Jack Yeovil - Demon Download

Stack slipped his hand into Leona's dress, and rubbed his thumb over a nipple. He bent down and kissed her grapefruit-flavoured lips.

She sucked hungrily at his tongue.

A cheer went up from the crowds outside as Oscar Romero appeared on his own, much grander, balcony, arm-in-arm with the new Pope of Rome, Georgi. Stack and Leona ignored the speeches.

Leona stood up, and pressed her body to his. They danced together, to the National Anthem of the Central American Confederacy, their bodies responding warmly.

He smelled the traces of perfume in her hair, and the soft female musk of her body.

Stack wasn't sure whether he had manoeuvered Leona back into their room and pushed her down on their bed, or whether she had done it to him. They were on the bed now, gently pressing against each other.

Their dressing gowns were getting in the way. They broke apart, unknotted their belts, and threw the gowns away. Naked, they embraced again. He kissed her neck and chin. She stroked his back, and sides.

She slid under him, and he looked into her eyes as he lowered his face to hers.

They kissed…

Stack's heart leaped as he started awake. His neck ached where the seatbelt had cut into it, and his entire face throbbed. His head was still bruised from Exxon's fists. Hardly an inch of his body wasn't in one kind of pain or another.

Chantal was shaking him. It was her subtly different scent he had smelled, not Leona's.

"Time to wake up, Trooper Stack."

His wounds came back to him. His body felt like a baggy diving suit. He would have liked to go to Doc Zarathustra and traded it in for a new, more durable model. Hearts, he remembered the Wizard of Oz saying, will never be a practical proposition until they can be made unbreakable.

He rubbed the grit from his eyes, and looked at the woman. "I was dreaming."

Chantal stood up, and backed away from the car. "I thought so. I'm sorry for disturbing you. You were REMming."

He tried to stretch, to lift the imaginary weight from his shoulders.

"You were smiling."

Stack sighed. "It was a nice dream."

"So I noticed."

Chantal was almost smirking. Embarassed, Stack realized he had a generous erection straining the crotch of his Cav britches. He adjusted his position to de-emphasize his bulge, and waited for his arousal to die down.

Chantal slipped into the driving seat, and flicked switches. Federico reacted with lights and instrument evaluations.

In the light of day, Chantal wasn't the woman she had seemed last night. Appearing in the Silver Byte with her cannon and steely determination in her eyes, she had looked to Stack like Redd Harvest on steroids with a touch of Clint Eastwood and Annie Oakley thrown in. This morning, in the same outfit, she seemed more demure. Passive, restful, even. There was something kittenish about her unconscious pout, and a certain unassailable balance in her disposition. She was younger than he had thought, too. Maybe twenty-four, twenty-five. She gave the impression that she could hardly lift the heavy side-iron she was packing, let alone squeeze off a ScumStopper and hole the target dead centre. Stack knew better.

Quite apart from the fact that she had saved him twice from certain death, there was something very attractive about Chantal Juillerat.

"Good morning to you, Ms Julie-Rat."

"Everybody calls me Ms here in America. I am not used to it."

"Would you prefer to answer to Madam-weasel?"

"Chantal, please."

She pressed the auto-ignition.

"Nathan."

"Thank you, Trooper Stack."

Federico rolled forwards. This was a righteous piece of rolling stock. Its elegant curves made the typical US Cav cruiser look like a dray horse next to a she-panther.

"Do we get breakfast?"

"There are some N-R-G candies in the glove compartment. Oh, and some cherries."

Stack pulled the bag of fruit out, and chain-popped cherries until his mouth was full of stones.

"You must be loaded, sister."

She shifted her shoulders. "I'm on generous expenses. Fruit is essential to a balanced diet."

"Essential it may be, but that doesn't make it cheap."

She shrugged again. That was a characteristic European gesture, Stack thought, the famous ca va shrug.

He spat the stones into his hand, and threw them out of the window. Maybe they would seed the desert.

"Now," she said, "where's the Church of St Werburgh's?"

"You see that half-destroyed building over there?"

"Yes."

"Well, like they told me, follow the trail of death and destruction through town and you can't miss it."

"This may be boring for you, I'm sorry. I shall take you back to the fort when I've finished."

"I'll come along for the ride. I don't mind."

"That's good then."

They drove slowly over the bumpy, wreckage-strewn ground.

"Federico," she said to a voice-activated console.

"Buon giorno, sorella."

"Good morning. Could you book me a satellite channel, please. I'm going to want to talk to Rome. If you can raise DeAngelis, I would be especially pleased. If not, Edwina will do."

Federico beeped an affirmative, and got working on it. Stack realized he was flying in very high circles. He doubted if Brevet Major General Younger could as casually get airtime on a satellite link.

Chantal gasped, as if someone had slapped her across the face with a rope-end. Stack followed her eyeline.

She was looking at the raped ruin of the church.

Rintoon had doubled the guards, but that hadn't stopped the murderer or murderers from striking nine more times during the night. Cat Finney had retired with an automatic pistol under her pillow, her cubicle lock scrambled and a desk against it. She hadn't slept much. No one who had got a good look at Younger's kitchen would sleep well for months.

At the morning briefing, Rintoon gave a report.

"Rexroth is an unconfirmed kill. It is possible, indeed probable, that we should count him as a suicide…"

"In that case, sir, where's his gun?"

"Good question…er…Badalamenti. His weapon may have been…er…appropriated by personnel unknown prior to Captain Lauderdale's discovery of the body."

Finney was in yesterday's uniform. It was still discoloured from her climb up the liftshaft. Slung over the back of a chair, it had been the easiest thing to find this morning. She didn't want to admit to it, but her childhood fear of the closet might just have come creeping back. All through the night, she had been waking up and looking at the slats of the closet door, wondering absurdly if the killer might not be lurking within. Her clean uniforms were in the closet, and they would probably stay there until the crisis was over. Rintoon hadn't slept at all, and was looking wilder by the minute. She found it difficult to connect the hypertense, unshaven, neon-eyed c-i-c of this morning with yesterday's smug, complacent, new-pin-neat Number Two. There was something increasingly familiar about him, though, as if he were metamorphosing into a different, truer, more immediately recognizable shape.

"So, if we leave Rexroth out of the reckoning, and setting aside Brevet Major General Younger, we have eight more VUEs to log and deal with."

VUE. That was a new one on her. Captain Badalamenti, obviously too smart for his own advancement, questioned the acronym.

"VUE, Badalamenti. Violent Unknown Event."

Major Hendry Faulcon, next down the chain of command after Rintoon, was a five o'clock shadow man. He shaved two or three times a day. He had had late duties last night, and had tried to shave at about eleven-thirty. As far as anybody could tell, the electric razor in his quarters had slithered out of his grip and buzzed halfway down his gullet. He had died of a combination of suffocation and drowning in his own blood. A typical VUE.