by James Axler
If it hadn’t been for the battle of the consortium gunmen, Thurpa would have been focused on his fear, caught up in pure panic. As it was, the brief respite allowed him to remember his natural abilities. In a heartbeat, the Nagah opened his mouth, flexing his fangs and emptying his venom sacs into the face of his tormentor.
In his panic, Thurpa held none of his body’s natural venom in reserve. He got the toxic spit everywhere, in the creature’s eyes, his mouth, his throat.
Almost instantly, his opponent was racked with pain, but as the first of the venom drops hit the back of its throat, its tissues swelled up, hindering its ability to cry out. The thing thrashed violently, at once blind and voiceless, but that didn’t give Thurpa the break he’d hoped for. The kongamato brought up a powerful arm and smashed it across the cobra man’s chest.
Searing, incredible pain rolled through Thurpam, who collapsed to the ground, gasping for breath. The glue keeping his wound shut held, but only barely. Skin stretched, and one of his chest scales dropped to the ground, leaving an ugly, piebald patch on his skin, growing redder and redder with bruising.
Breathe, he told himself, clawing at the floor. Any moment, the blinded kongamato would start casting about, looking for him. It didn’t need eyes or sonar to locate him, and those arms were as strong as ever. Thurpa pulled himself to all fours, willing himself to move toward his fallen pistol. His amber eyes scanned the shadows for the one equalizer he could hope for.
Claws reached down, digging into Thurpa’s scaled shoulder even as his fingertips brushed the butt of the weapon.
As the sharp nails pierced the cobra man’s skin, he picked up the object and swung it toward his attacker.
Chapter 24
Grant looked skyward and saw that the kongamato were scattering, shrieking rather than projecting their echolocation barks. A grim smile creased his lips as he realized that something was interfering with the creatures’ concentration.
“Kane, you blew stuff up?” he asked.
His friend grunted an affirmation over the Commtact. “Of course. The winged beasts confused?”
“Naturally,” Grant replied. “Keep up the good work.”
“Naturally!” Kane responded.
Brigid emptied the contents of her Copperhead into a particularly tenacious kongamato who refused to take flight in fear and confusion. Maybe its injuries had angered it too much to want to retreat, but the thing finally succumbed to multiple bullet wounds.
The archivist looked to Grant. “I take it your plan is going fine?”
“Hell no,” he said. “There’s too many of these things around, Lomon is on the radio telling me that the millennialists turned on the Zambians, and Gamal is still alive. The destruction that Kane wrought gave us a temporary reprieve, especially since Gamal has a lot of machinery by his throne.”
“So, his control of the animals is still an issue,” Brigid mused.
“A distraction, but a useful one,” Grant replied.
He stuffed another magazine of slugs into the big shotgun. “That energy field does a good job of stopping bullets cold, and doing the same to grens.”
“Ionic plasma discharge. It doesn’t allow the grenades to explode,” Brigid noted. “I watched your first attempt, and then Edwards’s efforts with his launcher.”
“At least it doesn’t send an electrical arc back along the route of the attack. Otherwise we’d be screwed,” Grant mused.
“There’s another thing I want to try,” Brigid said. “Distract Gamal for a moment.”
Grant nodded. He threw another grenade at the warlord’s protective energy umbrella, and the weapon shot away as it struck a pencil-thin arc of ions. He then turned the big shotgun at Gamal and fired off three quick shots. The muzzle-blast made Grant an unmistakable target, and once more the warlord summoned his winged minions. The batlike horrors swung out of the sky, swooping toward the Cerberus giant.
Grant let the shotgun hang and snapped his Sin Eater into action. The signature machine pistol roared, spitting out slugs quickly. He needed a couple more shots on target than with the shotgun slugs, but the Sin Eater held more and could be aimed with much greater precision. Grant and his Sin Eater knocked three of the kongamato out of the air before a fourth slammed into him.
He held his ground, and the bullet-riddled kongamato bounced away from him. Grant turned toward Gamal. “That all you got, sucker?” he taunted the African warlord.
“All I have?” Gamal asked in return. “My queen has promised me unlimited power, the secrets of the gods. I have so much more at my command....”
Grant spotted Brigid sneaking up through the long grass. Thanks to the shadow suit, she was as hard to spot as a black cat, and the body-hugging material added to her feline grace and appearance. The militia had called itself the Panthers of Manosha, but so far, facing the Cerberus team, they’d been shown to be kittens, with Brigid taking on the stealth and cunning of a black panther herself.
“So, you have nothing,” Grant said. His suit’s optics allowed him to see Brigid, but Gamal didn’t have any such eyewear. She produced a small handful of something, then lobbed it low.
Gamal sneered. “Pitiful...”
Grant realized that Brigid was going to try to come up through the truck’s flatbed itself. The umbrella of ionic energy surrounded and protected the machinery, but those lightninglike fingers ended at the floor Gamal stood upon.
Hopefully, whatever grenade Brigid had tossed beneath the trailer would cut through the metal. If not...
The implosion grenade went off with a deafening roar, and instead of being hurled upward, the platform beneath Gamal bent down to the ground. The African warlord screamed as he was knocked from his feet. The machinery on the flatbed with him shook violently, rolling toward the sudden depression in the metal they rested on. Gamal scrambled, rushing to get out of the way of toppling consoles, but there was a brutal crunch, and the warlord broke into pained screams.
Grant didn’t take any time to gloat over the fall of the Manoshan madman. The kongamato took the destruction of their control systems as a bad, bad sign.
The flying beasts let out a unified shriek of rage.
There must be at least fifty of the monsters left, Grant mused as he quickly reloaded his shotgun. “Find a way to burn these things’ brains, Kane!” he growled.
* * *
MAKOBA SMILED AS he watched the kongamato surge from the underground tunnels, a dozen of the brawny, brutal beasts having slipped in the back door, thanks to his brilliance. Certainly the Millennium Consortium and Durga would consider this treachery, but Makoba was nothing if not set in his ways. He’d lived his entire life with minimal influence from whites, and he was damned certain that Africa was not going to give up its secrets to snake men from India.
Makoba, younger brother to Gamal, was going to be a prince of Africa.
He looked down at Jonas, who had expected him to arrive topside, having sealed off that entrance with high explosives. The man was unconscious, and Makoba had taken his rifle.
Lomon and the Zambians still in a mood to fight were farther down the hall, and Makoba concentrated, looking at the throng of kongamato he’d been given. At first, while they were coming to his side, they seemed confused, unmotivated. They milled around instead of moving at full speed. Makoba wondered if this was simply because they had feasted upon the surviving millennialists who had been assigned to him. They were covered in blood, with shreds of flesh stuck between their long teeth.
“Move, you morons!” Makoba growled. He ran his fingers through his hair, touching the control crown that he’d stolen from Durga. Gamal said that he’d be able to keep the creatures in line with them.
They’d been quick and brutal. The millennialists had died screaming and shooting. When the kongamato were done, there were only scraps and bones. Ma
koba felt a little disappointed that he hadn’t seen Thurpa torn to ribbons by the snarling horde, but the annoying outsider was nowhere to be seen.
“Attack them,” Makoba whispered, ifocusing as hard as he could through the control crown.
The beasts suddenly galloped forward, charging on all fours.
Except they were simply plowing through the battered Zambian soldiers, shoving them aside. Some were hurt by their passage, but the chaos, the carnage that Makoba wanted, was ignored. The creatures reached the shattered entrance of the redoubt and leaped upward into the night sky, taking to the wing.
“Come back. No! Come back!” Makoba shouted. “You’re supposed to kill them all!”
Even as he bellowed at the fleeing kongamato, he clutched Jonas’s rifle tightly in both hands, muzzle pointed in Lomon’s direction.
Bad idea.
“Son, you’d best lower that weapon!” Lomon called out.
The ragtag Zambians turned their attention toward the man they’d known as a millennialist. Now, he stood over one of their own, Jonas, and had taken his firearm, calling out about having the mutants stay and kill them all. Makoba watched their eyes go from confusion and exhaustion to hard anger and determination. Those with the strength to sat up or rose to their feet, swiftly reloading their guns.
Lomon rushed to the front of the group, getting between his fellow Zambian militiamen and the consortium gunman.
“Look at the odds, Makoba,” he shouted. “If you shoot, you’ll be dead in an instant.”
Makoba took a step back, then prodded the muzzle of his rifle into the stunned Jonas. “You attack me, I’ll kill him. I swear upon my brother, I’ll murder this little bastard!”
Lomon’s glance of concern faded away. “If you do, you won’t die from a gunshot wound. Hurt my friend, and I’ll make your ending long, slow and painful.”
Makoba looked down at Jonas. He continued to step back, but kept his weapon trained on him. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll let me be.”
“Really?” Lomon asked. “You call out to a group of maniac beasts to kill us, attack one of my friends and expect me to leave you alone?”
The Zambian officer didn’t press the point. He was hurting badly from all manner of dings and cuts. Chasing an armed, uninjured opponent was nothing that he cared to engage in. The battle with the kongamato and their satchel charges had wrought a hefty toll upon him and the others. While Lomon didn’t have much attachment to the millennialists, the sight of Makoba alone meant that he’d betrayed them. The kongamato wouldn’t have been the only ones that the big bandit brought with him. That meant the consortium contingent was gone.
Likely torn to pieces by the beasts who’d run out on Makoba.
If he let the marauder escape, the murders of those men would go unpaid for, as well. Lomon cursed his limits.
Then he saw a movement behind the gunman.
It was a hooded figure in the shadows, and it was carrying a length of rebar.
Makoba backed right into Thurpa. Sheer panic filled the man, and he pulled the trigger on his rifle. Only fear and providence had kept that stream of bullets from striking Jonas or any of Lomon’s other fellow Zambians. Makoba whirled and tried to bring up the rifle, but Thurpa smashed him across the face with the knobby length of steel. The first stroke laid open the Manoshan Panther’s flesh all the way down to white, gleaming bone.
A second stroke with the rebar, and Makoba toppled against the wall, clutching his throat, rifle forgotten in a clatter on the floor. Thurpa glared at the fallen figure, then dropped the rebar down to the ground, to support himself as a cane. His shoulders heaved, and even the rebar couldn’t keep him on his feet for long.
“Get that man help!” Lomon shouted.
“Makoba?”
“Thurpa! The Nagah!” Lomon spit.
“He saved Jonas,” Shuka added. “He’s one of ours.”
Lomon led the rush, picking the wounded Nagah up from his knees.
Even as he held the exhausted Thurpa, Lomon knew that there was a chance for this ragtag Zambian contingent.
* * *
BRIGID BAPTISTE SCAMPERED through the grass, moving as quickly as she could to the side of the collapsed, almost folded truck bed, looking for Gamal and his control crown. If she could get hold of the device, and the detonation of the implosion grenade hadn’t destroyed the electronics, she could utilize it. There were still dozens of the kongamato flying around, but at this point, they were on a rampage of their own, no longer directed by the mental impulses of the warlord.
That didn’t make anything safer for her or the other Cerberus warriors, but now, the kongamato were turning their attention and their hunger toward the carrion and wounded in the wake of their initial strikes. Men screamed and gunshots rang out as the creatures swooped down and plucked at the dead, the dying and those just running scared as hell. At least the focus was off her and Grant, but she couldn’t see her friend for the darkness and the confusion.
That might have been a good thing, especially since that would mean Grant could be out of sight of the flying predators suddenly possessing free will and great hunger.
She reached the side of the wrecked flatbed and saw a massive form swing into view. Brigid was about to fire on him, but the faceplate suddenly outlined the form and threw up a green identify-friend-foe flag on the optics. It was Grant, and thankfully, her reflexes were slower than the technology she wielded.
“Brigid,” he said. “Looking for Gamal?”
“Yes,” she responded. “See him?”
Grant shook his head. “But there’s a trail of blood. And I found this....”
He held up the headpiece that the warlord had worn. She could see that it was broken.
“Damn,” Brigid grumbled. “I was hoping to use that.... Is the equipment all right?”
Grant tilted his head. Brigid stepped around, peering closer. There were field computers, bulky, heavily armored systems with green screens and keyboards. They had been meant to take a pounding, but both showed damage. The screen on one showed an error message, its hard drive having lost vast amounts of its programming as it had collided with the ionic field.
The other machine seemed to be in operating condition. Its lights were working, but its monitor had shattered, having struck a corner of the other console.
Grant looked around. “We need something to kill all these things, or sooner or later, they’re going to overwhelm the amount of ammunition we have.”
Brigid looked at the working device, then leveled her .45 at it. A pull of the trigger, and the keyboard and its guts were blasted to pieces.
“Why did you do that?” Grant asked.
“Because it’s obvious we can’t control these things from here. Gamal is gone, that control headpiece is broken, and there’s no way we can jury-rig one screen to another,” Brigid replied. “So, we remove these machines from the equation immediately. That way, there won’t be any interference when Kane and the others find something.”
She held out her hand. “Let me look at the crown.”
Grant handed it over. “If anything, it looks like the tech we’re using for the Commtacts.”
“I’ll call Bry and see if he can pick up anything on it,” Brigid offered.
“Grant? Brigid?” It was a familiar, Indian-accented voice, but it wasn’t Durga’s. Kane and the cobra prince had been out of contact for several minutes, meaning they could have gone deeper underground, or into an area where electronic interference was preventing communication.
“Thurpa?” Brigid asked.
“I’ve found Durga’s control unit,” the Nagah said. “Makoba took it.”
“Where are you?” she inquired.
“With Lomon. I’m using his radio, since Grant keyed him to the Commtact frequency,” Thur
pa replied. “Makoba tried to control the kongamato, but he failed....”
“Presumably because Gamal had more powerful equipment,” Brigid said. “Can you try to use it?”
“Yeah,” Thurpa replied.
Grant looked to the tree line. The kongamato were avoiding it, because CAT Beta held down that area. Unfortunately, that reprieve wasn’t going to last long.
“Okay, I’ve fit it on my head,” Thurpa said over the radio. “What’s your order?”
Brigid looked to Grant. “Anything from Kane?”
“I’ll give it one more try,” he said. “Bry, you read me? Can you boost the signal?”
Donald Bry, the computer genius back at Cerberus redoubt, was on immediately. “If we can’t reach him, it won’t because the satellites were too weak.”
“Kane!” Grant shouted. Brigid tensed, flinching away from the stentorian bellow.
“Damn it, Grant, I kind of need my eardrums!” Kane answered. The signal was loaded with static.
“Well, we need a surefire way to deal with the clones,” Grant countered. “What have you got?”
“Durga’s located a self-destruct mechanism for the cloning facility,” Kane replied. “It’s a pretty simple fail-safe. Kerosene is released through sprayers, and then it’s ignited by a timed charge.”
“Kerosene,” Grant murmured. “The clone facility will turn into a fuel-air explosive underground.”
“Send them here!” Kane ordered.
* * *
DURGA GLARED AT Kane, not enjoying being manhandled like a sack of rice. But considering that the Cerberus explorer held the ancient artifact Nehushtan, and his strength had been boosted by a considerable degree, the Nagah prince held his tongue.
Kane felt almost disappointed. He wanted to get into a throwdown with his old foe. Or did he?
With the influence of the staff, and his adventures on the psychic plane, Kane still felt off balance. The power coursing through his veins could have been like a drug, and the influence of that unknown, voidlike queen could have spurred an even more intense rivalry with Durga. She sounded as if she was interested in getting Kane on her side, even after doing her best to crush and mutilate him with all manner of telepathic torture.