Edward Llewellyn - Prelude to Chaos

More wild bursts hissed overhead. Judith, her arm around Drummond, crawled away into the darkness. I glimpsed a shadow racing for the cemetery gate, waited for a head to show against the night sky, then hit it with one shot. The shadow dropped into darkness.

Our attackers were reacting rather than thinking. They had probably slapped a radio transponder onto Drummond’s car as a routine precaution, then sent a team after him to discover what he was doing at dusk in suburban Buxton. When they had seen he was meeting the woman they were hunting They must have assumed they had an easy snatch and gone into their usual brutal drill. They’d met rifle fire and fallen apart, shooting wildly at every shadow they thought had moved. By now they would be radioing frantically for reinforcements, reporting that they had a gang of armed revolutionaries holed up in Buxton cemetery.

I was moving from grave to grave in the darkness under the trees, firing only when I saw a target. My night sights were proving their value. I picked up a cluster of shadows working their way round the margin of the parking lot and put a burst among them. A woman screamed and the shadows scattered. I turned and ran across graves and gravel paths.

I had almost reached the far railings when a blow on my left shoulder spun me round and sent me sprawling. I struggled up with my left arm useless. I grabbed my Luger with my right, found the gap in the railings, squeezed through, kicked it closed, and staggered to the Auditor.

Drummond was hanging onto the door while Judith was trying to drag him away across the dirt road. Lights were coming on in the inhabited houses. When Drummond saw me he made a weak gesture of defiance and Judith shouted, “No—that’s Gavin! He’s my friend. Gavin, help me get Eugene to my car!”

A chopper roared out of the mists overhead, its search-beam probing among the trees of the cemetery. “Faces down!” I gasped as we crouched by the Auditor, hoping the leaves of the oak tree were thick enough to hide us. Apparently they were for the chopper continued to follow a standard search pattern, methodically angling across the cemetery.

Drummond hung onto the door. “You’ve got another car? Then go to it, for God’s sake! Leave me. I’m finished. Lungs!” The whistle of air through a puncture wound, the blood he was coughing from his mouth, confirmed his diagnosis.

“No!” Judith continued to tug at him.

I hit her with my good arm, knocked her sprawling across the road, dragged her semi-conscious into the overgrown backyard beyond.

“Help me in!” Drummond had got the door of the Auditor open and was trying to climb behind the wheel. “I’ll decoy!” He spat blood. “Least I can do.” The questing chopper came overhead a second time and its beam flashed off the car. “That thing will follow me. I’ll lead it as far as I can.”

He wouldn’t get far. I can recognize the face of death on the features of a wounded man. He moaned, “Save Judy! Please!”

I took him at his word. With only one arm I had little choice. I shouldered him behind the wheel of the Auditor and he gripped it with both hands. “Start the motor!” he gasped.

I started the motor. “Straight ahead, down the hill, through the underpass, into the cloverleaf.” I was careless of how many innocent motorists he might kill so long as he led the hunters away from Judith.

“Headlights!” he moaned.

I switched on the headlights, grabbed my Luger, and stumbled across the road to where Judith was starting to get up. I pulled her down.

Drummond roared the motor; the tires spun and gripped. The Auditor skidded and swerved away along the dirt road, the picture of a panicked driver. I held Judith down among the weeds as the chopper sighted its target and darted off. Moments later a car came around the comer of the cemetery and roared past, chasing the tail-lights of the Auditor.

I managed to get to my feet and urged Judith across the yard to the Superb. She was starting to get in when from down the hill came a dull thud. An instant later there was the screech of brakes and a second thud. Judith stood with the door open to stare past the houses at the glow rising from beyond the hill.

“Oh God! He’s crashed!”

“He’s hit the underpass!” There was a sullen rumble from the valley. “So have the Feds!” The glow was changing from dull red to brilliant white. Hydride packs don’t explode like gasoline tanks nor catch fire as easily. But if they do bum they bum in a feedback combustion, reaching temperatures which turn everything around them into a fine ash. Including bones.

“Eugene!” She had her hand at her mouth. “He never hurt anyone in his life!”

“He’s finished it by killing himself and a carload of Feds. With luck they’ll assume we’re among the ashes. It’ll be days before they’ll be able to sift for dental fillings. Maybe they melt. Or maybe they won’t bother.” I was losing orientation in time and space. “For Christ’s sake, get under way while they’re watching us bum!”

She shuddered, started the car, then noticed my arm hang-lug loose, the blood running down my sleeve. “Gavin, you’re hurt!”

“Flesh wound. Move us out of here before I get one in the head.”

“Let me look at it.”

“Look all you like when we’re on the other side of Frederick. Now—move!”

She glanced at me as I slumped down in the seat beside her, then turned the Superb up the lighted street. But once we were out of Buxton she parked on a dark lane and I was too weak to protest when she pulled the coveralls and jumpsuit back from my shoulder.

She studied my wound. “You won’t last to Sutton Cove.”

I lost consciousness.

I regained it outside a packaged liquor store on some deserted highway. She was forcing me to drink brandy against my objections that alcohol was not the treatment for gunshot wounds. Then she started to use her panties as a first field dressing, snarling, “They’re clean, dammit!”

I remember her pouring brandy over the panty-pad. As a disinfectant I supposed. Then pouring the rest over me. Of my gasping, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Disguising you as a drunk!”

I sank into a fog of alcohol, surfacing later to ask, “Where are you going?”

“The nearest Settlement. At Sherando. They should take us in.” She didn’t sound certain they would. “I’ll never get you to Sutton alive.”

I remember waking and watching her face, intent over the wheel, greenish in the dim light from the instrument panel. Of trying to tell her to slow down; she was driving like a mad Mormon. Of waking under the glare of a flashlight; the face of a policeman looming through the open window.

And Judith saying, “I’m Doctor Zworkin. Here’s my license and ID. This specimen’s my husband—more drunk than damaged. He hit somebody his own size for once I’m taking him home to repair.”

‘Take him away, lady!” The flash went out and the head disappeared. “Call us if you want help.”

“Thank you, officer. I Will. But I think the most he’ll be able to do is throw up.”

A dirt road winding between wet woods. A crowd around the car. Being carried. Lying half-naked on a high table, strange faces around me, Judith bending over me. “Gavin! We’re here! At the Settlement. We’re safe!”

“You? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Her face came closer, gray with fatigue and concern. “I’ve got plasma running into you. You’re out of shock. But your left brachia plexus is damaged. If I don’t operate your arm will be paralyzed. I can’t promise a perfect repair.”

I remember muttering, “Rewire it right or cut it off.” Then the stab of another needle and she faded away.