Helmet Head (17 page)
CHAPTER 39
The Source
Blood seeped down Fagan’s neck into his shirt. There were no mirrors in the basement and he dared not waste the time to go upstairs and look. By feel he determined it was not a serious cut. He used duct tape and tissue from a box to bind the wound leaving a silver band around his neck.
The faint whining from behind the metal door had stopped. It was as if the house was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen. He could almost feel its faint exhalation as something stirred the air. He got down on his knees on the bottom stoop and laid his head flat against the dust-covered concrete floor trying to peer through the quarter inch gap beneath the metal door. He saw light, linoleum, and stainless steel. He listened.
Not a sound issued from behind the door. He stood, hefting the ax in both hands. His side was a throbbing mass of pain. His introduction to the basement had been so intense he hadn’t noticed but now it came roaring back. Fagan stared at the door handle. Not a knob. A handle. The door was too high-tech for its surroundings. It was fitted with a dead bolt lock. He wouldn’t know if the door were locked until he tried it.
The minutest brush of moan issued from somewhere up above, so soft Fagan was not sure he heard it. He froze, white knuckles gripping the ax. The front stoop creaked as someone stepped on it. The visitor ponderously mounted the three stairs, each step eliciting squeals and groans from the sagging wood. The front door opened and shut.
The visitor paused inside the door.
And paused.
The seconds staggered by like a noon train in the middle of town. Fagan found himself breathing with a high keening sound and forced himself to inhale deeply. The minutes stretched on. What was he doing? The same thing as Fagan? Listening, extending his senses, trying to divine who was in the house?
But if it were Helmet Head, who had been operating the machinery behind the metal door? It could have been an automatic compressor. A refrigerator. Or any other electronically timed device.
The footsteps resumed with an odd clumping gait as if on uneven legs. The visitor marched straight back through the house, threw open the basement door and started down as if he owned the place. Fagan dashed beneath the stairs clutching his ax. The area beneath the stairs was crowded with metal tanks, regulators, and boxes filled with circuit boards, transformers and switches.
The visitor stood beneath the sixty watt bulb. A mesomorphic body wearing filthy blue jeans, a T-shirt. The visitor had no head. Instead it had a circuit board and a tiny camera that swiveled on a gimbal mount. It breathed through a tiny circular valve inserted into its larynx emitting an odd wheezing sound. The camera swiveled with a tiny whine until it fixed on Fagan. The shoulders slowly followed.
It was Fred. Fagan recognized the shirt. Fagan ran forward and brought the blunt end of the ax down on top of the camera and circuit board. There was a spark, a whiff of smoke, the smell of jet plane fuel. Fred took one step forward and collapsed.
Fagan bent to examine the device fixed to Fred’s neck. Fagan knew little about electronics but even he could see this wasn’t the usual circuit board. It had a homebuilt quality—using folded metallic gum wrapper and tiny gold earrings for connections. The transistors—or whatever they were—were nothing like he’d seen before with translucent segments.
Fagan searched Fred again from force of habit. Nothing new. He searched more thoroughly for his gun. Gone. All he had was the ax. He really had no choice. If Macy was behind that door he had to go through now.
Gripping the ax Fagan turned the handle and shoved the door back. Fluorescent light blinded him for a second and he instinctively pulled back and to the side.
Nothing happened.
Gripping the ax ferociously Fagan stepped through the door.
Into a gleaming underground laboratory that descended another four steps to tunnel under the earth toward the hills. The basement level had an institutional linoleum floor and acoustic tile ceiling with flush-fitted fluorescent housing. To his right a series of six foot vertical cabinets with convex doors lined the wall. And here, at last, were the computers: a laptop set up near the cabinets showing graph charts, a desk model at another station against the wall.
Where did they get power? Where did they get internet access? Fagan had seen no dish antennae or lines but that meant little. Von Mulverstedt could have run the lines through the forest to a dish. Just looking at the underground complex gave Fagan an eerie sensation. Look what one man could accomplish when he set his mind to it.
Von Mulverstedt may have found a way to restore damaged nerve tissue. He had solved the insurmountable problems of keeping detached human heads alive. He had found a way to animate dead bodies.
What could he not do? Von Mulverstedt had come closer than any human being to understanding the secret of life itself and what did he do with it? The desktop computer was connected to a radiator-looking hard-drive. Fat cables criss-crossed the floor held in place by gaffer’s tape. They all converged in the wall next to a metal door the size of a broom closet. Fagan turned the latch and pulled it open.
Inside was a massive copper coil made of half-inch tubing, about six feet high. It hummed faintly and Fagan could feel its heat. It took him a second to realize that the coil was wrapped around an axis, poking up about six inches to within an inch of the closet ceiling, which was fitted with a concave dish. Fagan couldn’t clearly see the axis without removing the copper tubing and he wasn’t about to touch anything. The protruding top came to a point. Fagan stood on his tiptoes and examined it as best he could.
It was some bronze-age implement, a spear or a javelin.
He got down on his knees and looked at the four inches that fell below the copper coils. A staff of wood so old it was almost petrified with some leather shards attached.
The Spear of Destiny. The Spear of Destiny was the power source.
The slam of a refrigerator door made him levitate. Gripping the ax he stood and turned as the first of the headless bikers emerged wearing a Nazi-party armband.
***
CHAPTER 40
Chop Chop
The corpse’s skin had turned deep purple and had contracted but not decayed. The muscles bulged smoothly and ominously as the creature, surmounted by a weird little turret with a single camera eye aimed at him like a tank’s gun, fixed on Fagan with a tiny hum. A brilliant red dot passed over his face. Laser sighting. The thing was unarmed but massive, preparing to bull rush Fagan into the wall. With a terrible whistling noise issuing from a valve in its throat it charged.
Fagan went down on one knee and swung the ax through the creature’s left ankle. The ax was sharp and heavy. The blow severed the foot and the thing smacked turret first into the wall even as its hands snaked out and seized Fagan’s pant leg. It was incredibly strong. It hooked one leg through the open closet door and began to pull Fagan inexorably to itself with hands like grappling hooks. The patch on its filthy denim vest said “Duckie.”
Fagan shortened up on the ax and brought the blunt head down again and again on the turret until he had hammered it a half inch into the neck. The body shuddered once and went limp. Von Mulverstedt must have concealed most of the circuitry beneath the metal pot. Up close it looked like a small sauce pan into which he’d drilled a hole.
Using the ax like a cane Fagan got to his feet, side throbbing. He felt like Hiroshima after the bomb. Light headed. He stared at the closed cabinets across the room. There were dials and controls on each cabinet. Maybe there were locks. Maybe if he twisted the dials and controls whatever was behind the doors would die. Once and for all. Be still. He started across the room as two of the cabinets swung open and their occupants emerged, one with its camera housed in big soup can, the other in an old metal canteen fitted to the top of the spine like a cap.
Fagan snarled, hefted the ax and rushed forward. The dead bikers moved swiftly with surprising fluidity. Pain shrieking in every joint Fagan buried the ax blade first in the canteen, inflicting a huge dent and causing the reanimated corpse to drop. Fagan whirled clockwise in a huge three-sixty, catching the second corpse with the flat of the ax right on the tin can which popped loose and splanged into the wall. A circuit popped and the headless creature trembled and dropped.
The room smelled of decaying flesh, ozone and acetone.
Where was Macy?
Panting, Fagan went to a counter containing a stainless steel sink, drew water, leaned down and drank deeply. He leaned heavily on the counter waiting for his breath to return. There was a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink. He opened it. Inside was a bottle of aspirin. Gratefully he washed down three. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like he’d gone five rounds with Junior Dos Santos.
He could only go deeper into the maze. It must have taken Von Mulverstedt years to excavate this installation, even with a backhoe and Caterpillar. Someone must have noticed the noise. Why had no one checked to see if he had the permits?
Once he got underground there would be no noise. Headless automatons to dig and to blast and to clear. To stand around throwing
sieg heils
. Midnight runs to his drop box to pick up the mail-order equipment. Years to figure it out and put it all together. The man was clearly a genius, perhaps one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived and it all seemed to happen after the accident. Like it jarred something loose. Triumph and tragedy in one metal mash-up.
What a waste. All those miracles—immortality, reanimation, stem-cell research would not survive the night. And even if Helmet Head survived, and killed Fagan, there was no way Von Mulverstedt would ever be taken alive or cooperate with the authorities. He’d engineered his own little Ragnarok out here in the woods. He’d cut himself off from the human race and declared himself a new species.
Fagan wished he had a gun. Then he remembered the Walther. He listened. The basement was silent as a tomb. Gripping the ax he hustled as fast as he could out of the sub-basement, up the creaky stairs, around to the front, up the creaky stairs down the hall to Von Mulverstedt’s room. He grabbed the Walther out of the top drawer, released the magazine. It was full. He slapped it back in and looked for a second magazine. He found a box of cartridges and dumped a dozen in his pocket.
His legs went out from under him on the way down to the first floor and he instinctively grabbed the rope banister saving himself from a nasty fall. He hobbled back down to the basement half-expecting the lab door to be sealed from within. Everything was as he had left it.
Where was Von Mulverstedt? For the first time Fagan entertained the terrifying possibility that the killer and Macy were elsewhere. But that made no sense! Hadn’t Doc told him Von Mulverstedt brought Macy into the farmhouse?
He couldn’t remember.
Fagan dropped the ax and ratcheted a cartridge into the chamber. The broom-like wooden handle felt odd in his hand like he was an actor in a play. Three steps down to the second steel door, the one leading under the hill. Standing with his back to the wall, Fagan turned the lever and swung the door inward. A rush of cool damp air flowed past.
He stepped through the door. The cave was lit by a series of utility lamps strung from metal hooks sunk into the cave wall, some suspended from stalactites. Fagan turned to his left and his blood froze.
***
CHAPTER 41
Triumph of the Will
A red, black and white Nazi rally pennant the size of a handball court hung from the smooth cave wall lit by several spots at the base. It momentarily stunned him like a smacked fly. Black box speakers hung from the wall at intervals. What lay before it was even more disturbing. A professional deck finished in polished oak, twenty feet on a side. On top of the deck two gurneys side-by-side, one containing the unmistakable red clad Macy, the other a black body bag. A stainless steel counter rose from one side and on it lay a cranial saw. Fagan had seen them in Afghanistan.
At the front of the deck facing the cave a podium bearing the official Nazi Party seal: an eagle gripping the swastika. All it lacked was der Führer himself. You didn’t advance in modern German society by flaunting Nazism. The conversion must have occurred after the crash. Or perhaps Von Mulverstedt had believed it all his life and kept it hidden. Psychosis in full flower. Fagan knew well the temptation to give oneself over to evil. He had made his choice. And Von Mulverstedt had made his.
Sixty feet across the uneven floor, a coarse dark gray concrete half-tube, convex side up, approximately five feet high with a thick steel door and discolored metal piping snaking back toward the farmhouse, disappearing in a vent in the wall. A pile of ash lay on the ground beneath the hatch.…
Macy was not moving.
He was going to operate here? In a cave? Was there anything he couldn’t do? With what goal? His dead wife had lain in her grave for months, if not years. Was he reconstructing her from DNA, like the dinosaurs in
Jurassic Park
?
Fagan limped across the uneven and slippery cave floor and stepped up onto the deck. He went to Macy, who was strapped to the gurney via forehead, neck, arms, waist and legs. He felt her pulse. She was still alive, thank God. He slapped her gently.
“Macy! Wake up!”
She moaned and her eyes fluttered. Fagan looked for the buckle on the strap securing her head. It was hidden inside the gurney. The strap was made from the same tough nylon material as the helmet from which he’d cut himself loose. Fagan drew water from the tap in the stainless steel sink and dashed it in Macy’s face. She opened her eyes and stared at him uncomprehending for an instant. Her gaze softened.
“Pete!”
Fagan put a finger to is lips and leaned in close. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “The last thing I remember him grabbing me in that house and pressing a cloth against my face.…I think he knocked me out.”
“Hold tight. I’ll have you free in a second.” He slapped his pockets. Where was his knife?! His eyes swept the stainless steel counter and stopped on the cranial saw. It was cordless. He jammed the Walther in his pants and picked up the saw. It said Guangzhou Mecan Trading Company/Made in China. The blade was a five-inch stainless steel disc with tiny sharp teeth, like a piranha.
He turned it on. It emitted a high-pitched whine like a six ounce mosquito. Maybe Von Mulverstedt was off meditating. Maybe he was riding around cutting off heads. Please God let him cut Macy loose and get out of there before the freak returned.
That’s all he asked.
“Hold still,” he said slowly bringing the spinning blade to bear on the strap below her neck. The blade zipped through like paper and the strap fell free. Fagan quickly applied the spinning saw to the arm and leg restraints. Macy moved cautiously, testing her arms and legs before trying to sit up.
She reached out and Fagan helped her to sit. She seemed a little wobbly. Fagan found a red plastic cup on the counter, filled it with water and handed it to her. She gulped it down gratefully. He refilled it. She drank half and set the glass on the gurney next to her.
“Think you can walk?” Fagan said.
She looked over his shoulder, pupils contracting to pin points. Her arm shot out knocking the cup of water to the floor. Fagan instinctively drew the pistol and turned. Von Mulverstedt stood at the bottom of the three concrete steps leading into the cave looking at them. For a second they stared at one another, frozen. Helmet Head walked deliberately toward them, right hand swooping up over his left shoulder and drawing the blade with a metallic
ching
.
“If I can lure him away from the door get out of here.”
“Not without you!” Macy said, hugging him and surprising herself by her depth of emotion. Fagan reluctantly turned away.
Fagan settled into a shooter’s crouch behind the podium resting his forearms on the polished oak. Fagan was a trained marksman. At this range he couldn’t miss. He zeroed in on the faceplate and squeezed off three shots in a tight cluster.
Helmet Head belied the laws of physics and believability. As the shots rang out the blade flickered cutting a complicated pattern in the air, catching a bullet with each stroke. Fagan’s aim had been perfect. None of the bullets hit their target. Helmet Head split and deflected all of them. The zing from the vibrating steel lasted longer than the gunshot echoes. The repercussions continued to echo down the cave all the way to the hell. Helmet Head was the devil and this was his domain.
Helmet Head paused, hands in front, palms facing forward.
Whaaaa—?
Helmet Head advanced. He was ten feet from the deck when Fagan seized the steel gurney with the body bag, whirled it around and ran at the monster, shoving the gurney over the lip of the deck. The gurney smacked Helmet Head square in the gut and he staggered as it fell to the floor with a clang, spilling its grisly payload.
Helmet Head’s wail was louder than a tornado siren. Fagan clapped his hands to his ears. Helmet Head dropped the sword and fell to his knees. He gathered the body bag to him with a disturbing rustle and cradled it, no bigger than a large rag doll. Fagan turned to Macy, held out his hand and helped her off the deck. She leaned into him and stumbled but she could stand. Like a three-legged race they staggered to the edge of the deck. Fagan stepped down first then turned to help Macy down. Her fingers sank into his shoulders like eagle talons.
“He’s getting up.…” she said with barely suppressed hysteria. Fagan looked around frantically for a place to hide her. There was no good place. He was the only thing standing between her and Helmet Head. He walked her back to the far end of the platform and pushed her down to the cool stone floor.
“Stay there!” he hissed looking for a weapon. He leaped on the deck and pulled out the stainless steel drawer from the counter as Helmet Head stepped up onto the deck holding the sword back in one hand for a killing blow. Fagan threw the stainless steel drawer at him sending scalpels and hemostats flying. The blade struck the drawer and cut through six inches. Helmet Head flicked the stainless steel drawer off his sword with a musical chime.
Fagan put his head down and charged. He’d been a Double AA collegiate wrestling champion and studied martial arts in the Army. He got inside the creature’s swing and barreled forward shoving Helmet Head off the deck onto the cave floor where he landed hard on his back. Fagan landed with a knee on Von Mulverstedt’s diaphragm and thought he heard a faint exhalation behind the opaque shield.
Fagan sprang up and lurched back. Helmet Head had dropped his sword. He seemed momentarily stunned. Fagan dove onto the wet stone floor, grabbed the sword and rolled. He got to his feet as the monster sat up.
Fagan brandished the sword. “YEAH, MOTHERFUCKER! HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW?”
***