Tengu (51 page)
Skrolnik ran
forward, screaming, “Stop him! For God’s sake!” but the confusion and panic
were too much. Most of the officers stayed where they were, unable to admit to
themselves that they had seen a man hit by seventy or eighty large-caliber
bullets and still walk. Jerry and Mack guided El Krusho up the concrete steps
to the broken doors of the power station, and although one policeman challenged
them and asked, “What are you doing?” nobody else stood in their way. Tengu In
a moment they were inside, following the spatters of blood which the Tengu had
left behind him on the floor. Inside the power station, it was coolly
air-conditioned, and lit with dim, greenish fluorescent lamps. The floor was
polished vinyl, as reflective as water, and the walls were as white and sterile
as a hospital.
Skrolnik, at
the smashed door, yelled, “Sennett! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
But Jerry and
Mack kept pushing El Krusho onward, up a flight of steel Stairs, along a steel
latticework catwalk, and around at last to the main hall where the fusion
reactor was housed.
Mack pointed
down to the reactor itself and said, “There he is. For God’s sake, he’s playing
around with all those switches!”
The fusion
reactor was quite small, the first of America’s experiments in nuclear fusion.
It was no more than 20 feet high, shaped like a giant metal donut in a frame of
pipework and valves and electrical wiring. The control console was a white
upright cabinet, no bigger than a Space Invaders game, with five
power-indicator dials, and a circular screen to indicate the build-up of
nuclear energy. The Tengu had already flicked down a whole row of switches, and
the fusion reactor was beginning to hum as it built up the extraordinary charge
of power necessary to raise its internal temperature to 100 million degrees
Celsius.
Skrolnik came
banging along the catwalk, followed by six armed policemen and the scientific
director of the Three Arch Bay complex, a young but balding man with hornrimmed
glasses as heavy as Clark Kent’s.
“He’s tampering
with it, for God’s sake,” shouted the scientific director. “He’s started it
up!”
“Cut the power,
then!” snarled Skrolnik.
“I can Y! If I
shut off the power now, the whole damned thing will go unstable!”
“Shoot him!”
Skrolnik directed his officers. “Blow his goddamned head off!”
“No!” insisted
the scientific director. “One stray
bullet,
and the
whole reactor could blow up!”
“Well, what
then?” screamed Skrolnik in utter
frustration.
“Go, Maurice,”
said Jerry in a gentle voice. “Go kill him.”
Everybody
watched in morbid fascination as Maurice strode purposefully along the catwalk
and down the steps which led to the main floor of the reactor room. The Tengu,
at the reactor’s console, neither saw nor acknowledged him, but he must have
sensed that he was there, since both of them were possessed by the same evil
spirit. Different manifestations of the same spirit, invoked for different
reasons–after all, like the demons of Christendom, the devils of Japan were
legion–but the same fundamental spirit. The atmosphere within the
nuclear-reactor hall crackled with evil and with the huge power of the fusion
reactor, as it steadily amassed incredible power.
“Kill him!”
shouted Jerry, and Mack leaned over the rail of the catwalk and yelled, “Sic
him, Maurice!”
El Krusho
stepped forward and seized the Japanese Tengu by the neck. His bruised and
lacerated muscles bulged with power as he wrenched the Tengu’s head this way
and that, and then twisted the Tengu’s arms around behind his back. But the
Tengu, for all that he was lighter and less muscular then El Krusho, had been
an Oni adept when he was alive; and as El Krusho tried to claw back his head
and break his neck, he twisted powerfully around, and threw El Krusho against
the metal staircase.
El Krusho
lurched to his feet again and tore into the Tengu with the madness of a wild
animal.
He dug his
fingers into the Tengu’s wounds, and ripped yards of red muscle away from the
Tengu’s bones. He butted the Tengu repeatedly with his skull, and at last the
two of them became locked together in the clinch which, in Oni, is known as the
Fatal Embrace. It is one of the few slow moves in Oni, a twisting together of
arms and backs which can be fatal to either antagonist, or both.
J There
were
three or four minutes of grunting strain, as the Tengu
pulled against El Krusho and El Krusho pulled back. Then, with enormous effort,
El Krusho staggered to his feet, carrying the Tengu on his back like the
carcass of a slaughtered bull, and walked with him, step by agonized step, out
of the reactor hall and out toward the huge pool where spent nuclear fuel was
kept submerged, prior to reprocessing.
The pool hall
was as cold and echoing as a swimming pool. Beneath the deep-turquoise water,
lit by underwater floodlights, stood rack after rack of tubular steel where the
fuel rods were stored.
At the very
edge of the pool, El Krusho and the Tengu wrestled and chopped and grappled
with each other. The Tengu at last seized Maurice by the neck and flailed him
from one side to the other, howling with a weird echoing howl that sounded as
if it had come from hell itself.
There was a
moment of physical ballet, a moment of strain and tension and ultimate pain.
Then both of them, Tengu and El Krusho, toppled and fell into the radioactive
pool.
Mack and Jerry
stood by the edge, watching the two figures claw at each other beneath the
surface, their bodies distorted by the water, a huge burst of bubbles rushed to
the surface from El Krusho’s lungs, but still neither of them came up.
It was then
that Skrolnik came through and urgently touched Jerry’s arm. “Listen,” he said,
“the reactor’s gone out of control. It’s like a runaway train. The director
doesn’t think he’s going to be able to control it.”
Jerry looked
down into the depths of the pool, where El Krusho and the Tengu were
struggling
their last among the racks of plutonium and
U-235. He could already feel the deep hum of the fusion reactor reverberating
throughout the building. He glanced at Mack, and then at Skrolnik again.
“Hiroshima,” he
said. “That’s what this is all about.
Goddamned Hiroshima.”
He felt a crunching of broken porcelain in his pocket, and realized it was the
cricket cage.
A
t 8:27 P-M., the sun rose over San Juan Capistrano, just south of
Los Angeles. The explosion of the reactor at Three Arch Bay was exactly similar
to the detonation of a hydrogen bomb, since the release of neutrons caused by
the fusion of the reactor led to fission of the plutonium and uranium waste in
the used-fuel pool, and the discharge of violent radioactivity.
The evening
turned to daylight as an immense white fireball ascended thunderously into the
sky, and then hung there, rumbling, glowing with malevolent heat and power. A
young starlet who was prancing out of her car on Santa Monica Boulevard was
immortalized in the glass of the Palm Restaurant window. A famous producer who
was drinking his tenth collins of the day looked southward from his Bel Air
balcony when he first saw something flashing, and was evaporated where he
stood.
Within seconds,
a roasting wind blew through Garden Grove and Anaheim and Lakewood, turning
Disneyland to fiery wreckage, melting the dummies in the Hollywood Wax Museum,
melting human beings, too. Dreams and reality both died that day. Reels of
movies waiting to be edited at Twentieth-Century Fox and Universal Studios
flared up in seconds.
David Sennett
was watching television when he heard the first crack and rumble. Then a
terrifying flash filled the room, and the drapes billowed out as if a hurricane
had caught them.
“Oh, Dad,’’ he
thought. He knew what had happened.
“Oh, Dad, Oh, God.”
The End
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