Part One THE LITTLE RED KING Chapter IV:DAN-TETE
ONE
As the baby's time neared, Susannah Dean looked around, once more counting her enemies as Roland had taught her.
You must never draw, he'd said, until you knoio how many are against you, or you've satisfied yourself that you can never know, or you 've decided it's your day to die. She wished she didn't also have to cope with the terrible thought-invading helmet on her head, but whatever that thing was, it didn't seem concerned with Susannah's effort to count those present at the arrival of Mia's chap. And that was good.
There was Sayre, the man in charge. The low man, with one of those red spots pulsing in the center of his forehead. There was Scowther, the doctor between Mia's legs, getting ready to officiate at the delivery. Sayre had roughed the doc up when Scowther had displayed a little too much arrogance, but probably not enough to interfere with his efficiency. There were five other low men in addition to Sayre, but she'd only picked out two names. The one with the bulldogjowls and the heavy, sloping gut was Haber. Next to Haber was a bird-thing with the brown feathered head and vicious beebee eyes of a hawk. This creature's name seemed to be Jey, or possibly Gee. That was seven, all armed with what looked like automatic pistols in docker's clutches. Scowther's swung carelessly out from beneath his white coat each time he bent down. Susannah had already marked that one as hers.
There were also three pallid, watchful humanoid things standing beyond Mia. These, buried in dark blue auras, were vampires, Susannah was quite sure. Probably of the sort Callahan had called Type Threes. (The Pere had once referred to them as pilot sharks. ) That made ten. Two of the vampires carried bahs, the third some sort of electrical sword now turned down to no more than a guttering core of light. If she managed to get Scowther's gun (when you get it, sweetie, she amended-she'd read The Power of Positive Thinkingand still believed every word the Rev. Peale had written), she would turn it on the man with the electric sword first. God might know how much damage such a weapon could inflict, but Susannah Dean didn't want to find out.
Also present was a nurse with the head of a great brown rat.
The pulsing red eye in the center of her forehead made Susannah believe that most of the other low folken were wearing humanizing masks, probably so they wouldn't scare the game while out and about on die sidewalks of New York. They might not all look like rats underneath, but she was pretty sure that none of them looked like Robert Goulet. The rathead nurse was the only one present who wore no weapon that Susannah could see.
Eleven in all. Eleven in this vast and mostly deserted infirmary that wasn't, she felt quite sure, under die borough of Manhattan.
And if she was going to setde their hash, it would have to be while they were occupied with Mia's baby-her precious chap.
"It's coming, doctor!" the nurse cried in nervous ecstasy.
It was. Susannah's counting stopped as the worst pain yet rolled over her. Over both of them. Burying them. They screamed in tandem. Scowther was commanding Mia to push, to push NOW!
Susannah closed her eyes and also bore down, for it was her baby, too. . . or had been. As she felt the pain flow out of her like water whirlpooling its way down a dark drain, she experienced the deepest sorrow she had ever known. For it was Mia the baby was flowing into; die last few lines of the living message Susannah's body had somehow been made to transmit. It was ending. Whatever happened next, this part was ending, and Susannah Dean let out a cry of mingled relief and regret; a cry that was itself like a song.
And then, before the horror began-something so terrible she would remember each detail as if in the glare of a brilliant light until the day of her entry into the clearing-she felt a small hot hand grip her wrist. Susannah turned her head, rolling the unpleasant weight of the helmet with it. She could hear herself gasping. Her eyes met Mia's. Mia opened her lips and spoke a single word. Susannah couldn't hear it over Scowther's roaring (he was bending now, peering between Mia's legs and holding the forceps up and against his brow). Yet she did hear it, and understood that Mia was trying to fulfill her promise.
I'd free you, if chance allows, her kidnapper had said, and the word Susannah now heard in her mind and saw on the laboring woman's lips was chassit.
Susannah, do you hear me?
I hear you very well, Susannah said.
And you understand our compact?"
Aye. I'll help you get away from these with your chap, if I can.
And. . .
Kill us if you can't! the voice finished fiercely. It had never been so loud. That was partly the work of the connecting cable,
Susannah felt sure. Say it, Susannah, daughter of Dan!
I'll kill you both if you-
She stopped there. Mia seemed satisfied, however, and that was well, because Susannah couldn't have gone on if both their lives had depended on it. Her eye had happened on the ceiling of this enormous room, over the aisles of beds halfway down. And there she saw Eddie and Roland. They were hazy, floating in and out of the ceiling, looking down at her like phantom fish.
Another pain, but this one not as severe. She could feel her thighs hardening, pushing, but that seemed far away. Not important. What mattered was whether or not she was really seeing what she thought she was seeing. Could it be that her overstressed mind, wishing for rescue, had created this hallucination to comfort her?
She could almost believe it. Would have, very likely, they not both been naked, and surrounded by an odd collection of floating junk: a matchbook, a peanut, ashes, a penny. And a floormat, by God! A car floormat with FORD printed on it.
"Doctor, I can see the hea-"
A breathless squawk as Dr. Scowther, no gentleman he, elbowed Nurse Ratty unceremoniously aside and bent even closer to the juncture of Mia's thighs. As if he meant to pull her chap out with his teeth, perhaps. The hawk-thing, Jey or Gee, was speaking to the one called Haber in an excited, buzzing dialect.
They're really there, Susannah thought. The floormat proves it.
She wasn't sure how the floormat proved it, only that it did. And she mouthed the word Mia had given her: chassit. It was a password.
It would open at least one door and perhaps many. To wonder if Mia had told the truth never even crossed Susannah's mind. They were tied togedier, not just by the cable and the helmets, but by the more primitive (and far more powerful) act of childbirth. No, Mia hadn't lied.
"Push, you gods-damned lazy bitch!" Scowther almost howled, and Roland and Eddie suddenly disappeared through the ceiling for good, as if blown away by the force of the man's breath.
For all Susannah knew, they had been.
She turned on her side, feeling her hair stuck to her head in clumps, aware that her body was pouring out sweat in what could have been gallons. She pulled herself a little closer to Mia; a little closer to Scowther; a little closer to the crosshatched butt of Scowther's dangling automatic.
"Be still, sissa, hear me I beg," said one of the low men, and touched Susannah's arm. The hand was cold and flabby, covered with fat rings. The caress made her skin crawl. "This will be over in a minute and then all the worlds change. When this one joins the Breakers in Thunderclap-"
"Shut up, Straw!" Haber snapped, and pushed Susannah's would-be comforter backward. Then he turned eagerly to the delivery again.
Mia arched her back, groaning. The rathead nurse put her hands on Mia's hips and pushed them gently back down to the bed. "Nawthee, nawthee, push 'ith thy belly. "
"Eat shit, you bitch!" Mia screamed, and while Susannah felt a faint tug of her pain, that was all. The connection between them was fading.
Summoning her own concentration, Susannah cried into the well of her own mind. Hey! Hey Positronics lady! You still there?
"The link. . . is down," said the pleasant female voice.
As before, it spoke in the middle of Susannah's head, but unlike before, it seemed dim, no more dangerous than a voice on the radio that comes from far
away due to some atmospheric flaw. "Repeat: the link. . . is down. We hope you'll remember North Central Positronics for all your mental enhancement needs. And Sombra Corporation! A leader in mind-to-mind communication since the ten thousands!"
There was a tooth-rattling BEE-EEEEP far down in Susannah's mind, and then the link was gone. It wasn't just the absence of the horridly pleasant female voice; it was everything.
She felt as if she'd been let out of some painful bodycompressing trap.
Mia screamed again, and Susannah let out a cry of her own. Part of this was not wanting Sayre and his mates to know the link between her and Mia had been broken; part was genuine sorrow. She had lost a woman who had become, in a way, her true sister.
Susannah! Suze, are you there?
She started up on her elbows at this new voice, for a moment almost forgetting the woman beside her. That had been-
Jake? Is it you, honey? It is, isn't it? Can you hear me?
YES! he cried. Finally! God, who've you been talking to? Keep yelling so I can home in on y-
The voice broke off, but not before she heard a ghostly rattle of distant gunfire. Jake shooting at someone? She thought not. She thought someone was shooting at him.
TWO
"Now!" Scowther shouted. "'Now, Mia! Push! For your life! Give it all you have! PUSH!"
Susannah tried to roll closer to the other woman-Oh, I'm concerned and wanting comfort, see how concerned I am, concern and wanting comfort is all it is-but the one called Straw pulled her back. The segmented steel cable swung and stretched out between them. "Keep your distance, bitch," Straw said, and for the first time Susannah faced the possibility that they weren't going to let her get hold of Scowther's gun. Or any gun.
Mia screamed again, crying out to a strange god in a strange language. When she tried to raise her midsection from the table, the nurse-Alia, Susannah thought the nurse's name was Alia-forced her down again, and Scowther gave a short, curt cry of what sounded like satisfaction. He tossed aside the forceps he'd been holding.
"Why d'ye do that?" Sayre demanded. The sheets beneath Mia's spread legs were now damp with blood, and the boss sounded flustered.
"Won't need them!" Scowther returned breezily. "She was built for babies, could have a dozen in the rice-patch and never miss a row's worth of picking. Here it comes, neat as you please!"
Scowther made as if to grab the largish basin sitting on the next bed, decided he didn't have quite enough time, and slipped his pink, gloveless hands up the inside of Mia's thighs, instead. This time when Susannah made an effort to move closer to Mia, Straw didn't stop her. All of them, low men and vampires alike, were watching the last stage of the birth with complete fascination, most of them clustered at the end of the two beds which had been pushed together to make one. Only Straw was still close to Susannah. The vampire with the firesword had just been demoted; she decided that Straw would be the first to go.
"Once more!" Scowther cried. "Foryour baby!"
Like the low men and the vampires, Mia had forgotten Susannah. Her wounded, pain-filled eyes fixed on Sayre. "May I have him, sir? Please say I may have him, if only for a little while!"
Sayre took her hand. The mask which covered his real face smiled. "Yes, my darling," he said. "The chap is yours for years and years. Only push this one last time. "
Mia, don't believe his lies! Susannah cried, but the cry went nowhere. Likely that was just as well. Best she be entirely forgotten for the time being.