Nick Carter - The Omega Terror

The sun was glaring harshly overhead when my eyelids fluttered open. For a minute I had no idea where I was. Then I looked up with blurry eyes and slowly remembered. I closed my eyes against the hot glare, turned my head slightly, and felt excruciating pain at the base of my skull.

I lay there with my eyes closed, trying to think. Zeno had ambushed me beautifully. He probably thought the blow had killed me. Otherwise he’d have taken my gun and shot me.

I opened my eyes again, and the glare from that white-hot orb was painful. The Land Rover was gone, naturally. I sat up and grunted aloud as the pain clawed through my head and neck. A hammer was pounding at the inside of my skull. I rose agonizingly to my knees and tried to stand but fell against the side of the van and almost went down again. I was seeing two of everything.

I stumbled to the door of the van and looked inside. Despite my poor vision. I could see that Zeno had taken the keys. The hood of the vehicle had been raised. I stumbled clumsily to it, looked under and found that the distributor wires were gone. Zeno hadn’t done any of this for me, since he thought I was dead. He just didn’t want the natives stumbling onto the scene and driving the van into Mhamid, where it would be connected with the laboratory.

I leaned heavily on the fender of the vehicle. Nausea welled up in my gut for a moment and dizziness came over me. I waited, breathing hard, hoping it would pass. Those damned tracks leading away from the van. Zeno had been clever. He had walked in a big circle, come back behind the rock outcropping, and waited there for me with a tire iron or jack. I had been stupid.

The dizziness subsided. I looked in the direction Zeno and I had come from and wondered if I would ever be able to find my way back to the dirt track that served as a road, even if I found the strength to walk that far. But I had to try. I couldn’t stay here.

So I pushed myself from the van and started walking. The thing I wanted most was to lie down in the shade and rest and let the pain in my head and neck subside. Better yet would be a week in a hospital bed, with a pretty nurse. Maybe Gabrielle.

I put those thoughts from my mind and stumbled along unevenly, the pain ripping into me with every step. Sweat began running into my eyes from my forehead, and there was a dry, cotton taste in my mouth. I wondered how far it was to the road. I tried to reconstruct how much time had elapsed while I drove to this remote place after Zeno, but I could not focus my thoughts on anything because of the pain.

Suddenly the dizziness came again, and a blackness crowded around the periphery of my vision. There was a jarring bump against my head and chest, and I knew I had fallen. I groaned at the pain and lay there, making no effort to get up for a moment. It was so much better on the ground than on my feet. I could feel the sun like a fiat-iron on the back of my neck and could smell the sweat from my exhausted body. And I felt sorry for myself. I felt very sorry for myself, and I told myself that I was in no condition to go on, that I had earned a rest here.

But another part of me prodded. “Get up, Carter, damn you! Get up and move or you’ll die here.”

I knew that the voice was right. I listened to it, and I knew that what it said was true. If I could not get back up now, I would not get up at all. That sun would boil my brains in an hour.

Somehow I made it to my feet again. I looked down at the ground for a trace of the vehicle I had been following. There was nothing. I squinted and tried to focus, but could not. I moved ahead a few yards, then made a slow turning circle. Blurred vision or not, there were no car tracks anywhere near me. I had lost them.

I glanced up at the sun, and it was like looking through the open door of a forge oven. It was in a different direction from when I had started walking. Or was it? I couldn’t think. I closed my eyes and squinted. I had to remember. When I started walking, the sun had been on my right. Yes, I was sure of it.

I moved forward again. I wiped the sweat from my eyes, but that made them burn even more. My head was being pummeled from inside. I ran a leathery tongue over parched lips and realized that the desert sun had already dehydrated me more than I liked to think. I saw something moving on the ground and stopped short, almost falling again. It was a shadow. I looked up and saw a vulture up there, high above me, wheeling and turning silently.

I grunted and kept moving. I squinted at the sandy ground as I passed over it, hoping to see the tire tracks again. For a while I made an effort to keep the sun on my right, but then I drifted. I was thinking of Damon Zeno and how I had let him get me. I had destroyed the Omega Mutation, but with Zeno still on the loose he could start all over again somewhere else. That was why David Hawk had said to kill him if he would not come back as my prisoner.

My tongue was becoming thick as if I had a wool blanket in my mouth. The sweating wasn’t so bad, because I was dried out inside. Dust caked on my clothing on top of the dampness and on my face and in my eyes and ears. It clogged my nostrils. And my legs were becoming very rubbery. My mind wandered back to all those rows of cultures destined for Peking. And I was in that horrible ward, passing down the aisle between those rows of stricken faces.

My side thumped the ground again and brought me around. I had been moving forward on my feet, but in a daze. Now I had fallen once more. For the first time I felt the back of my head where Zeno had struck me, and there was caked blood drying there. I looked around and saw that I was on a hard pan of salt clay that seemed to extend endlessly in every direction. It was a bad place to be. A man would fry like an egg on a griddle here in no time at all. The entire area was parched bone-dry, and inch-wide cracks patterned the clay everywhere. There was no vegetation of any kind on the horizon. I had a fleeting memory of seeing the edge of this area earlier, but then the memory was gone. Another shadow passed overhead, and I looked into the serene inferno that was the sky and saw that there were two vultures up there now.

I tried to regain my feet but could not get past my knees this time. That, and the vultures, really scared me. I stayed on my knees, breathing hard, trying to think which way the road might be. The hard fact of the matter was I could wander around out here all afternoon, moving in circles like a beetle on a string, and end up where I had started. If only I could regain clear vision, that might help.

I began moving over the hot clay on my hands and knees, the clay burning my hands as I moved. The cracks in the clay made an intricate design on the surface of the flats, and the edges of the cracks cut my hands and knees. A short time later the vertigo came back, and the landscape was whirling around me in a giddy circle. I suddenly saw a flash of bright sky where the ground should have been and felt the now familiar shock of hitting the hard clay, this time on my back.

Four vultures. I swallowed and glanced back upward and counted again. Yes, four, their wings whispering on the still, hot air up there. A small shudder passed through me, and the realization slowly dawned. I was immobile for all practical purposes, and the vultures had found that out. They, not the sun, represented the most immediate threat. I slumped down on my back, too weak to hold my body up even slightly. The concussion and the blast-furnace heat had taken their toll.

I had seen vultures in East Africa. They could tear a gazelle to shreds in fifteen minutes, picking the bones clean in another fifteen, so that all that was left was a dark spot on the ground. The big birds had no fear of a live animal, even man, if that animal was disabled. And they had lousy table manners. They had no compunctions about starting their grisly meal before the animal was dead. If it could not fight back, it was ready for the picking. There were stories about vultures and disabled men from white hunters and African trackers that I would rather not have remembered. It was best, I had heard, to lie on your face after you became immobilized, but even then you were vulnerable, because they would attack the kidneys which was more painful than the eyes.