by James Axler
And so she and Kane ran, making their way to the surface, Lyta feeling the uncanny eeriness of eyes watching her from the shadows. She didn’t dare to look back over her shoulder to acknowledge that presence. She bore down, put one foot in front of the other, taking long strides, keeping wary of cracks in the flagstone path corkscrewing its way up from the depths of the chimney shaft. Even though she moved, able to see everything, she was filled with doubt. Was this real or was this a dream? She had abilities that had been granted her by a magic stick, so was this an illusion, or was she actually keeping her footing because she could see in the pitch black as if it were the brightest noonday sun?
Lyta tried to fight the doubts, fight the nerves that jangled within her brain. Doubt was the enemy, and if she lost her concentration, she was certain that she’d doom herself and Kane. She’d gone from a world of men preying on their fellow humans to a realm where goddesses sculpted human flesh as if it were clay, and where liquid beings took over corpses and turned them into unliving warriors at that goddess’s beck and call.
Each stride brought them closer to the surface, and Lyta could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Her heart skipped a beat, and her grasp loosened on the artifact. As she did so, the world dimmed immensely; her eyesight returned to normal human parameters. Her feet slapped the ground harshly, bare soles as tough as elephant skin crashing to the ground again and again. Kane whirled and grabbed her by the hand and once more the darkness was pushed away. The light of the alien staff was picked up by her optic nerves.
“Come on,” Kane grumbled through gritted teeth. His grasp was as strong as iron, and she felt as small as an eight-year-old girl, pulled along by this tall, muscular warrior. They continued rushing, and the oppressive pressure of the underground realm lightened about them. Cool air wafted into her nostrils, caressed her skin, promised her relief from her fears.
And then a single figure landed in the mouth of the tunnel, a black shadow defined by the starlit night sky behind him. His stance seemed wrong, as if parts of himself were broken, bent out of place.
Kane growled and released Lyta’s hand, then grabbed the pistol in its holster. He came up, triggering the .45, pumping slugs into the shape ahead of him. Lyta, plunged once again into the blackness of the tunnel, didn’t see a single reaction from the impacts of those bullets.
Lyta hadn’t been alongside Kane for long, but she didn’t think that he could miss a man-size figure, not from under fifty feet with his vision enhanced by the ancient artifact he grasped in his other hand. The .45’s three mighty blasts were the only ones issued, and Kane paused long enough to return the gun to its holster. He then grasped Nehushtan in both fists.
“Stay behind me, Lyta,” he snarled, stepping forward.
Kane saw the man drop to the ground, right at the mouth of the tunnel. Thanks to the powers of the artifact he carried, he could make out details of the horror. It was more monster than human, and he could see where a knife had laid open the flesh beneath its jaw from one ear to the other. Its head listed over one shoulder, a sign of how he hadn’t died from massive trauma to the arteries that fed blood to his brain, but from the brutal wrench of neck bones.
Kane recognized his butcher’s work, and he had no guilt over it. Men like the one before him had been dragging unarmed, naked and helpless humans to be sacrificed so that Neekra’s minions could have flesh to occupy. That he himself was now a husk for such a monstrosity was a fitting punishment. Though Kane was glad that he’d killed the man before he could suffer the agonies of being conquered while alive. Even so, he had no hesitation in pulling the Colt automatic from his hip holster again.
A flick of his thumb as the front sight rose, and the pistol was alive. He squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped down, igniting the primer and setting off the powder charge within the cartridge. The bullet, a fat, nearly half-inch miniature cannonball with a blunt, flattened nose, snorted out of the muzzle at hundreds of feet per second. The recoil worked the slide, feeding another fresh round under spring pressure from the magazine. Kane rode out the recoil, lined up the front sight and fired a second round as soon as the gun was on target.
Everything was moving fast, but Kane was in the zone. He knew each step of the weapon’s function, and with an odd detachment, he ticked them off. The swiftness with which he analyzed each must have been a side effect of the same powers the cat-headed staff Nehushtan granted for night vision. He could feel the steel and wood buck against his palm; the forces of recoil pushed the gun up while his forearm muscles flexed to snap it back down on target. He watched as each round smashed into the bloodied militiaman’s chest. The first two slugs struck in the center of mass, just as he’d been trained as a Magistrate.
Two slugs in the chest, and the man didn’t even stagger in reaction to their impacts. Kane rode out the recoil for the second shot and pushed the front sight of the pistol up. He aimed for the bridge of the man’s nose where it rested at an odd angle on his blood-slicked shoulder. Kane didn’t need much imagination to see how people could equate the walking corpses commanded by the boneless creatures with invulnerable undead. The third round struck the man in the face, in the triangle between eye sockets and the tip of the nose, where the skull bones were thinnest and most fragile, all the while sitting right in front of the clump of nerves that connected the human brain to the spinal column.
His Magistrate training told him that a single shot there would bring down any man, even if body armor protected the heart. The third shot snapped the thing’s head back, and a fine mist exploded from the impact zone. Kane held his breath, continuing his advance toward the lifeless sentry to the surface world.
Then the bullet-smashed face rolled forward, eyes alight from within with demonic glee, even though one eye had popped from its socket under the force of the single .45-caliber slug.
Kane flicked his thumb again, putting the pistol on safe. No use wasting more ammunition on a foe who didn’t feel the trauma of bullets.
He warned Lyta to stand behind him, even as he replaced the gun in its holster. According to the oral history of the previous owner of this staff, Solomon Kane, the black-clad Puritan had utilized the ancient stick to slay vampires. Kane braced the stick in both of his hands, feeling the warmth and throb of Nehushtan’s “pulse” pumping through his palms. The grinning, one-eyed corpse stepped forward. Its remaining orb glinted, almost as if it were filled with the confidence of its immortality in the face of a man whose gun didn’t work.
But Kane was not defined by a hunk of lead-spitting iron. He’d fought for his life against all manner of forces, all forms of horror, utilizing anything he could get his hands on, his ever-burning mind seeking ways through obstacles, no matter how dire the odds. So the vampire thing ahead of him was bulletproof. With a surge of might, he lunged to take on the bestial corpse, face-to-face.
The animated carcass paused in confusion. Obviously, the thing had occupied bodies before. It seemed to be genuinely surprised that Kane was on the attack, not cowering in paralyzed terror at something immune to bullets. Too bad for the vampire that it was standing against a man who had seen his bullets bounce off or be absorbed by more enemies than he could count. If one form of combat was ineffective, then it was time to switch to another.
Kane pivoted with the staff, bringing the newly formed cat head across the jaw of the flop-necked horror, knocking the head to the other shoulder with enough force to send him staggering to the wall of the tunnel. Kane pushed in hard, snapping the other end of the staff into the ribs of the thing, listening to bones snap under the impact of the ancient artifact. The black surface didn’t register a single mark despite the scratch of shattered rib across it.
The vampire folded over the bar. Its core was made from orichalcum, meaning that it was a nearly indestructible length of alien-designed alloy. Kane looked toward Lyta for a brief heartbeat.
“Go!”
The girl, to her credit, did not hesitate as he returned his attention to the African vampire, whose head was now straight on its neck. Its loose eyeball had been sucked back into the socket, and the tattered lips beneath the .45-caliber’s entrance that used to be its nose peeled back to expose a death’s-head grin. Suddenly, Nehushtan had another pair of hands on it, and they possessed enough strength to easily lift Kane until his feet could only kick at empty air.
Deprived of leverage on the ground, Kane swiftly adapted to the situation and brought up both knees, slamming them against the vampire’s clavicle. There was a grunt of escaping breath, but that proved as much of an impediment as a bullet through the face. The vampire chuckled.
“You cannot stand long against me, bone sack,” the creature taunted.
“How about standing on you?” Kane asked. His knees jammed onto the thing’s shoulders, and he now had the leverage to wrench the staff out of his opponent’s steely grasp. The vampire’s grip was strong, though, and the most that Kane could manage against that might was simply twisting his own torso atop his foe.
“Nope,” the dead thing returned. With a sudden surge of might, Kane was hurled from the walking corpse’s chest, and his broad shoulders slammed against the far wall of the tunnel. What was left of his shadow suit was enough to keep the Cerberus adventurer from shattering his spine against the stone. Unfortunately, the impact on the far side of the tunnel still knocked the wind from him, and the artifact tumbled from his numbed fingers.
The vampire chuckled at the sight of Kane slumped on the ground. “I have to admit, you show a lot of spunk for a bone bag. Too bad you’re facing one of us.”
Kane looked up, realizing that the monster before him had once more settled into an attitude of superiority. And it seemed to be recovering its facial features. The nose wound was rapidly closing, and lips that had been torn and bloody solidified, making its smile appear a little more human. It walked around Kane, studying him as he got back to his feet. Kane reached for his knife.
“Your gun failed. Your magic stick didn’t hurt me. Now you’re going to try that?” it asked him.
With speed that would have overwhelmed a less experienced fighter, the vampire surged forward, gnarled fingers snatching for Kane’s knife hand. However, the dead thing was a heartbeat too slow, and it clutched at empty air. Instead of disarming the Cerberus explorer, the vampire found itself overextended in reach.
Kane brought up his elbow under the dead creature’s armpit, hooking the thing with one smooth, swift motion. All the strength in the world was a great thing, but the vampire still only possessed the weight of a normal human being, maybe a few extra pounds for the entity that shared its lifeless mass. Kane easily hefted the vampire up, pivoting, then slammed his foe onto the flagstone floor. Bones snapped and popped like the sounds of distant gunfire, and the vampire looked up with bulging eyes.
Kane stepped back, wound up with one foot and kicked down hard. The sole of his boot stamped into the dead humanoid’s face, producing another wet set of crunches. Kane took the brief second of the vampire’s vulnerability and dazedness to hurl himself toward the staff. He hit a shoulder roll as he scooped up the powerful artifact.
The vampire sat up once more, then surged to its feet. It spun around with uncanny speed, and this time, it didn’t move with the laconic assuredness of an unmatched predator. The dead horror moved forward with the suddenness of a lightning arc. Too bad for the vampire that Kane was no slouch in the speed department. Even as he came up with Nehushtan, Kane swung the staff around so that its pointed bottom was held up like a spear.
The vampire let out an agonized scream as the ancient staff’s unyielding point burst through its shoulder and tore out of its back. There was the horrible shriek of a thing on fire, and the damned corpse writhed on the end of the stick, hands clubbing at the shaft to try to pull free. Kane saw the panic, felt the heat of the artifact increase beneath its blackened surface. Kane pushed forward, bowling the monstrosity off its feet, slamming it to the ground.
“No!” the vampire shrieked, impaled on the staff of Moses, the scepter of Solomon. It seemed the myths of the vampire’s vulnerability to holy artifacts had the whiff of truth. Kane could smell it as the thing let off steam from around the edges of its wound, a rancid, putrid scent that stunk of white-hot brass.
“Why not?” Kane asked, wrenching the staff free from its shoulder wound.
This time, the vampire didn’t show any haste in rising back to battle. Perhaps the touch of the relic was too much, too poisonous for its remarkable parasite to heal it, to continue this fight. Either way, Kane wasn’t sticking around. He turned and followed Lyta out into the open.
And stopped cold. Others burst from the woods. Where there had been one, there were now a half of a dozen. Kane clenched the staff, knuckles white with the adrenaline surge that came with near-abject terror. Kane was not immune to fear; indeed, he relished the ability to be scared. That was the trigger for the body to increase its efficiency, flushing the bloodstream with extra oxygen, extra strength surging through his muscles. It made him quicker, more powerful. All the better to fight, or to flee if necessary. Only the fused-brained worst burnouts, unsuited for any contest of survival, would show no emotional response to being outnumbered.
Here, Kane was surrounded and outnumbered by six more examples of a creature who’d shrugged off gunfire, withstood some of his strongest blows and only felt pain at the touch of a product of ancient alien technology.
Even with the relic grasped in both of his hands, he’d just came off a battle that had left him rattled, his skull pounding. Nehushtan might not be enough to turn the tide of this ambush.
He choked up his grip on the artifact, holding it more firmly.
If Kane failed, it would not be for lack of effort.
A snarl curled his lip. “Bring it, you freaks.”
Chapter 11
Lyta, once more in the open, could see the vampiric figures staggering in the darkness, and her hands were no longer preoccupied with staying in contact with the staff in order to gain night vision. She saw the six figures leap and land about her.
And, unlike Kane, she had not been disarmed. Brigid Baptiste had made certain that she had avoided capture and kept her slung rifle and handgun. Even as she was urged to race past Kane and his reanimated opponent, she was taking the rifle off its sling, gripping it in both hands, stock tucked up against her shoulder. Even a woman as slight as she was had a much better chance hitting a target with a rifle than a handgun. The handgun was an unsupported, lightweight piece of steel that was far less efficient than the long stocked rifle in mediating recoil or aligning sights. Most especially, the rifle had much more ammunition capacity and stopping power than even a large-bored pistol.
Kane was out. He joined her as the vampires circled them both, hemming in the subterranean tunnel entrance they’d originally come through. The man from America had traded his handgun for the staff, and he tightened his grasp on the long weapon, looking around. The dead puppet carcasses kept equidistant from each other. Attacking more than one at a time would be difficult for them and there was coverage in case someone tried to escape between them; two attackers would fall on any victim trying to cross their line in the sand.
Kane edged closer to Lyta until they were back to back.
“Any plans?” Lyta whispered.
“Make it costly for them,” Kane growled.
That response wasn’t the most heartening of military stratagems, but at least Kane wasn’t ready to lay down arms and be dragged into the depths of the earth before Neekra. Lyta ground her molars, dark eyes flitting from vampire to vampire and keeping tabs on them in her peripheral vision. 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
mentally repeated.
Despite the lack of stopping power of Kane’s .45-caliber handgun, the Cerberus explorer had hit the vampire right in the spot where a normal human would have instantly dropped. A bullet through the thinnest bones of the skull, burrowing into the medulla oblongata, the deepest reptilian parts of the human brain responsible for controlling heartbeat, breathing and other motor functions, was a kill shot, no matter what. That was what she’d been taught in her training as part of her town’s militia.
Even though she didn’t expect much of an effect on her enemy, she snapped the rifle to aim and fired as fast as she could pull the trigger, starting at center of mass and letting the recoil guide her fire upward. The gun boomed, poked against her shoulder, brass spinning out of the breech across her vision, and she watched as her target staggered in a deadly dance of hammer blows that made its arms windmill in a wild effort to regain its balance.
When the vampire finally toppled, she realized that Kane was no longer at her back. The sounds of battle were on, the thud and crunch of fists on flesh, staff against bones, and Lyta turned toward the second of the creatures on her side of the melee, tearing 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.
The third of the vampires lunged at her, and Lyta barely had time to twist out of the way of its snatching fingers. Unfortunately, the thing grabbed hold of her rifle’s barrel and squeezed hard; metal whined under inhuman pressure. As the carcass crushed the rifle’s business end, she heard the bones shatter and splinter in a hand not designed for producing that kind of force. The horrific things that subsumed the dead bodies had little concern for the corpses they operated. It was as if they felt no pain, and they had little fear of irreparable damage.