Dragon City

by James Axler

  “What is it, friend Kane?” Balam asked.

  “Over there,” Kane said, keeping his voice low as he indicated the wall surround over the cafeteria door.

  Balam looked at the thick skin of rock that now covered the plaster. Orange light glowed dimly in thin traceries within that rock, illuminating its surface like a web of veins. And there was something moving across it, three somethings, in fact—each one perfectly camouflaged with the rock, each round and about the size of a baseball. “What are they?” Balam whispered.

  “Not seen ’em before,” Kane confirmed, prowling across the room toward the wall in question. “Definitely more of this Ullikummis shit, though, can’t be any doubt about that.”

  As he spoke, there came a sound like pressurized air bursting from a canister, and one of the ball-like rock things sprung from the wall. Automatically, Kane took a shot at the rock as it rushed through the air toward him, twin bullets hammering into its foremost point with unerring accuracy. They did nothing to slow or alter its trajectory, and in a second Kane felt the thing strike his left shoulder with the force of a hammer, throwing him backward in a spastic twirl of limbs.

  Kane palm-slapped the floor with his open left hand, stumbled back to his feet as the spherical rock rolled away across the canteen floor. A growing sense of trepidation rose in his chest as he watched the rock turn, following a definite path as if alive.

  “Kane,” Balam called, “behind you!”

  Kane spun, the sense of disorientation with his newfound vision still palpable, catching a confused glimpse of movement as the next rock detached from the wall and surged toward him like something hurled. Kane was ready for it this time, bringing the barrel of his Sin Eater up and using it like a club to bat the thing away. The metal barrel clanged hollowly as it struck the rock, and Kane felt his whole arm shudder with the blow. Knocked aside, the rock flew at the nearest wall, sticking there as if glued.

  Kane’s head whipped left and right, checking the floor for the rolling rock and keeping one eye on the wall where the things were emerging like bubbles on a pan of boiling water. With his sight so altered, it was hard to keep track of everything, but Kane dismissed the whirl of color, concentrating on any movements within it. The third rock pulled away from the wall like the others, and Kane watched the way it seemed to elongate like liquid before its strutlike leg kicked off from the wall and tossed the body of the rock toward him.

  Kane ducked, letting the launched stone whiz past overhead before turning and blasting it with a burst from his pistol. The bullets carved burrows in the rock’s surface as it streaked across the room and disappeared in the shadows beneath a table.

  Then the room fell silent, just the eerie sound of rock scraping against rock emanating distantly from all around.

  “Balam?” Kane asked, scanning the walls for movement. “You okay? Anything hit you?”

  “Nothing came close,” Balam said from behind him. “Whatever they are, they seem to be attracted to you, not me.”

  Kane was tempted to joke that they must be female rocks, but he bit back the words. Grant or Baptiste might have appreciated his gallows humor, but he was pretty sure Balam would deem him unstable to joke at a time like this.

  “They’re a trap,” Kane said instead. “Like land mines, left here to prey on the unwary. Ullikummis doesn’t like us, he made a special effort to target Cerberus once he realized the threat we posed.”

  “I was here for six days,” Balam reminded him, “and I saw nothing of this sort.”

  Kane glared at him. “They’re hot-wired for human DNA, I guess. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen this Ullikummis guy employ something so specific. Rosalia has a stone under her skin that can open stone doors.”

  “Rosalia?” Balam asked, not recognizing the name.

  “Long story,” Kane told him. “For now, maybe we’d be best off making a tactical retreat. Can you walk okay?”

  Balam nodded, shuffling across the room toward the doors while Kane scanned the area for more of the vicious little rock bursters.

  * * *

  MAKING THEIR WAY FROM the canteen, Kane and Balam headed through the dismal corridors of the Cerberus redoubt, lit as it was by the streaks of magma buried in the walls. Several more of the strange little rock-mines budded from the walls like boils on flesh, throwing themselves at Kane as he and Balam hurried past. There was no question about it—they were very definitely targeting Kane and not his companion, and Kane reasoned that the things had some genetic element in their makeup, working as predators with the specific prey of humans.

  “There has long been a truce between my people and the Annunaki,” Balam reminded Kane as they trudged down a corridor toward a stairwell. The two-hundred-year-old fire door was webbed with strands of rock. “Perhaps your Ullikummis respects that.”

  “Yeah?” Kane growled with an edge to his voice. “Well, he doesn’t respect much else. I saw this guy mind-wipe a load of Canadian farmers and get half of them to commit ritual suicide without so much as a thought.”

  “Then he doesn’t respect humans,” Balam observed pointedly. “Don’t forget that your own history is one of segregation based on arbitrary rules, skin color, gender and age all being used to excuse man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.”

  Kane grunted as he pushed at the fire door, making his way into the stairwell without comment. It was darker in here, and it took a few seconds for Kane to adjust. Like a camera, his eyes seemed overpowered with color and brightness until they compensated for the slight illumination of the claustrophobic staircase. Kane had to stop while this change occurred, placing one hand against the nearest wall and taking deep breaths, his head bowed.

  “Are you coping, friend Kane?” Balam asked.

  “Whatever you did to my eyes, the transitions aren’t so good,” Kane explained. “Takes a moment to get working right.”

  Looking around the almost square walls of the shaft, Balam saw the familiar movements as rock spheres began to bud. “I don’t think we have a moment,” he whispered.

  His head still bowed, Kane listened as a dozen stony protrusions peeled from the walls and launched themselves at him.

  Chapter 17

  She could still see his face looming in front of her when she closed her eyes.

  It was late afternoon in the temporary Cerberus headquarters. Exhausted, Reba DeFore had withdrawn to her room for a couple of hours with Lakesh’s encouragement, taking a little time to just rest and gather her thoughts. Kane’s last report had suggested he was fine, so she wasn’t needed there, at least. She had been the Cerberus on-site physician for several years now, and even though she wasn’t a fully certified doctor, she had the training, knowledge and determination to put any twentieth-century general practitioner to shame. One thing that DeFore had been praised for on more than one occasion was her steady hand, her nerve under pressure.

  And yet she could still see his face, chiseled from rock, those hideous eyes burning like lava, the smell his inhuman body gave off.

  Right now, DeFore lay above the covers of her bed, her eyes wide-open and the drapes pulled closed, with cold sweat clinging to her white one-piece suit. She had been suffering from panic attacks for almost two months now, ever since Ullikummis’s people had attacked the once safe haven of the Cerberus redoubt.

  And dear Heaven, she could still see him as he cast a shadow over her, the sound of his breath like a pressure cooker, the way he had looked at her with those burning pits of eyes.

  His people had come, proclaiming their allegiance to stone, their fearlessness engendering an apparent lack of any instinct for self-preservation, making them seem almost robotic in their nature. They had swept aside the first wave of opposition, the security detail of Mills, Wagner and Ezquerra knocked aside in a heartbeat, limbs broken, one man’s face r
uined by a volley of tossed stone, their sharp edges as deadly as shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade.

  A fierce running battle had erupted through the corridors of the redoubt, DeFore remembered, as the resident Cerberus crew had fought to defend their home base. It was too late, of course, and with hindsight they should have realized that the very moment the cultists had entered the redoubt itself; the only way they could enter was to be invited by one of Cerberus’s own number, one whose mind had been twisted into a dark place. That member had been Edwards, who had suffered at the hands of Ullikummis months before, back when the great stone monstrosity had set up his initial training camp in the wilds of Saskatchewan, Canada. Ullikummis had planted the obedience stone inside Edwards then, left it hibernating inside his skull until the order was given and his traitorous agent was activated. No one had noticed that Edwards was acting odd in the meantime, despite the numerous signs. He had been strangely drawn to a group of cultists out in the fishing ville of Hope, just a little way along the coast from where Cerberus had relocated now, and he had frequently complained of headaches. Furthermore, his Commtact had failed to operate, picking up signals but unable to transmit where the tendrils of the living stone had blocked its connections.

  DeFore cursed herself for that, for not noticing the little peculiarities in Edwards’s behavior. She was the redoubt’s physician, dammit all, so she should have realized something was wrong. He had mentioned the headaches only in passing one time when they had lined up together in the Cerberus canteen.

  “My door is always open,” she had said.

  Well, it wasn’t open now. Now she cowered behind it, wishing it could hide her from the outside world, the ravages and cruelties that continually threatened. Just as she had hidden behind that other door, back in the Cerberus redoubt, rocking herself back and forth as her sanity had threatened to detach and float away like ashes on flame.

  She had been in the ops room when Edwards had returned with the strangers. There had been a problem out in Louisiana, where someone had accessed a long-buried redoubt, triggering an alarm at the Cerberus operations center. CAT Alpha, consisting of Kane, Grant and Brigid Baptiste, had been scrambled to investigate, and Reba DeFore had been kept on hand to monitor their transponders remotely. There was always a risk in sending agents out in the field, and Kane’s group seemed predestined to run into the worst trouble whatever the given situation. This time, DeFore recalled, it had been something about the dead getting up and walking again under the auspices of a perverted Annunaki goddess.

  The ops center itself was a vast, high-ceilinged room that featured twin rows of computer terminals, a huge Mercator map across one wall and a mat-trans unit in an antechamber off to the far corner. It was the same room where Kane had met with Balam today. Brewster Philboyd had switched the Commtact link to the overhead speakers, and DeFore and the other personnel there listened tensely as Kane relayed the situation, making their way through the undead hordes to reach the disturbed redoubt and shut down the insane dark goddess who had unleashed such abominations upon the Earth. So, like everyone else in the ops room, DeFore had been distracted, worried about the field team and not really thinking that they might be attacked right here in their own home.

  Approaching the hidden redoubt without alerting the staff should have been impossible, as there were sensors scattered all around the nearby territory. But Ullikummis had abilities that the Cerberus staff were even now still trying to comprehend—the ability to step through space, to somehow be both there and not there. Afterward, Lakesh had speculated that Ullikummis could somehow use hidden interphase pathways, stepping both in and out of reality, utilizing an extra dimension in his movements. It was impossible to know for sure.

  No one had given it a second thought when Edwards had disappeared from the ops center to get some air maybe twenty minutes earlier. When he’d returned, he’d brought a handful of strangers in hooded robes, the troops for Ullikummis. Each of them was armed with a slingshot and a pouch of stones, but they hadn’t even needed them at first. They had begun by simply using their fists, channeling the power of stone and hitting people and objects with such force it was like being hit by a sack of bricks.

  DeFore didn’t even know when she had been hit. It was so sudden she had just crashed to her knees, her head reeling and blood streaming from her lip. There was movement, shouting, and she just lay there on the floor between computer terminals, watched helplessly as the world swam in and out of focus.

  Something shattered beside her, and debris pattered across her back, an overturned chair hurtling across the room. She pushed herself from the floor, feeling the movement around her as something distant, her head was still so out of it. Domi, the albino girl, was running past, shouting something that DeFore could not make sense of over the sounds of conflict. DeFore ignored it, reaching up and grabbing the edge of her desk. Something fell from the desk, a pad of notes, slapping against the floor. Strangely—stupidly—DeFore herself reaching for them amid the chaos, then stopped herself.

  Then she was standing, her head low as a man in a hooded robe leaped past her, vaulting the desk to land a savage kick in the gut of Donald Bry. The copper-haired supervisor staggered back, falling against a desk so that its computer screen wobbled in place. The hooded man had his back to DeFore, clenching his fists as he approached Bry.

  “I am stone,” he said, the words coming with the deliberation of a mantra.

  DeFore turned and ran, scarpering across the room to the nearby doors. A robed figure made a grab for her as she passed, but was met with something hard and heavy—a computer terminal that Domi had tossed across the aisle at his head. Reba winced as it hit but she didn’t slow. She pulled open the door and ran out into the corridor.

  And that’s where she saw him. Ullikummis.

  He was immense, towering over her like some great statue. He stood eight feet tall, his body and face roughly carved out of dark, earthy stone like charcoal, veins of volcanic lava visible across the cracked plates of his chest, arms and legs. He was wide, his broad shoulders dominating the width of the central tunnel that ran the length of the redoubt. A series of thorny protrusions poked from atop each shoulder, like the horns of a stag arching upward toward his head. His face itself was a nightmare vision. It was roughly hewn from rock as if it had been weathered or eroded into shape. It had features—a slit of mouth, two deep-set eyes beneath its brow—but they were misshapen, as if in mockery of a face. The eyes and the mouth glowed like fire, red magma throbbing there in a ceaseless swirl.

  DeFore stopped, the soles of her shoes slipping on the dark tiles of the floor where something had spilled, something red. Ullikummis had started out as an Annunaki, reptilian in his appearance like an upright crocodile, but he had been genetically altered while still in the womb, physically manipulated ever since. Now he looked like nothing that had ever lived, like the old Jewish legend of the Golem, the stone giant who brought righteous vengeance on all who defied his masters. Behind him, more of the robed troops were marching down the long corridor that dominated the redoubt’s design, their feet in step, echoing from the vast steel girders holding the rock roof up high above. Her body trembling, Reba stared up into those glowing red eyes, feeling them draw her like magnets, north to south, south to north.

  Ullikummis looked at her for a moment, the way a man might look at an insect, and then he reached out one of his massive hands, the digits, like the rest of him, roughly carved from metamorphic rock. “Take heart,” he said in a voice that sounded like two millstones grinding slowly together, “the future has arrived.”

  DeFore turned and ran, ducking beneath one of those great arms and scampering up toward the faraway exit of the redoubt located a long way up the corridor. The corridor had been carved directly into the mountain itself. It looked like a tunnel cavern, with the dark rock walls and ceiling. The ceiling had been left in a natural arch that towe
red high into the mountain, its apex lost in shadow well above the lighting rigs that ran across it on their steel support girders. Despite the heating of the redoubt, the corridor always felt cold, and DeFore had heard people equate it more to spelunking than walking when they had had to walk the length of the corridor more than twice in one day. Now DeFore ran, her ash-blond hair—carefully plaited that morning in a long rope that curled over her head and went halfway down her back—slapping against her spine as she moved.

  There were infiltrators all over. DeFore guessed there must have been more than a dozen of the hooded figures in the corridor alone. Twenty feet away, two of the robed figures were laying into a Cerberus defender named Ezquerra, shoving him against the hard rock wall like so much discarded newspaper. DeFore heard the crack and knew what it was—Ezquerra’s neck had broken on impact, and beside him Mills was reeling from a volley of stones that had struck him across the face, ribbons of blood welling into existence even as she turned away. As a doctor—hell, as a human being—DeFore wanted to step in and help her colleagues, see to their wounds. But that thing was just a few feet behind her, looming in the rock corridor like a statue brought to life. So she ran, each breath coming in a loud whimpering sigh.

  She dodged, weaving out of the path of the tossed body of a Cerberus operative called Chang. Chang, a slender woman in her mid-forties, slammed into the wall beside DeFore, and blood began to pool almost immediately from her crumpled body.

  DeFore turned, feeling nauseous. Behind her was another Cerberus staffer called Wagner. Wagner was a round-looking man better known for his map-reading skills than his combat prowess, and he stood beside security expert Sela Sinclair. Sela had an M-16 assault rifle in her hands that featured an underbarrel grenade launcher for added effect, but she couldn’t seem to get a clear shot at the stone monster who stalked toward the three of them down the corridor. Her eyes were fixed on Ullikummis again, DeFore realized, drawn in by those sulfurous pits that burned in his face where his eyes should be. The stone monster moved then with an incredible speed that belied his lumbering appearance.