Necropolis

by James Axler

  “You sure?” Grant asked. “Durga rarely does anything in a straight line.”

  “How snakelike of him,” Brigid mused, her frown belying the lightness of her pun. “Neekra? But why would Neekra want him?”

  “That’s what we’ve got to figure out, after we hie ourselves henceforth the fuck out of here,” Grant concluded.

  The three travelers nodded in agreement. They wouldn’t do either Thurpa or Kane much good if they sat around solving mysteries and were caught again.

  It was time to run and hide.

  Chapter 18

  Kane’s flight through the necropolis was illuminating, to say the very least. As the Nagah clones spread out, watching over the maze of streets winding throughout the plethora of crypt-like houses, he darted and wove. None of the cobra men opened fire, meaning that Kane’s suspicion that both Durga and Neekra wanted him alive was correct. Or correct enough for the time being. For a moment, he regretted being so brutal against the pair of men he’d brought down. But he knew that although he’d been lethal, the ends he’d brought to those guards had been swift and relatively merciful.

  Even though they were clones, and seemed to have no will of their own, they spread out like professionals. Kane had seen the formation they’d fallen into a dozen times, especially when he and other Magistrates had had to pursue a particularly hostile outlaw into the Tartarus Pits.

  Then again, it seemed that the facilities that were being utilized for creating these clone troopers had the means of quickly programming fighting behaviors and tactics into the minds of the newly “hatched.” The Kongamato had showed lethal cunning, even when not being directly controlled by either Durga or the warlord Gamal. There had been other electronic equipment around the capsules in which the artificial organisms were grown. Since Kane had only penetrated the facility late in the cycle of producing the clones, he hadn’t seen what the extra devices were for, but the awakened creatures had ended up being intensely hostile, if rather uncoordinated.

  Of course, Durga had already produced hundreds of the creatures. The ones chasing him throughout the cloning facility were half-baked, but, with their strength and agility, they had still been dangerous.

  These cobra-hooded men were likely preprogrammed, as well. The North American continent had been swamped and swarmed by herds of less precisely created entities, creatures that were abominations in the nominal shape of normal humans, some scaled, others with facial tentacles and mouths like lampreys. The wild mutants had been released as a means of keeping people pressured and hunted, to keep their populations low and forced to cower from marauding bands of savage primitives.

  By the same token, those laboratories had created the hybrids, the slender, ultra-advanced entities who had taken over the ruling caste of humanity. These genetic elite beings decided who was worthy and who wasn’t to live within the gigantic arcologies where they’d reestablished civilization under their iron fists. This weeding of the “unwashed” from their societies was intent on driving humanity further and further into servitude to them. Kane had been one of the willing servants of that regime before he had seen the truth of the situation. Rather than enforcing law and order, they were merely preserving a status quo for a tiny elite whose ties to humanity were thin at best.

  Those hybrid barons and their less exalted brethren were eventually awakened, modified by a genetic signal from the ancient biological ship Tiamat. The god chromosomes within each of the lab-bred monsters became either one of the overlords or the psychically lobotomized drones called the Nephilim, an ersatz take on the Nagah who were Enki’s “brainchildren.” Durga’s lineage was of an Annunaki who didn’t want mindless servants but people who blended the best of multiple worlds, able to create and grow; however, the clones here were no more than the blank-slate Nephilim that Durga had reprogrammed and reconfigured to blend in with Nagah society.

  Those creatures, so altered by the fallen prince, had been responsible for acts of terror and murder in the cobra-folk’s city of Garuda. They had continued a reign of fear that Kane had thought he’d ended by detonating a fuel-air explosion beneath Durga.

  And now he was facing them. He’d had only a small skirmish with them before, a couple of agents, but here was a coordinated hunting force, stalking through the maze behind him. They had the tactics, apparently.

  Kane narrowed his eyes, almost in defiance.

  You’ve got a plan, he thought. But can you handle it when you run into enemy action?

  As he retreated through the underground graveyard, Kane saw that the cavern spread out farther. Indeed, he could see a dip in the ground beneath his feet. Was there more up ahead? The vaulted ceiling was at least twenty feet above the top of his head, meaning that he had to keep an eye out for foes running along the tops of the low structures about him.

  Kane took a running start and dug his feet into a wall, letting momentum carry him upward. He wrapped his fingers over the top lip of a crypt-like structure and dragged himself to the roof. With another kick, he was on top of the building, scanning into the distance. From his new vantage point, he could spot the Nagah guards. There were actually six of them. Three had stayed back, obviously to protect Durga and Neekra. The guards were armed with typical Zambian militia firearms: AK-47 rifles of old design but likely more modern build. Centuries after the fall of twentieth-century civilization, the simpler, more rugged weapons were easier to assemble.

  Africa had plenty of raw resources and still had the technology to make classic pre-skydark weapons, as well as vehicles, electronics and power production, from drilling for petroleum to maintaining electrical plants able to run major cities.

  Of course, if Neekra rose, or Durga took the opportunity to conquer the continent, then a mostly harmless region would become the starting point of a world-threatening army. Stage one of handling this was dealing with Durga’s clone troopers and Neekra’s vampiric emissaries. Granted, the gunmen would be far easier to deal with. Each of the Nagah replicants was scanning, searching for Kane at ground level, using weapon-mounted flashlights to look for him. Kane knew that if he was to have a chance, he needed to keep them from thinking on more than just a two-dimensional plane.

  Luckily, Kane had an advantage over them with his shadow suit hood’s night-vision optics. He could pinpoint all six of the gunmen advancing through the necropolis. Stealth and tactics were going to be his advantages.

  There was a flash of movement up ahead. Kane kept low to the roof, scanning, and he spotted a figure atop one of the crypts. Kane wasn’t certain of what kind of senses the entity had, but its human shape but insectlike movements told him that it was one of Neekra’s vampires. He clenched his foot-long combat knife, keeping in mind the Sin Eater with its suppressor attached. If he made too much noise, he’d draw the attention of the patrolling cobra troops. That included firing the so-called silenced machine pistol. Even a softened gunshot was still unmistakable. The silencer just made the location of the firing harder to narrow down.

  Kane also realized that every time he’d tried to take one of the reanimated horrors down with gunfire, it’d proven tough to slow them down, let alone keep them down. Any interaction with the vampiric things would need to take place at bad-breath distances, with his knife in conflict with their strength and inhuman durability.

  Even then, fighting a vampire with only a knife would draw attention.

  Which meant that he had to get the drop on it before it could even fight back.

  Kane’s mind was running through angles of attack and blind spots for the cloned soldiers and the shadowy form in the distance. He took a glance toward the ceiling overhead. Just because he saw one of the things wearing a corpse as if it were a suit didn’t mean there weren’t others that had shed their flesh shells and returned to their semiliquid forms to defy gravity and physics, slithering along the ceiling.

  He was glad that he did, be
cause there were two of the blob-like horrors, stretching themselves from spot to spot, advancing toward Kane’s rooftop swiftly.

  Kane cursed himself for thinking exactly like he’d wanted the Nagah clones to and for thinking of every problem as a nail because he had a hammer. He, Fargo and Lyta had spent more than enough time discussing the potential vulnerabilities to wood of the gelatinous creatures that he’d thought immediately of his knife instead of the sharpened wooden stakes he’d prepared to deal with these things.

  One of the elastic monster’s pseudopods whipped toward Kane’s face, and he jerked his head out of the way and clasped the butt of one of the stakes. He drew it from his combat belt. With a reflexive snap of his wrist, he plunged it into the gooey, stretching limb and elicited the keening that Kane had identified as pain in Neekra’s children.

  In an instant, the blob withdrew its tentacle and shrugged back in retreat from the human who knew how to hurt it. Even as that one pulled away from battle, Kane caught the other creature in the periphery of his vision, splashing atop a nearby crypt’s rooftop. The flowering spatter of the creature’s form suddenly sucked back together, forming into a fountain arc of the blob pushing itself across the distance between the two of them. Kane whirled and faced this new attacker. Even in the dark, the advanced optics of his shadow suit hood allowed him to make out the two major organs floating within its fluid mass.

  Brigid had told Lyta that those two shapes were akin to nucleoli in a standard cell. The nucleoli were structures within a cell’s nucleus that produced the ribosomes that allowed the unicellular organism to process protein. And Kane figured that the liquid proteins in blood were much easier for these things to absorb through their membranes than actual ingestion of solid food. Kane didn’t know what pinioning one of those organs did for stopping them cold, but then, he didn’t want to know about cellular biology. He just knew that putting a sharpened wooden stake through one of those masses caused the creatures to lose cohesion and fall apart.

  And it was time to get stabby.

  The trouble with that was that his current opponent was now forewarned about Kane’s deadly wooden weapon. It lunged out one pod, seeking to grasp at Kane’s wrist. However, with a deft spin, the Cerberus warrior brought up his combat knife and sliced at the extended appendage. Carving through membrane and cytoplasm was ridiculously easy, and now there was a lifeless splatter of goo sailing off into the shadows as the creature backed off from Kane’s attack.

  Unfortunately, with all the scuffle now going on, and the wailing cry of the first injured blob, the cobra gunmen had raised their attention toward the dark shadows. The blue-white glare of gun-mounted flashlights caught Kane out in the open, delineating him as an easy target.

  So much for a quiet one-on-one fight, Kane thought. He jumped from one roof to another only moments before the air was suddenly filled with the snap and crack of rifle rounds.

  As Kane landed, bled off his forward momentum with a somersault, then regained his footing, he cursed whatever training had been placed into the warrior clones. They were firing single shots, not fully automatic. And they were seeking him out with the cones of their torches before triggering the next shots in their volleys against him.

  They were trained and disciplined on the trigger. He hopped to another roof and landed just in time to crash into another figure on the top of the small concrete structure. As Kane struck the other in the chest with his shoulder, he could feel the tattered, crusty uniform of a dead militiaman. That was all the identification that he required to bring up the knife and spear the walking corpse through the mouth with the nine-inch-long blade. Steel punched through the skull and up into the vampire’s brain pan with brutal efficiency.

  Hands rose swiftly, fingers digging like steely claws into Kane’s shoulders, trying to push the man back. Before those deadly talons could draw blood or break bone, Kane brought up the sharpened stake in his other hand. He stabbed into the thing’s belly, driving upward toward whatever heart might still exist within the reanimated body. Even as the fire-hardened point reached the tough muscle of what used to be its heart, the unliving body opened its mouth and belted out a death screech that threatened to shake the molars from Kane’s skull.

  Still, the creature’s dying cry was the last of its offensive actions against Kane, and when the blaze of a rifle light burned in his peripheral vision, the Cerberus explorer swung the once again lifeless corpse around to form a living shield. Bullets smashed into the dead soldier, giving Kane a brief moment’s respite, which allowed him to drop from the roof of the crypt and land behind solid stone. A human body was something of a shield, but when dealing with high-powered rifles, Kane didn’t trust it for much more than a shot or two. He’d rather have granite between himself and a bullet.

  One vampire was dead, another had received an agonizing injury from one of Kane’s wooden stakes and the last one was still out there in somewhat good condition. Kane was glad that his knife didn’t have a sawtooth back, as he had been able to wrench it from the skull of the reanimated corpse. The stake was smooth and still in his hands.

  Unfortunately, Kane didn’t think that the fire-hardened point of his vampire-slaying weapon would do much good against the armored scales that guarded the torsos of the Nagah clones. Luckily, Kane’s combat blade would do the job with aplomb. Unfortunately, even in close quarters and sharp corners, that meant Kane would need to get within arm’s length of one of those cobra-hooded guards. He sheathed his combat knife and flexed, launching the Sin Eater into his grasp.

  The Nagah already knew he was present, but they only had a slight hint of his location, so the silenced weapon was going to have to work. Again, with the suppressor in place, he could hide his muzzle-flashes and avoid giving away his position with the sound of his gun going off.

  Sure enough, a Nagah lurched into view, but fortune favored Kane and the soldier glanced to the left while Kane was to his right. He lifted the Sin Eater and pulled the trigger, putting a single suppressed 9 mm slug into the side of the clone’s skull. The snap of the bullet striking flesh and shattering skull wasn’t quite as loud as the pop of Kane’s gun, but it did bring the blaze of three lights spraying toward the falling Nagah. As Kane was out of sight to the side, and about fifteen feet away from the now dead trooper, the other guards held their fire but advanced toward their fallen friend. Kane kept to the shadows, staying put as beams of light burned past corners, casting him into darkness. As long as he was not in the direct shine of the light, they wouldn’t notice him immediately.

  Even now, the scuffle of feet covered the sound of his own steps, and the Nagah hunters betrayed their presence with their weapon-mounted lights.

  Better for Kane, those swiveling beams elicited hisses of dismay and annoyance from the gelatinous entities.

  They don’t like bright light, Kane mused. Of course it wasn’t far-fetched, since they retreated back underground with the rising of the sun.

  That meant that the creatures had some form of visual input, even though he couldn’t see a sign of even an eyestalk on the blobs. He’d worry about the specifics of that later, if he managed a later. Right now, he took advantage of their momentary discomfort and skirted down a causeway between several of the small, blocky houses.

  Every so often, he’d stop and fire a single shot at a wall to draw them closer, but as he fired, he altered his course, keeping them from anticipating his progress or his path.

  Keep them on the go. Keep them confused. Give the others time to regroup, arm up, join him in the fight.

  And maybe, just maybe, he could even the odds some more against the forces assembled.

  * * *

  AUSTIN FARGO DIDN’T waste much time around the cells after delivering “the goods” to Brigid Baptiste. He had little desire in showing himself more than necessary, even if Brigid and Grant did figure out that he was present. Dealing with either Durga or N
eekra would blow any chances he had of staying out of the embroiled madness of their scheming.

  The cobra prince and the vampiric goddess were plotters to the point of fetishism, involving as many different forces and contacts as they could, seemingly for the sheer joy of duping others into doing their busywork. The more arcane their plotting, the better for their personal egos, and Fargo was no longer a fan of such machinations. The complications added were hardly worth the headaches and threat of failure.

  He’d survived a prior encounter with Durga, first meeting as antagonists and then becoming distant allies, ultimately falling apart on opposite sides of the plot when Fargo saw that Durga had become drunk with newfound power.

  Still, Durga had made arrangements, and Fargo was supposed to back Durga up just in case Neekra turned out to be the untrustworthy ally that they both knew she’d eventually become. Fargo didn’t like the fact that someone imprisoned by Enlil and his compatriots—at great effort and requiring an item as powerful as Nehushtan to seal that deal—was working toward freeing herself.

  The knowledge of Annunaki history that was available to Fargo was incomplete, but what he was aware of informed him that they were, at worst, jealous gods and, at best, the lesser of two evils, at least where Enlil and his earthbound compatriots were concerned. Neekra, the figure who was working alongside Durga, was a mere fragment of a far deadlier, far worse entity that Enlil and the overlords had seen as a bold threat to their control of earth.

  Fargo knew better than to underestimate anything that Enlil and kin considered a threat. He’d been on the receiving end of what Kane and the other Cerberus “threats” had been capable of, either through brute force and combat skill or the resourcefulness and courage to adapt to threats, which included weathering grenade explosions and high-powered automatic weapons as if they were mere droplets of rain on a spring day.

  Neekra’s tomb had not been able to contain her, at least her psyche. And that mind was more than powerful enough to mold a human male into an egg-producing horror. The legends of other vampires were spawned from the scions of others Neekra had touched in the past, and the only reason humanity had lasted as long as it had was that there were those who somehow remembered the lessons of the Archons, an intermediary race whom the Annunaki and their Tuatha de Danaan counterparts had created to watch over the planet Earth and humanity. Those who recalled the teachings of the Archons knew the weapons and strategies necessary to drive these body-jacking horrors away or slay them.