The Doomsday Men

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

It is an age of omnipotent machines; of a vast, megalopolis with hover-cars tied into an electronic traffic control, pedways and monorails... It is an age, too, of ultimate detectives. Robin Carver was one of the best on Ridforce. Connecting with the dying brains of murder victims, reliving their last moments, fingering the killers for the police was his job, and he did it well. But the sudden wave of murders had shaken him to the core. A man could work with death for just so long - then something had to give...

Release date: July 16, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

In forty-three and a half seconds James McLellan Partridge would once again be dead—once more murdered.

Partridge walked now unhurriedly through the throng of late-evening strollers along the brilliantly lit boulevard, his lacklustre eyes seeing the profusion of glittery tourist-trap trash garishly illuminated behind plate-glass windows, his ears hearing the muted pneumatic thump of suspended traffic lanes above, his feet feeling the firmly yielding surface of the pedway beneath, his nose smelling the subtly bracing city scents all about and his tongue tasting the soothing menthojell in his mouth. James McLellan Partridge like most men took all these appurtenances of modern civilisation for granted. He had time to kill before the early night show and so he strolled among a thousand other strollers on the boulevards.

But of all those myriad city dwellers hurrying about their multi-storied catacomb of light and bustle and rush only he—only James McLellan Partridge—was due to die within the minute.

At least, Robin Carver made the mental correction, at least for now. Other men and other women would die this night, death was the one final incurable disease; but as of this recurring minute James McLellan Partridge and Robin Carver would share that death in so enwrapped a symbiosis that for the agonising instant of death each would become the other and Carver, too, would share that scarlet moment of destruction.

He didn’t like that—Carver never had relished the final moments of death when the symbiosis became too painful, too poignant. It was in that moment that he wondered why he did what he did, an instant of self-doubt that vanished with the stroke of death that set him free.

Partridge sucked on his menthojell with the acidulated enjoyment of the addict. Stripes of gaudy colour from shop windows lay athwart the boulevard cutting at right angles to the street lighting and lacquering the faces of passers-by with gay chameleonlike changes that served to remind Carver only of the pathetic brilliance of painted mummycases from the dusty tombs of Egypt.

A narrow service alley between stores opened off to the right; a constricted space not so well lit as the boulevard but still suffused with the saffron sheen from animated advertisement panels plastering the walls with gigantic colour and movement. Partridge walked at the focal point of six differently coloured and sized shadows as he turned down the alleyway to the place where he had met his death.

Twenty seconds to go now.

As always when death zero approached Carver felt the weird inappropriateness of the victim’s unawareness, despite his knowledge that the victim could not know, he still cringed as he awaited the impact. A shadow moved in the mother-of-pearl radiance of the alley. Two shadows, clinging and then parting, opening out, waiting, two shadows waiting at death zero.

Partridge looked at them. His dull city eyes saw them as people, as passers-by, non-personalities met by the thousand and forgotten quicker than a shower of rain.

Carver looked at them. Carver took them into his mind, every lineament of them, treasured up every single revealing feature and made very sure he would know them again. For this—he was here.

They were dressed as Withits. Sharp, mod, snappy. Carver took their incongruous uniform dress in with a single all-embracing glance.

The boy shuffled his feet, his face loose and leering, his whole posture at once ingratiating and repellent.

“Have you a light, citizen? My flicker’s dry.”

“His flicker’s dry,” the girl said, the saffron light coating her black lank hair. “Gotta light?”

“Why—a light—yes …” James McLellan Partridge fumbled in his pockets, aroused from apathy to a jerky wish to please. His fingers closed around a gas lighter, began to pull it out.

Ten seconds.

“Now?” said the girl.

The boy licked his lips. They shone unhealthily. His hand slid with the furtive movement of a snake into his pocket. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, Belle.”

“I wanna!” Belle spoke on a breath, her chest moving spasmodically, her face pinched and yet alive, vibrant. “Let me—you promised!”

“What was that?” said Partridge, the lighter extended in his right hand.

Three seconds.

“Aw—all right, Belle.”

Her eyes showed the rapacity of a rat.

“Thanks, Marv! Thanks a trillion! This is the kick I crave!”

And still Partridge held his lighter out on his palm, still he stared at the two Withits, still he had no inkling of what was to happen in—in—

One second.

Belle lifted her short skirt and the flash of the shiv against the white of her thigh above the tan stocking at last got through to Partridge. He dropped the flicker. He took half a step back and his right hand spread, lifting, the fingers opening like a fan.

Carver felt his brain trying to move muscles that did not belong to him. He automatically wanted to fall into a fighting crouch, take the knife away from the girl and not bother overmuch if he hurt her doing it….

Partridge hasn’t got a clue how to defend himself!

“Go on Belle! He’ll yell any minute!”

Marv pushed the girl’s shoulder and she surged forward, her black hair falling across the left side of her thin face. Her eyes glinted in the saffron light, biliously, hideously.

The point of the knife struck a star of brilliance into Partridge’s eyes. He blinked. He didn’t even see the knife as it clove forward. But he felt it.

Carver, of course, could not see the knife either.

The feel of the knife going in nauseated him and that sensation effectively blocked out any thankfulness that he could not feel the sharp shrill of pain biting into Partridge. Partridge opened his eyes for the last time, his mouth open and bubbling and forming words that did not come. The boy and girl, Marv and Belle, the Withits, were looking down on him. The bloodied knife hung in the air before Partridge’s greying vision. The Withits gloated. Pink tongues licked stained lips, a sheen of sweat glistened on their foreheads, an intense absorption in the final death agonies of this man they had murdered concentrated in their faces, screwing them up, tightening them, turning them into the semblances of satanic satiated evil.

James McLellan Partridge fell to the ground. He fell exactly at death zero, where he had been found.

Confused, random impressions and sensations struck at Robin Carver. This was always a moment of great but dangerous fascination. He saw … but he had no concepts to explain even wordlessly to himself what it was he saw as Partridge died. Partridge’s eyes closed and he was dead and the blackness came thankfully for Carver.

Robin Carver opened his eyes as the tech bent down to detach the sensing lobes from his temples. The lobes slid away gently and with them went death and memory and the near-blasphemous resurrection not of life but of death. The tech smiled.

“You’re back again, sir. Just lie still for a moment, relax, breathe steadily …”

“I’m perfectly all right and oriented, thank you!” Carver hadn’t meant to snap quite so sharply; but the tech’s hazel eyes and neatly waved blonde hair, her red smiling lips and trim figure beneath the white lab smock threw up vividly the contrast of normal life with the hideous plunge of the knife in Belle’s young hand.

“I’m sorry, sir—”

“Forget it. It was only a short one; the poor guy was a walking zombie anyway—” And then Carver paused. The word zombie had been used unthinkingly to describe a man of the grey modern city life who only half-lived his allotment of years, a man without inspiration or flashes of temperament, a man of non-personality. But the word zombie had come to have a very special meaning to the men and women on the R.I.D. Even then he was making a mistake even thinking of the Force as the R.I.D. Rid-force they were to the rest of the police departments and Ridforce they must remain.

They didn’t much care for the thought they dealt in zombies—even if it had been true.

“I didn’t have to go back far,” Carver said, amplifying his explanation, annoyed with himself for having been abrupt with the tech. The girl was young, a new recruit, anxious to please and soaked in the team spirit animating all the technical staff that gave them a driving spirit of oneness with the operators. He had been driven into accepting the team spirit. He could see its advantages. He could also see that the scientific, psychological and technical staff of Ridforce needed that feeling of importance and necessity to bolster their own awareness that they stayed in the rear and let the operators, men like Robin Carver, go out up the sharp end.

He glanced across at the second pallet. James McLellan Partridge lay there, lax and limp, awaiting the onset of rigor mortis, a man past caring about the grey worries of his grey life. The tech slipped the sensing lobes from Partridge’s temples, let the spring coil the lead back to their hook on the front cover plate of the equipment banked against the walls of the hovervan. The sensing lobes snapped into place alongside the pair that had enwrapped Carver’s head. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the pallet.

As always, orientation had come swiftly for Carver so that he could carry out the rest of his duties immediately, unlike some otherwise first-class operators who reacted slowly to their return to real life from the dead.

That remark of his about Partridge being a zombie bothered him as he stood up and brushed a hand across his head, smoothing down the brown hair ruffled by the sensing lobes. Partridge had been, of course. But in a very different sense, so was Carver, too.



The tech had pushed the green finished button. Carver glanced around this most holy of holies, seeing the van’s walls, windowless and forged from armoured beryl steel, massed with equipment the function of which he understood only as an end product as it affected himself.

“Everything all right, sir?” The tech quite obviously spoke with an effort. Carver’s brusque words had done more damage than he had realised and at once he felt ashamed, annoyed with himself for his own clumsiness.

“Yes. Yes, I’m perfectly all right. You’ll soon get used to having your head snapped off when we return. It doesn’t mean anything.” Carver smiled, the unfamiliar action obscurely pleasant. “And it helps to return to a pretty face and know that the mind behind is working for you.”

“Why—I mean—that is—” She was saved, mercifully, from saying anything else by the abrupt entrance of Cy Adams. He shoved the connecting door to the lobby of the van open and strode briskly in, his round face beaming and his shock of wiry black hair bouncing with the violence of his movements.

“You’re back, Robin! Good. Good. Everything’s set up outside. Just let me have a look at you …”

Adams, as the unit’s psychiatrist and general father confessor, must by regulations check a returning operator first. Even now, with Ridforce well into its second decade of operations, the unknown still encompassed them and tripped them up. All the machines in the world and all men’s complicated planning couldn’t hold off the baleful laws of chance a full hundred percent. Carver lay back and let Adams go ahead.

“You’re back quicker than we expected. When Marjie here pushed the green finished button I was about to start a thick bacon sandwich. Where were you born?”

“The Old Oast, Brenchley, Kent. Sorry about the bacon sandwich, Cy. Poor Partridge didn’t have much time before he died—not that that is vital—but he just functioned on an extremely low level, even for a city dweller.”

“The city’s not too bad a place, Robin. When?”

“Twenty-sixth August, eighty-nine. And you didn’t send me a card last birthday.”

“Thought you’d reached the time of life when you’d want to stop counting. Was Partridge married?”

“Yes. And take it easy with the old age sympathy—I’m only approaching the forties—”

“You seem in command, Robin. But—but I don’t know—What happened to your wife? Your wife?”

“She ran—hey, now, wait a minute …”

“What happened to your wife, Robin?”

“She ran away.” Mere simple statements in answer to straight questions couldn’t suffice now; asked to prove that he still regarded himself as Robin Carver, prodded by questions until a lid popped, he spoke on, rapidly and feverishly. “She ran off. After we’d been married eighteen months. With a satellite electronics engineer. Left me holding the baby. Her name, you want? I’ll tell you the name of the conniving, snivelling, deceitful little—”

Adams held up a hand, his face quite unalarmed by the outburst. “That’s enough, Robin. Easy, lad, easy …”

“What’s that?” Carver slowed down. He put a hand to his cheek, a hand that trembled. “Sorry, Cy—silly of me to blow my top like that. Just, somehow—”

“I know, old son. Forget it. You had a raw deal out of life but you’re over it now. Or if you’re not then you should be. All I want right now is to know that you still are Robin Carver. No, not that, exactly. You are Robin Carver, of course, we must be sure you know that too.” Adams reached down a hand and hauled Carver off the pallet. “Come on. They’re waiting. I know you only had a short trip but that, strangely enough, is a very good reason for quizzing you just that extra bit more.”



Carver stood up and reached across to the peg for his jacket. “Oh?”

“Sure thing.” Adams was pushing the connecting door open. “Sometimes these short trips give an operator the biggest kick of all. Disorientation is so subtle it can strike unnoticed. After you.”

Carver walked out into the lobby and through to the second, interrogation van, settling his jacket about his shoulders. Adams was the head shrinker. He ought to know.

He stepped into a bright actinic light falling across the desk and chair, the easel, the ident-books, the filing cabinets and radio equipment. Soames, Detective on Watch, looked up, his hard craggy face intent beneath tufty grey eyebrows. “D’you see him, Robin?”

“Yes. Two of ’em—boy and girl. Withits—”

“Oh, for gosh sakes!” Soames pushed his hat back and looked his disgust. “Not them again!”

At his side Rawlinson, second detective, shook out a pack of cigarettes moodily. He stared at the polished metal floor of the van, skimpily carpeted. “If it’s not the Withits, it’s the Slashers—or a dozen other stupid and vicious teen-age status symbol organisations. They all should be stuck against a wall and be shot.”

“Well, now, Charlie …” Soames was the father of a teen-age girl and boy, children born late in his marriage, and quite clearly Carver could see the battle going on in Soames’ opinions. “Seems there are teen-agers and teenagers.”

Charlie Rawlinson stuck the cigarette in his mouth. He did not look up and the cigarette bobbed as he spoke. “Your kids are okay, Bob. You know that. I know that. But these Withits, now—they’re petty little criminals—”

“Not so petty,” Carver interrupted. He walked across to the easel and sat down, stared thoughtfully at the sheet of white paper ready and waiting. “Not now. Two With its murdered Partridge.” He picked up a pencil, began to draw with a swift light touch. “Two. Boy and girl. Marv and Belle. Belle asked Marv if she could do it and Marv agreed. They acted like he was doing her a great favour allowing her to murder the man.” Under his rapidly moving pencil the face and figure of Belle began to take recognisable shape. “He wanted to do it himself, that was clear. But she asked him and he let her, just as though she’d asked if she could ride his hoverscooter for the kicks.”

Soames was writing in the log, filling in the details in orderly fashion as Carver related them.

Carver picked up brushes, holding three at a time in his left hand, drawing one to needle sharpness in the poster paint with his right hand and filling in Belle’s picture with deft touches of colour. He liked this part of the job. This was creation—or rather re-creation—with a purpose.

His finely cut features showed his intensity of concentration as his eidetic memory brought up fact after fact, channeled them through to his eyes and fingers, wrought Belle’s and Marv’s images on the paper. He sat back. “There they are. Pitiful pair, yes? But they really enjoyed pushing that knife into Partridge’s guts.”

“Why’d they kill him, Robin?” asked Soames.

Carver wiped the brushes carefully. “If I said no reason I’d be wrong. No reason that makes sense to a policeman seeking a murderer with a motive he can understand. But Cy would know. They did it—” Carver paused, thinking back to that moment of death zero in the saffron-sheened alley. “This is the kick I crave!” Belle had said. “They did it,” he said at last, slowly. “They did it for kicks.”

Their reaction surprised him.

Rawlinson made a short sound of disgust.



Soames—Soames leaned back in his chair behind the desk and nodded thoughtfully, tapping the pencil against his nose. Then he said slowly: “It’s beg. . .