Brian Lumley - Psychomech 03, page 28
'My God!' His hand flew to his collar bone, paused, touched the spot gingerly. 'And here - ?' he felt the area over his left breast.
'And your side,' she reminded him. 'There are bullet-holes and blood all over your clothes.'
He tore off his jacket, dragged his polo-neck and vest up over his head and off all in one movement. While he examined himself, Lynn took the polo-neck and separated it from his vest. 'May I?' she said, pulling it on.
'Yes, of course,' he murmured, holding up his jacket and peering through the holes. And: 'This hole looks . . . burned?'
She nodded. 'Hot lead.'
He snorted, 'Hell, a bullet's not that hot! And anyway, it moves too fast to - ' But he paused when he saw her shaking her head.
'Not just hot,' she corrected him, 'molten!'
He looked blank.
'How much do you remember, Richard?' She arranged cushions on chairs, wrapped her legs and feet in a blanket and plumped down in the chair closest to the stove.
He too sat down, warming himself, pulling his jacket over his naked shoulders. He was frowning again, concentrating. But then he shook his head. 'Nothing. Only that I was shot. Two men in a car. They grabbed you, shot me. And then nothing. No, wait!' His eyes opened wider. 'I remember running back to the Schweitzerhof. I knew I was dying -'
She took his hands, which were shaking, but his grip was strong; he grimaced as he said again, 'Jesus, Lynn -1 was really dying!'
'I thought you were dead!' she said. 'What else do you remember?'
'I got the pronged thing - the knuckleduster - on my hand, and I rammed the prongs through the TV cable.'
'You did what?' her frown matched his own.
'That's the third way,' he explained, 'don't you remember? I curse, I get violent, or I give myself an electric shock.'
'But surely that's only when you're about to suffer an attack?' Lynn was completely baffled.
He nodded. 'I thought so too. Anyway, I did it. And that's all I remember.' He looked at her, managed a wry smile, touched his shoulder and chest again and shook his head in complete bafflement. 'Now you'd better tell me what you know about all of this, before I have a stroke trying to work it out for myself!'
She told him all she knew:
About the two men, twin brothers who worked at PSISAC (she did not know their names, except that one of them had called the other Darren); something of her ordeal in their car; her 'escape' as she saw it, and how she must have made her way through the night all the way to the cabin; of finding Suzy here, then Richard himself, and of everything else that had happened. She left very little out and took most of an hour to tell it.
'It was the other you,' she finished. 'It was what your father passed down to you.'
Through it all he had not once interrupted her. Now that she was done he shook his head, slumped down into himself. 'You're sure that you haven't been dreaming too?'
'You've seen the burns in your clothes where the lead came out of you,' she said. She got up, went across to his blanket and prised free a blob of lead. 'Look at this. This was a bullet! And that crockery and cutlery there on the shelf: all Schwejtzerhof stuff. Check it if you wish.'
He merely glanced at the shelf, took the small leaden blob from her fingers and weighed it in the palm of his hand. 'No,' he said, 'I don't really doubt a single thing you've told me, Lynn. Of course I don't. Actually, I'm half-glad I don't remember any of it.' Then his expression turned angry. 'But as if we haven't enough on our hands, now we have to worry about those two thugs!'
'No,' she said, 'I don't think so. You seemed pretty sure they wouldn't bother us any more. I mean, when you were like . . . that.'
'But your father may have sent more of them.'
Now Lynn got angry. 'We're still not sure he did send them!' she snapped. 'I just can't believe that he -'
'Who else if not your old man?' Richard cut in, no less harshly. 'Anyway, they told you he sent them.'
'But not to kill you, surely?' she was on the verge of tears.
He drew his chair close and hugged her. 'You mean everything to him, Lynn,' he said. 'I've always known that. And in his eyes I'm just a gibberer, a bloody lunatic. Hell, in a few more days it won't matter one way or the other! Mind-plaguers will be killing themselves off left, right and centre . . .'
'But he doesn't know that,' she protested. 'I mean, I can understand him wanting to know I'm safe and all, but -'
'Wait!' Richard held her back from him, gazed at her in something like astonishment, as if she had suddenly slapped him in the face or spat at him. 'What did you say just then?'
She stared back at him.'I said I can understand him wanting me back, and -'
'No, before that.'
'Before that?' she frowned. 'I said he doesn't know the world's going mad: that people will soon be killing themselves, each other, everybody. That there'll be mind-plaguers running amok all over the place.'
Richard's expression stayed the same and she was puzzled, worried by it. 'Well, he doesn't, does he?'
'He shouldn't,' Richard finally said, his voice much quieter. 'But what if he does? That would explain his wanting you back right away - even his not caring a twopenny toss what happens to me!'
'But how could he know?'
He shook his head. 'I've no idea. Maybe we'll find out eventually.'
They came to a silent, mutual decision to leave it at that. 'So what's next?' she asked.
'Next?' he stood up, yawning, stretched. 'Next, I'm hungry! And if I don't pay a call I'll burst - and you and Suzy, too, by your looks. So first we'll settle those little problems. Then . . . well, it's too late today to buy fresh clothes, so that's for the morning - following which we'll be on our way south. As for tonight: we're probably safest right where we are. I don't think there's anyone else in the world who knows about this place.'
'South?' she repeated him, 'Tomorrow? What's south?'
'Switzerland,' he answered, 'that's what's south. Schloss Zonigen - ' and he paused. Even saying those words, that name, he had not known where they or the idea behind them came from. Yes, he had - from his dream, his nightmare. From someone else's past.
'Schloss Zonigen?' she said, shaking her head. 'I never heard of it.'
'No,' he slowly answered, 'me neither, until just a moment ago. But now I know where it is, and what it is. I was there in my dream. It's one of those cryogenic suspension places, where rich, dead people are quick-frozen in the hope that a cure will be discovered for whichever UMess killed them. That's where we're going. We have to.'
She touched his face, waited for the faraway expression to go out of it. 'But why?'
'Because . . . because it's the next stop along the way,' he said, coming back down to earth. 'I have this feeling that if I can just see that place, maybe all of this will come together.'
She looked at him suspiciously. 'You know more than you're telling me,' she accused.
He grinned and drew her close, said: 'No, I don't. Really I don't, Lynn. It's just a feeling, that's all.' But over her shoulder the grin slipped from his face in a moment.
How could he possibly tell her why he had to go to Schloss Zonigen? If he even tried it, she'd be convinced that there was really no longer any hope for him! Even after everything else she had accepted, still this would be too much. No, he couldn't tell her.
Not that Schloss Zonigen was where, ten years before he was born, they had laid his mother to rest in a tube of freezing gas deep in the glacial ice ... the first time she died!
Without her clothes, Lynn was unable to accompany Richard when he went off in the Mercedes to find food and drink for them. In any event, he had something of a problem himself, mainly because of the state of his own clothing. His trousers were not so bad, a little creased now but surprisingly clean, but his jacket was bloody. Fortunately the jacket was of a brown colour and the bloodstains did not show too much, but the bullet-holes did. Lynn solved most of the problem by suggesting that he wear his polo-neck backwards, and by pinning a pine sprig just under his left jacket lapel, in the German fashion, to hide his bullet-hole there. As for the tear between neck and shoulder: an eight inch wide strip torn from the edge of a blanket, worn as a loose scarf, covered that. The hole at the side of the jacket was scarcely noticeable. With his stubble of beard he still looked something of a rogue, but he would get by.
Then, leaving Suzy behind for Lynn's protection, and keeping his lights dipped as much as possible as he manoeuvred the uneven surface, he drove the car slowly down the trail towards the main road. In two or three difficult places he had to use his full headlights, for it was that time of evening before darkness has fully fallen, when the light is strange and plays tricks with the eyes. But at last he got down to the belt of pines fronting Garrison's Retreat, and through them, out on to the slip road.
There, deeming it foolish to go back into St Andreas-berg, he turned left and headed for Wernigeroder maybe fifteen kilometres away across what had once been the East German border. The road was good and all downhill, and he made the town in a little less than ten minutes. Fortunately it had a branch of the World Bank with a night-cash system, where he was able to dial in his personal number, hold his ID tag to the scanner for verification and draw the standard three hundred Deutsch Marks in crisp fifties.
Then back to a Schnell Imbiss where the service bar opened into the main street for a small bucket of potato salad, bratwursts, cold schnitzel, a chicken fresh-roasted on a spit over charcoal, several large bottles of mineral water and two cans of Dortmunder Actien beer. The grubby-looking Wirt was good enough to fill a plastic container from the back of the Mercedes with two gallons of fresh water.
And so back into the mountains proper.
In all, the round trip had taken him a little over fifty minutes, and it had been doubly successful in that he had spotted several ladies' outfitters in Wernigeroder where in the morning he could buy clothes for Lynn. Moreover, he was back at the cabin long before the chicken and bratwursts in their thermal wrappers could begin to get cold . . .
Those were the simple criteria upon which Richard reckoned the value of his brief excursion. In another way it had been far less than profitable, but of this he as yet knew nothing. For as he had descended along the saddle's rim and through the flanking pines - especially where he had been obliged to use full beam - and when he had returned, climbing up and over the saddle's hump again, his to and froing had not gone unobserved.
Earlier in the day Emma Tyler had spoken to a somewhat puzzled and bitter0 Herr Gutmann, whose splendid hotel was now the centre of a frightening and largely unexplained mystery. She might have explained something of it for him, but she preferred to listen; and from him she had learned interesting things indeed about this Garrison and his young lady who had gone off without paying their bill and left their room in such terrible disarray. And his information had been so useful that Miss Tyler had insisted upon paying the truant pair's costs, against which Gutmann had pleaded not at all.
Since then, and before darkness set in, she too had visited Garrison's retreat and read the legend of the tumbled arch, and she too had driven in through the iron gates to enter the one-time hideaway of Thomas Schroeder. And there she had been, in the tricky half-shade of twilight, when Richard's flashing lights had sent their beams swinging along the downward slopes and cutting through the pines; and at the gates she had waited until he returned, standing not fifteen feet away behind one of the gate's columns as he drove past her in his big silver car. And her eyes had been not at all friendly, and her gaze more than a little calculating, as she watched his red and orange rear lights out of sight and up through the wooded belt. . .
During the last twelve to fifteen hours:
In South Africa all white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five had been mobilized, issued with weapons. Sections of territory with clearly defined boundaries had been placed under their partial control, areas of responsibility wherein they would work in close liaison with the police. Their orders were simple: gibberers -black gibberers - were to be shot on sight or notification. This was not information which should reach the outside world, the South African press and other news media would remain silent on the subject. Nor would there be any talk tomorrow, none, about the black mind-plague enclosures, which overnight would be seen to have become mysteriously depleted of inmates and in many cases entirely emptied. For the present, white gibberers would be dealt with as before, until the situation either changed for the better or became more desperate yet, when further measures might have to be taken.
Along the northern borders a barricade of men, machines and weapons kept watch; no one was to be allowed over those borders from the north without very good reason for being there; alleged 'refugees' were to be turned back or killed, depending upon their degree of insistence; white travellers must be completely screened before admittance . . .
In the East, two million cyanide capsules of British manufacture had been flown in a special container aircraft from Hong Kong to Tokyo. Their cost was only a small fraction of a per cent of that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs; but their cost in human lives, albeit irreparably damaged lives, would be far greater. Nippon had started to poison the worst of her mind-plaguer sons.
In Australia the left-wing government had been overthrown. Certain members of the new regime were said to have conclusive proof that the Aborigines were plague-carriers. Large gangs of drunken, fear-crazed locals were shooting pre-men by the score in all their reservations and protectorates. Social and civil rights improvements of twenty years' standing were erased in a matter of hours. No one opposed the carnage.
Recently prosperous Poland appeared to be preparing for war on her neighbours . . .
In Russia, a large suburb of Moscow had been burning uncontrolled for a day and a night in an inferno which threatened to rival the Great Fire of London. According to a Kremlin press release, the USSR was not being inundated with mind-plague - cases had numbered a mere handful. An old curtain, albeit with many a moth hole, was slowly closing once more across half-forgotten frontiers.
In New York in the early hours of the morning there had been a power failure. Gangs of distinct ethnic origins had gathered out of nowhere to battle and vie with each other in looting, destroying, and brutalizing the city's centre within a radius of half a mile. In the morning presses there had been accusations of unnecessarily harsh police retaliation and the indiscriminate shooting of over one hundred rabble-rousers and suspected gibberers. Some of the larger organs, however, were seen to applaud.
In most of South America there was utter chaos, particularly in Argentina which had suffered a major coup and was now under the rule of a junta of three mind-plaguers. This was hardly surprising: madmen had been in power there before.
In England, parliament had been sitting for four hours and would continue throughout the night; the press had been totally excluded; several ministers would be detained and 'removed to a safe place' following the ayes having it on a certain very controversial subject. Tomorrow police nation-wide wouid be issued with special emergency powers . . .
The rest of the world fared no better, most of it far worse. In the main, international relations were seen to be rapidly deteriorating, communications were becoming 'very strained'.
There had been no contact whatsoever with Moonbase for more than eight hours . . .
At PSISAC that Wednesday evening, J. C. Craig personally inspected the recently completed fortifications and put his disciples, old and new alike, through their drills. All went well, which was all to the good.
The day had been long and hard - especially for Craig, with no further word concerning his daughter, and with pressures steadily mounting - but he and his initiates had somehow struggled through it. The worst of it was over now, the bulk of the preparations completed.
Plainly, though, Craig must now bring forward to tomorrow noon his original plan for closing PSISAC down; and as today's lessons had taught him, even that might be a little on the tight side. For today there had been almost four hundred new mind-plague cases at PJSISAC, all of whom bar three - who killed themselves -had been dart-stunned by Security or by Craig's disciples; but patently the thing was now mounting to a crescendo. Which was why, when PSISAC's employees reported for work tomorrow, the great majority of them would be turned away. Only the technicians and a handful of labourers would gain access to the complex, the people whose skills were required to close down and seal off the lesser converters, and muscle to put the finishing touches to the fortifications and secure the main buildings and installations no longer in use.
Then, at noon, the last of these would be sent away and finally PSISAC would come to a standstill - almost. But the main converter would function as before, supplying PSISAC's power - and Psychomech's. To this end Craig had recruited and initiated an ample number of technicians, each of whom now carried the headset insignia of the disciple wherever he or she went in and about the complex.
In all, including the six left behind when Bragg and the others commenced their pursuit of Richard Stone and Lynn Craig, there were now twelve of them at PSISAC. Craig had further ensured that two of the newer members were dog-handlers from Security; and as chance would have it a third, also from Security, was one Geoff Bellamy
Along with the three remaining seekers, all of whom were somewhere out in the Harz Mountains, that would appear to make fifteen. Except that Craig had already decided that those three absent members were now expendable - and especially Bragg, contrary to anything he might have been led to believe.
As for PSISAC's fortifications:
The perimeter wall had been fully wired and the main converter could readily supply anything from a few volts of electricity to a sudden jolt massive enough to light a town. Nothing was going to climb over that wall - nothing human.
There were places, however, where the wall in its own structure was weak - where, for instance, internal prefabricated buildings, sheds and warehouses backed on to it -and others where it was overlooked by buildings outside the complex. All such weak areas had been reinforced as best as possible, often with steel plates bolted to the walls within and supported by concrete stanchions, or by large vehicles and bulky machinery strategically parked or positioned. And on top of the wall where it was overlooked and wherever entry might conceivably be gained from adjacent buildings, there were platforms where machine-guns had been mounted behind hastily erected sandbag barriers..
