Terrors by Richard A. Lupoff Page B

pulled over. He and Barney jumped from the cab and raced to the river bank. The front end of the bus had smashed through the ice covering the river and the buswas slowly sinking through the opening. Barney was able to wrench open the bus’s emergency door and clamber in, only to find his teammates dead white and ice cold. As he stood, horrified, he felt the strong hands of the cab driver seize him by collar and elbow and drag him from the doomed bus seconds before it sank through the ice.
    Neither Barney nor his rescuer noticed the stream of tiny whitespecks that flowed from the open emergency door and across the cracked ice.
    By the time derricks pulled the bus from the icy water, there were no survivors. The cadavers were transported to the City Morgue, with all-too-familiar results.
    Meanwhile, in a penthouse suite atop the Central Railroad Tower, a usually graceful figure bent over a dizzying array of electrical devices. Needles swung onmeters. Bright points skittered erratically across the faces of vacuum tubes that resembled miniature motion picture screens. A typewriter seemed to operate itself, clattering out columns of figures. To the casual observer, it might have been powered by a ghost, but in fact it was connected by a heavy cable to one of the most advanced scientific analyzers ever built by human hands.
    The figurebent over these devices was clad in a white scientist’stunic. Her dark countenance and glossy hair stood in shocking contrast to her clothing.
    She looked away from a panel of meters, studied the columns of figures produced by the typewriter, and turned toward a large-scale grid-map of Seacoast City. In the center of the map, the gridwork of city streets and tall buildings was interrupted bythe world-famous Molly Pitcher Park and its shimmering Poseidon Pond. In happier times, lovers paddled boats on the surface of the Pond while artists stood at their easels, striving to capture the beauty of this man-made speck of paradise. Now the Pond was frozen and children skated on its smooth surface.
    The white-coated figure placed a pair of sensitive earphones over her head. She stared atthe map, moving her head ever so slightly to the left or the right, up or down. What she had discovered seemed unbelievable, but she knew it was true.
    The mysterious signal from Lord Gorgon and his superior, The Scorpion Queen, seemed to be coming from Poseidon Pond. More precisely, as the white-clad scientist’s devices showed, it was coming from directly beneath the Pond.
    The white-clad scientistreturned to her former position. She flicked a series of switches, then turned a carefully calibrated control. A peculiar light played upon her, or perhaps the suggestion of a light. It might have been a deep orange in tint, or then again it might have been something at the violet end of spectrum, something that teased the optic nerve, hinting at shades and images better left unimagined.
    Oneof the vacuum tubes before the scientist came to life. Within it could be seen the face of a woman. Her skin was deathly white, her lips a dark crimson. Her eyes had just the slightest suggestion of the Orient in their shape; their color was that of fine emeralds. She wore a shimmering, high-necked garment, decorated with sinuous embroidery. But most striking was her hair, which seemed to waver andwrithe with a life all its own, suggestive of Medusa, the snake-headed sorceress of myth.
    “Nzambi,” the figure hissed, “I have heard of you and your work. I have seen your image in news reports. What is it that you wish?”
    “You are The Scorpion Queen?” the white-coated woman asked.
    “I am. And I am busy. State your business, Nzambi.”
    “You are the cause of the cold wave. You and your henchman,Lord Gorgon. You have demanded that your terms be met, but you havenot stated your demands. Do so now.”
    The snake-haired figure laughed derisively. “There are no terms, Nzambi. I was merely toying with those fools in City Hall, and