by James Axler
Then again, this was Brigid Baptiste he was thinking about. The woman’s observational and extrapolation abilities were second to none. Hers was a brilliant intellect able to direct them to a spot in a featureless desert without benefit of the global positioning satellites in the employ of Cerberus redoubt and Lakesh.
The sound of distant gunfire and the levels of stress in Kane’s voice might as well have been distress flares in the sky for her.
The only trouble with that was the Nagah were not the only enemies coming after him. As soon as he got off the Commtact with her, Kane felt the almost steely grasp of a tentacle wrap around his throat. The pseudopod was trying to strangle him, and the force of the pull was hard on his spine as the creature lifted him off the ground.
The braced amoeboid had more than sufficient strength to haul Kane off the ground like a rag doll, and he kicked at the air, struggling to get traction or to throw off his opponent’s balance. Neither happened as he was hurled against the other vampire blob. It was like slapping against mud, and the frame of the gelatinous horror indented, wrapping about him.
This is not good at all, Kane thought instantly. He punched and pushed. The rubbery outer membrane resisted his fists and the skin tried to stick to him, but the force of his punches pushed it off of him. He could feel the stickiness of the vampire’s outer layer trying to latch on, to slurp the blood from his epidermis, but Kane had his knees up now, shadow suit trousers protecting him even as he kicked away its balloon-like mass.
As the sticky flesh peeled off his, he could see tiny threads, strings ripped from either his body or from the blob’s, and he felt needles stabbing his flesh where the strings let go. Kane jerked back harder, ripping the remainder of those strange cilia away from his body, his boot stamping a deep footprint into the bulk of the jellied beast.
The second of the things reached out with a pseudopod, but by this time Kane had his knife tight in fist. He slashed out with the razor-keen edge, lopping the thing in half in an instant. The severed tentacle wormed its way, end over end, through the air. The keening wail from the blob must not have been a cry of pain as he’d originally thought. It withdrew the stump and lashed out with a second of the polyp-like limbs that sprouted from a stretch of flattened skin.
These things were pissed off with him and the discomfort he inflicted on their gelatinous forms. Kane lanced forward, punching the point into the rubbery arm. Its pod speared, the monster suddenly lurched and twisted its wounded limb, wrenching the knife from Kane’s grasp. The Cerberus explorer retreated backward, avoiding the trap of slurping membrane closing around his blade in an effort to suck down his arm.
In response to that, he fired the Sin Eater into the dark mass he presumed was either the heart or brain of the vampire. A burst of slugs stitched through its wobbling mass, and the creature retreated. At least a spray of powerful slugs would slow it down.
And then more bullets snapped through the air, one burning across the skin of his back. Kane whirled and threw himself flat, seeing the three Nagah gunmen had swung around and had gotten a good line of sight on him. With that line of sight, they could fire at him with a great chance of hitting. Only his wild battle with the vampire blobs had made him enough of a moving target that he’d survived the first salvo of bullets.
Kane fired a burst back toward the blaze of their lights, then rolled, looking for the boneless things. All was darkness behind him. The creatures had retreated from the blue-white glare of the LED lamps attached to the gunmen’s rifles.
But the enemy rifles continued to blaze their beams, remaining silent.
The sudden, odd silence made Kane turn just in time to face a cobra man, hood flared, fangs bared and dripping venom, lunging at him. One hand batted the Sin Eater away, and its gunshot echoed in the darkness of the necropolis.
Chapter 20
You plan for an assault on a vampire queen’s underground city, and the first fangs you see ready to tear out your throat belong to a snake-man, Kane’s brain managed to flash. He lifted his forearm up, smashing the attacking Nagah clone under his chin, catching him full in the throat. The humanoid cobra’s forward momentum ended with those curved, venom-glistening canines inches from his face. Had the raised forearm struck a throat without the dense chest scales of a male Nagah, the impact of Kane’s elbow would have left the assailant gurgling, windpipe and larynx bruised if not crushed entirely.
Instead, a cough of fetid breath splashed against Kane’s hood and faceplate, the stream of burning poison jetting from the hollow notches in each fang immediately following. The Cerberus warrior was glad for the full head covering that he wore, not only for the advanced night vision that had brought him some advantage against both cloned soldiers and inhuman vampire spawn in the pitch-black caverns, but also because the hood was environmentally sealed, protecting his eyes and sinus cavities from the brutal effects of the spit venom. Kane had seen men dropped and left clawing at their faces in response to a Nagah’s spit attack.
Kane had also caught a peripheral spray of that, as well as having been exposed to the same venom injected into him, directly from a bite applied by Durga. The toxins of the Nagah were deadly, and only a quick shot of antivenom had kept Kane from dying. No such provisions were on hand now, and while Kane hoped he’d developed some resistance to the killer bite, he didn’t want to test that, not when the attacker looming over him had fangs that were also two inches long and able to stab and rip his throat, as well.
Kane twisted his wrist with the Sin Eater up, but Durga’s soldier still had a death grip on Kane’s forearm, keeping the muzzle of the Magistrate sidearm away from him. The strength of the cloned cobra man was great, enough to remind Kane that Durga had made use of Nephilim in previous instances, remolding them to resemble either native Indian humans or Nagah soldiers themselves, both of whom were ubiquitous and unnoticed among the citizens of the Nagah city of Garuda. This might have been an “overwritten” Nephilim, a gift from Durga’s Annunaki sponsor, Enlil, but Kane didn’t care how this thing had been born. He just needed to make it die before it killed him.
Twisting his powerful upper body, the lean, angular musculature of a grown wolf giving him the leverage and might to unsettle, then topple his fanged opponent, Kane managed to free himself and get some distance from the slavering cobra fangs. With that distance, he was now able to bring his leg up, first spearing his knee into the ribs of his opponent and driving the breath from his lungs again. A second jab with the knee made the Nagah convulse, eyes squinting shut from the pain. Kane rolled back a few feet, then swung his boot up in a slashing arc, catching the cobra man under the chin.
An unintelligible garble erupted from snaggletoothed lips. One fang protruded almost comically over the lower lip, and blood glistened from the opposite corner of his mouth. Kane got his hands and feet beneath him and shot himself up to a standing position, looking for the other Nagah fighters.
Instead of Durga’s shock troopers, he instead spotted a shambling, bloody man hopping toward him with angry abandon, fingers hooked like talons.
It was the vampire who had broken his leg trying to kick Kane. Even with its chest ripped asunder by sprays of AK fire, the thing didn’t know when to quit or give up. Somewhere in the back of Kane’s mind, he was reminded of a story of “hopping vampires” from ancient Chinese mythology. As quickly as that thought arose, with the image of those Asian corpses moving on the only good leg that remained to them, Kane pushed it aside and reached for the handle of his fighting knife.
Almost immediately he recalled that his battle blade had been sucked into a corpse-deficient blob, lost.
Kane dropped one shoulder and lunged at the off-balance corpse, slamming the fiend off its remaining foot, as the grasping hands clawed at empty air. Kane’s shoulder block hurled the reanimated militiaman’s form into the dirt with a thud. He swung the muzzle of his Sin Eater up and fired two
shots into the thing’s face, blasting it into a pulpy mess of ragged flesh and splintered bone.
Once most of the head was gone, a rubbery stalk shot out of the remnants of the thing’s face—the blob that had been operating it like a puppeteer from within decided to take the combat to Kane in a more direct manner.
It was then that Kane pulled the second of his sharpened wooden stakes from his belt. The amorphous horror was in full lunge, unable to stop its forward momentum, even as Kane thrust the sharpened length of wood right through its rubbery membrane. The blob wailed out its cry of pain as oozy cytoplasm and tacky skin rushed across Kane’s arm in an effort to escape from the wood that was poisonous to its very existence.
Kane must have missed its nucleus or whatever organs the creature had within its translucent form, because the shapeless thing continued to bound and bounce away from him, seeking escape from the weapons that burned it so.
“Suck it, boneless!” Kane bellowed after the fleeing vampire, feeling the need to add insult to injury.
The challenge was not accepted, but the man from Cerberus redoubt felt a surge of adrenaline in him as he returned to seeking out any other armed killers hunting for him within the underground graveyard he’d found himself in.
Gunshots ripped in the distance, sounding like the tearing of canvas. Kane turned to look in the direction of the sound, and he noticed that a wounded Nagah staggered along, fleeing whoever had opened fire.
Since it was Nagah clones falling and running away, then it was fairly certain that Brigid and Grant were the ones coming to the rescue. He turned and activated the zoom on his hood’s optics. He focused on Brigid Baptiste, who lowered her weapon. She didn’t seem to have the heart to shoot a wounded man in the back, no matter how hard he’d been trying to kill one of her own. Kane was glad for that. There’d been necessary ruthlessness, but outright cruelty was nothing that he wanted to get comfortable with.
“I’m coming,” Kane said before jogging toward them. He kept looking over his shoulder for signs of any of the vampiric creatures.
“Covering you,” Grant responded.
Kane scanned his group of allies, but he could only make out Brigid and Grant, and their weapons were “lights off.”
Of course, it made sense. Neither of them would want to make blatant targets of themselves. Kane continued along, eventually turning on his own flashlight, illuminating his face, thankful for the polarization on his faceplate’s optics.
“You didn’t happen to bring night vision for the rest of the class, did you?” Brigid asked.
Kane shook his head. “I’m lucky I was able to scrape this much back together.”
The archivist shrugged. “You have any news on how to deal with the vampires?”
“They don’t like the LEDs on these rifles,” Kane mentioned. “That sent them into retreat. Also, they hate wood.”
“We got that,” Grant answered. “Well, Brigid learned that from experience, but she’s shared.”
“Where are Nathan and Thurpa?” Kane asked.
“We sent them up the corkscrew to the surface,” Grant explained. “I figured you were keeping most of the gathered gear in reserve up there.”
Kane nodded. “That’s good thinking. Any other reason why they’re not hanging around?”
“Thurpa’s having issues of self-doubt after he was removed from one cell by Durga,” Brigid told him. “He wanted to make certain he was under guard by someone we all trusted.”
“Nathan,” Kane surmised.
Brigid nodded. Her green eyes flashed as she swept the empty cavern, the highlights of her irises picking up a flicker of glow from the distant, still burning flashlights on the abandoned rifles. Kane focused in closer on the setup and saw that the cobra men had wedged themselves against gravestones, so as to spray as open an area as they could.
“How long will those lights last?” Kane asked.
“Depends on the batteries and the lights. Since they’re LED, it’s a low power drain for that much candlepower,” Brigid stated, looking back. The three of them retreated from the edge of the graveyard, weaving among the crypt houses. “They’ll be burning for maybe a full day, minimum. Maybe even more given their brightness.”
“Then the blobs won’t want to cross too close,” Kane said. “It’ll keep them from following us.”
“Not by much,” Grant said. “There’s plenty of dark for them to crawl around.”
Kane wrinkled his nose beneath the full cowl. “Great.”
“Either way, they won’t be back soon,” Brigid said. “It seems that they didn’t want to mess more than once with a foe who could harm them.”
“So they’re smart or cowardly,” Kane mused.
“Probably smart,” Grant said. “I wouldn’t go at the same foe twice with the same tactics.”
“And you’re no coward,” Kane agreed. He paused. “Thurpa thinks he’s not quite trustworthy? You mean he’s worried that Durga might still be somewhere in his head?”
“My feeling is that if he’s worried about it, he’s not bad,” Grant said.
“But then he’s programmed Nephilim to work as his operatives back in Garuda,” Brigid added. “Durga’s damned devious. He even used Thurpa as a mail drop for Fargo.”
“So that’s why Fargo popped out from the woodwork when he did,” Kane said. “It wasn’t to help me out or to deal with Neekra before she blossomed into a full-blown horror.”
“It could be that,” Brigid said. “He didn’t stick around much longer than to get us your supplies and to either deliver or pick up an object.”
“What kind of object?” Kane asked. “Unless it could fit into a pocket, I didn’t see him carrying much aside from his archeologist’s shtick.”
Brigid frowned as they continued along. Kane was glad that both Grant and she were armed with rifles, obviously taken from the same stockpile of militia arms that Durga had outfitted his cloned Nagah with. Even so, he was certain that those rifles weren’t going to be everything necessary to deal with the rest of Neekra’s inhuman children, let alone her. If the spawn were as resistant to bullets and knives as they had already experienced, then their sire would have equal, if not superior, resilience.
Kane knew full well from his encounters with Enlil and his Nephilim soldiers that the Annunaki and their drone slaves were tough to kill, and in general, the Nephilim were merely armored and stronger than the average man. The overlords themselves, by dint of genetic manipulation or by their specie’s royal genetics, had near immortality and could awaken in reincarnation, spreading their existence across multiple centuries and dimensions.
Something that the Annunaki worried about enough to slam into a prison in the heart of the African continent was a concern for Kane. Neekra was working with a puppet body and still able to birth children from what had formerly been a man.
The three people stopped cold as they heard the slap and squish of the amorphous children of the dark goddess.
“Lights,” Kane ordered, drawing his wooden stake. Kane didn’t know exactly why they were so susceptible to light and wood, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Brigid shook her head, and Grant took his cue from her.
Kane looked up, grimacing as he realized that four of the blobs were on the ceiling above them, and that those spawn no longer showed a lick of interest in the intruders from Cerberus. They were heading back to the corkscrew shaft leading to the surface.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Kane murmured.
“No,” Brigid agreed.
Grant touched his Commtact. “Nate, Thurpa? Come in.”
“I read you,” Nate answered, audible over the implanted communicators for all three of the Cerberus team. “But I can’t talk much. We’ve got company. Lots of it.”
Though Kane could alre
ady presume who had just joined the little party at the mouth of hell, he spoke up. “Lyta?”
“Here,” she answered tersely. “It’s the Panthers of Mashona.”
“And it’s still night up there,” Kane mused, checking his wrist-chron.
The news clicked quickly for Brigid Baptiste, though she tried to hide her concern behind a snarky quip. “Neekra’s kids are getting all new clothes for Christmas.”
“Stay low, all of you,” Kane ordered. “Don’t try to even the odds. Don’t try to ambush anyone who seems hurt. Stay out of the way.”
“We hear you,” Thurpa answered. “What about you three?”
“We’ll handle things down here,” Grant answered. “Don’t worry about us.”
With that, they shut down their Commtacts. They didn’t want to give away any more information about themselves or their allies than necessary, but they were at least glad to know the situation above.
“Don’t worry about us,” Brigid muttered. “That doesn’t apply to the us who should be worried, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Grant returned. “But the three of us worrying leads to us solving problems as fast as humans can. So, yeah, I’m sweating, but, hey, we’ve been in worse positions.”
“Vampires and militiamen, with a side order of Durga,” Kane added. “Brigid...have we been worse off?”
“Each crisis we’ve been in has had its own unique issues of peril,” Brigid responded.
“You’re nervous, too,” Kane translated.
Brigid rolled her eyes. “Because I have a pulse.”
Kane smirked. “No worries. If I’d eaten more than a tiny snack in the past day, I’d be shitting a brick myself.”
“Kane, Grant, Brigid, are any of you there?” a voice came over their Commtacts. It was familiar, Indian accented and sibilant, and the last person they ever expected to call them on the Cerberus party line.