Robert W. Walker (37 page)

Stroud stumbled about trying to find his way, unable to see, as blind now as a man could be, banging against dangerous tiers in his way,
belowdecks
of a ship sunken beneath earth. He was blind inside a black hull.

Then he remembered the radio. He couched the skull in the crook of one arm and tried to raise James Nathan, and it seemed that all static had been created by the demon. He got directly through to Nathan. An agitated female voice came over before Nathan got to the radio.

"Abe!
Abe, you're alive! You're okay!" It was Kendra.

"And you? You're topside?"

"Yes,
Wisnewski
and I made it back when--"

"I thought you died. In fact I thought I saw you die, both of you.
Illusions, deception ... all along."

"Thank God you're okay."

Nathan must have snatched the receiver away, for he was suddenly on. "Stroud, it's like a miracle. Everyone here, the zombies--"

"All free, I know ... I know."

"Thanks to you."

"I need help down here. Can you send help?"

"We're on our way."

Kendra got back on. "You must be awfully lonely down there by yourself. How ... how did you do it, Abe?"

"Kendra, I ... I've lost my eyesight."

"Your eyes?"

"Burned badly ... can't see ...
stumbling
."

"Stay where you're at. I'm coming back with the team. We're on our way."

He wanted to shout that he didn't want her to set foot in the pit or the ship again, but she was gone, replaced by
Wisnewski
, who said, "Now, Abe, just sit tight. Stay right there. Stumbling around inside that debris field could get you killed, and after all you've gone through--"

"I
know,
a terrible irony now to have a beam fall on my head, or to suffocate below a mountain of bones."

"What about the ...
your
... ah--"

"Have the skull with me, and thank God and
Mamdoud
in Egypt that we had it with us."

"I keep thinking of poor Leonard."

"Yeah ... yeah ... me, too."

Stroud soon heard them coming and thanked
Wisnewski
for staying on the radio with him. "Not afraid of the dark, are you?" asked Wiz.

"Now I am ... afraid of blindness."

"What do you think of our doing something archeologically sound with the ship now, Stroud?
Now that the cursed demon has vanished?"

"I say let sleeping demons lie."

"
Ahhhh
... thought you'd say that."

The others finally reached him, Kendra throwing her arms around him, Nathan helping guide him along. It took some time maneuvering out of the ship and through the tunnels. When Stroud took in the first breath of fresh air he'd had in hours, it was a great relief, moving him near to tears. He'd thought on several occasions that he would be buried forever in the tomb.

Kendra tightened her grip on him, and he held firm to the crystal skull, asking her to see that it be kept in an absolutely safe and unassailable place as they put him into the waiting ambulance. She climbed in with him, telling him he wasn't getting rid of her so easily. In the absence of his eyes, unable to see the destruction to his torso, limbs and arms, Stroud sensed her apprehension on seeing him in the light of the outdoors. The medics were calling in with the report to the
hospital,
second- and third-degree burns over two thirds of his body. Most of his clothing had been torn away. Stroud wondered if Kendra thought he was going to die when he went off into a drifty little boat that carried him into unconsciousness.

Three months later

Abraham H. Stroud's bandages had come off his eyes the week before, and after some initial distress, he was able to see through darkly shaded sunglasses, and by now he knew he would regain full use of his eyesight. This week some sections of the burn bandages were being peeled away and the skin given treatments. His body was a mangle of scars from various other encounters with beasts of the night and cave dwellers, not to mention the war. He felt like a man who had gone in for full-body tattoos, except that he hadn't gone in voluntarily.

Still, all his limbs were intact and in working order, and he hadn't gone out of his mind, although some people would question that--especially the nurses on the floor.

Kendra had suffered through the worst of the agonies with him, to the point of exhausting herself, and was for days tearful and easily agitated. She continued to come to see him and sit with him every single day, letting her career go and angering him for doing so. She'd put everything on hold for him, unable to return to the CDC until she was sure that he would be all right. For a time, he flirted with the idea of making her his wife, but the near mention of the idea backfired, and now she was rushing off for Georgia to get back into life there and the career she had almost abandoned for him. Kendra could not see herself waiting up nights wondering what new banshee or beast he was combating next. Like most of the people who knew or read about the circumstances surrounding the bizarre New York legion of zombies that had fed live people to a gaping hole in the earth, Kendra didn't know quite what to make of Abraham H. Stroud, or his strange crystal skull; even now the fact that he had survived engendered more awe and fright than respect or love.

He couldn't completely blame her. Why should she wish to spend a lifetime with a man who was called by the tabloids a modern "vampire hunter"?

Wisnewski
visited with chocolates and flowers like a man going on a first date. He discussed in detail with Wiz the events leading up to the final demise of the demon, a story that Kendra did not want to hear. Stroud was glad to tell it, but it had left
Wisnewski
a little estranged, too, as if Stroud had some kind of communicable disease. In time, Wiz would come around again, he told himself, but the old doctor got busy again in his Museum of Antiquities and never returned.

A surprise visit by Commissioner Nathan proved testy at first, Stroud assuming the man wanted nothing more than a hasty whitewash done, a rationalization that would make the truth go away, a rationalization of the events that would be more farfetched than the actual horror that had occurred in the city. But Nathan surprised Stroud again as they went through every detail of the events that had occurred below Manhattan.

"I don't expect you'll be sorry to see me go," Stroud finished.
"Seems everyone would like that."

"On the contrary, Stroud.
If you need anything, want anything at all, I'm at your disposal. You gave this city a second chance at life, and I'll never forget that, ever."

Stroud had heard that song and dance before, from the commissioner of police in Chicago for one. Nathan would likely deny any connection with Stroud after today, he had thought.

But the following day, on public television, Nathan defended Stroud, who was being crucified in the tabloids as a modern-day Rasputin who charmed city officials into allowing an elaborate
seance
as extravagant as a David Copperfield magic stunt to go on for days in the city. Nathan warned others across the nation that men like Abraham Stroud were scarce, men who were willing to sacrifice life and limb for total strangers. People ridiculed him afterward.

An official inquiry into what was being termed the "Zombie Disease" incident was in full swing, and it appeared the questions would go on endlessly. Stroud was subpoenaed to appear before a board of inquiry that had been set up primarily by political hacks who were interested in getting their faces on the tube and their names in the columns.

Stroud, in a wheelchair, still in great physical pain, wearing a pair of black Oakley dark glasses, playing the blind man part to the hilt, since it afforded some protection from both press and public, answered politely the questions put to him. He did so knowing that few of the people here wanted to know the truth. That no one wanted to hear about human accomplices involved in human sacrifices to an unheard-of demon. He simply repeated again and again such tired phrases as, "There is more between Heaven and Hell, dear Horatio, than we know" and "Suffice it to say that we were dealing with supernatural elements beyond our control and human understanding."

He was debunked in most circles, held up as a hero by fringe elements in the community, invited to speak at any number of functions that involved psychics and Wicca people. He wound up hiding in the sanctuary of the hospital feeling a lot like Quasimodo without a bell to swing. The papers and most of the editorials regarded him as a freak of some sort. It was the same sort of publicity he had run ahead of in the past, the reason he had forsaken American continental archeological pursuits for foreign digs such as the one in Egypt.

Strangely, he had gotten more well-wishing letters from foreign ports than home. He had even gotten a telegram from
Mamdoud
who seemed to understand best what he was going through. Most well-wishers here had a hand out, a thousand requests to visit some haunted place in the heartland of America to vanquish some evil spirit that was causing harm and destruction to a community or a single family.

Haunted America, he had thought, no end of work for a Peter
Hurkos
or other ghost hunters, but he was not a goddamned ghost hunter, or a vampire stalker. He was an honest archeologist with the credentials to prove that he had worked hard to become who he was. But the press twisted who he was and what he was beyond recognition, to the point where sometimes now he was wondering himself.

He had to seek safer ground. He must go home to Andover, Illinois, sort out his feelings there amid his grandfather's presence in the old manse, a positively haunted place indeed. He wondered if his best friends after all were not among the dead ...
his grandfather, his parents,
Esruad
...

They would not question him, deride him. They alone understood. Stroud reached for the crystal skull and gazed into its smoothly fashioned indented eyes, watching the fire refracted by light slicing through the opened blinds there in the hospital. The inquiry hadn't gotten to the root of the evil, hadn't placed it where it rightly belonged, as
Esruad
and Stroud knew.

In all this time none of Stroud's champions or detractors had any idea of the shameful causes of the body count racked up by
Ubbrroxx
and the terrible human accomplices of the demon. It seemed only Nathan, Kendra, Wiz and a handful of others appreciated the true horror of the day, the guile and the fear residing in the species called man. There was no undoing what people had done to one another here, given the catalyst of the ancient god of the Etruscans.

Mankind's only hope, it seemed, was to keep the genie in the bottle, or in this case, to keep
Ubbrroxx
in the skull ... In the wrong hands, the skull could be a true Pandora's
box
, unleashing untold powers.

Some days later Stroud was on a 747 jet, bandages still encircling half his body, the arrangements made between his doctors in New York and doctors in Chicago. James Nathan had taken more time from his busy schedule to see him to the airport in the limousine that had driven him that first day to the Gordon Construction site. He'd told Stroud that despite Gordon's
death,
the tower was going up, getting back on schedule. Gordon had many associates who were anxious to take over his tower and they'd formed a pool to do so.

Stroud was simply glad to be on his way home, anxious to see his Andover prairie and home again, Stroud Manse. It had become a haven for him, a place to hide away from the publicity-seeking that not even the hospital had been able to completely stay. It had also been a long time since he had sat by the pool, and a long time since he had opened his mail. No doubt stacked to the chandelier by now.

He thought of his people at the manse, his housekeeper, gardener, his butler and stable man, his helicopter pilot ... all people he had, at one time or another, saved from some black form of demonic evil. The only people who didn't fear him.