Terrors (11 page)

Was this cowardly weakling the blustering Lord Gorgon?

The Saint shook her head scornfully. She turned from the cowering male to his female commander. “You’re right, Scorpion Queen. You have made league with the European dictator. That is unforgivable. If you had acted from greed, even from hatred, I might have managed some small degree of empathy for you. For the world mistreats us all, in one
way or another. But to sell your country to the brute of Europe, that places you beyond the pale.”

Even as the two women exchanged words, the cowering male had slipped from their immediate environs. Stationing himself behind a control console he turned dials, studying them until he was satisfied. Then he flicked a toggle switch.

As she stood confronting the Scorpion Queen, the Golden Saint felt
a sudden pain. It was as if her feet and legs had burst into flame, yet at the same time a terrible chill shot through her.

An involuntary gasp of dismay escaped her lips. She slapped involuntarily at her legs and peered down. From the tips of her golden boots to her knees she seemed to be coated with frost. But even this was the
case only for a moment. She realized, then, that the whiteness
that covered her was not a single coating but an array of hundreds, thousands, of busily moving specks.

They were coming from a great tank that stood against a wall of the Scorpion Queen’s laboratory, an army of white specks that headed for the Saint and crawled up her boots and her gold cloth covered legs. And they were stinging, stinging, inflicting a pain that could only be described as that
of ice-cold flame.

The Golden Saint managed to capture one of the white specks and raise it to the level of her eyes. It was nothing other than a scorpion, albino in color and reduced to tiny dimensions. As were all of its kind it was equipped with claws and multiple legs, like an Atlantic lobster, but with a curling tail terminating in a wicked stinger.

“You like my pets?” the Scorpion Queen
asked. “Are they not lovely?”

The Golden Saint slapped and brushed at her legs, striving with frantic energy to scatter the tiny creatures, but as rapidly as she could brush the scorpions off they were replaced by more and more of the tiny stinging creatures.

They reached her thighs, then her waist. Wherever they had covered her, she felt first a burning agony, then a terrible cold, and then—worst
of all—nothing.

This, the Golden Saint realized, was what had happened to the earlier victims of the mysterious plague that terrified Seacoast City. She knew that she had to act within seconds or she was doomed to become a hollow, frozen replica of herself, her flesh and bones devoured by ravening miniature scorpions. In a flash she realized that she had a chance not merely to survive but to
triumph.

With a rustle and a sudden
crack!
the Golden Saint’s membranous wings spread to their full expanse. With a whirr she lifted off the flagstone floor and rose toward the laboratory’s vaulted ceiling.

Had the laboratory been of smaller dimensions there would not have been room for the Saint’s wings to spread to their full extent. Had the vaulted ceiling not been so high, it would have
been impossible for the Saint to take flight. But the arrogance of the Scorpion Queen had dictated that her headquarters be gigantic, and now that very prideful splendor would lead to her defeat.

As the Saint rose above her enemies she opened a compartment on the belt that hung from her graceful hips. She drew an instrument from it and pointed it at the albino scorpions that had attached themselves
to her boots and her legs. With a low humming sound, a brilliant ruby-tinted ray sped from the instrument. As it struck the tiny scorpions they flared briefly with color, then fell away, most of them landing unharmed on the flagstone floor. The stream of white specks had ceased to emerge from the tank. The creatures milled around on the flagstone floor, seeking some new victim. When they approached
the oddly made boots of either the Scorpion Queen or her craven deputy they swerved from them, obviously repulsed by the strange material of the boots.

But not all the scorpions falling from the Golden Saint landed on the laboratory floor. Some landed on the Scorpion Queen; others, on the craven Lord Gorgon. Both of them brushed frantically at the tiny specks of white. It was obvious that the
stings of the tiny creatures, as painful as they had been to the Golden Saint’s lower limbs, were agonizing beyond compare as they attacked the Scorpion Queen and Lord Gorgon’s faces, whipping their tiny stingers against sensitive eyeballs, exploring the insides of their nostrils, their panting mouths, the very channels of their ears.

The Scorpion Queen ran for the portal that opened upon the
great hall of her castle. Lord Gorgon followed but halfway across the laboratory he stumbled across a heavy cable and fell to the flagstone floor. Even as he struggled to rise he was attacked by tens of thousands of albino scorpions. He got as far as his hands and knees, then threw his hands into the air. He uttered a single, final cry of anguish and despair, then fell to the floor, a cold, white
shell all that remained of what had once been a man.

The Golden Saint pursued the Scorpion Queen from the laboratory, her membranous wings holding her aloft and safe from the Scorpion Queen’s white warriors, but as the Saint emerged into the great hall of the castle, her arch-foe was nowhere to be seen.

Shortly the Golden Saint would leave the castle, circling above its walls and towers, searching
for the Scorpion Queen, but the latter was nowhere to be seen.

Later, her ravaged lower limbs treated with exotic unguents developed by ancient scholars in hidden cities still concealed in the vastness of the continent of Africa and unknown to the outer world save for the towering redoubt of the Golden Saint, the Saint spoke with General
Hopkins. Her message for him, transmitted across the ether
by a device of her own devising, was urgent.

It was imperative, the Saint told the military man, that the fleet of B-16 warplanes be loaded with high explosive bombs. They must return to Seacoast City from their base at North Orion Field carrying their load of destruction and utterly obliterate the Scorpion Queen’s now abandoned redoubt in Poseidon Pond.

To his great credit, the General agreed
without argument. Within the hour the squadron of mighty B-16’s were refitted with high explosive bombs. Within another hour they were airborne, and shortly they would make their bombing runs over Molly Pitcher Park.

The menace of the miniature scorpions was ended. The ice in Seacoast Harbor would melt, the city would return to its summer norm, children would play once more in the grassy meadows
of the city’s parks. The baseball league would hold a special selection of players to create the once idolized Seacoast City Superbas. And foodstuffs and vital war materiel would flow from Seacoast Harbor and the other great ports of America to the beleaguered, heroic resistance fighters of suffering Europe.

The following morning Ruby Mae Jones, formerly of Savannah, Georgia, now a proud resident
of Seacoast City, reported for work as usual. Seated at her manicurist’s station in Madame Cerise’s Salon of Beauty, she carefully manipulated a cuticle stick on the carefully maintained fingernails of one of her regular patrons.

“Isn’t it nice,” the patron asked, “that the sun is shining again and summer has returned to Seacoast City?”

“Oh, yes’m,” Ruby Mae smiled. “It was real nice and warm
down South where I was raised up. I do love living here in Seacoast City, but I didn’t like having that extra winter this year, not one bit.”

The patron laughed. Ruby Mae was a smart girl. She was going to go places in the world, the customer thought.

She was right. Even more than she knew.

The so-called editorial offices of Millbrook High School’s student paper would never have been mistaken for the city room of the San Francisco
Chronicle
or even, to stick closer to home, the Marin
Independent-Journal
. A cardboard sign with hand- lettered copy was taped to the frosted glass; it said
Millbrook Hi-Life
, and inside the musty room, wrestled a decade ago from a protesting
language teacher, half a dozen battered desks crowded into an area suitable for half that number.

Karen Robertson sat behind the biggest of those desks. On its battered composition top stood a plastic sign announcing Karen’s position,
Editor-in-Chief
, and on a rolling table beside the desk resided a battle-fatigued electric typewriter, its once bright paint-job suffering severely from the chips
and fades.

Mario Cipolla and Annie Epstein sat in straight-backed chairs opposite Karen. All three were seniors at Millbrook High; another half year and they would have their diplomas and be off for a final carefree summer before they started college. They’d been friends and schoolmates for a long time, but fall would see them scattered, to Cal across the bay in Berkeley, to the local College
of Mann in nearby Kentfield, to USC nearly half a thousand miles due south.

But now, on this miserable Friday afternoon in January, with the northern California sky a sodden, depressing gray and a steady thrum of chilling rain descending, they clustered around Karen’s desk discussing the assignment that Annie and Mario would head out on that evening.

“Nobody gets interviews with the Whisperers,”
Karen said, “are you
really sure you can get in there, Annie?”

Annie shook back her long, rust-red hair. “My father says it’s all set. We’ll go in for the sound-check, then get our interview, and we have backstage passes for tonight’s show.”

Mario nodded his support of Annie. Almost unconsciously he dug a couple of fingers past the felt-tipped pen in his shirt pocket and reassured himself that
the precious stage-door pass was still there. It was a small cloth square with the two words
The Whisperers
, in stylized lettering, and the words
Winterland San Francisco
and the date rubber-stamped beneath in special ink that would fluoresce beneath a specta4 light.

He had an attaché case with a miniature cassette recorder in it, along with his pad and pencils. Annie had her camera around her
neck—he’d seldom seen her without it—and a gadget bag beside her chair, with extra lenses and film. He knew that flash equipment was
verboten
on-stage, and that Annie, like the professional rock photographers, had learned to use ultra-fast films and wide apertures to capture their images by available stage lighting.

“I
am
a little nervous about the interview,” Mario said.

“You know, the Whisperers
have had those big hit singles, ‘Daemonium’ and ‘Erich Zann,’ and I’ve seen them on television and all, but—” He shrugged.

“I’ve met lots of musicians,” Annie replied. “Daddy’s always bringing them up to the house to use the swimming pool or taking me to shows and introducing me to them. Most of them are perfectly ordinary people, and very nice.”

Neither Mario nor Karen responded.

“Well,” Annie
resumed, “some of them are a little bit odd.”

“I’ll bet.” Mario smoothed his medium-long hair. “The stories about weird carrying on, and drugs, and breaking up hotel rooms.” He paused. “And groupies. They must all be strange people.”

Annie said “No they’re not. At least, not most of them. Not the ones I’ve met, and I’ve met practically every artist on the Dagon label, and a lot of others, that
daddy’s friends introduced me to—Elektra, London, Epic.”

Mario began to pick up his case with the recorder. He got to his feet and headed for the corner of the newspaper office, reached for his quilted down jacket and rain-hood.

“Yeah, well, let’s get going. We’ll be going against the traffic but
it’s still going to be rush hour, especially in the city.”

“Good luck!” Karen called after them.
“Get a good story. We’ll scoop everybody.”

Mario and Annie headed down the hall, toward the front door of the school. It was after four o’clock, and by this time of day—especially by this time of Friday—Millbrook High was nearly deserted.

They signed the late-exit book at the front door, headed down the steps hand-in-hand and sprinted across the front yard toward the student parking lot where
Annie had left the little Volvo 1800E her father had given her for her senior present. She and Mario weren’t exactly sweethearts—they’d both had dates with plenty of other kids, and had never got into the heavy senior scene—at least with each other—but they’d gone to parties and dances and generally hung around together even since junior high. That was a long time.

Annie unlocked the door on
the driver’s side of the 1800. She looked across its sleek, rain-beaded roof at Mario. “Would you rather drive us into the city?”

He grinned. “Really, I would. I always feel kind of—strange—when a girl drives. You know?”

Annie said “That’s pretty old-fashioned, Mario.” But she walked around the car’s long hood and handed him the keys, waiting for him to climb into the driver’s seat and reach
across to unlock the passenger door for her. She settled into the leather bucket seat, fumbled in her gadget bag and came up with a pair of phototropic Jerry Garcia glasses. She settled them on her nose. In the gloomy wet afternoon they were as clear as plain ground glass.

Mario clicked on the engine and eased the Volvo’s floor-shift into its smooth and powerful lowest gear. He rolled it out
of the parking lot, braked for the stop sign at the street, then headed onto Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and up-shifted, cruising through the light traffic and the steady rain toward the freeway.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Annie doing something with her hands in the car’s map compartment. “You looking for something?” he asked.

“Do you know the Whisperers’ music?”

“Their singles.”

“Well, here.” Annie pulled a tape cartridge from the map drawer
and slapped it into the Volvo’s Bendix tape system.

This is their new album. It’s called
Cthulhu
. Daddy brought it home for me. It’s a promo advance copy, the album won’t be out till next week. They’re supposed to push it on this tour.” Mario shook his head and pulled around a big Oldsmobile station wagon that was filling a lane
and a half of Sir Francis. “Grocery shopping,” he grumbled.