The wounded man was gray with shock. I said, “How many more ambushers?”
He stared at me with big pain-glazed eyes and said, “None. Everybody else is down there with Caliban and his men.”
“Any guns among them?” I said.
“No. Noli let us have what was left because you were still armed. He’s got enough men to run over three Calibans and then some.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” I said, and I cut his throat.
Trish became even paler and swayed. “Do you have to do that?” she whispered.
“I don’t want live enemies at my back,” I said.
We went through three rooms and down a hall towards the rear of the castle and then down a tightly corkscrewing case of stone steps. This led to the dungeon, which was a huge room with a number of cells with iron bars, some old torture machines, and, in one wall, the stone door to the atom bomb shelter. The room was well lit by a number of electric torches in sconces and several batteries of lamps overhead. It was a dead end room. The stone door to the shelter was pitted and gouged with Noli’s efforts to blast it open.
The room was a babel of shouts and screams and a chaos of struggling men. I paused a few seconds.
The chaos became a pattern, fluid, but still a pattern.
At the far end of the room was Caliban. He was not totally visible because he was immersed in bodies. About 14 men were trying to get at him. Some were trying to get away, however, I quickly saw.
They held knives, the butts of pistols, brass knuckles, and one had a mace taken from the wall upstairs.
Some were armed only with their fists or were trying to use their feet or their hands, karate style.
The goal of their weapons seemed to be a whirlwind. He could not be halted long enough for anybody to get in a crippling blow or thrust. The flesh around him was a bag trying to contain one man, and when the man pushed, the bag swelled out on one side and collapsed on the other. His hands were a blur; they chopped, poked, and his elbows rammed, and his feet kicked frontwards and backwards. He did not seem to be holding a knife, but blood was spurting from stabs of his fingers. Shrieks of agony rose as he snapped wrist bones and fractured shinbones, crushed insteps, punctured an eye, tore an ear off, slammed a man so hard against three others that they all fell.
I have never seen a man move so swiftly or powerfully or skillfully. He seemed to be more of a natural force than a mere man. Yet, he was doomed. In a matter of seconds, a knife would go through a soft part or the butt of a gun slam into his skull and momentarily make him open to other weapons. Most of his clothes had been torn off, and he was splashed with blood everywhere.
There were unconscious or dead men on the floor around him. Eight at least. And six sitting up on the floor, too hurt to get up.
The two old men were halfway down the room, their backs against the wall. They were clubbing at the five men against them. Four men lay on the floor.
Simmons and Rivers went down even as I took stock of the situation. The slender Rivers succumbed to brass knuckles against his temple. The apish Simmons, bellowing as if he were enjoying the fight, fell several seconds later. A huge, black-haired, blue-jawed man stepped in just as Simmons brought the barrel of his weapon down on the head of a bandy-legged red-haired man. The huge man slammed Simmons on the side of the neck with the butt of a pistol. Simmons dropped his gun, and another man thrust a knife into the white-haired gorilla chest.
The old men were covered with blood, and their clothes were half-torn off. But they had given a battle of which young men would have been proud.
There was blood on the walls, on the floor, and on almost everybody in the room. Only Noli seemed untouched. He stood in the center of the room, his back to me, waving a long knife and bellowing orders, unheard, at those around Caliban. The men who had downed Simmons and Rivers joined the others.
Nobody saw us standing at the foot of the stairs.
Trish, behind me, said, “Doc!”
“You stay here,” I said.
I handed her the.crossbow.
“One bolt only left.”
I did not tell her not to waste it. It would have been an insult and a stupid thing to say.
I roared out like a male of The Folk challenging a leopard or defying a male of a strange band. I lacked the throat sac, but I have very powerful lungs.
That froze everybody except Caliban, who took advantage of the paralysis to twist a man’s head until the neck snapped.
Nobody paid him any attention. Noli turned slowly as his bald head and face lost much of its redness.
I roared again and charged. Noli crouched with his knife up.
I don’t really know what happened next. I did a bad thing, that is, a nonsurvival thing. I succumbed to my rage, to my desire to kill the man who had assaulted me and had endangered my wife. I saw through a red shot with black. And I recovered my senses only at the end.
Why his men did not interfere, I do not know. Perhaps things went too swiftly. Perhaps they, who had suffered so much from Caliban and his men while Noli stood aside, wanted to see how he would handle himself.
They saw.
I had taken his knife away from him. I had ripped his clothes off. He was entirely naked. Somehow, whether with the knife or with my fingers, I had cut around his anus, and severed it from the surrounding connecting tissues. And then, while he screamed, I raised him with one arm by a buttock, while holding the end of his bloody anus with the other. And I shot him away with my arm, giving him a half-spin.
Screaming, he soared. Every bit of adrenalin possible to my body must have surged through me, I threw him so far.
His intestines, approximately 24 feet long, trailed out behind him and then tore loose from his body.
He landed on his face and sprawled with arms out. He was still living, though gray with shock. His intestines were strung out on the floor behind him.
He jerked once and died.
I dropped the bloody end.
I had shocked even myself. I was not aware until then that I had ejaculated.
Since I had copulated with Irish, I had not had an orgasm. The several killings in between her and
Noli had not, as before, resulted in ejaculations. I had been aware of semi-erections during them but had grown so accustomed that I had ignored them. If I thought about them at all, I hoped that the aberration was weakening.
I knew now that my unconscious forces had been summoning up a store, and conserving it, for just this.
The ecstasy had been missing or I had been so overcome with rage that I was unconscious of it.
39
Nobody moved. They could not accept what they had seen. And, when their senses thawed, they began to realize what they faced.
They were eighteen effectives. Behind them was Doc Caliban and before them was someone who, at that moment, must have seemed even more terrible.