Just Another Judgement Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

cover us. Suzie swept her shotgun back and forth, looking for a useful target, knowing she was outnumbered and outgunned, but refusing to be intimidated. I was intimidated, but I made a point of striking a defiantly casual pose, while waiting for the puppet master to show himself.
     
    Whoever ran the nurses wouldn’t miss an opportunity to gloat over the capture of two such famous faces as Suzie Shooter and John Taylor. If he’d been sensible, he’d have had the nurses shoot on sight, but the bigger the ego, the bigger the need to show off.
     
    And sure enough, the crowd of bamboo nurses suddenly broke apart, silently opening a central aisle for their lord and master to make his entrance. Surprisingly, it was no-one I knew. Not one of the Major Players, not even one of the more ambitious up-and-comers. The man striding quite casually through his army of bamboo nurses was entirely unknown to me, and that doesn’t happen often in the Nightside.
     
    He was tall, well made, well dressed, in a rich cream suit; the kind usually favoured by remittance men banished by their families to hot and far-away places. At first I thought he was a young man, but the closer he got the more the little tell-tale details gave him away. The skin of his face was too tight, too taut, and his eyes were very old. Old and cold. His smile was a dead, mirthless thing, meant to frighten. This was a man who had seen the world, found it wanting, and taken his revenge. His movements had the surety and control that only comes from age and experience, and he walked like a wolf in a world of sheep. He had large, powerful hands, with long, slender fingers—surgeons’ hands. And for all his grace, there was no mistaking the sheer brute power of his wide shoulders and barrel chest. He finally came to a halt, a respectful distance away, nodded to me and smiled at Suzie, ignoring the shotgun she was levelling on his chest.
     
    “The famous John Taylor and the infamous Shotgun Suzie,” he said, in a rich, deep voice with just a hint of an unfamiliar accent. “Well. I am honoured. I should have known that if anyone would find me out, it would be you.” He laughed briefly, as though at some private joke. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Frankenstein. Baron Viktor von Frankenstein.”
     
    He said it as though expecting a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder in the background. I didn’t quite laugh in his face.
     
    “That’s a not uncommon name in the Nightside,” I said. “The place is lousy with Frankensteins. I don’t know how many nephews and nieces and grandsons I’ve run into down the years, along with any number of your family’s monstrous creations. You’d think practice would make perfect, but I’ve yet to see any proof of that. They’re nearly always complete fuck-ups. What is it with you and your family, and grave-yards, anyway? I’m sure it was all very cutting-edge, back at the dawn of medical science, messing about with body parts and batteries and cosmic radiation, but the rest of us have moved on. Science has moved on. You people should have gone into transplants and cloning, like everyone else. So you’re another Frankenstein. What relation, exactly?”
     
    “The original,” said the Baron. “The first... to bring life out of death. To take dead meat and make it sit up and talk.”
     
    “Damn,” said Suzie. “Colour me impressed.”
     
    “Doesn’t that make you over two hundred years old?” I said.
     
    The Baron smiled. There was no humour in it, and less warmth. “You can’t spend as long as I have studying life and death in intimate detail and not pick up a few tips on survival.” He looked around him at the rows of patients suffering silently in their beds and smiled again. “My latest venture. I know—voodoo superstitions and medical science aren’t natural partners, but I have learned to make use of anything and everything that can assist me in my researches. Like these bamboo figures. Pretty