Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

'I know we've been over some of this before/ Trask began, 'but I just want to make it plain what we're dealing with. That job we did in the Gibson Desert — Bruce Trennier and his creatures — it wasn't big stuff. Trennier was a lieutenant, a righthand man, but he wasn't the boss by any means. Just what he and those others were doing out there in the middle of nowhere, we still aren't sure. Maybe that entire set-up was just a bolthole, somewhere that the big chief could run to if things went wrong. But as for the boss himself— who incidentally could as easily be herself — he or she is here, not far away from us even as I speak. At least that's our belief. It's what our experts are telling us.

'Now, that night when we camped out in the Gibson Desert. After the fireworks were over, one of you — no names, no pack drill — asked me a question. Normally it would be a perfectly reasonable question: why couldn't we take a lesser creature, a thrall, captive in order to talk to him, study him, and try to see what makes him tick? Which as I've said would seem reasonable… if we were dealing with an entirely human enemy. But circumstances being what they are, and our enemy being what he is, your question told me that you were either poorly informed, or you hadn't understood your original briefing, or you really didn't appreciate what you'd been dealing with that night. And for all I know, it mightn't be just one man I'm speaking about here, but all of you could have the same problem.

'So, despite that I've had experience of these things in the past — or maybe because I have — and you people are newcomers to the game, I tried to put myself in your shoes. Maybe it had seemed too easy. Unpleasant, yes, but not really difficult. And I began to see what the problem was. You've probably seen yourselves as men with a nasty job to do… but someone has to do it, right? I mean, maybe it seemed to you that these people you were killing were like, what — escapees from an isolation ward somewhere? — and you were putting them down simply to ensure they didn't pass on the infection. A pretty effective preventative measure, certainly, but perhaps a bit drastic to your way of thinking.

'So, let's go back to that perfectly reasonable question: why don't we just immobilize these things, lock them away, and study them? And wouldn't that be a far less drastic solution?

'Well, let me tell you again — let me remind you — about vampires:

'Oh, they can be downed. Shoot at them with bullets, especially silver bullets, and you can knock them down… even if they don't always stay down. Burn them — burn them entirely — and they die. Lock them up in silver cages, and keep their systems topped up with garlic so that they can't work up a head of steam, and you might even manage to confine them — for a little while. But as for studying them…

'Only make a mistake — your first mistake, just one — and you become the prisoner. And you don't get a second chance.

'Think of it this way. Men have devised chemical and biological weapons, toxins and living viruses, that could wipe us all out — destroy Mankind itself— if they were to get loose. We keep these things in secure laboratories where we study and even develop them. Well, when I say "we," I mean men: "scientists," in outlawed lands mainly, dabbling in a mainly outlawed science. For happily a majority of governments have long since banned all such agents; they deem them simply too terrible for study or development, and they're right.

'But the unpleasant fact is that because some people continue to experiment with this stuff, our people are obliged to follow suit in order to find vaccines and antidotes. They don't want us to be caught with our immune systems down, as it were. So yes, these terrible poisons still exist in just about every country that's capable of handling them. But by God, you'd better believe they take damn good care not to spill this stuff!

'So then, why am I bothering to tell you what you probably already know, and what does it have to do with vampires and the Wamphyri? Well, it's this simple:

'If you think of the Wamphyri and their works in just such terms of reference you won't go far wrong. That is, you have to think of them as something that must be destroyed. But whatever you do don't think of them on the same scale of danger! I mean, we all know that the Richter scale is a yardstick for the power of earthquakes. But if it was a scale for all potential disasters, then to cover man-made biological weapons it would have to stretch from the current nine to ninety, and to cover the Wamphyri it would need to carry on from ninety to infinity! That's by my personal scale of reckoning, and I am not wrong.

'And remember: our man-made toxins and viruses aren't bent on escaping; they can't think!Rut only imprison a vampire, and from that moment on he's thinking of ways to get free. He wants to be free, like you, and wants you to be a prisoner, like him. The prisoner of something growing inside you, that will gradually make you someone — something — else. Something other.

'So then, now maybe you can see why we can't suffer a vampire to live. The point being, we really won't suffer a vampire to live. Be sure of this: if you get infected, there's no cure. Which means we'll kill you. Oh, it'll be clean, but it will happen.

'So remember, a moment or so after one of us — I include myself— shows up positive, he also shows up dead… 'And on that point, enough said… 'Now let's move on:

'We think it's likely that our quarry has a hideout somewhere in the mountains. Where they come from, the Wamphyri are very fond of their aeries — the places where they live — and the higher the better. Unfortunately that doesn't tell us very much, doesn't narrow down his or her location. For as you know as well or better than I do, there are mountains galore around here. But there's also a paradox in that the Wamphyri don't go much on sunlight. And right now we've rather a surfeit of that, too! Weird, wouldn't you say, that our alien friend has chosen to set up shop here? Well, maybe not.

'You see, he's not dumb. He knows that we know his habits, and that we've known about his "invasion" from square one. That means he also knows that normally this would be one of the last places we'd expect to find him. So where better to hide himself away and do his thing, whatever that thing is? The only problem is, he might also know that we found and dealt with Bruce Trennier, and by now he could well be expecting us to come looking for him here.

Indeed, he could already know that we've arrived. And if so he'll be doubly dangerous, because there'll be little or no element of surprise.

'Okay, we have a couple of days before our back-up squads and the big ops vehicle are in situ. And that has to be one of our first priorities: to find suitable and preferably non-obtrusive sites, with access to principal mountain approach roads, where we can harbour these men and vehicles as they arrive. So as of noon today we'll be air-mobile again, but not in the jetcopters that you've grown used to. They may have been great in the desert, but to Brisbane's civilian population — not to mention our quarry — aircraft that look like they do are bound to attract attention. So for the time being they'll be on standby in hangars at the airfield where we came in.

'So, there's a firm in town that does aerial sightseeing trips by helicopter, north along the Coastal Range to Gladstone, and south over the Macphersons and along the Richmond Range as far as Grafton. Which is ideal for our purposes in that it covers the ground we're interested in, and the pilots know all the routes by heart and have first-class local knowledge. Alas that we can't simply commandeer this firm, its men and machines; but no, that would be to give the show away, and so we'll be paying our way. But I will try to get us a bit more clout than the average tourist. Obviously we have to have the final say on where we fly and what we look at. So later this morning I'll speak to Prime Minister Lance Blackmore and see if he can sort something out for us.