The Source by Brian Lumley Page B

sphere, but this seemed to be just a man. How many of them would it take to cow just one man? With an assortment of weapons at their fingertips, they must feel like men swatting midges with mallets! But on the other hand, some damned weird things had come out of that sphere, and they knew that, too.
    The man from the sphere saw them coming, straightened up. His red eyes were now at least partly accustomed to the light. He stood waiting for the soldiers, and Jazz had thought: this lad has to be six and a half feet if he’s an inch! Yes, and I’d bet he can look after himself, too.
    And certainly he would have won his bet!
    The walkway was maybe ten feet wide. The first two soldiers approached the near-naked man from the sphere on both sides, and that was a mistake. Shouting at him to put his hands up in the air and come forward, the fastest of the two reached him, made to prod him with the snout of his Kalashnikov rifle. With astonishing speed the intruder came to life: he batted the barrel of the gun aside with his left hand, swung the weapon he wore on his right hand shatteringly against the soldier’s head.
    The left side of the soldier’s head caved in and the hooks of the gauntlet caught in the broken bones of his skull. The intruder held him upright for a moment, flopping uselessly like a speared fish. But it was all nervous reaction, for the blow must have killed him instantly. Then the man from the Gate snarled and jerked his hand back, freeing it, and at the same time shouldered his victim from the walkway. The soldier’s body toppled out of sight.
    The second soldier paused and looked back, his face bloodless where the camera caught his indecision. His comrades were hot on his heels, outraged, eager to
bring this unknown warrior down. Made brave by their numbers, he faced the intruder again and swung his rifle butt-first toward his face. The man grinned like a wolf and ducked easily under the blow, at the same time swinging his gauntlet in a deadly arc. It tore out the soldier’s throat in a scarlet welter and knocked him sideways. He went sprawling, got to his knees—and the intruder brought his weapon down on top of his head, caving in his fur hat, skull and all!
    Then the rest of the combat-suited figures were surging all around the warrior, clubbing with their rifles and kicking at him with booted feet. He slipped and went down under their massed weight, howling his hatred and fury. The yelling of the soldiers was an uproar, over which Jazz had recognized Khuv’s voice shouting: “Hold him down but don’t kill him! We want him alive— alive, do you hear?”
    Then Khuv himself had come into view, advancing onto the walkway and waving his arms frantically over his head. “Pin him down,” he yelled, “but don’t beat him to a pulp! We want him … in one piece?” The final three words were an expression of Khuv’s astonishment, his disbelief. And watching the film Jazz had been able to see why, had understood the change in Khuv’s voice, had almost been able to sympathize with him.
    For the strange warrior had quite genuinely slipped when he went down—possibly in blood—and that was the only reason he’d gone down. The five or six soldiers where they crowded him, hampered by their weapons and desperate not to come in range of that terrible mincing-machine he wore on his right hand, weren’t even a match for him! One by one they’d rear up and back, clutching at torn throats or mangled faces; two of them went flying over the rim of the walkway, plunging sixty-odd feet to the basin-like magmass floor; another, hamstrung as he turned away, was kicked almost contemptuously into empty air by the warrior—who finally
stood gory and unfettered, and alone, on the red-slimed boards of the walkway. And then he had seen Khuv, and nothing between them but four or five swift paces across the planking.
    â€œFlame-thrower