Robert W. Walker (31 page)

"Is everyone all right?" asked Kendra.

"One of them tore a rent in my suit," said Leonard, shaken.

"I've patched it," said Wiz, "but I'm not so certain that will help."

"How do you feel, Dr. Leonard?" asked Kendra.

"Aside from having my brains and my bowels emptied by fear?" he replied.
"All in one piece.
So far, I'm all right."

Kendra examined Leonard's gear, giving a thumbs-up sign, but saying, "At the first sign of trouble with your breathing, Doctor--"

"I'll let you know, Dr. Cline."

"Be certain that you do."

"We've got to get above," said Stroud.

"How will the timbers hold us?"

"Good question. Maybe we'd best hold up here a moment, take time to gather our bearings," suggested Wiz.

"Yeah, time for a rest," said Leonard, flopping down.

Kendra watched Leonard closely, concerned about his condition. It may be more than fatigue, in which case he'd have to come out of his protective wear to take a hypodermic.

"All of you stay put. I'm going ahead with the skull."

"But, Stroud!" began Wiz.

"No arguments! It's between
Esruad
and that thing in there now. Remain here. It's likely to concentrate its efforts on me and the skull if you stay back."

Kendra rushed to him, holding on. "Come back to us, Abe Stroud."

Ignoring her plea, he tossed a rope overhead and caught a large wooden beam. It looked as if it would hold as he put his weight against it, pulling himself up and up until he was through the opening. He called down, "If I'm not back within the hour, you're all to vacate the ship and the tunnels, get back to the surface any way you can."

"We won't leave you, Stroud!" she cried.

"You do as I say, do you hear! Dr.
Wisnewski
, Leonard."

"We will do what we must," said Wiz,
a sadness
in his voice.

"Contact Nathan.
Bring him up to date," said Stroud to them. "Plead for more time." He looked at his gauges: air was running out along with time.

"Take some extra of the gas," said Kendra.

But Stroud declined, saying, "No, you may need it to ward off any further attacks."

"You're sure you want to play it this way?"

"Absolutely, yes."

"Alone ... you'll be all alone," said Kendra.

He hefted the orange-glowing skull of crystal. "Not entirely"

Stroud had found some side timbers which were almost firm, but he slipped again and again, and the sounds coming from beneath his feet threatened to send him crashing through to the deck below, when suddenly he felt a strange weightlessness and he realized that he was hovering above the boards over which he walked, and that
Esruad's
crystal skull was at his feet, guiding his steps, creating the magic of walking on air.

He moved along the black wall of the ship, thinking of his ancestry: his grandfather, a great man whose dark secret was that he stalked and killed vampires. Stroud's grandfather had descended from the man who had destroyed Dracula, Van
Helsing
, whom the world remembered as a fictional character. Stroud's family knew better. Stroud's thoughts of his grandfather brought a quiet calm, and then his grandfather's voice rose from within his mind, saying,
"Trust
Esruad
... for he is one of us."

Stroud knew that he could trust his grandfather's voice as he had in the past. All of his own inner fears and doubts about the power inherent in the crystal skull began to fade as he realized that he, Stroud, carried the genes of the Etruscan who had committed himself to the eternity of the skull.

In an excited state now, Stroud recalled the teachings of his grandfather. That which seemed impossible, even incomprehensible to most men--supernatural beings at work in the world--was in fact quite simple, strangely, even "natural." How else to explain the transmigration of the souls of men, how that very soul could be stripped from a man, or encased in crystal as had become the fate of
Esruad
? The battle for the soul was the oldest and most fundamental fought by mankind.

And now it was being fought again...

Christ's own soul had risen from the blood of the man he had become. In man's own veins lies his final destination.

Somehow, via some unnatural, sinister alchemy, dark forces had appeared in the world, beings taunted the soul and chipped away at it; their ultimate aim was not carrion or even the red life's blood. With the stolen flesh and blood, these things stole the souls of men and women ... That is what
Ubbrroxx
demanded. And with each soul conquered, its dark evil flourished greater and greater.
Ubbrroxx
, satanic genius, natural- and supernatural-bound and inextricably mixed, like God and Satan.
This was the battle being fought here now. Good and Evil, evolution and mutation and all that lay between the two...

Then Stroud was suddenly on a hard surface which was less than solid ground. For the brittle pieces that made up his floor skittered away and rattled across one another as he stepped, threatening to send him over the side. It was a truly enormous
boneyard
that reached up from the bottommost depths of the evil ship at the juncture where he stood, the remains of 500,000 carcasses. Stroud's booted feet sent bones cascading down the sides of this mountain into what appeared the way to Hell. The bones formed a wobbling mass over which he now climbed on all fours. He had no idea how large this mountain of bones was, or how far it went beyond the beam of his light, and time was running out...

He must surely find his enemy, the enemy of all men, somewhere out there on the other side.
But which way?
And was he up to it? Did he really have the courage to go on, even if he knew which direction to take, and most important, if he really knew and understood the enormity of the evil waiting just beyond the dark side for him? Why him?
Because he was a Stroud?
Was being a Stroud reduced to this--a curse? What would happen if he should fail? What would have happened had he not been pulled off that plane by Leonard and
Wisnewski
, if he had gone quietly home to Andover, Illinois, and from there on to a new archeological adventure on the other side of the globe, leaving New York to be sacrificed to
Esruad's
evil god?

How very strangely life worked, Stroud thought, as if in the same pattern that emanated from the earth over which water rapidly carved its movement. At the moment, Abe Stroud felt like a mere crystal of sand over which time itself was washing.

"
Esraud
cannot save you,"
whispered
Ubbrroxx
in his ear, and yet the voice filled the room.
"You are
mine
now ... as he was mine once..."

"Never!" shouted Stroud, tumbling loose particles from the ship with the sheer energy of his own voice.
"Never, you bastard thing."

"Be strong in your belief, Stroud. Hold firm to what you know of me." It was
Esruad's
voice, the voice of the skull. "Trust in me, not in anything else--not even your own eyes. I trusted my eyes, and for it, I had my eyes and my soul put out."

"You are ... blind?" Stroud quaked with the idea.

"Those imprisoned in the skull are all blind fools ... fools who did not see in life, and so who do not see in death."

"So I am to trust a blind fool?"

"Yes."

Stroud wondered what
Esruad
was trying to tell him. Much of their discussion here in the ship had to be in a cryptic kind of code of half-truths and innuendo, as the skull had alerted him to the fact that their enemy would monitor all their communications, just as it would monitor any communication through any modern devices he used with the others and those on the outside.
Ubbrroxx
would then use whatever information it could gather from these communications against Stroud.

"You may have to sacrifice the woman,"
Esruad
had told him again, and once again Stroud said that he could never bring himself to do so.

"You must if it means winning. You must win against this evil, Stroud."

The inner monologue welled and waned inside his head like the sea tides, and there was a faint echo, also inside his head, as if bouncing off the steel plate which was acting as a kind of radar. The echo was
Ubbrroxx
, or that part of him that he sent out to infiltrate Stroud's mind, to gather in his thoughts, desires, fears and anguishes.
Ubbrroxx
was there now picking over the beaches of his memories,
both good
and bad, beautiful and ugly. He sensed it inside his head, but fortified with the warning that this would occur, he expected many seductions would follow. Stroud girded himself up.

The idea that
Esruad
knew every step the demon would take might have instilled a keen suspicion in Stroud if it were not for the shared secrets of the Etruscan's own worse nightmare: that
Ubbrroxx
would continue on and on and on through eternity feeding off mankind in ever greater numbers.

It appeared that
Esruad's
nightmare and Stroud's own coincided, and for this reason Stroud had decided to place his complete faith in the ancient wizard. But giving over Kendra to the beast ... Stroud still wondered if he could do it.

"You must,"
Esruad
whispered in his ear, sounding now as demanding as the demon. "You have no choice."

-18-

Commissioner James Nathan could not believe the eerie calm that had come over the site of the devastation where 500,000 zombies stood against them, frozen in place. Some of his key people felt this was the time to attack, and so did the military brass, but he
had
made a promise to Stroud and he intended to keep his word. But holding off the others was getting increasingly difficult, especially since they had heard nothing from Stroud in an hour.

Then the communication came through from Kendra Cline, informing him of their situation, and that Stroud had gone on alone.

"How is Dr. Leonard now?" Nathan asked.

"Holding."

"And
Wisnewski
?"

"We're alive," said Wiz in response. "Our spines are like rubber, but otherwise we are fine. You must keep your people out, Nathan, do you understand? They wouldn't survive even a moment down here, son, believe me."

"What is Stroud doing, going on alone?"

"He has his reasons. We're counting on him, all of us," said Leonard, "possibly the entire human race, as it is shaping up. Because this thing will come again in the future, and each time it returns, it will devour more and more and more..."

"You people have a little over an hour before you've got to get clear of there, do you understand? The Army intends to shell the entire site at dawn."

"Stroud needs more time than that, Commissioner," Kendra pleaded.

Nathan shook his head and said, "I can't buy him a minute more. You people best start back now."

"No, Commissioner," said Leonard. "We stay until Stroud returns."

"Don't be fools!"

"You heard Dr. Leonard," said Kendra. "If you intend to bury Stroud here, we'll be buried with him." She hoped her bluff would buy the time Stroud needed.

"
Wisnewski
, you can't be as idiotic as your friends!"

"I've long been noted for my idiocy, Commissioner." He laughed into the communicator before they shut Nathan off.