Night Warriors 04 Night Wars Read online

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  back cover

  * * *

  BEFORE THE BATTLE

  Perry shook the woman's arm quite violently, but still she didn't stir.

  The manager appeared, a small balding man with a bristling mustache. "Anything wrong here?"

  "This woman," said Perry. "I can't wake her up."

  The manager tried shaking her arm, too. "Ma'am? Can you hear me, ma'am? This is the manager!"

  When she didn't respond, he carefully took hold of her head and turned it sideways so that they could see her face. Her eyes were wide open, but the pupils were dilated, and she was plainly dead. She must have been quite pretty once, years and years ago.

  Springer laid a hand on her forehead. "She's cold," she said. "Feel how cold she is."

  "That's okay," said Perry. "I'll take your word for it." He had never seen a dead body before, not even his mother.

  Springer came back to their table. "No question about it," she said.

  "The Winterwent?"

  She nodded. "He must be aware that we're preparing ourselves to fight him. I think he's going to give us a whole lot of trouble."

  One by one, the lights blinked back on. Sasha said, "My God, I'm frightened. Why can't I wake up?"

  John laid a plump, reassuring hand on her shoulder. "You are awake, honeycakes. It's when you fall asleep that you have to start worrying."

  Night Wars

  Graham Masterton

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  A LEISURE BOOK®

  September 2006 Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  ISBN 0-8439-5427-2

  The name "Leisure Books" and the stylized "L" with design are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com.

  Chapter One

  Sasha was woken up at three o'clock in the afternoon by an earsplitting thunderstorm. It sounded as if the city were being bombarded from the other side of the Ohio River by heavy artillery. She could hear rain cascading from the broken gutter above her bedroom window and clattering into her window box. Fortunately, she had long ago given up trying to grow geraniums in it. Like everything else in her life, she had never remembered to take care of them.

  She buried her head under the pillows, but she knew that it was no use. She turned over and lay on her side for a while, watching the rain trickling down behind the blinds, but then she said, "Shit," under her breath and sat up.

  She had promised herself that she would sleep all day. But the thunder was too calamitous and she simply wasn't tired anymore. Apart from that, she didn't like the dreams that she had been having. She had dreamed that a woman in a white coat had crept into her bedroom with a sackful of albino squirrels and let them all loose.

  She went to the window and let up the blind. The surface of Third Street was dancing with rain, and people were hurrying across the intersection with umbrellas and newspapers held over their heads. Huge brown clouds were moving slowly across the city from the southwest, and it was so gloomy that cars were driving around with their headlights on.

  She pressed her forehead against the glass. She wished that this were yesterday, and that she hadn't left for work yet. She wished that this were the day before yesterday—before she had filed that story about the ninety-one-year-old woman in St. James Court who had been so neglected by her children that she had survived only by frying and eating her nine pet cats. The old woman had even devised recipes to make her kitties more palatable, and Sasha had quoted the recipes in detail.

  It was a terrific story, and it would have been even more terrific if it had been true, and if Sasha hadn't inadvertently used the same apartment number as the mayor's mother.

  Regrettably, it wasn't the first time that the accuracy of one of her scoops had been challenged. There was the story last June about the Butchertown man who had concealed himself and his surfboard inside a large cardboard box and tried to FedEx himself to Oahu because he thought he deserved a vacation. Then there was the story about the fifteen-strong girls' choir who were so depressed about their failure to win a bluegrass contest that they had decided to join hands and throw themselves off the George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge, only to be saved by a passing entrepreneur who offered them a $50,000 recording contract.

  Yesterday, less than an hour after the Courier-Journal had hit the streets, and less than ten minutes after a phone call to her editor Jimmy Berrance from the mayor's office, Jimmy had ordered her to clear her desk.

  "What does it matter if it's true or not?" she had protested. "It could have happened, couldn't it?"

  "It could, sure," Jimmy had agreed. "But the problem is, it didn't."

  Lightning flickered over the shiny wet rooftops, followed by another barrage of improbably loud thunder. Sasha went across to the small divided-off kitchenette in the corner of her room and opened up her refrigerator. Two bottles of white wine, a wrinkly apple, three slices of pepperoni pizza, and a can of tuna. At this rate, she was going to end up like her fictitious old lady, eating Cat Creole.

  She closed the refrigerator. On the door was Scotch-taped a poster that the Courier-Journal had brought out when she first joined them, two-and-a-half years ago. It showed a pretty, smiling girl of twenty-four in a cream designer jacket. She had a beautifully cut blonde pageboy, and wide-apart blue eyes that just sparkled sincerity. Sasha Smith, the Tender Heart of Kentucky.

  She didn't look like that now. Her hair was cut short and messy, her eye makeup was smudged, and she was wearing nothing but a grubby T-shirt with a picture of Alfred E. Neuman on the front and a scarlet lace thong.

  Her room was at the very top of the house, so that it had steeply sloping ceilings, and it was a catastrophe. The bed-sheets looked as if they had been knotted together, ready for a prison break. The couch was heaped with cushions and discarded sweaters and bottles of nail polish remover and cotton wipes and candy wrappers. The polished wood floor was strewn with shoes and bras and shopping bags and worn-out jeans and CDs all out of their cases. On the walls she had stuck posters of her heroes and heroines: Bob Woodward, James Thurber, Erica Jong, Hunter S. Thompson and Paris Hilton. Well, Paris Hilton wasn't exactly a heroine, but Sasha considered that a total lack of self-awareness was an achievement worthy of respect.

  She decided to take a shower and wash her hair an
d dress up in the new honey-colored Max Mara sweater that she had bought at the Fourth Street Live! Mall, if she could find it. Then she would meet her friend Laurel and go to Freddie's Bar, where the Courier-Journal staff usually hung out after work. Screw them, she thought. I'll show them what they're missing.

  She had just stepped into the small triangular bathroom when she heard her cell phone playing "Wake Up, Little Susie," somewhere on the couch. No, ignore it. It wasn't going to be Jimmy Berrance, apologizing for firing her, and it wasn't going to be WHAS, offering her a job as a roving TV reporter. It wasn't going to be her father, either, that was for sure. But it kept on playing and playing, and after the tenth play she hesitated in the middle of the bathroom with her arms crossed and her T-shirt half-lifted over her head. Maybe it was Joe Henry, her kind-of-boyfriend, back from Seattle two days early.

  She went back into the living room and rummaged through the magazines and sweaters on the couch. She found her cell phone studded with caramel popcorn.

  "Hello? Joe Henry?"

  "Is that Sasha? I tried to call you at the office, but they told me you didn't work there any longer." It wasn't Joe Henry. It was a woman's voice, and she sounded as if she were panicking.

  "No, that's true, I don't work there any longer. Who is this?"

  "Jenny Ferraby. Do you remember me? You wrote an article about me last year."

  "Jenny Ferraby? Oh, sure, yes." It would have been difficult to forget Jenny Ferraby. She had fought the State of Kentucky for the right to use her late husband's sperm to conceive a child, even though he had been executed three years before for a triple homicide. It had become known in the media as the "Demon Seed" case.

  "You must be due pretty soon, huh?" said Sasha. "I have a note somewhere to call you about that."

  "The baby was born two days ago, three weeks premature. He's a little boy."

  "Congratulations. Is he okay?"

  "That's why I'm calling you. There's something wrong with him. He won't stop screaming and he won't sleep. He hasn't slept for even a second since he was born."

  "You're kidding me. All babies sleep. I mean, that's what they do, isn't it? Cry, crap, eat and sleep."

  "Not this one. He opened his eyes as soon as he was born and he hasn't closed them since."

  Sasha cleared herself a space on the edge of the couch and sat down. "So what do the doctors say?"

  "They don't understand it any more than me. At first I thought—well, you can imagine what I thought. Maybe it was a punishment from God, for going against nature."

  "Oh, come on."

  "I know. It wasn't very rational, but then I wasn't feeling very rational. It was only when another baby was born, about seven hours later, and she wouldn't stop crying, either—and then another, and another."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that every baby born here in the past forty-eight hours is exactly the same. Seven babies so far. They won't stop screaming and they won't sleep. They're having to feed all of them on a drip."

  "Well, I have to admit, that is very strange indeed. Listen—if I remember, you were going to have your baby where? At the Ormsby Clinic, wasn't it?"

  "That's right. That's where I am now."

  "And the doctors can't work out what's wrong?"

  "They're going frantic. Everybody here is going frantic."

  "Who else knows about this?"

  "Nobody. They asked us not to tell the media, in case the whole thing turns into a circus. But it's obvious that they don't have the first idea what to do, and I thought that if you published a story about it ... well, some specialist might read it. Somebody who has experience with cases like these."

  "Ms Ferraby—Jenny—I don't work for the Courier-Journal anymore. They fired me. Why don't you call the editor, Jimmy Berrance? He should be able to help you."

  "But surely you can still write a story about it? When I wanted to have George's baby, you were the only one who understood. You were the only one who didn't treat me as if I was some kind of ghoul."

  "I'm sorry. I'm finished with the Courier-Journal. I'm looking for a career change. Maybe TV, or movies. Maybe I'll join a rock band."

  "Sasha, I'm desperate. I wouldn't have called you if I wasn't desperate."

  "I'm sorry, Jenny. What can I say?"

  "Wait up," said Jenny Ferraby. Sasha could hear voices, and a door opening and closing and a phone ringing. Then another door opened and she heard babies crying.

  "Just listen," said Jenny Ferraby. "Listen to them, and my boy is one of them. Listen, and tell me that you're not going to help me."

  Sasha listened, and the sound she heard made her feel as if the skin around her scalp were shrinking. An appalling chorus of naked, helpless fear. Seven babies, every one of them way beyond hysteria, screaming and screaming as if something so terrible was about to happen to them that they would never be able to catch their breath.

  The thunder had cleared away toward St. Matthews by the time she reached the Ormsby Clinic, and the red asphalt driveway was wreathed in steam. As she climbed out of her ten-year-old sky-blue Mustang, Jenny Ferraby came down the front steps of the clinic and hurried toward her. She was a thin, fretful-looking woman of thirty-five with wild gingery hair, wearing a pale green summer dress and Birken-stock sandals.

  "Thank you so much for coming. You have no idea how worried I am. If Kieran doesn't stop crying ... I'm sure he's going to die of exhaustion."

  "You didn't tell the doctors I'm a reporter? Well... was a reporter?"

  Jenny Ferraby took hold of her arm and clung to it tightly. "I said that you were a very close friend of mine, that's all."

  "What about the other parents?"

  "They've all agreed to keep this out of the media. None of them really wants the publicity. It's distressing enough as it is."

  They went through the revolving door into the clinic's reception area, which was chilly and modern, with cream marble floors and bay trees in woven straw containers. The words ormsby obstetric clinic were written in shiny stainless steel letters on the wall, and in the center of the reception area stood a bronze sculpture of a faceless mother and a faceless child.

  The receptionist glanced across at them, and Jenny Ferraby pointed at Sasha and said, unnecessarily, "My friend. She's come to see my baby."

  She led the way along the corridor to the maternity wing. Sasha could hear the babies crying as soon as they walked through the swing doors. A harassed-looking nurse hurried past them and gave Jenny Ferraby a sympathetic grimace.

  Outside the intensive care ward, nine weary mothers and fathers were sitting, drinking coffee or trying to read magazines or simply sitting with their heads in their hands. One or two of the mothers looked around as Sasha and Jenny Ferraby came past, and tried to smile, but the rest of the parents ignored her. They were too worried and too tired.

  Through the large glass window, Sasha could see the babies lying in their transparent plastic cribs, all of them crimson-faced and all of them crying. A drip had been attached to each of the babies to keep them hydrated and fed, and each of them was wired-up to an LCD screen to monitor their vital signs. Two doctors and four nurses were gathered around one of the screens, talking and shaking their heads.

  "That's my Kieran," said Jenny Ferraby, pointing to the third baby along the row. "Look at him, the poor little darling."

  "Haven't they tried sedating them?" asked Sasha. "I mean, I know they're very little, but they can't let them go on crying like this."

  "They've tried everything. They've tried music, they've tried dolphin noises, they've tried flashing lights and they've tried keeping them in total darkness. They gave them as much antihistamine as they dared, but it didn't have any effect at all."

  "So what do they plan to do next?"

  "I'm not sure. They've told us that they're going to try hypnosis, but I don't see how you can hypnotize a premature baby."

  "Can I talk to one of the doctors?"

  "Sure, I don't see why not. So long
as you don't tell them what you're really doing here."

  Sasha approached the window and looked into the IC unit at all the wriggling, screaming babies. They were so dehydrated by their crying that they no longer had any tears.

  Jenny came and stood beside her and said, "I feel so helpless. Kieran is depending on me to protect him and take care of him, and I can't."

  She waved to one of the doctors, a short African-American woman with glasses and hair cropped like a blacksmith's anvil. The doctor waved back, and after a moment she came out through the double doors.

  "Hello, Jenny. How are you holding up?"

  "Dr. Absalom, this is my friend, Sasha. I brought her along for some moral support."

  "Right now, I think we could all use some moral support," said Dr. Absalom.

  "This is so strange, isn't it?" said Sasha. "All of these babies crying like this and not sleeping."

  "Well, we're working on a couple of possible treatments," said Dr. Absalom. "One theory is that they've somehow been traumatized while they were still in the womb, but why this condition should only have affected babies born here at Ormsby, we simply have no idea."

  Sasha watched one of the nurses taking a blood sample from the baby next to Kieran. "Were the mothers given any kind of prescription medication prior to their giving birth?"

  "Nothing stronger than vitamin supplements."

  "Were they following any specific diet?"

  Dr. Absalom raised one eyebrow. Sasha realized that her question might have sounded too professional, so she shrugged quickly and said, "I'm just wondering, that's all. Like, I heard that unborn babies can even get a taste for garlic, if their mothers eat a whole lot of it."

  Dr. Absalom nodded. "We've been recommending the same diet plan to thousands of mothers for more than sixteen years. It's not mandatory, though, and so the mothers have all been following different regimes. Three Hot Browns a day, in one case."

  "Hey—that's what I call a diet."

  Jenny Ferraby said, "Do you think I could take Sasha in to see Kieran?"