Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

Fortunately WO 2 Bygraves had taken the initiative. Thinking he'd lost his commanding officer when the Major's radio had gone down, he had called the rest of the platoon out of the casino. Now they came running, gathering at the pool. But from the pool on outwards to the perimeter of the resort, it seemed that the whole of Xanadu was an inferno. Even if there were no more explosions, the sheer heat would certainly kill everyone before they made half the distance. And meanwhile the precog, in a fit of delirious anxiety, was turning this way and that, repeating, 'It's going to blow! It's going to blow!'

Then a piece of burning debris from the bubble came drifting like a kite, weighed down by and trailing a length of electrical cable. No one noticed it until it struck the monorail's overhead power grid. There was a flash that sent blobs of molten copper skittering, and the kite and cable fell to earth.

Trask and the Major glanced at each other, headed for the boarding platform no more than fifty feet away. The rest followed them, and Jake quickly caught up. 'What are we doing?' he asked Trask breathlessly.

'The elevated monorail,' Trask gasped. 'It has power. Maybe we can drive out of this, or over the worst of it, at least as far as the main parking lot and the big ops truck.'

His idea was as good as any other; in fact it was the only idea, for the armoured car had been blown over onto its side by the blast from the garden. Fortunately the locator David Chung, along with Bygraves and his men, had already vacated that area; like Jake they had seen the pool as the only sanctuary from the bomb blasts and the fires that licked closer with every passing moment. And by now the heat and smoke were suffocating.

Dragging Liz behind him, Jake was the first into the leading carriage of two articulated, open-sided cars. Climbing into the driver's seat, he hit the red power button and, as the motor throbbed into life, grabbed the drive lever.

The system could scarcely be simpler: push forward to go, pull backward to stop. And ahead the single overhead rail climbed and curved outwards towards the perimeter parking lot, the reception area, Xanadu's gates and safety. But while the motor warmed up, still the precog was shouting. 'It's going any minute now.''

Men ran, limped, or were carried; they bundled each other into the cars. Until finally Trask yelled, 'That's it. Now get us the hell out of here!' And Jake pushed the lever forward.

Slowly — agonizingly slowly, or so it seemed — the cars climbed to their elevated height and started along the spiralling, pylon-supported rail. Fifty feet, a hundred, and gathering speed. And then the Pleasure Dome went.

The blast was awesome as the casino literally lifted into the air, sank down into itself, split asunder under the irresistible pressure of expanding gasses, and blew apart in red and yellow streamers of flame. The whole thing disappeared in dust, rubble, and gouting fire, and in the next moment the hot blast of its passing reached out and rocked the monorail's carriages, causing its passengers to grit their teeth and hang on for dear life. But then the cars steadied up and the danger was past.

So everyone thought—

— Except lan Goodly. 'There's one bomb left!' He suddenly cried. 'It's in the reception area, the gatehouse!' He was right and just like the bomb in the Pleasure Dome, this too was a delayed action device. When it went it took a good man, their rearguard, with it — but it also took out the last elevated section of the monorail!

Liz was behind Jake, shouting, 'Look! Look!' and pointing ahead. But he was already looking. All he could see through the smoke and the fire was a mass of slumping, buckled metal — the wreckage of the tower that had borne the weight of the monorail — beyond which there was empty space and a drop of some thirty odd feet into a red, roaring death!

Jake slammed the drive lever into reverse… and nothing happened. The power had gone along with the overhead gantry and power line, and the cars were free-wheeling down a gentle gradient at some thirty miles an hour.

But lan Goodly's talent was back in force. Suddenly he was there, leaning over Jake and shouting, 'Jake, listen! There's a way out. I can see it. We're going to make it!'

And he told Jake what he had seen, shouted it into his ear as the articulated cars went lurching into empty space, heading for the inferno that waited below.

Korath knew what was required and set those fantastic formulae rolling yet again down the screen of Jake's mind — until Jake froze them and conjured a door that even Harry Keogh would be proud of. Then:

Darkness surrounded the cars — the Ultimate Darkness of a time before time — and in a single moment which might yet be as long as forever, light, gentle moon and starlight, blinked into being as Jake made his first perfect three-point exit from the Mobius Continuum at well-known coordinates.

The cars were boat-bottomed. They didn't dig in but rode across the dry grass and sandy soil of the safe house's garden, quickly slowing until, with scarcely a jolt, they were brought up short by the stout wall. Then the rear car slewed a little — but not enough to spill anyone — and both cars rolled sideways through forty-five degrees and came to a rocking standstill…

For a long time there was silence. Until Jake and the E-Branch

people climbed out of the lead car and, as a man, collapsed or plumped down on the withered grass and began to breathe again. Then someone (it sounded to Liz like 'Red' Bygraves) said, 'Holyfuck!' And everyone started talking at once.

In Xanadu, Jethro Manchester had built a Pleasure Dome. Now it was gone, and Manchester with it, to an end as undeserved as it was brutal and horrific. Likewise the alien author of Xanadu's and Manchester's ruin; he, too, was gone. But Lord Nephran Malinari was fled, not dead. And it grieved Ben Trask's heart that he must admit it: that the chase wasn't nearly over yet, but if anything was now more needful and deadly than ever.

For if the others, if Vavara and Szwart, were trying to do what Malinari had begun to do in subterranean Xanadu — if they, too, were nurturing 'gardens' of loathsome plague-bearing death-spawn — and if a single red spore, all unnoticed, inhaled like a speck of dust, could write finis on a human life and replace it with undeath, how then millions or billions of spores — and what then for the world…?

On the second morning after the Australians cremated their four dead comrades in a quiet ceremony with full military honours — a ceremony which Trask and his E-Branch people felt privileged to attend, where in fact there were only three bodies in their coffins, for the fourth had burned on Manchester's island, and was represented by a photograph, a scroll of honour, and messages of farewell from his closest colleagues only — the second morning after that, the Major and his two stalwart Warrant Officers were at the airport in Brisbane to see Trask and his people off.

After the British team had received their regulation new bubonic shots — for the Australian authorities were insistent that no one be allowed to enter or leave the continent without first being inoculated — then, over drinks in the departure lounge, Trask and the Major had a quiet word in private. Jake, Liz, and the rest of the team sat at a table with Bygraves and Davis, where for the better part they commiserated in silence. Something of an aftermath, it seemed there wasn't a lot to be said. But Trask and the SAS Major weren't willing to leave it at that.

'And so it goes on/ said the Major, Tor you at least.'

'For us it never seems to end,' Trask answered. 'Just when we think it might, there's always something new. Not always as bad as what we've just been through, but always bad.'