by James Axler
Ohio sat on a chair to the side of the road, directly before the passenger-side door to the leftmost of the two wags. The wag would shield her from any kind of sneak attack, and a guard stood at her side three feet away with an AK-47 held in his hands. The man looked emotionlessly up the road as Kane and Brigid approached. His face was hard and square, his shoulders seemed too wide for his head and his sleeveless shirt revealed tattooed arms. He had a second blaster at his hip, a modified Sin Eater like the Magistrates used to use before they began to employ the retractable design that functioned with the wrist holster.
Ohio’s chair looked antique, with a velvet backing in the same sapphire blue as the long dress she wore, its high back arched and framed in mahogany. Ohio sat cross-legged, wearing a long blue dress whose slit fell open to reveal almost the full length of her uppermost leg. Her peekaboo hair hid her left eye, as it always did, blond bangs falling until they almost brushed her cheek. She held a glass of clear liquid aloft in salutation as she spotted Kane and Brigid approaching. The chair and the woman looked incongruous amid such earthy surroundings, the sounds and smells of the swamp impossible to ignore.
“Drink?” Ohio asked when the Cerberus warriors got close enough that she would not need to shout.
“We’ll have to decline,” Kane told her. “Running a tight schedule just now. Care to tell me how you knew we’d be here? How you broke into our comms signal?”
Ohio took a long, slow drink from her glass, her eyes fixed on Kane’s, never leaving his gaze. When she drew the glass away, she had left a lipstick stain on its side, and she smiled a tight-lipped smile. “You take such pride in your independence,” she observed, “that you do not always know when to accept help, sweet prince. I have something for you, and my people here have gone well beyond normalinquiries to reach you.”
Kane’s eyes flicked to Ohio’s guards as he stood before the blond-haired trader. He figured she was tracking him, somehow—probably with the same transponders that Cerberus used. Under different circumstances he might even be impressed. “What do you have?” he asked.
Ohio raised her free hand, the one without the glass in it, fist clenched, palm down. She opened her fingers and something dropped from her hand, dangling there on a thin loop of gold chain. It looked like a shark’s tooth to Kane.
“What is that?” Kane asked, stepping forward.
“Ah, now you are intrigued,” Ohio teased him. “You realize that perhaps your anger was misplaced, sweet prince.”
“What is it?” Kane asked again, reaching for the yellow-white object on the length of chain.
Ohio dropped it into his hand with a smile. “This was worn among other trinkets by an old woman who came into my presence. Her name was Dagmar—she came from around these parts, worshipped at a local temple.”
Brigid’s eyes widened at that, recalling their own dealings with a voodoo priest called Hurbon. “Do you know where? With whom?”
“Your colleagues met with me and spoke with her,” Ohio replied, brushing the questions deftly aside. Ohio was a trader and information broker, so she was not in the habit of giving away data easily, and almost never freely. Kane and Brigid knew instantly that she was talking about Edwards, Domi and Sela Sinclair, however. “She was wearing this around her neck,” Ohio continued.
“Do you know what it is?” Brigid asked, leaning closer to take a look. Beside her, Kane was holding back, watching the guards and the covering of vegetation, wary of an ambush.
“No,” Ohio admitted. “It appears to be a piece of bone or tooth. It was brought to our attention when the woman tried to swallow it—one of my assistants caught her in the act and removed it from her mouth, though with some degree of trouble.”
“She tried to swallow it?” Kane asked. “Chain and all?”
“I am told that she spoke of ancient powers,” Ohio explained. “Of strengths gained by imbibing parts of the great ones themselves. Voodoo hogwash, of course.”
“Of course,” Kane agreed, peering at Brigid as she stared, almost transfixed by the white shard. She knew what it was, he felt certain. “Baptiste?”
“We’ve seen this before,” was all she said.
Kane knew not to ask anything further at that moment. He would speak to his colleagues out of hearing range of the wily trader and her people. His eyes flicked back to Ohio where she reclined in her eccentric chair. “Where’s this Dagmar woman now?” he asked.
“She...struggled,” Ohio said, clearly uncomfortable.
Kane nodded, feeling as if a coiled snake was sitting in his gut. He’d had few dealings with voodoo, but all of them had been creepy, and frequently their resolutions had been unclear. “Thank you. Was there anything else?” he finally asked.
Ohio shook her head and smiled. “So much. But it can wait. I see that you are busy.”
Kane saluted Ohio with his fingertips, turned and marched back the way he had come, Brigid keeping step beside him with the charm now in her hand.
As Kane and his companion left, Ohio watched the way he walked, the lithe movement of his muscles. She liked Kane, he was her prince, but there was something that always kept them apart. He was reticent, always had been, but perhaps she was partly to blame for that because she had never been truly honest with him. She reached up to her hair, and touched the thing that her peekaboo hairstyle hid, on the left-hand side of her face. One day, perhaps, she would share that little secret with him.
* * *
“I HATE ALL this voodoo shit,” Kane muttered once he was satisfied that they were well away from the trader and her guards. “Symbols and bloodletting and weird little ugly dolls with ribbons tied to their waists.”
“Agreed,” Grant said, joining them from his hiding place in the bushes, hefting the scoped rifle in his hands.
“So?” Kane asked, turning an inquisitive eye to Brigid.
Grant looked from Kane to Brigid, feeling the electricity between them. “You guys find out something?” he asked.
“Better than that,” Kane said. “Ohio handed us a trinket that was being used by one of the locals.”
Brigid was turning the white shard over and over in her hand as they walked toward the Mantas and the entrance to Redoubt Mike.
“That it?” Grant asked, and when Kane told him it was, he peered more closely. “What is it?”
Brigid was still looking at the white shard, her emerald eyes fixed rigidly on its pitted surface.
Kane saw now that she was pale even for her; in fact, she had gone white as a sheet. “Baptiste?” he prompted.
“I think it’s a piece from Tiamat,” she said, “the dragon ship of the Annunaki.”
Chapter 22
Kane and Grant looked at Brigid with complete astonishment, a single question on both their lips—though Kane was the first to give it voice.
“How can you be sure that’s Tiamat?” he asked.
“Because I can remember the shade of the dragon ship’s bones,” Brigid explained, “exactly.”
Brigid had perfect recall, Kane knew, something she called an eidetic memory, which meant she could remember the most intricate detail of the things she had seen with photographic exactitude. But this was not an object that they held, it was a splinter from one. For Brigid to remember a color—no, not even a color but a shade of white, only infinitesimally different from all the other shades of white that were out there—seemed incredible.
“You’re sure?” Kane asked, knowing the question was redundant even as it left his lips.
Brigid glanced up from the white rock on the necklace chain and smiled at Kane, that beautiful, genuine smile she reserved only for those moments when she recalled how far behind her Kane mentally was. “You remember in Iraq, on the banks of the Euphrates,” she said, “when Enlil regrew Tiamat from a seed?”
Kane and Grant did,
of course. The seed had grown but it had corrupted, so that instead of forming a new spaceship it had grown only the parts, leaving the bone substructure on show in something that the locals had called the Dragon City. Grant had fought his way into the city twice over, ultimately battling with Enlil and his son Ullikummis in the ship’s engine rooms before Kane stepped in via astral projection and managed to trap Ullikummis in an interphase wormhole.
“The ship never fully formed,” Brigid said. “It was instead left with its framework—its bones and teeth—on show.
“I think that this is one of those teeth,” she said, “or, more accurately, a part of one.”
“A dragon’s tooth,” Kane pronounced with gravity. “And just what would an old lady be doing with a dragon’s tooth?”
“It was found on an old lady?” Grant asked, his eyebrows raised in surprise.
Kane nodded. “She tried to swallow it and kill herself. Two separate acts done at the same time.”
“No, she didn’t,” Brigid said as they neared the overgrown entrance to the redoubt. “She tried to shed blood as she swallowed the tooth. Subtle difference. We’re talking about sacrifice here, sacrificial blood. It’s a standard tool in voodun ceremonies, though usually they would use the blood of an animal such as a chicken.”
“No chickens about, I guess,” Grant said, catching on.
“But why would you swallow a dragon’s tooth?” Kane asked, baffled.
Brigid racked her brains, making new connections at lightning speed. “Dragon’s teeth were said to have great power in ancient times. The Spartoí were the children of Ares, the Greek god of war. They were powerful soldiers grown from the teeth of a dragon. But they were walking dead and that made them almost invincible.”
“How did they grow these teeth warriors?” Kane asked.
“According to Greek legend, they were sown in the ground,” Brigid recalled. “But that only means that they required some kind of nurturing, an organic base in which to flourish.”
“So if you put one inside a person—?” Kane began.
Brigid swore then, her frustration suddenly bubbling over. “Of course. Ereshkigal was the same thing! Dammit, why didn’t I see that at the time?”
“What are you talking about?” Grant asked. He had met Ereshkigal, the reborn Annunaki goddess of the underworld while vacationing with his girlfriend Shizuka in Zaragoza, Spain. Ereshkigal had manipulated the dead, building an unliving army and bringing about a momentary revolution that had threatened the local populace and almost caused a whole city to die. Kane and Brigid had joined Grant in a showdown with the reborn goddess, whose physical coherence was threatened by some kind of rot that caused her strength to ebb, leading to her defeat.
“Ereshkigal was unfinished,” Brigid said. “Reborn, but incomplete. Just like when we faced Ezili Coeur Noir on this very site two years ago.”
“You think voodoo was involved in Ereshkigal’s reemergence?” Kane asked, realization slowly dawning.
“Yes, and not just hers,” Brigid said. “Charun and Vanth in Italy, everything that just happened to us in the Congo. Gods—dark gods, the kind of bastards who ruled over their own legendary hells—have been appearing all across the globe with no pattern, no reason. But how do you make a god?”
“Spartoí,” Kane said solemnly. “The undead born from the dragon’s seeds.”
“Exactly! Exactly!” Brigid said, holding the pendant before her. “This little sliver of Annunaki debris works like a seed. Like everything else the Annunaki ever made, it’s organic technology, DNA twisted in a way that can be grown to make whatever they need. Dragon ships, obedience stones, gods...”
The Cerberus trio had halted before the entrance to the redoubt and saw now that the rollback doors had been pulled back, leaving the access tunnel—concrete walled and wide enough to drive a Sandcat down—open to the elements. Mold grew up the walls, specks of green and darkness intertwined.
“How can one broken tooth do all that?” Grant asked.
“Not one,” Brigid said. “Dozens. Maybe even hundreds. The Annunaki were humankind’s first gods, their escapades became the templates for myths that traveled far beyond their reach, and touched cultures far and wide. Their stories were rewritten and reworked, turned into new tales with new gods and new heroes, but all the while the same core concepts lurked beneath the surface—Ezili was Lilith was Lilitu, for example. All those histories, all those templates, are contained in the pieces of the wombship Tiamat, the place where all the genetic templates resided, waiting for rebirth.”
“And now somebody’s gotten ahold of them and has been using them to—what?” Kane asked.
“Raise Hell,” Grant growled.
“They weren’t gods,” Brigid said. “They were seeds. Seeds that used genetic matter to revive their data, giving rise to Ereshkigal and Nergal and Charun and so on. Someone spread them across the globe deliberately, guys.”
“But why would anyone do that?” Grant asked.
“Control,” Kane answered without missing a beat. “The same reason the barons made the villes, the same reason we became Magistrates. The same sick reason that the system keeps coming back—to control people.”
“They used voodoo,” Brigid said, eyeing the shadowy entry to Redoubt Mike, voodoo iconography drawn into the once-precise lines of the military base. “They mixed dark magic with the supercomputer nature of these fragments of Tiamat to make things come to life.”
Kane looked from Brigid to the darkness of the redoubt entrance. “We’re at the belly of the beast, then, I guess.”
“I guess,” Brigid said, trying to pierce the gloom with her eyes.
“You think they have any more of this stuff?” Grant asked. “These dragon’s teeth?”
“I think we had best keep our eyes open,” Brigid said, “and stay on our guard.”
With that, the three Cerberus warriors pulled dark-lensed glasses from their pockets and put them over their eyes. The electrochemical polymer of the lenses gathered all available light to give them a form of night vision as they entered the darkness of the cavernous tunnel into the complex. As they walked, all three drew their weapons, Kane his Sin Eater from its hidden sheath at his wrist, Grant his Copperhead subgun, leaving the SSG-550 on its sling across his back, and Brigid her TP-9 semiautomatic.
As they went farther along the sloped road, disappearing deeper underground, they saw figures strewn on the road, dead men and women, their bodies rotted away, just piles of bones and rags. All three of them remembered this place, remembered their frantic escape in a rotting truck as undead things came back to life to stop them.
The redoubt was dead now, almost noiseless. And yet, all around them as they went deeper into its subterranean confines, the sense of something organic, something alive, seemed to seep from the mold-covered walls, the soft, moss-covered ground where once there had been tarmac road.
The last of the distant daylight ebbed away like the reflection of the moon on the ripples of a lake, and the Cerberus warriors were walking in darkness, down under the earth, where the dead things had been. They reached a wide rollback door at the end of the tunnel, beside which stood a guard’s monitoring station. The rollback door was wedged cockeyed into the wall. The guard post featured burned-out television monitors and a large red panic button whose works had been overcome with rust.
They pressed on, Kane taking the lead as they stepped through the door and into the redoubt itself. They had been here before, their previous excursion hectic and disturbing, a rush of escapes from dead things brought back to life.
A vehicle elevator waited at the end of the road a dozen feet from the rollback door. Overhead, lights flickered and blinked, activated by motion sensors but no longer functioning properly, instead casting the whole chamber in a stutter of illumination, like lightning at midnight.
&nb
sp; Within, the redoubt seemed to pulse. It was quiet, but not quite silent—the distant noise of swishing water, things dripping, creaking against their tethers or against one another echoing through the distant corridors. There were scars on the wall, gashes like blood, as if the walls were the flesh of something living that had been attacked and left for dead. Figures lay against the walls, mold growing over their long-rotted bodies, one a man with a concave rib cage within which mushrooms grew.
Kane glanced past the elevator, searching for the telltale door that would open onto the stairwell that ran through the redoubt. He pushed at the door, then pulled, then pushed again until it opened—inward, stiffly, accompanied by a groan of unoiled hinges.
Inside, wall lights flickered and died, flickered and died, sputtering like candles against a hurricane. Kane trotted swiftly down the stairs, their hard surfaces marred by spreading mold, diffusing the sound of his footfalls and the tap-tap of Brigid’s heeled boots that followed.
Without a word, Kane halted at the doorway to the next level, pressing himself against it as he listened for any signs of company. Nothing, just silence—creaking, dripping, silence.
Kane pulled the door, stepping around it with his blaster nosing before him, using the wall for cover.
He was in a wide area now, the stairwell opening onto a vehicle garage with the wreckage of stripped-down jeeps and military trucks that had not been used in two hundred years. A pool of water dominated the room, dark with debris, bones and weeds swirling within its shallow depths.
Kane gestured in the darkness, commanding his team forward without making a sound.
They joined him, moving through the waterlogged garage, past the vehicles and crates where two years before they had tangled with living dead things.
It was slow, Kane regretted. Slow progress, checking places like this, searching for his lost colleagues while avoiding traps an enemy might set. Grant and Brigid peeled away, checking the nooks and crannies, searching for signs of Domi, Edwards and Sela Sinclair.