Necropolis

by James Axler

  “Hit that thing,” Kane growled.

  “Not yet. These grens won’t scratch that slab,” Grant told him.

  Kane nodded, acknowledging his friend’s knowledge. He’d temporarily forgotten that they didn’t have implode grenades, and even those might not have the punch to cut through her slammed door.

  “Got to say, when Neekra slams a door, she slams a door,” Brigid muttered.

  The tunnel around them shook violently. Faint cracks emanated from the barrier that the goddess had put up, dust drizzling down on them.

  “This is going to be another Remus situation, isn’t it?” Grant asked.

  “No. We don’t have to worry about harming her. That’s our whole point down here,” Kane answered.

  “We’re really going to hurt something that is shaking a tunnel cut through bedrock?” Brigid asked. Even as she said that, she reloaded her rifle, making sure she was armed and ready to put up the fight of her life.

  “We’re going to try,” Kane answered, growing calm. The concept of battling a god was ridiculous, but he’d fought those who had claimed such omnipotence.

  He’d won those other times, but those were usually instances where he’d edged out a victory by the skin of his teeth. Durga had a plan, but whatever it was, it had disappeared the moment the earth quaked around them.

  The Nagah prince was either dead or dying. And with Nehushtan behind them and Neekra in front of them, Durga was not getting a third chance at life. Not unless he found some means of cheating death.

  Again the slab cracked, and the amorphous beasts squirmed.

  “They’re pushing through the cracks,” Brigid said. “And they were likely full of nutrients. They’re trying to strengthen her.”

  “Strengthen her? Why?” Grant asked.

  “She closed off the tunnel to protect herself. She must be vulnerable,” Kane replied. “Otherwise she wouldn’t start breaking her own shield.”

  “What could have made her vulnerable?” Brigid mused. “It can’t be anything to do with the threshold—if Durga had attempted to use it, Neekra would be long gone.”

  “No,” Kane murmured. He glanced toward Grant. “Any ideas?”

  “I’m drawing a blank,” the big Magistrate replied. “She’s strong, she can access human minds. She can create those snot-balls, even bragged about birthing them...”

  Brigid narrowed her eyes. “Wait. She’s operating within the confines of Gamal. Gamal didn’t show telepathic proficiency. Rather he utilized technology to control the Kongamato. She reconfigured him to be her current base.”

  “Those cracks are starting to get bigger for her,” Kane mentioned.

  “There has to be some biological analog for our communicators built into Gamal’s current body, and a similar structure which Gamal and Durga had encountered beforehand,” Brigid stated.

  “Similar structure?” Grant asked. “Like that navigation chair back in Louisiana.”

  Brigid nodded. “She made a new body out of Gamal, despite the fact that Durga and Thurpa had seen her. However, upon her appearance, something didn’t seem right to Thurpa. As if she were not really there, a psychic illusion, perhaps.”

  Kane looked over toward Brigid. “So when she separated us from our own minds, she was using us as her base.”

  “A temporary repository, at least until she could acquire a more permanent form,” Brigid stated.

  “So why not take hold in me? I was unconscious for long enough,” Kane asked.

  “Because you kept fighting your way out. And Durga, as well. Your wills were just too strong,” Grant concluded. He looked to Brigid for confirmation, and the woman nodded.

  “But Gamal’s wasn’t, though he still had enough brainpower to operate the control interface for the Kongamato,” Kane added. “Or his willpower dipped after he was badly wounded....”

  “Having your foot shorn off really wrecks your concentration,” Grant added.

  Another hammer blow shook the tunnel, cutting off their brainstorming.

  “Hit it!” Brigid shouted.

  They threw their grenades, then retreated, seeking cover. The trio of bombs landed and erupted, filling that section of the corridor with a brilliant flash. Polarization on their hoods kept their eyes from being burned out by the sudden flash, and shock waves and heat washed over them.

  Kane slapped at his bare chest, feeling his skin redden as the temperature rose. He felt as if he’d gotten an instant sun urn, and he realized that the combined explosions had likely given him minor heat damage, a first-degree burn. Grant and Brigid also grunted at their discomfort.

  “Did that hurt her?” Grant asked.

  “No,” Brigid replied. “But it kept the spawn from giving her nutrients.”

  “And healing her from whichever injury Durga inflicted on her,” Kane added. “But what did Durga do?”

  “He did what his people are supposed to do, what Enki designed them to,” Brigid answered. “I’ve been going over the ancient legends that had been scrawled, imprinted, on the walls of Garuda.”

  “Enki chose them to be his guardians for humanity, to watch over us, at a lower profile than the Archon Initiative,” Kane added. “So...”

  “What is the one thing that cobras have that humans don’t?” Brigid asked.

  “Venom,” Grant replied. “So, her weakness is cobra venom?”

  Brigid nodded. “She must have infected Gamal’s body when he discovered one of her old hosts. She’s a biological-based force, like Kakusa.”

  “A sentient protein which claimed Enlil trapped them in octo-slugs,” Kane said, catching up. “We’ve already figured that she and Kakusa were cut from the same cloth...and that cloth, it’s a protein string.”

  “Enzymes metabolize proteins,” Grant threw in. “And snake venom has digestive enzymes in them.”

  “Right,” Brigid answered.

  “So that’s how he hurt her,” Kane mused.

  “Kane!”

  Neekra’s voice cut through the darkness. He looked toward the broken slab of stone. It was still blocking his view of the entity on the other side of the slab but not her shout. In front of the granite barrier, her spawn were nothing more than sticky black webs of incinerated cytoplasm and membrane. The grenades had neutralized them. All that pressure and heat had broken down their living structures, reducing them to greasy shadows on the stone.

  Another blow shook the ground at their feet, and a wave of dust, particulate granite dispersed by an impossible impact, washed over them.

  Through their hoods’ advanced optics, Kane, Grant and Brigid could see Neekra standing there, her shoulders heaving. She was still a statuesque, naked woman, her physique belying the power that could smash stone into powder. But there was a fury in her twisted face.

  “Kane, you will learn your lesson.”

  Kane grimaced and opened fire with his Sin Eater, pumping a full twenty-round magazine into the lethal goddess. The bullets peppered her body, and he could see their impacts making her skin dance and jiggle as if he were beating on gelatin.

  Grant and Brigid opened up just as Kane’s weapon locked empty. Shotgun and rifle slugs slashed into her, but she walked forward, ignoring the horrific carnage the flying lead wrought on her borrowed flesh. She was bulletproof, more so than her “children,” who at least were stunned by the impact of slugs slicing through them.

  “Fall back,” Kane ordered. He switched to his rifle, ripping round after round into Neekra/Gamal’s face on full-auto.

  Grant and Brigid took his order, scrambling out into the necropolis. Nothing good would come from trying to fight Neekra in an enclosed space. The strength that she demonstrated meant that she was instantly lethal to any human within an arm’s reach, and the tunnel had been scarcely wide enough for the three of them to enter
abreast.

  Kane held his ground. The goddess had said she needed him, which meant that she would be loathe to kill him. He could bide his time retreating down the tunnel, but he couldn’t risk the lives of his beloved friends on that same need.

  Before the assault rifle could empty its magazine at six hundred rounds per minute, Neekra reached out. Her hand crushed the barrel and caused a backfire in the weapon. Kane grimaced as splinters of metal peppered his naked chest; the shadow suit’s faceplate kept his eyes safe from the shrapnel of the destroyed rifle.

  Neekra grinned at him, standing nose to nose with him.

  “So, teacher, what’s today’s class?” Kane asked her.

  She wrapped her fingers around his throat. It was like before, when the blob had tried to grab him. For an instant, Kane felt as if his head were going to come off his neck, blowing off like the cork on a bottle. Then she relaxed her grip, enough to keep his throat from collapsing under stone-smashing force.

  “You’ve been a bad study, my sweet,” Neekra told him.

  His feet kicked helplessly in the air, inches above the ground. Kane punched at her forearm, but she paid no notice. He might as well have been dropping grains of sand on her limb.

  “You...won’t...hurt...” Kane sputtered. He could breathe but only barely. She was in control now.

  “I won’t hurt your brother, your anam-chara?” Neekra asked.

  Kane grimaced. Any further words were caught beneath her steel grip.

  Neekra continued to stride forward, holding Kane as if he were a cupful of water. His feet kicked, bicycling in empty space trying to give himself leverage.

  “I will do whatever I damned well please, you overrated little monkey!” Neekra spat. “I need you to open my tomb, to tell me where it can be found.”

  “Why...me?” Kane rasped.

  They were in the open now. Kane cast about, trying to find Grant or Brigid in his peripheral vision. He wished he could talk to them, but he could barely get out two words before the force of her fingers on his throat stopped him. Apparently, somewhere deep inside, he possessed a map to Neekra’s tomb, the final resting place of her true body.

  If she found that, the world would be damned to her whimsy. If she could manipulate a human body to be this powerful...

  “Shoot...me,” Kane gurgled. He hoped that they heard him through his Commtact. He wasn’t sure if they’d kill him, but if it was a choice between his life and that of the earth, he hoped that they’d make the right choice.

  “Go right ahead!” Neekra agreed. “Kill your soul mate, your brother! As if I do not already have what I need to free myself.”

  Kane tried to say something else, but she had upped the pressure of her fingers around his windpipe. He could breathe, but speech was now out of the question. He fumbled, gripped the wooden stake in his belt and brought it up, spearing it at her.

  The point plunged through the palm of her hand. Again she winced, and reflexive impulse made her drop Kane to the ground like a discarded, dirty shirt.

  “Wood,” she grumbled. “Still allergic to it. It still hurts a little.”

  And then she closed her hand around the stake. It exploded into a mass of sawdust and splinters. She shook her hand at the inconvenience, the discomfort, and looked down at him.

  “That was your final gambit, Kane,” she told him.

  Kane gulped air. She bent and plucked his knife from its sheath.

  His Sin Eater was empty; he hadn’t had time to reload it. Almost all his weapons were gone now.

  And still, Kane refused to get up, clawing the .45 from its spot on his hip.

  “I’m not giving up, bitch,” he growled.

  Neekra smiled. “I love it when my prey are spunky.”

  Chapter 25

  Grant watched his best friend in the world on his back, aiming a pistol at a being who had shrugged off hundreds of rounds of gunfire already. She loomed over him, a smile on her face as she taunted the downed man.

  The pistol erupted, and she didn’t flinch as the first round struck her in the cheek. She didn’t react to the other impacts, either.

  Neekra simply smiled.

  He turned back to the corkscrew. He spotted the cones of light put out by the flashlights of their three companions.

  They came, just as they had been called for. And he could zoom in on them, seeing all three bristling with weaponry, primary among them the ancient artifact known as Nehushtan. It had altered its head. When they had first seen it, it was a cross with twin serpents wound around it. Now it was a round, blunt club at the top. Even as he looked closer at it, he could see odd waves emanating from where the face would be if the club were a humanoid skull. Bat wings flexed out from where the neck and shoulders would be.

  And Grant felt an uneasy surge through his spine. The very image of the staff now was one of blasphemy. He recognized more as it grew closer—it was the snot-ball-like octo-slugs that they had encountered in Florida, the tentacled parasites, except this had no intention of hiding. It was as if the thing had engulfed a person’s head.

  Where the wings came from, Grant didn’t know, didn’t want to know. But the arrival of the artifact down here on the floor of the underground cavern drew not only his attention, but Neekra’s.

  “Ah, and as if on cue, the second part of my delivery is here,” she said. “Stay put, little boy.”

  She stepped around Kane, ignoring him as he fumbled a magazine into his emptied pistol. Neekra ran with the light leaps of an antelope, crossing the distance between her and Nathan Longa in a few bouncing strides. Grant pushed more shells into the magazine of his shotgun, rising from his hiding spot, issuing his stentorian challenge.

  “Stay away from those kids!”

  Neekra paused, looking back at him.

  And within an instant, Grant slammed a shell full of bone-crushing and flesh-pulping buckshot into her chest, spinning her about. Neekra wasn’t the only one capable of ground-eating strides, and with each landing, Grant pulled the trigger on the big semiauto 12-gauge, watching her skin splash, liquefying under his assault. The goddess grimaced under each of the first six bursts that hammered into her, and then Grant was within two arm’s lengths from her, raising the muzzle toward her face.

  Neekra’s hand flashed up and crushed the barrel, twisting the metal pipe and wrenching the weapon out of Grant’s hands even as he triggered the final shot. In a way, Neekra had saved Grant’s hands from enduring the backfire of the self-destructing shotgun. She glowered at him.

  “Sit down, Grant,” she snarled. She took a step closer and poked him in the chest with her splayed fingertips.

  Grant’s feet flew out from under him, and the sensation of her push was akin to when someone had hit him in the chest with a particularly powerful firearm while he had been wearing his Magistrate armor. He landed in the dirt, skidding along as skin abraded off his shoulders, his ribs aching from those finger jabs. He rolled on his back, sucking in air, trying to return his breathing to normal after she’d emptied his lungs of oxygen with her strike.

  Grant saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He saw Brigid Baptiste take charge of defending their three young friends. Her rifle hammered, and the sheer force of bullets hitting Neekra in the skull at a range of only three feet bent her neck until her cheek touched her shoulder.

  Grant knew, however, that the very fact that Neekra still had a head, despite the firepower emptied into it at close range, meant that Brigid was out of her league. For a moment, Grant thought that the brave, brilliant woman had made an incalculably wrong decision, but as Neekra pushed against the stream of automatic fire, cupping her palm over the muzzle to give herself time to think, Brigid let the weapon go and danced backward.

  “What’s this, Baptiste?” Neekra asked.

  “Your shoe’s untied,�
� Brigid responded.

  Grant was thrown, as was obviously the goddess, who looked down at her bare feet.

  As she did so, a flash-bang grenade went off. The sound was a sheet of force that slapped Grant in the face, but he hadn’t looked directly at the detonating gren. He could see the glare of its burst reflecting off the stony roof of the necropolis. Neekra, on the other hand, was staring right at it. And since she was seeing the Cerberus exiles and their allies without benefit of torches or flashlights, she’d been caught looking at the flash with her eyes in light amplification mode.

  Her children hadn’t liked the burning gaze of LED flashlights that produced a fraction of the candlepower put out by the grenade. Neekra threw one arm up to cover her eyes.

  “Little ginger bitch!” the goddess bellowed, slashing the air with her free hand.

  There was the sound of metal impacting meat, and Grant sat up just in time to see Nathan swing the blasphemously topped artifact against Neekra’s side. Bone crunched on impact, lifting Neekra from her feet. The ancient tool strengthened Nathan, giving him an edge against her, the same way it had allowed the young man to battle hulking creatures that were 250 pounds of muscle and rage a week ago. Nathan struck again and again, hammering at her with all his might.

  It was a brutal beating, and if the woman on the receiving end of that mystic weapon hadn’t just left him gasping for breath with a mere caress, Grant would have thought it unnecessarily cruel. As it was, he was still uneasy rising from his hands and knees to stand. As much as he hated the sight of a woman being pounded on, this same entity was a global-level threat. She shrugged off guns and bombs as if they were minor inconveniences.

  “Keep swinging, Nathan,” Grant whispered, gathering up his strength.

  Kane was on his feet, too, advancing toward Neekra from behind, having paused only to scoop up the two-handed machete that Grant had dropped. Grant then spotted movement to his right and spun. He was relieved to see that it was Lyta, bringing him his bow and quiver of arrows.