Farmer, Philip José - Traitor to the Living (21 page)

A few seconds later, the fire was returned from the guards. And the killing had started.

One of the watchtowers went up in flames as a rocket hit it. Carfax saw four bazooka teams, exposed now by the withdrawal of the crowd. Three other rockets streaked flaming from them, and they struck below the three towers. These disappeared in roars and clouds, and when the smoke had cleared away, they had vanished or become part-rubble. The bazooka men ran forward, the tubes on the shoulders of four, the firers behind them, and behind them about twenty men carrying missiles.

"It's torn now!" Carfax said. He looked upward. The lights of the planes were dropping swiftly, but they weren't going to strafe the few people still outside the walls. Not yet, anyway.

He stood up and pulled Patricia up.

"That Langer set this up," he said. "He didn't expect Western to let us in."

Patricia did not answer.

"Listen," he said, "you get in a car and drive back to Bonanza Circus. No, wait a minute! You might run into the Westernites! Come with me! I'll put you in the charge of those county cops. They can take you back!"

He pulled her along toward the silver-and-black car. From the area inside the walls came a roaring and a screaming, the banging of rifles and the rapid-firing of machine guns. Then, three booms as bazooka rockets exploded. Three more towers were enveloped in smoke, out of which pieces of wood and bricks soared into the light of the few lamps that were still illuminated.

The two county policemen were crouching by the side of the car. One was speaking rapidly into the car phone.

"Can you take her back to town?" Gordon yelled.

The man, a slim youth with a face as white as sugar, shook his head. "No way. We got orders to stay here. Besides, the pro-Westerns are on the way, and we don't want to get caught between them and the ambushers." "What ambushers?" Carfax yelled.

"Hell, the hills just back of the pass are alive with men," the youth said. "Didn't you see them?"

Carfax shook his head, and the policeman said, "They must've all hidden themselves before you got there. Man, this is terrible! Those guys are going to walk into a trap!" "Then don't you think you should warn them?"

"We radioed in already, but they won't let our men near. And they're all on the road now."

Four more large explosions, one after the other, caused them to duck down on the ground. Carfax looked over the hood a moment later and saw pillars of smoke. He also saw a small two-engined jet, lances of flame spurting from along its wings, diving at the area just within the walls. Then it curved up and was gone, and another had taken its place.

Either the pilot of the second jet had made a mistake, or some of the ground fire had hit it. It struck the top floor of the middle ten-story building, and the crown of the building went up in a ball of fire. Patricia screamed and would not quit until Carfax shook her.

She collapsed sobbing on his chest. He made her sit in the back of the patrol car, said, "You stay here," and went back to the youth. The man on the phone quit talking then and looked at Carfax.

"Did you tell them we have to have the militia here now?" Carfax said.

The man nodded and said, "They're on the way. The governor called them out about ten minutes ago. But it'll be an hour before any of them get here. If they can get through the mess up in the hills."

Carfax presumed that he meant by that the expected battle between the Westernites and the ambushers.

Carfax stuck his head in the window. "I'm going in after your father, Pat."

"You'll be killed!"

"Maybe. But I have to go," he said. "If Western doesn't kill him, those maniacs will. They're likely to slaughter everybody."

"But you won't even know what he looks like."

"I know," he said. "I don't have much chance for success. You might as well face that. Pat."

Chang and Lopez walked toward them, and Carfax went to meet them.

"Where's Hiekka?"

"She went on in," Lopez said, grinning sourly. "She said she had a duty to find your uncle, and she wasn't going to let any men scare her off. She's mucho hombre, that one. She said we didn't have any balls. I told her we did, but we didn't want them shot off."

"She's crazy," Carfax said. "She just wants to knock off a few males. Well, I'm crazy, too. I'm going."

"Wait a while, and we'll go with you," Chang asid. "There isn't any percentage doing it now. You're as likely to be shot by the pros as the antis."

He jumped as two more explosions beat the air around them.

"Talk me into it," Carfax said.

"They're setting the whole place on fire!" Lopez said.

He was right. There seemed to be fires in the upper stories of all the buildings. He could see men clinging to the edges of the tops of the walls and dropping. The guards were deserting their posts in the towers.

He ran toward the gateway, drawing his automatic, furnished him by Langer. At the gate, he stopped and looked cautiously inside. There were about twenty-five bodies scattered over the grounds. A few of them were in Lincoln green. These seemed to be guards who had fallen inward from the blasted towers. Two men were dragging themselves toward the gateway.

From the buildings themselves came the uproar of many firearms and voices. Carfax slipped around the wall and ran toward the nearest building. As he did so, he heard the scream of a jet's engines, and he dropped to the pavement. The plane zoomed upward without firing. Apparently, the pilot had no way of knowing whether Carfax was one of his own men or not. At least, the pilot wasn't trigger-happy.

He got up and ran to the doorway, outside of which two men were crumpled. Inside, along the hallway, were about six dead and wounded. None of the latter were in a condition to cause him trouble even if they had been so inclined.

Carfax methodically went along the hall, opening doors and looking inside. Some held dead men; most were empty. At the end, a door led to a chemical laboratory. A man in a white smock was on the floor, unconscious from a blow on the head. Two other lab workers lay dead among shattered glass and plastic tubes. The odor of acids and unidentifiable chemicals set him to choking and his eyes to tearing. He stumbled out, coughing, and leaned against the wall to recover his breath. Then he went down a hallway which intersected the first corridor halfway along its length. The rooms along it had the same grisly contents.

After inspecting the rooms along the hallway at the south side of the building, he climbed a flight of steps. Here a man at the end of the hallway yelled at him.

Carfax dropped his gun and held up his hands while the man advanced. When the man got closer, he said,

"O.K. I saw you with Rexter."

Carfax picked up the gun and said, "Was it necessary to kill all those men? Most of them were unarmed." "Couldn't be helped," the man said. "Those guys"--he meant the mob from Bonanza Circus--"aren't professionals. They are just out to kill anybody who works for Western. But I think Rexter's got them in hand now. At least, he did in this building."

"Come along with me," Carfax said. "I have to search the whole building, and I don't want my head blasted off just because nobody knows I'm one of the good guys."

The man, a heavy-set dark-skinned Mediterranean, looked at him sharply. He said, "O.K."

Near the end of his search of the second story. Carfax found a man holding another at the point of a gun. Carfax spoke to the prisoner, a tall thin man of about forty bleeding from a gash on one side of his face.

"Are you Rufton Carfax?"

The man shook his head. Carfax said, "Do you know Rufton Carfax?"

"Never heard of him," the man said.

"In what building is Western?"

The man hesitated, and the man with Carfax growled, "Tell him, mister, or it'll be the worst for you."

"He was in Building Four," the tall man said. "He has an apartment there, two stories above MEDIUM."

"Building Four," the man with Carfax said. "That's the one the plane hit."

Carfax strode away, shouting over his shoulder.

"Come on!"

They ran downstairs and out into the open as the first of the mob poured out of Building Four. The fire had reached down to the fifth story now, and as Carfax ran toward it the heat struck him. It felt as if it were hot enough to fry eggs, but that was an exaggeration, of course. The men staggering out of it could not have gone more than a few steps if it had been that strong.

The clothes of the last man out were beginning to smoke, though.

Carfax found Rexter, who was leading a group car rying Hiekka and a man so covered with blood that his features were unrecognizable. Rexter shouted at Carfax to come with him, and they all walked swiftly to the gateway and some meters beyond it. Here the men carrying Hiekka eased her to the ground. She was dead. A bullet had torn off one of her amazonian breasts and another had half-severed her leg at the knee.

"She got four men before they got her," Rexter shouted.

"I hope she died happy," Carfax said. He pointed at the bloody man, who had also been put on the ground.

"Who's that?"

"It's Western," Rexter said.

"Why didn't you tell me before?" Carfax snarled. He got down on his knees and wiped the blood off Western's face with a handkerchief. He felt the neck and detected a slight pulse. He shouted, "Western! Can you hear me?"

The eyelids fluttered, and the lips opened. Carfax put his good ear down close to the mouth. He could hear only something like ". . . wasn't long..."

He said, "Western? Where's Rufton Carfax?"

Blood bubbled from the mouth, spraying his ear.

Carfax said, "Western! It's me, Gordon Carfax!

Where's my uncle?"

"... not Western..."

Carfax said, "Hang on, Western. Hang on long enough to do some good, for Christ's sake! Where is my uncle, Rufton Carfax?"

Western coughed, and more blood ran from his mouth. He sighed, and for a moment Carfax thought he was dead.

Then, weakly but distinctly, "I'm not Western. I'm Rufton Carfax."

Carfax had to restrain himself from grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him.

"What did you say?" he shouted.

"I'm your uncle, Gordon."

And he was dead.

Carfax got out of jail the next day on bond, and that only because Chang had vouched for him. The cells of the Bonanza Circus jail were crowded with pro-Westernites and anti-Westemites. The overflow had gone to a number of Nevada prisons. One newspaper article said that every jail in Nevada was packed to capacity with those arrested at Megistus and at the ambush, but that was an exaggeration.

The public outcry was hysterical. The followers of Western demanded that the "vicious murderers" be given a quick trial and hung, preferably at a televised execution. Those opposed to Western demanded that the "martyrs," the "public benefactors," be released immediately with thanks from the American public. Some letters to the editor even suggested that the stormers of Megistus should be given the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Western's body was claimed by the chief divine of the PanCosmic Church of the Embu-Christ (a distant relative). The public funeral in Los Angeles, attended by 500,000 mourners, was marred by a number of riots and injuries and deaths. The body was not released, however, before a thorough post-mortem had been done on Western. Langer received the secret report on this and showed it to Carfax. Particular attention had been given to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Langer had asked the pathologists to note anything unusual, though he did not tell them why he wanted the information. The report, however, indicated that Western had had a healthy brain, that there was no degeneration beyond that to be expected from a man his age.

"I was hoping that they would find some changes which they could not explain," Langer said to Carfax.

"Something that would have resulted, perhaps, from the occupation of the brain by a semb. Apparently possession doesn't cause physiological changes."

Carfax had told only Langer about Western's last words. The senator had decided to keep it a secret for the time being.

I don't understand it," Langer said. "Western, or your uncle, I mean, would not have lied. He was dying and knew it, so what would he gain by lying? But how did Rufton Carfax come to possess Western's brain?"

"I don't know," Carfax said. "I doubt that it could have been accidental. I can't say that it couldn't have happened accidentally. I don't know enough about the mechanics of semb transference. Maybe Western was going to place Uncle Rufton in a man's brain and something slipped up, and Uncle Rufton possessed Western instead. But if that happened, why didn't my uncle say so? What was to keep him from telling the public?

"I think, however, that there are some people, or at least one person, who could tell us. He is among those found in the subbasement."

Carfax was referring to the twenty employees who had taken refuge in a secret underground complex deep beneath Building Four. They had survived the fire, which had completely destroyed the building above the surface. They had then gone through a tunnel which led to an exit behind the hangar on the airstrip. They might have escaped unnoticed if a National Guardsman had not glimpsed one of them as he fled toward the hills beyond the plateau. A chase had rounded up twenty, all of whom had been put in jail. With the exception of a few, such as Pat, everybody present at the scene had been arrested. Most of them were being held as material witnesses while a grand jury was being formed.

"Of course," Carfax added, "we don't know we caught everybody. A few may have escaped. The people who were in the subbasement swear that nobody did. But they might be lying."

If only a MEDIUM were available, the truth might be ascertained. MEDIUM had burned, and the schematics needed to build another one had also gone up in flames. Two of the men who had hidden in the subbasement were physicists who might be able to rebuild MEDIUM. They, however, denied that possibility, claiming that they had no overall knowledge of the machine.

Carfax thought that they were lying and that they intended to put together another as soon as they got their freedom.