Thorn

Chapter Twenty-Five

Gunfire and uproar brought Gliddon running, cursing through the fragments of sandwich that he spat out of his mouth, grabbing up his shotgun from where he had left it leaning against the stacked crates of food. At the far end of the building, Ralph reported to him that the prisoner as yet unquestioned, Bill Bird, had somehow got loose. Ike had seen him, with unbound hands, sneaking out a door and then making a break for it. Ike had fired at him, evidently missing completely; and then Ike had gone in hot pursuit.

"Get him!" Gliddon snarled, shoving Ralph toward the door also.

"He could maybe try something like doubling back, to get the Jeep—"

"I hope to hell he does. Get him!" And Ralph ran.

Gliddon drew a deep breath, let it out. Well, all right. He had pretty well made up his mind anyway that he was going to have to cut out alone, and probably tonight, sometime before dawn. So anything that got Ike and Ralph out of the way, kept them from raising any objections, might well turn out at this stage to be an actual advantage.

He trotted toward the shed where the aircraft was kept, at the other end of the building from the Jeep. Should he stop on the way and finish off the people left in the cells? No, first things first; it looked like there was a good chance of one witness getting away anyway. First make sure of the painting and the plane.

He reached the aircraft shed, which was attached to the north end of the building. He, Ike and Ralph had built it carefully out of old lumber so it wouldn't look strange from the air. Now at once Gliddon dragged open the wide doors. In the moonless night the section of abandoned road which served as runway was vaguely visible. Lantern still in hand—now was no time to worry about showing a little light—Gliddon then turned back toward the deep end of the hangar-shed, where he had stashed the packaged painting in the middle of a stack of rotted lumber, studded here and there with rusty nails.

And as soon as he had turned, he stopped. In the beam of his lantern stood the slim young girl, Helen, bending over the pile of old boards and timbers. Her hands were free, and now she was down to wearing nothing but her jeans.

"God," said Gliddon, speaking aloud but to himself. "They're all loose." And any one of them could finger him for kidnapping, at least.

"Don't you point that gun at me," the girl said, straightening up and turning, a hand on one hip. She put her other hand on a flimsy table that Gliddon had brought into the shed when they were doing some maintenance on the aircraft engine, as a place to set down tools and parts.

And Gliddon paused for a moment, struck by her face. It was suddenly different. And her voice . . . maybe he was starting to go crazy himself, he spent so much of his life around nuts of one kind or another.

She was starting to say, again, "Don't you—" just as Gliddon fired. And at the same moment, somehow, the table she had been holding came flipping up into the air toward him. As if the girl had tossed it, though no little girl could possibly—and the charge hit the table in midair and blew the middle of the table into fragments. The legs and various splintered parts of the top went flying everywhere. The thin wooden tabletop was not enough to save the girl, of course, not at close range like this. She went down at once. Gliddon shone the lantern briefly on the bloody mess, then set it down so he could rub his right forearm. One-handed wasn't a good way to fire a twelve-gauge, even if you did have a powerful grip. Anyway, he hadn't broken any fingers, though one had been torn slightly by the trigger guard in the recoil.

He set the weapon down too. Then it took him a minute to dig through the lumber pile and get the painting out, bulky and heavy inside its special protective crate and wrappings. Grunting, he wrestled the package over to the Cessna, got the cargo compartment open and worked the package inside. A tight fit; carefully planned by the Seabrights, probably, even as far back as when they bought the aircraft; give them credit for being planners. That was one reason Gliddon didn't want to ride with their plan to the very end, not once it had become obvious that they were keeping important secrets from him.

He reloaded his shotgun—he liked a simple double-barrel for reliability, two shots were enough if you knew when to use them and could put them where you wanted. Then he headed back into the building to finish off the two live witnesses he could still reach. In passing he glanced down once more at the dead girl. He thought she had moved amid the blood. Even so, there didn't appear to be any need to waste another shell on her, but he would check again on his way back.

Tonight everything was one surprise after another. Looking into the room where he had left the punk called Pat, he saw that the kid appeared to be dead already. Pat lay still, on his back, bound hands underneath, with open, unblinking eyes and some kind of bloody mess around his parted lips. Beside him lay the sweatshirt Helen had been wearing. Well, whatever, the kid looked dead. Making sure, Gliddon knelt down, felt a forehead that was already cold. No heartbeat under the shirt. He flicked an eyeball with a fingertip and got no reflex blink. No need to waste a shell here, either.

With a growing sense that speed was necessary, Gliddon turned away. He had to make sure that the last prisoner, the girl called Judy, was still where she was supposed to be.

Indeed she was, though she was working to get the door of her cell open when Gliddon got there. She was alive and still hand-tied, and satisfyingly terrified. It was reassuring to find at least one person behaving as they ought.

Gliddon would have loved to play with her for a while, but there just wasn't time. He set down his lantern and raised his gun and grinned. "Sleep tight," he said.

And whirled round, on nerves that had become hair-trigger, at the ghost of a small sound just a few steps behind his back.

The small brown-haired girl with the bloody torso stood there, seemingly ignoring her great red wound. In the reflected lantern-light the wound now looked more like scar tissue than like hamburger. Gliddon's eyes must have played him tricks a minute ago, the flimsy wooden tabletop must after all have saved her life. Temporarily.

"Gliddon, Gliddon." She didn't even sound hurt. Her little-girl voice held a tone of soft reproach, and it appeared that she was smiling at him.

Gliddon's nerve might have held up, would have held up, if she had been yelling, or attacking him, or crying out in pain for mercy. But he couldn't take this kind of a reality just now. He fired both barrels right in her face. The girl's hair blew back in the wind of the blast, but her face remained untouched. The wall behind her cratered widely and shallowly, and a choking cloud of brown adobe powder burst into the air. The girl stood there with her lovely, smiling face untouched.

Gliddon dropped the emptied shotgun, grabbed up the lantern again, and at the same time drew his pistol. The lantern's beam shining through the cloud of settling dust showed him Helen's dazed and gentle smile. The great red scar along her ribs and belly looked almost superficial, like an old, half-healed burn or scrape.

"Gliddon, no, you shouldn't. Uncle Del's going to be awfully angry with you. He loves me, I'm his niece. I'm just like his very own little girl, he says."

Gliddon couldn't think any longer. He triggered his revolver at the figure, and behind it wood and adobe shuddered and burst, gave up flying fragments to the air.

There was something else in the air, at Gliddon's elbow. He sensed another presence, saw another human figure starting, trying, to take shape. He turned and ran, fleeing by instinct to the aircraft shed.

* * *

Judy, gazing at the new apparition, almost broke down in her near-hysterical relief. "You're here, you're here, thank God. I was . . ."

Her voice trailed off. The figure of the vampire taking shape before her eyes was not that of the man she had been expecting. She stared as the form solidified. It was that of a huge man, massively built. He looked quite young—she knew how deceptive that could be—and Judy was sure that she had never seen him before.

He was looking at Judy oddly. In a bass voice he asked her: "Who did you think I was?"

Before she could answer, another man's voice screamed outside in the night, a hundred yards or more away: "Ike! Gliddon! Help!"

Judy slumped, knowing behind closed eyelids a sudden vision: white teeth quenched in red blood. The help that she had waited for had come.

* * *

In the aircraft shed, Gliddon hurled himself into the Cessna's cabin. The engine would be cold, but he had kept everything as ready as possible. He was going to make it now. Mexico, here we come.

He grabbed for the electric starter. The engine caught on the first try . . . then coughed, and died. He tried again. The pale figure of the girl was following him. Here she came, walking toward the aircraft through the dim shed, and in the restored silence when the engine died again he could hear her softly calling.

Any moment now he was going to wake up. But no, this time the engine caught and held. He released brakes and grabbed the throttle, and now he was rolling for the doors . . .

The slender blue-and-white figure of the girl in jeans came sleepwalking right into the path of the rolling aircraft. Gliddon could see the disaster coming but it was too late for him to do anything about it. Just at the moment of catastrophe everything seemed to be happening at once, and he had not even time to perceive it all; but he had the distinct impression that at that very moment there was yet another person in the shed. A dark-clad man with a pale face, standing near the girl and in the act of reaching for her with one outstretched arm . . .

. . . Gliddon's right hand had hit the switches, and was reaching for the throttle, but too late. The sound of the blow had elemental power, and Gliddon knew the wooden prop must have been sprung if not completely shattered. The aircraft shuddered with the impact, the engine dying finally in a great cough. Gliddon had a door open and jumped out of the cabin again almost before the Cessna had stopped rolling. Something lay on the floor, but he was not going to stop to decide what it was. If there had really been two people in front of the propeller, quite likely it had hashed them both.

Moving in desperate haste he wrenched open the cargo compartment again, pulled out the awkward package and ran with it, stumbling, arm muscles quivering, out of the shed and through the passage that led to the other shed where the Jeep ought to be parked. The Jeep was there.

Gliddon wedged the encased painting into the back seat, then sprang into the driver's seat and started the engine with a roar.

The Jeep bounced out of the shed and away into darkness, following a route that twisted among dimly visible boulders and over tiny hills. Next Gliddon headed down into a breakneck ravine that took long minutes to work through, at walking speed, even with the four-wheel drive. At the bottom end of this ravine a small stream murmured almost invisibly. Otherwise the night had grown quiet; so far, there was no pursuit. Tires splashed, and then the Jeep was working its way uphill again. Gliddon drove out of the rough at last on the old road, not far from the point where the punks' cars had been stalled. Only a few more miles and he'd be on highway. Then he'd head south. He had in mind a place or two where it ought to be possible to steal another plane.

He felt it was safe to use the headlights now. As soon as they came on they showed him a solitary figure ahead, walking along the primitive road in the same direction he was driving. This figure too was small and slight, but it had on a shirt, and its hair was light in color. As the Jeep slowly overtook it from the rear, it turned. The pale eyes did not squint in the headlights. Numbly Gliddon recognized Pat O'Grandison's dazed, childish face and bloody mouth.

But Gliddon had begun by now to regain his nerve. He was able to believe again that the world was manageable. If tonight's events hadn't beaten him yet, there was no way they were going to.

It wouldn't really be practical to try to finish someone quickly by running over them, on this twisting, humpy, low-speed road. Especially not on a night like this, when people who had looked finished kept coming back.

Calmly watching the Jeep approach, the kid stuck out his thumb, hitchhiking. Well, why not? Gliddon saw that somehow, and it was against all sense, the kid had even managed to pick up and repack the knapsack that Gliddon had emptied onto the earthen floor during the search.

Gliddon slowed the Jeep, meanwhile feeling with one hand for his pistol. It was gone. He must have dropped it somewhere. Never mind, there were plenty of other ways. But he'd rather not delay for a killing until he'd got a few more miles on his way.

He stopped the Jeep beside the waiting boy. "Want a ride, kid? Get in."

The kid didn't even appear to recognize Gliddon. "Thanks," he acknowledged, and got in quite calmly, just as if this were afternoon on the Interstate somewhere. He slipped out of his knapsack and dropped it on the floor, after noting that the back seat was pretty well filled with a huge package. "I'm headed for California."

"Me too," said Gliddon, and eased the vehicle ahead, tires gripping the edges of an old rut, scraping around a rock. Maybe, just maybe, his luck was starting to turn a little for the good.

* * *

In the weeks since he had succeeded in inducing the girl to transform him into a vampire, Delaunay Seabright had reveled in the new keenness of his senses, among other things; and he had discovered that they remained most usefully acute when he retained the form of man. Thus it was that he was walking on two human feet when he moved stealthily into the aircraft shed. In the shed there was much more light than his eyes now needed, an electric glare streaked with shadow, spilling from a battery lantern that someone had dropped and left on the dirt floor.

The Cessna was almost at the opened doors. It looked wrecked, with its cargo compartment door standing open and one blade of its wooden propellor broken to half its length. But Seabright gave that little attention. Directly in front of the plane, the figure of a lean man dressed in black, turned in profile to Seabright, was down on one knee. The man, head bent, was giving his full attention to something on the earthen floor. Seabright could not see his face at first, only his white and bony hands, sifting the dry dust.

Even though Seabright continued to advance into the shed, one step and then another, the kneeling man did not look up. Surely anyone of even moderate alertness would have by now sensed his presence . . . then with a quiet shock the realization came that the kneeling man knew Seabright had entered the shed, but simply did not care.

Seabright advanced yet another step. He now had, or thought he had, an understanding now of what his dark-garbed visitor was, if not of who. For some time now Seabright had known it was practically inevitable that sooner or later he must encounter one or more of the Old Ones—that was how he had thought of them, when in private thought he had made his plans. It had taken him years of research into the ancient and the arcane to convince himself of the reality of vampires, and to be able to recognize, however belatedly, that the girl called Annie was what some of the old books called nosferatu. He was not at all sure what the others, when and if he met them, would be like. Surely they were not all mad, as the girl had been. In his heart Seabright expected that they would prove to be not all that essentially different from breathing people—manageable, for the most part, by someone like himself, once he had grasped what really made them tick.

He would not submit to being ignored, and now he moved forward yet another step. First he would make sure that his own credentials were established, and then . . .

The kneeling figure in dark clothing at last raised its face. And Seabright, who in recent weeks had imagined himself become totally immune to fear, found himself stepping involuntarily backward. The face was pale and thin, and on the surface it held nothing terrible, though it was marked with wooden splinters from what must have been the propellor's terrible impact against another body that was now nowhere to be seen. From one splinter in the forehead a trickle of dark blood ran down into one eye and out of it again like tears. Yet Seabright retreated another step, and yet another, until the adobe wall came against his back. One of the Old Ones. But he had never dreamed it could be so hard simply to confront one of them.

The figure straightened slowly until it stood erect. It was actually not as tall as Seabright, but from several yards away he got the impression that it was towering over him.

"I was a second too late," the man in dark clothing said softly, in precise and only faintly accented English. "A second too late, and she is dead. Already nothing but dust. That is how we old ones go."

With a great effort Seabright made himself push away from the wall, and speak out boldly. "Who's dead? Who do you mean?"

"You are Delaunay Seabright," the man said. "And you used her."

"You're Thorn," said Seabright, suddenly understanding a little more. "No wonder you . . . I heard about that bombing. No wonder you were able to escape alive." Trying hard, he made himself look closely at the other's face, and was astounded. Were tears mixed with the blood on those almost emaciated cheeks?

"She is dead," said Thorn.

"Look, I'm really sorry about that. Very sorry. She and I were lovers, you know. But she was more than a little bit crazy, and it's not my fault she—"

An invisible giant's fist closed down on Seabright. He was picked from his feet and spun through the air back against the earthen wall, with a violence that tore his clothing and his skin. Imposed force choked his outcries in his throat. Desperately he tried to change his shape, to melt his flesh to mist or nothingness for escape. But his own powers, that he had thought almost perfected, were infantile against the potency that held him now.

Delaunay Seabright sought to strike back at the dark man. But he could no longer even see where his opponent was. The vise-grip blinded his eyes, even as it crushed his ribs. Now he could feel the bones of his elbows, pinned to his sides, shattering in their sockets, and he could not even scream. Then, still capsuled in solid form, he felt himself being propelled helplessly through the air again, driven by what felt like the energy of a locomotive. His eyes were allowed to open, in time to see the ancient wooden beams of the building hurtling toward him.

* * *

Nothing prevented Judy Southerland from screaming, and scream she did. She knew that her long-hoped-for rescuer was now somewhere near at hand. But he had not come to her. And she could feel that something had happened, something terrible, something to drive him mad, though she had no idea what it was. Violence as shocking as a bomb was bursting, just on the other side of the building, while Judy, her hands still bound, could not get out of her cell, could not do anything to help herself.

Then, abruptly, came help in a surprising form. A woman Judy had never seen before, a young-looking woman wearing some kind of high-necked granny dress, was bending over her. There came sharp snapping sounds and the tough cord fell from Judy's wrists.

"And you must be Judy," the young-looking woman said. She strongly resembled someone Judy knew—yes indeed, she actually resembled the image that Judy still saw daily in the mirror. In the middle distance there rose a great cry, as of some huge predator in torment. "There now, he's making a great lot of noise over there, isn't he? And I must go to him, but I wanted first to have just a quick word with you. You see, you can't understand what has happened to him tonight—I understand it, a little bit, and I must go, and you must stay here quietly and not try to talk to him just now."

"Gliddon!" That was another voice now, a man's voice shrieking from not far away. "Gliddon, it's got me, for God's sake helllp—"

Judy stuttered: "I . . . he's . . ."

"He's been your lover, yes, Judy, I know. He was my lover in the same way, but that was many years ago . . . my name is Mina, by the way. We shall meet again, someday, perhaps—but then perhaps not. In either case I wish you well. I must go now, to do what I can. He can be very dangerous like this."

The woman, or the vision of a woman, was gone. No, it had been more than a vision, for Judy's hands were free, the cords that had bound them lay snapped away like thread. And the door of her cell, that she had been trying vainly to force, now stood slightly ajar. Judy pushed weakly against it, then stopped, her eyes closed. Her contact with her once-beloved, strained by the burden of things that Judy had never imagined it might hold, had broken and was gone.

Or had it been deliberately cut, as by some seamstress' scissors?

For the moment she did not care. Freed hands, freed mind—for the moment it was enough, it was all that she could ask for, to enjoy both.

Then Judy's eyes opened, and she cried out again. Great wing-beats of throbbing sound were buffeting the roof above her head. For a moment she cringed from monsters. Then there was a glare of harsh electric light outside, and her own good sense came to her rescue. The light bobbed and probed with the throbbing roar, seeking a good place for helicopters to come down.

* * *

Gliddon had at last maneuvered his Jeep as far as the highway. It was a dirt road, smoothly graded and two lanes wide, that could pass for a state highway in this part of the boondocks. Gliddon looked both ways into darkness, at zero traffic. He considered, then suddenly reversed the Jeep. A few yards back he had noticed a branching road, and now he found this again and backed into it for a few more yards, until he had reached a place that he was sure would be out of sight of the highway by day.

He stopped the Jeep there, and grinned over at his young companion. "Afraid this is as far as you go, kid."

"I'm going to California," the boy repeated vaguely. He rubbed at the dried mess around his lips, looked at his fingers, then touched one with his tongue. He appeared to be trying to remember something.

"Sure. This is Hollywood and Vine. Hop out. I'm gonna fix you up with a job in the movies."

"I'm going to get a job out there making films. My home's in Chicago." But the kid got out on his side, obediently enough.

As Gliddon stepped out of the Jeep on his own side, he remembered something else. "Hey, kid, you were pretty good that night in Phoenix. Better than any of the girls. I wish we could have finished good friends, the way we started." He walked through the beams of the headlights and put a hand on Pat's shoulder. "I wish we could get a little fun in right now. But I'm in a hurry." And Gliddon, remembering the wounded finger on his own right hand, drew back his left arm and with a practiced, lethal snap sent the blade of his hand with full power against the youngster's neck.

And Gliddon shouted, blinded by the pain and shock. It felt like he had struck a thick wooden pole.

Before he could begin to think of what to do next, the kid had taken him by the right arm. And somehow Gliddon, try as he might, could not pull free.

"Your finger is bleeding, gosh," the boy said. There was something in his voice that was not sympathy, and was certainly not fear either. Whatever it was, it made Gliddon look closely at the kid's face, and then try again to pull away again. When Gliddon saw those dried stains around the childish mouth. And how Pat's teeth had changed. When the boy displayed them in a merry smile.