Armageddon?? (31 page)

The
baldrick watched the fat old man land in the food court on the floor below and
looked around for another victim. A middle-aged woman had stopped running and
was facing him, holding both hands out as if she was praying. A ridiculous idea
but who knew what these humans would try. Then there were a series of bright
flashes from the woman’s hands and the baldrick felt six jabbing pains in his
chest. He paused for a brief second then started after the woman.

“Lady
you got reloads?”

“No.”
She wailed, looking at the monster bearing down on her.

“Run!”
The man speaking had another handgun out. One a lot bigger than the woman’s
little Kel-Tec .32. He was in the correct position, M1911A1 in both hands,
right hand pushing, left hand pulling and his nine shots made a perfect group
on the baldricks chest. Then, his slide locked back on empty, he followed the
woman running for the exit, the baldrick now streaming green blood from the
wound in its chest, closing rapidly on them.

They
were saved by the shoe salesman in Gary’s Shoe Store, who had been a mighty
athlete in his day. As the baldrick crossed in front of his store, he ran out
and took it in a perfect football tackle, slamming it off its feet and into the
guard rail. The railing, more decorative than ornamental, cracked free of the
floor and for a moment looked like it might give way under the impact, but it
held and the fighting human and baldrick bounced off it back onto the floor.
The baldrick managed to tear at the human’s face with one hand and that gained
him enough of an advantage to throw him off. The shoe salesman was blinded,
crippled by the injury and didn’t have a chance of evading the slash that tore
out his heart. By that time, the man and woman who had shot the baldrick were
safely away.

Out
in the car park was a Ford F-150 pick-up truck, covered with NRA stickers. More
significantly, both its driver and passenger were hunters who had come in for
some supplies at the Northwest Face store before going off on a trip. Bill
Redfield saw the people pouring out of the exits and managed to stop one as he
ran past the truck.

“What’s
going on?”

“Baldricks,
in the mall. They’re killing everybody.” The man tore himself free and
continued running.

“Can’t
get in though the doors Jim, too many people coming out. Like running into an
avalanche.”

“The
Café.”

“Hit
It.”

The
Coffee Cup Café was on the ground floor level with the car park and, better, it
had a terrace and windows that were a rare interruption in the otherwise blank
mall walls. Jim Caldwell slammed his truck into gear and floored the
accelerator. He was doing over 60 miles an hour when his truck ploughed through
the terrace tables and smashed open the windows beyond. Redfield and Caldwell,
and their truck, were in the mall. A few seconds later they were running into
the main concourse holding their hunting rifles.

“Escalators,
up.” The screaming said the baldricks were on the top floor. They sprinted up
the escalator in time to see a single baldrick, there was only one, tearing a
man apart outside a shoe store. The baldrick stood up and started to close in
on the people struggling outside Macys but Caldwell dropped to one knee and
took aim. He had an old Garand, sporterized and fitted with a scope, across the
width of the mall it was murderously accurate. He squeezed out his eight rounds
of .30-06 and heard the characteristic ‘ting’ as the clip was ejected. The
baldrick staggered with the impacts, obviously finding it had to stay on its
feet, but it was still obviously determined to get into the crowd of humans.
That wasn’t bad tactics either, once mixed in with humans, the usefulness of
the hunting rifles would be much diminished.

Redfield
stopped that happening. His favored game was elk and moose and he had the rifle
to match. A Weatherby Mark V Deluxe chambered for .416 Weatherby Magnum. With
its scope, it had cost him almost $3,000 and his wife had given him the silent
treatment for three months after she’d found it in the gun safe. He dropped
flat and took careful aim, squeezing the trigger and feeling the brutal recoil
as the rifle sent the heavy bullet tearing down range. He didn’t stop to see
what the result was, he was working the bolt to feed the second round into the
chamber. By the time he got his eye back to the scope, the baldrick was sitting
down, the wall behind it splattered green with its blood. Redfield fired again,
seeing the baldrick jerk as the bullet ploughed into it. There was no doubt, it
was down for good but he still had a single round left in his rifle and the
thing was still moving. He worked the bolt again then took careful aim at the
monster’s head. It burst very pleasingly as the bullet struck home.

Redfield
straightened up, pleased with himself despite the pain in his shoulder.
Caldwell was looking at him. “Remind me never to poke fun at that cannon of
yours again,” he said.

Across
the concourse, it was hard to believe it was over. The baldrick lay dead barely
ten feet from where Maria stood crying. She was in shock, from terror and the
deafening explosions that had brought the monster down. She and her friends had
been at the back of the crowd trying to escape and they would have been the
first to die if the baldrick had reached the crowd. Maria knew it but all she
could think of was that in the panic she’d lost the bag holding her new blouse.
Now she’d lost it, it seemed enormously important to her. Behind her, she felt
a hand on her shoulder.

“Hey
Maria.” It was Kelly, one of the Anglo girls with Maria’s shopping bag. “You
dropped this. Second lesson on being a mall rat, never, ever, let go of your
loot.”

Across
the mall concourse, two men in hunting clothes stood up. There was silence for
a second, then an eruption of cheering. One of the men waved, the other held
his rifle above his head. The cheering redoubled.

Maria
found a microphone stuck in her face. “KVTW News. What did you see?”

“I
saw the devil coming to kill us and an old security man attacked it with a
stick. It killed him but he saved our lives. Éra el hombre mas valiente que
nunca haya visto.”

The
television reporter turned to another person, a woman who was staring at a tiny
semi-automatic pistol in her hand. “Ma’am, what do you think?”

She
looked dazedly at the camera. “I need a bigger fucking gun.”

Chapter
Twenty Three

Military
Attache’s Offices, Royal Thai Embassy, Washington DC

Major
General Asanee settled back in her seat to watch the early morning news. She
knew what the leading item was likely to be but the U.S. news networks always
amused her. She flipped the television mounted on the wall to Fox and waited
for the headlines. She wasn’t disappointed.

The
death toll in the baldrick attack on the Lakeview Mall in Chicago continues to
rise. At least ten humans are reported to have been killed when a lone baldrick
materialized in the shopping area of the mall and started to indiscriminately
kill shoppers. Hero of the hour was 56 year old security guard Philip Phelan
who saved the lives of a group of teenage girls when, armed only with a baton,
he defended them from the baldrick. Now, from the scene of the attack….

The
General pursed her lips for a second and asked herself the same question that
was puzzling people in government offices across America. Why had this happened
now? Was it linked to the crushing defeat of the baldrick army in Iraq? If so
it appeared to be opening an entirely new front in the war. Almost
absent-mindedly she flipped channels to CBS.

An
incident in a Chicago mall turned violent yesterday when two gunmen opened fire
with assault rifles on a baldrick that was visiting the shopping plaza. The
gunmen, both members of the NRA, had brought their guns into the mall in
flagrant violation of the operation’s “no guns” policy and started shooting
without warning. More than ten people were killed in the attack.

The
General sighed quietly to herself, the American media never changed she thought
ruefully. Perhaps it was better that nobody believed a word they said. Still,
that comment about the NRA started a chain of thought in her mind, one that
rotated around the phrase “a well-organized militia”. Her country already had
one, the Tahan Phran and it was a key part of their defense against terrorism.
She nodded quietly to herself and picked up the telephone, dialing the Office
of the Secretary of Defense. “Hello, this is Major-General Asanee here. I would
like to speak with Secretary Warner, this morning if possible.”

Outside
the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC

The
television cameras had been waiting outside the White House since early morning,
hoping to catch one of the Cabinet members in a limousine just after the
imposition of gasoline rationing on the rest of America. So far, they had been
sorely disappointed since the only footage they had got was one sequence of
Condoleezza Rice on a bicycle and John Warner jogging into the building. The
cameraman was about to give it up as a bad job when he felt a tap on his
shoulder. A small, nondescript van was pulling into the White House driveway
and, significantly, it passed through security with hardly a moment’s delay. It
wasn’t much but it was better than nothing.

White
House Conference Room, White House, Washington DC

“You
all got the warning about the television cameras then?” President Bush glanced
around the assembled members of the Cabinet, reassured by the nods he received.
“Right let us continue. Just what happened in that mall? And why did it
happen?”

Secretary
Michael Chertoff looked down at the brief he had been given. “The eye witness
accounts are pretty confused as one might expect. As far as we can make out,
the baldrick just appeared within the mall and started killing people, more or
less at random. It carried on doing so until it was shot dead. And that’s
pretty much all we do know.” The Homeland Defense Secretary looked up at the
meeting. “It’s critical we don’t confuse what we think with what we know here.
We can make all sorts of guesses but the amount of hard information we have is
very limited. We can really screw ourselves up if we start thinking our guesses
are facts.”

There
were a series of nods around the table. In some ways, it had been an
unnecessary comment, not confusing facts with deductions from those facts was a
caution that everybody knew. In another way, the warning was timely and vital
for, although everybody knew the principle, they forgot it with dreadful
regularity. People treating their opinions as facts was called the Rumsfeld
Syndrome in this room.

“Another
fact for the pile.” Secretary Warner spoke quietly as was his usual practice.
“That baldrick took a lot of killing. It got hit 15 times with pistol fire, OK
six of those were .32s but the rest were .45s. Also eleven rifle-caliber hits.
Only the last three really hurt it.”

“Not
quite so John.” Secretary Michael O. Leavitt consulted his brief. “My people tell
me that the .30-06 hits would have killed the baldrick eventually but the .416s
really hurried things along. This fits what we’re getting back from Iraq I
believe?”

“It
does Mike. Baldricks appear to die from bleeding out, they can take quite
devastating hits but if they don’t cause massive blood loss, they can keep
going for some time. Some of our snipers report that baldricks have kept going
after taking .50 caliber bullets to the head. On the other hand, fragmentation
damage rips them up and causes extensive bleeding that finishes them quickly.”

“Very
interesting.” Bush was a little annoyed, this was all very well but it didn’t
answer any of the key questions he needed to deal with. “But why did this
happen, how likely is this attack to be repeated and what can we do to stop
them? If this thing just appeared in the middle of a mall, it can appear
anywhere – can’t it?”

In
one corner, General Schatten coughed gently. “If I may be permitted Sir, we
have brought along about the only expert we have on how and why baldricks think
the way they do. If I may be permitted to bring her in?”

Bush
nodded. General Schatten left for a moment, then returned with a companion
whose appearance stunned the room into silence. It was about six feet tall and
was wearing a cape-like red robe which did not hide the fact that it was naked.
Its skin was the sort of shiny black normally associated with insects except
around the head where is faded to a corpse-like white. Its hair was
pinkish-blonde with two red-tipped horns emerging from its lank folds. Its the
mouth large and vivid red, the eyes sunk deep in shadow, their yellow gaze
darting around from one person to the next. On closer inspection, it was
female.

“That’s
a baldrick, are you insane bringing that thing in here?” Secretary Warner’s
voice almost cracked with the shock.

“Ladies,
gentlemen, this is Lugasharmanaska, a succubus who has defected to us. She has
provided us with a significant amount of intelligence over the last few days.
Secretary Chertoff, you stressed the need for facts, not opinions. Luga is the
only person who can give us facts.”

“Take
a seat my dear.” For want of any more appropriate attitude, President Bush
dropped into his genial Texan host mode. Lugasharmanaska took a vacant seat,
appreciating how those nearest to her shifted away. “You heard what happened
yesterday afternoon in Chicago?”