Whatever Gods May Be (32 page)

Yet now, a million years later in the twilight of Mankind's existence, Phillips was no longer a detached observer to tragedy; he was a full-fledged participant, and he had the further dubious distinction of being the sole representative to a civilization that was at least partially responsible for its own ultimate demise.

Phillips no longer felt sorrow or remorse for the inevitable doom that lay ahead for his people - or for himself.  At first, when Thalick had found the Challenger, and subsequently urged he and his daughter to join the tribe, Phillips was stunned, and even outraged, that the gentle, weakened descendants of his own species were slowly being devoured by the Redeyes and the plague-dispensing Dark.  Those early days with the tribe marked a point of catharsis for John Phillips; instilled with a new purpose for living, he threw himself into the monumental endeavor of instructing humanity and working on a possible cure to the sickness which thrived off of it.  In the Stingers, he found strong and willing allies, but as the years passed and the tribe continued to disintegrate from Redeye assaults and Dark-related illness, Phillips recognized the futility in his endeavors.

As the Thelericks had understood for thousands of years before his arrival, the prognosis for Mankind's survival dictated that a postponement to doom was all that could be struggled for.  There was no cure to the Dark; and there were not enough of them to effectively discourage the persistent vampire from further sieges.  All the Stingers could do, along with Phillips' assistance, was to keep the tribe moving away from the ever-growing numbers of Redeye hoards which migrated and shadowed its every move.

Perched on top of the Stinger Green-Belly, Phillips now surveyed the new valley which he and the Thelericks had led the tribe to several days earlier.  It was a rocky place, divided by a three-fingered stream that finished abruptly where the desert began.  On one side of it, a strange, twisted forest of rubber-like vegetation crawled over rolling slopes that later sprouted into thousand-foot mountains directly north.  Canyons and passes delved into the surrounding cliff walls, which from a strategic standpoint, held excellent potential for defensive planning against any foreseeable enemy from the desert.  Gigantic blocks of volcanic stone spotted the valley floor, some rising over twenty feet high, and these, too, could be exploited advantageously for defensive purposes.  Rising two hundred feet above the desert boundaries, the valley was actually part of a gradual slope that later formed a chain of snow-capped peaks that fed the descending streams and forest perimeter.  With the promise of so much camouflage, coupled with a high-ground superiority, the valley was far more than just an insulated sanctuary for the tribe; if necessary, it would serve as a final battlefield in which a protracted retreat would be possible for at least a week.

These logistical handicaps had not been overlooked by the thoughtful Stingers; indeed, while the tribe was only halfway across the desert, several Thelerick scouts had painstakingly reconnoitered hundreds of miles of this lower hill chain in search of a proper base camp.  Ideally, the Stingers should have urged the tribe further into the mountains, where the higher elevations assured substantial safety from potential vampire threats.

But so exhausted and sick had the people become, that to push on further after coming out of the desert barely alive, would have killed many more with the ambitious climb upwards.  Thus, the lower foothill regions where the streamy valley was located was decided upon as the tribe's new home.

For a week now, it had proved to be a benevolent sanctuary.  But the earthquake of only hours earlier had transformed the place into a living tomb, once again shattering all hopes for Phillips that his people could enjoy at least a modicum of peace and life.  He stared at the rock rubble around him, listening to the cries of those trapped beneath tons of smashed stone which the Stingers were attempting to remove.  For all of his concern with the tribe, though, Phillips' main concentration was devoted to what he had seen drop from the Dark a few minutes earlier.

Phillips was perhaps the only creature on Earth to realize the configuration of the falling star had been that of a spacecraft - though where it could have come from, he could not even guess at as yet.  He was not pleased that his daughter had accompanied Thalick in the investigation, and had he the opportunity, he would have refused her the privilege entirely.  Had the earthquake not inflicted so much damage to the tribe, he might even have saddled one of the Stingers for the journey himself.

With this last thought, Phillips doubled over in pain, and was forced to lower himself to a sitting position on the Green Belly's back.  The cancer within him was a sober reminder to Phillips that his movements and activities had to be kept at a minimum.  It had been just as well, he concluded, that Valry had gone with Thalick instead of himself to find the UFO; realistically, Phillips knew that he never would have survived the endeavor.

Barking out feeble orders to the men and women around him who had escaped injury from falling rock, Phillips paraded around on top of Green Belly for the next hour, offering words of comfort where he could when a new victim and friend was dug out from beneath the scattered debris.

The Stingers were kept busy administering emergency doses of venom to those who had sustained brutal damage, but for all their efforts, the earthquake toll had summed up a devastating twenty dead, with twice that many wounded.  Among the dead, Phillips was especially bereaved to discover, was his little attendant Marma.  The old woman had taken care of him for several years now, and he had grown to depend upon her for almost all of his needs.

Phillips sobbed openly, as he saw one of the Stingers lay her corpse out alongside the other bodies recovered.

Another hour passed before three of the Stingers completed the mass grave a mile out in the desert.  By the time they returned, the tribe for the most part had already forgotten about the disaster, and were already involved with ripping the precious Fuzzy apart that Thalick's hunting foray had produced.

Phillips remained aloft on Green Belly, alternately looking at the Fuzzy ceremony and to the slopes beyond where his daughter and Thalick had disappeared.  He was worried for Valry, though he knew that she was under the finest protection on the planet, and he could not dispel the feelings of anxiety he experienced each time he thought back to the Dark's maniacal behavior and the thing it had deposited earthward a few hours earlier.

The air in the valley had become distinctly more muggy since the Dark storm, and though the temperature had risen a few degrees, Phillips felt chilled and frightened.  There was something different about the world around him now, and the strangeness of it made him uneasy.

A low breeze whined terribly through the valley.  Phillips found himself listening to it.  And there was a voice.  Phillips went white, and his eyes blinked in animal terror.

Phillips was about to scream, before several screams interrupted his own.  Opening his eyes, he looked around himself at the tribe and Stingers.  All the people were running and yelling heading for the protection of the nearest Stinger, and grabbing on to a comforting leg or claw.  Their eyes were turned toward the sky.

The sky blackened.  The breeze which had moments ago carried the menacing voice on its breath had evolved into a lashing wind storm, and Phillips was now forced to cover his head with his torn blanket to shelter his eyes from the racing dust.

Phillips looked up at the sky.

The Dark segments were still present, but there was something...different about them.  Phillips recognized the difference at once.  They had stopped moving against the gray clouds completely, and were now stationary slabs of black, undulating and malevolent.

And they were larger, too.

Something else was happening .  Phillips watched, fascinated, only mildly aware of the screams of terror around him from the traumatized tribesmen, and the concerned hisses from the Stingers nearby.

The Dark was coming together again.  No, that wasn't quite it either, Phillips corrected himself.  It was actually expanding, like a great oil spill across the sky.  Phillips' heart sped up with renewed fear and shock.

She is mine.

Phillips brought his hands to his head and screamed.  The Stinger upon which he rested hissed curiously below him, but did not intrude upon his private torment; it, too, could detect a wrongness about the valley, the air and the sky above.

Preoccupied with trying to understand what precisely the deviation was, it did not attempt to pry into Phillips' thoughts.

She is mine, the voice continued demonically.

"No," Phillips whined like a baby, his whole body shaking with fear.

She is mine.

Phillips closed his eyes.  Even awake, the dreams would not abandon him.  But no, he admitted soberly to himself, this was no dream.  The voice was real and deliberate - and more monstrous than anything his own imagination could have conjured up.

Suddenly a face appeared before him.  Phillips stared on in fascination.  It was a beautiful face; the face, perhaps, of an angel.  It was smiling at him, almost lovingly.  Phillips also wanted to smile...  except something deeper than instinct, perhaps it was his soul, told him that this was a visage of hate and loathing.  Phillips watched the mouth move, and listened to the voice speak again.

Valry is mine.

Phillips closed his eyes, fighting back the urge to leap off of his Stinger, and running blindly around the valley, screaming to deafen himself against the unearthly litany on the winds.

At last, almost unexpectedly, the words came out of his mouth in a whisper.

"Go to hell."

The voice stopped.  The confused, terrified grumblings of the tribesman again filled the air.  The Stingers, like Phillips, however, remained silent.  For they were listening to a new sound.  A horrible sound that could not be explained but existed nevertheless.  Powerful, drumming, it echoed off the canyon walls, rumbling over the world like an approaching avalanche.

The sound grew louder.  It did not diminish.  The Great Stingers instinctively moved backwards, their busy antennae probing the skies futiley for a dozen unanswerable reasons to what was now taking place.

Phillips listened momentarily to the Thelericks puzzled hisses.  They would not be able to identify the source of the cacophonic evil exploding overhead.

How could they?

For the sound of laughter, Phillips knew, was not one a Thelerick Stinger could easily have recognized or imitated.  Laughter was a gift to man from gods.

And devils.

THIRTY-FIVE

An hour passed before Thalick was completely successful at disentangling himself from the web-trees.  The great spiders, watching their homes being shredded, did little more than crawl around or on top of Thalick as he extricated himself from the sticky coils.  The Stinger regretted the needless destruction; he understood how long the spiders had worked at constructing their webs, but under the circumstances, he was forced to rash action.  The storm had died down in the crater valley, and since Valry could not be detected in the near vicinity, Thalick had to assume the worst.

Either the girl had miraculously survived the tornado, or she had been killed shortly after he had flown overhead to safety.  Though he was still suffering from the massive damage to his underside from the light bolt, he was more agonized over the possibility of Valry being dead.

His one good antennae told him two Stingers were approaching along with an odd number of humans.  Had they found him in his former, bound-up condition, covered with spider dung, he would have experienced something very close to embarrassment - at least from a Stinger's perspective, anyway.  Now that he was free, he thought about waiting for Slow Charlie and One Claw to arrive before descending into the crater once again.  Impatience, however, won over.  He did not hesitate a moment longer.

Stepping carefully around the hissing spiders who were crawling beneath his feet and doing everything possible to be a nuisance, Thalick made his way awkwardly out of the forest of webbing.  He had not even considered killing the spiders once; after all, it had been his fault that their homes had been smashed up.  The insects were certainly entitled to a little recompense.  This they derived by clamoring all over Thalick's charred armor, analyzing him to see if he was at all edible.  Deciding unanimously that he was not - and lacking any other form of defense to rid their webs of the monster - the spiders proceeded to further defecate on the clawed invader with the greatest enthusiasm.

Thalick endured the humiliation while increasing his speed away from the web cities.  Pulling free at last from the sticky remnants, he hissed a tone of relief.  The spiders scattered and crawled up the rubbery trees that supported their webs.  A few bolder ones released a strange sounding growl of disgruntlement as a farewell, but for the most part, all concerned were content to forget the unfortunate incident.

The moan of the Light Storm had all but dissipated and one glance at the sky over the crater told Thalick that the overcast was returning to its familiarly bland configuration.  There would be no danger of a recurring funnel for at least another day.  Thalick lost no time in moving to the edge of the crater's lip and surveying the interior.

The topography of the valley had been changed dramatically.  Small pot marks at irregular intervals still smoked from the light-bolt impacts, and several tons of charred earth had been lobbed in great gobs against the crater walls.  Thalick could feel the scorching heat rising from below.  It was not a very consoling indication that Valry could have survived such ghastly temperatures.