Project Legion (Nemesis Saga Book 5)

by Jeremy Robinson

  It would appear that all of those social advances have been lost. The Dread are tearing each other apart. I watch from behind a tangle of black tree roots, as a bull—something like a cross between a bear and wolf, but hairless, far stronger and covered in glowing red veins—lifts what Crazy calls a mothman. The mothman is actually even more ugly, with bug-like red eyes, lots of twitching insectoid limbs on its underside and buzzing wings. While the mothman’s talon-tipped limbs dig divots in the bull’s forearm, the attacker grasps the smaller creature’s waist and tears it in half, bathing itself in the flying creature’s oily insides.

  Beside me, Mephos wretches again, not out of disgust, but as a side effect to shifting between frequencies of reality. I really want to mock it. So, so bad. But even I recognize the need for staying focused in this situation. I’m just glad that Crazy was right. While Mephos is losing its alien lunch, I’m experiencing mild nausea. My body is growing accustomed to the frequency shifts. Of course, my other senses shift the scale back to Barftown. In addition to the absolute carnage on visual display, I can hear flesh being torn, organs splashing into the swamp and the shrill cries of dying creatures. I smell their blood, bile and emptied bowels. Can taste it, too, thick in the air.

  “We need to go back,” I say. “Find another way inside.”

  “The Aeros will detect us,” Mephos says, wiping the tuft of hair sprouting from its forearm across its toothy mouth. “We must press on.”

  In his Ferox form, Mephos looks about the same strength and size as one of the bulls. On top of that, he’s thousands of years old and a trained fighter. Up against creatures with half a mind, he’d have little trouble. And Crazy is an ex-assassin with Dread speed and strength and a complete lack of fear. He probably won’t give this mess a second thought.

  Me? I’m just a normal dude with a healthy phobia of being torn apart, eaten or disemboweled. I’ve got a .50 caliber LAR Grizzly handgun and an AA-12 fully automatic shotgun. Both are heavy hitting weapons, and the shotgun can unload thirty-two ‘frag-12 HE’ shells with nearly no recoil. The frag-12 are high-explosive rounds capable of taking down an Aeros with a good shot, and they have a range of nearly six hundred feet. I’m packing some of the most deadly weapons a man can carry, but behind all that killing power is a grade-A non-GMO human being. Soft, juicy and relatively easy to kill.

  Crazy, who has been silently observing the bloodbath, and apparently ignoring Mephos and me, points straight ahead, to a gray hump rising out of the earth. It looks like a dry, papier-mâché ball, severed in two. Half a bee hive. And then I realize that’s exactly what it is. A hive. Crazy told me about them, but I haven’t seen one yet.

  “There,” Crazy says. “If they’ve gone mad, it’s because of the Matriarch connecting them all. She’ll be at the hive’s core.”

  “That’s not far from where the black hole would be kept,” Mephos says.

  My forehead scrunches for a moment, but then I realize he’s talking about the real world, where the Aeros have created a massive citadel containing the black hole. “Those are some good spatial skills, but how are we going to get from here...” I walk a path forward with my fingers, headed toward the hive. “...to all the way over there, without being torn apart?”

  “Violently,” Crazy says, and before I can put up a stink, he leaps out into the open and starts sprinting.

  Mephos springs from hiding, following Crazy’s lead without another word, probably reveling in the man’s reckless behavior. Instead of charging through the swamp, he leaps up into the tree above, shaking the hanging black vegetative tendrils. Then he charges through the canopy unseen.

  And then there is little ol’ me. Having no choice, I chase after Crazy, pounding through the swamp. Muck slows me down, clinging to my boots with each step. I lift my knees high, trying to pull my feet out of the water with each step. I don’t know if my efforts help me run any faster, but I’m pretty sure I look about as strange and out of place as Pat Robertson at Mardi Gras.

  About five seconds into my run, I’m noticed. Luckily, it’s by a shrieking horde of bat-things that fly toward me, and then tear each other apart. They don’t look built for fighting, and they probably wouldn’t have hurt me much with my body armor, but they would have slowed me down. A few of the survivors remember me, buzzing around my head, dive-bombing my face. When one of them digs its little claws into my cheek, drawing blood, I swat it into the swamp.

  Still running, I look back at the fallen bat, intending to throw a creative curse in its direction. Instead, I very nearly shit my pants. A wave races toward me. But it’s not really a wave. It’s a Dread-croc. While this is my first time seeing one, Crazy gave me the details, and Lilly filled me in on the wild variety she encountered. With all the water surging up over the thing, I can’t tell which one of them I’m dealing with, but I don’t think it matters. I’m a snack in either situation.

  A snack with an AA-12 shotgun.

  A second ago, the last thing I wanted to do was stop in this swamp of death. Now, I just want to not be eaten. So I plant my feet, and then slide the shotgun around my back and into my hands. It’s dripping with water, but the stainless steel weapon functions in just about any condition. With no toggle switch between single and rapid fire, I point the big gun toward the rushing croc and hold my finger down.

  In about the time it takes most people to sneeze, I unload five high explosive shotgun rounds, each one finding its mark on the croc’s snout. The rounds burst on contact, shredding flesh and bone, carving a hole in the base of the creature’s skull.

  Okay, I think, five was overkill. Good to know.

  The blazing string of explosions also drowned out the noise of death and battle surrounding me. On the surface, that sounds like a good thing. A shotgun boom is always preferable to the sound of intestines unraveling into water. But in this case, I’ve basically just rung the dinner bell.

  A rainbow of angry eyes turns in my direction, from all around. Then half resume tearing each other apart, and half come for me.

  Crazy tries to trail-blaze a path ahead of me, using Faithful, his machete, to hack through the onrushing Dread, but I’m not fast enough. I run with the AA-12 braced against my shoulder, pulling the trigger when anything gets in front of me. Dread burst apart, flailing as arcs of bright red, yellow and green blood spray into the air. It’s progress, but it’s not enough. I’m being flanked by bulls on both sides and pursued by God knows what.

  When the thirty-two-round shotgun drum runs empty, I eject it, letting it fall into the water. I retrieve a fresh drum from my back and slap it in place.

  “Hudson!” The voice is inhuman and coming from above my head. As a shadow falls over me, I aim the shotgun up and nearly pull the trigger. I’m slapped down before I can fire. Swamp water rushes into my mouth, choking my lungs as I whip around, expecting to be devoured. Instead, I see a blur of gray moving swiftly amidst a luminous mob of Dread. Blood and gore fill the swamp as Mephos amps the violence to something like an art form. It’s not beautiful, but it’s impossible to look away.

  A Dread-croc surges toward Mephos’s back as he eviscerates a bull.

  “Lookout!” I shout, climbing back to my feet, trying to bring the waterlogged shotgun to bear.

  As the massive pair of jaws burst forth and snap open to consume Mephos, the Ferox ducks down beneath the lower jaw, and then thrusts up. He’s pushed through the swamp for several feet, but his coiling muscles manage to stop the giant’s attack. Before he can finish the creature off himself, three silent rounds punch through the croc’s exposed chin and explode out its head.

  Crazy stands above me, looking totally calm and relaxed. “You need to keep up.”

  “I’m trying,” I growl.

  Mephos splashes down into the swamp, the nearest wave of foes dispatched. “Get on.”

  I look at him like he’s Donald Trump in drag, and then say the two words that have preceded most of the stranger choices I’ve had to make over the past few years. “Fuck
it.” I slide onto his broad back, grasp two handfuls of hair and pull tight. “Don’t lie,” I say to Mephos. “How many times have you fantasized about me pulling your hair.”

  He snarls at me, but says nothing. If there’s a war I can win hands down, its one where snarky digs are weapons.

  “I’m going to move fast,” Crazy says. “Straight line until we get there. Try to keep up.”

  He turns, takes two steps and then is enveloped by the massive clamshell jaws of a Dread-croc.

  35

  SOLOMON

  Eyes closed, he breathed in the world. His senses expanded. Reached out. Every atom of the continent he called home became his own. He could feel the cold peaks and depths. He could smell the forest and earth, water and wind. The creatures that tread upon the land, from the smallest to the largest, tickled his skin. And from the top of Mount Ninnis, to the very gates of Tartarus, miles beneath the ground, he searched.

  “I cannot feel their presence in Antarktos,” Solomon said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not here. There are ways to hide from me. And there’s no way to predict when they will return. They will return.”

  “So you say.”

  Solomon, perched atop the tallest tower of his fortress, legs dangling over a five hundred foot drop, opened his eyes and looked up at his wife. She was as physically imposing as ever, her battle hammer hanging from her hip, dressed in tight-fitting black leather—and not a whole lot of it.

  “Kainda...I would not forgive myself if something happened to you or the children,” he said.

  “You forget to whom you are speaking.” She patted the hammer, with which she had slain enemies both human, and very much not human. “Antarktos is far from defenseless. Your hunters are stronger than ever.”

  “And if I do not return?”

  “I would remind you, again, to whom you speak.” Kainda was a warrior through and through, trained to endure any pain, physical and emotional. She would mourn the loss of her husband, but she would not be undone by it. If anything, it would strengthen her resolve. He knew all this because without her strength, Antarktos would not be the free continent it was today. “And if you would not listen to your passion,” she says, referring to the role she had played in the course of his life, “perhaps you will listen to your hope.”

  Solomon spun around, and nearly fell from the wall. Kainda was already back at the door leading to their private quarters. She smiled and then left, leaving him alone with the only other woman to have once stolen his heart. He’d been a child at the time, but his memories of Mirabelle Clark had been powerful enough to carry him through the darkest times of his life. She had given him hope when all else was lost.

  Mira’s dark skin made her face harder to make out in the moonless night, but her nearly white, blonde hair gleamed like a star—a large poofy star.

  She noted his attention and tried to push her hair back down. “You do this on purpose, don’t you? Not everyone likes humidity, you know.”

  Mira took a seat beside Solomon, feet over the edge. Unlike Solomon, if she fell, she couldn’t summon a wind to save her. But as long as Solomon was around, she had nothing to fear. She knew it, just as surely as the rest of Antarktos’s population. And that was precisely why he couldn’t leave. He had been to other continents before. His powers faded the further he got from Antarktos, but that hadn’t stopped him from rooting out the Nephilim still hiding around the world. But even on the far side of the planet, his tether to the continent remained. In another dimension though... His connection to the land might be completely severed, and he had no idea what that would do to the continent here, or to him.

  When she turned to him and smiled, some ancient part of him broke. Though she’d aged fifty years, her smile, eyes and hair hadn’t changed a bit. She was still the girl in that polaroid photo. The girl who had saved his very soul. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he smiled as her hair tickled his neck. While it had been just as many years since they’d sat like this in the back of her father’s car, he had aged far less, thanks to the supernatural elements inside the subterranean realms of Antarktos. They were both nearly sixty, but Solomon looked closer to forty, and he felt even younger. At eighty-five, Kainda was older than both of them, and yet thanks to her long years spent deep in the earth, she looked even younger than Solomon.

  “So what’s this I hear about you shirking your duties?” she asked.

  Pulled from his reminiscing by the present’s problems, his broad shoulders shrank. “She told you?”

  “And if you don’t listen to me, she’ll have Em and Kat here next. But I like to think she went with the heaviest hitter first.”

  He smiled. He didn’t know if that was Kainda’s intention, but Mira was right. As his oldest friend, Mira would always have his ear. “What do you know?”

  “That people from another dimension came here looking for help and you turned them down.”

  “They destroyed a tower,” he said.

  “That you fixed with a thought.”

  “People were nearly killed.”

  “But they weren’t.”

  “Because I was here.”

  Mira was silent for a moment. The logic was sound.

  “We have seen some weird stuff, right?” Mira asked. “Demons, Nephilim, Titans, dinosaurs. But people from another dimension? And one of them could control the elements, just like you?”

  “Not like me. She spoke to the land. I am the land.”

  “But she could control it.” Mira said. “You know what my father would say, right?”

  Solomon’s insides tightened. Merrill Clark had not only been a role model for Solomon, he’d also been a trusted advisor and spiritual guide. And his wife, Aimee, had ultimately set Solomon free from the Nephilim’s influence. He owed everything to the Clark family. Saving his world would have been impossible without them.

  “That trials and tribulations test our character,” Solomon said. “And then he’d quote the Bible to back it up.”

  Solomon had a photographic memory. He could have quoted a dozen verses to support that point of view, but he really didn’t want to.

  “Or build it,” Mira added. “He’d also say that your birth, the first and only birth on Antarctica before it was Antarktos, wasn’t just a fluke. That the gifts you were given as a result, came from a higher power. And that you were called to suffer, rise above it and set the world free using your abilities. He would also go on to point out that the one who created the supernatural bond between you and Antarktos, also created the Earth, and if there are other Earths, He created them, too.”

  Solomon couldn’t argue the point. It wasn’t necessarily logic, but he had learned long ago that where logic failed, things like faith made up the difference. But that didn’t change his responsibility to Antarktos. He could quote Bible verses to support that, too.

  Mira beat him to the punch, “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.”

  It was just half a verse. A small part of the Parable of the Shrewd Manager. He understood what she was saying, but had a hard time believing that Antarktos was ‘very little’; that there could be something larger to save.

  But that’s exactly what they’d said.

  Infinite Earths populated by an infinite number of people. Including his.

  It sounded insane.

  But the science? Despite living in a quasi-primitive world that would make Edgar Rice Burroughs giddy, Solomon, at heart, was a man of science. Before being thrust into a world of ancient mysteries, monsters and supernatural chaos, he’d preferred the sciences and math to any kind of physical activity. As a result, he knew and understood the multiverse theory. Thanks to his memory, he could even write out the mathematical formulas that supported it. But science theory and reality didn’t always mesh. His abilities were a perfect example of that.

  And they weren’t arguing the science. “So you think I should abandon Antarktos to—”

  “—save Antarktos. Yes
.” Mira smiled at him, raising an eyebrow that said she knew he was leaving something out. Clearly, Kainda hadn’t. “If what they said is true, as ridiculous as it sounds, that an alien race is going to wipe out Earth in all dimensions, then helping them is helping us. Even if the Nephilim waged a war in your absence, even if we lost that war because of your absence, and Antarktos was lost, if your leaving helped save an infinite amount of people, which very likely includes multiple versions of us, it would still be the right choice. To not go is selfish.”

  “Selfish?” Solomon’s temper flared. “Selfish? Me?”

  Mira stood. “No one understands sacrifice better than you. I know that. Every human being alive on this Earth knows that. But you have a lot more to lose now. A wife. Children.” She swept her hand out over the nighttime view. “All of this. But that doesn’t mean the rest of your days will be comfortable, or that you won’t have to risk, or even sacrifice it all to do the right thing. But you’ve been given a gift. You shouldn’t squander it.”

  She bent down and kissed the top of his head. “I’ll let you stew on that for a bit. Try not to brood too hard, or you’ll wind up wrinkly like me.”

  Solomon watched her leave, but said nothing. He was angry, not because his feelings were hurt or because of Mira, but because she might be right. And if she was right, then he’d been wrong to turn those people away. And now...now it might be too late.

  He stood atop the precipice and looked out at his kingdom. But it was only his because he’d been blessed. Because he’d been given gifts. And now the one who’d given them, needed him for something more. Who was he to say no?

  He glanced back, smiling when he saw Kainda and Mira talking inside. His passion and his hope. With a thought he scrawled a message into the stone floor, reading simply: I love you both. I will return.

  Then he leaped from the fortress wall and let gravity have its way with him. When he reached terminal velocity, he summoned a wind to propel him downward, toward the solid ground beneath. Just feet from impact, a hole opened up and swallowed him up, sealing shut behind him. He fell through the Earth itself, descending miles, straight down to a realm few had ever been to, and only he now visited.