“Yes,” she said fiercely, “and no one understood what he’d done in it—no one!”
The thrumming inside Rafe was getting worse instead of better. He folded his arms and pressed back hard against his middle.
“Something the matter?” said Gaby quickly. “You’re shaking!”
He managed a small grin.
“I’ve got a hunch taking that dexedrine was a mistake,” he said.
“Then why on earth did you take it?”
The thrumming mounted within him. He felt as if he were shaking apart.
“Never can tell how drugs will work with me,” he said between teeth that were starting to chatter in spite of everything he could do. “Never could take stimulants—on the other hand, had to load me with sleeping pills when they wanted me to sleep. Thought—maybe with the broadcast, things could be reversed—worth trying, anyhow . . .”
The chattering of his teeth and the thrumming inside him were becoming too strong to permit him the luxury of spending effort on talking.
“There’s got to be something that’ll help you!”
“Sedative. Depressant. Any liquor handy—”
“Lucas! Dining room. Scotch—”
But Lucas was already on his feet, tense and motionless, head pointed toward the front of the house. Slowly his head moved and a barely heard rumble of a growl sounded in him.
“What is it, Lucas?” said Gaby. “What—”
“Four,” said Lucas, who was now slowly turning around in a full circle. “One, front door. One, driveway gate. Two at back of house.”
“Four? Four what? Zombies?”
Rafe forced his head up, struggling to ignore the thrumming and the teeth-chattering for long enough to understand what was going on—and suddenly the room was full of shadows.
Four shadows, like black paper cutouts of men with clubs in their hands, were converging on him. He flung himself forward out of the chair, lunging stiff-armed at the mid-section of the closest shadow, to break clear of the ring of them before they could close in on him. His fist sank home. Something struck heavily but glancingly against his shoulder. He heard the mounting snarl of Lucas, and the wolf had joined him in the fight. Rafe kicked devastatingly at another of the shadow figures, and it went down in front of him. Suddenly he was struck again, this time heavily on the side of the head.
He stumbled, falling, into a blur of darkness.
* * *
5
He woke again to find Gaby out of her vehicle, seated on the carpet beside him, and supporting his head while she held a small glass at his lips. He drank—and choked. It was undiluted Scotch whisky. He shook his head and turned his lips away from the glass.
“No need, now—” he had to stop to cough. “I’m all right.”
And, in fact, he was. Even as he said the words, he realized that the thrumming and the pressure of the soporific effect was gone from him, as it had been momentarily after his earlier encounter with the zombies on the street under repair. He lifted his head and looked around. There was no sign of shadow figures in the room, and Lucas sat with his fur unruffled.
“Where’d they go?” Rafe asked Gaby. “Where were they?”
“I don’t know.” She looked at him strangely, sitting back with the glass of Scotch still in her hand. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Didn’t see anything?” He stared at her. “Four black shadows like men with clubs?”
“Is that what they were?” She shook her head. “No, I didn’t see them. But Lucas was fighting them too; so they were here, all right.”
“And they were real, all right,” said Rafe. He felt the side of his head where something had struck him. It was tender and swelling under the scalp.
“Two, I killed,” said Lucas. “You killed the others.”
“Killed?” Rafe looked at the wolf. “What were they, Lucas?”
“Men,” said the wolf. “Men with no smell. What’s left is outside.”
“Outside?” Rafe scrambled to his feet. “That reminds me. We’ve got to get out of here, Gaby. We can talk on the way, but we’ve got to get going. I practically hijacked a shuttle, and I did kidnap Pao Gallot and Bill Forebringer to get here. As soon as it’s day, the police’ll be looking for me. You’ve got to come with me. There’re too many questions and not enough time to answer them here.”
Gaby reached back with one hand for her vehicle, which stood behind her, and tipped the cylinder down. She turned and slid her legs back into it, then pushed with one arm against the rug. As if counterweighted, the cylinder swung back upright with her in it.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll go—all three of us. Just give me five minutes to pack a few things.”
“Do you have to—all right, yes,” said Rafe. The thrumming was just beginning to make itself felt inside him again, and some nervous element inside him was rubbed raw by it. He looked about, picked up the glass of Scotch Gaby had been offering him earlier. He drank it down.
“I thought you said you didn’t want it?” she asked on her way out of the room.
“We’ll find out—” he began to answer, but she was already gone. He looked for the wolf and found Lucas siting on the rug. Their eyes met.
“So,” said Rafe. “Men without smells.”
“Yes,” said Lucas.
A slight shiver ran down Rafe’s spine. There was something terrible, with a terribleness transcending a sick and near-starving world, in two-dimensional shadows that could enter a brightly lit room like this to try and kill. Shadows that vanished after they were fought off.
“But you said what’s left is outside?” Rafe asked the wolf.
“All four men. Dead,” said Lucas.
“You mean”—Rafe thought for a second—“what came into the room here was part of the four men you smelled—”
“Heard.”
“Heard outside the house? Who could that be?”
Lucas merely stared back at him.
“What’s that mean when you don’t answer?” Rafe asked. “You mean you don’t know?”
“I don’t know,” said Lucas.
“But you say the men and the shadows were the same. How do you know that?”
“I don’t know,” said Lucas. “But the same. I know. But I don’t know.”
“You mean you know how they could be the same, but you don’t know how to tell me?” Rafe asked.
“No. I don’t know how, but they were the same. I know that. Man-shadow, shadow-man—all the same. To me, all one. To you, don’t see how. To Gabrielle, nothing there.”
Rafe frowned thoughtfully.
“She really didn’t see them . . .” he said, half to himself.
“Didn’t see, feel. They didn’t see, feel her. No touch between them.”
“How do you know?” Rafe said. “How do you know all this?”
“I . . . see,” said Lucas. “You don’t see. No more. That’s all of talk. It’s no use.”
The wolf dropped down into lying position and began to lick at his forepaw. Rafe took a step closer. Slicked down by the wet tongue, the hair of the foreleg revealed a cut and a swelling on the leg. Rafe dropped on one knee and reached out a hand to examine the leg.
Lucas growled. Rafe drew back his hand.
“No,” the wolf said.
“I just wanted to have a look at it, Lucas,” Rafe said. “Maybe I can help.”
“No,” said Lucas.
Rafe got back on his feet.
A couple of minutes later Gaby came into the room, carrying a small black overnight bag.
“Ready,” she said. “We’ll go out the kitchen door to the garage. The car’s there.”
Rafe and Lucas followed her. They went through the house to the kitchen, and through a door in its far wall. Gaby opened the door and switched on the light beyond. Rafe got a glimpse of the interior of a three-car garage and both a large and small two-wheeler.
“We’d better take the big car,” she said, and looked at Rafe. “You’ll dr
ive?”
“I’ll drive,” he said.
They got into the larger two-wheeler, and Rafe took it out of the garage carefully. It was a good, powerful vehicle, and in tune. Good for perhaps two hundred and fifty, flat out.
He backed it down the driveway toward the locked gates closing the driveway and stopped. Gaby handed him a key.
“Right,” he said. He got out and went back to unlock the chain securing the gates. As the lock opened and the chain fell apart, he saw a dark figure crumpled on the lawn about twenty feet away. He finished pushing the gates open, then went over to bend above the figure.
It was the body of a man. The motionless, staring eyes and the contorted face, seen in the reflected glare of the floodlights on the house, were enough to see—without testing further for evidence—that the man was dead. There was no wound upon him, but both hands were balled into fists, protectively, at his throat; and the arms were so tightly cramped that they resisted when Rafe tried to pull the fists away. A whine behind Rafe made him start.
Lucas pushed past Rafe and sniffed at the dead man.
“One of yours, was he, Lucas?” said Rafe, looking at those clenched hands. The little shiver he had felt earlier returned to his spine. “But what sort of sympathetic magic made him die out here, without a mark on him?”
Lucas made no answer.
Rafe turned abruptly.
“Back to the car,” he said, turning on his heel. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
But when he went around the car and slid once more behind the control stick, he glanced back and saw Lucas still standing over the dead man.
“Lucas!” he called.
The wolf did not respond. Instead, he sat down suddenly and lifted his muzzle to the sky. He howled—a long, eerie, quavering howl.
“What’s wrong with him? Gaby,” said Rafe, “we’ve got to get out of here. Call him back to the car.”
“Lucas!” Gaby called. “Lucas!”
But Lucas continued to howl, ignoring even her.
“Damn!” said Gaby. She twisted about in the seat. They had put her cylindrical vehicle across the curve of the back lounge seat of the car. “Help me, Rafe. I’ll have to go after him.”
Rafe reached back to help her get the awkwardly large cylinder up where she could slide into it.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Won’t he come when you call?”
She flashed him a glance that was almost angry.
“You don’t understand!” she said. “He’s a wolf, not a dog. Ab left him that way.”
“What’s the difference?” Rafe asked.
“He’s a person—that’s the difference!” She was into her vehicle now and a second later was upright, gliding over the grass. She came up to where Lucas still howled, his wild cry splitting the otherwise silent night, nose pointed at the sky. She took hold of what was evidently a collar hidden in the rough, long fur of his neck and pulled hard, using the drive of her vehicle to reinforce her efforts.
“Lucas!” she said.
The wolf allowed himself to be dragged to all four feet. His howling ceased. She turned and drove back to the car. He followed behind her, head and tail held low.
Gaby got back into the car and Rafe got her vehicle once more onto the rear lounge seat. Then she reached out, took hold of Lucas’ collar, and pulled him into the front seat of the car with them.
“Now we can go,” she said.
Rafe backed out into the street, turned, and drove off. The thrumming was back inside him now, but so was the Scotch. The liquor was like a pad between a raw spot and something savagely chafing. The relief, as much as the alcohol, made him a little lightheaded. He looked across at the furry mask of Lucas.
“Gaby says you’re a person,” he told the wolf.
The wild face looked back at him.
“I am Lucas,” said Lucas.
Rafe nodded slowly, turning back to his driving and his watch on the street ahead.
“Where are we going?” asked Gaby. “I haven’t even asked.”
“As far away as we can get by sunrise,” said Rafe soberly. “But first—there’s a spot I want to look at again . . .” He told her about the two zombies and the ambush by the spot where the street was under repair.
“But why?”
“Who were they waiting for?” Rafe asked. “Me? But how could they know I was coming? And who else would be moving around during the broadcast? Or do they have gang wars at night, these zombies?”
“In Grinnell?” Gaby said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t you know the zombies—I mean, all people with resistance, natural or trained, to the broadcasts—are less than two in every million of population? The whole Des Moines metropolitan area can’t have more than half a dozen.”
“In that case,” said Rafe, “I’ve met them all tonight.”
“But—” She broke off. For a moment she was silent. Then she went on in a subdued voice. “It still doesn’t make sense. What do you know about zombies ?”
“Not enough,” said Rafe grimly. “Wait—” His headlight had once more picked up the site of the road repair. It seemed deserted, but he drove up to it cautiously and swept the headlight all around, carefully, before getting out of the car.
There was nothing to be seen, only the warning blinkers falsely set up to direct a driver into the hole in the road, and the scoured-up sand in the bottom of the hole itself. Rafe stepped down into the hole and looked around, but discovered nothing that might give any clue to the identity of the two who had ambushed and attacked him.
Lucas shoved past him, nose to the sandy bottom of the hole. He cast about, snorted some dust from his nostrils, and then moved away up the side of the hole next to the curb.
“This way,” Lucas said.
Rafe followed Lucas, and the wolf followed his nose along the ground. They crossed the grassy boulevard, a corner of a front lawn, and went down a narrow mid-block alley until Lucas abruptly turned in behind a tall, untrimmed hedge of Japanese barberry.
Rafe followed. There, in the deep shadow of the bushes, was a short-bodied but heavy-engined sport two-wheeler, obviously built for speed. Rafe opened the closest door.
Inside, the body of a man lay dumped on his back on the narrow lounge seat, and his skin was already cold to the touch. It was the man Rafe had hit in the neck. Slumped over the control stick was another man, unconscious.
Rafe felt through the pockets of both men, but outside of a couple of wallets with money, they carried nothing. The control-panel compartment and trunk compartment also were empty except for a road map of the Grinnell area. Rafe felt around under the front seats and came out with a fuel-cell receipt from a service station with the address Crazian’s Corner, Nipigon, Ontario, Canada.
He tucked it in his pocket and went out around the back of the car to look at the license. Sure enough, it was an Ontario license.
He went back to Gaby and their own car. This time, Lucas leaped into the rear lounge seat and curled up. Rafe took the control stick and drove them back the way he had come in, and out onto the freeway. He turned north.
“You found something back there, then,” said Gaby, as the car swung at last onto the unlimited-speed strip and he set it on autopilot.
He told her.
“All the way from Canada, down here?” she said. “I don’t see the sense of it.”
“Or the sense of four other men dead back at your house?” said Rafe. “There wasn’t any reason for either setup except for you—to keep me from getting to you or from talking to you once I did reach you. And not even you knew I was coming down from the Moon today. Who could know enough to have zombies waiting for me?”
She did not answer immediately. He glanced from the highway ahead over to her. She sat with her shoulders hunched, her arms held tight to her as if she were shivering, suddenly, in an unexpected breath of chill wind.
“The Old Man, maybe,” she said.
“The Old Man?” He stared at her. “You mean whoever it
is that’s supposed to have power over all the zombies. What’s his name—Thebom Shankar?”
“Thebom Shankar, the Old Man, Shaitan,” she said, still huddled up as if against the cold. “Whatever you want to call him. He’s supposed to be a thousand years old and be able to make ghosts and devils fight for him—like whatever it was you and Lucas fought at the house tonight.”
For a third time—and he was not used to such feelings; a surge of anger rose suddenly inside him at the reaction—Rafe felt the chill touch on his spine.
“What’re you talking about?” he said harshly. “There can’t be any such man!”
“But there is,” she said. “Ab talked to him on the phone, the day before Ab disappeared.”
* * *
6
For a long minute nothing was said. The car hummed its way northward along the unlimited-speed strip through dark farmland where all ordinary creatures, human and animal, slept in their drugged-like slumber.
“Let’s get this straight,” said Rafe at last. “We’re talking about the same man, aren’t we? The one who’s supposed to have some kind of occult power over anyone who can resist the broadcast enough to move around at night?”
“Yes,” said Gaby. “The Old Man of the Mountain.”
“The Old Man of the Mountain,” said Rafe roughly, “was the head of the so-called Assassins, the leader of the Isma’ih sect of Shi’ite Muslims in 1090, who first seized and held the mountain castle of Alamut for his headquarters. And his name was Hasan ibn al-Sabbah, not Thebom Shankar or anything like that.”
“I know,” she said, still huddled up. “I looked him up in the history books after Ab talked to him.”
“What did Ab talk to him about?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I came into the lab and Ab was talking on the phone there. I couldn’t see the screen, and he broke the connection right away. I said, ‘Who was that?’ I was just kidding. I don’t know what made me say it. ‘The Old Man himself?’ And Ab’s face went white . . . so white . . .”
Her voice trailed off.
“What did he say when you said that?” demanded Rafe.