by James Axler
Along the way, observers developed their own vampiric myths. The remnants of technology brought to humanity by the alien races became holy items that the night terrors shunned.
Fargo went over what lore he could recall from human legends, knowing that there was merit to some of it, seeking a way to defeat these creatures if Kane and his allies failed. Sometimes it involved a wooden stake through the heart or even the severing of the head.
Fargo knew he’d given Brigid and Grant the tools necessary to escape from their cells, then perhaps to even battle this incarnation of Neekra and Durga and their assorted minions. But they were without guns and other tools. All they could do was talk to each other via the Commtacts. The closest thing to a weapon that he’d supplied to Brigid was a folding pliers multitool that had a three-inch-long utility knife.
Would that be enough of an edge—Fargo allowed himself the pun—to fight their way to freedom?
That was why he needed to regather himself, see what odds he had.
Fargo delivered Durga’s ace in the hole to a spot where the fallen prince would be able to locate it readily.
His obligation complete, Fargo turned and left the necropolis.
Whatever the outcome of this conflict between Cerberus and Neekra, it was best observed from afar.
Chapter 19
Thurpa’s awakening was not one of comfort. His breathing was ragged and his arms were held out to either side of him, in the position of crucifixion, though it was more appropriately being pinioned, manacled to a wall, chains once more about his wrists. Even as his eyes fluttered open, he saw movement, a pair of leather boots padding away into the shadows on the floor. The thing that struck him as most unusual about those boots was the spurs, the Y-shaped bars of metal each supporting a multipointed, starlike wheel. Only the most remote of societies had never seen a cowboy and his riding spurs, and the underground city of Garuda, with its store of stolen memories of the surface world, even after two centuries, had a treasure trove of cowboy movies within its records, as well as every other kind of cinema on record.
Thurpa had a faint recollection of someone else who had cowboy spurs on his boots, and then he realized that he’d just seen Austin Fargo exiting whatever dungeon he was stuck within. And the damnedest thing was that this was not the one where he’d gone under.
All the effort he’d expended, tinkering with his manacles with his unhurt tooth, was now erased. Something was in his pocket, as well, and Thurpa didn’t like that one bit.
He didn’t like being a mailbox. He was sure whatever was in his pocket would be for his teammates or for his captors. Even now, in the distance, he heard the crack of guns, firing single shots mostly. Thurpa stood straight, and the pressure of his chest muscles against his lungs immediately lessened. He scanned around the dungeon.
“How do I get out of this?” Thurpa murmured.
Thurpa gave his wrists a shake and realized that the manacles had slack in them, different from the ones that had held him in place before.
So now he could get out. Then where would he go?
Freedom first, was his main thought. He tugged on one hand, folding in his thumb as far as it would go. The chains wouldn’t give him much slack or leverage, but at least he was getting motion. Scales popped from his skin. The sensation was similar to having hairs ripped from skin, except these follicles were in small plates, a combination of hair yanked out by the roots and a too-strong swatch of tape.
The grinding sharp edge of the manacle scraped off long stretches of his scales, revealing raw, pinkish flesh beneath, as well as dozens of tiny prickles of blood where the roots of his scales had been torn up.
But Thurpa’s hand was freed. He staggered momentarily, slumping from one arm as his legs weren’t used to supporting his weight. He briefly wondered how long he had been out. Then he realized there was a new presence in the cell with him.
“Your...majesty,” Thurpa managed to say, his throat dry and raw.
Durga stepped closer, into the light. They’d left him a sconce with which he could see by, and the former prince nodded in acknowledgment of his former subject. A skin of water was raised to Thurpa’s lips, and the prisoner jerked his head back and away.
“This isn’t drugged,” Durga told him.
Thurpa’s eyes narrowed, but he was so parched, he surrendered to his need to drink. He took two deep draughts before coughing some up; clear water stung in his nostrils before he snorted it out of his nasal cavities. “Thank you.”
“Good to know that I’m still worthy of your respect, if not your obedience,” Durga commented, stepping back.
Thurpa felt his pocket was now lighter. Fargo’s little “gift” had been delivered to the cobra prince. “That’s why you moved me.”
Durga rested his hand on the side of Thurpa’s face. “Listen. Don’t try to think about what happened. Please.”
Thurpa, once more, was taken aback by the concern, the same kind of leadership that had seduced him from believing in the reign of Matron Hannah, Durga’s former bride, to the formerly crippled prince. There was a goodness in him, but the events of the Kongamato plague, and his first encounter with Neekra while in Durga’s presence, weighed heavily on his mind.
“Forget for now,” Durga intoned. “Until she is gone.”
Thurpa’s whole body tingled as chills raced from his cheek to the rest of his body. Blind terror stormed past the doors of his mind, threatening to grind him under the hooves of nightmares. Durga’s grasp on his wrist, the one that should have still been manacled, brought him back to consciousness. He looked into Durga’s amber eyes and realized he was sitting.
“That was Neekra,” Durga whispered. “But you held your will against her.”
“H-how...” Thurpa asked, sputtering. “How did you know?”
“I’m sensitive to her. I could feel her presence here,” Durga responded. He touched Thurpa’s forehead. “In there. We resisted her together.”
Horrific flashes whipped across Thurpa’s mind’s eye. He had to fight to keep what little he had in his belly from spewing over his lips.
“I hate this place,” Thurpa murmured as Durga pulled him to his feet.
“Then get out now. Chances are that your new friends are free,” Durga told him.
Thurpa looked shocked at Durga’s betrayal of this knowledge.
“You need to move before I can act on this information,” Durga pressed. “I can’t hold off much longer, and the four of you need to escape now.”
“What about Fargo?” Thurpa asked, woozy.
Durga helped the dazed young man to both feet. “Just move it.”
The first step was wobbly, Thurpa’s head swimming. The next step caught him, and he reached out, touching wall, fingers clawing at the crease between two blocks to gain purchase and hold himself up. There was a gun lying on the ground ahead of him, and, as Thurpa looked around, he noticed Durga was long gone. It all would have seemed a dream except for the damage caused by the manacles and the undeniable weight of horror from having Neekra inside his skull.
Thurpa knelt and picked up the pistol. It felt real enough, and as his mind cleared even more, he noticed that it was in a holster, a belt dangling from it. It was the setup that he had worn. It had been stripped off when the blob-like vampire creatures attacked him. Spare magazines were in side pouches. He drunkenly fastened the belt about his hips, then looked up to see Grant and Brigid watching him don his gear. Brigid had a rifle tucked to her hip, but she lowered the muzzle as she looked the scene over. Wariness disappeared within a moment of her observation.
“Are you all right?” Brigid asked, approaching him.
Thurpa nodded. “I woke up, and things just got more weird from there.”
“You saw Fargo and likely Durga,” Brigid pointed out.
Thurpa blinked
, but then he remembered that he was dealing with Brigid Baptiste, a woman who epitomized the same kind of observation and logic as Sherlock Holmes. “Durga would have had access to my gun belt And Durga came by...”
“Because of Fargo?” Grant asked.
Thurpa squeezed his eyes shut. “Brain’s not working right. Drugged...things hitting me weird. Nightmare flashes...”
“The same thing that Kane suffered, except over a shorter span,” Brigid said. She lifted Thurpa’s chin, then looked into his eyes, studying his pupils.
God, your eyes are emerald gems, Brigid, Thurpa caught himself thinking. His cheeks warmed, and he felt ashamed that she might have read that thought.
“You’re definitely suffering from shock,” Brigid said. Again, Thurpa fought against the stirring feelings deep within him. He remembered Durga’s statement that Neekra had been inside his skull, and she must have left him susceptible to the slightest pull of sexual interest.
“Neekra?” Brigid asked.
Thurpa looked at her, confused. She could read minds?
“I’m not reading your mind, but you are oddly interested in me at this point,” Brigid pointed out. “Probably trying to get information out of your head.”
“That’s what Durga said,” Thurpa responded. “Though...why would—”
“Whatever happened was to help Durga against her,” Brigid stated. He realized that she was bandaging his stripped forearms to give them a chance to heal. “And Durga needs someone to help him against a menace like Neekra. Hence, we’re part of his backup plan.”
Thurpa glanced toward Grant. He was still half-naked, except for his gloved hands and the length of blood-spattered chain he wielded.
“We ran into one of the cloned guards that Durga made,” Grant explained when he noticed Thurpa’s gaze fall on the crimson, dripping links.
Realizing that he wasn’t operating on all cylinders, Thurpa reached down and pulled the gun from its holster, reversed it and handed it to Grant. “You’ll be a steadier shot than I am.”
Grant shook his head. “You’ll be able to pull your own weight, and, for now, we’ll make do with what we’ve got.”
Thurpa nodded. He holstered the pistol, though, not wanting to inadvertently set it off. Sooner or later, he’d wake back up, get his head together. And until then, he’d keep his hands off the grips and fingers away from any triggers until the absolute last possible moment. Better to keep from shooting his allies by accident than suddenly have to learn how well he was trained as a medic.
Even that decision helped to clear his mind a little bit more. He looked around. “Where’s Nathan?”
“He’s covering our egress,” Brigid responded.
Grant patted Thurpa on the shoulder, signaling for him to go back and join the other young man who’d joined the Cerberus explorers on this journey. Thurpa didn’t want to think about what the two of them had been saying about him, and he wondered if they still trusted him. In their shoes, Thurpa wouldn’t trust himself, either. Durga had separated him from the group for a reason, and it might have been for more than just being a human mailbox between himself and his silent partner, Austin Fargo.
Thurpa also didn’t have anything he considered to be a psychic ability, or any meditative training, which made him wonder why he’d been so capable of resisting the dark influence of the blood goddess Neekra.
That wondering didn’t go much further than that: he had been hypnotized to resist the witch’s influence, and that hypnotism had to have come from Durga. With that programming bouncing around between his ears, there might also be other thoughts and orders that would make him turn against the others.
Thurpa wondered if he would have the will and strength to resist those commands.
Or if, deep down, he really wanted to resist.
Uncertain of who he was anymore, Thurpa just put one foot after the other, praying to Enki for the strength and serenity to cleanse his mind of all doubts. But the young Nagah wasn’t going to hold his breath for results. He’d need faith in himself and his allies to make it out of this pit.
* * *
KANE DUCKED BEHIND a toppled column, bullets screaming as they ricocheted off stone. The underground necropolis had opened up into a terrain of old packed dirt, with flagstone markers for whoever had been buried down there. The gravestones stood, relatively undisturbed by weather and wind, shielded in the cavernous vault. Around him the markers stuck up like the snarled teeth of a dozen giants who’d fallen asleep with their mouths open.
Once out of the city of crypts, Kane now had far less cover and concealment against the cobra gunmen, but the shadows were deep and long. Beams from their weapons’ torches stabbed into inky black and seemed to shine on forever without illuminating any objects or walls.
The cloned Nagah were making at least most of them seem visible. But Kane found himself being steered in one direction, toward one of the walls of the great tunnel. He paused and returned to the toppled column, keeping his profile low. The flashlights on the rifles were doing as much to guide him toward a trap as the actual gunfire.
He switched from the light amplification mode on his shadow suit’s faceplate to infrared detection. As soon as he did so, he saw only three bulbs burning next to the still warm barrels of rifles. Kane grimaced and scanned the graveyard for signs of the other two cobra men. As he did, a cold mass moved swiftly in his peripheral vision.
Kane hurled himself away from the fallen column just as a pair of gooey entities splashed against it. There was a third being falling, and it snapped the aged stone; cracks appeared on its landing. This was another of the vampires, the corpses with the blood-blob horrors reanimating them.
That last landing informed Kane that he was going to be in for a hell of a battle. Just as the thing took a step, its leg folded beneath it. The same force that had shattered the column had also turned the bones of the corpse’s leg to splinters floating in the meat sleeve that used to be a human limb.
But even with that, the thing recovered its balance and hopped along on one foot.
He’d switched to light amplification, his instincts informing him that the snap of the column was louder than any gunshot. Kane knew that those weapon flashlights would swing toward his back, but he was between the Nagah and the light-sensitive children of Neekra. He stood his ground just long enough to give the nocturnal horrors a face full of LED spotlight, then dived to the ground. Rifle bullets sliced the air that he’d stood in only moments ago. The crack of their passage made his skin crawl with the knowledge that he had no body armor protecting him.
Still, the gambit succeeded as he watched the hobbled, reanimated corpse tumble backward under the impact of multiple bullets. As well, he spotted more movement to his right.
It was the two missing Nagah gunners, and they were holding back, scanning for any sign of Kane before taking action. Kane almost felt as if he were at an unfair advantage over the two cloned soldiers, but, then again, they were hunting him to his death, and they had three of their fellow guards flushing him toward them. Kane brought up the Sin Eater and fired at the one who was closest to looking directly at him, punching a burst of slugs into the reptilian humanoid’s chest. The snarl of the rounds cutting through the suppressor at the end of the forearm gun was loud enough to jerk the other gunmen to awareness, but the Nagah that he hit dropped to the gun, the life smashed from it.
The other soldier had good reflexes and discipline but wasn’t fast enough to catch Kane, even with the dull flicker that managed to escape his Sin Eater’s silencer. His wolflike physique sliced through the darkness, lunging for the cover of a grave marker even as bullets missed their first mark. The reptilian gunman turned on his weapon light, probing for where the human had disappeared to, but that only reinforced Kane’s triangulation of where the shooting came from. Kane swung his gun on target and put three rounds into
the rifleman as another round splashed against the stone he used as cover.
That would-be killer toppled as Kane’s bullets smashed through the cobra-hooded gunner’s skull. Unfortunately, the dying Nagah’s rifle still stayed lit, its beam spilling across the dirt, casting a blaze of light on the ground. The moment Kane moved, he was illuminated, still within the range of the flashlight, the ever-growing cone keeping him visible to the other three killers who directed rounds his way.
Kane hit the dirt. The supersonic crack of air parting in the wake of their bullets buffeted his eardrums as the Nagah guards missed him by inches. At least on the ground, he was no longer betrayed by the spill of LED beams, but the remaining gunmen in Durga’s group were no doubt splitting up, looking to get a better angle on him. He needed either a distraction or some help soon.
“Kane. Free and armed.”
Four terse words broke over his Commtact, and Kane had never felt so glad to hear the voice of Brigid Baptiste before.
“Need help,” Kane answered with equal brevity.
“On the way,” were the only words spoken. Again, Kane couldn’t be certain that their enemies were not listening in on the encrypted conversations, so the three of them were stingy with their speech. The less they chattered, the less Durga’s group would have to home in on them.
He had friends on the way.
“Vampires here,” Kane added.
“We know,” Brigid said.
Kane sincerely hoped that the tension in his voice and the increase in gunfire were enough to tell her that he needed their aid quickly.