Date: Thu, 27 Apr 1995 13:26:46 +0100 Reply-To: MB Overton Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: MB Overton Subject: "Atlantic Games" Part 4 "Atlantic Games" Part 4 by Mark Overton 20th July 1976 20:30 Quill hesitated. "What?" "Everybody has to answer this kind of call," the Magician said, doing her best to look faintly embarrassed at the same time. "Please." Quill nodded slowly. "Alright. I guess if you've been in the sea nine years.." "Exactly." The Magician stood up carefully, not making any sudden moves that might startle Quill into pulling the trigger. "Which way?" "Back through the door." The Magician moved to the crew-room door and pulled it open. As she did so, she gently kicked the base of the door with her foot. The rivet she'd loosened fell off immediately, clattering loudly as it fell to the floor. Quill's eyes instinctively moved downwards and the Magician seized her chance. She sank her foot into his stomach and, as he staggered back, spun round and snatched the pistol away. Quill fell back against the wall of the crew-room, coughing, and the Magician examined the gun. "A pity it doesn't have a silencer," she said. "Still, I expect the noise of the storm'll help me." "Don't - please!" Quill gasped. "I've got a wife at home. We've only been married a year. She's expecting a child, for Christ's sakes!" "How sweet," the Magician said, and shot him calmly through the head. The bullet exited out the back of his skull seconds later, bringing with it a spray of blood and brain tissue, spattering the wall behind as the corpse toppled bonelessly to the floor with a dull thud. The Magician re-cocked the gun and left the crew-room without looking back, pulling the door shut. She had others to kill. Easton pushed open the door of the hold and looked around inside. "Hello? Andrew? You in here?" He spotted Penner almost immediately, lying unconscious near the hull, and leapt to the obvious conclusion that the dead woman they had picked up was somehow responsible for this. With a mental curse, he scuttled over the fishy floor to crouch beside his fellow sailor's body, and turned him over. After checking that there was indeed a pulse there, Easton slapped Penner gently round the face. "Come on Andrew," he said aloud. "Wake up." "Uhh..." "Wake up, Andrew." Penner's eyes flickered. "What's going on?" "That woman's come back to life," Easton said briefly. "Sit up, that's it. You okay?" "Uh - yeah, I think so." Penner rubbed a hand against his forehead. "What d'you mean, the woman's come back to life? The dead one?" "What other kind could come back to life?" Easton asked edgily. "Yeah, that one. She's up in the crew-room, Rob's guarding her now." Penner got to his feet. "Yeah. Look over there, that's the dress she was wearing. Must've been a shock when she turned up naked." "She wasn't naked," Easton said, mystified. "She was wearing a jumper and - " His voice tailed off as he and Penner realised the same thing at the same time. "Those are Andrei's clothes," Penner said slowly. Easton shivered. "Then she must have - " "But how? Where's the body?" Penner swung round, surveying the hold briefly. "There's nowhere that she could - " He stopped and looked at the huge mass of fish with foreboding. "Oh shit." "Good evening again," the Magician said breezily from the doorway, and shot them both in the back. As the bodies fell to the ground with a thud from the fish, she pulled the hold door closed and barred it. The longer the bodies remained undiscovered, the better. 23rd July 1976 13:11 Connor turned away from the railings and pushed his way back through the crowd until he was away and walking towards the stern of the big cruise liner, ignoring the general rush to get and see what the explosion had been - the noise had obviously penetrated to below decks. As he passed one of the other lifeboats it started to lower itself, operating on automatic from the bridge; a door opened nearby and several seamen rushed out, throwing a rope ladder over the side of the ship. Connor knew it would probably be useless sending anyone else out towards the rapidly-sinking trawler - after all, the explosion had practically separated the ship in two - but he also knew that the seamen would need to try. Several of their comrades had been torn apart in the detonation. As he reached the rear of the cruise liner, where the swimming pool was, he felt the familiar shiver creep up and down his spine; the chill and the buzz that signified the presence of another immortal in the area. Connor ignored it; he knew who the immortal was. Skirting two attractive young women in bikinis who were sunning themselves beside the swimming pool which dominated the stern of the Empress, Connor crossed to where a small slightly scruffy figure was sipping a drink and staring at the aforementioned two women. "The trawler just blew up," he reported, seating himself on a sun lounger. "I told you so," Flint observed, setting the drink down on a table between the two of them. He scratched the designer stubble around his cheeks and chin thoughtfully. "Sounds like you were right about it being the Magician, though." "I knew it was," Connor said grim-faced, looking at the calm blue chlorinated waters of the cruise liner's swimming pool. "It had her written all over it." Flint lowered the sunglasses he was wearing slightly in order to stare across at Connor. Though the Scotsman looked in his early thirties and Flint about ten years younger, the latter was at least five thousand years older than the former. "You sound like you've met her before as well." "Twice." Connor rested his chin on his hand. "Once in Russia, once in England. Both times I barely escaped with my own head, much less hers." Flint pushed his sunglasses back up. "People have been trying to take her head for centuries, ever since she first showed up on the Game board," he observed. "There's no shame in being one of those. Everyone's failed so far." He smiled. "Obviously enough, since she's still alive." "She's killed enough people to get the whole world after her," Connor muttered, in a voice that was as close to growling as he got. "I want her. I want her bad." "Go after then," Flint said. "She'll be onboard by now." Connor nodded grimly. "I will. I promise you that." The Magician strolled lazily down a corridor of the Empress and paused to admire herself in the mirror. Catching a young woman alone in a corridor had been a stroke of luck, especially since it had happened almost as soon as she had boarded the cruise liner. A bit of a pressure on a nerve point and then a clothes switch had succeeded in at least a temporary change of identity; and at least the young woman had had good taste in clothes. The Magician continued onwards. She wondered idly if her companion had escaped the explosion. 20th July 1976 21:01 Dallas stepped back onto the lower deck of the trawler and closed the door grimly. Captain Myles had to be told about the wheel-house explosion as soon as possible, and as soon as morninglight came they would be sending up a distress call. First, though, she intended to go to the crew-room and relieve Rob Quill from holding the resurrected woman at gunpoint; the woman was obviously more deadly than she had seemed, if she had killed Trenton, and Dallas knew she would feel more comfortable if she herself was holding the gun rather than the less experienced Quill. She put her hand on the crew-room door. Her vision blurred and she convulsed as the electric charge from the metal door, carried by the wires from the dismembered socket by her feet, forced hundreds of volts up and down her body. Her skin fused to the doorhandle and she felt her hair begin to shrivel. Dimly she heard a scream and realised it was herself. Suddenly the current vanished and she dropped twitching to the deck, her limbs spasming out of control. Dallas struggled to hold onto consciousness. Hands touched her and she fought to keep from screaming aloud again, until she realised it was Myles and Waterfield, expressions of fright and concern on their faces. Dallas wanted to reassure them, to tell them it was alright, but the words wouldn't come. She heard footsteps, wanted to warn them, but the words wouldn't come. "Ah, there you are," she heard the dead woman say. "Stay back!" Myles snarled. Dallas was dropped to the deck with a thud that made her head ring and vision blur, and for a moment she almost lost consciousness. When she regained her faculties, Myles was pointing the other gun on the ship - a big shotgun - at the woman, who held the black pistol that Quill had been using. Dallas had no need to guess who was responsible for electrifying the door. "A Mexican stand-off," the Magician observed. "Blow her head off," Waterfield urged. "But which one of you dies?" the Magician asked. "I can shoot one of you before he shoots me. Which one's going to die?" "Nobody's dying." Myles' finger whitened on the trigger and the shotgun roared. Dallas never even saw the Magician move, but somehow the latter was a foot to one side, and the shotgun blew a hole in the bulkhead. A shocked expression crossed Myles face just as the Magician fired the pistol, catching him in the shoulder just above the heart. The captain screamed, a sound that tore at Dallas' heart, and fell back. Waterfield snatched the shotgun from him and started to turn just as the Magician blew her head off. Silence reigned in the corridor. "Well now, that was lucky," the Magician observed, breathing hard and seeming for the first time a little exhausted. She crossed over to Dallas, who was just beginning to move again, and looked down at her. "I've killed five people with this gun this evening, in - let's see - about half an hour. That's probably a record." "Go...to...hell," Dallas managed. "Probably," the Magician agreed. "But you might get there first." She pulled apart Dallas' shirt and put the cold barrel of the gun against the other woman's heart. Dallas looked back at her coldly. "I don't care about dying," the sailor said. "Who said anything about dying? See you in a couple of hours," the Magician said, and pulled the trigger. Dallas jerked once and was still. Rising, the Magician tossed the gun away and considered the motionless body in front of her. She had known the moment she walked in that Dallas was a pre-immortal, and almost from the beginning the idea that she might teach a newcomer the Rules was amusing. The Magician sat down to wait for Dallas to recover. She felt the Quickening force begin to stir in the corpse and for a moment was almost tempted to take the woman's head. But she might as well do something different for once. As Dallas began to return to life the Magician started to whistle a tune. ..to be continued.. =========================================================================