The Battle of All the Ages
Blake Corbett fled the central office to get away from the massacre that was taking place there, and though he began trying every door that he passed and practically begged for admission through the wall speakers, he had to run far down the hall to the room marked C-6 before anyone answered his petition by opening the door. Once inside, he intended to stay there until dawn, but a short series of events changed his mind.
The first incident occurred only minutes after he had entered and fallen, exhausted physically and emotionally, onto the floor with a wall pressing reassuringly against his back. There were fifteen people in the room, young and old, reporter, doctor, scientist, and security guard, injured and whole, and they shared a common fear that left them for the most part wide-eyed and silent, as if Cummings were creeping just beyond the doors and listening for the slightest sound. Corbett saw an M.D. doing what she could for those with the most obvious injuries, but hardly anyone else in the lab was moving any more than was required to carry on breathing. Blake swiftly adapted to this prevailing mood.
For this reason, the voices that suddenly disturbed the terrified tranquility were magnified far above their true levels and shocked Blake from his stupor. He glanced around the room to find a pair of older men heatedly discussing the present situation in one corner of the long, narrow room. One man was apparently the elder of the pair, and he possessed a full, white beard and a fringe of cottony hair; the second was a red-haired, equally distinguished-looking doctor, the doctor who had been at Cummings’ side just before the transformation. His brightly colored hair was nearly covered by a stained towel that he had wrapped across his head and beneath his chin and secured by several feet of adhesive tape. The man (was his name Goren? Gurren?) had fashioned this turban-like covering to protect a large, crescent-shaped flap of scalp that had been sheared partially from his skull during one of the encounters with the beast.
The older man was bleeding heavily through his shirt and smock in the area of his stomach. Corbett, who had collected a number of physical “souvenirs” of the evening himself, was surprised by the calm manner in which he had come to accept the many vicious remnants of the monster’s attacks on his fellow men and women. He’d never thought that he possessed a particularly strong gut.
“It has to be a physical manifestation of the drug-induced trauma, Bernard!” asserted the older man so loudly that the gentle music from the radio was drowned out. “As a rational human being with scientific training, that must seem quite evident to you!”
“Now, Marion,” the other answered with a somewhat embarrassed smile that he had never employed with Cummings in the observation room, “it’s not ridiculous to hold that the man actually is infected with a disease which acts in conjunction with his subconscious to bring about these extraordinary changes, even as he claims. Certainly, his mind is orchestrating a percentage of the modifications: changing only on the first night of the full moon and at midnight rather than moonrise; the basic regenerative ability, one might say invulnerability—not, incidentally, a characteristic of classic cases of ‘werewolves’; and the manner in which …”
The conversation, while little louder than normal conversational tone, was clearly disturbing the other nervous people in the lab, so Corbett quietly stood and walked back to where the two men sat. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he began in a whisper. “We really should keep our voices down.”
The bearded older man waved at the interruption the way a college lecturer dismisses an impertinent student. “Yes, yes, forgive us for disturbing you, but Gurren here insists upon indulging in pseudo-scientific fantasizing in a situation which is undeniably real!”
Gurren sprang to his own defense, “Yarman, please explain to me how pure mental energy could possibly incite such massive physical changes, no matter how powerful the psychosis. His teeth, my god, man, did you see his teeth? There must be some sort of microorganism involved to provide for the originally external introduction of—”
“Please!” Blake hissed. “Everyone in here is less than a degree away from blind panic, and we’ve still got several hours to go until daybreak! We don’t want to alert the monster to our presence!”
“Do you seriously believe that anyone could hear our conversation through these walls?” asked Yarman, the older of the two men. “And as for any further damage from Cummings, there’s absolutely no way in which he could burst through the irradiation chamber to reach us.”
The strange thrill that actual confrontation with the creature had inspired in Corbett swiftly had transformed to nervous fear once he was separated from the deadly thing by all but his memories, and Yarman’s blithe rejection of Cummings as a continuing threat fanned that fear into a brief anger. “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not so damned certain about our safety! If you would just shut up, it might improve our chances of surviving this nightmare considerably!”
Before Yarman could respond, Gurren came to his feet and took Corbett firmly by the right arm, leading him a number of steps to one side and away from the red-faced professor. “You listen to me, young man,” he said in a tight whisper, “that man you are attacking is undoubtedly one of the great minds of our time, and he is not accustomed to being harassed by anyone, do you understand? I will not allow it!”
“Be reasonable, Gurren,” Blake tried to respond, “we’re in a desperate situation! We don’t know what—”
“We do know that the last minutes of a brilliant man should not be spent in enforced silence rather than extrapolation and investigation into the mystery of the thing that has cost him his life!”
“That what?” said Corbett, thoroughly stunned. “Do you mean that he’s … ?”
Gurren nodded. “Professor Yarman is dying. You’ve seen his abdominal wound; all of his internal organs have been severely injured. Dr. Vaughn has done everything possible for him with the limited resources of this room, and he is drugged against pain, but it can’t be very long now.”
Blake dropped his eyes and rubbed them wearily. It was really everywhere, wasn’t it? And what he had dealt out so carelessly in his fiction was infinitely worse when viewed with an involved eye. Life was no longer a powerful, self-sustaining energy in his perception, but a frighteningly rarefied liquid held in the most fragile of vessels.
His voice was thick when he spoke again, “There’s no chance that he can hang on until morning, when we can get to the medical supplies?”
“Who can say what’s ultimately possible after what we’ve gone through tonight? But, having seen the extent of the damage to his abdomen, I’d have to say that the odds are very high against his survival.”
“Does he, uh, know?”
“Of course. That’s one of the reasons we’re trying to reason out this matter, so that he can have some idea of the why of it all before he dies.”
Fear, rage, and an impotent urgency welled up within Blake. “Isn’t there something we can do?”
“Here? This is a moderately to poorly equipped laboratory set up for the most basic of biological research. In Yarman’s case—and in the cases of at least four or five other people, I’m afraid—not even the supplies available in the medical rooms could guarantee survival. He needs to be in a hospital, which would mean leaving the compound, and this building is as totally occluded from the inside as from the outside while under a general quarantine. Why don’t you move away, back to where you were, so that Yarman won’t be unduly provoked and we can continue our discussion?”
“Oh, sure.” Corbett turned aside and then stopped. “And, um, tell him I’m sorry, will you?”
“Certainly.”
Blake Corbett had always believed that his writing skills and ability to conceive of the worst forms of horror had developed because a playful and frightened thirty-five year old kid lived deep inside him; but when he walked away from those two men who were calmly speculating upon death even as it overtook one of them, he aged centuries with each step. Even when he sat numbly beside the doorway again, he couldn’t keep himself from staring at Professor Yarman with damnably acute understanding of the cause of the slowing speech, wavering movements, and irregular breathing.
It took only ten minutes. Yarman was whispering by then and lying propped on one elbow. When he began to cough heavily from the depths of his chest, Gurren gently raised him into a sitting position to make his breathing easier. He mumbled several things into his friend’s ear before Dr. Vaughn arrived to do what little she could to ease his pain. Corbett was able to turn away only when the Professor began to choke on a great welling of blood, and when he next looked in that direction, Yarman was lying quietly on the floor.
That was the first incident in the series that eventually convinced Blake that he would have to face Cummings and his madness again that night.
In the following minutes the inter-lab communications were initiated by a man named Melchior in room C-4, just a couple of doors up the hall, and the spirits of those trapped throughout the facility were immediately raised by this sharing of experiences, despite their isolation from one another. When these conversations got underway, Corbett could even conceive of short forays into the corridor for the purpose of getting badly needed medical supplies to the areas without them.
Then the heightened hopes were blown away and replaced by the agonizing certainty that they were not safe from the roaming creature behind their steel doors; Melchior displayed an incredible reserve of bravery in his final broadcasts, but they were still death knells. Blake reacted to this revelation as did everyone else who heard and understood it: he leaped into a pit of anguished self-pity. His own problems seemed worse than those facing the rest of the trapped victims, at least to him, because he knew that he was only a few yards from the site of the first break in, and if Cummings were orderly about his plan of murder, room C-6 could be under attack within minutes.
Actually, almost everyone else in the room realized this, as well.
Instinctively seeking any form of reassurance, he began to count the passing minutes. Melchior had announced the effective invasion of C-4 at two-twenty-one a.m., so by the time his watch showed two-thirty with no indication that Cummings was following any sort of regular pattern (though Corbett had no idea of how long it took to break through two heavily constructed metal doors) a faint glimmer of hope began to grow within him. He hoped that no one anywhere was suffering from the unnatural lusts of that monster, but at that instant he was still in the stage of concern which dealt primarily with his own safety.
The tense silence in the lab developed into a different atmosphere almost without his noticing. Corbett positioned himself by the inner chamber door and allowed the piped-in music to softly ease the knots in his physical and emotional muscles. The other residents of this small piece of the world, even the painfully wounded, seemed so drained by the horrors which had enveloped them in the past two and a half hours that they actually slipped into varying levels of unconsciousness. They had to last only until daybreak, and now it seemed that they might.
A quiet moan stirred Blake’s attention. He turned his eyes from the point in the door which he had stared into near-invisibility and scanned the rest of the room, finding the author of the sound in a young woman lying on a sofa almost directly across from him. Her left arm and shoulder appeared to be badly injured, and wounds in her neck and chest still spilled blood around the edges of the soaked cloths that had been applied to them.
Blake had seen this woman back in the central office, along with a man he took to be her husband and who now was slumped on the floor beside her in a sleep brought on by total exhaustion. Through a trick of memory, Blake could remember witnessing the moment that Cummings had assaulted them: while he and his three companions were carefully edging their way to the front of the office, the werewolf had pounced on the woman, using both fangs and claws in his attack, and only the man’s quick action in snatching her literally from the monster’s hands had saved her life. A brief backhanded blow smashed the husband’s jaw while Cummings turned his attention elsewhere.
The woman was in obvious pain now, but her low moans seemed to draw no attention other than Corbett’s; Dr. Vaughn was still far in the back of the room. Blake had next to no medical knowledge or training, but he couldn’t refuse help to any of these people, who were in the same danger as he. There was a sink in one of the counters in the lab and some apparently clean beakers by it, so, filling one with water, the writer carried it to her like a gift. The only gift he could offer her in the situation. She saw him and nodded weakly when he asked if he could help her sit up. Small cries of pain escaped her lips as she moved.
“Here, just a sip at first,” he told her.
She followed his instructions, but the water only incited a bout of coughing. Corbett could feel the heat radiating from her face, so he poured the rest of the water over his handkerchief and used it to cool her with gentle application.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “That feels so good.”
He tried to sound hopeful and confident. “You’ll be all right soon. We can get you to a hospital at dawn, and it’s two-thirty now.”
She knew the truth in some mysterious way provided by Nature, but she didn’t try to contradict him. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Corbett. Blake Corbett.”
“Mr. Corbett, do you have—something to write on, a pad or a sheet of paper, or something? And a pen?”
Blake quickly pulled his thirty-nine cent notepad from his pocket and gave it to her. There was certainly no reason for him to use it tonight, because his mind would never allow him to forget a single second of the terrible ordeal. He found with some surprise that his ballpoint pen was unbroken.
“Thank you,” the woman said as she took the items in her trembling hands. “There are some things I still need to tell Bob.”
That didn’t sound right to Corbett. “Bob … he’s your husband?” he asked, indicating the unconscious man.
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll be okay, and you can talk to him in the morning.”
She sighed softly. “I’d better write it.”
It struck him then in all of its poignancy. “Listen, you’ll be all right just as soon as we can get you out of here. Don’t give up.”
She tried to answer him, but her weak breath failed her.
He didn’t want this to happen, he didn’t want her to die, he didn’t want anyone to die! And there was nothing he could do to stop it. “Should I try to find someone to, uh, to help you?” he asked with a scratchy voice. “I don’t know much first aid, but Dr. Vaughn is around …”
The woman shook her head. “Bob did all that he could, and he’s the best doctor in the Institute.”
“Then I’ll wake him—”
“No! Don’t, please … let him sleep. He’s hurt badly, and it hurts him even more to see me like this … he loves me so much that he couldn’t … I don’t want him to watch me … please.” Tears began to flow down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry, God, I’m so sorry,” Corbett said. He carefully stroked her hair.
“Would you help me with this?” she asked, gaining control of herself.
“I’ll do everything that I can.”
Corbett sat at the woman’s side and held the paper while she wrote. When she weakened, he was her external strength, until all of the final thoughts that had to be left behind were written. After that, in spite of all of the vastly emotional psychic power that Blake directed into her, the time approached. He forced himself to maintain the strength that he was providing for her. His help ended when he closed her eyes and softly placed her upon the couch.
In the midst of his anguish, he found himself pushed closer to the commitment that he privately knew he would have to make.
The room fell quiet once more and remained so until two-forty-five, when the speaker connected to the hallway immediately outside the chamber door erupted with a woman’s voice, a voice filled with both desperation and exhaustion. “Someone, please let us in!” she said. “There are two of us, and we’re hurt!”
Blake was on the side of the inner door opposite that containing the speaker, so another man was startled out of a light sleep into answering the call. “Do you see the monster—” he began.
“Get out of the way!” Corbett snapped, pushing the man aside to hit the opening switch. He recognized that voice.
The doors slid back to reveal a pair of bedraggled figures standing just beyond; the path they had taken up the corridor could be seen by a trail of smeared blood on the smooth floor as far into the darkness as the lab’s lights reached. The woman, who was more fully alert, was holding a limp man around the shoulders, though barely keeping him on his feet. She drew in a breath and began dragging her companion into the chamber. Corbett rushed out to help her.
“You okay, huh, are you all right?” he asked frantically while he took Grundel’s body from her arms.
“I’m all right, I think,” Meg answered, but her appearance denied that. Like almost half of everyone in the building, she was bleeding from countless small wounds, but the most striking and frightening aspect of her condition was the way her normally fair-complexioned face and arms were swollen and almost cherry red in hue. Corbett thought at first that she was suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, which he had used as a plot device several times. But the ridiculousness of this assessment was driven home to him when he looked closer and saw that the young woman had been burned by something.
Nick Grundel was in worse shape. His left hand was mangled and bleeding badly, with three fingers missing, and his chest looked as if a knife had been used on it. In spite of these injuries and the fact that he had been flash-burned as badly as Meg, he was unconscious and in no evident pain.
Corbett didn’t know who closed the doors behind them while he got the two wounded people into the room, and he was too busy hustling Dr. Vaughn to their aid to worry about it. Meg was trying to tell him something, but her physical reserves were almost gone, and the doctor’s swift ministrations didn’t give her any time for conversation.
“My god, I need antiseptics,” Vaughn muttered while ripping Nick’s clothing away from his bloody chest and examining Meg at the same time. Her urgency told Corbett that there was little time left for at least one and perhaps both of his friends.
“Is there something I can do to help?” he asked.
“Um, see the sink over there? Well, get some cloths, plenty of them, and preferably clean towels, but strips of your shirt if nothing else is available. Then soak five or six pieces with water,” she answered quickly. “I’ll also need a good supply of dry material to staunch the blood.”
Blake rushed off to follow these instructions and was lucky enough to locate a supply of fresh-appearing cloth towels almost at once.
“How did this happen?” Vaughn asked while fashioning a tourniquet about Nick’s left wrist.
“Cummings,” Meg replied weakly. She was barely maintaining a grip on consciousness.
“No, not the wounds, the burns, the ones on your faces and arms,” Vaughn explained.
“Steam pipe ruptured.”
Corbett returned to the corner holding two stacks of white towels, one in either arm. Vaughn worked swiftly and surely on Grundel and involved Blake in the procedure by directing him to apply direct pressure to bleeding wounds and to help her in binding them. The doctor’s intense expression grew more concerned as the minutes passed. Finally, she turned from the young man, who was left covered in staining cloth and seemingly bound together by adhesive tape, and directed her attention to Meg, who, while not so deeply slashed as Grundel, was still in poor shape.
Meg continued to try to relate something to’ Corbett, but her thoughts were too overcome with pain and shock to pluck the information from the raging torrent within them.
“Just take it easy,” he whispered to her. “The doctor will take care of everything, I promise.”
“But he told me, before he died,” she sobbed, crying into his shoulder as Vaughn tore open her sleeves to get at the worst of the wounds on her arms. “I’ve got to tell you what he said, but I can’t remember—”
“Nick’s not dead! Do you hear me?” he said forcefully. “He’s alive and we’re going to keep him alive!”
Meg closed her eyes, still softly crying, and Vaughn was soon finished with all that she could accomplish in the way of medical aid. At the doctor’s direction, Blake gently eased the girl from his side and placed her head on several bundled coats that some of the others in the room had provided.
“That’s the best thing for her now, for both of them,” said Vaughn in a low voice. “Sleep is about all that can be offered them.”
Corbett didn’t care for the looks of that sleep in either of them; it was too still and forced their breathing into a pattern of shallow gasps. “Are they going to make it?” he asked, hearing the words as if someone separate from his body had spoken them.
Vaughn drew in a deep breath. “Oh … I feel sure that the girl will be okay, but the boy … there’s severe internal damage and hemorrhaging, just like half a dozen others in here.”
That was the moment that Blake Corbett was pushed over the boundary formed by his own sense of self-preservation. “Nick might not live until morning?” he asked.
The doctor shrugged. “His hand is—if we had him in the infirmary his chances would improve greatly, but it’s all the way on the other side of the building. I can’t tell you anything more.”
Blake had never been driven to this extreme in his safe, normal life, and he didn’t know what to do—shout defiantly? curse? remain composed?—so he simply said, “Thanks,” to the woman and walked away from her to where a slender, pretty young girl sat with her back pressed against the wall and her blue eyes swelling with the fear that was growing in the room like a cold brushfire. He didn’t recall her name, but he knew that she had been his guide earlier in the evening, back when “reality” had been a word with meaning. She would have some knowledge of this place and the people inside it.
“Miss, my name is Corbett,” he said quietly. She didn’t respond to his voice because all of her attention was focused on the horribly fascinating spectacle of Nick’s slow death. He touched her arm, and she snapped her face around to his with a sharp intake of breath. “Miss, I have to ask you some things.”
“What?” she asked. Though injured no worse than a few bruises, her mind seemed as clouded by shock as those who had suffered at Cummings’ fangs.
“I want you to tell me something,” he repeated. “You’re acquainted with this set up, so you should know who can get this quarantine lifted until we can get help from the outside.”
“No,” she whispered, and she seemed to shiver with the word. “I can’t get them to do that, only Dr. Axton has the authority—”
“Axton is dead,” he told her bluntly, hoping to jostle her from the dream-like stupor. “We have to go on that assumption. Who else is there. Who’s second-in-command?”
“Nobody. I don’t think I want to go out there.”
Corbett wiped his face with his hand, as totally weary as he could recall ever having been. “And there are maybe eight people in this room who probably won’t live until dawn, just three and a half hours from now, because the medical facility is a few hundred yards away. Two of those people are very close friends of mine.
“That doesn’t even bring into consideration the dozens of people in similar shape in the other rooms, or the poor bastards who are still alive out there in the corridor, trapped by their injuries and just waiting for Cummings to return to them to feed …”
“Please, don’t …” the girl whispered.
Perhaps it was the author in him composing the lines that were flowing so glibly from his lips, but the emotion came from his soul and was an indictment of the entire situation. It was also an admission of too-recently recognized cowardice.
“I’m not waiting here, in this hole, like a rat hiding from the cats,” he continued. “I can’t sit listening to “Try to Remember” and “Canadian Sunset” while they die, and I don’t care if Cummings does escape into the mountains. I need help; can you get control of yourself long enough to at least answer my questions?”
The girl drew away from him as if his words had been blows. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking …” For a moment, he thought that she was about to burst into tears, but she fought off the rush of guilt and fear. “It’s just that I was in the central control office with everyone else, and my father was in the rear of it when the monster came, and I ran before I saw if he got out or not.”
Blake’s conscience booted him solidly in the butt. “Christ, forgive me, honey, I guess I forgot that we’ve all got our private hells to deal with.”
“You’re right, don’t apologize. I’ll do whatever I can, because there’ll be a lot more deaths if we don’t do something! What do you want to know?”
“Right; first, if the central office is wrecked, is there some other place that we could get a line to the people outside?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know much about the private offices, but there is a phone hookup in the employees’ lounge that connects with the people on the other side of the irradiation room at the entrance.”
“The first chamber we had to come through?”
“Yes. We could talk to the on-duty people, but the lounge is all the way on the other side of the entrance; that’s halfway around the building.”
“But in this state of emergency, there’s sure to be someone important out there, waiting for word from the inside. We’ll have to go with that. The next problem is how to convince them; it’s a damned cinch that they’re not going to listen to a novelist or a tour guide. Who’s a really big name in the building tonight? A visiting specialist or a staff doctor of international reputation?”
“There’s my father,” she answered without thinking. The realization struck quickly. “But I don’t know if he’s—if he’s alive. Um, … Dr. Gurren!” The girl pointed excitedly to the man with whom Corbett had spoken earlier. He was still sitting beside the body of his colleague. “He’s one of the top men in the world in his field, and everybody around the Institute knows him!”
“The guards will listen to him?”
“They should!”
Blake nodded. “Okay, I’ll turn on the persuasion then and convince him to come with me.” He patted her hand. “You did fine, really, and I thank you.”
“Mr. Corbett,” she said as he turned to speak with Gurren, “I’m going with you.”
“What? No, oh no, you’re not.” No more lives in his care, no more blood to sate that unholy thirst. “You’re staying right here.”
“I have to find my father.”
Corbett realized that the girl was going along no matter what he said, either alone or with Gurren and himself, so he merely grunted and walked to where the other man sat. He expected a repeat performance of his reasons for tempting fate in the hallway would be required, but as soon as the red-haired doctor heard his plan for bringing in help he enthusiastically offered his aid. He was as sickened by the circumstances as Blake himself and well beyond the limits of his fear.
Having used the wall speaker when Melchior canvassed the entire building for information, Corbett was familiar with its operation, and he used that knowledge now in preparation for what promised to be a long walk. “This is room C-6,” he said on the open channel, “Corbett speaking. I’m … taking a couple of people into the corridor to locate an outside line. We know that Cummings has attacked another lab since C-4, because we have survivors.” He glanced at Nick and Meg. “Does anyone else have any information about his current location?” He let up on the send button and waited for the replies.
The news was good: no other room was under attack, and, even though there was no way of scanning the hallway from behind locked doors, it seemed that the prowling terror had deserted the installation. There were questions about his plan, half-hearted attempts to discourage him, and good wishes from all, but Blake listened only to the words that came from room A-9 in the voice of Douglas Morgan.
“Are you going to the central office?” the reporter asked.
“That’s where we’ll try first,” he answered. “But I’m not too hopeful about that place after Cummings’ invasion of it. There’s another room around past the main entrance that we’ll try if we have to.”
“Blake, you know who this is, it’s Doug. If the office is wrecked and you have to move along the hall, stop when you come to A-9. I’m going along.”
“No reason to risk it, Doug. A bigger crowd makes a bigger target.”
“Don’t try to snow me, Corbett. Just let me know when you get here.”
Corbett felt like a woozy fighter in the ring with six hungry tigers. “Okay, you’ve got it. Room C-6, out.”
Blake was really concerned about the size of his “expedition”, reasoning logically that a small number could move through the dark corridor more swiftly and with less chance of attracting unwanted attention than a large force. A second deeply ingrained attitude—whether mere chauvinism or true concern, he couldn’t say—whispered to him to keep the women behind in the minor amount of safety that the labs provided, but he knew that this wouldn’t sit well with Loraine Powell, among others.
Despite these details, when his band left C-6 for the darkness of the corridor it consisted not only of himself and Gurren, but also of Audrey Tucker, the young girl who had to discover the fate of her father and Dr. Agnes Vaughn, who insisted upon accompanying them in order to get the vital supplies that she would need to save the lives of a number of people who were bleeding away on the lab floor.
The lights hadn’t been turned on following Axton’s attempt to capture the supposedly tranquilized creature, but the blackness wasn’t complete, in spite of that. The glowing room numbers stretched out before them like high, red eyes, evil and omnipresent.
Before Corbett realized it, that old feeling returned to him, the fear that was really more than fear. It was a type of thrill that overtook him even while Audrey exhaled small sighs with each breath and Gurren ground his teeth so fiercely that the noise was audible for several feet around him. The feeling was like a fistful of razors planted in the middle of his chest and radiating a hot power throughout his body.
He hated and feared Gerald Cummings with every cell of his being, but this was a sensation—’playing on the edge’, some people called it—that was unlike anything he had ever before experienced. And it was addictive.
The office came into view after only seven minutes of furtive dodging about the red globes and a thousand sightings of Cummings in empty shadows. They couldn’t have missed this spot unless they had been blinded during one of the beast’s attacks, because in addition to the identifying room number, the door was gone and the fluorescent lights glowed brightly into the hall through this and the shattered window. Corbett approached the room cautiously and peered around the doorwell into the area for any sign of movement. He saw the dead where they had been left in the wake of the more fortunate and the caprice of the monster, but there was no sign of anything breathing in there.
The irradiation chamber’s doors never had been closed.
“Wait here and I’ll check out the back office,” he whispered to the others. Naturally, his order was only partially obeyed, as Audrey followed him inside; well, he’d never claimed to be much of a leader, so he only hoped that she would not give them away through hysteria if she found Lyman Tucker in the second office.
He discovered what he expected in the room beyond the chamber, more bodies and nearly total demolition of the sophisticated equipment which had been installed there. The communications panel had been ripped from the wall with such obvious fury that Blake was forced to consider the possibility that the creature had acted with intent to more completely isolate the people from the outside world. But when he thought further about it and drew the awful images of Cummings’ rampaging from his memory, he knew that there was no room inside that mad brain for rational planning.
A gasp came from behind the writer and jarred him into action. He leaped about ready to smother the cries that Audrey would begin over her father’s mutilated body, but instead he was startled for at least the hundredth time that night when he found her laughing.
“He’s not here!” she shouted joyously. “He wasn’t in the front office and he’s not here, so Daddy is alive!”
It could have been the truth, of course, or Tucker’s corpse could have been lying in some other dark portion of Hell, but Corbett was not inclined to second guess any bit of good news, no matter how tenuous. He was almost laughing himself when he rushed across the room and calmed her before her happy cries could bring trouble upon them. She nodded cooperatively to his whispers but continued to display her relief in spite of the slaughterhouse atmosphere in which she stood.
“We’ll have to try somewhere else,” he said, trying to reestablish the immediately important tone of their mission. “This phone system is wrecked.”
“That’s okay, we can get to the lounge,” she replied. “Everything’s going to be all right now.”
Blake didn’t say it to deflate her hopes, but he realized that far too much had happened during that night for everything to be all right for centuries to come.
“Are you sure that little thing will stop him?”
“This ‘little thing,’” Brad Ferguson said in answer to Morgan’s question, “will knock the eyes out of a blind earthworm at thirty feet below ground. It’s probably the most powerful light for its size in commercial photography.” His large fingers skillfully fitted the relatively small device onto the top of his shoulder camera. “Being a creature of the night, Cummings is probably irritated by even the fluorescent bulbs in the labs, so when I hit him with this baby, he should run in the other direction like a cat on fire.”
Ferguson touched a switch on the lamp, and the light burst into Morgan’s eyes like white fire, rocking him back on his heels like a physical blow to the face. “Jeeze, Brad, you’ve made your point! Are you trying to blind me?” he demanded, covering his face with both hands.
“Not you: Cummings,” answered Ferguson as he switched off the lamp.
“Just as long as it keeps him off of us until we get to a phone.” Doug was blinking furiously, but he knew that it would take some minutes to get rid of that floating sun before his eyes.
“Speaking of phones, how’s our star witness taking the news?”
Brad was referring to Barry Druitt, Governor of California and an unwilling convert to Blake Corbett’s plan for breaking the hermetic quarantine. Morgan realized that Standard Operating Procedure for the installation would be extremely difficult to overcome with any firepower less than that wielded by Heath Axton, no matter who was thrown up against the dubious parties on the other end of the telephone line; then he realized that room A-9 held the ace card in the form of Druitt. Even though this was a federal establishment, the weight of the man’s name could be the push that moved the plan to success.
Predictably, Druitt had been violently opposed to leaving the room for any reason, but Doug had matched his shouts to the decibel, and when the Governor turned to his remaining bodyguard—the other men had not made it out of the central office—he had found himself alone for a change. The bodyguard wasn’t convinced that anyone inside the building would survive until dawn, so the plan sounded just fine to him.
Of course, Morgan couldn’t have physically forced the other man to accompany him and Ferguson out there, but his emotional argument, pointing out such details as responsibility and the possibility of the monster’s invading every room in the facility before daybreak if he were not checked by some method, finally shamed, scared, and convinced Druitt to accept his responsibility. He wasn’t happy, but Morgan didn’t have to have him contented, only present.
Doug consulted his watch, found that almost fifteen minutes had passed since Corbett’s last contact, and walked up to his ace card. “It looks like the central office was no good for them, or I’m sure Blake would be on the horn to the whole building by now, so they’ll probably be arriving here soon.”
“If they’re not dead,” Druitt added.
“Yes, if they’re not dead. If they are, we’ll have to go it alone, Governor. Right?”
There were twenty other people in the room, and none had volunteered to go on the dangerous mission until then, which was only to be expected; the figure who stood from a place on the floor at that moment was perhaps the last person Morgan would have chosen as the heroic type: Max Coslo. Coslo, who was universally relegated to the status of a Big Talker with no backup in his spine.
“Hey, Morgan, count me in on this thing,” Max said.
“The trip outside?” Doug asked in surprise. “Max, do you know what you’re volunteering for?”
“Of course I do, man! I’m an adult. Just plan on having me alongside you out there.”
Somehow, that didn’t sound at all comforting to Doug. “Max, there’s no need for you to risk—”
“That’s a lie, Morgan. If Ferguson’s light doesn’t stop him, you’re going to need every hand you can get to allow Druitt time to reach the phone. I have to go.” To himself, he added, As the toughest writer on the Disclosure and in American journalism, I have no choice but to go; I can’t let somebody else get all of the glory. He picked up a metal chair to use as a weapon.
Surprised and a little unsettled by the new addition to the group, Morgan turned his attention to the speaker connecting with the hallway just outside the door. As if he had willed it, Blake Corbett’s voice erupted over it with a tone that was a mixture of nerves and a kind of wild elation: “We’re here, Doug! The central office was wiped out, so we have to try the employees’ lounge around the corner!”
Morgan rushed to reply. “Got you, Blake. We’ll be out in half a minute.” He looked to those who would accompany him. “You fellows ready?”
“Let me at him,” Ferguson said, and Morgan had to wonder whether anything on God’s Earth could really frighten the big photographer.
Coslo nodded, and Druitt grunted, “Okay.”
Morgan flipped open the doors to the room and, as he stepped into the chamber, glanced down at Loraine Powell, who sat unmoving at its side. More as an affectionate jibe in their continuing series of one-upmanship than anything, he smiled and said, “Well? Aren’t you coming?” He was somewhat surprised that she hadn’t already shoved him aside in her rush to get into the corridor; he was well aware of her boundless courage and curiosity.
So he was openly shocked when she answered, in something near a scream, “I’m not supposed to, damn it! That’s for you—that’s your function! You’re supposed to protect us from things like that—that god-awful creature out there!”
“My job?” repeated Doug, and those were the only words that came to him in the moments following the strange outburst.
“You’re men! That’s why we have you, to fight the monsters and bury the dead and give up your lives for us …” Her voice trailed off.
These words, coming as they did from a woman who had lived equality throughout her life, even before it was fashionable, who had covered countless shootings with every bit of the dedication of any of her male colleagues, could not have been more startling to Morgan had he heard them from the lips of Gerald Cummings or a stone statue. All of her years of a strong self-image and consciousness reshaping had been melted like wax before the blast of hellish reality presented by the werewolf.
“Loraine, I didn’t mean—” he began.
“Go on and close the door! Kill him, oh god, tear him apart if you have to, but don’t let him get through to me!” she screamed.
“Women and children last, eh?” Doug sighed.
At that moment, Audrey Tucker—at seventeen, qualifying for both descriptions—stepped through the chamber to find out what was taking so long. “We have to get going!” she said urgently.
Loraine Powell looked at the tiny girl and felt herself crumbling inside. After all of these years, it had finally worn her down and destroyed all that she had considered herself to be. Dropping her face to her knees, she began to cry.
“Let’s go,” Morgan said hoarsely.
In the corridor, Corbett was at first disconcerted by the size of the group that left A-9 to join them. He had expected only Morgan. “Hey, this is going to make us all the more noticeable if Cummings is around,” he whispered.
“It’s necessary,” Morgan responded. “Brad has a light on his camera that will drive him away from us, Max is going to give us a hand in case that fails, and Druitt is going to lend his awesome reputation to the cause.”
“Barry Druitt? The Governor?” It was difficult to make out faces in the darkness. “That’s great! They’ll listen to you, I’m sure! Thanks for coming along.”
Druitt made no reply.
“Let’s move along,” Corbett said in the abrupt silence. Their progress was slow, in spite of the fact that they had a considerable way to walk, because they didn’t want to take a chance of running blindly into the terrible thing that was really more an elemental force than a flesh and blood human. But even in their caution and stealth, they underestimated the enemy by denying him the capacity for cunning.
“No luck at all in the office?” Morgan whispered as they walked.
“God, it was just awful in there,” Blake responded. “Like a … a war zone or something.”
“How many is that, I wonder? Thirty? A hundred?” Corbett shut his eyes for an instant, and his voice was dry when he said, “You know what Rostand said: ‘Kill one, you’re a murderer, kill millions, you’re a conqueror, and kill everyone, you’re God.’ I’m afraid Cummings is past mere conquest now.”
Doug nodded. “Before tonight, I didn’t believe in Hell.”
As they moved, they stayed in the shadows, away from the room globes that might reveal them to Cummings. No one took particular notice of another huddled, motionless form as they stepped over it. The corridor had literally taken on the look of a butcher shop with human remains, and none of the group knew of the only truly debilitating injury that Cummings had suffered that night—Grundel’s stabbing of him with the silver crucifix—so they had no reason to suspect that one of the bodies beneath their feet could have belonged to the monster.
But the beast was immobilized, by the metal crucifix—the metal itself, not any religious significance that it held—still lodged in the flesh of his back where he couldn’t manage to swipe it away. After running in agony almost halfway around the corridor, he had fallen prone on the floor while the silver object slowly and steadily ate a path from his back through his chest cavity and into the front of his body with a hunger that not even the vials of acid thrown onto him could match.
Finally, the torturous journey was complete and the deadly crucifix had fallen from him onto the smooth marble floor. Had the attack been made with a liquid solution of the silver, one that would have covered a much wider portion of his body, perhaps even the remarkable bacterial life within him could not have resisted it. He did survive, however, though greatly weakened and driven even more furiously by the demands of his ravenous affliction. When the quiet group of living people appeared from around the corner, he resisted the impulse to leap, slashing, among them and allowed his piercing wound to heal itself.
“How much farther is it?” Druitt asked Blake, but it was a question which was never to be answered. A “dead” man at his feet suddenly burst upward and hurled the Governor from the writer’s side to a spot ten feet down the hall.
A deafening roar filled the instant following the appearance by the demon. And “demon” was certainly the correct term for Cummings as he stretched to his complete height and wailed in the red light of a globe like Satan himself. Corbett had no weapons to attack him with, so he ducked and tried to kick the creature’s knees, while Morgan screamed over the fearful din for everyone to stand clear of the beast.
The shadowy madness was abruptly split by what looked like the first blazing of a supernova; it was the powerful lamp on Ferguson’s camera that glared forth so gloriously. The others fell back from Cummings, who was pinned in the dazzling beam of light and cried out futilely at the pain. The plan, born in desperation, had worked perfectly.
Corbett felt about in the now even more dramatic darkness and caught Audrey Tucker by the shoulders. “Take off!” he shouted over Cummings’ cries. “Get Gurren and Druitt to the lounge!”
She stumbled away from him in the direction they had been travelling.
Gurren and Dr. Vaughn heard Corbett and followed the girl, but the Governor had been stunned by his sudden battering at the monster’s hands (his left arm and two ribs were broken, but he wasn’t yet aware of this), and when he regained his feet, he wandered almost like a drunken man back to the only strong source of light in the hall. The stark horror of the thing caught in that powerful light blew away all traces of his confusion and told him where he was, but in spite of every fear that shrieked within him, he didn’t run. A stand had to be made; the creature had to be stopped. He slowly stooped and grasped a metal chair that had been dropped by one of the others, none of whom he could see now.
Ferguson held the lamp on Cummings like a man totally without nerves. Each time that the beast leaped forward in an attempt to smash the blazing light, the big photographer danced away with agility that belied his bulk. This swift countering technique appeared to be working far better than they might have dared hope, as Cummings was driven into a state of frenzy which could only conclude in his flight down the corridor, but Druitt’s brave—if uncharacteristic—display in carrying the battle forward disrupted the entire plan.
When Druitt staggered into the beam, Cummings was provided with an instant of welcome shadow that allowed him to launch another attack. He knocked the Governor again to the floor and managed to reach the camera with a slashing motion that tore it from Brad’s hands. It crashed to the floor and scattered shards of the bulb across the floor.
Complete blindness engulfed them. They had been so accustomed to the camera’s white brilliance that they were momentarily unable to detect the comparatively faint redness of the room numbers. Curses and shouts mixed, the latter wordless and throat-rending, and only the fact that the creature was, if anything, more blinded by the darkness kept them from dying in the few seconds that followed.
Somehow, Morgan fell across Druitt and recognized him. He roughly jerked the man to his feet and shoved him in the direction of the front entrance, where the three others of their party had vanished. “Run, you goddamned fool!” he shouted. “Find the lounge, get them to open the doors!”
For all of his short-lived courage and his dedication to ending the terrible ordeal, Druitt then realized that his only actual worth as a part of this was contained in his one exceptional talent, his voice. He ignored his own stabbing pains and the cries of those left behind to seek out the instrument that would turn his words into the potent weapon that would be needed to get help from the outside.
Corbett had caught up the chair that the Governor had dropped when knocked down by Cummings and now threw himself toward the only standing form near him. He hoped that it was not Morgan, Coslo, or Ferguson when he swung the mass of metal edge-on at the shadow and was rewarded with the werewolf’s familiar howl of pain.
The top of the chair landed solidly across the beast’s forehead, causing him to stumble back, swiping ineffectually at the air. Blake pressed his advantage with three more hard blows that connected with the head and shoulders of the monster. He realized that their only chance now was to keep Cummings on the defensive while the others reached a phone and then to somehow get into a lab and pray that the doors would hold until help arrived.
Blake missed his next swing at the monster, and his own momentum spun him about and allowed Cummings to swat him on the shoulder with enough force to bring him to his knees; he squatted there, a perfect target, beneath a radiant sign that said “A-2”. For an instant, his legs wouldn’t work, and he looked about wildly for help as Cummings slowly stalked toward him. He saw Max Coslo standing motionless on the fringe of the red light with a chair dangling from his hands.
“Coslo, help me!” he shouted.
But the other man only stood there, entranced by visions filling his mind. He couldn’t accept this. Before, during the rush from the gallery and then from the central office, he had seen Cummings, but both times there had been a protective band of people separating him from the nightmare and he had run as a part of the herd, screaming but unharmed. Now the beast was right there, in the same fragment of reality as he inhabited; it was something that had no right to exist by all of the laws of science and religion, and there was no one to stop the horror from turning on him with those awful teeth. He stared into the living face of every instant of fear that he had ever lived.
“Coslo!” Ferguson repeated as he struggled to his own feet.
The sound of his name snapped what remained of the man’s self-control, and the chair clattered to the floor. Then he turned on one foot and ran screaming from that unacceptable time and place through a blackness that was both safety and damnation to him. Every time that he stepped upon or stumbled over another of the werewolf’s victims, his dive into insanity was sharpened and his panic multiplied; within seconds, he was only a faint scream in the distance.
Though he had no way of knowing it, Coslo had saved Blake Corbett’s life in that instant. When the monster’s head snapped around at the noise of the chair hitting the floor, the writer gathered his remaining strength in his legs and sprang forward, with his own chair thrust ahead of him like a shield. The combined energy and surprise of the action allowed him to knock Cummings aside and dart into the blessed darkness beyond. He turned back to face the beast when Morgan and Ferguson had regained their feet and were ready to help him fend off more attacks by the insatiable creature.
Their stand was gallant and futile. Gone were the purpose of buying time for the others and turning Cummings down the corridor. Now they understood that it was their lives which were at issue, and all that they tried to do was hold off the final assault while finding a room to flee into. They were momentarily successful in keeping him at bay with the chairs and hit and run attacks, but none of the doors would open for them and their shouts through the wall speakers drew no responses. Against a stronger, faster, and inexhaustible foe, they had to lose eventually, and it wasn’t long—no more than five minutes—before each member of the trio lay on the floor with his consciousness almost beaten away and the creature standing in triumph over them.
Morgan watched as Death approached on clawed feet.
Walter Taylor came alive.
He was in the laboratory just across the hallway from where the three men lay in defeat and the monster raged in victory, and he knew these facts with an understanding that originated within the heart of his existence, as well as through the impassioned voices that came from the device entrenched in the wall of the room. These cries had been studiously resisted by the other men and women in the lab with him, but they were breath to the very fires of his being. Now was the Time, no more false beginnings! His birth had been schemed millennia before for this single, magnificent confrontation, and there was no fear or sorrow in the expanse of his soul. His life flared like a hundred suns inside the confines of his mighty form.
“All Father!” he roared with ecstasy as he came to his feet.
“Walter, sit down!” whispered his sister urgently. She knew, as did the others, that some kind of mad, hybrid animal was roaming the halls and killing some poor people right outside the doors to that very room. “Be quiet!” she begged him.
“Aye, calm yourself, Girl,” he replied in a resounding, yet controlled and affectionate voice. She didn’t know and could never truly understand. She tried to stand, but he gently pressed her down with one massive hand.
“Hey, hey, shut that big goon up!” said a man in a voice that was little more than a squeak.
“Walter, please!”
Walter turned his gaze on the man who had spoken, but this one refused to even meet his eyes. “What manner of warrior …” he rumbled, leaving the rest to be filled in by the other’s fighting soul, or lack of it.
Dorothy grew panicky. “You have to sit down, Walter, there’s something out there!”
He threw back his massive head and laughed. “Aye! Something great and damned, and it will feel my blade this night!” He held the long table leg aloft; it was no Excalibur or Eaglesbreath, but it was all that he possessed, and for this glorious meeting, he would have employed nothing more than his hands, if needs be.
There was no mistaking his intention when he set his gait in the direction of the door. Though the Girl and a number of others turned their strengths to stopping him, he ignored their childish efforts. The only barrier to be broken now was that created by the doors that had closed him in this room. He had some knowledge of this place and the way that he had lived in it at one time, before he had come to himself, so he knew the switch and recognized the purpose of it without difficulty.
“Good lord, stop him!” shrieked a woman. “He’s going to let that thing in here!”
Blows bounced from his shoulders, and one bottle of liquid was stretched all the way up to crash against his head, so high above theirs, but he hardly noticed these things. With a shout of half-anger, half-joy, he turned and thrust them away from him with a single surge of his huge arms.
Only the Girl did not feel his wrath, because she had always loved him. He faced the now-open irradiation chamber and the challenge that he had only lived to meet.
“Hoy, cacodemon!” he bellowed exultantly. “See your dooming! This very hour shall your brain float in the bone pits and your blood soak the soil like rain! Turn, turn, turn to face the warrior who shall rip out your heart and scatter your intestines for the feasting of the birds!” He slammed the table leg against a wall, and the sound raced around the corridor.
In the hall itself, Douglas Morgan was convinced that he had been seized by hallucinations. He had been weakly trying to crawl away from Cummings and the honor of being the first kill when the blackness was interrupted by a wide bar of bluish-wide light from a lab and this literally gigantic shadow stepped out, tossing an insane challenge in comic strip language. He could hardly believe his eyes, and the surprise was only strengthened when the werewolf turned away from him and bellowed a defiant response.
For an instant, they stood there like a pair of figures out of a drug-induced dream before Cummings charged in obvious delight across the hall. Corbett and Ferguson had recovered enough to stagger up by then, so the three men watched what had to be, in their reasoning, just another incredibly brave, but ultimately useless sacrifice.
The beast had sprung to within five feet of the massive man when the latter responded with a dazzling burst of speed in whipping over the metal club that he carried into his attacker’s shoulder. The power of the blow was such that the werewolf was knocked from his feet and into a roll that didn’t end until he lay fifteen yards away in the darkness. For a moment, even Cummings was too stupefied to utter a sound.
Doug recovered his voice first. “Get back in the lab!” he screamed, limping quickly away from the downed monster and toward the open doors.
Ferguson and Corbett shook themselves free of their stunned inertia to follow the reporter, but they could hear Cummings’ renewed fury just behind them and suddenly found the way into the room blocked by the strange man, who was almost a foot taller than big Brad. Brad grasped one of his arms and attempted to drag him into the lab, but he might as well have been pulling on a sequoia for all that he accomplished.
“Do you die so easily?” demanded the giant. He freed himself of the confused men with a step forward. “My sword thirsts for the poisonous fluid of your body!”
“What the hell is going on?” Morgan shouted.
Barely visible in the radiance of a red bulb, the battle resumed as the monster darted at his tormentor and the giant swung the club in blows that landed consistently and with savage effect. The way into the lab was open now, but none of the three escaped through it, because their eyes were gripped by the sights which were evolving only a few feet from them.
“I gotta get this on film!” Ferguson said while he scrambled about, searching for his camera without looking away from the conflict. “What a scene, my god, would you look at that!”
The war was continuing as it moved away from them, with Walter’s swift counters with the blood-drenched table leg offsetting the creature’s desperate attempts to get in close to tear open the arms wielding the club.
Blake was throbbing throughout his body and his head seemed half-filled with wet sand, but he found himself clutching the same chair which had already failed to protect him from Cummings and stepping in the direction of the fighting bodies just in case the terrific strength of the man was worn down by the ceaseless attacks of the monster.
Morgan could hardly stand on his right ankle, and he needed no medical examination to assure him that it was broken, but he, too, lingered in the corridor in the unbreakable fascination of that eerie vision and was almost bowled over by another form emerging from the open lab doors. He wrapped his arms around the smaller body to keep her from chasing after the warriors and to keep himself from falling again.
“Where are you going?” he yelled.
“Mister, you’ve got to stop them! Don’t let him get killed!” the young woman screamed hysterically.
Those words shattered what had been a fragile respite from responsibility and danger for Douglas Morgan, a short time in which the questions of survival had been in the hands of another. He glanced in the direction into which the rescue envoy had disappeared, Audrey, Gurren, Vaughn, and Druitt desperately seeking a way to contact those outside, and he thought that his responsibility was now with them, to ensure that their mission was completed. Then he looked back into the shadows where the huge man was bringing the fight to Cummings, shoving it down the monster’s throat and roaring in a wild, glorious joy. What could he do to help, especially since the pain from his ankle would very soon penetrate the shock that was deadening his nerve endings and render him unable to walk?
“Please, please!” the blonde-haired girl begged. “It’s going to kill my brother!”
“That big guy?” he asked fuzzily. “He’s handling it, he’s doing okay on his—”
“He’s fighting a monster! At least help him! Please!”
“Listen, I’m hurt … my ankle …”
“He’s only sixteen years old!”
Jesus Christ, only a kid, Morgan thought, and he saved my life. “Okay, I’ll do what I can. Get back in the lab, Miss. Brad, can you come with me?”
Ferguson stood with the camera in its place on his shoulder. “Try to catch me, son,” he answered.
Corbett had heard it all and used the anger and fear coming from the girl and the primal joy bursting from the giant to renew his own spirit. Standing before the open doors to the lab, he shouted into the room, “You men in there! We need help! Grab something to use as weapons and come on!”
The answer was non-verbal and immediate: the chamber doors slid shut and locked. Blake was stunned and then enraged. He slammed his chair repeatedly against the dead steel and screamed curses at those beyond it. Only when Morgan stumbled against him for support did he come to his senses. Then, like soldiers making a final charge against the enemy, the three men and the girl rushed down the hall after the furious, ongoing battle.
Walter had driven Cummings before him like a leaf in a gale, and in doing so he had struck the werewolf blows that would have killed any normal man. But each time that he tore a deep trench in the body of the beast and released a new fountain of diseased blood, the unbelievable resiliency provided by the organisms mended the damage as swiftly as waves coming together in a trough. The Warrior knew—had known from the very first—that this was a creature beyond any that he had ever faced and one with the devils at its command, but still no hint of fear made itself felt in that jubilant outpouring from his heart.
So very few people ever experienced the exact point in life for which they have been destined since before their conception, but this was Walter’s time. The spirits of all of his brethren on the Other side rejoiced with him in the magnificent battle.
The darkness hindered them both, though Cummings’ eyes were more suited to the gloom than Walter’s, and when they came to a set of swinging doors that opened into a vast amphitheater which had been abandoned with lights blazing at the sound of the general alarm, Walter maneuvered the conflict so that he could lead the creature into an element more suited to his style of fighting. He made a brutal mistake when he took a precautionary swing at Cummings and turned to open one of the doors, however, because his club missed the beast and created the perfect opening for a knife-like counterstroke.
Cummings leaped high and swiftly to land upon Walter’s wide shoulders, and his glittering teeth dug hungrily for the man’s throat.
A clutch of knives sank into Walter’s neck, just behind his left ear. He howled like some wild bull as the agony flooded through him. His hands dropped the club and closed about the chest of the monster; with a feral cry, he ripped the fastened body from him, held it high over his head, and hurled it through the doors into the auditorium with the force of a missile fired from a canon.
Cummings’ screams receded momentarily, but Walter gave no thought to escape. The terror was rolling in pain in another room, blood was streaming freely from a dozen wounds in Walter’s body, including a huge one in his neck, and he as yet saw no sign of the help that was coming from the blackness of the hall, but instead of running, the Warrior swept up his club in one hand and sprinted with jubilation after his fallen foe.
Cummings met him as he passed through the doors by leaping directly into his face, but Walter’s marvelous reflexes answered the challenge once more with an upward swing of the table leg that caught the beast in the chest and sent him somersaulting back in a high arc. He rushed at the numbed monster and thrust the jagged end of his warping sword down through the writhing form—driving the club completely through the flesh until it struck the wet floor beneath—but Cummings kicked his legs from under him and twisted upward with enough strength to wrench the spike from the hole it had dug into his abdomen. He staggered momentarily, as desperately injured as he had been throughout the battle.
Morgan, Corbett, Ferguson, and Dorothy Taylor burst into the auditorium then, and their cries of exhortation and horror added to the deafening pandemonium. Blake, the only man with any remaining speed and mobility, ran across the room to aid Walter with his dented metal chair.
Walter had regained both his feet and his club when Cummings attacked again. He knew now that the move into the amphitheater, despite the light that it offered him, had been a mistake. In the narrower corridor, he had controlled the flow of the battle with the fast, devastating blows from his substitute sword; but in the spacious auditorium the monster was freer to run, dodge his blows, and charge at him from all angles. The god of war that now controlled Walter’s brain recognized all of this, even in his battle madness, and he decided that this new freedom—plus the fact that the monster’s form could sustain no permanent wound—would undoubtedly be the decisive difference in the meeting, but he still couldn’t force himself to care. He was at last in the battle of the ages.
Before Corbett could reach them, the tide shifted against the mighty Warrior. Cummings began to get in more often and tear new rents in Walter’s flesh. Failing to overwhelm the giant, as he had successfully overwhelmed so many others, he would come in very low, like the wolf his mind had used as a model in fashioning his strange body, and this way he was able to slip beneath the club to savage the boy’s chest and stomach before being wrestled off. For a time, Walter defended himself by whipping the table leg down in wicked, backhanded blows. But after a few of these, his swings became slower and his breath deteriorated into great, wheezing gasps. The wounds in his throat, which were defeating him more than anything else, vented large crimson bubbles among the streaming blood.
But his love of the moment lessened not a whit.
Taking advantage of the other’s slowing actions, Cummings was eventually able to bite deeply into the right forearm and make Walter drop the highly effective club. Instantly, he again went for the boy’s neck, but those gigantic hands caught him and raised him into the ringing air as if he were a child.
“Die, then!’ screamed Walter.
Cummings soared from the aisle in which the war had been taking place and crashed among the bolted seats that filled the room, with the bones of his back snapping completely into shards in an explosion of pain. Ignoring the pleas of the little people around him, Walter waded among the chairs, pulled the monster skyward again, and then sent him on another incredible flight toward the front of the auditorium.
When Cummings landed this time, it was on the wide stage that filled the front of the room, and an instant later the world above Gerald Cummings was all an image of a wild-eyed man shouting in triumph and raining down hellish punishment from fists as large as buckets. At that moment the huge, coordinated, and powerful entity known in two worlds as Walter Bearsarm/Taylor would have overcome any man or woman—any human being ever born; he was, indeed, the greatest Warrior of all.
But Gerald Cummings was no longer human.
Whether he realized it or not, this was Walter’s final offensive, one which would end in victory or death, and out of some unfathomable well of understanding, he had suddenly come to understand what it would take to bring a real end to this creature. But he needed a weapon of some kind, something with a cutting edge, and he had not even his club, only his hands …
The punches fell for almost half a minute before the Warrior removed himself from the chest of his enemy and lifted its addled head from the stage with a great, twisting, upward heave. “Your head, fiend, your head is mine!” he roared.
It was not to be. Cummings was hurt and confused, but he was also possessed by a lifeform which allowed him to draw stamina from an unquenchable fire. His arms came slowly up as Walter worked in a final madness, and his clawed hands found the Warrior’s open throat once more. Walter struggled, roared his anger and defiance, but he faced the inevitable like the man he had always been among his own; he had known from the first that he would be in danger of the final night, but what was death other than a reward for the man who met it in a man’s fashion?
The werewolf finally beat him to the floor and covered his defenseless chest and throat like a deadly sheet from the bowels of Hell.
When Cummings rose from his greatest victim, ready to feast on the neck and complete the hardest kill of his existence, Corbett was on the stage at his side and swung the long, stained club that had been torn from Walter’s hands. The blow landed on his forehead with enough energy to drive him backward and tumbling over the edge of the raised platform to the floor. Ferguson waited there with a desperate tactic that he had not yet been able to employ during the ordeal. It came from the earliest tales of monsters and their ends, and it lived again in the material of his torn coat in crackling eagerness. It was fire.
Cummings was enveloped by the flaring, melting, polyester-coated garment before he could spring to his feet. When the flames raced from the material into the long hair that covered his body, he lost his triumph and became the prey. The victims were forgotten as he lashed at the flames consuming his outer flesh and ran blindly as if trying to shed it from him. He hit the doors and dashed like a glowing meteor into the endless corridor.
Morgan was the first to find his voice after the creature had shot within mere feet of him on its charge from the room. “You did it, Brad! That’s the answer! We’ll burn the bastard!”
In reply, the automatic sprinkler system was activated by the heat and smoke, and it doused them heavily.
“Still think so?” the photographer asked with a grim smile. “Besides, it would only annoy him. It’ll take something more than fire to stop that thing. Like a live grenade shoved down his esophagus, maybe.”
“You got one?” asked Morgan while he hobbled painfully into one of the chairs. “How’s the kid?”
Ferguson looked toward the stage, where Corbett and the girl were kneeling on either side of the still form of the giant. The water continued to spray from the ceiling, making them look almost comical in the midst of the madness. Walter was conscious, though bleeding viciously throughout most of his body, especially from the wounds in his throat.
“The rain,” he boomed out in a barely weakened voice. “The sweet tears of the moon are sent by the gods in a cleansing flood to wash free my soul and bid me enter Valhalla.”
“You’re not going to die, Walter,” his sister said in a pleading tone, and Blake wondered how many times he had heard those words in the course of the endless night—how many times he’d said them himself. “The monster’s gone, so you hold on until we can get you to the doctors!”
He smiled up at her. “Don’t cry for me, child. Recall … only recall the battle itself! What a wonderful present to give those who watch above! Holy gods of war, did ever Red Eric or even Conan engage such a foe with the same strength or zeal?”
Without thinking, Corbett whispered, “Never.”
“Please, Walter, you need to rest now …”
He laughed; mutilated and dying, he actually laughed. “Aye, the rest which I shall garner in the hours before morning when I shall be risen anew in the eternal hall to live, fight again, die, and repeat the cycle throughout Glory with the greatest lives of all time at my side!”
Dorothy was crying too much to reply, and Blake was, to put it honestly, too awed by the moment to speak.
“Death is reward,” Walter continued. “I die with a warrior’s pride and in a warrior’s boots … my sword. Fetch to me my sword.”
“Uh, I don’t know where I dropped it,” mumbled Corbett.
The giant’s voice rose hysterically to show the very first fear that he had evidenced during the entire night. “Would you deny me entrance to Heaven? Give me my sword so that I may die a death befitting a man!”
Ferguson retrieved the battered table leg from where Blake had thrown it after flooring Cummings, and Walter’s wide face was transformed from concern to sublime contentment when his broken fingers closed about it. He laughed again and began to sit up. Dorothy tried to keep him in a lying position, but he sat up despite her efforts and struggled to his feet, where he stood alone and shook in the grip of life’s end.
“Look down and judge!” he roared at the ceiling. The water kept raining upon them. “Do you find an equal? A man fit to be listed among you? Who can call me to task?”
The room dropped to near silence.
Walter Taylor, Bearsarm, raised his sword into the air and shouted out in a voice so loud that it hurt their ears, “Odin!” The word echoed in the huge room like a wild song. In ecstasy now, he repeated, “Odin!”
Corbett realized that he wasn’t breathing.
And the final act was closed with the cry of “Valhalla!”