V 09 - The New England Resistance Read online

  THE NEW ENGLAND RESISTANCE Tim Sullivan

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Chapter 1

  Though it was still late afternoon, the shadows in Mike’s Tavern were deep around the booths and tables where lobstermen and hunters drank. Everyone, the bartender included, looked up warily as the front door opened.

  A man entered, squinted in the darkness, and walked to the last booth.

  “John,” he said. “John Ellis, is that you?” “Ayuh,” a deep voice answered. “What can I do you for, Phil?”

  “There’s a stranger just got off the bus.”

  “Lots of strangers come to Cutter’s Cove, especially in the fall. Good huntin’.”

  “Not like this guy. He’s asking about Dr. Brunk.” Nobody spoke for a long moment. Then there were the sounds of heavy boots and rifle stocks rubbing against the hardwood floor as the men put down their drinks and rose.

  “Where is he?” John Ellis asked.

  “Walking down Union Street toward Main, last I saw him.”

  Ellis led the way, blond hair streaming under his hunter’s cap, his bulk filling the doorway. Outside, the men slipped shells into their guns and checked the safeties, somewhat sobered by the salt air. They clomped along the wooden sidewalk until they came to the comer. The ocean came into sight, crumbling piers and a

  cannery along the shore. On Main Street walked a solitary man.

  “Hey!” John Ellis cried. “You!”

  The man looked up at them. He appeared to be in his thirties, thin, with a big nose and a worried, furrowed brow. As they came toward him, he didn’t run as they expected. He just stopped walking and stood his ground.

  In a moment he was surrounded by the armed mob. Fifteen men watched him closely as their spokesman questioned him.

  “What are you doing around here?” Ellis demanded. “Doing?” The stranger’s accent was odd. “I’m lurching for Dr. Randall Brunk.”

  “Huh? Lurching? You mean searching for Dr. Brunk?”

  “Yes, searching. That is correct. Can you help me find him?”

  Ellis ignored him. “Where you from?” he asked. “Los Angeles.”

  Sizing up the man’s windbreaker, trousers, and polished shoes, John Ellis said, “You look too normal to come from L.A.”

  “Nevertheless, that is where—”

  Ellis grabbed him roughly by the collar. “Let’s get a closer look at your face.”

  The stranger didn’t struggle as two men gripped his arms from behind.

  “George,” said John Ellis, “hold my rifle.”

  The man took his gun, and Ellis turned back to the stranger. “Now let’s see what you’re made out of.” He reached toward the thin face and clutched the loose skin just under the jawbone and pulled. The skin stretched an inhuman length and snapped free, a two-inch-long piece still in Ellis’ hand.

  Where the skin had been on the stranger’s face, there was now a long, jagged rip along the jaw. Green, scaly flesh was revealed, but the stranger still didn’t flinch.

  His manner affected the men strangely. In the past, they had always been boisterous when they caught a Visitor, but they were silent now.

  “I am not your enemy,” the alien said.

  “Shoot, of course you ain’t,” one of the men in the crowd said. “You’re just like us.”

  “If you aren’t our enemy,” John Ellis said, “who is?” “I admit that my people are your enemies,” the Visitor said, “but I am not. I have come to help Dr. Brunk.”

  “Help him? From what we hear, he’s working on a new poison to finish you lizards off once and for all. Why would you want to help him?”

  The Visitor tried to say more, but he was drowned out by the shouts of the men, who pulled him forward roughly. As they dragged him toward the courthouse, faces peered out of windows and cracked doors at the spectacle passing by.

  At the courthouse, a rope was strung over a brick arch. A bigger crowd began to gather as a wooden crate was set under the makeshift gallows and the Visitor was lifted up onto it with the noose around his neck. The people shouted for his blood.

  “Well, Mr. Lizard,” John Ellis shouted over the din, “you got a name?”

  “I am called Willie,” the Visitor said, scales glistening green where his human pseudo skin had been tom away.

  “Willie, say your prayers—if you heathens have such a thing as prayers.”

  A burly man approached the crate with the intention of kicking it away, but at that moment Willie began to chant something in the alien tongue, a rasping, melodic sound not of this earth.

  The crowd was silenced, transfixed. The strange chanting was unlike anything they had ever heard before, and yet it was plainly of a spiritual nature ... a very highly developed spiritual nature, at that.

  The song ended as abruptly as it had begun, and the people were moved in spite of themselves. A few even returned to their clapboard houses before the hanging, wanting no part of it.

  “All right,” John Ellis said, regaining his sense of command, “he’s said his prayers. Wilbur, kick that crate over.”

  The burly man raised his leg.

  Willie was silent.

  Everyone waited for the end, but with none of the blood lust they had felt a few moments ago.

  A shot rang out, thundering out over the ocean and echoing through the town.

  “Kick that crate over, Wilbur,” a voice said, “and you’re a dead man.”

  Chapter 2

  A gray-bearded, grizzled old man stepped through the crowd with a shotgun leveled at the would-be hangman.

  “Kick that box, son, and there’ll be two dead men here.”

  Wilbur stepped back, hands outstretched in supplication. He disappeared into the crowd.

  “What the hell you think you’re doing here, Pythias?” John Ellis demanded.

  “What do you think you’re doing here, John Ellis?” the old man said accusingly. “I know your father taught you better than to string a man up without giving him a fair trial.”

  “This isn’t a man, Pythias. Look at him.”

  Pythias Day glanced at Willie. “I see him.”

  The shotgun remained leveled at John Ellis.

  “Dammit, Pythias, you know what his kind have done to our people.”

  “Stringing him up,” Pythias Day observed, “won’t make you any better than the Visitors. In fact, I’d say it puts you right in the same league with ’em.”

  The crowd murmured its agreement.

  “Take him down,” Pythias Day instructed.

  John Ellis hesitated for a few seconds and then nodded toward one of his followers. The man jumped up on the crate and quickly removed the noose from Willie’s neck.

  Willie stepped down onto the ground and looked into

  the eyes of Pythias Day. He saw no softness in the man, only a concern for justice. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me yet. You still got some explaining to do, mister.”

  “Of course,” Willie said, then explained that he had come searching for Dr. Brunk, as he had told the others. “What for?” Pythias Day asked suspiciously.

  “I am to be a control in an experiment involving a new toxin.”

  “A control? If I hear you right, you’re saying you came here as a ... a guinea pig.”

  Willie remained silent.

  “Well, if that’s the truth, I reckon we’re all gonna owe you a big apology. And if you ain’t telling the truth, we’ll know soon enough.”

  “How are we gonna find out?” John Ellis asked. “If you weren’t so damn hotheaded, John,” said Pythias, “you’d of figured it out by yourself.” He frowned at the younger man
. “I’m gonna take him over to Brunk’s and see if there’s any truth in what he says.” “And what if he’s some kind of spy?”

  “Well, he already knows what Doc’s up to out at that lab, so he won’t learn any new secrets. And if he’s lying, we’ll put him in a cell, same as anybody else suspected of committing a crime.”

  “You talk like you’re the sheriff,” Ellis sneered. “The mayor swore me in yesterday, John. I guess you were too busy drinking to know what’s been going on since Sheriff Evans was killed last week.”

  Ellis glared at him for a moment and then looked down at his boots. “All right, Pythias, you win.”

  The old man slapped Ellis’s shoulder. “It’s a good man who can admit he’s wrong,” he said sincerely.

  “You gonna need any help taking this buzzard out to Brunk’s?” Ellis asked.

  “Naw, I’ll be okay.”

  The crowd dispersed, except for Ellis and Pythias Day and their captive. Finally, Ellis shrugged and walked away.

  Day gestured with his shotgun, and Willie started in the indicated direction.

  A few hundred yards later, they came to a white Victorian house replete with-gingerbread trimmings and a big front porch. There was a jeep parked in the yard.

  Day pointed at the jeep, and Willie got in. Day sat in the driver’s seat and fished in his coat pocket until he came up with a key. He started the jeep and backed out of the yard. As they drove up Main Street, Day asked Willie what his name was.

  Willie told him, and then said, “Thank you for saving my life.”

  “Might not have saved you,” Day replied. “Might have just put off your execution by a few days.”

  “You will soon know the truth,” Willie said with certainty

  “One way or the other.”

  Pythias Day drove a winding two-lane road between immense glacial boulders as if he had done it a thousand times, which he had. Willie admired the scenery. He found Earth very beautiful, though much of the natural beauty had been destroyed by man himself. Still, there was no chance of Earth regaining her grandeur if all her water was taken. It was simply not morally defensible to drain a world of its life’s blood, even if it was to save your own planet.

  “You were pretty cool standing up on that crate,” Pythias said. “Seemed like you weren’t afraid to die.”

  “When it is time for one’s spirit to leave one’s body, one must resign oneself to the end. However, the preta-na-ma teaches that there is no real end.”

  “The preta-na-what?” Day asked, taking a hairpin curve at sixty miles an hour.

  “The preta-na-ma. It is an ancient system of belief, forbidden now on my planet.”

  “Well, I’ll allow you derive some strength from it, whatever it is.”

  The jeep sped over the top of a cliff, the ocean sparkling below like an eternity of gems. A few minutes later they reached the cliff’s highest point, a flat area with an expansive view of the sea and much of Cutter’s Cove as well as the island off the coast. Pythias pulled his jeep into a small parking lot—empty in the middle of the afternoon—adjoining a cluster of long, one-story, whitewashed buildings. He cut the engine and sat staring at the quiet structures.

  “Brunk Laboratories, Willie,” he said. “But it don’t look like anybody’s home.”

  Chapter 3

  “Perhaps the resistance was not the only force to learn of Dr. Brunk’s work,” Willie said.

  Day stroked his beard, looking at Willie as if trying to figure out if the alien was second-guessing him with that comment. “You might be right,” he said at length. “Let’s go take a look.”

  They got out of the jeep and walked toward the laboratory complex. Except for the whipping of the salt wind and the crying of gulls, the place was completely still. Day held his shotgun like a newborn babe, stroking the outside of the finger guard as he walked. He did not point the gun at Willie, perhaps sensing that if there was action now, Willie would not be his target.

  They peered in the windows lining the lab walls. There was no sign of life inside, only long rows of tables and sinks, shelves of glassware, and locked doors.

  “This is the damnedest thing I ever saw,” Pythias opined. “But I’m beginning to wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that you’re here the day this place turns into a ghost town.”

  “I have told you all I know,” Willie insisted. “The resistance has sent me here to work with Dr. Brunk.” “Did they send word you were coming?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Then maybe somebody else got that message,” Pythias said. “Your people have a way of closing down scientific establishments. ’ ’

  “That is true, but I don’t think that is the case here.”

  “Why not?” Pythias reached in his hunting jacket pocket and withdrew a packet of chewing tobacco. He bit off a healthy plug and then offered some to Willie.

  Willie declined, thanking him before he explained his reasoning. “This compound was closed in an orderly fashion, without any resistance. I believe that the people who lurk here left willingly, suspecting that my people are on the way.”

  “How come you didn’t know this before, Willie?” Pythias eyed him sourly.

  “I have been traveling incognito, on a bus from Boston since early this morning. This was done so no suspicion would be aroused at the various checkpoints along the way. I received no messages from the resistance since I left Los Angeles.”

  Pythias mulled that over for a few seconds. “Makes sense,” he said at last. “And you know what else makes sense, Willie?”

  Willie shook his head.

  “That we better get out of here. Because those Visitors might be closing in on this place right now.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late,” Willie said, his brow furrowed.

  “Huh?” Pythias stared into Willie’s blue eyes, but the alien wasn’t looking at him. He was looking past him at the sky. Pythias slowly turned and saw something he had hoped he’d never see again after the last skirmish a few days before, in which the previous sheriff was killed. It was a Visitor skyfighter, hovering at the cliff’s edge.

  “Goddammit,” Pythias muttered. He turned to see if there was anyplace to run to, but several red-clad Visitors without their human disguises, were coming out of the bushes around the premises. All of them held laser pistols, pointing them straight at Pythias and Willie.

  “Willie, I hope I’m facing death with the courage you showed this afternoon.” With that, Pythias leveled the

  shotgun at the nearest Visitor and fired, knocking the alien off his feet.

  The downed Visitor sat up, the birdshot absorbed by his protective vest. Pythias calmly broke open the shotgun and popped in another shell. Pulling up the barrel, he took aim and fired again, blasting a second alien off his feet. This continued until he loaded his last shell. However, the Visitors kept advancing as their ship landed in the parking lot.

  Pythias fired the last round, frustrated that he hadn’t killed one of his assailants but satisfied that at least he was going down fighting.

  “That will be enough, Mr. Day,” said a big Visitor standing on the skyfighter ramp. “Put down your weapon.”

  “The hell I will.” Pythias turned the shotgun around and held it as if it were a baseball bat. “Come on and get what’s coming to you, you slimy lizards.” He looked at Willie. “No offense intended.”

  “None taken.” Willie stepped forward and addressed the Visitor captain. “Don’t harm this man,” he said. “He will be of more use to you alive than dead.”

  Pythias glaced at Willie, long white wisps of hair streaming in the breeze. “And I was beginning to believe in you,” he shouted, rushing at Willie and trying to strike him with the gun butt.

  Half a dozen Visitor claws grasped at the old man, rendering him helpless by tearing the gun from his hands. He cursed them and shouted at them as they took him away.

  The alien leader walked imperiously down the ramp. He spoke to Willie in their own tongue, t
he tongue of the preta-na-ma corrupted by rampant militarism and cruelty. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  Remembering that the local sheriff had been killed only a week before, Willie guessed that there had been much fighting in this area. “They took me prisoner a few days ago,” he said.

  “How many days?”

  “I don’t know,” Willie replied. “I was locked up in the darkness for a long time.”

  The captain gazed at him through his dark glasses. “You will stay with us until a skyfighter leaves for the Mother Ship. Until then your loyalty is to me.” Willie bowed. “What is our mission here?”

  The captain’s reptilian lips curled up in pleasure. “To find a human who goes by the name of Dr. Randall Brunk.”

  Chapter 4

  Willie didn’t know how long he could fool Ronald, the captain. Indeed, he wasn’t sure Ronald was fooled; he might have only been pretending to believe Willie’s story, biding his time until he could learn more about the resistance.

  Willie had to get away as soon as possible, and he was obliged to help Pythias Day escape too. After all, the man wouldn’t be here now had he not saved Willie’s life from the mob back in Cutter’s Cove.

  Luckily, Pythias had not been taken aboard the skyfighter. He was locked in a small storage room—a large closet, really—in one of the laboratory buildings. The compound had been taken over so that a search could be made for any information about the new toxin. Brunk Laboratories would serve as a command center for the occupation of the Maine coast as well. Its computers would be like a nervous system for the Visitors’ forces while they were here, a communications network second to none in this part of New England. Ronald had seen to that.

  He pointed this all out to Willie as they walked through the largest of the lab buildings, occasionally jabbing toward points of interest with his laser pistol.

  “How many would you estimate are in the local resistance?” Ronald suddenly asked.

  Willie wasn’t prepared for such an abrupt about-face. “Uh, a few dozen, I think.”

  “You think? It is your duty to observe the activities of