Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

Maybe Jake had been too tired to dream, or perhaps he had managed to fight it off this time. Whichever, he had slept deeply, soundly and dreamlessly, and remembered coming awake only once, when he'd thought he'd heard a vehicle's engine starting up. Then he'd eased his cramped body off the chair, zipped himself into a sleeping bag, and curled up right at the edge of the fire's cooling embers—

— And now came starting awake as the toe of a boot nudged him and Trask's voice rasped, 'Jake, get up. Have you seen anything of Miller? Obviously not. Well, the fat bastard's run out on us, and in your bloody vehicle! Damn, I thought for a moment you'd gone with him!'

Throwing back the mosquito net from his face, Jake unzipped the bag and struggled out of it. Now he remembered the engine starting up, dipped headlamps swinging faint beams out onto the road, and the cautious crunch of tyres on dirt and pebbles. He had thought at the time that someone was being very careful not to awaken the camp… and he'd been only too right!

'My vehicle?' he mumbled, but Trask had already moved on.

The entire camp was coming awake, and overhead the shrill, pulsing whistle of a jetcopter cutting its thrusters; the whup— whup — whup of its vanes lowering it down from a sky in which the stars were only just beginning to fade. And the first faint nimbus of dawn silhouetting the treetops and shining on rising, writhing wisps of mist.

'Hell's teeth.'' Lardis Lidesci groaned where he came stumbling from the direction of the big articulated Ops vehicle. As he came, his trembling right hand gingerly explored a blackened patch of bloodied, matted hair on the left side of his head. It looked ugly, and was made to look worse by a flow of blood that had run down and congealed around his ear. 'Damn the bloody man to hell.'' he said.

Meeting him halfway, Trask grunted: 'Miller?' 'Wouldn't you just know it?' Lardis nodded, then groaned and held his head again. 'I bedded down under the steps at the back of Ops. And I heard something in the dead of night, something breaking. But these damned short nights of yours… my system's all out of kilter with them… I'm used to sleeping, not these forty winks that you people take.''

'You didn't wake up till too late,' Trask grunted. I'm not a damned watchdog!' Lardis snapped. Trask shook his head. Tm not blaming you, Lardis. Hell, I didn't think the crazy bastard had enough guts to make a run for it! So if it's anyone's fault it's mine. I should have posted a guard on him.'

lan Goodly came loping, looking more than a little angry with himself. 'The camp's awake,' he said, sourly.

Trask looked at him and growled, 'You too? It seems we're each and every one of us blaming himself.'

'But I'm the precog,' Goodly chewed on his top lip.

'Right,' Trask agreed, 'but one man can't foresee it all. And let's face it, if you could anticipate everything that was coming…'

'… Then I would probably have killed myself a long time ago, yes,' Goodly nodded. 'But damn it, I did see this one!'

'You what?' Jake was wide awake now. 'So why didn't you do something?'

'I saw it in my sleep,' the precog answered. 'Saw it as a dream. Hub! When is a dream not a dream? When it's a glimpse of the future! But even if I'd known what it was, how would I have woken myself up? When you're asleep you're asleep. And the future guards its secrets well.'

'And I thought I was the only one who was having problems with his dreams!' Jake said. At which Trask looked at him very curiously… but only for a moment. There was too much to do.

'Okay,' Trask said, let's forget it. I'm to blame, Lardis is to blame, lan is to blame, and so is Jake—'

'Me?' Jake raised an eyebrow.

'For leaving the keys in your 'Rover,' Trask nodded. 'Anyway, no one is really to blame. The problem is we've grown too used to dealing with the weird, the abnormal, the monstrous. I mean, if it's mundane we tend to let it slide. And you couldn't ask for anything more mundane than Mr bloody Miller!'

'I beg to differ,' said Goodly.

'Eh?' Trask looked at him.

'Can I put you fully in the picture now?' the precog said. And when Trask nodded: 'Miller's a strange one,' Goodly continued. 'When finally I woke up I was worried about my dream. So I went to see if everything was okay. I missed Lardis where Miller must have pushed him back out of sight behind the trailer's steps, but I found the Duty Officer. He's going to be okay, but he, too, had been bashed on the head. He was lying in the corridor outside Miller's bunk with the door on top of him. They're pretty flimsy, those doors. The hinges had been worked loose.

'I wasn't sure how long the D.O.'d lain there, so I checked that he was okay then went to see if the Ops Room was safe. The place was working as normal… incoming, that is. Several messages, waiting for answers, and situation reports coiling up on the floor. There was some Cosmic Secret stuff that the D.O. must have been processing when Miller attracted his attention. Quite a bit of it had been decoded. Then I remembered how you'd asked for background information on Miller. That was there, too, coming out of the printer even as I got there. But there was stuff that should have been there and wasn't… like a lot of Cosmic Secret stuff from HQ? The printouts had been ripped through and some of the serials were missing. We'll need to get them duplicated, find out what was on them.

'Anyway, I grabbed the stuff on Miller, then began to wake people up. Now they're all awake, though I don't see what they can do to help. Oh yes, and here's all the background information on Miller…' He thrust some sheets of printout at Trask.

But before Trask could even begin reading, Goodly went on: 'Miller isn't as mundane as you think, Ben. But he is an obsessive nut, and the black sheep of the family. His uncle was big in Western Australian politics, got him work as a minor official in a job where he didn't have a lot to do but could indulge his thirst for power — in however small a way. Why else do you suppose he's the guardian of a million square miles of nothing? To keep him out of the way, that's why. Good grief, and we had to get lumbered with him.' Come to think of it, it's likely that that, too, came about as a result of his uncle's influence.

'Okay, his obsessions. Anything…! I mean it: this fellow can get hooked on literally anything! An obsessive personality, it's as simple — or not as simple — as that. But guess what? Back in the late 1970s, early '80s, he saw Close Encounters and E.T. — well, who didn't? But this is Peter Miller we're talking about.' He joined a whacky UFO group, of which he's still a member, and wrote two "Friendly Aliens Are Here" books that didn't get published. Need I say more? No way you could have convinced this bloke that we were in the right last night, Ben. No way at all…'

'I see,' said Trask. And, after he had given it a moment's thought, 'Do we have any idea how long he's been gone?'

'Judging by the D.O.'s signatures in the message log, maybe three, three and a half hours,' Goodly answered.

Trask nodded. 'Then he could be anywhere by now. Two hundred and more miles away, for all we know.' So no good our trying to chase him. Very well, here are the priorities. I want Lardis and the D.O. taken care of as best possible. And I want a man — you, lan — in the Ops chair sending out wanted notices to all the police authorities in a two hundred miles radius… better make it three hundred miles… or better still, all of Western Australia!' But on second thought: 'No, wait, send out just one, to the Internal Security people in Perth. He's their man, after all, so let them go after him. Oh, and check that they have his profile, too, which ought to scotch any "wild stories" that Miller may be circulating. And finally, I want to know what was on those missing printouts…'