Robert Walker - Zombie Eyes

"Anyone hurt?"

"All are fine, and we're pushing on."

"Where are you? Have you penetrated the ship?"

"Not yet."

"What? You've been in there an hour."

"We've met with several obstacles thrown up in our way."

"Are you near your target?"

"Why, is there a problem up there?"

"Army is here, and chomping at the bit, ready to open fire, and I can't blame them."

Stroud hesitated at his end. "You've got to give us time, Commissioner. We're closing in, but--"

"You've got till dawn, Stroud."

"Dawn?"

"Three hours. And then we unleash the heavy artillery."

"I can't promise we'll be out by then."

"And I can't promise you that it will make a damned difference, Stroud. Too many people up here have lost too many friends and relatives to this thing. They want action, not a ghost hunt on a ship buried below the city."

"We're wasting time, then. Stroud out."

Nathan frowned. He'd hoped that he could convince the fool that he must get his people out of there now. But Stroud was a stubborn son of a bitch. And either brave or stupid. Either way, James Nathan had come to admire the man.

Abe Stroud clicked off the communicator, their only link with the outside, informing the others that they had less than three hours before the Army meant to flatten the place. "Can't stop ignorance," he told the others. "Everyone thinks the disease can be ended if they just bomb the site. We know better."

All of them felt it now as Stroud had felt it right along; they were not alone. They could not see it so much as they could feel it: the definite presence of Ubbrroxx. It was like the fire of a furnace. You didn't have to stand at the furnace to feel the heat.

And the temperature was rising in the pit, rising by leaps and bounds. Inside their protective wear the temperature was rising to ninety, ninety-five and a hundred. Kendra was the first to notice her temperature gauge and ask the others if they were also experiencing difficulties.

They were. All of them. And the tunnel they had chosen to step into was now a river of superheated air. Stroud shouted for them to form a circle, to huddle together and hold on.

The others, not knowing what else to do, did as Stroud instructed. Holding firmly to one another, Stroud shouted, "No one must break the circle. Hold on! Hold on!"

The heat flew over and around them, swirling in a torrent of electrified hatred from the thing in the ship.

Inside the circle of their bodies, Stroud held the skull at the very center of them, which had suddenly become a freezing orb, an icy vapor rising from it. It was a silent conversation to them all, not just Stroud, a visual dialogue among them all as the others saw what Stroud saw: the skull was fighting the fire wind of the damnable tunnel with a preternatural wind of its own. Stroud understood the magical power and sanctity of the circle, that it closed out evil and kept in good. The church with its brethren of believers was the circle.

There were, apparently, all manner of nasty creatures in this underworld, many of which had taken up a long residence here in the pit. Abe had learned of his ancestry, of his special genetic makeup, which had only been enhanced by the steel plate in his cranium. He knew that he alone had the capacity to detect and put an end to the creature in the ship, and that he was indeed the distant ancestor of the brave and curious Esruad.

Abe smelled smoke and saw that their protective wear was being seared by the heat, a thin smoke rising off them all. It threatened to burst the material into flame. The shield of safety around them seemed to be eroding, when suddenly the threat retreated and the air cooled.

"You like it coooooold?" came a voice that barreled down the cavern just before a rush of frigid air, followed by demonic laughter.

"Hold to the circle, all your hands on the crystal!" Stroud shouted, and the crystal turned warm and then hot beneath their touch until they could hold it no longer, and Stroud bent to place it at their feet. The circle crouched with him and withheld the freezing temperatures hurled at them, although their protective clothing was laden with ice.

"It's expending a great deal of energy over this game," said Stroud.

"So is our skull," said Wiz.

Then the brutally cold storm was suddenly lifted. There was not so much as a sensation it was ever there, save for the falling glasslike pieces of ice as their suits thawed. The skull, too, returned to normal.

"Uncanny," commented a shaken Leonard, "simply uncanny."

An unearthly, ungodly stench began to filter through the tunnels. It was so ghastly that they could even smell it through the protection of the oxygen masks they wore.

"What the hell is that?" asked Wiz.

Leonard was pointing a bony finger at the things that now suddenly appeared to block their way. Stroud saw what was to him a nightmare, the vision of several vampires that he had personally killed in Andover a year ago. Their bodies were fully intact, but they walked upright with the metal stakes he had driven into them. The sight unnerved Stroud as he watched the white maggots feeding on the wounds of the vampires who now opened their mouths wide, baring their fangs.

Leonard was seeing some other horror altogether, a creeping, spiderlike creation. Wiz shouted something about anthropomorphids--creatures with human limbs and organs jammed into their anatomy--while Kendra saw giant insects of the praying mantis variety. The creatures gained the distance between them, scattering Stroud and the others. Stroud shouted, "It's using our own worst nightmares against us! It's rummaging around in our heads for our worst fears!"

It seemed to be true, because now one of the awful vampires had turned into the kind of cannibal werewolf Stroud had once combated in the deep woods of Michigan. "Control your fears, people! Control your fears!"

The darts didn't have any effect on the monsters that pushed them back and back along the corridor, returning them to the hole that would send them once again below the ship to weaken the energy of the skull. Stroud could not believe the precision with which the evil Ubbrroxx re-created the fearsome creatures that had been stored in Stroud's mind, down to the sickening "O" pucker of the vampire wishing only to kiss him about the throat, and the slavering of the werewolf. All around him, Stroud heard the members of his party shouting in terror at their own fearsome visions.

Stroud suddenly reached for his weapon, firing the gas at the menacing monsters. They seemed impervious to it. "What do we do?" shouted Kendra, separated from Stroud by four or five feet. Wiz and Leonard, too, were shouting that their weapons were useless.

The skull levitated from Stroud's pouch, spraying the images of the monsters with a strange ray, creating holographic mists of them into which Stroud stabbed his hand. It went through the vampire image. The images continued to threaten, lunge and attack, but they were as harmless as celluloid. Stroud and the others laughed at the effect and their own fears as they now simply stepped through them.

"And it was going to devour us whole. Each of us!" Kendra was telling Leonard, explaining what her eyes told her was there.

Stroud gently caught the skull in his hands. He feared losing Esruad now; he feared having to sacrifice the skull and its potent contents to this demon. Suppose it gave the demon hyper-supernatural power, a kind of superconductivity in the underworld? Could the cure for Ubbrroxx be worse than the disease? Esruad's crystal-imprisoned spirit had said nothing about the chance possibility, yet it now struck Stroud like a hammerblow, and then the voice of Esruad came clearly rolling through the coils of Stroud's brain, as if brought by the flow of his blood. "I have not come this way to strengthen my enemy, but to destroy him."