Read Live and Let Drood for Free Online

to bring the whole thing down. Once, I wouldn’t have given a damn, but not having my armour was making me cautious. The trapdoor opening revealed an unfamiliar set of stone steps leading down into gloom. Old, scuffed steps, polished smooth by much hard use. The stairs had clearly been there a long time. I led the way down, with Molly treading close on my heels and peering over my shoulder. I was just as fascinated as she was. We were in new territory now, and for the first time I began to wonder if things really were as they appeared to be.
    The stairs gave entrance to the Armoury, which looked exactly as I remembered it. The family had set up its Armoury in what used to be, centuries earlier, the old wine cellars. The heavy, specially reinforced blast-proof door was intact, but once again it hung partway open. I squeezed through the gap between the door and the frame, with Molly pressing so close behind me that she was breathing heavily down my neck.
    The lights flickered on as we entered the Armoury proper. It’s really just a long series of interconnected stone chambers with bare plastered walls, curved ceilings high above, and mile upon mile of multicoloured wiring tacked carelessly into place across the walls, crisscrossing in patterns that may or may not have meant something to somebody at some time. All the overhead fluorescent lights were working, but I realised immediately that I couldn’t hear the usual strained sounds of the air-conditioning. The air was stale, but there was no smell of smoke or sign of fire damage.
    “I don’t see any signs of a firefight,” said Molly, looking quickly about her. “No bullet holes, no energy burns or anything more extreme to suggest the people here fought back…”
    “No,” I said. “But there has been a hell of a lot of looting. Look at all the gaps.…I’m not seeing half the things I should be seeing. No computers, no weapons. Even the shooting range is empty. It’s all so quiet.…I don’t think I’ve ever heard the Armoury this quiet before. There was always something going on; Uncle Jack or his assistants working on some new way to blow themselves and everybody else up. It’s eerie.…”
    I walked slowly between deserted workstations and abandoned testing grounds that should have been full of loud noises and general excitement as Uncle Jack’s technicians happily risked their own lives and others’ testing appalling new weapons of mass disturbance. Nothing had been destroyed in the Armoury, unlike in the War Room or the Operations Room, but the enemy had stripped the place clean. They hadn’t been interested in precious pieces of art that would have sold for millions, but state-of-the-art weapons? Those were different. I checked everywhere, but there were no golden-armoured bodies, no heads on spikes, not even a splash of dried blood. A few things had been overturned here and there, but no signs of any struggle. Which was just…wrong. No matter what the odds or the threats, Uncle Jack and his lab rats would have fought to the last to keep the Armoury out of the hands of our enemies. Hell, Uncle Jack would have blown the whole place up before he’d risk letting Drood weapons fall into the wrong hands. So why didn’t he?
    I stopped and looked about me in frustration. “This would have broken Uncle Jack’s heart,” I said finally. “To see his precious Armoury stripped bare…”
    Molly nodded understandingly. “The Armoury was always his pride and joy. Eddie, the information in his head would have made him invaluable. Do you think… ?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to think anymore. Hello. What’s this?”
    I knelt down beside a workstation. Something had caught my eye, but I wasn’t sure what. It turned out to be a small black blob on the floor. Molly crouched down beside me, looked at the blob and then looked at me.
    “All right; I’ll bite. What’s so significant about a small black blobby thing? What is