Hellstrom's Hive

Janvert stood behind two females and two males in an upbound elevator. The quartet had shown disturbance at his entry and he had interpreted this as growing out of the wound on his cheek. A peremptory gesture with the gun, however, had quieted them, but he was left with the odd feeling that the gesture, not the gun, had elicited the response. To test this, he tucked the automatic under his right arm when one of the men turned, and he waved a palm at the man. It was as though Janvert had said turn around and leave me alone. The man turned, wiggled his fingers at his companions, and all of them ignored Janvert from that point.

He had the hang of the elevators now. You stood to the back in these upper-level cars. The act of stepping forward slowed them at a passing floor. Near the doorway there was a critical area that operated an invisible sensor.

One of the women glanced back at him presently, nodded at the doorway which was passing a blank gray wall. Last stop coming up? Janvert wondered. The others moved forward in a body. Janvert readied himself to join them, lifting the captured wand in his left hand. As he moved, the first thin edge of the opening gaped above him. The car slowed and he saw a cluster of bare legs, two weapons pointing inward at the elevator car.

Janvert depressed the stud on his own weapon, fanned it across the doorway as the opening deepened. He caught his fellow passengers as well as those outside. He leaped over the passengers, spraying his weapon right and left in a humming arc of destruction, and ran down the tunnel to the right, partly on the cold floor, partly on fallen flesh still warm under his feet.

As he ran, he heard a gushing crunch behind, glanced back without breaking stride. One of his fellow passengers had fallen with head across the door opening. The upward-surging car had left a head rolling on the floor in a patch of gore.

Janvert turned away, finding it odd that he felt nothing. Nothing at all. That denizen of this hive had been dead already, killed by one of his own kind’s weapons. It made no difference what was done to the body after that. No difference at all.

Continuing to depress the firing stud for short bursts of humming, Janvert trotted down the tunnel, clearing a path as he went. In this way, he rounded a corner, caught another group of elevator watchers. They collapsed as he burst upon them, but there was a new group running toward him down the tunnel ahead and Janvert heard the thrumming of their weapons. Obviously they were out of range. He lifted the automatic, emptied it into this group, dodged into the first up-car, and rode it two floors before emerging into another tunnel where the opening had been left unguarded.

Janvert dodged hurrying figures to cross this tunnel, entered another sharply slanted up-ramp which he abandoned at the first doorway on his right. This led into another hydroponics garden full of harvesters. He recognized tomatoes and hurled the empty automatic at a worker who ran toward him protesting the intrusion. He ran, firing the captured weapon ahead and to both sides. Tomatoes splashed on the floor from tumbling harvest sacks, and their red pulp spattered over his feet and legs as he skidded through them. His chest was one big band of flame, throat dry and painful, his body almost ready to quit.

A series of small openings became visible in the far wall of the hydroponics room as he approached. They were about chest height and he could see sacked produce whisking upward—then baskets, bins. He recognized berries, what appeared to be deep green cucumbers, string beans . . .

A dumbwaiter system!

Shoulders sagging, he came to a halt, stared at the wall. There was no door along its entire length—only these openings with produce whipping upward. There were flat shelves on a conveyor; some of them came past him empty. Containers went onto the shelves. The openings were about three feet square and the moving shelves didn’t appear to be much larger. Could he get in there onto one of those shelves? They moved upward at frightening speed. He could hear sounds of tumult growing in the tunnel behind him. What other chance did he have? He couldn’t go back.

Janvert summoned a small reserve of strength, backed off several steps, and watched for an empty carrier. When one appeared, he dove for the opening, rolling himself around the weapon clutched in his hands. The instant his head entered the opening, the carrier slowed and he landed hard. The shelf swayed under him, but he compressed himself into a fetal ball, managed to stay aboard. His left shoulder rubbed the back wall as the carrier gathered speed, and he left a trail of skin before he could jerk away. He peered up and around.

The dumbwaiter system operated in a long slot between gray walls, an area illuminated only by light from the feeder openings. He could make out many carriers moving swiftly upward around him and there was an acrid fruit smell overriding the other stinks. He passed more openings, glimpsed a startled face at one—a woman carrying a basket piled high with yellow fruit that looked like tiny pumpkins. Janvert peered upward, trying to find out how the system terminated. Did it disgorge into chopping machinery? Was there a bloody mincer arrangement up there, a sorting system, or conveyors?

A wide line of light was becoming visible far above him and he could hear the increasing roar of machinery up there. It drowned out the whistling, clanking, hissing of the conveyor he was riding. The wide line of light was nearer—nearer—he tensed himself and was caught by surprise as a trip system tipped his shelf at the top of the lift, dumping him into a bin piled high with yellow carrots.

Clutching the bin’s top with his left hand, Janvert righted himself, clambered over the edge into a room of long, waist-high troughs that flowed with bubbling pulp of many colors. Workers moved all through the area dumping bins of produce into the troughs.

It was easily six feet to the floor and Janvert landed with a slippery squishing that sent him lurching into a female who had come up to the conveyor outlet with an empty bin on wheels. Janvert’s momentum sent her sprawling. He kept her down with a burst from his weapon, charged forward, slipping and skidding. There was pulped tomato on his feet and the floor itself carried a skimming of multicolored debris from the processing that continued all around him.

He passed another group before reaching a doorway, but their food-spattered appearance differed little from his and they paid no attention to him. Janvert plunged through the door, was hit by a cold shock of water spraying from overhead nozzles. He gasped, splashing through the water, and was almost clean when he emerged on the far side through another door into a wide, dimly lighted tunnel. Water was draining off him, off the captured weapon in his hand, collecting in a puddle under him, but there were similar puddles all around.

Janvert glanced left—the long vista of a tunnel down there, but few people and none of them appeared interested in him. He looked to his right, saw a spidery stairway similar to the one at the underground river. The stairs went upward into gloom and that was his direction. Janvert turned, slogged toward the stairs, began climbing, drawing himself up by sliding his left hand on the rail and pulling. His mouth was hanging open with fatigue and the aftermath of that shocking shower.

At the fifth rung on the stairs, he saw legs appear at the top. He fired his weapon without pausing, kept it humming as he climbed the remaining steps. Five sprawled figures lay on a platform where the stairs ended. He limped around them, his gaze fastened on a door beyond them. The door had only a bar latch which he lifted. The hinges were on the inside to the right. He pulled the bar. The door creaked open, revealing a dank dirt passage and the upthrusting roots of a tree stump that the door’s movement had pushed outward and down. Janvert dragged himself past the stump into starlit darkness, heard the door creaking closed behind him. The stump tipped back into its concealing position with only a faint thump.

Janvert stood shivering in cold night air.

It took him a moment to realize that he had escaped from Hellstrom’s madhouse human hive. He peered upward: stars. No doubt of it—he was outside. But where? The starlight gave him few clues to his surroundings. He could see a faint suggestion of trees directly ahead. He groped for the stump that masked the exit. His fingers encountered a hard surface which a fingernail told him was real wood. His eyes were adjusting, though, and escape from the tunnels had tapped a source of energy he hadn’t known existed. There was a faint glow in the sky slightly to his left and he guessed that would be Fosterville. He tried to recall the distance. Ten miles? His overworked body would never make that on bare feet. The area in front of him appeared to be a grassy slope with dark spots in it.

Most of the water had dried from his body, but he still trembled with the cold. He knew he couldn’t delay any longer. Those bodies behind him would be found. Hellstrom’s people would be out here after him all too soon. He had to put distance between himself and that camouflaged exit. No matter how he did it, he had to get back to civilization and tell what he had seen.

Taking the sky glow as his compass point, Janvert set out down the slope. He clutched the captured weapon in his right hand. This thing was his passport to belief when he told his story. A demonstration of this weapon on a convenient animal would silence all doubt.

The rough ground hurt his bare feet, caught his toes with unseen rocks and roots. He stumbled, hobbled, ran full into a low wooden fence, and fell across it into the dust of a narrow road.

Janvert picked himself up, studied what he could see of the road in the starlight. It appeared to angle down to his left in the general direction of what he thought was Fosterville. He turned in that direction, stumbled down the dusty track, panting, not trying to be quiet. He was too worn-out for that. The road dipped into a shallow swale and he lost the sky glow for a moment, but had it again at the next rise.

The dust kicked up by his feet tickled his nose. There was a breeze like a feather touch on his right cheek and down his arm and his bare flank. The track dipped once more and turned gently to the right into a deeper darkness that suggested trees. He missed part of the turn, stubbed the little toe on his left foot against the edge of a rut. He hissed a curse, knelt, and gripped the injured member until the pain eased. As he knelt, he saw a sudden flickering of light in the darkness directly ahead. By reflex, Janvert brought up the captured weapon, pointed it, and fired-a single humming burst.

The light vanished.

He straightened, groped his way forward with his left hand outstretched, the weapon held close to his right side. His outstretched hand was too high to meet the next obstruction, and he fell across a cold metallic surface, the weapon scraping it with a noisy clatter that froze him for the moment it took to realize he was sprawled half across the hood of a car.

A car!

He eased himself back, skinned his elbow on a hood ornament, then guided himself with his free hand around the left side of the car. At the window, his fingers explored an open crack at the top and he smelled tobacco smoke. He tried to peer through the window, but it was too dark. There was a rhythmic wheezing inside, though. He groped for the door handle, jerked the door open in a startling flash of light from the automatic switch. The light revealed two men in business suits, neat white shirts and ties, slumped unconscious in the front seat. The driver held a smoldering cigarette which was charring a circle in the left leg of his pants. Janvert took the cigarette and dropped it in the dust by his feet, crushed out the burning cloth with one hand.

The man lighting a cigarette—the flicker of light at which he’d fired. This weapon didn’t kill from a distance, then. Walls and distance made it less than fatal, and it obviously had a limited range beyond that.

Janvert shook the driver’s shoulder, got only a lolling head for response. They were out cold. The movement opened the man’s coat, though, revealing a shoulder holster and a snub-nosed magnum pistol. Janvert took the gun and then saw the radio beneath the dash.

These weren’t Hellstrom’s people! These were cops!