Forty-seven
Corin stopped in the trees just below the highway,
accompanied by his army of miniaturized machinery. Sarah and Richard
waited below on the hillside as the firefight between the Colonel and the
forces of Silver Ridge commenced and seemed to last forever.
“They’ll all be killed,” Sarah said with her tears
staining her cheeks.
But Richard saw one of Corin’s the little war
machines tearing through the underbrush in the distance, armed with darts
tipped with the debilitating venom of a jelly fish. The Colonel had more
help than he knew. The audible gunfire was sporadic, clearly not the
primary cause of the many flashes of light that signaled the deaths of
townspeople armed with the rifles that could kill without leaving a mark.
“Wait and see,” Richard said and pulled Sarah to his side. “I think we’re
doing okay.”
“He didn’t want us here,” Sarah said. “How did he
expect to fight all by himself?”
Richard suspected Corin was using the Colonel and his
forces as a diversion. Corin’s army of little machines would have slipped
through any defense and taken the infamous adversary by surprise. Beyond
that, he could not imagine the forces the two otherworldly entities had at
their command to pit against one another.
The shooting ended at midmorning. Shell-shocked by
the unrelenting tension, Richard took Sarah by the arm and followed Corin
when he stepped out onto the highway. His army of machinery remained
hidden in the trees behind him. The three of them moved into the open
across from the motel that Corin had wanted surrounded and contained.
They walked into the face of a veritable wall of armed and panicky
townspeople.
Sarah clutched at him. “Richard?”
“Swing with it. He knows what he’s doing.”
A voice maddened with frustration roared from
somewhere behind the human barrier.
“Let them pass!”
As the confused line of last defense opened, Richard
got his first look at Corin’s adversary. Sarah clutched at his arm in
horror.
Corin entered the court without visible concern for
his personal safety. Richard was hopeful the giant of a man awaiting
within accepted his defeat as gracefully as Corin seemed to expect it.
The brute’s facial expression and posture of uncompromising ferocity
struck Richard as strangely exaggerated.
The opening in the human wall closed behind them.
Richard studied the line of faces, taking quick note of the fear he saw in
most of them. He suspected that Corin’s mobile forces and the Colonel’s
young troops had decimated their number during the course of the day.
Even now the Colonel’s men were probably in a position to pick off a good
portion of the balance with a single volley of rifle fire. The motel
court was surrounded by tall trees. There was no wind, but branches
stirred here and there.
Richard took note of two men standing by the row of
cabins. One held a gun on the other. He had seen photographs of the
Darker brothers, and one of the pair was Abraham Darker. Whatever petty
drama was taking place between those two was dwarfed by the one taking
place between Corin and his adversary.
Corin walked to within twenty feet of his nefarious
adversary and stopped.
“There were no local inhabitants with the resolve to
challenge me,” the giant growled unhappily. “I overlooked the house on
the hill. It spoke of resources exceeding those of the locals. Who are
you?”
“I am Corin,” the far smaller boy said.
“We have never met before. I am King.”
Corin nodded acknowledgement of the information.
“I’ve seen your name on a list of rogue operatives. You are a specialist
in western cultures, twentieth through twenty-second centuries.”
“And you, my quiet little friend?” King said.
Corin smiled. “No one of any consequence. I’m
linked to just this one life, the son of the two who build the house on
the hill.”
King grunted acceptance of his misfortune.
“Regardless, I have not as yet been defeated, and you have no reputation
for resolve extensive enough to jog my memory.”
Corin shrugged his lack of concern. “Your second
observation may be accurate as far as it goes. The first one is in
error.”
“Then I would suggest you show me my error before I
lose my patience with you and destroy you and your little group of friends
without ever knowing how defeated I truly am.”
Corin’s grin broadened. “As you wish.”
A roar sounded from the rim of armed men. There was
nowhere to hide as Corin’s hordes of gleaming little machines rushed from
beneath their feet.
“Destroy them!” King bellowed.
Richard turned his face aside from flashes of heat
accompanying the appearance of the fat-barreled electromagnetic guns.
More than a few of King’s men fell screaming to the ground as the
invisible radiation heated metallic tooth fillings and an occasional
orthopedic pin to incandescence.
Corin’s machines spat their debilitating darts
unimpeded. A good fifty percent of King’s surviving forces sank to the
ground in a chorus of agony.
“Optical electronics!” King cried out. “You deceived
me!”
“Correction,” Corin said. “I have defeated you.”
King’s eyes bugged from his
head in rage. “You have no idea of the scope of my operations!
You have defeated nothing by your rash and senseless blundering!”
Corin shook his head, either in denial of King’s
accusation, or in contempt for his ignorance. “I know the scope of your
operations. I determined the weak link in those operations, and I did not
blunder at all when I myself hijacked roughly twenty-four pounds of the
fissionable material passing through Silver Ridge. I constructed two of
the weapons of terror you intended to use to destroy the peace and good
will of this world.”
“The weakness!” King cried. “I intended to destroy
the weakness it has engendered! War is the creator of resolve!”
Corin shrugged, a gesture that struck Richard as
ominously cold-blooded in its own right. “We’ll argue the point some
other time. The destruction of my laboratory triggered a timer to one of
two, quarter kiloton nuclear devices that will cover my tracks, now that
the my equipment has served its purpose. It will also serve to attract
the attention of the highest authorities of the locals who have both the
resources and the resolve to trace the full extent of your meddling and
shut it all down. I do this as a demonstration of my own resolve.”
King reached behind his back and whipped free a
semi-automatic pistol from his belt. He stepped forward and held the gun
to Corin’s head. “You have failed, I tell you! I’ll kill all of you by
my own hand!”
A second, milder commotion held King’s hand. Richard
turned in time to see a driverless subcompact nose its way into the court
and stop.
“I said two nuclear devices, one now engaged in a
countdown on the hill, the other contained in the vehicle behind me which
will detonate simultaneously with my death. You see, King, I’m not
entirely ignorant of the effectiveness of your terrorist tactics, simply
aware of their limitations. If we die in this particular manner, there
will be no further opportunity for underground nuclear proliferation in
this world. They won’t let you slip past their notice so easily a second
time.”
King’s was beside himself with rage and indignation,
but he quickly stuffed his pistol back into his belt. “As you wish, but
disarm the device on the hill, you fool. Those weapons are primitive and
indiscriminate. The radioactive debris alone will kill all of us.”
Corin stepped closer to his adversary, pressing home
his counterattack. “You blocked access to the timer when you blew the
main bunker. I have no way to disarm the device.”
“Then this is how you intend to come to the aid of
your friends?” King bellowed, “by the wanton destruction of the innocent
natives you claim to hold in such high esteem?”
“The cost is a small one considering the
alternative.”
Richard glanced at Sarah with a worried look. Was
Corin implying that they were all about ready to die?
The ground lurched violently beneath
Richard's feet.
Sarah’s nails dug bloody furrows in his arm as the concrete court yard bucked and ruptured with a ear-shattering report.
One half of the
motel court tipped backwards several degrees, throwing King and many of his
men off balance.
A blinding light flared from the direction of the
Trevor estate, a far less innocent light than the one that had reduced the
mansion to drifting carbon. A thunderclap slapped at Richard’s eardrums,
striking a fraction of a second before the slower shockwave of debris
blown from denuded trees and torn from manmade structures about town.
An enormous fireball rolled into the evening sky,
followed by a spreading dome of darkness that glowered from within like
the angry crimson of hell itself. The darkness covered the sky overhead,
then slowly began to descend.
“You cannot win!” King cried, scrambling back onto
his feet. “I challenge you! I challenge you and your worthless allies to
the death!”
“We accept your challenge,” Corin said, oblivious to
the maelstrom of fire raging on the hill and the still shaky ground
beneath their feet. “These people will defeat you. Their roots are deep
within their world. Yours are shallow.”
“As are yours!” King roared. “I killed your female,
you impotent meddler! She died a death of such horror that she will turn
her back upon your memory forever!”
A door to one of the motel cabin’s slammed violently
open, seemingly in response to King’s claim of Evie Darker’s death. Two
people emerged, terror-struck by the violence raging in the sky overhead.
The panicky young woman with the dark hair and eyes had to be Evelyn
Darker, still alive and in good health—to King’s astonishment. The big,
mean looking one with the stringy hair and the expression of a rabid pit
bull would be Lazarus Darker. Lazarus scanned the deathly silent crowd
with a look of abject horror.
Abraham Darker whirled about, slamming a fist the
size of a small ham into the side of the man holding the gun on him. King
spun about with a shriek of insane anger and fired a single shot.
But it was Abraham’s guard rather than Abraham
himself who took the bullet. The man spun about with blood spurting from
a chest wound. Abe caught him as he fell, cradling him and exchanging a
moment of quiet conversation before the injured man sagged into
lifelessness.
Abe snatched the dead man’s gun from the ground and
leveled it at King.
Corin stepped between the two. “Put away the
weapon,” he said to Abraham Darker. “There is a better way to take
revenge, one I think you will find far more satisfying.”
Abe paused, then tucked the pistol into his belt
without further argument.
Evelyn Darker came flying across the court and leaped
into Corin’s arms. The two exchanged desperate hugs of relief.
“Take all of them!” King roared, “your useless woman,
her weak-willed brothers, your ignorant friends, and your army of
undisciplined children! I will defeat you all by the power of your
own weakness."
Corin turned with an arm thrown about Evie’s
shoulders to face Richard and Sarah. The Colonel had returned and
was standing at their side. The two Darker brothers drew close as well,
clearly terrified by the firestorm raging in the center of town.
“I haven’t time to explain what will happen next,”
Corin said. “Only the Matrix can reverse the course of destruction I have
set in motion. In any event, hold fast to what is of value to you and you
will survive. Hold fast to what you believe.”
Hot ash rained upon the court. Richard turned to
protect Sarah and found himself unable to move. A strange buzzing noise
filled the air. He thought at first that it was the radioactive fallout
already beginning to have its lethal effect upon his nervous system. His
surroundings suddenly became faded and ghostlike.
“Rely on nothing but your own resolve,” Corin said,
as if reciting a book of rules without compassion. “In the end, if you
choose life over death, the Matrix will see you to a safe harbor.”
“But what will happen to us!” Sarah Trevor cried.
Only in that final moment did Richard see Corin’s
composure slip. “I have no way of knowing. The programming of the Matrix
in a challenge of resolve is too complex to anticipate, and I have little
experience in these matters.”
The darkness and the silence intensified.
“Corin, I’m frightened!” Evie cried out. Her voice
and the confused murmuring of the crowd faded as if swiftly receding in
the distance.
Alone, Richard Welk tumbled through the darkness.
