Who Hunts the Hunter (38 page)
“Where do I find Dr. Phalen?”
Someone begins frantically shouting at the guard through an intercom. The guard speaks rapidly into the handset.
“Where is Lab Six?”
“Through those doors to the right!” the guard shouts.
Bandit steps through the doors beside the counter and turns right, and enters a scene of pandemonium.
Bells clang, klaxons blare, strobe lights flash. Dust and smoke billow through the hallway. People shout and shriek. Three people in white lab coats run past Bandit’s left, one tripping, falling, and scrambling up in passing by. As Bandit moves ahead, the dust and smoke thickens, then clears a bit. He comes to a segment of hallway littered with debris. There’s a huge, jagged hole in the hallway wall on the left. The hole flickers and flashes with arcane energy. Beyond the hole, Bandit sees a room littered with debris, an overturned table and chairs and the sprawled forms of several metahumans.
Out through the hole in the wall steps an unusual figure. It is like that of a woman, but unlike any woman Bandit’s seen before. She is slim below the waist—naked, too. Above the waist, she is massive and powerful, cloaked in a reddish fur marked by black stripes, and streaming blood. Her face is inhuman. Her eyes glint red in catching the light. A gun dangles from one hand.
This does not appear to be related to Bandit’s reason for being here.
He frowns, puzzling, all the more so when he views the unusual being on the astral plane. Her aura is not that of a human. He is some moments realizing that he is looking at an aura like that of a tiger.
The being pauses, watching him, softly growling.
Is this a natural being? a dual-natured being? or is she the result of some terrible experiment, which might account for the warping of the fabric of nature of this place?
Something changes. The animal face suddenly seems more humanoidal. In a voice like a husky snarl, the being says, “My cub ...
“
Where
is
it?
!"
Cub? What does she mean? That is an animal word, not a word for a human or humanoidal infant. Bandit stares, baffled, then suddenly an image comes to mind. He remembers his first visit to this place, the lab of Dr. Ben Hill, the small red and black-striped creature he saw in a cage. Could that be mere coincidence? “I saw a small ... being, like a tiger, in Lab Sixteen. It had fur like you. The same color.”
More shouts. Bandit looks to see a pair of uniformed guards coming up the hallway at a run. The mysterious striped being before him whirls, lifting her gun. The guards tug guns from holsters. Bandit murmurs words of power. The guards’ arms leap upward. Their guns jerk free of their hands and go sailing back over their shoulders. Their pants drop to around their ankles and send them sprawling.
The striped being whirls again, pointing the gun.
“Don’t shoot,” Bandit says, lifting his hands.
“Where is Lab Sixteen?” the being snarls.
Bandit points."That way.”
What is it? Tikki scowls. The two-leg wears a long dark coat like a duster and holds a wooden flute. He smells like a magician and yet he does not attack her. Instead, he does something and then suddenly the approaching guards are disarmed and sprawling. When she turns back to face him, he lifts both hands in a gesture of surrender.
To judge by his smell, the magician has no feelings about her one way or another, except maybe a vague curiosity.
“Where is Lab Sixteen?”
He points down the corridor."That way.”
Does she dare turn her back on him?
Does
she
have
any
choice?
She must trust him or kill him and, incredibly, without really being threatened, he seems to be helping her.
Tikki turns and runs. The guards shout and stagger to their feet as she nears them, but do nothing to impede her. She grabs one of their guns from the floor and continues ahead. Now she’s got two guns and that gives her odds to play with the next time some two-leg tries to get in her way. She needs odds like that because she’s tired—her reserves are wearing thin. She needs sleep, real sleep, and enough meat to gorge herself. She’s taken too many hits, too many explosions, in too little a time. She can’t keep going like she’s been going.
A door comes up marked by two big numbers: One-Six. She looks at the combination lock on the wall beside the door.
How does she get in?
Without warning, the door snaps aside. The human male who steps toward her abruptly stops. His eyes flare wide. His smell turns to fear."No,” he says.
Tikki thrusts the hard metal barrel of one of her guns across the male’s throat, shoving him back through the doorway, then drops one gun to seize him by the throat and thrusts the other gun in his face.
She knows this two-leg. He’s one of the humans who visited her in the room with no windows. He left his smell on her fur.
“
Please
!” he gasps.
Fear swells into terror. Tikki feels her fangs lengthening, fur rushing over her face, and then she smells the cub."WHERE IS IT?”
The two-leg shouts, jerking as with surprise.
Tikki snarls, but by then she already has the answer to her question. The smell in the air turns her head toward the rear of the room. Beyond a sea of technical equipment and boiling, bubbling fluids is a cage. In that cage is a red and black-striped body, and it’s pounding the cage’s mesh, crying, snarling, desperate and afraid. Not dead, not even bleeding.
Alive!
Tikki drives the barrel of the machine pistol across the two-leg’s head, shoves him back off his feet, then turns— snarling her menace—toward the rear of the room. More two-legs in white coats shout and scream and rush frantically out of her way. She reaches the cage and smashes at the locking mechanism till the door pops outward.
The cub lunges into her grip.
For a moment, Ben Hill is conscious only of the pain throbbing through the left side of his head and the cool, flat hardness of the floor against his right temple.
When he lifts his head, the pain is intense. Colors strobe in front of his eyes. He hears people screaming and shouting, things crashing, a sudden rush of slapping, pounding footsteps. As his vision clears, he sees the brief stretch of Off-white floor between him and the door to the hallway, and the black shape of a gun, lying barely two meters away.
It occurs to him that he might need that gun. Striper has escaped confinement. She is wild with animal fury. Fear motivates him forward, crawling, then up, on his hands and knees. The lab seems very quiet as he takes the gun in hand.
Shakily, he gets to his feet, leaning against a lab bench, then a table. He sees at a glance that his colleagues and lab assistants have all fled. The figure at the rear of the room looks only partly human, covered with fur about the head and shoulders.
When she turns, Ben sees that she holds a child in her arms, a human child, of four or five years of age.
But that can’t be. It’s Striper, it must be Striper and her cub. The sight is strangely fascinating. They’ve had both mother and cub for how long now, and, until now, neither has transformed into a human-like shape. Neither has shown the least hint of that ability. Why now? Striper presumably has some reason, but what of the cub? Does it simply take its cue from its mother?
Striper says, “Are you going to shoot me,
man
?"
“
Mannnn
!” the child echoes, growling.
And the small head turns, and the child’s face comes into view. It looks half-animal, half-demon, lips curling, fangs bared.
Its eyes glint with the light.
Ben feels chills rush up his spine. He realizes now more than ever that he is facing a form of intelligence that bears only a superficial resemblance to the human kind. He is facing a born predator, a creature or creatures that perhaps assign no value to life, only to survival. The notion scares the hell out of him. He lifts the gun in his hand a little higher. Involuntarily, he sneezes."I ... I can’t let you leave,” he stammers."You or your cub. I’m sorry.”
Striper says, soft and low, “Get in my way and you die.”
The child snarls, “
Diiieee
!"
“It’s not ... not my decision!”
Striper puts the child on its feet, takes its hand, and comes walking up the center aisle from the rear of the lab. Her eyes bore into Ben’s eyes; the gun dangles at her side. The child glares and growls, its features twisted with vicious fury and hate. Mother and child pause barely two steps away. Both seem oblivious to the gun pointed at Striper’s chest. Ben feels his arm growing weak, sagging, slumping downward. It’s no good.
But suddenly someone’s grabbing his wrist, twisting the
gun out of his hand. To his astonishment, he sees it’s Germaine, now shrieking, “
SHE
KILLED
MY
SON
!”
“What? Germaine! NO!”
“
MURDERER
!”
It hardly takes a second. Ben does not see who fires first. He glimpses the feral violence gripping Germaine’s features, and the sudden vicious rage that possesses Striper’s face. He hears a series of reports: the barking of a handgun, a rapid rattling like a machine gun. Germaine staggers, blood splashing her chest, and topples over backwards. Striper turns, twisting, crouching, sheltering the child, bending over it, even as her head snaps toward her shoulder and the side of her head becomes a gory mass streaming down her neck.
Striper crumbles. Germaine lies sprawled, unmoving. Ben staggers back, slumps to his knees, bends forward, gags, and vomits. Through it all, he hears Liron Phalen’s voice, urging, persuading, telling him what he must do.
The steps of the stairway are a dull muddy blue. The railing is silvery chrome. The second-floor landing is empty. Bandit pauses by the door on the landing to listen, then pulls the door inward, and steps into a hallway much like the one on the ground floor: lighting panels in the ceiling, gray and yellow tiles along the walls, muddy blue floor. Bandit pauses as a faint shimmering appears in the air before him. On the astral, he sees the small raccoon-like form of his watcher.
“
He’s
still
in
there,
Master
."
“
Good
."
In fact, there is quite a lot that’s good about the situation. The clanging alarm bells may pose a distraction to Phalen. The alarm also seems to have sent people running for the main lobby. There should be no bystanders hanging around to get hurt.
A short way up the hall is a small sign that sticks out from the wall. It reads, “Dr. Liron Phalen, Director.” Bandit considers how to get past the printscanner, then watches as the door clicks and slides open.
“Come in, my dear shaman,” a voice says.
Not good. Not the way Bandit wanted to start things. He surveys the hallway astrally, but perceives no way by which he might have been detected. That’s troubling. Is he about to confront an initiate so far advanced that his skills exceed anything Bandit can comprehend? Bandit supposes that’s possible, but there’s no backing out now. He steps through the open doorway and immediately crouches, darting to his left, and pointing a finger.
The room is like a small study: bookshelves, chairs, a leather couch. Phalen stands at the rear of the room behind an old desk. He looks briefly to his right as a bang and a crash and the quick-razor snarl of an alley cat sounds from the corner of the room; but, then, Phalen merely smiles.
“Come, come,” he says casually."We have no need for artful ruses. I believe you’re called Bandit. I’m Dr. Liron Phalen. We’re both gentlemen, I’m certain. Let us discuss our differences like men who’ve devoted their lives to the pursuit of arcane knowledge. I’m sure there is much we can both learn. May I offer you a cup of tea?”
Bandit lifts the Mask of Sassacus to his face."You will obey me.”
The power of the Mask reaches out instantly, crossing the astral terrain to enwrap Phalen’s aura, a blazing comet-head of power. The force of will Phalen immediately hurls against the power of the Mask comes back to Bandit in the form of a dull throbbing ache inside his head.
“Now ... Vorteria,” Phalen says in a voice that sounds pained."Quickly, my dear.”
A radiant white figure descends out of the ceiling: Phalen’s familiar. Vorteria. She settles between Bandit and Phalen, interposing a pulsing shield of life energy to divert the power of Bandit’s spell. Divert it, then break it. The power flashes and fluctuates, splashing around the shield like water around rocks.
A clever strategy, but Raccoon is ready.
Phalen shrugs off the tendrils of the Mask’s power and begins conjuring a spell, something that mounts slowly and steadily, gathering the power of the astral. Bandit snaps his fingers. The windows behind Phalen explode into fragments. Cups and saucers shatter. Books leap from their shelves. Books and window fragments and broken crockery rain across Phalen’s end of the room, gathering into a whirlwind, bypassing the familiar completely, and forcing Phalen to cease spellmaking and hastily throw up another shield or risk being cut to pieces.
“Vorteria!” Phalen cries out sharply.
A confused expression crosses Vorteria’s features; she turns, looking behind her. Abruptly, she reaches across the astral to surround Phalen with her shield.