Evil Star (33 page)

The mobile laboratory was in front of him. The helicopter had come down less than a quarter of a mile away. What time was it? He still had no watch and he won-dered if he was too late, if midnight had already passed. In that case, somewhere in the Nazca desert or perhaps even in another part of Peru, the gate would have opened.

The Old Ones would already be walking, once again, on the face of the Earth.

The laboratory was part truck, part container, part mobile home. It had been driven here on eight fat rubber tires but once it had arrived, it had been jacked up on steel legs so that the wheels were about twenty centimeters off the ground. There was a driving cabin at the front — empty — and a door with a couple of steps leading down the side. Matt's eyes were drawn to the roof. Another satel-lite dish, about three meters wide, pointed upward, connected to the main body of the vehicle by a series of thick wires. There were other machines surrounding it. A ladder led up at the very back. This was going to be easier than Matt had thought.

He stopped.

He remembered how he had to do it. The key was the smell of burning. Somehow, all this had begun with the death of his parents in a car accident when he was eight years old. That morning, his mother had burned the toast. And whenever his power came back to Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star him, so did the mem-ory of that single, defining moment in his life.

When Gavin Taylor had tripped him up at Forrest Hill, he had smelled burning. A moment later, the chandelier had exploded. And the next day, in class, as Gwenda prepared to drive a petrol tanker into the school. . . the same thing.

He smelled it now. He closed his eyes and let it happen. His arms were loosely folded in front of him. He could feel the cool of the evening on the back of his neck. With a sense of calm, he waited for it to happen. He wasn't in any hurry. At last he was in control.

He opened his eyes.

In front of him, the satellite began to shimmer and bend, as if caught in a heat haze. Matt concentrated. It was as if he were pushing himself, or some part of himself, for-ward. Something invisible was flowing out of him. He heard a shot but he knew that nobody had fired at him. He had torn one of the bolts out of the roof. He smiled to himself and at once another bolt snapped, then two more. If there had been four men standing on the truck, they would have been unable to move the satellite dish. But Matt was rip-ping it out as if it were paper.

The entire dish rattled as if it were trying to jerk itself free of the metal roof. Matt helped it. He merely flicked his eyes and the dish came free, the cables and supports snap-ping, the whole thing spinning away into the night. And that was it. It was over. Whoever was inside the trailer would no longer have control of the satellite.

Matt was astonished that, after all he had been through, the whole thing had ended so quickly.

The door of the mobile laboratory opened and a figure stepped out.

It was Salamanda. Matt had only ever seen him once, but of course Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star the elongated head, the tiny eyes and mouth, and the colorless skin were unforgettable. He was wearing black trousers and a white shirt, the sleeves open and loose. Carefully, he stepped down from the trailer. Even the three steps were a challenge for him. All his attention was focused on keeping his head upright. It was the same task that had occupied him throughout his life. Behind him, through the open door, Matt saw other men and a woman wearing a white coat. Miss Klein. He remembered her from the hacienda and wondered why she was here. But Salamanda wouldn't have been able to track the satellite on his own. He had brought along his technicians to help.

Almost idly, Matt wondered what would happen next. Salamanda reached the ground and stood, staring at him. He had something in his hand. A gun — of course. Did he really think he could use that against Matt?

"Why are you here?" Salamanda screamed in fury. His face would have been contorted in anger except that it was contorted already and always had been. His eyes blazed. "How did you get here?"

"What time is it?" Matt asked.

Salamanda stopped. It was as if he had been slapped. "What. . . ?"

"What time is it?"

The man understood the question and why Matt had asked it. "It's five minutes to twelve!" he replied. "Five min-utes . . . that's all I need! Five minutes more!"

He raised the gun and fired.

The bullet exploded out of the barrel and began to travel toward Matt, aiming for his head. It didn't get any-where near it. Matt simply stopped it in midair and sent it spinning away into the night.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star And at the same time, he pushed a little harder. Salamanda felt the waves of pure energy shimmer past him. He wasn't touched himself,
hut
behind him, it was as if the truck with its mobile laboratory had been hit by a nuclear blast. The whole thing was picked up and flung away like a toy in the hands of an angry child, somersaulting over and over again as it bounced across the sand. It traveled for a hundred meters and at last came to a stop, crumpled in on itself, and lay still.

Salamanda stood where he was, out in the open, exposed. He had nothing to support him. The gun hung limp in his hand.

“You think you've won," he said. "But you haven't. The world belonged to the Old Ones and it will belong to them again. It said so in the diary. . . ."

"Maybe the diary was wrong."

"It can't be."

Matt gazed at the man who had caused him so much torment, who had tried to kill him and who had been responsible for the deaths of his friends. "Why did you do it?" he asked. “You're rich. You've got all these houses. You've got a huge business. Why wasn't it enough?"

Salamanda laughed. “You're a child!" he said dismissively. "Or you'd understand. There's no such thing as enough." He fell silent.

Nothing moved. The people inside the laboratory were either unconscious or dead. Still there wasn't a hint of a breeze. "Do you have any idea how much I hate you?" Salamanda asked.

"Hate is all you have," Matt replied.

Salamanda lifted the gun and fired the five remaining shots.

Once again, Matt turned the bullets around and scattered them.
But Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star this time, there were too many of them. He
couldn't control where they all went. Three of them spun away into the night, but the two others smashed into Salamanda's chest. Salamanda was thrown off his feet and onto his back. Matt heard his neck break. The huge head rolled to the side. The eyes stared blankly up at the night.

It was over.

Matt let out a deep breath. He would go back to the helicopter and stay with Pedro until the morning if he had to. By then, Richard and the others would have arrived. They would probably be on their way even now. He shiv-ered. It seemed to him that it had gotten very cold. And there was something else. He hadn't noticed it before, but there was the smell of decay in the air. Rotten meat. He looked up, remembering the condors. There was no sign of them. But the sky had changed color. There was some-thing pulsating inside the blackness. A sort of dark mauve light. The stars seemed more intense than ever, unnatu-rally so. They were like lightbulbs that were about to fuse. Matt's head was aching. He looked over to the mountains. And there it was.

A single, brilliant light was traveling horizontally across, making for a point between two peaks. It was very low in the sky. From where Matt was standing, it looked as if it were just meters above the ground. He knew at once that it wasn't a star. Nor was it a plane. It was the satellite. It had to be. With a terrible sense of emptiness, Matt thought back over what had just happened. Salamanda had lined up the satellite. He had been guiding it into position. Then Matt had arrived and destroyed the laboratory.

But he'd been too late. It was as if he had destroyed a gun after the bullet had been fired. He hadn't had time to change the trajectory of the satellite, and even without guidance it had continued moving, Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star making for its final resting point. Of course, it wouldn't stop.

Perhaps it would end up crashing into the Earth. But that didn't matter. At the very instant that it reached its correct position, the alignment of the stars would be complete, the combinadon lock would be forced, and the gate would open.

And that was what was happening.

The gate was opening after all.

Matt felt something tremble underneath his feet. He looked down and saw a crack appear in the sand. It began quite close to where he was standing and then twisted and zigzagged into the distance."

Another crack ran across it. Several more began to spread in every direction. It was as if the entire desert were breaking up. At the same time, some sort of liquid began to ooze out from below, spilling onto the sand. It was dark in color, somewhere between brown and red, with the consistency of glue or treacle — except that it was obviously blood, because Matt could smell it everywhere in the air, sweet and sickly. The cracks widened. Matt actually felt himself moving. It was as if he had been caught in an earthquake, except that this was somehow slower and more deliberate. The mauve light in the sky was pulsing harder than ever. Something somewhere began to scream. The sound came from everywhere, thin and high-pitched.

Matt wanted to put his hands over his ears but he knew it would do no good.

He understood something now that he hadn't under-stood before. He had come to Peru looking for a second gate and had thought that it would be found somewhere in the Nazca desert. But he had been wrong. They had all been wrong. Because the Nazca desert
was
the gate. The whole thing. He could actually see the famous lines from where he was standing, even though it should have been impossi-Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star ble. They were glowing. There were circles and triangles, rectangles and squares, drawings on a vast scale, activated and ready after a wait of more than twenty thousand years.

The ground was rumbling. He could feel the vibrations traveling through him. He tried to refocus, to gather in his own power, but it was hopeless. He was as completely alone as he had been told he would be. There was nothing more he could do. The rumbling grew louder, and at the same time an icy wind sprang up all around him, throwing the sand into his eyes and sending his hair flapping against his forehead. Matt lost his balance and staggered. He heard laughter echoing across the plain. His vision shimmered and then there was the sound of what could have been a huge whiplash, so loud that it almost threw him off his feet. Light burst out of the desert floor, slicing through the air, lancing up into the sky. Blinded and battered, Matt fell to his knees.

Silence. Everything had stopped.

Then the creatures began to appear.

There was an eruption as if from a volcano. A huge bird exploded out of the ground in front of Matt and hung, static in the air, its wings beating so fast that they were barely visible. The earth boiled all around it. Matt felt the air buffeting against him and covered his face with his arms, afraid of being blinded. It was a hummingbird.

Its eyes were black and brilliant and full of wickedness. Its beak was half open, and Matt knew that if it chose to, it could swal-low him whole.

Four massive, hairy legs suddenly appeared, reaching out over the edge of the desert, and a gigandc spider pulled itself up from below.

Matt saw the poison sac hanging under its belly. Two glistening fangs jutted out of its neck. It paused for a moment, twitching, then Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star scurried away.

There was a screech, and a monkey leaped out of nowhere, its tail curling and uncurling, its teeth stretched in a grotesque smile. One by one, the pictures that he had once seen from the air sprang to life.

Matt stayed where he was, on his knees, waiting for his own death to come.

For perhaps twenty seconds, nothing more happened. Matt heard a buzzing sound. It started low and distant, then rose, getting louder and louder until it was as if there was a chain saw trying to cut the world apart. Matt pressed his hands against his ears, and the next moment a vast cloud of insects burst out of the cracks in the ground and twisted into the air. They were flies with fat, black bodies and beat-ing wings. They flew out of the cracks in an endless swarm —

thousands of them, then millions, then thou-sands of millions, a plague of flies thicker than the air, filling the entire sky. Then, as Matt watched in horror, they began to re-form themselves. They flew together, forming the shapes of men, armed soldiers. Each man was made up of perhaps ten thousand flies and in an instant there was a whole army of them, standing at attention in long lines that stretched all the way back to the mountains.

They were the advance guard. But there were still more creatures climbing out of the bowels of the Earth, finally breaking free from the world where they had been held captive for so many centuries.

The ones that came now were like no recognizable life-forms. They were just strange, freakish shapes with the beginnings of arms and legs stretching out of them. Some had horns, some teeth, some gleeful, bulging eyes. Some were part animal and part human, an alligator on legs, a pig the size of a horse, a huge toad with the head of a bird. Each one was more deformed, more horrible than the one Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star before, and they continued to pour out of the ground until the entire desert floor was covered by them. Some were black. Some were gray. Occasionally there were bursts of color: green feathers, glistening white teeth, the dirty yellow of pus dripping from an open wound. They stood there, breathing the air of the world they had come to destroy with the fly soldiers stretching out behind them, waiting for their first command.

But their true commander was still to come.

A fork of lighting splintered through the night sky and the rumbling deepened. One after the other, thirteen more figures in the form of men appeared on horseback, dressed in rusting armor and rags. Each one of them was a giant, ten feet tall. There was a flash of lightning