by James Axler
“Where is she now?” Brigid asked.
“She’s currently in a trance, with a couple of her spawn standing guard,” Durga stated. “I think she’s running the assault on the militia. It’s hard not to hear what’s going on.”
Brigid turned off her signal and murmured something.
“Just keep gathering gear,” Kane said. “Durga—”
“I don’t have much time,” the Nagah prince cut off the human warrior. “What I need you to do is arm up and brace for a battle. Neekra is going to want to stall for time until she finds what she’s seeking. That means you’re going to get very busy and bloody in a few minutes.”
“Crap,” Kane grumbled. “The soldiers don’t really think they can actually fight those things off, do they?”
“They’ve got an ace up their sleeve,” Durga returned.
“You or Fargo,” Kane responded.
“Right,” Durga said. “I told you—I don’t like the idea of having to worry about a goddess, or her vampire minions, running loose.”
“Even with a little knowledge, those things are hard as hell to kill,” Kane told him.
“Which is why I think you’ll be able to handle the militia,” Durga said. “They’re going through a hell of a beating, despite what they’re handing out.”
“Great,” Kane groaned. “And what will you be doing?”
“Dealing with Neekra and finding out what she wants from this necropolis,” Durga answered. “And hopefully killing this body of hers.”
Kane frowned. “She didn’t need a body to hijack our brains.”
“Anything I can do to slow her down,” Durga said.
With that, the Nagah prince turned off the radio handset, still hidden within his pocket. He plucked his earplug with built-in microphone and pocketed that swiftly. He saw the avatar of the goddess stir.
Her lips formed into a smile. “I’ve made you my bitch, Gamal.”
Durga knew that she was closing in on her goals if she was in this good of a mood. Her initial emotions and euphoria over the ambush were still high. But sooner or later, she’d realize that things wouldn’t be that easy. He’d already used radio equipment from the militia’s slave caravan to summon the rest of the forces in the area, alerting them to a dangerous ambush force.
Durga, at least, wouldn’t feel much concern for the group of power-hungry thugs when they met their fates. He just hoped that his plots would keep him going. He knew he’d earned a lot of bad karma for his actions, and his chumming with one of the world’s deadliest enemies was dancing dangerously close to extinction.
* * *
KANE COULD TELL that Brigid didn’t enjoy having to scavenge spare weapons and ammunition off the dead, but time was of the essence. Somewhere between them and the surface were Durga and Neekra. Durga had kept at least one of his bodyguards in reserve, and Neekra would not have been foolish enough to leave herself completely defenseless.
Grant was stuffing magazines and grenades into an improvised duffel bag he’d made. He’d also created a harness from which he hung a shotgun, a handgun, a fighting knife and a combat-style machete. The scene reminded Kane of something from a pre-skydark vid about their vision of a postapocalyptic warrior, guns and gear bristling over the man’s shoulders. So far, Grant kept his machete in hand as his main weapon, though a confiscated assault rifle was gripped around its forearm, looking small and puny in his powerful hand.
“If I had my bow and arrows, I’d go toe to toe with Marduk himself,” Grant muttered.
“Feeling that confident?” Kane asked.
Grant’s eyes narrowed. “Feeling that pissed and tired of being chased around Africa. First hiding in the Victoria Falls redoubt, now getting stuck in a dungeon.”
“We’ll get ours back,” Kane told him. His discussion with Durga had him on edge. He’d quickly explained that Neekra was going to throw her other set of enemies at them, especially since the militia had knowledge of how to battle her amorphous spawn and the corpses they reanimated. Or maybe they just knew about the rubbery blobs. Durga was a duplicitous son of a bitch, so his warnings might not go far in giving them an ability to totally dominate a foe he was using as a buffer.
Brigid rose, touching her Commtact, concern in her features. “Good news and bad news.”
“How bad for our friends?” Kane asked.
“Nathan took a bullet in the leg,” Brigid explained. “It was a cross fire, but no one’s paying close attention to them for now.”
Kane adjusted his Commtact and picked up Lyta.
“The militia looks like it’s driving the things off,” she said into the radio. “Thurpa and Nathan are with me now. Nate’s leg has already stopped bleeding.”
“What about ‘low profile’ did you not understand?” Kane asked.
“The staff would keep us invisible. In fact, once Thurpa and Nathan got to me, the attention was off of them,” Lyta snarled. “If they’d stayed where they were, they would have been sliced to ribbons.”
Already, over by the corkscrew shaft, flares popped, illuminating the base of the two ramps. Kane grimaced as he saw amorphous beings bouncing and dropping to the ground. Gunfire crackled in the air.
“Durga called Neekra’s plan. She’s making her things withdraw, pulling the militia with them,” Kane grumbled.
Grenades dropped, exploding in a sequence of thundering blasts that shook the air violently. Kane could feel the buffeting breeze, but he saw that the rubbery horrors had achieved cover and weathered the explosive storm with ease.
“He probably planted that strategy in her ear,” Grant said. “All the better to mess with us.”
“And she’s drawn them between us and the other side of this necropolis,” Brigid added. “We’re cut off from where the dungeons lie. Who knows what else is in the catacombs on that side of the underground complex?”
“Another way out?” Kane asked.
“Undoubtedly. Otherwise she’d be as trapped as we are,” Brigid responded.
Kane frowned. “Durga said he’d destroy her current body, or at least try to.”
“If he can keep that promise,” Brigid said before she was cut off by the rattle of automatic weapons and bullets chipping the stones near her. “It’s not going to do much for us here....”
Grant scanned the scene. He and Brigid were both adorned with the flat-folding shadow suit hoods, complete with flexible faceplates and advanced optics. He gave a quick assessment. “There’s only about a dozen of the blob things.”
“That’s about what we faced on the first night,” Kane mused.
“Yeah. After only a few hours waiting down here,” Grant said.
“Grant’s correct. Neekra could have birthed many more, given the time we were indisposed,” Brigid agreed. “She should have at least three times as many.”
“That is going to suck,” Kane murmured. “No matter how many soldiers come down here, the leftovers will be able to cork them up in the bottlenecks at the surface.”
Bullets began zipping into the ground yards short of the Cerberus trio’s position.
“Of course, that’s not going to do us much good if they shoot us in the cross fire,” Brigid pointed out. “We need to protect ourselves.”
“She’s aimed them right at us,” Grant said. “Take a look.”
Brigid and Kane swept the blocks of crypts. Their amoeboid “friends” had disappeared, slipping into cracks and crevices, leaving a clear channel into the shadows that would lead right up to them. Brigid dropped to the dirt, letting a gravestone shield her from the coming storm of bullets.
“I thought that you said she wanted your assistance in freeing her,” Brigid mentioned to Kane.
Kane nodded. “That’s right. She must have some high expectations of the kind of punishment we can take.”
G
rant grimaced. “It’s not what we can take. It’s what we can dish out. And right now, we can make life very tough for that group.”
Kane peered around his flagstone shield. “Yeah. A few grens down their throats when they least expect it... Right now they’re in fighting-alien-monster mode. A salvo of modern firepower will take that group totally off balance.”
Grant nodded, smiling as his friend saw the vulnerability of their enemy. “Of course, we’ll still have to deal with Neekra’s kids.”
“One army at a time,” Kane whispered.
With that, the two men looked to Brigid Baptiste, who knelt, ready to add her fury to the coming firestorm.
Chapter 22
Nathan’s knee buckled as soon as the bullet sliced through the muscle around his thigh. Only the lack of jarring shock, the vibration of his femur shattering, made certain that he wasn’t completely screwed by circumstance. He watched as an elastic body lashed out toward the source of gunfire, and Nathan tried not to smirk in satisfaction as the chatter of an automatic weapon dissolved into a shriek of agony accompanied by wet slaps and sticky tearing.
Thurpa lunged under Nathan’s arm, supporting him on his injured leg. “Let’s go!”
Soft pops of gunfire issued from the copse of woods beyond the tree line, their ultimate destination. Lyta fired a suppressed weapon of some sort, spitting bullets out at a much lower profile than the rest of the militia’s weaponry. To Nathan’s right, he could see a reanimated figure rise jerkily, then get knocked back down by the sputter of full-auto bullets.
Nathan didn’t hold out much hope for that burst of gunfire keeping down the skinsuit for the rubbery vampire thing. He pulled the .45 from Thurpa’s hip holster, then swung it up to cover the two of them as his sudden injury made him drop his rifle on its sling. Rather than struggle with the bouncing weapon on its strap, he went for an easier to manipulate piece of kit.
None of the militia seemed to give a damn about the two figures scuttling across the open ground. They were too busy shooting into amorphous shadows. Nathan could hear shouted orders to fix bayonets and to use machetes. To aim for the dark masses within their translucent blob membranes. These were the same tactics he, Thurpa and Brigid had figured out in their first encounter with the killer snot-balls.
Of course, Brigid had been discussing the basis for vampiric myth with Nathan based on the attacker who’d slain his father. Their speculation had proven fruitful, but Nathan, for all the gunfire and screams of man and amorphous beast, couldn’t figure out why these cruel marauders had a lick of information about what their foes could be. It couldn’t have been the reanimated bodies, because only one had risen so far, at least within observational range of him and Thurpa. And the amoeba-like figures, all tentacles and shimmering, rubbery skin, were scarcely reminiscent of the kind of creatures they’d been thinking about.
The leadership and elite troops, at least, weren’t concerning themselves with gunfire to either of the two vital organs floating in their cytoplasm. One Mashonan Panther bounded into their path, angling his rifle like a spear and plunging it through the tough skin of an attacking blob. The point of his bayonet dived deep within. Nathan followed its penetration through translucent hide and inner mucus. The bayonet connected with one of the creature’s nerve centers, and the beast unleashed its inhuman howl. The shriek pulsed within Nathan’s sinuses as if it were hot pepper spray.
The skilled Panther ripped his rifle free from the bulk of the dead creature, but before he could turn and notice Nathan and Thurpa, tentacles whipped out, one lashing around his face, others about his waist and knees. The militiaman’s muffled cry became audible as the skin on his cheek tore, sloughing loose under the grabbing adhesive force of the deadly spawn’s barbed cilia.
“Enki preserve me,” Thurpa prayed, watching the gleam of cheekbone poke through the tear in the doomed African thug’s face. An instant later, his body was snatched up and drawn into the darkness outside the spill of a pair of headlights. Nathan aimed his .45 at the spot where the body had disappeared, hammering out two big fat slugs. If he didn’t harm one of Neekra’s children, at least he’d grant their human prey a reprieve from a slow, terrible death by skinning and bloodsucking.
Now Nathan knew what was meant by a fate one wouldn’t wish on their worst enemy. That the poor bastard had torn the flesh from his own face in an effort to escape was sign enough that he and the others had been lucky not to have been subjected to the full power of the tentacled monstrosities. Nathan fought off a horrible chill that poured down into his gut like lumpy, cold mud. Each scream of a dying militiaman was in reaction to the horror of being torn apart or exsanguinated through their skin.
And that was just the men who were able to scream. Others could have been muffled, smothered by the elastic bulk of Neekra’s spawn. The vampire blobs were on the attack, and now a jeep exploded, flashing brightly in a column of flame. Keening wails from the giant amoebas informed Nathan that this was a resistance tactic by the Panthers of Mashona. The militia sacrificed at least one vehicle, letting its burning demise buy them time.
The paramilitary group prized working vehicles. They engaged in bloodthirsty raids on settlements merely to acquire more jeeps and trucks, risking their lives in exchange for working machinery that was worth its weight in gold. The Panthers were desperate. How many lives had been ended just for them to use that set of wheels?
And now, its gasoline—another precious and rare resource among the jungle pirates—flared and blazed. One of the rubbery assailants writhed, twisting as flames licked along its surface. As individual tongues of flame winked out on its shimmering membrane, that skin blackened and puckered before bursting and vomiting out its cytoplasmic guts in a thick, cloying ooze. One tendril reached out, groping in the dirt. The thing’s pain was a whistling screech that struck nerves up and down Nathan’s spine.
Thurpa threw Nathan to the ground, hurling him roughly to Lyta’s feet without ceremony. He glanced up, jarred by the impact, but by then Thurpa had a weapon in hand and he ripped off short bursts into the ground around them.
“Get in here!” Lyta shouted.
The young Nagah turned at her plea. Almost immediately, Nathan felt warm, golden energy pouring through his veins, shimmering all along his bloodstream before focusing on his bullet-ravaged thigh muscles. The sunny, nurturing heat was an intoxicating rush, making his heart skip a beat before he rose to one knee and held out his hand to Thurpa.
“Take my hand!” Nathan shouted.
It was as if someone else was guiding him as his leg supported his weight; words left his lips before he knew what he was saying.
“But—” Thurpa began.
“Take it!” Nathan bellowed.
Thurpa reached out and clasped hands with the young man from Harare.
Suddenly, that warming, giddy glow inside his bloodstream stretched out even farther. Lyta, Thurpa and Nathan formed a human circuit, each of them sharing the protection and care of the ancient Atlantean artifact. And as that circuit was completed, the three of them gathered in the rut that Lyta and Kane had dug to watch over the entrances to the necropolis. Thurpa was the only one with a free hand, and he swept their camouflage blanket over the top of them. Guns and screams still clawed through the night, headlights bursting as reanimated fighters smashed them with rifle stocks. The column of Panthers was growing increasingly dark even as another vehicle erupted into flames, burning from the detonation of a grenade beneath its chassis.
With that, the walking dead pulled back into the tree line as their bodiless brethren retreated back to the subterranean entrance to the necropolis. Nathan looked around as one of the rubbery monsters bounded over them, ignoring their presence altogether. He turned to Lyta.
“The staff can hide us from their senses,” she answered in a quick whisper to his unspoken question. He didn’t know whether she’d read
the confusion on his face or Nehushtan had actually allowed her to access his thoughts. Either way, he felt a sudden wave of relief, and his heartbeat slowed.
The staff calmed him; he could feel the sleepy serenity washing through him, mind to toes. He breathed, watching as the militia pursued the amorphous creatures that had attacked them. They kept out of reach of the bayonets and machetes, shrugging off rifle fire. Grenades landed in their midst, but that merely stunned the creatures as they ran.
An officer shouted, “You’ll bring down the whole tunnel! We’ll kill them with stakes. Just keep them on the run for now!”
Nathan looked down at himself and realized that the soldiers were passing within a few feet of them, and they took no notice of them. Sure, they were tucked underneath a blanket loaded with twigs, leaves and branches as a layer of convincing camouflage, but surely there should have been at least one glance through the trees as the soldiers were on the alert for an ambush from creatures who lagged behind. Instead, their gaze was locked either dead ahead or scanned in the opposite direction.
It had to be the staff. The same way it had guided him to Victoria Falls, to uncover the mat trans installation in the redoubt beneath the high-tech hydroelectric dam, Nehushtan had put a subliminal order into the soldiers’ minds. There would be no peek, nothing in their peripheral vision that would draw them to any imperfection in their concealment.
Another rescue, old stick. Thank you, Nathan thought.
Rest now, son, a familiar voice echoed in his mind. It was his father.
And with that, the injured young man fell to slumber.
* * *
KANE PULLED THE PIN on an implode grenade at the same time Grant charged his. The two men threw in unison, Grant’s toss going farther in its arc toward the army of African plunderers. Kane’s landed toward the nearest of the group. The distance between the two throws was about forty feet, but Kane hurled his with all his might. The two longtime partners knew the ranges at which they could hurl grens at targets, and their simultaneous launch meant that the bulk of the Panthers of Mashona would be caught between the twin detonations.