Necroscope: Invaders (Necroscope: E-Branch Trilogy) - Softcover

Lumley, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812575520 ISBN 13: 9780812575521

Publisher: Tor Books, 2000

Synopsis

Three great vampires--two Lords and a Lady--arrive on an unsuspecting Earth that teems with defenseless humans, easy prey for the marauding vampires. But humanity has defenders. Though the necroscope is gone, the psychically gifted men and women of E-Branch move swiftly against the vampire infestation.

Jake Cutter is running for his life through the streets of Turin when he vanishes, appearing moments later inside the triply locked "Harry's room" in E-Branch's London HQ. Jake's dreams are very strange, filled with the voices of the dead--the Great majority, the Necroscope, Harry Keogh, even a dead vampire. He hears them all, but he doesn't truly understand.

If Jake is the new Necroscope, he has to learn--fast!--how to control his powers and speak to the dead. E-Branch, with the reluctant Jake along for the ride, is about to go head-to-head with Malinari the Mind, a vampire Lord who psychic abilities are second to none.

But the dead don't trust Jake, not like they trusted Harry. Jake's got personal revenge on his mind, and he's spending too much time talking that dead vampire. He's got to start thinking about the future--or he won't have one!

About this title

About the Author:

Brian Lumley is the author of the bestselling Necroscope series of vampire novels. The first Necroscope, Harry Keogh, also appears in a collection of Lumley's short fiction, Harry Keogh and Other Weird Heroes, along Titus Crow and Henri Laurent de Marigny, from Titus Crow, Volumes One, Two, and Three, and David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer, from the Dreamlands series.

An acknowledged master of Lovecraft-style horror, Brian Lumley has won the British Fantasy Award and been named a Grand Master of Horror. His works have been published in more than a dozen countries and have inspired comic books, role-playing games, and sculpture, and been adapted for television.

When not writing, Lumley can often be found spear-fishing in the Greek islands, gambling in Las Vegas, or attending a convention somewhere in the US. Lumley and his wife live in England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
 
See the Creechur
 
 
IT WAS HOT AS HELL, AND FLIES THE SIZE OF Jake Cutter's little fingernails had been committing suicide on the vehicle's windscreen for more than a hundred and fifty miles now, ever since they'd left Wiluna and "civilization" behind.
"Phew!" Jake said, sluicing sweat from his brow and out of the open window of their specially adapted Land Rover. The top was back and the windows wound down, yet the hot wind of passage that pushed their wide-brimmed Aussie hats back from their foreheads, tightened their chinstraps around their throats and ruffled their shirts still made if feel like they were driving headlong into a bonfire. And the "road" ahead--which in fact was scarcely better than a track--wavered like a smoke-ghost in the heat haze of what appeared to be an empty, ever-expanding distance.
Behind the vehicle, a mile-long plume of dust and blue-grey exhaust fumes drifted low over the scrub and the wilderness.
"That's your fifth 'phew,'" Liz Merrick told him. "Feeling talkative today?"
"So what am I supposed to say?" He didn't even glance at her, though most men wouldn't have been able to resist it "Oh dear, isn't it hot? Christ, it must be ninety! 'Phew' is about all I'm up to, because if I do more man open my mouth a crack--ugh!" And he spat out yet another wet fly.
Liz squirmed and grimaced. "What the hell do they live on, I wonder? Way out here, I mean?" She swatted and missed as something small, black, and nasty went zipping by.
"Things die out here," Jake answered grimly. "Maybe that's what they live on." And just when she thought that was it, that he was all done for now: "Anyway, the sun's going down over the hills there. Another half hour or so, it'll be cooler. It won't get cold--not in this freaky weather--but at least you'll be able to breathe without frying your lungs." Then he was done.
She turned her head to look at him more fully: his angular face in profile, his hard hands on the wheel, his lean outline. But if Jake noticed her frowning, curiously intent glance, it scarcely registered. That was how he was: hands off. And she thought: We make a damned odd couple!
She was right, they did. Jake hard yet supple, like whipcord, and Liz soft and curvy. Him with his dark background and current...condition, and Liz with her--
--Which was when they hit a pothole, which simultaneously brought Liz's mind back to earth while lifting her backside eight inches off her seat "Jake, take it easy!" she gasped.
He nodded, in no way apologetically, almost absentmindedly. He had turned his head to look at her--no, Liz corrected herself--to look beyond her, westward where the rounded domes of gaunt, yellow- and red-ochre hills marched parallel with the road. They were pitted, those hills, pockmarked even from here. The same could be said of the desert all around, including the so-called road. "These old mine workings," Jake growled. "Gold mines. That was subsidence back there, where the road is sinking into some old mine. I didn't see it because of this bloody heat haze."
"Gold?" Squirming down into her seat, Liz tried to get comfortable again. Hah! she thought. As if I'd been comfortable in the first place!
"They found a few nuggets here," he told her. "There was a bit of a gold rush that didn't pan out. There may be gold here--there probably is--but first you have to survive to bring it up out of the ground. It just wasn't worth it...."
"Because even without this awful El Niño weather, this was one hell of an inhospitable place to survive in." She nodded.
"Right." Finally Jake glanced at her--at her this time. And while he was still looking she grinned nervously and said:
"What a place to spend your honeymoon! I should never have let you talk me into it" A witticism, of course.
"Huh!" was his reply. Shielding his eyes, he switched his attention back to the rounded hills with the sun's rim sitting on them like a golden, pus-filled blister on the slumping hip of some gigantic, reclining, decomposing woman.
"Fuel gauge is low." Liz tapped on the gauge with a fingernail. "Are we sure there's a gas station out here?" In fact she knew there was; it was right there on the map. It was just the awful heat, the condition of the road, evening setting in, and a perfectly normal case of nerves. Liz's tended to fray a little from time to time. As for Jake's...well, she wasn't entirely sure about his, didn't even know if he had any.
"Gas station?" He glanced at her again. "Sure there is. To service the local 'community.' Heck, around these parts there's point nine persons per hundred square miles!" While Jake's sarcasm dripped, it wasn't directed entirely at Liz but rather at their situation. Moreover, she thought she detected an unfamiliar edge to his voice. So perhaps he did have nerves after all. But still his completely humourless attitude irritated her.
"That many people? Really?" For a moment she'd felt goaded into playing this insufferable man at his own game...but only for a moment. Then, shrugging, she let it go. "So what's it doing here? The gas station, I mean."
"It's a relic of the gold rush," he answered. "The Australian government keeps such places going with subsidies, or they simply couldn't exist. They're watering holes in the middle of nowhere, way stations for the occasional wanderer. Don't expect too much, though. Maybe a bottle of warm beer--make sure you knock the cap off yourself...yes, I know you know that--no food, and if you need the loo you'd better do it before we get there." Good advice, around these parts.
The road vanished about a mile ahead: an optical illusion, just like the heat haze. As the hills got higher, so the road began to climb, making everything seem on a level, horizontal. Only the throb of the motor told the truth: that the Land Rover was in fact labouring, however slightly. And in another minute they crested the rise.
Then Jake brought the vehicle to a halt and they both went off into the scrub fifty yards in different directions. He got back first, was leaning on his open door, peering through binoculars and checking the way ahead when Liz returned.
"See anything?" she asked, secretly admiring Jake where he stood unselfconsciously posed, with one booted foot on the door sill, his jeans outlining a small backside and narrow hips. But the rest of him wasn't small. He was tall, maybe six-two, leggy and with long arms to match. His hair was a deep brown like his eyes, and his face was lean, hollow-cheeked. He looked as if a good meal wouldn't hurt...but on the other hand extra weight would certainly slow him down. His lips were thin, even cruel. And when he smiled you could never be sure there was any humour in it. Jake's hair was long as a lion's; he kept it swept back, braided into a pigtail. His jaw was angular, thinly scarred on the left side, and his nose had been broken high on the bridge so that it hung like a sheer cliff (like a Native American's nose, Liz thought) instead of projecting. But despite his leanness, Jake's shoulders were broad, and the sun-bronzed flesh of his upper arms was corded with muscle. His thighs, too, she imagined....
"The gas station," he answered. "Sign at the roadside says 'Old Mine Gas.' There's a track off to the right from the road to the pumps...or rather, the pump. What a dump! Another sign this side of the shack says...what?" He frowned.
"Well, what?" Liz asked.
"Says 'See the Creature!'"Jake told her. "But it's spelled C-r-e-e-c-h-u-r. Huh! Creechur..." He shook his head.
"Not much schooling around here," she said. Then, putting a hand to the left side of her face to shut out the last spears of sunlight from the west, "That's some kind of eyesight you've got. Even with binoculars the letters on those signs have to be tiny."
"First requirement of a sniper," he grunted. "That his eyesight is one hundred percent"
"But you're not a sniper, or indeed any kind of killer, any longer," she told him--then caught her breath as she realized how wrong she might be. Except it was different now, surely.
Jake passed the binoculars, looked at her but made no comment. Peering through the glasses, she focussed them to her own vision, picked up the gas station's single forlorn pump and the shack standing--or leaning--behind it, apparently built right into the rocky base of a knoll, which itself bulged at the foot of a massive outcrop or butte. The road wound around the ridgy, shelved base of the outcrop and disappeared north.
And while she looked at the place, Jake looked at her. That was okay because she didn't know he was looking.
She was a girl--no, a woman--and a sight for sore eyes. But Jake Cutter couldn't look at her that way. There had been a woman, and after her there couldn't be anything else. Not ever. But if there could have been...maybe it would have been someone like Liz Merrick. She was maybe five-seven, willow-waisted, and fully curved where it would matter to someone who mattered. And to whom she mattered. Well, and she did, but not like that. Her hair, black as night, cut in a boyish bob, wasn't Natasha's hair, and her long legs weren't Natasha's legs. But Liz's smile...he had to admit there was something in her smile. Something like a ray of bright light, but one that Jake wished he'd never known--because he knew now how quickly a light can be switched off. Like Natasha's light...
"Not very appetizing," Liz commented, breathing with difficulty through her mouth.
"Eh?" He came back to earth.
"The dump, as you called it."
"The name says it all." Jake was equally adenoidal. "Probably the entrance to an old mine. Hence 'Old Mine Gas.'"
A great talent for the obvious, she wanted to tell him but didn't. Sarcasm again, covering for something else.
"So what do you think?" she finally said as they got into the Rover.
"Good time not to think," he answered, and Liz could only agree. At least he'd remembered what little he'd been told. So they tried not to think, and continued not thinking as he started up the vehicle and let her coast the downhill quarter-mile to the Old Mine Gas station...
* * *
Lights of a sort came on as they turned off the road to climb a hard-packed ramp to the elevated shelf that fronted the shack. The illuminated sign flickered and buzzed, finally lit up in a desultory, half-hearted neon glare; grimy windows in the shack itself burned a dusty, uncertain electrical yellow. In an ancient river valley like this, dry since prehistory, it got dark very quickly, even suddenly, when the sun went down.
It also got cooler; not cold by any means--not in this freakish El Niño weather--but cooler. After they pulled up at the lone pump, Jake helped Liz shrug herself into a thin safari jacket, took his own from the back of the Rover and put it on. In the west, one shallow trough in the crest of the domed hills still held a golden glow. But the light was rapidly fading and the amethyst draining from the sky, squeezed out by the descending sepia of space. To the east, the first stars were already winking into being over blackly silhouetted mountains.
Maybe twenty-five paces to the right of the main shack, a lesser structure burrowed into the side of the steep knoll. The see the creechur sign pointed in that direction. Liz wondered out loud, "What sort of creature, do you reckon?"
But now there was a figure standing in the shadow of the shack's suddenly open screen door. And it was that figure that answered her. "Well, it's a bloody funny one, I guarantee that much, miss." And then a chuckle as the owner of the deep, gravelly voice stepped out into full view. "It's a bit late in the day, though, so if yer want ter see 'im, best take a torch with yer. Bloomin' bulb's blown again...or maybe did it 'imself. Don't much care for the light, that creechur feller. Now then, what can I do fer you folks? Gas, is it?"
Jake nodded and tilted his hat back. "Gas. Fill her up."
"Ah!" The other's gasp seemed genuine enough. "Eh? What's this, then? Brits are yer? A pair of whingein' pommies way out 'ere? Now I asks yer, what next!?" He grinned, shook his head. "Just kiddin'. Don't yer be takin' no note o' me, folks."
To all appearances he was just a friendly old lad and entirely unaccustomed to company. His rheumy little pinprick eyes, long since abandoned to the wrinkles of a weathered face, gazed at his customers over a bristly beard like that of some garrulous stagecoach driver in an ancient Western. As he took the cap off the Land Rover's tank, his wobbly spindle legs seemed about ready to collapse under him. And as if to make doubly sure he'd said nothing out of turn: "Er, no offence meant," he continued to mumble his apologies.
"No offence taken," Liz gave a little laugh. And Jake had to admire her: her steady, give-away-nothing voice. She quickly went on, "Can we get a drink or something while you're filling her up? It's been a long and thirsty road, and a way to go yet. Maybe a beer? You do have beer, right?"
"Did yer ever meet up with an Australian" (but in fact he said Orstrylian) "who didn't have a beer close ter hand?" The old man grinned again, started the pump and handed the nozzle to Jake, then hobbled back and held open the inner door to the shack for Liz. "Just you 'elp yerself, miss. They're all lined up on die shelves back o' the bar there. Not a lot ter choose from, though--Foster's every one! It's my favourite. And since I'm the one who drinks most of it, it's my choice too."
"Well, good," said Liz. "It's my favourite, too."
Jake watched them go inside, frowned at the nozzle in his hand. Just like that, he'd accepted the bloody thing. Damn!
After that...but it seemed it was going to take forever to satisfy the Rover's greedy guzzling. So Jake quit when the tank was only three-quarters full, slammed the nozzle into the pump's housing, tried not to look too concerned as he followed Liz and the old boy into the shack. But he'd hated to lose contact with her, lose sight of her like that, even for a few seconds. And she'd looked back at him just before she passed from view, her green eyes a fraction too narrow, too anxious.
Inside, however, it wasn't as bad as he'd thought it would be. Or as it might have been.
It was the grime, the blown dust of the desert, clinging to the outside of the windows, that had shut the light in and made the place seem so dim from outside. But within--this might be typical of any outback filling station a million miles from nowhere. That was Jake's first impression. The bar was a plank on two barrels, with a bead curtain hanging from the plank to the floor in front and smaller barrels for seats. Liz was perched on one of them, and the old man had passed her a beer that she held unopened in her hand.
She must have asked him if he was all alone out here, and he was in the process of answering: "Alone? Me? Naw, not much. And anyway I enjoys bein' on me ownsome. Oh, I got a couple o' boys to 'elp out. They 'aint 'ere right now, is all. It 'aint so bad, actu'ly. 'Ad a truck through just a day or so ago."
"A truck?" Liz said, all innocence and light. "Out here?"
And the old man nodded. "Gawd knows where they'd be goin'! But for that matter, where be you goin', eh? What're yer doin' out 'ere anyway...

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0812575520
• ISBN 13: 9780812575521
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544