In that case Jake would immediately transfer Szwart to the chopper and desert him there…if he could get away from him. Then, with the coordinates fresh in mind, he would go back for Chung and Co. and rescue them from the sea. Complicated, yes—the plan had a great many ifs, buts, and maybes—but for the moment it was the best he could do.
And one thing for sure: if it worked there would be no more trouble from Szwart. For there’s no darker or deadlier place to be than under the crushing weight of a mile of water…
That had been the Necroscope’s plan, but as he conjured his Möbius door he saw that once again it was slipping and sliding, bucking and heaving—and slowly but surely descending—and so guessed that the helicopter must be settling toward the sea.
He made a quick decision, dissolved the door and moved away from it, and at coordinates of his own conjured another. Except this time, without pause, he proceeded through it into the dark Atlantic night and the blustery aftermath of the storm.
His calculations were a little off. Emerging in midair, he tasted salt and felt the slap of spume from driven wave crests, saw the helicopter’s fan glinting overhead some little distance away…and then fell; Jake and Szwart, plunging into a trough between waves, sinking under the water and slowly surfacing.
Then: “What? Eh?” Szwart gasped and spluttered, tightening his grip as their heads broke the surface. “Are you mad, Necroscope? Do you want to die?”
“A mistake,” Jake lied, as choppy water slapped him in the face. “But I can get us out of this.”
“Then do it now, at once!” said Szwart. “For that was your last mistake, Jake Cutter. I won’t allow another.”
At which moment Jake spied the Russian ship.
As the heaving ocean lifted them up, Necroscope and monster together, Jake saw the stricken vessel; saw members of her crew in goggles and safety harnesses, risking their lives where they hung from a framework of buckled steel booms at her stern. They were working at frantic speed with acetylene torches, trying to cut through the trailing towlines. And behind the ship, lolling in the swell with the tip of a rusty conning tower breaking the surface, there was the doomed old sub herself—where Jake had hoped she would be.
Then, breaking in on his concentration, Szwart told him, “I can’t swim. Nor can you, not with me clinging to you. So get me out of this now, Necroscope, or we both go down together.”
“As you will,” said Jake.
He judged the distance, saw the last hawser sliced through and go splashing down into the sea, attempted to recall everything that he’d seen of Chung’s target on the big screen in E-Branch HQ’s Ops Room. That great nuclear submarine—but more especially its reactor compartments: those lead-lined rooms that no sane engineer would ever enter except in the most desperate of circumstances.
And then—as the conning tower slipped under for the last time and a wave lifted them high—the Necroscope conjured his door, prayed that he’d got it right, and again entered the Möbius Continuum.
He needn’t have worried. Chung’s hardwood shard was vibrating itself into a hundred even smaller fragments in his pocket, and as before it was his compass and his range finder.
“EH?” said Szwart. “WHAT…?” Like a thunderous grunting in the Continuum’s nothingness.
Darkness, Jake answered, as he fashioned his most dangerous door and guided Szwart through it. That is what you asked for—isn’t it?
And dark it was—pitch-dark, oily, metallic—and burning with a heat that couldn’t be felt by men, except in the passing of time. But Szwart felt it, and he couldn’t understand it.
Astonished, he relaxed his grip, and the Necroscope at once leaned away from him and through a Möbius door. The one pseudopod that managed to come snaking after him was lopped off as he slammed the door behind him.
And Jake was free in the Möbius Continuum.
While in the corporeal world, below the waves:
There was heat in the reactor compartment, the same energy that fuels the sun—but without the sun’s light. Little wonder Szwart couldn’t understand it, but he could feel it. And as the groaning sub nosed ever deeper, he felt it eating into him.
Mercifully, perhaps too mercifully, he wouldn’t feel it for long. Already his mutant flesh was sloughing from him, steaming away into nothing, while his bubbling screams went all unheard, drowned in fathoms of ocean…
Down in Perchorsk’s core, Lardis had found another flamethrower and was busy filling the air with foulness, removing every last trace of Malinari and Vavara. Trask had told him (perhaps optimistically, because optimism was all he had left) that this was futile; as soon as the Necroscope got back the entire Perchorsk complex would be consumed utterly in an awesome nuclear explosion. But that had made no great impact on Lardis.
“A job isn’t done until it’s finished,” the Old Lidesci had answered. “And I’ve been finishing such as these bastards for a very long time. It needs doing, so leave me be.”
And who could say he was wrong? For even as Lardis worked Malinari’s neck grew fat as a leech wriggled free of the stump, and his body burst open in a nest of pulsing grey and purple pseudopods that lashed frenziedly at the air before they melted. And likewise with the hag; her crisped outer shell cracking open—steam jetting from the rupture—while her pale blue and yellow guts heaved and tossed, full of a mindless “life” of their own.
But Lardis had carried on, and finally had his way.
Meanwhile, Turchin had come up from the bowl under the Gate and gone with Trask, Millie, and Liz in search of Garvey and the precog. And they had carried them back to the core. Both of the men had been “sleeping,” but a special kind of sleep. And Trask said to Millie, “At least we didn’t go through that.”
“No,” she answered, “but it all works out the same anyway.”
“I know.” He nodded grimly, and sighed. “We’re all vampires now. And out there in the world a lot more are being made—and making others—as we speak. But that fight is still to come.”
“A good many fights,” she agreed. “Us against the rest, and I’m frightened. How do you think it will go, Ben, that’s assuming we can get out of here?”
“The fighting…or the rest of it?”
“The rest of it,” she answered quietly. “The blood.”
“Harry abstained,” Trask reminded her. “As did The Dweller. Likewise Turgo Zolte, until Shaitan forced him. It doesn’t have to be human blood, Millie. If we don’t slip too far back towards the Dark Ages—and if science doesn’t take too much of a battering—maybe we’ll be able to synthesize something. And if not…well, people have been meat-eaters ever since the Good Lord gave us incisors!”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll accept that. But where do we start? And what do we do? The human race is facing extinction, Ben.”
“We start at E-Branch,” he answered. “That is, if our people will accept us! That’s our power base. And while the world goes to hell we’ll look for a solution—we’ll find a way to survive and keep our humanity. As for the more distant future: you’d do better asking him.” He nodded toward the sleeping precog. “When he wakes up, his powers should have been enhanced quite a bit.”
“Talking about survival and the future,” said Liz, breaking in excitedly on their conversation, “he’s okay—Jake, I mean! And he’s on his way back here right…now!” Liz’s powers, too, had been enhanced.
Jake stepped out of the Möbius Continuum a different man from the one they had known. His hollow, handsome face was grey now; and his hair—where it swept back like wings from his temples—was white. It formed into a brown-and white-banded braid at the back. And as for his eyes…they were no longer feral but uniformly red. Red as blood.
“I lost my dark glasses,” he said, as Liz went to him. “But I can replace them. Right now, though, I think it’s time we all got out of this hellish place.”
Everyone agreed, and Gustav Turchin went back down through the trapdoor under the Gate to set the timer on his d
evice; ten minutes should be enough. In his absence, Trask took Jake aside and said, “You know, twice you’ve had my heart in my mouth. Are you insane or something? First to take on Malinari’s challenge, then to go chasing after Szwart like that?”
But Jake only smiled, and Trask knew the truth of it. “You did it!” he said. “You checked out the future!”
“That’s right,” said Jake. “I didn’t go far, but far enough to see that my thread goes on way past tomorrow and a day. It’s a red thread, sure enough, but it does go on. And as it goes it gathers other threads to it; doesn’t make them, you understand, just gathers them up. Yours and E-Branch’s, I suppose. And they all go on together.”
Then Turchin came scrambling back up through the trapdoor, and in the next few seconds and three trips Jake conveyed the entire party back to the surface. Up there, the locator David Chung was waiting—Chung and his scientist colleagues—and a British search-and-rescue helicopter, sitting there on the dam wall.
Inside the chopper the wide-eyed pilot told Jake, “I’ve got just enough fuel left to take off. But I’ll really have to give her the gun with all these extra passengers aboard. I mean, I’m still not sure we can make it. So, what do you want me to do?”
“We have to be mobile,” the Necroscope shrugged. “I suppose the easiest way would be to take off, and then fly her out over the dam wall.”
“Over the gorge, you mean?”
“That’s right,” Jake nodded.
“And you can do that, er—that whatever you did—again?” The pilot’s face was chalk-white. He wasn’t even sure where he was, or if he was, or what this blood-eyed creature was. But:
“Trust me,” said Jake.
And because he’d already been privy to one miracle tonight, the pilot did trust him. And when the engine shut down over the gorge he simply closed his eyes…and kept them closed even as the chopper yawed a little and fell—
—All of six inches to the roof of E-Branch HQ.
And not quite by coincidence, just a few minutes later and thousands of miles away in the Urals, the mountain over Perchorsk gave a massive shudder and subsided by almost exactly the same amount…
By Way of an Epilogue: Not so Very Devious After All
FOR A FULL SEVENTY-TWO HOURS, THE PRECOG Ian Goodly lay asleep, and Paul Garvey woke up just an hour or so before him. For both men it had been the sleep of change following a direct infusion of blood or essential essence from a Great Vampire; a three-day fight between the men and their raging fevers, which inevitably they must lose while yet surviving. They wouldn’t die—not the true death—but they would wake up undead.
Paul Garvey wasn’t alone in his anguish. A telepath, as he tossed and turned and fought his fight, other minds accompanied him. Liz, Millie, and John Grieve, they stayed with him through his torment, spelling each other, willing him on and constantly reminding him of his humanity. They didn’t try to converse, but simply topped up his troubled mind with positive and fortifying thoughts, so that when he woke up he would remember what he was and not what the alien thing in his blood wanted him to be. And when they weren’t succouring Garvey, the three were counselling each other.
As for the precog: he was a different case entirely. Search as they might, the greatest minds in E-Branch couldn’t find his mind; it wasn’t there but traversing future times, searching in its own right. And in the last hour or so, before he opened his eyes, Goodly dreamed the strangest of dreams.
This is how it went:
He was reading a newspaper report on the plague…but not the Asiatic plague. In the Mediterranean—in the air, on land, and across the Aegean—the Greeks and Turks were at war, each blaming the other for the vampires come among them. In Australia, the authorities had blockaded the east coast from Gladstone to Coffs Harbour, and were shooting anyone or -thing attempting to leave. China had launched its first nuclear missiles against the new vampire-infested “red” Russia, and there was continuous night-fighting all along their borders. The Bulgarian authorities operated a dusk-till-dawn curfew, and anyone caught walking the streets after dark was shot on sight and burned.
In the British Isles—with the exception of Northern Ireland, where as yet the two main parties had failed to agree on any mutually satisfactory countermeasures—the various governments had long since declared a state of emergency, giving the police and military previously unthinkable, draconian powers of arrest, confinement, and execution. Sales of home security systems were rising exponentially, while those of sunglasses, contact lenses, and sun-screening creams had been banned. Ounce for ounce, the price of silver was double that of gold, garlic was selling on the black market for seven pounds the clove, and for the first time in decades the churches were filled to overflowing, while holy water was disappearing from their fonts in equal measure.
Despite that he had rarely been allowed to see so much, the precog looked at the date on the paper: 13 March 2014—just a little over two years!
He was reading the newspaper while riding into the city on an evening bus. Outside, the streets were almost deserted; a handful of people—but a very small handful—were hurrying to their homes or other destinations and no one looked at or spoke to anyone else. There were posters pasted on the walls of every street corner; except for their headers, in blood red, six-inch letters, Goodly couldn’t read what they said.
He didn’t need to, for the headers alone said it all:
PUBLIC WARNING NOTICE.
ARE YOU AWARE OF THE TIME?
BETTER CHECK YOUR WATCH NOW!
Then he felt a bump and gave a start. The man seated beside him had fallen asleep, his head striking Goodly’s shoulder. And a nervous woman behind him tapped him on the other shoulder and said, “I think…I think someone should tell the driver.” And for all that her voice was a mere whisper in his ear—or perhaps because it was—still it contained a whole world of fear.
Goodly did as she suggested; as he moved from his seat, the sleeping man lolled sideways, falling across both seats without waking up. The driver took his bus off route to a gloomy building (once a police station, the precog felt sure) with bricked-up windows, and tall, new chimneys that were pouring out smoke, stopped and got out. And in a while three men came and carried the sleeper off the bus.
“There are so many of them,” the woman whispered again, and Goodly turned to look at her. But seeing his face her eyes went wide. Then she stood up and stumbled into the aisle calling for the driver.
A dream or a vision, whichever, it was time to move on. And Goodly left his newspaper, the woman, and the bus behind him as his mind carried him further still into the future…
Previously, the precog had recognized some of the streets. Now, too, he recognized them, yet at the same time didn’t, or didn’t want to. Not in their current disorder. But disorder? “Destruction” was the better word for it! It was still London—a sign on a heap of rubble where a chimney of bricks stood centraltold him that much: the junction of Oxford and Regent streets!
Goodly was still in a vehicle, but it wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a bus. Its windows were dark-tinted slits in the thick metal walls of an armoured personnel carrier, a half-track rumbling through the shattered remains of the city’s once bustling streets. He seemed to be the commander of the vehicle, and there were half a dozen combat-clad men with him, excluding the driver. Outside, it was a dirty, dingy daylight.
One of the men, his Second-in-Command, was David Chung, and his eyes were as brown as always. The rest of the crew was made up fifty-fifty of vampires and human beings, most of whom Goodly recognized as E-Branch agents of old. Which meant that they were quite capable of working together, if only because they’d always worked together in a common cause.
Looking at Chung, however, he thought, Good for you, David! Keep it as long as you can, my friend. You may grow older faster than I do, but you’ll always be you and no one and nothing else making decisions for you without you realizing it. Then:
“Stop her
e!” said Chung, and the vehicle kicked up dust and debris as it slewed to a halt. Then a motor hummed and the roof slid open, and four high-powered weapons elevated into position with their gunners crouched under smoked, sun-screening plastic canopies, scanning all the quadrants. Since the sun hadn’t been visible for a six-month, the canopies were a purely precautionary measure, and overhead the leaden, lowering clouds remained black- and yellow-streaked with poisonous smoke.
“Over there,” said Chung, pointing, his eyes narrowed, brow wrinkled, and radiation-sensitive mind focussed. “It’s there in that street, dumped there by the last heavy rains. It’s bad, so you can’t afford to hang about. Get those signs up quick as you can and then get out of there. We can’t have any of our patrols going down there.”
Two men in radiation suits left the vehicle carrying warning triangles and metal staves. They worked quickly, hammering the staves into the ground at the entrance to Chung’s “street”—an avenue of piled rubble stretching away out of sight, with two or three gutted buildings in various stages of collapse—hung the signs on the staves and ran back to the half-track.
“Decon as soon as we get back home,” the locator told them as they climbed aboard. And when the vehicle rumbled into life again, he turned to the precog. “Maybe it’s my imagination but you seem awfully quiet. What’s up?”
“Er, daydreaming,” Goodly heard himself saying. “I wasn’t here for a minute…or a couple of years.”
Chung nodded. “I know. Just a handful of years since those bastards brought this hell down on us.”
“A handful?”
“Well, six actually. Sometimes it seems like yesterday, and other times it’s forever, like it’s always been this way.” Then it was back to business again. “Is there anywhere else you want to check before we go back under the dome?”