Madman Run

Chapter Twenty

Blade had the Martin halfway to his shoulders when Geronimo’s Winchester cracked twice.

Both rounds were aimed at the visor, one of them flattening against the metal with a distinct ping and not quite penetrating while the second went through the right eye slot, bored through the brute’s brain, and pinged a second time when it struck the back of the helmet.

Elphinstone halted, his arms sagged, and he swayed. Although his brain had ceased to function, his body hadn’t quite gotten the message. His fingers twitched, as if he wanted to grab something, and his left knee jerked forward as if about to intitiate another step. Then, like a towering tree in the forest, he toppled with a tremendous crash.

“Two down and two to go,” Hickok said, departing without a backward glance.

Geronimo slowly lowered the rifle and looked at Blade. “I didn’t want to do that.”

“I know.”

“There was no other choice.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think being a Warrior is all it’s cracked up to be.”

Blade wheeled and stepped into the corridor where the gunfighter was waiting. “Endora mentioned something about a control room. If we find it, we’ll find Morlock.”

“A control room for what?”

“I don’t know.”

A reserved Geronimo joined them and fed new bullets into the Winchester. “Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.”

“What’s the matter, pard?”

“I may not become a Warrior.”

Hickok’s mouth dropped. “Why not?”

“I’m not like you, Nathan. When I kill someone, I feel a hurt inside.”

“And you think I don’t?” Hickok responded, his tone betraying bitterness. “I feel it too, but I don’t let it get to me. I control it. I tell myself it has to be done.” He turned and walked toward the stairs.

“Nathan?” Blade said.

“What?”

“Why did you shoot her?”

“One of us had to do the job, and it might as well have been me,” Hickok said and kept walking.

Blade glanced at Geronimo, whose melancholy visibly intensified. “He did it so we wouldn’t have to,” he stated in a whisper.

“Me and my big mouth,” Geronimo remarked.

They hurried to catch up, and the three of them were soon climbing the steps to the next floor. There were no candles lit, no sounds indicating any of the rooms were occupied, so on they went to the next level, and the floor after that, until eventually they reached the uppermost one, ten stories above the ground. An arched, open window gave them a view of the glittering stars and the inky expanse of countryside and explained the breeze they always felt on the stairway.

A sole candle burned next to a partly open door along the left-hand corridor.

“He’s mine,” Hickok said, leveling both Colts and stalking forward to the door. He kicked it open and darted inside.

Blade and Geronimo were right on his heels. The giant marveled at a large chamber illuminated by two lanterns that revealed banks of electronic equipment aligned along all four walls. There was no sign of Angus Morlock.

“The crud has skipped,” Hickok guessed.

“What is all this?” Geronimo asked, moving to a console and studying a series of switches and knobs.

When Blade noticed a dozen blank squares of glass arranged in three rows on the far wall, curiosity impelled him closer to study them. Their shape prompted vague memories of photographs he’d once seen in a book in the Family library, but he couldn’t put his mental finger on the exact photos. Two knobs were positioned under each square.

Hickok walked to a piece of equipment and flicked several toggle switches. “I wonder what these do?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t touch anything,” Geronimo said. “Morlock might have this room booby-trapped.”

“No way, pard. He wouldn’t want to damage all this stuff,” Hickok said and worked another toggle.

Suddenly, from a speaker mounted on the north wall, came the sound of leaves being stirred by a strange breeze, the distant wail of a coyote and the croaking of tree frogs.

“Where the blazes is that coming from?”

“Outside somewhere,” Geronimo said. “But how?”

An answer formed unbidden in Blade’s mind, and with it came comprehension. “A microphone.”

“What?” Hickok said.

“A microphone. It’s a device that can hear sounds and relay them elsewhere. There must be a mike planted outside the castle walls connected to this room by an underground wire, or else the equipment in here operates on battery power.”

“How do you know all this?” Hickok asked.

“I remember reading a book about the electronic age, as it was called, and all the wonderful devices available before the Big Blast. The people had devices for playing music, washing clothes and cooking food in a minute flat,” Blade said, indicating the blank squares of glass. “And unless I miss my guess, these are monitors used to keep watch on the grounds.”

He twisted one of the dials.

A screen in the upper row crackled to life and showed one of the gloomy underground passageways.

“See what I mean,” Blade said.

“But how could this gear work after so many years?” Geronimo wondered. “Electricity is a thing of the past.”

“Not if the Morlocks have a stockpile of rechargeable batteries,” Blade said. At least he understood how Morlock had known he entered the castle from the mausoleum.

“Keep turnin’ those dials,” Hickok advised.

Blade did so, going from monitor to monitor, and one by one corridors and rooms were dimly depicted, all empty. When there were only three screens left, the weapons room materialized with its grisly carpet of pale, grinning corpses.

“Morlock must have seen the whole thing,” Geronimo said.

Blade twisted the second to last dial, revealing yet another corridor, and was disappointed at not finding Morlock. Where was the madman?

From the number of monitors, he concluded only the main corridors and some of the rooms were part of the surveillance network. There weren’t enough to cover the entire castle. “If the runt saw the whole thing, why didn’t he try to help the serfs or sic his walkin’ fur rug on us?” Hickok brought up.

“He probably believed we’d be no match for the serfs,” Blade guessed.

“And I doubt he expected us to kill Endora and Elphinstone. Like Endora said, he’s been taking us too lightly all along.”

“His mistake,” Hickok said.

Blade twirled the last dial and stiffened.

The last scene depicted was the roof. And there, standing on a rampart and staring grimly directly into the camera, stood Angus Morlock with a shotgun cradled in the crook of his left arm. Somehow, he knew he was being observed because he nodded and made a beckoning motion with his right hand.

“He wants us to go up there,” Geronimo said.

“Let’s not disappoint the crumb,” the gunfighter stated.

Blade didn’t like the setup one bit. Why would Morlock blatantly challenge them to go onto the roof unless it was a trap?

“Are you comin?” Hickok asked, moving to the door.

“Yeah,” Blade said. He stared at the monitor for a few seconds, then went into the passageway with his friends.

“The stairs stop on this floor,” Geronimo noted. “There must be another way up.”

“Each of us will take a door,” Blade directed.

The youths separated. There were seven doors all tolled and it wasn’t until Geronimo opened the fifth one and called out, “Here it is!” that they found a spiral metal staircase to the top.

“Well, this is it,” Hickok said, inspecting the chambers in his revolvers to be sure the guns were fully loaded.

“I’ll go first,” Blade volunteered.

“Be my guest,” Geronimo said.

Blade went up a step at a time, tilting his neck so he could cover a wide door above. Once there, he tested the knob, found it rotated easily, and looked over his right shoulder. “Are you ready?”

“I was born ready,” Hickok said.

“No, but go ahead anyway,” Geronimo said.

Tensing, Blade flung the door open and threw himself outside to roll on his shoulder and rise to his knee with the Marlin sweeping the flat area before him.

Morlock had vanished.

The central section of the roof was level except for the doorway leading to the spiral staircase, which had been constructed as an isolated, elevated island in the very middle and fronted the northern battlements.

Blade glanced at the top of the door and saw the camera mounted on a sturdy bracket, so he knew Morlock had been within ten feet of the door a minute or two ago.

There were four ramparts connected to four turrets, one at each corner, and those turrets were the only hiding places on the roof.

“He must be in one of those beehive kind of things,” Hickok whispered.

“Spread out,” Blade said. “We’ll check the turret at the northwest corner first.” He rose to a crouching posture and advanced warily. A cool breeze caressed his face and brought to his nostrils a peculiar, pungent animal scent unlike any other he knew. He surmised the wind had carried the scent from an animal in the woods below but immediately realized such couldn’t be the case. And if the smell didn’t come from below or above, then there was only one explanation. The thought made him slow up, and his friends passed on by.

It couldn’t be! Blade told himself, staring at the turret in mounting apprehension. He would have smelled it before now, wouldn’t he?

Hickok was the closest to the three steps leading from the rampart into the shadowed turret. Both Colts were out and ready.

Blade moved forward, chiding himself for letting his imagination get the better of him. The thing was in the forest. Had to be.

The gunfighter had two yards to cover when a bloodcurdling roar rent the night and the monster squeezed through the turret entrance, all ten feet of hair and muscle and unbridled ferocity.

“Grell!” Geronimo yelled.

Hickok squeezed off four shots so fast they sounded like one. But none stopped the gargantuan mutation. He was lifting his arms to fire at the beast’s eyes when a swipe of a brawny arm sent him flying over five yards to crash onto his back, dazed.

“Try me,” Geronimo bellowed, lifting the Winchester. Quick as he was, Grell was quicker, and a second swipe tumbled the Blackfoot head over heels to lie in a stunned heap.

Blade felt his blood turn to ice. He gazed into those hellish red orbs and felt as if his life force was being sucked from his body. Fear—total, dominating, terrifying—rooted him in place. He wanted to shoot, but couldn’t make his hands move.

Grell snarled and lumbered toward the youth.

A tidal wave of panic engulfed the youth. Never had he been so outright scared. His dearest friends were down, perhaps severely injured and needing his help, and yet he couldn’t get his limbs to cooperate with his mind. He saw Grell’s long white fangs exposed and Grell’s right claw sweeping at his head, and he reacted automatically, spinning and running toward the safety of the doorway and the stairwell, his heart pounding, thinking only of escaping with his life. His spine tingled, and he shivered as he ran.

Somewhere, Morlock laughed.

The sound brought Blade up short in midstride, shocked at what he was about to do. He was fleeing, running away, being a coward. Worse, he was deserting his two best friends, leaving them to suffer a horrible fate at the hands of the madman or the mutation. Tremendous revulsion welled up within him, revulsion at his own behavior. He spun.

Grell had halted and coldly regarded the youth.

How could he be so base, so spineless? Blade asked himself. He’d let instinctive fear get the better of him, but fear could only maintain its grip if the person afraid allowed it to dominate their being. And he wasn’t about to have fear override his personality, have it supplant his will. He was a man, damn it, a man endowed with the power of choice. He could choose to let instinct win, or he would exercise his free will to do what had to be done.

At that moment, as he stood there confronting the monstrous, growling beast looming above him, he came to grips with his innermost being. His spiritual inheritance triumphed over his animal heritage and in the process forged a soul tempered in the adversity of supreme danger.

Blade smiled.

“Kill him, Grell!” came a shout from the darkness, and the creature stalked forward.

Whipping the Martin up, Blade went to fire, then paused. No. He wouldn’t take the easy way out. If he wanted to truly conquer fear, he must face it fully. The triumph must be total—spirit, mind and body. He threw the rifle to the roof and drew his Bowies.

Grell lifted his massive arms and snarled hideously.

Blade ran straight at the mutation and leaped into the air, his back arched, his hands overhead, the big Bowies held with the blades pointed downward. At the apex of his leap he was only a foot from Grell’s head. He could almost feel those baleful red orbs boring into his brain and smelled the beast’s fetid breath. For an instant panic tried to reassert control, until he gritted his teeth, tensed his steely sinews and swept both knives in a flashing arc, burying a Bowie in each crimson eye, sinking the sharp blades all the way to the hilts.

Grell stiffened, roared and swung his arms, catching the youth a glancing blow that knocked him aside. He staggered backwards, clutching at the Bowies and snarling, and managed to yank both knives out.

Blade gasped when his left side smacked into the hard stone roof, and he lay still for a few seconds, recovering, then pushed to his feet and dashed to where he’d thrown the rifle. He’d proven his courage to his satisfaction. There was nothing to be gained by further heroics. And without a weapon, slaying the monster would be impossible. He scooped up the Marlin and aimed at the thing’s head.

“Put down the gun.”

The youth froze at the gravelly command.

“You heard me. Put down the gun, and do it real slow.”

Blade estimated Morlock was not more than ten feet to his left and slightly behind him, just out of the line of vision. He could try to nail the madman, but even if he hit Morlock the shotgun might go off, and at such close range it would blow him in half. Reluctantly, he lowered the Marlin.

“Good. Now turn around, boy. I want to see your face when I kill you.”

Blade complied, his arms at his sides.

A malicious grin curled Angus Morlock’s lips. “At last I have you right where I want you. Any last words?”

The youth refused to give the madman the satisfaction.

“Very well. But I want you to know how much I hate you for what you’ve done. My daughter and my son, both dead. Poor little Grell, blinded for life. And why? All because I didn’t have you slain right away instead of toying with you.”

The scraping of calloused soles on the stone surface made Blade twist his head slightly so he could see the mutation. Grell was shuffling toward him, those hairy hands pressed over his ruptured eyes, hissing like an enraged viper.

Morlock glanced at his pet. “Look at him,” he said morosely. “Look at what you’ve done.”

Blade shifted, saw that he stood directly between the pet and its master, and instantly took the initiative. “You bloodthirsty brute!” he shouted. “You deserve to die!”

Grell lowered his arms, roared again and charged wildly in the direction of the youth’s voice.

“What are you doing?” Morlock exclaimed.

In three great bounds the monster was almost upon Blade. He dived to the right and felt the creature’s side brush his legs as it went past, glancing at the madman as he did.

Angus Morlock comprehended the ruse too late. “No, Grell!” he yelled, but his pet paid no heed. He already had the shotgun leveled, and he fired into the mutation’s chest. The explosive impact stopped Grell for just a moment, and then the beast’s swinging hands fell on Morlock’s shoulders.

“No!” the madman screeched. “It’s me, you dumb animal.”

Blade would never know whether Grell recognized the voice of his master. He saw those immense fingers wrap around Morlock’s head even as Morlock struggled and bellowed frantically. He saw Grell wrench sharply to the right, then the left. And he heard the snap, loud and clear.

A moment later yet another unfortunate victim crashed lifeless on top of the true beast of Castle Orm.