Read Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer Online
Authors: The invaders are Coming
But
first he had to see the face. He had to know whom he was going to kill. He had
to see the face, the tight, fear-ridden face. . . .
He clutched the scope, and
could not raise his arm.
It
came so swiftly he could only
gasp,
a wave of stark
terror that clamped shut his throat and froze him immobile. The hallway, the
room, the thing at the end of the hall, slammed down in his mind with a jolt,
and his mind was screaming,
It's
coming! It's coming! Get out while you can!
The
door had swung shut, and he threw himself across the room at it, wrenching at
the knob, fighting it, his breath coining in great sobbing gasps of terror.
Then it gave and he fell into the hall, the dark, silent hall, with voices
below and the clack-clack-clack of the
cardos
.
He
straightened up against the wall, fighting to drive the elephant-terror from
his mind, brushing through thick cobwebs of fear. It was a nightmare, only a
nightmare, he had been dreaming.
Yes.
That was right. Suddenly he was ice-calm. His knees were
steady,
there was no pain in his chest, no clenching across the diaphragm. His hands
were dry and steady; die stunner balanced in his right hand was cool.
He had to hurry. There were more rooms down
the hall, but it was all right, the rooms would be empty, all of them would be
empty, like the last two.
Two?
Of course not.
He smiled vaguely. He shook his head, as if
to clear away some shadow. He'd only been in one room.
One
empty room.
The elephant would never
find him. Never!
From somewhere down below a door slammed;
there were noises, voices shouting something unrecognizable, then Carmine's
flat nasal monotone cutting across the hubbub.
".
. .
eighty
feet off the ramp. Ten people aboard, but
we couldn't have squeezed them off without alerting him.
All
dead, concussion, heat and suffocation."
There was a note of
pleased satisfaction in the flat voice. "We saw them identify Bahr, all
right. Any calls while I was gone?"
"No, no calls."
"Good, three-thirty. I've got to call
long distance. How are things upstairs?" "Quiet."
Bahr
nudged
Kocek
and grinned. Then he crossed silently to
the window and flashed a recognition pattern with the
infrascope
at the Volta parked down the street.
"In
five minutes Chard is going to cut the main power line into here," he
whispered to
Kocek
. "The whole place will black
out. We'll go downstairs then. I think there are seven of them. What's your
count?"
"The
same."
"All right.
Chard will come in the front after he cuts the wires. I don't care
about the rest, but I want Carmine alive. I've got a few questions."
They waited five minutes, Bahr checking his
watch too often. "Ten seconds," he said. He squinted, staring into
the darkest part of the hall, his hand tightening around the stunner.
Downstairs, the sound of coffee-drinking and staccato conversation, and
the steady clack-clack-clack of the
cardos
.
Carmine was on the long-distance line. . . .
"Hey!"
"The lights . . ." "Where's
the fuse box?"
In
the noise and confusion Bahr and
Kocek
darted down
the stairs and crept into adjacent corners of the main room, letting their eyes
focus in darkness.
There
was a flicker of movement toward the door, and Bahr's stunner ripped at full
lethal power, the sub-echoes ringing.
A scream and a thud.
Silence.
A tense whisper.
"Somebody's got a stunner."
Kocek's
Wesson spat, a dirty tearing sound. There
was a gurgle, a thump on the floor, a chair toppled. . . .
"In the corner . . ." Carmine's nasal voice.
There was die snigger of a burp being
cranked. Bahr waited, and fired again, his target perfectly picked out in the
infrascope
. Body and gun hit the floor at the same time.
Three down.
"He's
got a scope."
Carmine's voice again.
A door
squeaked, and there were hurried crawling sounds.
Kocek
fired twice, from a new position. There was a shriek.
Then utter silence.
"
Kocek
!"
Bahr heard a grunt in response. "They
went into the
cardo
room," he said.
Kocek
hissed, and Bahr listened.
A very
faint sound of someone coming into the room.
"Bahr?"
"Over
here, Chard. They're in the
cardo
room. We'll have to
flush them." He crawled silently, checking four bodies, guessed at three
left in the
cardo
room.
"
Kocek
!
Those concussion
eggs."
Bahr
unscrewed the safeties, knelt and tossed one egg right inside the
cardo
room door. There was a dull crash, and the glass blew
out of the windows. The second toss was against the rear wall. A burst of
orange light flared and a man came screaming into the hall clutching his ears.
Bahr cut him down with the stunner and ducked into the room with Chard at his
heels.
They
started up the banks of
cardos
, leaving
Kocek
at the door with the Wesson. When he was sure he
would not be silhouetted, Bahr stood up, took a pile of
unpunched
cards from the top of a
cardo
and hurled them against
the far wall. A burp spat out reddish flame from behind a sorter three machines
away. Chard dropped down, firing. There was a scream of pain. One left.
"Carmine!"
Bahr stood up, stunner ready. There was a scrambling sound. "Don't
shoot him," Bahr said. A couple of shots scattered around the room as
Carmine fired wildly. "I'm coming after you." There were scurrying
noises; if Carmine realized that Bahr was still alive, he gave no indication.
Bahr smelled smoke, saw a flare of burning cards across the room. He saw Chard
leap across to smother the flame, and cough and reel back as three slugs struck
his chest. Bahr fired the stunner once, an off-target narrow beam shot and Carmine
screamed.
Bahr
hurled himself on the thrashing, half-paralyzed man, tore the gun out of his
hand and drove a knee into Carmine's groin. There was a shrill agonized cry,
then retching.
"Bastard," Bahr
said.
"All clear,
Chief?"
Kocek
asked.
"Get
that fire out." Bahr jerked Carmine up by the collar, smashed his fist
into his face savagely twice, and hurled him out into the hall.
Then
he saw Chard in the growing light of the fire. He squinted into the man's
pain-twisted face. "
It's
okay, Julie. I'm hurt.
Just get me out of here."
Bahr
saw the red dripping blot on the front of Chard's coveralls as the whole wall
began to flare from the burning cards. He saw the death-white face, the eyes
wide with fear. "Just get me to a doc, Julie. . . ."
"You're a dead man," Bahr said.
"You wouldn't last five minutes if we moved you." He shook his head,
lifted the stunner. "The breaks, kid."
One violent, tearing epileptic
lunge,
and it was over. Silence, the crackling of the fire,
waves of heat from the wall. He heard a noise break from
Kocek
as he turned the
power
off
on the stunner, put it back in the holster. "Get out to the car,"
Bahr said. "I'll get Carmine."
Kocek
bolted through the door. Sick, rotten, depraved
Kocek
seemed eager to get away from him.
He
thought suddenly of the upstairs. There was something . . . He shook his head,
his mind blanking. All he could think
of
now was
get out, hurry, get out!
It did not occur to him to wonder why he
could not go back upstairs. He could not remember what was up there. Upstairs
was empty . . . that was it . . . empty.
In
the eerie crackling light of the spreading fire, Bahr grinned suddenly, but he
did not know why.
The meeting at dawn was short and tense. The
principals were Bahr and
Kocek
, adults, and three
celebrities from the toughest of
Trivettown's
KMs.
The place of the meeting was a two-car garage in the
Trivettown
residential section. Bahr's Volta, with Carmine bound and gagged on the floor,
filled half the garage. In the other half there was a work bench, and a
nondescript array of woodworking tools, hedge clippers, and two disposal cans.
The bench was curiously stained.
There
was the usual exchange of greetings and explanations.
Kocek
,
who knew the KMs, did most of the talking, with Bahr silent, watching the one
called Joel cleaning his carefully trimmed nails with a tiny gleaming knife.
Bahr had heard of Joel by reputation. Now, meeting him, he felt an almost
irresistible urge to take the pale, smiling youngster by one scrawny ankle and
smash his brains out on the floor. It was just amazing how thoroughly he hated
him at first sight.
Kocek
negotiated with the girl, who was in charge
of proceedings, a thirteen-year-old who was noticeably pregnant. Joel would
work at so much an hour for four hours, after which the rates doubled at four
hour intervals. If those terms were not satisfactory there would be no deal.
Joel was a specialist, but the girl was a business woman. The third noteworthy,
a stocky, hard-faced bully, kept a hand in
a
pocket and never took his eyes off
Kocek
while he talked to the girl.
Joel,
of course, was different. He was strange, pathologically strange, and he made
Bahr's skin crawl. His hands were very soft and white, like a girl's, but his
eyes were vulture eyes. Bahr had seen such eyes once or twice before, and he
always hated them.
Then
the arrangements were completed, and
Kocek
and the
bully dragged Carmine out of the car. Bahr noticed that Joel's eyes began to
brighten when he saw Carmine's struggling figure; he stood up, studying
Carmine's
face,
and an odd little professional smile
crossed his waxy, almost doll-like face.
Carmine
was conscious, his eyes blazing hate at Bahr as he was lifted onto the
workbench.
"You
can make it easy on yourself, if you want to," Bahr said. "You know
what I want to know." Behind the gag Carmine's face twisted almost out of
shape, his eyes narrowing to slits. Bahr stepped forward, his fist back, but
Joel said, "No!" and stopped him cold.
"You'll
have to leave," the girl said. She and the bully moved between him and
Carmine. "Don't worry. He's in good hands."
Behind
them, Joel expertly finished wiring Carmine down to the workbench, viewed him
for a moment with a clinical eye, and
dien
snapped
open a black doctor's bag and began selecting appliances.
"All
right," Bahr said, suddenly cold. "Let
Kocek
know when he breaks."
"You'll hear from
us," the girl said.
She
opened the garage doors, and Bahr backed out. It was almost seven o'clock, and
he had to get back to New York through morning traffic. He thought of Carmine
and the good hands he was in, and he should have felt good, but he didn't; he
just felt hollow and cold and weary.
"He'll
break,"
Kocek
assured him as they moved into
traffic. "We'll find out who put him up to it."
Bahr didn't answer. Who put Carmine up to it
didn't seem important any more, nor did the interview with Adams that was now
facing him in two hours with no sleep to support him. He drove through the
gloomy drizzling rain, trying to remember something about a woman whose face he
could not see, and a long corridor, and an elephant.
In the darkened room, Harvey Alexander lay
immobile, staring fixedly at the ceiling, and he smelled the smoke long before
he felt the heat of the fire. He tried to move his arms; the muscles responded,
but slowly, sluggishly, and he fell back against the couch, panting at the
effort.
There
were many things he did not understand, many pieces that did not fit, but the long
hours of waiting in darkness, helpless and immobile, had given him time to
think, and slowly the picture had come clear. Now he understood things, and it
was a wellspring of satisfaction and a bitter defeat at the same time. He had
heard the shots and screams of the pogrom on the floor below, and then the
silence, and then the smoke and glowing heat, and he realized that
understanding, even knowing, was not good enough now that it came too late.
There was no one down below
who could help him now.
Slowly,
he tried again to flex his muscles. It was a major effort just to breath, an
impossible feat to sit up on the couch, but he managed it. He felt the floor
with his bare feet. Then he tried to stand, and felt his knees buckle, and fell
heavily onto the floor.
It was useless. The place was a smoke-filled
oven; already he could see the yellow brightness of the flames in the crack
under the door. He knew die truth now, and it was possible that he knew things
that nobody else knew, but he would never be able to tell anyone, to use that
information. It was useless to fight any more, but he tried.
Slowly,
he hitched himself up on his elbows, began inching his way across the room
toward the hall.
He had almost reached the
window when he blacked out
momentarily,
choking on the
acrid fumes from the fire down below, and he saw the uselessness of it.
He
had been running for too long. Now there was no more chance to run.