Invid Invasion: The New Generation Read online

  Rand was leaning against the trailer with his arms crossed. “I had no idea that soldiers also doubled as hijackers, Scott.”

  Rook looked at both of them impatiently. “Are you guys going to stand here and argue, or are we going to get a move on?”

  Scott and Rand exchanged looks. “Let’s do it,” they said at the same moment.

  A short while later the truck roared into town with Lunk at the wheel, the former driver’s hard hat and permits now part of his disguise. Rook, Rand, Scott, and Annie were in the rear, but not yet in what would soon be their hiding place. Originally the plan had called for all of them to hide underneath the chassis while the truck was cleared through to the storage facility, but good fortune was on their side in the form of a loft compartment built into the truck’s trailer. They could only speculate on what the compartment had been used for, but it was perfectly suited to their present needs. Lunk made one stop along the way to the facility gate—just brief enough to allow Annie to hop out and work her way into the crowds that were already gathering for Yellow Dancer’s concert.

  “Be sure to make lots of noise,” Scott reminded her.

  “Come on,” she returned, as though insulted. “How do you suppose I got the reputation for being such a loudmouth?”

  Scott grinned and began to pull the rear doors closed. He was surprised by the size of the crowds and recalled what Rand had told him earlier: When people find out Yellow’s coming to town, they go completely berserk. When Annie had jumped out, Scott had glimpsed a poster of the singer pasted to the side of a building: Yellow Dancer in a spaghetti-strapped sundress, some sort of matching turban, low heels, and a pearl collar.

  Lancer had left for Norristown three days before the rest of the team. The plan called for him to put a pickup band together and cut a deal with a local promoter, who would secure the sports arena and take care of publicity and logistics. The promoter, a man named Woods, was an old friend of Lancer’s and a member of the resistance.

  Scott thought back to Lancer’s departure—Lancer in his alter-ego guise. Scott couldn’t help feeling that Yellow Dancer wasn’t just Lancer in female attire but an entirely different personality. Lancer’s demeanor changed as well as his voice and carriage. Yellow was a real entity living alongside Lancer in the same body. Scott found it incomprehensible and just a bit unsettling, but it didn’t detract from the trust he had in Lancer. Scott was wondering how the second part of Lancer’s plan was succeeding when he heard Lunk’s fist pounding against the cab of the truck—the signal for Scott, Rand, and Rook to take to the overhead compartment. That meant the truck was nearing the twin-towered security gate on the road below the storage facility.

  Farther along the road that wound up toward the base of Drumstick Butte was the barracks of the security force that staffed and guarded the storage facility. The chief of station, Colonel Briggs, was a large, beefy man with salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache. He was in his office in the barracks, feet up on the desk, daydreaming over a color photo of Yellow Dancer that had appeared in the morning edition of the city’s newspaper when one of his staff arrived with good news.

  “We’ve been asked to supply security at Yellow Dancer’s concert this afternoon,” the staffer reported. He wore a blue-gray uniform with a red upturned collar, similar in cut and design to that worn by the colonel. A single red star adorned the front of his brimmed cap. The Invid had made a point of allowing local customs and garb to remain unchanged in Norristown and numerous other strongholds throughout the Southlands. “Shall I refuse the request, sir?” the staffer wanted to know.

  Briggs didn’t bother to lower the newspaper, which effectively concealed him from the staffer. He hummed to himself, finishing up his fanciful daydream scenario before replying. “Are you out of your mind?” he said at last. “If something should happen to Yellow Dancer, it’s our reputation that will suffer. Send every available man down to the arena.”

  “But sir,” the staffer pointed out haltingly, “we can’t risk leaving the facility unguarded.…”

  “Nonsense,” the colonel said from behind his paper. “What time is the concert scheduled to end?”

  “Around three-thirty, but—”

  “And what time are the Intercessors arriving to pick up the shipment?”

  “Four o’clock, but—”

  “Then there’s no problem.” Briggs set the paper aside, got up from behind the desk, and walked over to the office window. “What can happen?” he said, gesturing to the facility half a mile away at the top of the switchbacked access road. “The facility’s impregnable … And besides, I’d like to oversee Yellow Dancer’s security personally.” He swung around to his lieutenant. “See to it that she expects me.”

  Rumor had it that the storage facility was originally a castle imported stone by stone from Europe during the mid-1800s by a renegade nobleman from Transylvania. It saw more than one hundred years of alteration and modernization before being substantially renovated (in the Hollywood style) by a sports event promoter who fell heir to the place in 2015. Much of Norristown, including the arena, owed its existence to the same man.

  The building, with its mansard roof and numerous spires, still retained a Provençal look, but this was overshadowed by the fantastical elements added on during the last twenty-five years, primarily the east wing’s crenellated tower. Three-quarters of a mile down the road was the twin-towered main gate, where Lunk and the others were presently stopped.

  “I’m here to run a check on the cooling systems,” Lunk said to the helmeted guard who approached the driver’s side window.

  “Your permit,” the guard said nastily.

  Lunk handed the papers down for the man to read, while a second guard moved to the back of the truck to have a look inside. “It’s clean, Fred!” Lunk heard the man call out a minute later. The guard perused the permit a while longer, then returned it. “You’d better be clean on the way out, too,” he warned Lunk. Lunk saw sentries at the other tower frisking a white-coveralled driver.

  “You got it,” he told the guard.

  The guard waved him through and opened the fence that spanned the roadway. Lunk threw the truck into gear and drove off, removing his hat and wiping away the sweat that had collected on his forehead. Two trucks filled with security personnel passed him going in the opposite direction, a sign that Lancer’s request might have been granted. At the top of the switchbacks, Lunk backed the truck toward the shipping entrance. There were only three or four guards on patrol, and not one of them even glanced at Lunk while he climbed down from the cab and threw open the rear doors.

  “We’re in, gang,” he said loudly enough for his friends to hear.

  Rook, Rand, and Scott lowered themselves from the loft compartment and entered the facility. Scott unfolded Lancer’s map and checked it against their location. “This one,” he told Rook and Rand, indicating an air duct grate along one wall. Lunk helped them move several crates over to the wall. Scott climbed up first, rechecked the map, and peered through the grate. Satisfied, he nodded, and Rook and Rand joined him. The two men went to work on the bolts that held the grating to its frame, and in a moment they were able to lift the panel free. Scott and Rand crawled in. Lunk handed rope, a tool pouch, and an aluminum carry case up to Rook. She waved him good luck and followed Scott’s lead into the horizontal duct.

  Less than fifteen feet into the duct, Scott stopped and whispered: “The control room is on the third floor. It should take us about ten minutes to get there.”

  Rook could barely discern him in the darkness. Ten minutes was going to feel like an eternity.

  Down below, the arena was rapidly filling to capacity and Annie was circulating in front of the stage doing what she did best: inciting the crowd.

  “… At her last concert a whole bunch of people got up on stage, and everybody started partying and having a good ole time,” she told everyone within earshot. “Some of us even got to go backstage with Yellow Dancer after the concert and part
y some more! But this one’s going to be the best! I hear that she might not perform like this again, so we better make this the one to remember. Right?!”

  “All right!” several people shouted. “Party time!”

  Meanwhile, Yellow Dancer was entertaining guests in her backstage dressing room. She had changed to a sleeveless pink and burgundy pants outfit with a matching bowed headband, which held her hair up and off her neck.

  “At the last concert, some of my fans came up on stage and really made a mess of things,” she was explaining, facing the mirror while she applied eye liner. “I’d rather that didn’t happen again.”

  “We won’t allow that here,” Briggs, the facility security chief, said from behind her. Yellow smiled at him in the mirror. “We’ll do our job and guarantee you complete security. As long as nothing happens to bring the Invid down on us.”

  “Those horrible creatures,” Yellow said, twisting up her face.

  “Aah, they’re not so bad once you get to know them,” the chief started to say.

  Lancer’s friend, Woods, threw him a conspiratorial wink from a corner of the room. He was a handsome young man with a pencil-thin mustache whose taste ran to calfskin jackets and black leather ties. Just now he was holding the large bouquet of flowers Briggs had brought along for Yellow Dancer. “We know you’ll do your best, Colonel,” Woods said encouragingly.

  Lancer saw the chief’s puffy face turn red with embarrassment. “You’re damn right we will.”

  “And I want to thank you so much for the flowers,” Yellow gushed, turning away from the mirror now to flash Briggs a painted smile. “They’re lovely.”

  Briggs leered at her. “Anything for you, Yellow, anything you want.”

  Scott, Rook, and Rand had reached the third floor of the facility. The duct opened out into a small area that served as the relay center for the facility’s security systems. Scott and Rand moved in to try to make sense of the tangle of wires and switches that covered two full walls of the room. It took several minutes to locate the feeds from the security cameras, but the rest was child’s play. Rook unsnapped the clasps on the carry case and began to hand over the devices Lunk assured them would scramble the a/v signals. Scott and Rand quickly attached these to the feeder cables and set off on the next leg of their cramped journey.

  The map called for a brief return to the air duct system before they could enter the actual storage area. But once through this, they would be free to move about at will—assuming Lunk’s devices did the trick. They dropped out of the duct into a maintenance corridor that encircled the supply room but had no access to it except for a single elbow conduit located clear around the back of the building. Rand volunteered to test the effectiveness of Lunk’s scramblers by making faces at one of the surveillance cameras. When no sirens went off and no guards came running, the trio figured they were in the clear and decided to use one of the maintenance carts to convey them to the conduit—an open-topped electric affair with two seats and a single headlamp that brought them around back in a quarter the time it would have taken them to walk.

  They stopped at the first elbow conduit and commenced a careful count. Rook looked over the map, while Scott took charge of noting their position relative to the first main.

  “Under the main line, thirteenth from the right,” Scott said, recalling the scrawled notation on the map. He gestured to an elbow up ahead. “That must be it.”

  The conduit was made of light-gauge metal; it was a good four feet in circumference and stood at least six feet high from floor to right-angle bend. It was held in place by a circular flange, but promised to be flexible enough once the bolts securing the flange to the floor were undone. Rand and Scott took box wrenches from the tool pouch and immediately set to work. At the same time, Rook took a coil of rope from the cart and began to tie it fast to one of the adjacent elbows.

  When the last of the bolts had been loosened and removed, Rook and Scott shoved the conduit to one side and bent down to peer into the shaft below.

  Rand squinted and smiled to himself as his eyes fixed upon the objects of their search: crate after crate of Protoculture canisters, each the size and shape of a squat thermos.

  “There’s a mountain of it down here,” he reported.

  Scott gave a tug on the rope Rook had tied to the conduit. “Feels strong enough,” he commented while Rook tied the other end around her waist. “The security system down there is still operative. You touch anything—the wall, the ceiling, the floor—and you’ll trigger it.”

  Rook sat down and let her legs dangle through the opening. Rand and Scott took hold of the rope and signaled their readiness. “All right,” she told them. “Let’s get this over with before I change my mind.”

  Yellow Dancer’s concert was under way. She streaked onto the stage like a comet, with the band already laying down the intro to “Look Up!” and the audience of several thousand roaring their appreciation. It was a heavy-message number that had become something of an anthem in the Southlands, and Yellow loved singing it. She stood with her legs spread apart, one hand on her hip, holding the mike like an upturned glass, her body accenting the beat.

  Another winter’s day

  Another gray reminder that what used to be

  Has gone away.

  It’s really hard to say,

  How long we’ll have to live with our insanity;

  We have to pay for all we use,

  We never think before we light the fuse …

  Look up, look up, look up!

  The sky is falling!

  Look up,

  There’s something up you have to know.

  Before you try to go outside,

  To take in the view,

  Look up, because the sky

  Could fall on you …

  Yellow looked to the stage wings, where the colonel was eagerly trying to stomp his foot to the music, an ear-to-ear grin on his face, his men vigilant throughout the arena.

  Loaded down with canisters of Protoculture fished from the storage room, the electric cart sped away from the maintenance corridor and entered a stone serviceway, damp, foul-smelling, and seemingly unused for centuries. Rook, still dizzy from her upside-down descent into the storage room, had the map spread open in her lap while Scott drove. In the dim ambient light, she tried to match juncture points in the serviceway with the vague scrawls indicated on the map. Finally she told Scott to stop the cart. He got out and began to inspect the stones at eye level along the right-hand wall of the corridor.

  “Should be over here somewhere,” Rook heard him say. She watched him lay his hand against one of the stones, and in a moment the wall was opening. Another corridor was revealed, perpendicular to the first and decidedly downhill.

  “And this is supposed to lead to the concert hall?” Rook said uncertainly.

  “Looks to me like it leads to the dungeon,” Rand said behind her.

  Back at the wheel, Scott edged the cart forward into the dark passageway. “Lancer said it was an escape route constructed by the man who originally had this place built.”

  “Well, let’s hope so,” Rook answered him as the stone wall reassembled itself behind them.

  The ramp dropped at a steep angle that sorely tested the electric cart’s brakes, but the important thing was that they were leaving the facility behind.

  Rand was encouraged. According to his own calculations the passageway was indeed leading them in the direction of the arena. “Piece of cake,” he said from his uncomfortable position atop the Protoculture canisters stacked in the bed of the cart. “We should have taken more while we had the chance.”

  “Don’t be so smart,” Scott said stiffly. “We’re not out of here yet.”

  Rand leaned forward between the front seats. “What’s there to worry about now? The concert’s on, we’ve got the ’Culture, Lunk’ll be waiting for us with open arms …”

  “Mr. Confidence all of a sudden,” Rook snorted from the shotgun seat. Scott was easing up on
the brakes, and the cart was traveling along at a good clip now. Rook was holding her hair in place with one hand when the cart’s headlamp revealed a solid wall blocking their exit.

  “Hold on!” Scott yelled, pulling up on the hand brake.

  The rear end of the cart bounced and swerved as the brakes locked, but Scott managed to remain in control and brought the vehicle to a halt with room to spare. The trio regarded the wall and began to wonder whether they might have missed a turnoff earlier on.

  “I didn’t see any side tunnels,” said Scott. “And according to Lancer’s map there’s only supposed to be this one passageway.”

  “The map’s been accurate up to now,” Rook added, running her fingers through her tangled hair. “Where’d we go wrong?”

  “Maybe we have to give the wall a push or something, like up top,” Rand suggested.

  Scott was just about to step out and have a look, when he heard a deep rumbling sound behind him. The trio turned to watch helplessly as a massive stone partition dropped from the tunnel’s ceiling.

  “Now what?” Scott said after a moment.

  “They must be on to us somehow!” Rook said. But Scott disagreed. “Those a/v scramblers still have fifteen minutes of life left in them. I think we must have—”

  Scott cut himself off as a new sound began to infiltrate their silent tomb. It began with a grating sound of stone moving against stone, then softened to a sibilance before gushing loud and clear.

  “Water!” Rand yelled. “We’re being flooded!”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  It was just a case of overcompensation again: We went from having no plan to too much plan!

  Rand, Notes on the Run

  Yellow Dancer pranced across the stage, pointing and gesturing to the crowd, swinging the microphone over her head as though it were a lariat. She was in the midst of a hard driving number now, a flat-out rocker that had the audience dancing in the aisles and pressing forward toward the stage.