KINGDOM OF HELL

The damnation and deception that enslaved humanity was exposed after the earth was razed by a nuclear holocaust. As immortal god kings continue to lay claim to the planet, the epic struggle to repossess Earth rages on. The Cerberus rebels fight for mankind’s free will and enlightened purpose wherever the battle for freedom takes them. But nothing can prepare them for the bloodred shadows of a new, special hell.…

CITY OF BLOOD

After blasting open the gates of the underworld, the Cerberus warriors face a fresh evil. Deep beneath the African continent, a hidden city teems with bloodthirsty creatures ruled by a vicious queen. As her shape-shifting minions swarm to outmaneuver Kane and his allies, the rebels race to contain the unfurling horror. With the undead descending upon Africa, the warriors must escape a destiny far worse than they could ever imagine—as tortured ambassadors for the vampire kingdom.

Lyta could see six figures staggering toward them in the darkness

Kane edged closer to her until they were back to back, surrounded.

“Any plans?” she whispered.

“Make it costly for them,” Kane growled.

Lyta ground her molars, eyes flitting from one creature to the next.

The rifle she carried wasn’t fully automatic, but at this range, against normal human opponents, it unleashed some serious damage.

Against normal human opponents.

She fired as fast as she could pull the trigger and watched as her target staggered in a dance of hammer blows.

When the thing finally toppled, she realized that Kane was no longer at her back. She heard the thud and crunch of fists on flesh, and turned toward a second creature. She tore another salvo of bullets into its face and upper chest, grimacing as this one struggled upstream of her gunfire even as chunks of its head were blasted away.

Necropolis

James Axler

Even the bravest cannot fight beyond his strength.

—Homer,

The Iliad

The Road to Outlands—

From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 1

The yoke hung around Lyta’s neck as she staggered along in the line. Her shoulders were raw and bloody from the weight of the steel collar and the attached chains, which kept her in the queue with the rest of the “tribute.” The collar’s edge sawed into her skin, and each shift of weight as she stepped was a brand-new spike of pain. She kept her composure, the tears having long since dried out, shed for her lost family.

Lyta was nineteen, and just a week ago she’d been tall and athletic, with long blond-frosted curls styled by a friend utilizing peroxide. Now, six days later, she had lost fifteen pounds through sweat, lack of food, even blood loss. Her scalp was covered with slowly healing scars, nicks made when her hair was shorn off by a soldier of the Panthers of Mashona. He’d scraped her from hairline to nape of neck with a sharpened knife, and years of growth and hours of coloring ended up in the dirt, along with slivers of her scalp.

Thankfully, Lyta had been in shock at the time. The Panthers had swooped down on her town, one of many located on the edge of Zambia, close to the dangers posed by various bandit groups. She’d watched as her father was shot through the face, and then the marauders, having slaughtered all the armed opposition, got to the task of preying on the survivors.

Lyta remembered her face jammed into the dirt, cheek abrading against rocks and pebbles in the soil, her eye so filled with grit she couldn’t close it. Thus she was unable to look away as the militiamen grabbed her mother and threw her to the ground.

Lyta saw everything that happened, all the way to her mother’s death, and after it. Even demise was no excuse for the cruel, bloodthirsty thugs to stop having their way with the woman’s remains.

Lyta didn’t think of her own fate. She couldn’t remember anything, or maybe she just wouldn’t remember. Her brain had shut down, and she focused on the agony around her neck, weighing on her shoulders, her collarbone. Maybe someday the memories would surface, but she hoped that they wouldn’t. She only had the memories of being shorn, being stripped, being chained.

The Panthers of Mashona didn’t say why they were herding humans, but Lyta doubted it was for slavery. After the miles they’d gone, the weight she’d lost, she’d be useless for physical labor.

The sun was half of a molten disc in the sky. Sunset had arrived and painted the African skies a rainbow of purple, orange, red and yellow, deep blue at the far end of that spectrum behind her back, Lyta surmised. This part of the countryside was miles and days distant from her home, but here, there seemed to be more pollution, even though they marched away from Zambia, deeper into Mashonan territory.

“All right! Stop!” the whip master shouted.

The queue stumbled to a halt, and bodies bumped against each other.

“Sit!” the whip master ordered.

And there, the group, having been at it for six days, plopped to the ground heavily. Better to get it done and over with in one fell swoop than stretch out the torture of shifting collars and bouncing chains as they gently tried to lower themselves. Links of steel bounced between Lyta’s shoulder blades, and she wondered how much longer her backbone could take such abuse.

Water, filthy and tepid, but water nevertheless, was handed out in ladles. Lyta slurped at the muddy slurry, swallowing and feeling the grit of sand wash down her esophagus. She drank as much as she could in a single gulp; then, as her lips parted, the cup of life-giving moisture was gone.

Lyta’s stomach churned, but she was glad for a lack of food and a minimum of water. That way she wouldn’t have to worry, as days before, about having to relieve herself on the walk.

Above her was the vast expanse of the universe. They’d traveled so far from relative civilization that instead of a black night, they were beneath a swirl of stars. The spine of the Milky Way looked like a scattering of diamonds across black felt.

Lyta wanted to sleep, but as she stared into the infinite night above her, her mind drifted to the world she’d occupied only a week ago.

It had been a world where she’d read every night, even after being with her fiancé, Usain. It had been a place where she’d had a future in telecommunications. For decades, Zambia and Harare had shared a wealth of radios stored in the depths of some underground facilities along the Zambezi River. The two nation-states used the hydroelectric power of the dams to keep their cities modern. The urgency to keep the two entities in the technological manner that they’d become accustomed to had been the impetus to discard the last remnants of pre-twentieth-century prejudices about women’s places in society and the broadening of the education system.

Trying to keep a relative island of paradise, or even just normalcy, in the middle of a region as tumultuous as theirs was a full-time job for the military forces of Zambia and Harare. Most of Lyta’s electronics training came from a two-year stint in the army, learning her support role and apprenticing to more highly trained experts, all the while being taught the theories necessary to give her a basic grounding. With the actual science rolling around between her ears, as well as math and physics, she had the tools available to improve on the present technology.

That was something that Zambia needed desperately. Zambia and Harare weren’t in a race against each other. Mashona, on the other hand, was a large region with little in the way of central government, defined now more by the Panthers militia than anything else, and even then, the bandit army was still in contention with smaller gangs and individual madmen who sought domination. Because Zambia and Harare cooperated but didn’t try to become a whole nation, they were able to support each other while the forces of chaos were fragmented, pitted against their neighbors.

Maybe that’s what we’re here for. We’re going to be the ingredients for the glue that makes the Panthers of Mashona into the only game in town.

Lyta looked to the stars, her mind turning that theory over and over.

So who would want nearly dead people? she asked herself. How could I, as I stand now, be of any worth to a force that would provide this militia with the undisputed position of power in this region?

She gave her lower lip a bite. Things moved around her, but the damned steel collar left her with only one position to look—straight up. Lyta had long since gotten used to the sound of boots crunching on the stalks of long grasses, the snap of twigs and the grinding of dirt as guards paced up and down the line, making certain that their cargo of the walking damned stayed in place.

Odd that the guards are not interested in taking a little ass while we’re lined up like this.

The Mashonan soldiers didn’t want to assert themselves over this queue of the doomed. They didn’t need to feel the kind of cruel control that rape provided. They had control. They had the power. There wasn’t a shred of weakness in the gunmen who lorded their might over this hungry, thirsty, battered mob. They didn’t feel like they needed to be violent, to crush them.

Maybe it’s the collars.

Lyta took a deep breath.

“We’re human sacrifices.” The man behind her spoke softly, a whisper that was so light, if it needed to travel another inch, it would have been swept away by the night breeze. “The old gods awaken. And they hunger.”

Lyta peered at the speaker out of the corner of her eye. She couldn’t make out any physical details. None of the people shared names with each other, as they hadn’t been allowed to by their guards. The only details she could distinguish were the back of the man’s head in front of her, the breadth of his shoulders and the signs of scars woven across his flesh.

No one else had a face.

The man before her could have been Usain. He was of the right height, but those knives had taken the hair off everyone, and whips and swagger sticks had left wounds on shoulders and backs, changing the familiar terrain so that even Lyta couldn’t tell who he was.

And the yokes prevented speech easily even without the menace of the whip.

Lyta was alone. Everyone was alone in this line. There was no more sense of community. The chains and collars took away every chance of intimacy and communication.

And again, we return to the theme of communication. The guards discourage it, prevent it, grind it into the ground. They don’t need it, and they want no one else to have it.

“The gods want us to remember that we humans are alone.” The man’s whispers returned.

It sounded as if he were reading from an ancient book, occasionally stopping to paraphrase to his listener for clarity. Lyta strained to get a look at him. His voice was old, raspy, weathered.

But no, she couldn’t without turning her head.

Lyta ground her molars against her tongue and twisted her head just an inch. Just an inch, and she felt the collar cut into her neck like a hot knife, shredding the skin of her throat and upper chest as she forced herself to get a good look at the man she assumed was speaking.

It was a young boy, no older than fourteen. Too old to be taken to the rape camps for education as a child soldier, too young to have the experience and skills necessary to be put into forced labor.

And he was asleep. Beyond him, there was a woman, and another woman beyond that.

There was no one who matched the voice that had tickled her ear, threading legends from ancient times. Lyta straightened her gaze up to the sky.

The agony of just that slight movement, holding her head to see who was talking, had all been in vain. And it stole the last dregs of strength she had for the day.

She closed her eyes, wishing that her sleep would be eternal.

Now is not the time for any to sleep. Death will die, and the Queen awakens, stirring from her millennial slumber.

Lyta opened her eyes again.

And as she did, she looked up into a pair of catlike eyes, slitted in the middle, amber wreathing the narrow flames, and a flat face framed by a cobra-hood of muscle flexing in sheets from top of head to shoulders.

Before Lyta could open her mouth to scream, scaled fingers covered her lips, and a hiss issued from his.

Chapter 2

As always when the Cerberus warriors said goodbye to those whom they’d assisted, the parting moments were filled with a quiet sadness and embraces that seemed to last a moment too long. Of course, Brigid Baptiste might have had a biased view of those hugs, especially since she realized that she was an attractive and desirable woman. She’d noticed that among the other women they’d traveled with, too: Domi and Sinclair were offered extended and enthusiastic embraces by the Zambian soldiers. Meanwhile, Kane and Grant kept their farewells to hearty handshakes.

“Ah, dear Brigid, your presence here in our little outpost has been an experience,” Lomon said. “I wish it were all delightful...”

“I understand,” Brigid responded. “You and your men have been excellent hosts. We’ll miss you.”

Lomon nodded. His eyes glazed for a moment as he thought of the past couple of days and the losses incurred. They had come under the assault of a pair of groups; each had taken turns at controlling the strange clone hybrids called the Kongamato. The Kongamato, named after an African cryptid, were brutish, powerful winged creatures that were equal parts bat and gorilla. They had killed a great number of Zambian troops, first the outpost defenders at the power station attached to the redoubt, and then a company of soldiers who had been on their way to relieve the besieged trio of survivors.

“Don’t worry,” Brigid spoke up, breaking the elder Zambian soldier from his recollection of the horrors he’d endured. “We’ll find the ones responsible.”

Lomon rested a hand on her shoulder. “I wish I could send an army with you, girl.”

Brigid smiled, looking toward her companions, former Cobaltville Magistrates Kane and Grant. “We’ve taken care of armies before. I doubt that Durga has that much of a force left. The Millennium Consortium members were wiped out, and Gamal and the Panthers of Mashona turned out to be using him as a distraction.”

Brigid wanted to feel regret over the deaths of the members of the Millennium Consortium betrayed and murdered by Makoba, but there had been more than sufficient bad blood between the millennialists and Cerberus over the past couple of years that all she could manage was disappointment at the consortium’s vetting process for new members. Even then, she wasn’t too surprised at the millennialists picking the wrong person for the job. Austin Fargo and Erica van Sloan both boasted affiliations with the assembly of technocrats who sought to create their own new world order.

This time, the Millennium Consortium had thrown in their lot with Durga, the fallen prince of the Nagah, as both parties searched Africa for Annunaki wonders and ancient technology. In the process, the combined force had stumbled on a subterranean facility attached to the Victoria Falls redoubt that had a breed of mutants inside it to serve as their new shock troops.

Durga had maintained control of the monstrosities, but only for a brief period of time, until an African named Makoba had betrayed both the Nagah prince and the Millennium Consortium by stealing the control “crown.” Makoba was the brother of a local warlord, Gamal, who himself had already discovered the technology to control the Kongamato and had usurped control of them. With a major contingent of Panthers of Mashona soldiers and the means of growing an entire army of winged horrors, Gamal had been poised to conquer the continent of Africa.

Unfortunately for the deadly warlord, Gamal had run straight into the heroes of Cerberus redoubt. Grant and Brigid had disarmed Gamal of his control system, and Kane had set off a self-destruct after the Kongamato horde was summoned back to their birthplace. The self-destruct brought down the cloning facility and the winged monsters with a blast nearly as powerful as a nuclear weapon.

The threat of an army of cloned winged horrors was ended, as well as the more conventional threat of Gamal’s forces, thanks to planning, positioning and surprise on the part of the Cerberus operatives. With grenades and precision rifle fire, they’d scattered the bandit army, then watched as an ally wrested control of the creatures to send them to their doom in the self-destruction of the cloning facility.

That ally walked outside the group, standing at the edge of the Victoria Falls hydroelectric power station. Thurpa was freshly healed from major injuries inflicted by the ancient artifact that had brought Kane running to Africa. Thurpa himself was an artifact, a member of the Indian Nagah, a race created by the benign Annunaki Enki to watch over the subcontinent of India.

He’d come, one of the fallen prince Durga’s last followers, as an emissary for the crippled regent. Thurpa had been a true believer, having a low opinion of the Westerners who made up the bulk of the consortium gunmen who’d joined in this African trek.

And then the millennialist Makoba usurped Durga’s control of the Kongamato, and Thurpa was wounded, on the run, about to be killed by his prince’s perfect living weapon. What had saved him was the intervention of Kane and his allies.

Thurpa had gone from contempt for mammals—as he called normal humans despite his half-mammalian DNA—to a new appreciation for people. Kane and the others had protected him, had trusted him more than they trusted one of their own human companions, had nursed him back to health. Then when it came time to engage in final combat with the Kongamato, Thurpa had only barely survived Makoba’s betrayal of the millennialists to Gamal. Had it not been for the warlord summoning all the winged horrors to aid him against Grant and Brigid and the other Cerberus Away Team, Makoba would have killed the last of the Zambians.

With only a rifle, Makoba had taken one of the injured men hostage, only to be ambushed by Thurpa and beaten to death with a length of steel rebar. It was then that Thurpa and Lomon had combined their wits to take the stolen control headset and work with the Cerberus heroes to send the beasts to their doom.

After that, Thurpa had denied the newly healed and awakened Durga’s demand to rejoin him. The fallen prince had teleported away, using an Annunaki relic, abandoning Thurpa in a strange land among strangers.

Brigid and Lomon walked toward the Nagah man. He was wearing a pair of Zambian uniform pants that replaced his standard clothing. Thurpa’s upper body was covered with iridescent scales, predominately bronze in hue, but there were other glimmers of color along them, as well as black striped designs. His chest was plated in heavy panels of the same scales, only larger. Those same scales were present on the soles of his feet, as thick and durable as any boot. Had he worn a shirt, he might even have seemed fully human, except for his head and the hood of sheeted muscle that flexed between his shoulders and the sides of his head. His scaled face was fine featured, flat nosed, with yellow-amber jewels for eyes; the pupils were slits that adjusted to brightness by widening or turning to mere slivers.

“You are welcome to stay among us, Thurpa,” Lomon offered for what was the eighteenth time in the past day, by Brigid’s eidetic recollection. There may have been instances when she hadn’t been present to hear such a request.

Thurpa looked to the elder officer. “I’m honored. And I’d love to return, but there’s a lot of damage I feel I have to undo.”

“Helping the injured and rescuing Jonas went a long way,” Lomon said.

Thurpa smiled weakly. “It doesn’t feel like far enough.”

“We’re honored to have you with us,” Brigid said. She offered her hand.

The young Nagah accepted the hand. His palm and finger plates were smooth, supple and slightly warm, a sign of his mammalian metabolism. He still seemed uncomfortable around people, and Brigid could empathize. Her intellect had isolated her when dealing with others in years gone by. Only since she’d thrown herself into the world as one of the exiles from Cobaltville, adventuring around the world, had she lost her self-consciousness. Even so, there were times when she felt like an alien in the room; others did not possess her perfect recall.

Extrapolating that outsider’s discomfort with an inhuman exterior appearance must have been a crushing bit of alienation.

What made it all the more painful was Thurpa had aligned himself with Durga, a traitor and murderer, responsible for the deaths of many of his people and intense suffering. Returning home would be just as alienating. People would remember.

And they would shun him at the very least. At worst, his life would be in constant peril.

Maybe the Cerberus redoubt would be a good place for Thurpa, and, ultimately, Brigid would invite him to become a part of their ragtag family of misfits, exiles and refugees. But for now they needed him and his knowledge here in Africa, especially as CAT Beta had returned to Cerberus in order to protect the redoubt and respond to other emergencies if necessary.

Brigid worried for the young man. Life with her, Kane and Grant was not an easy one, not with all the enemies they’d made. And Thurpa had made himself just as much a target since he’d turned his back on Durga, the very sociopath they were off to chase.

The other newcomer to their little assemblage was Nathan Longa, a young man from the city-state of Harare, in a territory that used to be the nation of Zimbabwe.

“Thank you again for the use of the pickup truck,” Brigid said to Lomon.

“Think of it as repayment for helping us hold the line against the Mashona Panthers,” Lomon replied. “And be thankful that there were enough spare parts from damaged vehicles to keep it running.”

Brigid nodded. “And that it was one which I had read the specs on, including an exploded view.”

Thurpa chuckled. “You and the others exploded enough trucks as it was.”

Grant, six foot four with rippling arms, hefted the first of the last pair of jerricans into the bed of the pickup. He then used both hands to pick up the other. Forty pounds wasn’t much of an effort for the big former Magistrate, but it was still impressive to see his shoulders bulge and flex as he put the cans on board.

Kane opened the nozzle on each and took a whiff before closing and writing on the sides, separating fuel from water. There wasn’t going to be a guarantee of access to fresh and potable water on their journey. The maps and layout of the countryside differed vastly from the current high-altitude satellite photos of the region. The Earthshaker bombs used in the megacull had not been kind to the continent.

“It’s not a Sandcat, but it runs,” Kane pronounced. “Ready to saddle up, cowgirl?”

Brigid chuckled. “Don’t make me regret showing you those old Westerns.”

Kane smiled back, then offered a hand to Nathan and Thurpa and helped them into the bed of the truck with him.

“You ride with Grant,” Kane said. “I’ll enjoy the breeze in my hair.”

Thurpa looked dubious as he rested an arm on the sidewall. “We’re out in the open, aren’t we?”

“It beats walking,” Nathan said. “Besides, Kane will pick up any danger. That’s his thing.”

Thurpa nodded. Lomon and the Zambians had given him sufficient equipment to deal with most threats. He’d gotten a Heckler & Koch G3 rifle with a stock that collapsed, nearly halving the length of the weapon for easier carry and storage, and a Colt .45 automatic, which shared magazines with Nathan Longa’s own pistol. After the conflict with the Kongamato, Lomon knew that Thurpa would need power and mobility. As it was, Thurpa had almost died in hand-to-hand conflict with one of the creatures, saved only by being out of reach and blinding it with his natural cobra venom. The G3 and the .45 would go a long way toward making Thurpa the equal of most challenges.

Especially if he were beside the explorers from Cerberus and the wielder of the Nehushtan.

The trouble with that thought, Brigid mused, is that we’ve got plenty of enemies who shrug off bullets as if they were grains of rice. Even Durga qualified as bulletproof for a moment.

Brigid slid into the cab beside Grant, who took the wheel.

“Heavy thoughts?” Grant asked.

Brigid blinked, then looked at her friend. “Heavy thoughts. Yes. We’re going into uncharted territory in Africa, hunting a man who nearly killed us as he’s searching for the means of returning to godhood. Kane says that he’s hooked up with a queen who was dangerous enough that the Annunaki imprisoned her, rather than kick her off the planet or kill her, and who has enough power to psychically reach out and even pluck people from their bodies. Add to that we’ve got two young men to take care of, because as much training as they’ve had, they haven’t seen a tenth of the shit we have.”

Grant frowned. “You make it seem as if we’re badass just because we’ve fought gods, dinosaurs and living mountains.”

“We had the luck of surviving and outwitting them,” Brigid said. “Remember, a lot of our friends have ended up dead.”

Grant nodded.

“We’ll do our best to protect them. We always do,” Grant said.

Thurpa rapped his knuckle on the window on the back of the pickup’s cab. “You do know Nathan and I can hear you, right?”

“Not doing a lot of good for our confidence on this mission,” Nathan added.

“Hey, we protected Lomon,” Grant countered.

“And defeated an army of winged monsters,” Brigid spoke up.

“We were there,” Nathan said.

Thurpa nodded. “Not totally impressed with the protecting Lomon’s men part. In fact...”

Grant smiled at Thurpa. “You did some protecting yourself, son. Both of you. That’s why we want to keep you with us.”

“Any particular reason why Kane just doesn’t take the stick himself? He utilized it pretty well when we were in the cloning facility,” Nathan inquired.

“Because I’m not used to running around with a walking stick,” Kane replied. He slapped his hand on top of the pickup truck’s cab. “Let’s go.”

“Sure thing, grouch,” Grant returned. He started the engine, and the Cerberus explorers drove away, waving to the Zambian contingent they’d come to befriend.

Brigid returned to her doubts as they drove toward their future reunion with the Nagah prince Durga and whatever horrors he planned to awaken.

Already Nathan had spoken of an assassin who had slain his father, a mysterious, seemingly amorphous entity with translucent skin that shimmered in the firelight.

The killer with no apparent visible features seemed as if it might have been a trick of the mind or the shadows. But Brigid Baptiste knew a thing or two about human perception, as well as the intricacies of memory, especially since hers was completely photographic. Her time as an archivist had only been enhanced by the ability to recall every detail she’d ever seen, and Kane often wondered aloud if she were a “doomie”—a Doomsayer mutant who had some manner of psychic ability. Brigid doubted that she had transcendent mental abilities, but she presumed that her brain chemistry was somehow different, as her recollection skills and natural curiosity served only to increase the ever-growing database between her ears.

That Nathan Longa didn’t have the same kind of intellectual function as she was not an indication of the untrustworthiness of Nathan’s description of the assassin who’d slain his father, the previous protector of Nehushtan. Also, the moment had been one of intense fear and shock, meaning that Nathan’s senses would have been enhanced by adrenaline, his eyes sharper, probably dilated further to gather even more light, so shadowy hints wouldn’t have been so indiscriminate as he’d assumed. Plus, Brigid had gone with Nathan over the incident a couple of times, and she had asked questions about more than visual descriptors. She’d asked about the sounds, the smells, the feel of the room.

The smell of the murderer was something that made Brigid feel that the description as gelatinous had more validity. The thing smelled, according to Nathan, of salt and copper, two major components of blood. A translucent outline with no physical features, backlit by firelight, could easily have been a nontraditional physical entity. Supporting this observation was that it had disappeared in the brief instant that Nathan had looked away from the killer to see his father on the ground.

There were no windows that a full-grown man the bulk of the slayer could escape through, but there was a window open about three inches high. There was the sticky, slurping sound of fluid as the being moved, and Brigid could imagine an entity with no skeletal structure could easily have compressed itself down to three inches to squeeze out the window. She knew that octopi could fit through any opening large enough to accommodate their beaks, the only hard part of their anatomy, and that small rodents with skeletons could flex their bones to fit through openings only half the diameters of their bodies.

That was the cement for Brigid’s assumption of the assassin being a nontraditional physical entity, an expression she’d coined on the spot. Kane had asked her why she didn’t just call it a “blob,” but Brigid was not certain if it was an entirely fluid-based organism, a mollusk-like humanoid or just one with an extremely flexible skeleton as per a mouse.

Brigid coupled the appearance of that creature with Kane’s account of the void entity he had battled while he’d been comatose, left within a prison constructed in his own psyche. He’d also described her—it had taken on a more feminine appearance and addressed itself as “the queen”—as originally an amorphous, almost fluid-formed entity constructed of void. The limited shape-shifting on her part had a similar “feel” to Brigid’s presumptions about the killer who’d slain Nathan’s father.

The similarity between Kane’s psychic opponent and the elder Longa’s assassin was too coincidental for Brigid’s tastes. She’d studied more than enough mythology and parallel stories to realize that if something was vaguely related in the views of two separate people, there might be even stronger ties once exposed to the light of day.

Thurpa had added to the chain of coincidences. There was a strangely hued woman, Neekra, who seemed to come from nowhere, then disappear, and who could peer into Thurpa’s thoughts. She was at once dangerously alluring and viscerally disturbing, and she seemed cast in rust-or cinnamon-hued flesh that flowed easily.

Mind reading. The ability to appear and disappear like the wind. A voluptuous, curvy woman whom Durga had offhandedly referred to as his “queen.” Mind reading would not be too far off from the skill of telepathy and the construction of mental illusions, such as had been the case with Kane’s daylong, coma-like imprisonment.

Kane had described the queen’s interaction with Durga as more seductive than tortuous, as it had been with Kane himself. Thurpa had noted the obvious romantic relations between this very healthy, odd-hued woman and Durga. Right now, Brigid wasn’t entirely certain of who this Neekra was, but she knew full well that she and the queen were as related as the amorphous assassin and Kane’s psychic tormentor were.

Neekra was this woman’s self-appellation, and Brigid immediately returned to the dream wherein Kane had become aware of the artifact Nehushtan and the tales of a Puritan adventurer in the heart of Africa. Neekra matched up with not one but two names: Negari and Nakari—a hidden city and its queen, an immortal, vampirelike queen.

Nathan’s father had died of massive blood loss, and yet there had been very little blood spilled in the Longa home. The smell of blood was quite salty and coppery, Brigid knew from too much experience. Perhaps the reason no blood had been spilled was because it had been ingested, swallowed by the murderer.

Brigid’s mood turned black. A vampire queen and a hidden city.

Before skydark, Africa had been known as the Dark Continent. Now Brigid was certain they were going to find out exactly how dark. And that darkness could swallow them all whole.

Literally, Brigid feared.

Chapter 3

Kane’s mood was not good as he and Grant crept through the forest, closing in on the caravan that had crossed their path. Normally, he wouldn’t have been too interested in another group traveling through the jungle, and they had hidden their pickup truck, parked well off the formation’s route so as not to draw unwanted attention.

The group was armed to the teeth, and they had settled down for the evening not far from where Kane and his companions had set up their camp for the night. Traveling all day by truck was still tiring; there weren’t many roads, and the suspension could only take so much out of the bumps and jolts, especially for those who rode in the bed of the truck.

It was just good strategy for Kane and his allies to scope out a new group before coming out and greeting them, and seeing the column’s armed guards was more than a little unnerving. What made things even more tense was that they wore the uniforms of the Panthers of Mashona, the very militia they had battled back at Victoria Falls. While it was unlikely that Gamal could have communicated with this column, Kane was keen on keeping a low profile.

Well, he had been keen on that low profile.

Then he saw the row of naked Africans lying on the ground, connected to each other by chains and heavily burdened with steel yokes.

“We’re not going to leave well enough alone,” Grant murmured, counting on the Commtact to amplify the words in Kane’s ear.

“Slave traders. Damned straight we’re not leaving this alone,” Kane answered.

Grant nodded. Kane turned to regard his friend, and the massive former Magistrate’s brow wrinkled, knit with a mixture of concern and anger. His drooping gunfighter’s mustache only served to deepen the man’s frown into a grim mask.

Grant had no sense of solidarity with the blacks of Africa. Sure, his skin was dark like theirs, and they shared general facial features, but, culturally, Grant was a product of a world where race and familial history removed ties to anything other than fellow Magistrates. But here, Grant felt for the poor victims, lying immobilized by steel collars on their necks and shoulders, evidenced by the cracked, dried rivulets of blood on their torsos and the raw redness of scraped-off skin near the edges of those inhumane yokes. Kane heard the tendons in his fists pop as he flexed his big hands, and anger swiftly bled away as his eyes flitted from guard to guard.

Like Kane, he was sizing up the armed resistance, thinking of ways to kill the Panthers and to free their prisoners.

“We’re going to have to be very slow and patient,” Grant mused.

“Careful, yeah,” Kane agreed. “Even a silenced Copperhead would draw attention. It’s going to have to be knives and garrotes.”

Grant nodded. Neither Magistrate enjoyed murdering unaware opponents, but such ruthless tactics were going to be a necessity. If just one of the men standing guard over the prisoners suspected that someone was attempting a rescue, the Panthers would open fire, killing the group rather than giving up their treasured human cargo. “My bow, too.”

Kane turned, regarding the big man. “You brought that?”

“A collapsible version,” Grant replied.

Grant’s lover, Shizuka, the leader of the samurai force known as the Tigers of Heaven, had been teaching Grant to use the bow and the sword. It was a shadow of a skill that Grant had retained from when his tesseract—a physical “time shadow”—had been hurled back to the time of ancient Sumeria. Back then, Grant’s tesseract had been mostly amnesiac and just enough “off time” to have superior reflexes and durability, as well as his natural strength. His captor, a son of Enlil named Humbaba, had named Grant Enkidu, the man-bull, because of that physical power. In that era, Malesh, a rogue Annunaki, had been first Grant’s target, then his lover and co-warrior in a rebellion against Humbaba’s rule of the region.

Malesh was the inspiration for the mythic hero Gilgamesh, and she taught Enkidu the use of the bow as a replacement for Grant’s firearms knowledge. When Kane, Brigid, Domi and Shizuka had managed to arrive in the time stream where Grant’s tesseract had been deposited, the shadow had developed enough that its spirit gained reality in a spare body of the Annunaki court, returning Grant to his mortal form. All seven warriors had engaged the leonine, eleven-foot-tall Humbaba in direct conflict, finally killing the scion of Enlil after throwing everything at him, including flights of arrows, magazines of bullets and the slashing of deadly blades.

Grant had left his tesseract Enkidu back in antiquity, husband to a warrior goddess, and he’d returned home with the love of his life, Shizuka. Grant found great comfort with her.

“Bow’s pure silent, as opposed to a silenced gun,” Grant said. “And it packs a lot of power, especially with my strength and its construction.”

Kane didn’t doubt that. “Let’s get back to the others.”

The two Cerberus Magistrates slithered back through the forest. They moved slowly, cautiously, from where they’d closed on the slavers’ position. The two men took care to watch out for any sign that someone had come across their trail, and they felt secure once they didn’t pick up any. It helped that the two of them utilized the multiband optics in their shadow suits to look for spoor or tracks. Someone might have been good enough to evade high-tech optics capable of focusing on single broken stalks and twigs and disruptions in the dirt, or the talents of a skilled tracker, but when both combined, there was little sneaking up on them.

Then it would take an hour for the assembled travelers to make up a plan on how to assault the slave caravan.

The plan was simple: kill quietly or the failure would be measured in helpless prisoners executed.

Thurpa’s approach to the prisoners on the chain was at a midpoint on the line. There was only one member of the Cerberus group who could handle opponents at range with utter silence, and that was Grant. However, if there was one thing that the Nagah outcast knew he was capable of, it was a silent kill, by virtue of his half-cobra nature and the gifts that Enki had endowed every Nagah with—transformed or native born.

His fangs were folded against the roof of his mouth, and his legs were bent beneath him as he stood at the edge of the clearing, thigh muscles tightly coiled. He was to wait until one of the guards was close enough for him to strike, and Thurpa knew that his calculations had to be exact. One misstep, a few inches short or even a simple stumble could result in an armed killer turning his automatic weapon against Thurpa, his allies or the very people they were there to rescue.

Thurpa hadn’t cared much for the Panthers of Mashona when he and Durga first encountered them alongside the Millennium Consortium. They were brutish men, the type of beings who exemplified Durga’s description of mankind as nothing more than a pack of barbaric apes. It was their disregard for their enemies and victims that reinforced Thurpa’s initial prejudices. He’d seen what the Panthers had done to their captives already.

It had been that negative impression, and the consortium’s equal disregard for the militia’s cruelty, that had primed Thurpa to become so disgusted with “mammals” that he’d used a grenade against a small family of meerkats who had made too much noise. The last thing Thurpa had wanted to do was seem weak in front of the hairy-knuckled, thick-browed thugs who took the defeated and helpless and used them as glory holes, men or women, if they weren’t already pressed into hard labor.

Thurpa hadn’t wanted to think what would happen to him if they saw him as a pushover. He had little interest in becoming a rape rag. If there was one thing that Durga didn’t appear to tolerate among those fighting for the purity of the Nagah race, it was that the cobra men didn’t engage in that kind of sexual violence, against their own or against others.

That was before Thurpa had met humans with a conscience. People who protected their injured, who cared for others despite differences. That was before Brigid Baptiste had related Durga’s sexual cruelty toward Hannah, his princess, and the evidence of what he had done to other women who hadn’t been his perfect little toys.

You’ve been following a rapist, a kin-murderer, a despot, damn you, Thurpa told himself. That only strengthened the young man’s resolve to take the gunman guarding these prisoners out quickly and certainly.

The Panthers are so strong, so cocksure against the helpless, Thurpa thought. You haven’t faced a son of Enki, though. We were born with fangs to ensure that you do not poison the other beloved of our Father.

The Panther gunman drew closer. Kane and Grant had timed out the patrols of these men perfectly. Everyone seemed to be stepping into position as the two men had predicted. Even so, there was no guarantee that his timing would be right, and Thurpa’s heartbeat increased.

Just in case he had to take out more than one opponent silently, Thurpa also had his knife in hand. He had venom and long fangs, but a broken fang or an empty venom sac would make it impossible for him to bite two opponents. He wondered at the ability of Brigid Baptiste and Nathan Longa when it came to close-quarters murder, but he didn’t want to think about it too much.

Thinking about how hard it could be for others to take down a murderer with a swift, ruthless strike made him think about how cruel his act would be.

Brigid Baptiste was not a murderer, nor was she a trained assassin, but she hung around with some of the best masters of sharpened steel in the world. She knew how to use the knife in its sheath as more than a tool or utensil. Kane, Domi and Shizuka had taken turns at teaching her the art of the fighting knife, not any intensive set of exercises, but they’d shown her moves, explained to her the discipline and made her go through every step.

They hadn’t gone easy on Brigid simply because she had a photographic memory; they’d expected her to copy their maneuvers. They had her go at it with blunt, rounded cornered blades for intense sparring matches. Muscle memory was different from the data that came in through her eyes and ears, and they worked her in the gym until her arms and sides ached, her flame-gold hair was matted to her scalp and her breaths came in long, ragged gasps.

In the end, no, Brigid was not going to take on another knife fighter as a master duelist, but she would be able to show a good accounting of herself if she was separated from her pistol.

That if had come enough times in Brigid’s adventures around the globe for her to know that losing her firearm would be a when. Any distaste for an assassin’s strike had been washed away with Kane’s depiction of how the caravan of prisoners had been treated. Naked and manacled about the neck and ankles, as she could see now, thanks to the light amplification optics in her shadow suit, the captives were in miserable physical condition. They were gaunt, exhausted, with blood dripping down their torsos.

To a child, they were naked and ragged, and each had to sleep staring straight up into the night sky because the metal yokes about their necks would cut or tear skin if they moved their heads one inch. Brigid’s heart ached for the poor victims of the militia members, and she was able to make out the insignias on the patches of the soldiers.

They were the Panthers of Mashona, the same group who’d laid siege to the Victoria Falls power station, who’d allied themselves with the mad Nagah prince, Durga, and the Millennium Consortium. They were known killers, murderers, raiders who had no concern for human life except for what they could get out of them.

Brigid examined the line of prisoners. Women, men, those in their early teens, none of them seeming as if they were good for forced labor, especially after the march that had turned their necks and backs raw with the weight and abrasion of their slave collars. These people were going to be shells of human beings if they had to go much farther.

Her thoughts went back to the killer who had all but drained the last drop of blood from Nathan Longa’s father. The murderer would have made use of biomass, draining either blood or other moisture and plasma within the human anatomy. Sure, the prisoners spilled some blood, but they still retained more than enough to feed—

Feed what? Brigid asked herself, but she fought off the urge to visualize the horror or horrors that awaited them. She had her knife pulled from its sheath, the keen edge held in an ice pick grip, and the Panther guard ambled closer on his prescribed patrol route along the chained line of prisoners.

Concentrate on the horror before you, Brigid told herself. We’ll deal with an entity or entities who’d devour two dozen human beings when we get to it.

She locked her green eyes on the gunman, who showed no concern for the suffering of other human beings. Slipping a knife between his ribs or into his kidney wouldn’t be a pleasure, but it’d be one step closer to the safe emancipation of twenty-four human beings.

Brigid promised herself not to take visceral satisfaction in gutting the bastard.

Grant assembled the recurved bow he’d brought with him. He screwed the two arms into the central riser, the grip that an archer held, complete with an arrow rest where the shaft would stay during the draw. The riser was made of rigid, high-density carbon fiber around an aluminum core. The arms themselves were composed of sandwiched layers of carbon fiber and wood, making the limbs of the bow denser, harder to flex, and thus building up greater potential energy when the string was drawn back.

Grant also had the yugake glove that Shizuka had made for him. Grant was a student of kyudo, the samurai art of archery, and the yugake was specifically designed for the kind of hold an adherent of the style used, one in which the other fingers trapped the drawn string against the thumb. The yugake had ridges on the thumb designed for securing the drawstring, especially under the pressure of an eighty-eight-pound draw weight. That translated, with the 750-grain broad-head arrows he had, into 58.5 foot-pounds of energy when the recurved snapped straight and hurled the shaft at 188 feet per second.

The kinetic energy downrange might not have seemed like much in comparison to a bullet that moved much faster, but the dynamics of an arrow, especially with razor-sharp leading edges, translated into better aerodynamic passage through flesh and a larger wound cavity. And the fact that the wound channel was filled with the shaft of the arrow added to the disruption of physical function.

With this bow, Grant had dealt with a rogue deinonychus on Thunder Isle, a wounded creature weighing in at 250 pounds of lean muscle and reptilian hide. Grant first had assumed that he’d missed his shot, as there was no arrow jutting from the rib cage of the time-trawled predator, but the animal dropped to the ground immediately. Grant’s arrow had punched through the deinonychus’s rib cage, breaking one rib and turning both lungs into slurries of destroyed brachial tissue, and burst out the other side, embedding into a tree just behind it.

The impact had had such force that Grant had broken the shaft retrieving the arrow, and its hunting tip jammed into the cedar trunk. That kind of trauma was more than sufficient to end the life of a desperate, limping, but still deadly, dinosaur with a single shot. Grant knew that few humans would be able to stand against him. He pulled back on the bow, arms raised in the traditional kyudo draw, his shoulder muscles flexed and tensed.

His would be the shot that initiated this conflict with the Panthers of Mashona. Through the light amplification sensors on his shadow suit’s faceplate, he could see the others, perched and ready to begin the butcher’s work for this night. Grant, with the reach of his bow, and his speed and grace, was given the task of taking down two more men subsequent to his first target. Kane had another target, as well, but Thurpa, Brigid and Nathan were limited to only one ambush apiece.

Kane was a veteran of a dozen blade battles, and he had both the swiftness and certainty with which to bring down a militia maniac in a minimum of effort and time, freeing him for a second opponent. Even so, Grant braced himself to fire a fourth arrow in this dark plan.

Grant cleared his thoughts, entering the samurai state of zanshin, relaxed alertness, his thoughts in a smothered calmness. He was focused on nothing but aware of all around him. It was part of the art of kyudo and as much a mental state as a series of physical movements. He was mentally standing on the razor’s edge, uncommitted to any single action, to leave himself ready for anything.

The guards were in position, Grant stretched the drawstring back, packing the two-ounce arrow with kinetic energy. The stiff, reinforced limbs struggled to return to their natural state, fighting against Grant’s manipulation of them. He opened his thumb, and the string was freed to slip over the ridges on his glove. Now, at close to 190 feet per second, Grant’s first arrow sliced silently through the night.

The arrow struck the Panther caravan guard at the knot of muscle and bone where his neck met his shoulders. Razor-sharp steel cracked the man’s spinal column, splitting a vertebrae before the broad head slashed through the trunk of nerves that connected his body to his brain. The arrow would have gone farther, but vertebral bones were designed as thick armor to protect the spinal cord, and the shaft had already expended much of its energy shattering one half of the ring of bone.

It didn’t matter. The instantly quadriplegic man turned rag-doll limp and spilled to the ground, struck so hard and quickly he didn’t even have a lungful of air to cry out before he was facedown in the dirt. Grant pivoted, drew another arrow from his quiver, nocked it and turned toward his next opponent. In the shadows beyond, he spotted four people emerge from their hiding spots along the tree line and lunge toward four other guards. In a heartbeat, Grant pulled back, aimed and fired his second arrow of the night.

Grant’s shot met its target in the breastbone, broad head cleaving through rubbery cartilage and squelching off ribs before it shredded two ugly holes in the Mashonan’s aorta. The Panther militiaman’s only sound was a grunt of expelled breath as the impact of fifty foot-pounds of energy slammed into his chest. This arrow wasn’t stopped by the heavy bone of the man’s spinal column, and it burst out from under his left shoulder blade and continued on into the shadows.

Had the arrow stopped, the two yawning wounds in the man’s main pipeline of lifeblood would have been somewhat staunched, except where the four blades of the arrowhead had widened the wound beyond the diameter of the shaft. With the fletching gone through the blood vessel, causing more tissue disruption of already sliced tissue, the man’s chest instantly filled with high-pressure blood gushing through an entrance and exit wound. That arterial pressure pushed hard on the man’s lungs, making him unable to inhale as he knelt, eyes bulging from his horrific internal wounds.

Kane, whom Grant recognized from his location and his build, dropped the Panther he’d ambushed, and dashed with all the speed and power of the wolf he was often described as, overtaking the next of the Mashona slave masters, leaping at the last moment. Kane clamped his hand over the man’s face, and all his weight pushed the man backward to the ground. There was the ugly grind of steel on bone as Kane thrust nine inches of blade through the gunman’s sternum, slicing his heart in half.

Grant turned toward the last of his targets, drawing and nocking even as he was aware of Kane’s victory. The third of the militiamen had heard the rustle of silent, brutal combat, and he’d pulled his rifle from where it hung on its sling, swinging it into position. Grant took this into consideration for where he aimed, and he let fly.

Grant hit the would-be killer on the bridge of his nose. The arrow punched through the relatively fragile bones around the nasal cavity. That target was specific; Grant’s Magistrate training had kicked in and reminded him that an enemy with his finger on the trigger would be unstoppable with anything but a “fatal triangle” hit. The triangle formed by the eyes and the nose were not only the weakest part of the human skull, but they were also directly in front of the huge cluster of nerves and brain functions that narrowed down into the spinal cord.

The broad-head arrow destroyed that, and the third gunman was shut off instantly. His finger would never reach the trigger of his rifle; no shot would blast into the night, bringing down the rest of the slave caravan, rifles blazing. He could see Thurpa attending to a prisoner lying on the ground and Kane watching them.

“Mission accom—”

The crackle of a rifle discharging into the night sky cut Grant short.

He turned and saw that Brigid and Nathan were both atop a militiaman. Though Nathan’s target was no longer struggling, he’d still managed to fire his gun.

Yards away, the caravan quickly stirred at the burst of gunfire.

“Kane...”

“The prisoners have a chance. But we have to make it better for them,” Kane answered over the Commtact. “Get loud and get bloody!”

Chapter 4

Kane wrenched his knife from the heart of the second Panther gunman, then took a step back, looking toward Grant, who was using that weird samurai archery to dispatch yet another of the Mashonan thugs with a single shot. Kane saw the muzzle-flash and heard a Panther’s rifle. Bullets sliced into the night sky to where they wouldn’t hit anyone until they fell back to earth. Nathan had his arms wrapped around the legs of a guard, and Brigid Baptiste was on the gunman’s chest. She had her knife deep in the goon’s face, having ended his existence.

The cacophony that the rifle produced was damage enough.

Fortunately, all eight of the gunmen assigned to the prisoners were down, snuffed out before they could shoot at any of the chained victims. That meant anyone armed and willing to harm the helpless prisoners would be coming from the caravan camp themselves.

“Kane...” Grant spoke over the Commtact.

Kane spoke up; the need for stealth was gone with the echo of gunshots in the night. “The prisoners have a chance. But we have to make it better for them. Get loud and get bloody!”

With that order, Kane reached down to his belt and unhooked a fragmentation grenade. He plucked the pin from it and hurled it toward the enemy camp as guards roused from relaxation to alertness. Some of them were fast, rushing halfway up the trail between their quarters and the prisoner area. It was these men who ran right into the flying gren, hurled by Kane with all the speed and accuracy he could muster.

The miniature bomb struck the lead militiaman in the center of his chest. The impact knocked the wind from the gunman and caused him to stop cold. One of his fellows plowed through him, tripping them both and throwing them to the ground bracketing the high explosive, just in time for them to catch a wave of extreme overpressure and flying metal shrapnel.

The surge of force slammed into the downed pair and the three men with them. The blast wave burst blood vessels in their bodies, killing them swiftly. It was a quick, merciful end for the men who’d been marching unarmed, naked prisoners across miles of the wilderness of Africa.

The exploding grenade slammed the door on that approach from the column of militiamen. They now knew that someone was covering that route, and very few people were ever armed with only one grenade. At the very least, that would mean more hand bombs or firearms covering the trail between the two locations. And these militiamen weren’t stupid. The group that Kane could see beyond the explosion skidded to a sudden halt as they realized that if they cut through the bottleneck, they’d be cut down.

As if to punctuate Kane’s unspoken point, Grant loosed an arrow, sending the high-velocity missile into one of the groups who’d stopped. The arrow sliced through a rifleman in the center of the group. The fletching disappeared into his chest before the rest of his body got the message that it had been perforated through center of mass. The man dropped an instant later, blood bursting from his lips, much to the shock of his fellow soldiers.

Because Kane and Grant were wearing the night-black shadow suits, they were invisible to their opposition, and neither had used a weapon that gave a muzzle-flash. Grenades and arrows were good at keeping their users relatively unseen in darkness.

Kane knew, though, that the Panthers hadn’t become such a feared enemy without learning common tricks such as flanking maneuvers. They would come at their former prisoners and the rescue party from another angle, and when that happened, Kane intended to meet them with every ounce of violence he could muster.

Nathan Longa decided to leave Nehushtan balanced against a tree trunk. He didn’t want to inadvertently unleash a bolt of power, and he wasn’t certain how stealthy he could be with the ancient staff. Sure, the artifact had granted him superior speed and strength in the past, but he didn’t want to produce more of a spectacle than necessary. If things came to a worst-case situation, he was only a few feet away from the propped-up staff and the battle rifle he’d shed for stealth.

Then he made a mistake as he lunged at a Mashonan gunman and clamped a hand around his mouth, stifling him swiftly. As he brought the knife around and toward the man’s heart from the front, his blade slammed into the Panther’s rifle. The thrust was a powerful one, meant to pierce his target’s breastbone and spear the heart behind it, but the frame of the gunman’s weapon deflected the force of the blow, disarming both men as they toppled to the ground.

Then came the wrestling match: Nathan pitting his might against the disarmed gunman’s. The militiaman reached for his own knife, but Nathan chopped the edge of his hand hard against his enemy’s inner elbow, striking the cluster of muscles and nerves, which left the guard’s fingers numb and unable to hold on to any tool. Nathan suddenly saw stars, and the center of his face and left eye ached from where the militiaman head-butted him. Nathan lashed out, eliciting a grunt from his foe, finger sinking into wet, ugly tissues. Whatever cry the man would have released was superseded by unintelligible choking as the man’s eyeball burst, paralyzing his throat with terror and agony.

Nathan heard footsteps, a solitary figure racing toward him and the Mashonan soldier, and he expected to catch a back full of lead. When no bullets came, he glanced up and saw the lithe silhouette of Brigid Baptiste rushing to his aid, knife in hand. Nathan’s distraction caused an awful turn of events. The Panther punched Nathan hard in the chest, bowling him back just enough that the thug could crawl toward his rifle.

Nathan threw himself atop the gunman, grabbing his legs, even as Brigid Baptiste came down. The militiaman had a handful of his rifle, and he swung it upward; the stock of the weapon struck Brigid in the ribs. Her shadow suit redistributed the impact, but it slowed her, delaying her knife strike long enough for him to wriggle his finger into the trigger guard.

Nathan tugged the man’s legs hard, jolting the muzzle of the gun away from Brigid’s body. Despite the shadow suit, at this range, with the heavy slugs in the rifle, the Cerberus archivist would have been blown to pieces by a contact gunshot.

Nathan saved the woman’s life, but gunshots ripped into the night sky.

“Dammit,” Nathan swore. He heard the scrape of knife on bone, Brigid ripping her blade free and plunging it down again.

By the third time, Nathan was on all fours, grabbing at her wrist. The militiaman was dead already, but Brigid’s frustration was such that she nearly broke Nathan’s grasp.

“I’m sorry,” Nathan whispered.

Brigid shook her head. “I couldn’t keep his arm pinned. It was my—”

She was cut off by the boom of an explosion in the distance.

Kane was throwing grenades, which meant the enemy camp was up and active.

“I can make up for my fumble,” Nathan muttered.

He turned back to his tree and retrieved the artifact staff and the rifle he’d left behind. Brigid returned to her original hiding place to get her heavier weapons, as well.

Kane’s Commtact reached Nathan’s radio earpiece. “Nate, I’m going to need you at the bottleneck here. We’ve got the enemy force delayed, but you’ll work as the bar. You’ve got your grens, right?”

“Yes,” Nathan answered. “It’s because I screwed up?”

“No prisoners died. You kept the guard from harming them. You succeeded,” Kane countered. “I need a big, powerful rifle. Thurpa, you back up Nathan.”

Nathan nodded; then he noticed Thurpa jogging alongside him, holding his mouth. The captive Africans were already conversing among themselves as they reached the path between the two encampments.

“What’s wrong with your mouth?” Nathan asked.

“I pulled a muscle,” Thurpa returned. “The guy twisted once I bit him, and that flexed my fangs the way that they shouldn’t have.”

“Oh,” Nathan replied.

“This shit is not going as easily as we thought,” Thurpa muttered. “I ended up talking to one girl who seemed awake, but she was scared out of her wits.”

“She didn’t scream,” Nathan noted.

“No. I put my hand over her mouth, but gently. I told her we were rescuing them, but right now we need them to stay down and out of our way,” Thurpa responded.

The two men set up at bracketing sides of the path entering the prisoners’ clearing.

“Stuck on defense again,” Thurpa murmured.

“We do what we can, Thur,” Nathan answered.

The young cobra man nodded.

“Look at it this way—at least you’ll have grateful new friends,” Nathan added.

Thurpa managed a smile.

The two young men lapsed into silence, their eyes and ears peeled for signs of enemy movement down the path.

Brigid Baptiste linked up with Kane and Grant as they cut through the woods that separated the Panthers’ encampment and their line of prisoners. She had her suppressed Copperhead in hand now, firmly gripping it and keeping its stock against her shoulder, finger off the trigger and against the frame so as not to accidentally loose a shot and perhaps hit her companions. Though all three were in the darkened shadows of the copse of trees, they could see clearly, thanks to their shadow suit hoods, and were able to pick up the movement of Mashona troopers away from the path.

She glanced at Kane, and he held up his fist for a hold position. Brigid knew that Kane had a plan to intercept the force that was rapidly trying to flank Thurpa and Nathan. Whatever he had in mind, it was going to be simple but devastating.

Simple but devastating could have been the mantra of the Cerberus warriors as they often had to “wing it.” Even when working around their more familiar areas, such as the Tartarus Pits, flexibility was of the essence. As such, improvisation and tactics gained from observation of the terrain and evaluation of the enemy troops were applied.

So far, it had carried the day for them across dozens of adventures. Brigid anticipated that the Panthers of Mashona were a trained, disciplined force, despite the horrors they wrought. They had been well organized back at the power station assault, but the Mashonan militia hadn’t counted on fast-firing, quick-reloading grenade launchers and sniper rifles to flank them, surround them and hammer them with two dozen explosions and precision gunfire to slice through their ranks. The guards of this caravan moved on a schedule that gave the Cerberus explorers perfect placing to ambush them. There was a route—a slender game trail through the trees—that the Panthers were aware of and savvy enough to leave lightly attended.

Unfortunately for the Panthers, Kane’s woodcraft and stealth had allowed him to penetrate the forest between the two camps and stumble on the trail. He’d seen the sentry at that position, unobtrusive and mirroring the one on the other side, the one he’d ambushed immediately.

Brigid noticed movement on the game trail ahead, and she braced herself, waiting for Kane to give the hand signal to open fire. Grant drew back on his bow and took aim. Kane nodded, and the big archer loosed his arrow, putting it through the ear of the lead gunman on the trail. For a man who was a relatively new student to archery, Grant was proving to be quite lethal; Brigid marked that up to natural marksmanship training and his phenomenal strength. At six foot four, he was larger than most of his fellow Magistrates, and was much faster and smarter than he appeared.

Brigid had formerly had a low opinion of the Magistrate Division, seeing them as faceless ciphers, right down to the deletion of their “given” names and the fact they existed as surnames in service to the hybrid barons. Then she’d worked with Kane and Grant and discovered that they had a sense of duty, quick wit and humor, and were far more observant and resourceful than she’d imagined.

She remembered the Thunder Isle incident, before Grant had become lost in time. He’d used his kyudo lessons back then to deadly effect, alongside his lover and teacher, the samurai Shizuka. Now Grant was comfortable enough with the bow to bring it on their mission, meaning that he’d all but mastered the ancient combat art.

Kane gestured toward Brigid, and she swung her Copperhead up and targeted the heads of the next few gunmen, tapping off short bursts from the submachine gun. The bullets made soft popping sounds, like the flutter of a large bird’s wings, but when her bullets struck flesh and bone, the result was no less bloody and damaging. Unfortunately, the loss of three of their number sent the rest of the Panthers to cover on the far side of the game trail, seeking the protection of tree trunks and the concealment of foliage.

Kane motioned, and both Grant and Brigid hit the dirt, ducking below the inevitable stream of enemy gunfire in response to their ambush. Whatever Kane had planned became apparent when she saw him make two throwing motions. Two more grenades sailed through the night, going past the game trail and landing behind the line of Panthers. They exploded in quick succession, and Kane rose to his knees, watching stunned and wounded militia bandits stagger into the open.

Kane popped his Sin Eater and opened fire on the dazed survivors, chugging short bursts from the compact folding machine pistol. He tore through them, using the high-density slugs of his gun as a chainsaw, ripping open chests and bellies in a grisly display of vulgar firepower. Grant had set his bow aside and cut loose with his own Copperhead. Brigid joined in the grim and brutal slaughter.

She didn’t enjoy this butcher’s work, but she knew that there were dozens of helpless people on the other end of the game trail who needed protection. If she didn’t help to destroy this spearhead flanking maneuver by the Panthers of Mashona, they would burst in on the unarmed, naked prisoners and either retake or coldly slaughter them.

She was protecting lives, and that made the murder of these men all the more easy to bear. She’d sleep at night because she’d seen the condition of those poor humans, wrecked by a forced march, scoured bloody and raw by manacles and yokes about their neck. This wasn’t murder. This was the end of torturers.

Brigid caught movement from the corner of her eye. Kane motioned for her to stop shooting. She paused to reload the Copperhead, feeding it a new magazine.

They didn’t speak. The snarl of bullets through suppressed firearms was enough of a risk to compromise their position in the dark. The enemy knew that there were gunmen in the tree line, and they could quickly adapt to the situation. Brigid didn’t know how many of these soldiers there were. Kane had mentioned about thirty, maybe more. She wanted to do the mental math, but all that would accomplish would be counting how many more lives had ended this night.

The only true determination of victory was the retreat of their enemy and the cessation of gunfire.

Kane motioned to Brigid, gave the finger signal for grenades, then quickly pointed in the direction he wanted her to throw them. No need to risk being heard, even subvocalizing into their Commtacts, especially when they were under fire. Brigid sized up the targets for her grenades and braced herself to let loose.

“Now,” Kane whispered over the radio.

Brigid pulled the first pin, threw, then quickly armed the second miniature bomb. Both flew straight and far. She could see that they were fanning out their explosive counterattack along a wider front. Kane had kept an eye out for firing positions from among the Panthers beyond the tree line, and now they hammered the militia hard. Six explosions ripped through their ranks, and men screamed, torn asunder by shrapnel and concussive force.

The thunderclaps of the detonations stretched out in two distinct staccato roars. Whatever would be left of this group would not be keen on making another attack.

Back from the original path between the two clearings, they heard the rattle of heavy rifles.

Kane nodded for her to go check on the scene, to support the others. Now it was time for the Cerberus expedition to strike back, to force the Panthers into retreat. Thanks to cover and concealment, they’d presented a nearly impenetrable front against the enemy. Now it was time to press the advantage and make them retreat and give up the struggle.

Brigid gave a whistle, the signal for Nathan and Thurpa to know she was behind them. The last thing she needed was to be blasted at point-blank by either of the young men thinking that she was trying to ambush them. She saw Nathan wave her over, and she rushed to his side.

“They heard you fighting inside the thicket, so they thought they could cut this way again. We dropped three of them,” Nathan told her.

Thurpa’s rifle thundered, big bullets slapping the night air and cracking it before he shot down another of the Mashonan gunners. “Make it four.”

Brigid nodded.

“Do we pull back or hold?” Nathan asked.

“Hold,” Brigid said. She unscrewed the suppressor from the muzzle of her Copperhead. At this point, they were going to be on the attack, so they’d need to make noise. Silencers in the trees helped to keep them hidden against return fire, but now they needed to sow fear and scatter the militia’s surviving defenders.

In the distance, Kane and Grant cut loose with their automatic weapons, the unmistakable throaty booms of the Sin Eaters and the high-pitched cracks of their Copperheads. They were sweeping against the Panthers in that direction, guns blazing.

“Now,” Brigid said, and Nathan and Thurpa picked up on the cue for violence. Their rifles and her submachine gun cut through the darkness. They fired at shadows, pouring out a wall of bullets. Bodies fell, struck by rounds, but the blasting was to break the will of the enemy. The militia abandoned their camp, racing off into the forest, half of their number dead and likely more wounded.

It was a decisive strike, and one that would force the gunmen to reorganize and recuperate.

That would give them time to free the prisoners.

“Grant and I are going to stick by the camp,” Kane said. “You three unchain those people. We won’t have much time.”

“Acknowledged,” Brigid responded. Thurpa and Nathan heard him over their hand radios, which were tuned to the Commtacts’ frequency.

The three people turned back toward the line of prisoners, seeking out keys among the dead guards to undo the painful, heavy manacles.

The Panthers undoubtedly would either stage a counterattack or call for help from another group. Either way, Brigid was determined to free the prisoners and get them out of the clearing within an hour. Half that would be optional.

Anything to free these victims was necessary. Otherwise, she was a cold-blooded assassin for nothing.

Chapter 5

Lyta grimaced as the yoke came off her neck. The harsh corners of the steel collar took tiny slivers of flesh with it, peeling away whatever upper epidermis was left where the metal had chafed against her skin. The other prisoners were already up, moving drunkenly but with a semblance of speed and energy. The men immediately picked up firearms from the dead guards, and one of the three people dressed in jet-black skinsuits pulled off a hood.

Brigid Baptiste revealed herself as a woman, a white woman with hair that looked like streams of curled copper spilling over her shoulders. She was so tall, Lyta had originally thought her to be a skinny man, like the African with the staff or the humanoid who looked as if he was half cobra.

“Most of us speak English, if you do,” Lyta spoke up to the woman.

Brigid smiled. “Thanks. We’ve found that out working with your countrymen. We need to get to the other camp and get more stuff for you. Food, water, weapons and ammunition. Clothing would be good, too.”

“That’s a good plan,” Lyta replied. “Who are you people?”

“He is from India,” Brigid said, pointing to the cobra man. “His name is Thurpa. The other man is from Harare. His name is Nathan Longa.”

Lyta glanced toward the man she’d indicated. “Longa...I had an uncle named Longa.”

Nathan frowned. “What was his given name?”

“Nelson,” Lyta replied.

Nathan squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “I’m his son.”

Lyta didn’t take long to put the subtext of Nathan’s painful reaction into context. “How did he die?”

Nathan looked around, hating to take time from preparing for evacuation from the area, but he spoke after only a moment. “He was murdered. By something that might be working with the Panthers.”

Lyta nodded, repeating what he’d said. “Something. As in what would eat us at the end of this march.”

“Not anymore,” Nathan returned. “You and the others take off. Get back to your home.”

Lyta narrowed her eyes. “I intend to find out what these animals wanted to do with me.”

Nathan glowered at her. “You’re not in condition to come with us.”

“She could be,” Thurpa spoke.

“Help the others gather supplies,” Nathan snapped at him.

Thurpa frowned. “They’re doing well on their own.”

“Then stop convincing my cousin that she has to risk her life,” Nathan hissed harshly.

Thurpa looked between the two. “As if you risking yours is any better?”

Nathan rubbed his brow. “I’ve got an advantage.”

“What?” Lyta asked.

“None of your—”

“The snake-headed staff that Nelson Longa owned,” Thurpa spoke up.

“Snake-headed... Is that why you’re interested in it?” Lyta asked.

Thurpa shook his head. “It’s an artifact, from the dawn of time.”

“It’s too complicated to explain here and now. You’re hurt. Exhausted...”

“And free,” Lyta responded. “Why would you deny me the chance to find out why my home was attacked? There’ve been so many people killed...”

Nathan grumbled. He gripped the strange walking stick, one she remembered from when Uncle Nelson had visited her so long ago. The object was as tall as Nathan, who was a shade under six feet, and it was one central ebony rod with strange designs inlaid along its length, wound about by two metallic serpents whose heads poked straight up. Lyta glanced at the space between the ominous snake heads and saw that there was a space for another object up there, braced or locked in between them.

Thurpa walked closer to Nathan, whispering into his ear. She couldn’t make out what was being said.

“I don’t know,” Nathan replied. He seemed crestfallen, looking first to the strange staff and then toward Lyta.

“Just give it some thought,” Thurpa said.

“Could I get some assistance?” the woman, Brigid, asked them. The two men walked away, leaving her be.

Lyta felt hands on her shoulders, sitting her down. Petroleum jelly salve was spread over her neck and shoulders. The ooze was an important supply for a militia on the move to deal with blisters, cuts and abrasions of all forms. As soon as the balm was spread across her raw back and about her wrists, she began to feel better. There were several jars of the stuff for the militia, so there was more than enough for the prisoners. Bandages from the Panthers’ first-aid supplies were also put to good use to protect the ravaged flesh.

Lyta accepted a shirt and a web belt. The shirt was long enough on her to act like a minidress, but there was enough air around her bottom to make her feel self-conscious until a pair of men’s briefs was provided for her from the militia’s laundry.

Clean clothes, after being naked for so many days, were wonderful. A bottle of water was also provided for her, and she took several deep pulls before passing the bottle on. Fresh water, clothes, she didn’t even mind the cooling of the evaporating wetness on her shirt. Boots, unfortunately, were in short supply, but Lyta didn’t mind. Most of the people in her town didn’t have much use for footwear, and the soles of her feet were only slightly less tough than rhinoceros skin.

Finally, Lyta got a weapon, two of them actually. One was a machete that looked rusted and pitted, but it was still heavy and felt good in her hand. The other was a .45-caliber pistol. Since the weapons of the Mashona were mostly stolen from the Zambian and Harare armed forces, she knew this pistol. She dumped the magazine and saw that it was loaded. She pulled back the slide and noted that the chamber was empty.

Lyta would keep it that way. She wasn’t sure about the safety on the pistol, and she wouldn’t carry one with a hammer on a live round. It would take a moment to slingshot a fresh round into the breech, if necessary. Both came with sheathes, so she put them onto the belt that tugged the long uniform tunic about her hips snugly. She rubbed her hand across her bare scalp, wishing that she still had her hair and idly wondering how she looked. Right now, she felt wonderful, but she was certain that a glance in a mirror would show her the truth of her ramshackle appearance.

Here you are, covered in bandages and the clothes of dead men, and you’re wondering if you’re hot or not, she thought, trying to hold down her disgust.

“It sure beats being raped and dead,” she muttered. “I look human again.”

“Are you all right?” It was Brigid, the beautiful woman from America, from the place she called Cerberus redoubt.

“Just trying to get my mind off of my vanity,” Lyta replied. “Can I join your group?”

Brigid looked taken aback. “We’re on a dangerous journey, Lyta. I don’t know if it would be wise.”

“Wisdom comes from mistakes,” Lyta replied. “And I know this could be a big mistake, but if I survive, I’ll at least know what awaited me. What was on the other end of this journey.”

Brigid’s brilliant green eyes looked the young woman over. She took a deep breath, pursed her lips, then nodded. “I’ll see what my compatriots have to say.”

“If it’s any help, I’m a resident of a frontier town in Zambia. We all receive firearms training,” Lyta added. She looked at the other prisoners. Though dressed, bandaged, rehydrating from water bottles and gobbling down random bits of food left behind by the Mashonan militia, they were ragged. They were unmistakably former prisoners, gaunt, wounded, eyes darting at the slightest sound.

“Not that it seemed to help us,” Lyta amended, frowning.

“Does anyone else want to see where the Panthers were taking you?” Brigid asked.

“I have to see to my family,” one man said. Others nodded, muttering in agreement. “If there’s any left.”

Brigid glanced to Lyta, and the young Zambian woman bit her lower lip, trying not to show any emotion. That effort translated into exactly what she tried to avoid as Brigid laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.

It was a warm, comforting action, and she looked worried for Lyta.

“I want to know what was worth the life of my mother, my fiancé,” Lyta admitted.

Brigid nodded.

“I’ll see what we can do,” Brigid replied.

Lyta watched her head to the tree line. Her spilling curls of golden-lit crimson provided a beacon by which she could be seen in the light of the moon and stars above.

Kane mulled over the whispered Commtact message from Brigid, then looked toward Grant’s position. He was a hundred yards away, barely a silhouette picked up by his night optics.

“Grant, you have an opinion on this?” Kane asked.

“The girl can use some closure,” Grant replied. “And if we send her back, she’ll just break from the group and follow us, maybe make a mistake which gives us away. At least we can keep an eye on her.”

“Baptiste?” Kane inquired.

“She has a powerful desire to know. And when something like that hits, it’s hard to resist,” Brigid responded. “She’ll definitely end up following us. We can keep her out of trouble.”

“Pretty much my feeling, too,” Kane said. “We might actually have some luck bringing her with. She seems smart and determined.”

“Any sign of the Panthers regrouping?” Brigid asked.

Kane swept the forest. It had been twenty minutes since they’d driven the militia away, and their footprints had cooled to the temperature of the surrounding foliage. The blood of the injured was still only a few degrees warmer than the background ambient heat, showing signs of where the gunmen had escaped. Scanning between the trees, using the telescopic optics in conjunction with infrared and light amplification modes on the shadow suit hoods, he couldn’t see any sign of them returning. Even so, he and Grant had moved along their path for a good distance, keeping their eyes open and scanning as far as the advanced suits would let them, but also making time for the rest of their senses, as well. Infrared tracking could be beaten, especially with the use of a shield of “room temperature” woven foliage that blocked out the heat signatures behind it.

For all the advantages that the two former Magistrates possessed, there were still ways for the enemy to sneak past them. Caution and alertness were the order of the day.

“Nothing so far, but I still want those people on the move to someplace safer,” Kane said. “I noticed a couple of vehicles in the camp that they could use.”

“We’ve fit as many as we could, those with the least ability to walk back,” Nathan explained over the shared frequency. “Tell me we’re not going to bring my cousin with us.”

“She’s family?” Kane asked him.

“Yeah,” Nathan responded. “I’d rather not have her join us. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t have any innate advantages like experience, cobra scales or a mystical artifact.”

“No, but she does have frontier militia training,” Brigid spoke up.

“Fifteen rounds a month shot at a paper target on a wall,” Nathan countered.

“Her advantages don’t matter,” Kane said. “She seems dead set on joining this expedition. So let’s have her with us, rather than tripping over her.”

Nathan grumbled, “I guess that makes sense.”

“Don’t pout over it. Our job will be a little trickier, but she’s the one who asked to come with,” Kane offered. “She knows where we’re going is dangerous. We can only hope to survive with her help, just like she survives with ours.”

“All right,” Nathan answered. He sounded much less sullen. It’d take a while for him to be comfortable with the idea of having a cousin along or their journey, but, in the end, Lyta was determined to join them.

“Kane,” Grant warned over the Commtact. “I’ve got contacts. Seventy-five yards out. Three, no, five. Armed, moving low to the ground.”

“Test force?” Kane asked.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Grant said. “None of them appear wounded. They don’t seem to have any night optics, so they might not be expecting us to have the same.”

“Don’t engage unless they make the first move,” Kane returned. “Keep an eye on them.”

“Right,” Grant said.

“Baptiste, they’re early,” Kane told her.

“Already back to the group,” Brigid answered. He could hear her shouting orders for the prisoners to pack up and start moving out. In the distance, Kane could hear the low rumble of engines starting. He was glad that it was the audio sensors in the shadow suit hood. Still, he kept ready for Grant to tell him that the enemy were reacting to their vehicles powering up.

At the same time, he continued to sweep for signs of other foes in the forest. There might only have been five left uninjured after the initial assault, but Kane didn’t feel like he was that lucky. If anything, they wouldn’t put all their forces in one spot, especially not in the flanking maneuver that Grant observed.

Something else was happening. His nerves were on edge.

“Grant, status on the group moving up.”

“They appeared, but they only advanced about twenty yards,” Grant returned. “Then they hunkered down. Every so often, they look back, but that’s it. Why?”

“There’s something going on. I can’t put my finger on it, but those guys have backup on the way,” Kane explained. “I just can’t see it.”

“That void chick, Neekra?” Grant asked. “She could be oozing in?”

Kane thought about it. That’s when he began to feel the vibration. He looked down at the ground. “Grant, get out of the forest. Get back to the truck.”

“Shit,” Grant hissed, and Kane could hear his effort at running, his increased breathing, the thump of his body as he landed on the ground—all conveyed via vibration over the Commtact. Unfortunately, Grant seemed to be moving in slow motion, just as Kane was, in relation to the rising throb of forces seething beneath the earth. Kane charged through the forest.

“Baptiste!”

“Go!” Brigid shouted loud enough to make Kane’s inner ear ring. She was in full command mode, scooting two dozen noncombatants from the area. There were two trucks in the camp, enough to carry about sixteen people, tightly packed, so there were going to be people still on foot.

Running from a force that shook the ground and filled Kane’s spine with ice-water terror.

“Kane!” Grant bellowed. “The ground split ahead of me!”

“Double around!” Kane returned.

Then Kane realized Grant’s dilemma firsthand. He skidded to a halt as suddenly the ground split all around him. He threw himself down, reaching for the far edge of the ever-growing chasm, and he clawed at the ledge, but only for a moment. He hadn’t rooted himself on rock; he’d grabbed a handful of soil. It crumbled beneath his grasp, and gravity sucked him down the face of the cracking cliff.

In free fall, Kane felt absolutely helpless, but that stopped a moment later when he slammed hard against a crag. The sudden alteration of the kinetic force kept Kane from bouncing off the ledge, but even so, every inch of his body throbbed, aching from the abuse it’d just absorbed. He clung to the side of the chasm, listening as the rumble suddenly stopped.

The earth beneath Kane disappeared into inky oblivion. Kane would have used the optics on his shadow suit hood, but somewhere along the way, the seal that kept its faceplate on had failed, probably when he’d planted into the wall while tumbling in flight. He couldn’t find it anywhere, and he realized that most of his equipment was gone.

Sitting up slowly, taking deep breaths and forcing himself not to vomit, Kane brought himself back to a semblance of clearheadedness. He scanned the darkness, one hand absently digging for a flashlight. He clicked it on, and it spilled only a modicum of light. He ran his fingers over the surface. The lens had been shattered. Likely, several of the LEDs embedded in the lens had been similarly knocked out by his plummet.

Now he knew why he felt like a punching bag for the gods. He’d likely rebounded from cliff face to cliff face, spiraling down the chasm until everything in his inventory had been smashed or torn from him. Even his right arm didn’t feel right, as if it were too light. He shone his torch and saw that the hydraulic holster’s arm brace was there, but the Sin Eater was gone, torn off completely. There was no Copperhead to be seen, either, at least not on the ledge with him.

Kane dug his fingers into the cliff face, taking advantage of what light there was from his torch to mark his territory. The ledge was a long one, disappearing out of the spray of LED-emitted light at about twenty-five feet.

He also realized that there was a small lip along the ledge. Slowly it continued to rumble, rising until it stopped, a slender barrier of stone three feet in height. Kane limped over to it, examining it. Over the stone railing, the abyss continued beneath him. He glanced upward, but the night sky was gone. Invisible.

Had the earth shut again?

He checked the floor of the ledge again and noticed that it had a tile-like pattern on its surface.

Kane realized that this was not a random formation along the chasm wall. This was constructed, but he couldn’t tell by which force. He’d seen the rail rise before his eyes. He turned off the light in order to conserve its battery.

Nothing was around for him to see. Whatever had fallen off him had missed the ledge entirely.

And the way my luck goes, that’s not happenstance, Kane mused. A force must have guided me here. That bitch queen who played with my subconscious only a few days ago.

Kane sneered, then checked himself all over. He was relieved when he found that his web belt was still somewhat intact. He’d only retained two grenades and the Colt .45 he’d brought to back up the Sin Eater and the Copperhead. It had only one magazine in it.

He felt for the pouch and found the other magazines; their steel shells were bent and crushed by impacts. Kane figured he could pry shells from the damaged pair of clips to feed the one already in the gun, which meant that he was good for about eight shots before needing to retreat and spend minutes thumbing bullets into the remaining magazine. He checked the pistol for signs of damage, but the frame of the gun was thick enough not to have bent or warped under his impacts against the chasm walls. The grip was splintered on one side, though.

Luckily, Kane still had some duct tape in his kit. He wound it around the splintered wood, evening it out. He made sure the tape didn’t interfere with the magazine release or block the magazine well, but other than that, his pistol was much like himself. Battered, held together by a reliable wonder material, but still ready to fight.

He also had his knife in its leg sheath. The one part of him that felt like it hadn’t been swung at with a sledgehammer was his leg below the knee, where the fighting blade rested.

A knife. A gun. His shadow suit, sans optics. Two grenades. A flickering LED flashlight.

He touched his face. The Commtact plate must have been jarred loose when the face of his shadow suit hood had been torn off. He patted himself down, reaching down the neck of the suit, but he couldn’t find the contact plate.

Maybe it was better this way.

Brigid and Grant had shadow suits, as well, clothing that could have cushioned their plummet down the chasm.

But that was an advantage denied to Nathan, Thurpa and the new girl, Lyta.

He looked up. The sky was gone. Had the earth closed up? And had it been only he and Grant who had fallen? Indeed, had Grant fallen? Or was he still trapped aboveground, kept from advancing by the rift that had opened ahead of him?

Alone in the darkness, Kane knew that there were two ways to go. Up the inclined ledge, toward the surface where his friends may or may not be, or down, deeper into the belly of the underground, where he was certain the trouble originated.

His enemies were likely ahead of him. That meant going down.

Kane descended into the abyss.

Chapter 6

Neekra rode in Warlord Gamal’s skin. She’d carved his psyche out using the telepathic equivalent of a rusted fork, hurling the man’s personality into the void. His body, despite the loss of a foot when his truck-bed platform imploded on it, was more than sufficient for her needs.

Neekra infected his body, occupying his nervous system and limbs, consigning the original mind of the man to a hellish oblivion. She felt a disjointed sense of pain as she took the flesh from one part of his anatomy and turned it into a new foot for her. The effort and the laws of matter conservation had stolen inches of height from Gamal’s skeletal structure, but it also provided her with more room to play with and forge him into a brand-new shape. She took his manhood and much of his muscle and transferred it to fat, to curves, to feminine bits.

Once again Neekra had a body, and it befit the body of the seductress, the queen of the damned who drew men to their doom. Gamal had been one of her first consorts in a good hundred years, mainly because she didn’t find that much ambition, that much grandeur, in the lesser men scurrying past her tomb. Her telepathy projected from where the Annunaki overlords had interred her, but it could only stretch so far. In all that stretching, all she’d encountered were desperate men whose thoughts were living to the next dawn, whose desires were a mere crumb of food, to slay or elude their enemies.

The warlord Gamal was different. He’d organized the Panthers of Mashona into a teeming army, built on a bedrock of terror and brutality. Gamal had the promise to expand beyond being a mere robber baron and seizing the world by the reins. Unfortunately, there were others who had arrived on the continent, others who had their own agendas that were attractive to her.

And Gamal? He’d made the mistake of hurling his might against a set of opponents whose will was simply too much for him to overcome. His failure, even bolstered by his militia and swarms of winged mutates, cooled her interest in the man as a lover, as the savior who would raise her from her tomb. But Durga had been correct in retrieving the fallen warrior from the battlefield.

Neekra now had a skinsuit, a hunk of flesh with which she could interact with the world, even as she flowed through his cells like quicksilver, shaping him into a blood-skinned goddess.

And as her host, as her consort, she had a dozen snake men and their prince, a king cobra who had dared to challenge even the god who’d entombed her, far from man, entrapped without a hope of freedom.

Prince Durga of the Nagah was part of a race of genetically altered humans, spawned by Enki, brother and rival of Enlil, and kept vital for millennia by the cobra baths that could transform human to Nagah or back again, using cellular manipulation similar to what Neekra used on Gamal’s carcass. Durga had cut deals with Enlil and then the Millennium Consortium, in order to cement his place as the emperor of the Nagah’s underground kingdom. His plan would have worked had it not been for the resistance of the other man Neekra had been drawn to. As it was, Durga’s attempt at domination was undone, but not before a thousand had died and he’d wrecked Enki’s fountain of genetic alteration.

Durga had come to her, to Africa, because he sought the means of returning to health. He’d barely survived an immense explosion, thousands of bullets, grenades and knives hacking at him. Durga had abused the cobra baths, utilizing them to make himself into a living juggernaut, but even that invulnerability paled in the face of the efforts of Kane, her other target, and his allies from North America.

Kane, Neekra mused. I tortured him, ripped him from his friends and family, did everything in my power to shatter his spirit. And yet, when he had me on the ropes, he offered me mercy.

Mercy was a concept that Neekra had utilized before; she’d manipulated it in foes who assumed she was a mere mortal, a weakling. She’d appealed to the mercy of others to draw them into her trap.

But for all she had subjected Kane to, he’d stayed his hand and offered her a chance to walk away from the battle. As far as he was concerned, he’d won, and that meant he had no need or desire to murder her cold. That was something she’d never encountered, at least in her memory. At her current age, she wasn’t quite certain of her earlier days, when she had still been mortal.

Neekra would have had no problem with Kane putting the finishing blow upon her. The peace of oblivion would have been just as fine a reward for her as freedom. Anything would be better than confinement within her prison. Right now, inside Gamal’s head, she was only a sliver of what she had been, despite her ability to effect his cellular structure.

In her own body, alive and free, she was nigh unlimited, rather than being a ghost shredding minds on the mental plane or pulling parlor tricks with musculoskeletal reformation. Her senses were dulled, as if she were interacting with the world through a woolen blanket. Trapped in human flesh, she couldn’t even reach out to touch Durga’s consciousness, let alone reach out to locate Kane, the mighty and the merciful, the attractive human who had drawn her to his nobility and strength.

To corrupt such a figure would be delicious. To do it and retrieve her body, to become the goddess she was meant to be, not a corpse buried in concrete, that would be the ultimate. To attempt it, to fail and to be utterly destroyed by such a warrior would be the end of her imprisonment, her torment.

Either way, it was win-win for Neekra.

“My queen,” the prince spoke softly, awakening her from her reveries. “The other has arrived.”

Neekra regarded Durga, realizing that he made no secret of his disdain and jealousy of Kane and her newly spawned interest in him. She smiled at him. “How do you know?”

“The Panthers of Mashona have arrived with their tribute to your servants,” Durga stated. “And now they are under attack. They retreated.”

Neekra pursed her full, lush lips. The face she’d molded was a near approximation of her true beauty, but it was as nothing to her original self. She’d had to deal with mere human flesh, and, as such, it could only hold so much of her majesty. She recalled the tales of Zeus, and one in particular, how even at his most diminished in power, a glance upon his visage by a human turned them to ash.

She wondered if modern man could withstand her true beauty.

“Then send up my children,” Neekra told Durga. “Open the earth, and let them take those on the surface.”

“You would have those things kill Kane, after all the moony eyes you’ve cast his way?” Durga asked.

Neekra smirked. Durga had spirit. Certainly, he had positioned himself as enchanted by her sexuality and her promises of power, but he still retained his own individuality, an unflinching fear of stating his mind in contrast to her wishes. “They will not kill those who I do not wish to harm. I control them.”

Durga barely concealed a shudder of revulsion. When the Nagah had first come to this underground city, encountering the minions within, he had been disgusted by their translucent, wormlike flesh. However, they were among the layers of warriors for the city of Negari, which she’d ruled for centuries until the arrival of a black-clad European. He had traversed Africa, seeking out a young woman, a relative of some other man to whom he owed a debt. In the space of a few days, the traveler had brought the city down, wrecking it completely, causing the death of the pitiful human shell she’d used at that time and bringing dark slaughter to the cultists who’d clung to her.

Neekra could not help but recognize a small spark of that dark, grim Puritan within Kane. She even sensed an echo of the man’s voice within the wails of the tortured twenty-second-century adventurer, as well as a flash of familiarity with his profile as he rose from his psychic dungeon, armed for battle.

She closed her eyes and extended her consciousness to the minions.

They would rue the day they’d come to her city.

* * *

BRIGID BAPTISTE WATCHED as the earth that the prisoners had occupied suddenly began to crack open, then slanted down as if on a ramp. At first her mind reeled. That was exactly where the dozens of captives would have been had they not been freed; they’d be rolling down a slide of stone. The change of the terrain was sudden and dramatic, and as the dust and dirt tumbled down the preconstructed ramp, she realized that this was an ancient design.

She looked as the ramp disappeared into an arched entrance and segments of the floor slid and crunched out into the open. It all slid together with uncanny precision, producing one smooth inclined plane that stretched down into the darkness and out of sight. Even more boggling to her was that as the floor extended, she could see little lips of stone rising, forming a railing.

“What the hell?” Nathan muttered, gripping the artifact Nehushtan tightly.

“It’s an entrance to hell,” Lyta spoke up. “They brought us to the city of the damned...Negari!”

“Negari?” Thurpa asked.

“It was a realm which was thought to be made up by authors in the early twentieth century,” Brigid spoke. “A hidden city, ruled by an eternal...queen.”

Brigid kicked herself. This was the void entity that Kane had described as his tormentor, the one who’d plucked out his mind, taken it to another plane and tortured him on multiple levels.

“Neekra,” Thurpa snapped. “That blood-skinned bitch!”

Brigid nodded. “That was who was spoken of. She is real, unfortunately. And we’ve encountered her machinations already.”

“There’s movement,” Nathan said. He clicked on a light, but the beam, despite an intense brightness, could not reach the edge of it.

And still there were movements visible in the gloom beyond, odd flickers of shapes.

Brigid knew that she had the ability to get a closer look at whatever glimmered in the inky blackness. She swiftly tugged her hood up, feeling her long flowing curls bunch against the base of her neck, but it was something that she could endure for the time being. She swiftly adhered the shadow suit’s faceplate on, switching to night vision and image magnification.

Immediately, her stomach twisted with revulsion as she spotted the creatures rising from the depths. They whipped out their hands, which stretched out on pseudopods, not arms. Stretching out, hurled like lariats, the hands snapped shut as they gripped the walls. It was an obscene parody of how she’d seen amoeba attack and devour their prey.

Her photographic memory flashed back to the story Nathan had told of his father, Nelson, and Nelson’s death. The disappearance of the murderer through a hole that no man with a skeleton could fit recalled a similar “stretchiness.”

There were a dozen of the things, and they were moving toward her, Nathan, Thurpa and Lyta as swiftly as they could. Her mouth went dry, but she whipped up the Copperhead and peered through the low-powered scope atop the compact submachine gun. They were quick, but she anticipated the path of one of the beasts and she cut loose with the Copperhead, spitting high-velocity bullets toward it. The rounds slapped into it, and her shadow suit’s optics extended, picking up on the thing seemingly blowing apart in chunks.

She pivoted the gun’s muzzle, aimed at another and fired.

“What?” Thurpa asked.

“Monsters,” Brigid said. She ripped off a burst into the third of the creatures, but even as she did so, she could see the first of her targets reassembling itself. It’d been hurt, yes, but she was firing into gelatin-like bodies that could reassemble themselves.

Thurpa shouldered his rifle and looked through the scope. He let out a grunt of dismay at the image of the newcomers. “Enki help me.”

“They’re bulletproof,” Brigid shouted. “Move!”

Thurpa grimaced and triggered his weapon.

“I said—” Brigid began.

Thurpa glared at her. “That little gun doesn’t have the punch this does. I can at least break them up, stun them.”

Brigid glanced back and saw that the creatures that Thurpa had struck were down. They still showed signs of life, but the heavier rifle that the Nagah expatriate had used on them had left them stunned and confused.

She glanced after Nathan, who was leading Lyta away as quickly as his legs could carry them both. Thankfully for Brigid, they weren’t enhanced by the ancient staff’s power. She could catch up. “We both go, now.”

Thurpa kept shooting. “Aim for their center line. That seems to disturb and stagger them the most! I’ll hold this line as long as I can....”

Brigid grimaced. She took off, realizing that she could not allow Nehushtan to fall into the wrong hands.

Durga and his queen, Neekra, were definitely the wrong hands.

She sent a silent prayer of hope to Thurpa, knowing what he was risking for their sakes.

The big rifle kicked hard against Thurpa’s shoulder, and he knew that each bullet he put into one of the strange creatures coming up the underworld path bought more yards, more seconds for his newfound friends and allies to get away. He didn’t want to think of what horrors would befall him once they got to him, but, dammit, the fallen prince Durga had led him astray, pushed thoughts into his head and brought him to this countryside.

He dumped the spent magazine from his gun, pushed another one home and worked the bolt. Even as he did so, he realized that two of the things had survived his rain of lead. Technically, they’d all survived, but these two had avoided his shots and had not been slowed. They were only thirty feet away, and they showed no sign of slowing down.

Thurpa let out a roar of frustration as he tracked one of the slippery pair of translucent, stretchy foes, firing bullets to chase it down. As he did so, he felt a hand grasp him by the throat. Within moments, he was sailing through the air toward one of the underground horrors. Thurpa tried to scream, but the elongated limb around his throat cut him off. The strength of the creature was such that it pulled him through the air, feet airborne.

Those fingers clutching at his throat were as strong as iron, and he struck the ground behind the pair of gelatinous assailants. Thurpa blinked, struggling to bring his thoughts back into line, to get his limbs to respond to commands.

The two leapers continued on their path, having forgotten the cobra man after they’d unceremoniously dumped him on the ground. He twisted himself, rolling from his back to where he could get his hands and knees beneath him. Even as he did so, a hammer blow struck him between the shoulder blades, and his face was mashed into the ground, dirt digging into his nostrils. He turned his head, exhaling and clearing his airways, but another rubbery paw pressed down on his cheek and neck.

Out of the corner of his eye, Thurpa could see it was one of the horrors. It had fissures through its flesh and cracks on the surface of its skin. It looked vaguely male, but inside bones hung like pieces of fruit in dessert gelatin. His nostrils were assailed with the sickening, ugly stench of copper and salt, a cloying reek of decaying and drying blood.

The creature’s face lowered nearer to Thurpa’s, and it seemed to sniff.

“No,” came the order from another. “She says...no.”

Thurpa felt a moment of relief, but even so, the slimy, clammy grip on his neck and face was steely, rigid, unforgiving.

“Lucky,” Thurpa’s captor growled. “Lucky you.”

Thurpa wanted to say something, but he knew better. These creatures had some intellect, but they were following the orders of another. Someone who wanted living captives.

If the shimmering monstrosity hadn’t been resting its weight on his shoulders, neck and head, he would have been able to move, to shift the creature’s weight atop him, but the thing was either too well balanced on him or it had somehow laid down roots to make any motion on the Nagah’s part impossible. Seeing glimmering pseudopods digging into the dirt before his eyes confirmed his second suspicion, and he realized that he was a prisoner, pinioned and helpless.

He watched as translucent legs raced past, heading into the forest after Brigid Baptiste, Nathan Longa and Lyta.

Thurpa’s stomach churned with regret that he couldn’t protect the young woman.

* * *

GRANT HEARD THE RATTLE of gunfire and grimaced. He was separated from his friends and allies by the rift in the earth. Kane was gone, down through the pit, and while he was concerned for his friend, he knew his partner was wearing his shadow suit and had the devil’s luck when it came to surviving bad situations and the same devil’s cunning when that luck was not enough.

Right now, Grant knew that Brigid and the others were in combat. With what, he couldn’t tell, but everything he observed told him that this was not the work of a simple militia, even one with as much manpower and firepower as the Panthers of Mashona. This was more akin to the work of the Annunaki or the Tuatha de Danaan, ancient technology, and perhaps a subterranean city. He’d encountered many such hidden societies. One was lodged within a bubble in the basalt that separated the surface of the earth from its molten, fiery interior, a true lost world of dinosaurs, cast-off pan-terrestrial humanoids and ancient horrors.

Whether in the depths of space or at the center of the world, there were millions of secrets still strewn about the planet in multiple forms, and most of what they had encountered was deadly and dark.

Grant looked up and down the rift between him and his friends, and he saw that there was a tree, tottering with its gnarled roots showing out over the drop-off. The trunk of the tree was thick enough for him to walk on and long enough to use as a bridge. Running in either direction, looking for a better crossing, would eat up valuable time while his allies fought against the unseen force.

He rushed to the tree and hurled himself at the trunk with all his might. The shadow suit helped protect his shoulder from potential dislocation by the amount of force he’d thrown at it. Dirt broke and cracked, and he listened to the snap of roots.

One blow and he’d loosened an already half-uprooted tree. He immediately wrapped his arms around the trunk and pulled back. The tree rocked toward him, more cracks, more snaps echoing the distant gunfire, reminding him of the countdown he fought against. Grant surged with all his muscle, weight and leverage, and he felt the tree begin to loosen.

Pushing the tree down straight across the chasm wouldn’t do much. All it would do was rip out the tree by its roots, and perhaps send his only bridge toppling into the depths of the rift. Toppling the tree “inland” would take the ungraceful roots and make them into a grapnel, then leave the upper branches and trunk to rest on his side of the improvised bridge.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.