away, his face drawn, and his mouth turned down at the corners. As if he'd suffered a loss too great to bear. And Jake thought he knew something of how that felt.
On the other hand, if what little Jake had been told about Trask were true, then he might well be misjudging him; Trask's pain could have its origin in something else entirely. For in a world where the simple truth was becoming increasingly hard to find, it would be no easy thing to possess a mind that couldn't accept a lie. And that, allegedly, was what Trask was; a human lie-detector.
E-Branch; E for ESP. Telepaths, empaths, locators, precogs… psychos? That's how Jake had thought of them just five days ago: as raving lunatics. No, as very quiet lunatics. For nary a one of them had actually raved. But that was five days ago, and in between he'd seen some stuff. And anyway who was he to talk? What, Jake Cutter, who went on instantaneous, hundred-mile-long sleep-walking tours in broad daylight, and suspected that someone was hiding in his head?
All of these thoughts passing through Jake's mind as he and Liz followed Trask, Goodly, and Miller — who in turn followed a team of four, armed-to-the-teeth special agents — between the stinking fires and towards the slumping, blazing ruin that had been the main shack. The lone pump had disappeared; now a column of shimmering blue fire roared its fury at the sky as fuel from the subterranean storage tank burned off. And as Trask's party advanced on the shack, so Miller went prattling on:
'Do you think there can ever really be an answer to this, Mr Trask? Good Lord, man.' But who gave you the authority to do such as this? I mean— Look!' And his hand flew to his mouth. 'A b-b-body!'he stammered. 'For God's sake! A cindered body.''
In the lee of a clump of hip-high boulders where the blackened, smoking skeletons of cactuses and other once-hardy plants oozed bubbling sap, the clean-up squad had missed something. It was an arm and a hand, protruding from the molten mess of vegetation like a root among all the other exposed roots.
Obviously someone had tried to escape the fire by diving for cover in the foliage… any port in a firestorm.
Or rather it lad been an arm and a hand. Now it was a smoking black twig-thing with four lesser twiglets and the remains of an opposing thumb. Yet even now it was twitching, vibrating, showing signs of impossible life, and the vile soup within the nest of rocks was heaving and bubbling.
'You there — you missed something/ Trask called out. And one of the specialists came back with his flamethrower, playing its bright yellow lance on the shuddering mess until it seethed into a black liquid slop.
In the meantime, Miller had been sick. Trask looked unemotionally at the little fat man where he stood trembling, holding a handkerchief to his mouth, and said, 'Best if you stay here.' And to Liz and Jake, 'You two keep Mr Miller company. But make sure he gets a good look at it if… if anything happens.' He turned away, moved off with lan Goodly. Both of them were equipped with vicious-looking machine-pistols.
'Oh my God!' Miller moaned, hanging half-suspended between Jake and Liz, swaying from side to side. 'Oh my good God! Doesn't the man have a heart? I mean, doesn't he feel anything for these poor p-p-people?'
'Ben Trask is all heart,' Liz told him. 'And yes, he feels a great deal for people, for every man, woman and child of us. For our entire — and entirely human — race. That's why we're here. Because these creatures aren't human, not any longer…'
But Miller was bending over, being sick again, and Jake had got behind him, was holding on to make sure he didn't fall face down in it.
The fires were burning lower now, and the night was creeping in again. Long shadows danced like demons, turning the barren rock ledge into a scene from Dante's Inferno. Near the main shack the column of flame from the underground tank shrank down into itself, issued a final muffled blast, and then became a fireball that rolled like a living thing up the face of the cliff.
Along the foot of the knoll, a second half-team of agents had killed the fire at the shack with the cage and gone inside to explore the secondary mine shaft. While fifty feet away from the main shack — which continued to burn, sending a column of smoke and the occasional lick of red and orange fire into the night sky — Trask brought his team to a halt.
'How about it?' He shouted at Goodly over the crackle of burning brush and scorched timbers. 'What do you think? Do we burn him out?'
Not him, them! Liz wanted to yell, but Goodly was already doing it for her. 'There's more than just him, Ben,' the precog's piping voice, carried on gusts of hot smoke.
'But we can handle them?' Trask seemed undeterred. Goodly shrugged and said, 'I'm not forecasting any casualties, if that's what you mean. But it won't be very pretty.'
'It never is,' Trask told him. He came to a decision, nodded, turned and called for Liz. 'Tell them we're going to bring the whole damn' place down around their ears… and tell him he isn't getting out alive. I want you to taunt the bastard/'
'But… do you think that he'll hear me?' Liz seemed dubious, unsure of herself. 'I mean, I'm only half a telepath. I can receive but not send, and—'
'We can't be sure about that,' Trask cut her off. 'That's one of the things we're here to find out. But we know your talent isn't fully developed yet, and just because you can't send to a human telepath doesn't mean Trennier won't hear you. He's in there, a vampire, and these things have skills of their own. Maybe this will give us some indication of what to expect from you when your talent is fully developed.'
Liz gave an answering nod, moved forward. And Miller stood up a little straighter and asked Jake: 'Who… who is he talking about? And how can that girl talk to someone in there?'
'Just take it for granted she can,' Jake answered, despite that he wasn't too sure himself.
And now Liz was concentrating, concentrating, sending her thoughts into the main shaft, its entrance a smoking black hole glimpsed beyond the skeletal facade of the shack. There were no true telepaths on the team this time out, no one to 'hear' her or even suspect that she was at work. But her thoughts — which weren't intended for the minds of common men — went out anyway:
We're coming for you, Eruce Trennier, she sent. And if you think that what you've seen so far is hot stuff, wait till you see how hot it can really oet! We have grenades that will bring the roof down on you and your thralls, burying you forever like fossils in the earth, and thermite bombs to melt the rocks into permanent cocoons for your molten bones. You're trapped, and no way out. So stay right where you are, hiding your face from the sun, and do your best to enjoy what little you have left of the rotten, parasitic half-life you call existence…
It was, of course, a taunt, a challenge, and coming from a woman would be seen as even more of an insult. If Trennier answered, Liz didn't hear him. What she did hear, or more properly feel, was a sudden silence. A mental silence, a psychic serenity. Or was it more properly a sullen silence, the calm before the storm? lan Goodly confirmed that last with his piped warning: 'They're coming.'
'How many?' As the combat-suited men fanned out a little, Trask swung his ugly-looking weapon up into the ready position and cocked it. Goodly followed suit, narrowing his eyes as his mind read the future's secrets.
He saw men staggering, crumpling to their knees, bursting into flames! Three of them. And he saw one other— more than a man, an animal, a Thing— leaping headlong to the attack! And:
'Three of them,' he yelped. 'On their way to hell. And one other who looks like he was born there! That'll be Bruce Trennier. And Ben, they're coming now!'
'Are they armed?' Trask snapped.
'No,' Goodly piped. 'But… do they need to be?'
The first three came like moon-shadows: dark and fleeting, seeming to flow with the wreathing smoke, out of the shack and into the open, so that Trask and Goodly could scarcely be sure what they were firing at — but they fired anyway. And in a matter of moments the scene became chaotic.
The nightmarish figures firmed into being as lethal silver bullets found their targets. They had been loping, flowing forwards with their arms and hands reaching, but now were brought up short in the stutter of gunfire, snapped upright and hurled backwards. The feral yellow eyes of the central figure turned red as blood — overflowed with blood — in the instant that the back of his head exploded in a crimson spray. He slumped, went to his knees and burst into flames as the agent with the flamethrower found the range and licked him with a tongue of cleansing fire. There on his knees, with his head half blown away, the vampire burned like a giant candle.
But astonishingly the other thralls recovered and came on. And driving them with the sheer force of his presence, flowing like a vast inkblot immediately behind them, came the last and the worst of them. Their master.
