Farmer, Philip José - Traitor to the Living

by Unknown Author

  Chang, however, commented that there wasn't much chance of that in the city itself. All the action would be out at Megistus.

  "About a half-hour before you got here, the street walks were full of Westemites going to Profacci Hall. They'll be spilling out there as soon as Western's men whip the poor boobs into a vigilante mood. I hope we get to Megistus before that happens."

  "Why don't the police do something?" Patricia said.

  "Half of them have resigned and joined the mobs," Hiekka said. "And the other half are afraid to stand in anyone's way. They don't want to get trampled."

  20.

  They got out of the electric cars at the Number Twelve Exit and walked out into the desert night. Two steam cars waited for them, one bearing the county insignia and the other the U.S. eagle. Lopez and his two assistants got into the former; the others slid into Chang's car. They drove away from the bright lights and the vast conical light-perforated roof of Bonanza Circus and soon were going up a winding mountain road. Their lights struck the firs and pines lining the road and, occasionally, the red eyes of a rabbit, an opposum, a fox, or a deer.

  Hiekka commented that the area between the city and Megistus was an animal-refuge. "Every three years the deer hunting season opens here. I got a large buck myself last year. I love venison. Four years ago I didn't get a thing. I was busy hunting men. You remember it, don't you? You must've seen it on TV? There were two or three beast-lovers up here shooting hunters? Killed three hunters and wounded two? We never did catch them, and I was hoping they'd show up last year. But they never did."

  She laughed and added, "There weren't many hunters around last year. They were afraid the deer'd be shooting back."

  She patted the butt of the .45 revolver, a collector's item, in her holster. "Most men would be just as happy shooting cows in a corral. They're not real hunters."

  Carfax got the impression that she had liked hunting men.

  The twelve kilometers were mainly on a road that had been cut from the face of the mountain. At its end they came down a long pass between steep rocky slopes. They could see below them the broad plateau on which Megistus had been built. Its lights blazed from many towers and buildings and from the tops of the high brick walls that surrounded it. It covered about a square kilometer and contained four buildings about ten stories high and several smaller ones. Guard-towers were spaced along the top of the walls at forty-meter intervals.

  Outside the gates were about eighty automobiles and trucks, a number of which mounted searchlights. A dark mass surged back and forth before the gates, a human yeast.

  High over the complex, the lights of two planes flashed.

  All the makings of a massacre, Carfax thought. But if Western resisted, and blood was shed, he would be arrested and charged with murder. He must know that.

  If, however, the mob got out of hand and attacked, he would defend himself. He would have to in order to keep from being lynched.

  Ten minutes later, they drove out onto the plain.

  Here several cars blocked their passage, and men with rifles questioned them. Hiekka and Chang showed their badges and explained their mission. A big hairy scarfaced man named Rexter, evidently in charge, got into the car with them and told them to drive on up to the gate. He stank of booze and excitement. About fifty meters from the gate, Rexter ordered Chang to pull over to the side of the road. Everybody got out. Carfax looked around and saw only one police car. Two men in the uniforms of the county police stood by the hood and smoked cigarettes.

  There wasn't a man in the mob who didn't carry a rifle and a handgun of some sort. Their faces looked pale or flushed and were either set grimly or distorted with anger. Their voices struck him and surged over him. But they were kept in some order by men who wore black armbands. These stood along the road, yelling at anyone who got onto it.

  About seventy meters up the road from Chang's car was a truck with a camper, a steel girder over its bumper.

  Aside from the county police car, it seemed to be the only one with a running motor. One man sat in its cab, and another man, with an armband, stood just outside, talking to the driver.

  Chang, a tall man with short straight black hair and bright hazel eyes, looked over the crowd. Then he picked up a bullhorn and marched up to the gate.

  Hiekka and Lopez walked behind him, and Carfax, after a few seconds' hesitation, went after them.

  Patricia remained in the back seat. Gordon had asked her to stay there unless she was needed. "And get down on the floor at the first shot," he had said. "That is, if there is any."

  Patricia had nodded as if she were too scared to talk.

  Chang stopped near the foot of the two heavy steel gates, muttered, "This is a hell of a situation," and then put the bullhorn to his Ups. At the first blare of the horn , the crowd fell silent.

  Chang identified himself and then stated that he had a warrant which gave him entrance to Megistus and authority to search the place. He was looking for Rufton Carfax, whom the United States government believed was being held there against his will.

  The guards in the watch towers remained at then- posts, pointing their rifles, shotguns, and machine guns at the crowd. The gates did not open.

  Chang repeated his demands and handed the bullhorn to Lopez. Lopez bellowed out his identification and his mission. The county of White Pine demanded that its chief electrical inspector be admitted at once so that he could inspect the power system and the wiring. Lopez must determine that the system feeding from MEDIUM was set up according to legal specifications. Chang and Lopez were the one-two punches that Langer had spoken of.

  A guard dressed in the Lincoln green of Western's security police leaned out the right-hand tower.

  Through a bullhorn he identified himself as Captain Westcott.

  "Your warrants are illegal!" he bellowed. "No one, I repeat, no one, will be admitted! And I order you to disperse your unlawful assembly! You are on private property!"

  "I represent the authority of the U.S. government," Chang bellowed back. "Open at once, or entrance will be made forcibly!"

  "Any force will be met with force!" Westcott said. Chang wiped his forehead, which was covered with sweat despite the chill air. "Son of a bitch! I'll just have to order in more marshals. I didn't think he'd defy me." Rexter, who had been standing behind them, said,

  "Out of the way, you! All of you! Pronto!"

  Chang turned quickly and said, "This is going to be done legally. You and your mob have no right to be here."

  "So?" Rexter said. "Get out of the way unless you want to be run over!"

  He turned and ran toward the crowd, shouting. They started yelling and running. The marshals, Lopez, and Carfax stood bewildered until Carfax turned and saw the truck speeding toward them. He shouted and ran also. When he got to Chang's car, he stuck his head in its window, and said, "Come on, Pat! They're going to blow up the gates!"

  The door swung open and Pat, her face white in the lights, scrambled out. Carfax took her hand and ran along the road. The truck sped by them, its left-hand door opened, and the driver fell out. Carfax quit looking at it after that and raced desperately up the road.

  Then he heard the banging of rifles and the chattering of machine guns, a crash, and a thundering blast.

  He threw himself down, pulling Pat with him. The noise filled his right ear, the air tore at his clothes, and he smelled dynamite. He sat up then and looked at the gates or, rather, where they had been. The explosion had disintegrated the truck and ripped the gates from their hinges. They lay about twenty meters inside the walls. The towers on each side of the gates were half-demolished. The great overhead lights for about sixty meters on each side were dark. The figures in the towers beyond them were silent, but he could see that they were still erect. Evidently, they were paralyzed by the blast. But they would start firing in a moment.

  A massive shout went up from the crowd. It poured forward like two giant amoebae, fusing just before the gateway. Rifles banged here and t
here as shots were fired, either up into the air or at the guards in the towers.

  A few seconds later, the fire was returned from the guards. And the killing had started.

  One of the watchtowers went up in flames as a rocket hit it. Carfax saw four bazooka teams, exposed now by the withdrawal of the crowd. Three other rockets streaked flaming from them, and they struck below the three towers. These disappeared in roars and clouds, and when the smoke had cleared away, they had vanished or become part-rubble. The bazooka men ran forward, the tubes on the shoulders of four, the firers behind them, and behind them about twenty men carrying missiles.

  "It's torn now!" Carfax said. He looked upward. The lights of the planes were dropping swiftly, but they weren't going to strafe the few people still outside the walls. Not yet, anyway.

  He stood up and pulled Patricia up.

  "That Langer set this up," he said. "He didn't expect Western to let us in."

  Patricia did not answer.

  "Listen," he said, "you get in a car and drive back to Bonanza Circus. No, wait a minute! You might run into the Westernites! Come with me! I'll put you in the charge of those county cops. They can take you back!"

  He pulled her along toward the silver-and-black car. From the area inside the walls came a roaring and a screaming, the banging of rifles and the rapid-firing of machine guns. Then, three booms as bazooka rockets exploded. Three more towers were enveloped in smoke, out of which pieces of wood and bricks soared into the light of the few lamps that were still illuminated.

  The two county policemen were crouching by the side of the car. One was speaking rapidly into the car phone.

  "Can you take her back to town?" Gordon yelled.

  The man, a slim youth with a face as white as sugar, shook his head. "No way. We got orders to stay here. Besides, the pro-Westerns are on the way, and we don't want to get caught between them and the ambushers." "What ambushers?" Carfax yelled.

  "Hell, the hills just back of the pass are alive with men," the youth said. "Didn't you see them?"

  Carfax shook his head, and the policeman said, "They must've all hidden themselves before you got there. Man, this is terrible! Those guys are going to walk into a trap!" "Then don't you think you should warn them?"

  "We radioed in already, but they won't let our men near. And they're all on the road now."

  Four more large explosions, one after the other, caused them to duck down on the ground. Carfax looked over the hood a moment later and saw pillars of smoke. He also saw a small two-engined jet, lances of flame spurting from along its wings, diving at the area just within the walls. Then it curved up and was gone, and another had taken its place.

  Either the pilot of the second jet had made a mistake, or some of the ground fire had hit it. It struck the top floor of the middle ten-story building, and the crown of the building went up in a ball of fire. Patricia screamed and would not quit until Carfax shook her.

  She collapsed sobbing on his chest. He made her sit in the back of the patrol car, said, "You stay here," and went back to the youth. The man on the phone quit talking then and looked at Carfax.

  "Did you tell them we have to have the militia here now?" Carfax said.

  The man nodded and said, "They're on the way. The governor called them out about ten minutes ago. But it'll be an hour before any of them get here. If they can get through the mess up in the hills."

  Carfax presumed that he meant by that the expected battle between the Westernites and the ambushers.

  Carfax stuck his head in the window. "I'm going in after your father, Pat."

  "You'll be killed!"

  "Maybe. But I have to go," he said. "If Western doesn't kill him, those maniacs will. They're likely to slaughter everybody."

  "But you won't even know what he looks like."

  "I know," he said. "I don't have much chance for success. You might as well face that. Pat."

  Chang and Lopez walked toward them, and Carfax went to meet them.

  "Where's Hiekka?"

  "She went on in," Lopez said, grinning sourly. "She said she had a duty to find your uncle, and she wasn't going to let any men scare her off. She's mucho hombre, that one. She said we didn't have any balls. I told her we did, but we didn't want them shot off."

  "She's crazy," Carfax said. "She just wants to knock off a few males. Well, I'm crazy, too. I'm going."

  "Wait a while, and we'll go with you," Chang asid. "There isn't any percentage doing it now. You're as likely to be shot by the pros as the antis."

  He jumped as two more explosions beat the air around them.

  "Talk me into it," Carfax said.

  "They're setting the whole place on fire!" Lopez said.

  He was right. There seemed to be fires in the upper stories of all the buildings. He could see men clinging to the edges of the tops of the walls and dropping. The guards were deserting their posts in the towers.

  He ran toward the gateway, drawing his automatic, furnished him by Langer. At the gate, he stopped and looked cautiously inside. There were about twenty-five bodies scattered over the grounds. A few of them were in Lincoln green. These seemed to be guards who had fallen inward from the blasted towers. Two men were dragging themselves toward the gateway.

  From the buildings themselves came the uproar of many firearms and voices. Carfax slipped around the wall and ran toward the nearest building. As he did so, he heard the scream of a jet's engines, and he dropped to the pavement. The plane zoomed upward without firing. Apparently, the pilot had no way of knowing whether Carfax was one of his own men or not. At least, the pilot wasn't trigger-happy.

  He got up and ran to the doorway, outside of which two men were crumpled. Inside, along the hallway, were about six dead and wounded. None of the latter were in a condition to cause him trouble even if they had been so inclined.

  Carfax methodically went along the hall, opening doors and looking inside. Some held dead men; most were empty. At the end, a door led to a chemical laboratory. A man in a white smock was on the floor, unconscious from a blow on the head. Two other lab workers lay dead among shattered glass and plastic tubes. The odor of acids and unidentifiable chemicals set him to choking and his eyes to tearing. He stumbled out, coughing, and leaned against the wall to recover his breath. Then he went down a hallway which intersected the first corridor halfway along its length. The rooms along it had the same grisly contents.

  After inspecting the rooms along the hallway at the south side of the building, he climbed a flight of steps. Here a man at the end of the hallway yelled at him.

  Carfax dropped his gun and held up his hands while the man advanced. When the man got closer, he said,

  "O.K. I saw you with Rexter."

  Carfax picked up the gun and said, "Was it necessary to kill all those men? Most of them were unarmed." "Couldn't be helped," the man said. "Those guys"--he meant the mob from Bonanza Circus--"aren't professionals. They are just out to kill anybody who works for Western. But I think Rexter's got them in hand now. At least, he did in this building."

  "Come along with me," Carfax said. "I have to search the whole building, and I don't want my head blasted off just because nobody knows I'm one of the good guys."

  The man, a heavy-set dark-skinned Mediterranean, looked at him sharply. He said, "O.K."

  Near the end of his search of the second story. Carfax found a man holding another at the point of a gun. Carfax spoke to the prisoner, a tall thin man of about forty bleeding from a gash on one side of his face.

  "Are you Rufton Carfax?"

  The man shook his head. Carfax said, "Do you know Rufton Carfax?"

  "Never heard of him," the man said.

  "In what building is Western?"

  The man hesitated, and the man with Carfax growled, "Tell him, mister, or it'll be the worst for you."

  "He was in Building Four," the tall man said. "He has an apartment there, two stories above MEDIUM."

  "Building Four," the man with Carfax said. "That's the one
the plane hit."

  Carfax strode away, shouting over his shoulder.

  "Come on!"

  They ran downstairs and out into the open as the first of the mob poured out of Building Four. The fire had reached down to the fifth story now, and as Carfax ran toward it the heat struck him. It felt as if it were hot enough to fry eggs, but that was an exaggeration, of course. The men staggering out of it could not have gone more than a few steps if it had been that strong.

  The clothes of the last man out were beginning to smoke, though.

  Carfax found Rexter, who was leading a group car rying Hiekka and a man so covered with blood that his features were unrecognizable. Rexter shouted at Carfax to come with him, and they all walked swiftly to the gateway and some meters beyond it. Here the men carrying Hiekka eased her to the ground. She was dead. A bullet had torn off one of her amazonian breasts and another had half-severed her leg at the knee.

  "She got four men before they got her," Rexter shouted.

  "I hope she died happy," Carfax said. He pointed at the bloody man, who had also been put on the ground.

  "Who's that?"

  "It's Western," Rexter said.

  "Why didn't you tell me before?" Carfax snarled. He got down on his knees and wiped the blood off Western's face with a handkerchief. He felt the neck and detected a slight pulse. He shouted, "Western! Can you hear me?"

  The eyelids fluttered, and the lips opened. Carfax put his good ear down close to the mouth. He could hear only something like ". . . wasn't long..."

  He said, "Western? Where's Rufton Carfax?"

  Blood bubbled from the mouth, spraying his ear.

  Carfax said, "Western! It's me, Gordon Carfax!

  Where's my uncle?"

  "... not Western..."

  Carfax said, "Hang on, Western. Hang on long enough to do some good, for Christ's sake! Where is my uncle, Rufton Carfax?"

  Western coughed, and more blood ran from his mouth. He sighed, and for a moment Carfax thought he was dead.

  Then, weakly but distinctly, "I'm not Western. I'm Rufton Carfax."

  Carfax had to restrain himself from grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him.