He'd have to take the heat for this one all alone.
"I suppose you've heard the news?" he asked Mayor Bill Leamy.
Leamy, an Irishman and an instinctive politician, was cagey. He asked, "What's the word from the CDC people? Anything?"
"Working as hard as they can, Bill."
"I have to tell you, Jim, from where I sit, you and your archeology friends looked a little like Rocky and Bullwinkle out there today."
"Thanks for that insight, Bill. I'll treasure those remarks till they put me under."
"Why'd you have to get into it with Gordon on camera, Jimmy? That sort of thing only makes it worse."
"Mayor ... Bill, Wisnewski's out of his head with madness, Leonard and Abe Stroud are both gone comatose. How is street dancing with Gordon going to make it any worse?"
"Gordon's got a lot of pull in this town, Jimmy. I've told you that before."
"Lot of pull, Mr. Mayor? Enough to bump me off the playing field?"
"Dammit, Jim, this isn't a game of soccer."
"No, more like Monopoly, isn't it ... sir?"
There was a silence at the mayor's end. "We've got to get Gordon's people back to work. It's a lot of jobs we're talking about here, Jimmy boy."
"Things keep going the way they are, Bill, and for every Gordon employee there'll be a man like Stroud and Leonard vegetating in our goddamned hospitals."
"Please, Jim, you know a comatose man can't vote."
"If anyone can find a way to get him to..."
The mayor laughed heartily at the joke. "Yes, well, Jim, come down here to see me. Gordon's on his way and I've gotten the City Council together for emergency session and my advisers will be here. We'll hash this thing about some more."
"Hash it about some more ... sure."
"Now, don't be taking that attitude, Jim. I don't like Gordan a whit more'n you do, believe me, but Jim, you know how elections are lost over trivial matters like the trains running on time, dire weather that we can't control, and this ... this spreading epidemic is just such an uncontrollable wild card--"
"And it's an election year, I know."
"I go out, Jim, so will you. So, please, spare me the 'high and mighty' routine."
"Yes, sir."
"Bring along Perkins, too."
James Nathan forced himself into silent restraint before replying, "We'll be right along, your honor."
"Aha. That's my boy, Jim ... See you in chambers."
-5-
Abraham Stroud awoke blinking back the pain and stiffness in neck and back, to find himself listening to his own EKG. The machine and he shared an isolation ward in the hospital with two rows of motionless bodies, approximately twenty-six in all, thirteen to a row.
Stroud looked closely at the man on his right. Stiff and cold, the man looked like a cadaver, his color drained. For a moment, Stroud thought he was in a morgue, but the sound of EKGs humming up and down the rows of the zombies forestalled this notion. On his left, he saw the profile of the man he had seen in the silvery crystal skull in Egypt: Simon Albert Weitzel. This gave Stroud a start and he sat bolt upright, finding himself connected by wires and tubes to machines and feeding drips. The IVs looked like plastic bats hanging on each side of him.
A little disoriented, he tried to piece together what had brought him here to lie among the near-dead victims of the thing in the pit.
He'd had a bad reaction to the decontamination unit. The brilliant light colliding with the plate in his head had caused a catatonic response. This had led the others to assume that he had succumbed to the bizarre fate of the others, that he had contracted this vile disease being spread about by the thing on the dead ship.
Stroud's EKG reading was the only one in the room that wasn't damned near a straight line. He now tore away the attachments to the machine, watching the green reading disappear. He snatched himself free of the IVs and threw his legs over the side of the bed, facing Weitzel. He went to the man, the first victim, curious and filled with questions that had no solutions.
"It is you," Stroud said with a raspy, dry throat.
Weitzel lay like a stone, without response. His eyelids were closed. It was that way with all the patients in the room. Some nurse had gone about the silent forms and had placed a gloved hand on the eyelids, forcing them down. Stroud recalled the sensation as if it were happening now to him. Someone had done it for him while he lay in this state as well. Fortunately, for him it wasn't the same exact state.
"What's happened to you, Weitzel? What is happening to you now?"
Weitzel's eyelids flipped open, causing Stroud to back off, but not before the man's left arm had shot up and his hand had wrapped about Stroud's throat, tightening with the power of a vise, cutting off Stroud's air.
Behind a glass, men and women were suddenly up and rushing about, hitting alarms, calling others. Stroud called for help and one of the white-coated men came over an intercom with, "You've just come out of a coma! Try to relax. What're you doing to that other man? Get away from him!"
Weitzel's right hand quaked upward, trying to join with his left to strangle the life from Stroud. Weitzel's body trembled and shook, lifting off the bed, and a strange, eerie, metallic green and blue light discolored the whites of his eyes. His pupils were nowhere to be seen, rolled far back in his head.
Stroud tore the choking hand from his jugular, coughing and shouting for help. A distortion of Weitzel's already corpselike features began to overtake the man's face when a voice came from within Weitzel.
Weitzel's lips were frozen, deathlike, but a voice came like a bubble trapped in the body up and up through him with a start and a rumble, a gurgle and an eruption that sent a brown ugly liquid dripping from his lips along with the preternatural voice. The sound was coming from deep within his chest. It was not Weitzel's voice. Stroud knew this even though he had never known the man, for the voice was far from human in origin. It came from the ship; it came to speak through Weitzel expressly to warn Stroud off. It had the desired effect, for it shook Abraham to his core, and it made the hair all over his body twitch.
"Stay yourself from my wake, Esruad."
"My God," said Stroud, regaining his composure as much as possible. "Who are you?"
"Be gone, Esruad!"
"My name is Stroud."
"Esruad."
"Who are you?"
"Stay you from my wake! Run, Esruad, run!"
"Damn you, what are you?"
"Life is mine."
"Life?"
"Life to feed on."
"Who are you?"
"Life-taker."
"Are you demonic? Are you Satan?"
Its laugh shook through Weitzel like a kettledrum, and from deep within Weitzel it amassed a vile, guttural sound that brought forth a frothy brown liquid that first dripped and then spurted from the body it inhabited. Stroud stepped back an instant before the viper's spittle shot across at him, missing him and staining the floor and the bed sheets Stroud had earlier been on. The brown mucus sent up a stench with the gas it created on hitting the air. It burned an acidic hole in the bed sheets and the tiled floor. It smelled of earth, ancient and deep earth, of bog and swamp and sulfuric acid.
As doctors rushed into the isolation ward in their protective gear, Stroud took hold of Weitzel, causing the fuming, discolored eyes to disappear, shouting at the thing inside him to identify itself. "Who are you, damn you? Who are you?"
Stroud heard only a psychic whisper then: "Everyman ... legions ... armies ... I am everyman."
"Son of a bitch!" Stroud strangled Weitzel.
The doctors tore Stroud from Weitzel. The struggle took Stroud to the floor with a couple of orderlies while some of the others stared in horror at Weitzel. The old man's body rose from the bed, levitating, convulsing before it collapsed onto the covers again and the straight line on the EKG signaled that he was no longer in coma but dead.