, no, I’ll be needed here. But I’ll stay in contact.”

  “Be careful,” Stroud called out to him.

  “You, too, Stroud, and good luck. I’m sorry about the … the…”

  “Good luck is sufficient!” shouted Stroud, who sent the rotor blades into whirring battle with the wind. As the chopper lifted off, the image of the monster with snakes feeding out of its eyes filled Stroud’s vision ahead. He tilted the chopper into the sky streaked with the wretched sight, slicing through it.

  Kendra Cline stared down at Nathan, who was fast disappearing behind them. She felt herself still inwardly trembling at the touch of the gun at her temple, and yet she’d have preferred the quick death of the bullet to what the zombies might have done to her. She, like Nathan, now felt strange toward Stroud, that he was somehow different, because he had been singled out by the evil emanating from the pit, the evil with such power to reach out to take what it wanted from them.

  Stroud felt her eyes on him now. He realized that she hadn’t seen the apparition of the creature in the night sky, that it was meant only for him. He understood why Nathan might feel threatened by him, but now he was getting the same feeling from Kendra, and this he didn’t quite know how to deal with.

  “You have no reason to fear me, Kendra,” he told her.

  She breathed deeply, filling her lungs, holding on to her inner emotional turmoil. Her voice broke when she said, “I … I know that.”

  He put a hand on hers, but she pulled it slowly away. “Keep it uppermost in your mind, no matter what happens, Kendra, that what I do is for us all. I will not bargain with this thing, not for my life, not for yours, not for any individual.”

  “I think I understand,” she said, then turned to stare out into the surrounding darkness.

  Stroud brought the chopper around, searching for the rooftop of the Museum of Antiquities, which he soon found.

  As the helicopter lowered over the mammoth rooftop, Stroud steering by streetlamps and intuition, Kendra played out the events of the past few days in her head, but events and actions and words seemed all as confusing a haze as the night’s quickly descending fog over the city. The ominous fog swirled and eddied, and it felt like her thoughts. Was Stroud so very different from other men that this evil being in the pit sought him out to play games with? What kind of man was Stroud, she wondered as she stared at the maw of the blacktopped roof. It appeared from where she sat that Stroud was taking her straight down into Dante’s Inferno with him, there to abide somewhere between the sixth and seventh rings, she supposed, and she wondered at the dubious honor he had imposed on her, making her his companion in this occult contest. But she was now so tired and weary of thought that she almost welcomed his telling her when and where to move.

  The helicopter’s whir set her mind to droning with its even, calming sounds, so different from the horror of its mad gyrations before. Stroud, too, was like the machine: one moment loud and rancorous and the next quiet, gentle and caring. Yet, he was all a mystery; a man who seemed to have more than one past, a man filled with the life of the race itself, like some Greek dancing perpetually in the sand of the ages, or a mad cossack doing daredevil feats on the back of a charging horse.

  The museum grounds were littered with refuse and white, tumbling things that looked innocent at first glance but took on a sinister appearance when stared at unblinkingly. McDonald’s coffee cups, newspapers lost to the wind, sandwich wrappers had become apparitions that walked a ghostly landscape which by light was mere brush and trees and lawn that surrounded the Museum of Antiquities, where, deep inside, by the light of their gooseneck lamps, Drs. Leonard and Wisnewski were working diligently on answers to questions they did not know how to pose.

  Kendra only half heard the snap of the seat belt that held her, felt only the warmth of Stroud’s powerful arms go round her as he lifted her from the helicopter. She felt cradled, safe, and her mind begged for sleep, which Stroud now fostered in her. Complicated, confusing man, she thought, but quietly she allowed herself a moment’s peace freeing her mind of questions and fears.

  -12-

  Abe Stroud found the two archeologists obsessively working, surrounded by half-eaten sandwiches and unfinished Cokes. Stroud asked them how well it was going and they looked up, a little startled, not having heard them approach, with no knowledge the helicopter was on the roof.

  “I think we’re onto something,” Wiz said, “but it’s taking time, Abe. Patience … patience is rewarded.”

  Stroud worked his big hand across his wide shoulder to the nape of his neck, squeezing, headachy. “Only problem is, Doctors, we have a very impatient audience waiting for us, and worse, an even more impatient demon. Tell me what you’ve got thus far…” Stroud began looking over their shoulders.

  “I’m going to call the hospital,” Kendra called out from Wiz’s office.

  Stroud grimaced. He’d hoped she might sleep. He wondered how she was doing. But he must turn his attention back to Wiz and Leonard.

  Inside Wisnewski’s office, Kendra contacted colleagues at the hospital. “We’re going to require as much biochemical weaponry as we can get from you, Karl,” she was saying when Stroud poked his head in.

  Stroud said, “Wiz has found something very interesting in the literature—amazing really. Can you come?”

  “Be with you in a minute.�
��

  She joined them soon after. Wisnewski called her to sit beside him. He was saying, “Just a primitive drawing, not much more than a cave drawing of a behemoth with gnarled fangs and snakes crawling from its eyes, but it was given a name—Ubbrroxx—and further, this name was found by Leonard as well, on the parchment brought from the ship.”

  “Ubbrroxx,” said Stroud, repeating the strange name several times.

  “Careful,” said Kendra, “careful not to unwittingly invoke it.”

  “Yes, well…” began Wiz, sensing some tension between them. “Abe’s told us what happened at Nathan’s building. In any event, it would appear that if we do not soon go to it, Stroud, it will come to us. Is that not right?”

  “That’s my belief.”

  “What was this … this Ubbrroxx to the Etruscans? A deity?” asked Kendra, agitation dappling her pupils with fear.

  “A dark deity, a god of the underworld, much as our Satan,” said Leonard, wiping clean his glasses. “Here is a photo of a cavern wall drawing discovered in Tuscany a few years ago.”

  “My God,” said Kendra, “it’s … it’s…”

  “What we saw at One Police Plaza, I know,” replied Stroud.

  “It is also what I saw,” said Wiz, “the day I hefted the pick at you, Stroud. It … it somehow became you in my mind—all a jumble. Seeing it like this again, it all came back to me. It leaped out after you, was on your back when you were blacked out. I went to strike it, but it seemed to be inextricably mixed with your own tissues, and when I hesitated … well…”

  “This thing is so vile,” said Leonard, trembling.

  “Stroud’s blackout no doubt saved him from the menacing of the creature,” said Kendra, trying to understand it all, but deciding that she would never be able to do so.

  “Good,” said Stroud, putting a firm arm around Kendra, “good!”

  “What’s good? We’ve got a crude picture of it is all!” said Wiz.