"How did you find out about the Apocalypse Door?"
"A little bird told me. Come now, Eddie, you don't really think I'll give up all my little secrets and connections that easily?"
"Worth a try," I said. "More importantly, do you understand what will happen, if you ever open the Door?"
"Of course," said Tiger Tim.
"And you're really prepared to do that, if you don't get your way?"
"Yes. If I can't have the life I want, why should anyone else? To hell with them all."
"What about the Immortals?"
He looked at me. "Who?"
And then Ethel contacted me through my torc, her voice high and urgent. Eddie! You have to come home! Right now! The Hall is under attack!
"What? That's… impossible! Wait a minute…" I turned back to Tiger Tim's face on the monitor screen. "Drood Hall is under attack! Is this your doing?"
He smiled dreamily. "It has always been a dream of mine… To see the Hall go up in flames, and everything destroyed… And all of you will cry out to me, to save you from the fire… And I will lean forward, and smile, and say… Burn."
I called up the Merlin Glass, and threw myself through it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
War On a Country Lawn I burst through the Merlin Glass to see thousands of Accelerated Men running wild on the grassy lawns of Drood Hall. Screaming and howling with rage, they streamed out of a dimensional door hanging in the air, and every single one of them wore the black and gold uniform of Doctor Delirium's private army. They spread rapidly across the neatly mown lawns, running and leaping, baying like maddened animals. They moved at superhuman speed, churning up the ground and sending grass clods flying through the air. Their faces were twisted with an insane rage and hatred, fuelled by the Drug, and the noises they made didn't even sound human anymore. They headed straight for Drood Hall with murder on their faces, and more and more of them were coming through the dimensional door all the time.
For a moment, all I could think was: Where the hell did Doctor Delirium get so many people, to dose with his augmented Acceleration Drug? And then I remembered what the dosed people he'd left behind had done, at his secret base, and my stomach clenched hard, sickened at the thought of thousands of homicidal supermen running wild in the rooms and corridors of Drood Hall… I armoured up, and went to face the Accelerated Men with cold and brutal determination in my heart.
The grounds at Drood Hall stretched away for miles in every direction, or the Hall would have been overrun by now. As it was, the Accelerated Men had a lot of ground to cover. They charged forward at impossible speed-all strength and no grace, forced on by the Drug's terrible imperatives. They spread out in a massive dark wave, crossing the open lawns… but my trained mind had already noticed there was no sense of unity to them, no discipline in their movements or advance. They were a crowd of individuals, not a trained army, and a swift sense of relief ran through me. Suddenly, the family had a chance, because Droods are trained. Every one of us.
No one had launched a full-scale assault on the Hall for centuries; the outer defences see to that. First, you can't find us, and second, even if you could, the outer defences would track you down and kill you in any number of appalling ways. But somehow Doctor Delirium had found a way past all those layers of protection, by opening his dimensional door inside them. Which should have been impossible. The gateway was a large glowing circle, a good thirty feet or more in diameter, shining brighter than the sun, surrounded by crackling energies where one reality butted up against another. This was high-end tech, state-of-the-art, not just a brute rip in Space and Time. Almost Drood-level tech… and that was just plain wrong. There was no way Doctor Delirium should have access to anything like this. And even with that kind of tech, he still shouldn't have been able to open a door inside our grounds, within reach of the Hall. Not unless someone inside the family had given him the information necessary to bypass all our defences. Perhaps the same traitor who'd made the attack on the Heart possible…
Could it be that Tiger Tim wasn't the Doctor's only partner…?
The Merlin Glass had sent me straight from Amazonian midday to early morning in England. The sun was barely up, the sky still streaked with red, and a delicate ground mist wafted across the grassy lawns. Through the mist came the Accelerated Men, running desperately with flailing arms and maddened eyes. Like nightmares broken out of dreams and into reality, from the deepest part of the night into the breaking day. And the only advantage I had was that the Glass had brought me here only a few moments after the Accelerated Men had arrived. I ran towards them with my hands clenched into golden fists. I was only one man against an overwhelming force, but I was a Drood, and sometimes that's enough.
Sometimes.
Part of me was wondering if the family even knew they were under attack, but almost immediately I was answered when the automatic ground defences started up. Huge robot guns and energy weapons rose smoothly up through the lawns from their underground bunkers, and opened fire on the intruders. The early morning air was full of the roar of guns, and the fierce flares of energy beams, but the Accelerated Men were just too fast for them. They could run and dodge faster than the computerised tracking systems could come to bear, and within moments they were upon the gun positions and overrunning them. The guns swayed back and forth, laying down a murderous range of fire, and superhuman men were shot down and blown apart by the dozen, but they just kept coming, leaping over the bodies of their own dead to get at the guns. They ripped them out of their positions by sheer brute force, and smashed the more delicate energy guns with repeated blows from their bare hands. Hundreds died, running into the barrels of the gun emplacements, but there were thousands of Accelerated Men, and more arriving all the time.
The next level of protection kicked in, as twenty living scarecrows appeared out of nowhere. Old enemies who had died at Drood hands, resurrected as scarecrows, so they could atone for their crimes by defending the family-for as long as they lasted. Neither truly living nor dead, they were impossibly strong and mer ciless opponents. If you listen in on the right frequencies, you can hear them screaming. Forever. Individually, the Accelerated Men would be no match for them, but there were only twenty scarecrows, and thousands of superhumans.
I recognised some of the scarecrows; I'd fought them myself when I broke into the Hall, back when I was a rogue. Laura Lye, still wearing the tatters of a dark evening dress, complete with holed evening gloves. Mad Frankie Phantasm, in the remains of what had once been an expensive Saville Row suit. Bunches of straw stuck out of open wounds in grey flesh. Molly and I had torn them apart, but the family had put them back together again. Because that's what you do with scarecrows. You make them last. And then my heart lurched as I recognised one particular scarecrow-it was the legendary Independent Agent himself, Alexander King. I could still see the hollow in his chest, from where I'd punched out his heart, in his magnificent secret base at Place Gloria. I hadn't known they'd brought him here, and made a scarecrow out of him, but I should have known. Droods bear grudges.
The scarecrows hit the first row of the Accelerated Men, and made mincemeat out of them, grabbing at the black-clad supermen with their implacable gloved hands, and tearing them apart with brute inhuman strength. They tore arms out of sockets, stove in chests, and ripped the heads right off people. Blood spilled thickly across the lawns. The Accelerated Men struck out at the scarecrows with their own appalling strength, but the scarecrows' spongy bodies absorbed every blow, and they felt no pain. Every superhuman intruder they laid hands on died, but in the end their speed was only human, and the Accelerated Men were just so much faster. Once the intruders realised this, they just speeded up enough to avoid the scarecrows and kept going. The scarecrows speeded up too, with all the inhuman pace of their unhuman nature, but even so, they only caught stragglers. The Accelerated Men suddenly changed tactics and swarmed all over the scarecrows, piling onto them in greater and greater numbers,? until they bore the scarecrows down; and once they had them helpless, they ripped the scarecrows to pieces. I saw heads roll across the grass, cloth faces with human eyes, eternally suffering, endlessly hating.