Robert Walker - Zombie Eyes

"Ubbrroxx!" shouted Stroud, lifting his gas canister and firing. "Fire, Leonard! Fire!"

Leonard froze, not using the dart weapon, instead turning it on Stroud, firing. The dart hit an invisible shield around Stroud and fell harmlessly at his feet, but it made Stroud turn and stare at Leonard's apparition as it became a giant cat that started to pounce. Stroud swung the gas around, choking the sight and the enormous throat of the creature cat, causing it to writhe in pain.

"Stroud!" Esruad called in warning.

Stroud turned back to see long tentacles wrapping about the invisible shield that encased him, pulling Stroud and his shield, and all that was inside it with him, toward the gaping, enormous maw of the crab-faced thing ahead of them.

Stroud fired all he had of the gas. The monster drew him closer, closer, closer, and in its mouth Stroud saw the bottomless pit.

"Strike! Strike, Stroud!" his inner ally told him.

Stroud found the sword of ice emanating from his body and he struck out at the tentacles, slicing through them and sending up a sulfuric, gaseous cloud with the wounds he inflicted on the demon.

The monster advanced on him with the speed of a flying witch, a banshee howl filling Stroud's ears, drowning out Esruad's shout. But Stroud instinctively jumped to one side, realizing how effective the envelope around him was when the huge, fleshy thing slammed into a wall that had been behind him. There was a resultant tearing away of that whole side of the ship and the creature somehow swallowed itself up and disappeared, leaving behind a scattering of the parasites that had been feeding off it.

"Must keep your wits about you, Stroud," his counterpart told him. "Leonard was never here."

"A trick."

"It sends out little parts of itself to form these creatures, and it used Leonard's image. Leonard is--was--most likely dead all along."

"And the others?"

"Most likely the same."

"And Kendra's cries?"

"You must ignore them, Stroud. Trust me."

"Trusting you has kept me alive." But Stroud still feared for Kendra.

"Keep control of your fears, your emotions, Stroud."

"I will, if you will."

"It feeds on fear, grows stronger in the face of it. It will do anything to unnerve you."

"Apparently."

"Including using the girl."

Stroud stopped to sit down and gather his breath there in the dark, his hand going to his head. All the voices there behind Esruad's were unsettling. Kendra's fate, and how little he knew of it, too, was unsettling. And he was supposed to keep his composure.

Stroud pulled out his communicator and tried to reach Nathan outside, but the signal was weak and all he got in return was static. He kept trying for a moment when once more Kendra's screams reached his ears. She was now calling out his name, pleading with him to come to her rescue. This made him shut down the radio and get to his feet, determined to carry on. His watch told him he had less than half an hour remaining before they would blow the place to kingdom come.

"It was him, I tell you." Kendra had tried to answer the signal Stroud had sent up, but once more it was cluttered with Static. "He's still alive," she shouted amid the zombies.

"But we can't go back," Wiz told her.

"No, but we can get to Nathan. We can plead for more time." She tried to reach Nathan by radio but it remained jammed.

They were halfway through the zombies, fearful yet of being attacked by them. Several had reached out to them with pleading eyes as well as hands. Some moaned as if trapped deep within themselves, pleading for release. If the creature wanted to kill Kendra and Wiz, all it had to do was turn these people loose on them, and yet it had not done so. Kendra had wondered why and she'd put it to Wiz.

When he had no answer, she pushed him for a theory.

"I should guess that it is reserving all its power to ... to combat Stroud and his crystal spirit."

"And if that is so, it's further proof that he's alive ... that the battle down there is still going on."

"Yes, yes ... that would make sense."

"We've got to get to Nathan."

"Yes, hurry ... hurry."

They rushed on to the strange beating of an underground heart, the pounding rising in their ears until they felt their very souls shaken.

-20-

Kendra Cline's plaintive cries in the dark were like daggers plunged into Stroud's soul. Esruad tried desperately to hold him back, to tell him he must ignore the pitiful pleas of the woman, if he were to survive this day. Stroud, unable to listen anymore to Esruad, tore away and raced down the intricate, involved labyrinth now laid out for him by the demon. The walls of this maze were hard-packed clay molded together with the bones of men. Stroud rushed along its narrow and narrowing course to a point where his shoulders scraped the walls and his clothing tore on the outcroppings of bone. He then reached a point where the bones had taken on flesh and life and were reaching out at him, tearing at him as if they belonged to prisoners in cells who just wished to touch another human being.

Stroud tore loose from the wall of hands and found himself standing before a stairwell of stones. He heard again Kendra's screams and he rushed up the stones only to have them crumble below his weight, taking him to the floor once again, and now the stones were, one by one, hurled at him.

Esruad's shield around him held. He drew on Esruad's magical strength, making the leap to the next level, pulling himself up as if he were weightless, a kind of angel, he thought, an avenging angel.

"Let the woman go! Ubbrroxx! Take me, and let the woman go!" he shouted at the darkness around him. In the distance, through what appeared to be a tunnel that went on through eternity, he saw a light, a green, glowing light which touched off a fire.

"You want the woman ... so come for her," Ubbrroxx said, his voice curled by a laugh.

Esruad struggled with Stroud to use his head. "Another sacrifice is nothing to ending the power of this evil, Stroud!"

From the records uncovered by Leonard and Wisnewski, in the very written words of Esruad, Stroud had learned that he must locate the geographic center of the ship. He now stared down the tube of flame ahead of him. "But this is it ... this is where it lives, Esruad."

Esruad had no argument for this.

Stroud knew that momentarily he and Esruad would come face-to-face with the true demon...

No more vile little familiars, beasts with tarantula bodies or tentacles, no more substitute horrors. Once Stroud penetrated the center, Ubbrroxx had no place else to hide and could take no more camouflage, create no more apparitions. It wasn't anything Esruad had said, nothing that Stroud had learned from the records, only a peaceful inner power called knowledge. The offshoots of the creature, its telepathic powers, its havoc, all emanated from here, and at the very back of this chamber it had Kendra.

It had come down to Stroud and the Satan of the Etruscans, Ubbrroxx.

Stroud felt fortified, however. He did not feel alone, not with Esruad within him, cloaking him in his impressive magic.

Stroud started across the dark interior of the new cell he had reached when out of the dark on his right side a flying creature loped by his head, almost striking him. Stroud saw only the black wings of the beast as it swooped, until his light hit it, and he saw that it was an enormous vampire bat, not unlike the ones that he had done battle with in the caverns outside Andover, Illinois. Stroud heard others screeching in the dark, piercing the blackness with their beady, blind eyes.

"Ubbrroxx is drawing on your fears, your worst nightmares, Stroud," he told himself.

Stroud tried desperately to get a grip, but it was like looking into the graves of the many vampires he had personally driven into eternity with the long-spiked, chemically poisoned stakes he had used. Something roared like a beast to his left and then a den of snapping, snarling beasts rose up in Stroud's light, approaching. It was Kerac and his band of werewolves, monsters that Stroud had wiped out in the northernmost woods of Michigan the year before, after tracking one of their number from the streets of Chicago. All here, along with the vampires ... unreal, and yet so real and threatening. Then they pounced in unison with an attack from the vampires.