He must surely find his enemy, the enemy of all men, somewhere out there on the other side. But which way? And was he up to it? Did he really have the courage to go on, even if he knew which direction to take, and most important, if he really knew and understood the enormity of the evil waiting just beyond the dark side for him? Why him? Because he was a Stroud? Was being a Stroud reduced to this--a curse? What would happen if he should fail? What would have happened had he not been pulled off that plane by Leonard and Wisnewski, if he had gone quietly home to Andover, Illinois, and from there on to a new archeological adventure on the other side of the globe, leaving New York to be sacrificed to Esruad's evil god?
How very strangely life worked, Stroud thought, as if in the same pattern that emanated from the earth over which water rapidly carved its movement. At the moment, Abe Stroud felt like a mere crystal of sand over which time itself was washing.
'Never!' shouted Stroud, tumbling loose particles from the ship with the sheer energy of his own voice. 'Never, you bastard thing.'
'Be strong in your belief, Stroud. Hold firm to what you know of me.' It was Esruad's voice, the voice of the skull. 'Trust in me, not in anything else--not even your own eyes. I trusted my eyes, and for it, I had my eyes and my soul put out.'
'You are ... blind?' Stroud quaked with the idea.
'Those imprisoned in the skull are all blind fools ... fools who did not see in life, and so who do not see in death.'
'So I am to trust a blind fool?'
'Yes.'
Stroud wondered what Esruad was trying to tell him. Much of their discussion here in the ship had to be in a cryptic kind of code of half-truths and innuendo, as the skull had alerted him to the fact that their enemy would monitor all their communications, just as it would monitor any communication through any modern devices he used with the others and those on the outside. Ubbrroxx would then use whatever information it could gather from these communications against Stroud.
'You may have to sacrifice the woman,' Esruad had told him again, and once again Stroud said that he could never bring himself to do so.
'You must if it means winning. You must win against this evil, Stroud.'
The inner monologue welled and waned inside his head like the sea tides, and there was a faint echo, also inside his head, as if bouncing off the steel plate which was acting as a kind of radar. The echo was Ubbrroxx, or that part of him that he sent out to infiltrate Stroud's mind, to gather in his thoughts, desires, fears and anguishes. Ubbrroxx was there now picking over the beaches of his memories, both good and bad, beautiful and ugly. He sensed it inside his head, but fortified with the warning that this would occur, he expected many seductions would follow. Stroud girded himself up.
The idea that Esruad knew every step the demon would take might have instilled a keen suspicion in Stroud if it were not for the shared secrets of the Etruscan's own worse nightmare: that Ubbrroxx would continue on and on and on through eternity feeding off mankind in ever greater numbers.
It appeared that Esruad's nightmare and Stroud's own coincided, and for this reason Stroud had decided to place his complete faith in the ancient wizard. But giving over Kendra to the beast ... Stroud still wondered if he could do it.
'You must,' Esruad whispered in his ear, sounding now as demanding as the demon. 'You have no choice.'
-18-
Commissioner James Nathan could not believe the eerie calm that had come over the site of the devastation where 500,000 zombies stood against them, frozen in place. Some of his key people felt this was the time to attack, and so did the military brass, but he had made a promise to Stroud and he intended to keep his word. But holding off the others was getting increasingly difficult, especially since they had heard nothing from Stroud in an hour.
Then the communication came through from Kendra Cline, informing him of their situation, and that Stroud had gone on alone.
'How is Dr. Leonard now?' Nathan asked.
'Holding.'
'And Wisnewski?'
'We're alive,' said Wiz in response. 'Our spines are like rubber, but otherwise we are fine. You must keep your people out, Nathan, do you understand? They wouldn't survive even a moment down here, son, believe me.'
'What is Stroud doing, going on alone?'
'He has his reasons. We're counting on him, all of us,' said Leonard, 'possibly the entire human race, as it is shaping up. Because this thing will come again in the future, and each time it returns, it will devour more and more and more...'
'You people have a little over an hour before you've got to get clear of there, do you understand? The Army intends to shell the entire site at dawn.'
'Stroud needs more time than that, Commissioner,' Kendra pleaded.
Nathan shook his head and said, 'I can't buy him a minute more. You people best start back now.'
'No, Commissioner,' said Leonard. 'We stay until Stroud returns.'
'Don't be fools!'
'You heard Dr. Leonard,' said Kendra. 'If you intend to bury Stroud here, we'll be buried with him.' She hoped her bluff would buy the time Stroud needed.
'Wisnewski, you can't be as idiotic as your friends!'
'I've long been noted for my idiocy, Commissioner.' He laughed into the communicator before they shut Nathan off.
Topside, Nathan seethed with frustration and anger, the feeling of helplessness so overwhelming as to make him see red.
'You should never have allowed those fool scientists in,' said a Captain McDonald of the U.S. Armed Forces Special Services who was itching to turn his men loose on the zombies and his mortars loose on the pit.
'All I know is that we had a deal, McDonald, and you're going to stick to it, to the last minute!' Nathan knew that negotiating another second with McDonald and the others was useless. He stormed away from the other man to have another look through his field glasses at the calm before the storm.
He thought about his last conversation with Stroud, and the grim feeling that he would never hear the other man's voice again settled over him like a shroud. But he must resist the impulse to assume that Stroud and the others were doomed to failure, that there was no hope for them, for without that hope, James Nathan believed there was no other hope on the horizon. He didn't for a moment believe that the battery of tanks and howitzers being moved into place by the military was any match for the kind of power he had seen firsthand.
New York was his city, and on a normal night, he'd be able to look out over the harbor, maybe take his sixty- footer out for a night cruise to turn her to leeward and stare back at the jeweled necklace of the city in lights, following the constellations along the sensuous path where she lay snug against the harbor, winking ... always winking. To most people, in and out of the city, New York was a sprawling madhouse built on the shoulders of an Atlas whose main interest was commerce; to James Nathan the city was a graceful lady lounging as carelessly as a disinterested goddess like those you might see in a Babylonian temple, all-powerful and all around, and yet unseen ... just out of sight and out of range of the dimension of mankind. Until you wounded her. She could be as dangerous and unyielding as the ocean, as treacherous as a mountain glacier, callous, cold, warm as her mood dictated.
James Nathan had felt the pulse of the sensuous living thing that was New York City, and even with all her ills, she was a towering woman of substance--never to be taken for granted--and as for beauty, a modern Mesopotamia where most lived out their lives, nestled in her bosom, but never knowing her. Like lice on a mammoth elephant, krill in the presence of the whale. Most busy with their little ruts, their minds frantic with schemes that centered on themselves...
People ... what else was to be expected?
What can I take from her, from this goddess called New York? That is what people wanted to know. Take from her, always taking, stripping, biting out large chunks of her, but here was Stroud, a stranger to her, come to
