Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

by Jerome Preisler

  “This is the sixth one of these damn things,” Jax said breathlessly. “And each one gets uglier.”

  “It’s the merger of the realms,” Sonya said.

  Jax frowned in annoyance. “You keep saying that, Sonya. And it doesn’t mean squat to me.”

  “I told you,” she said, pushing ahead past the idol. “It’s the end of the world.”

  Jax suddenly grabbed her from behind by the arm.

  “Goddamnit!” he grunted. “You’re talking to me like I’m some kind of idiot! Take a minute to think about how I feel, would you?”

  She looked at him, nodding to indicate she was listening.

  “You drag me out of the hospital with some lunatic killers on our ass, put me in a spinning ball, and take me halfway around the world,” he went on. “If I’m gonna die today, at least tell me why!”

  “Nobody told me why Johnny had to die. Shit happens, Jax. You’re a big boy. Deal with it.”

  Jax searched her face, but her stony expression revealed nothing. “Who the hell’s Johnny?

  She turned away, leaving him more confused and exasperated than ever.

  “I’m your partner, girl,” he said. “If you can’t trust me, who can you–?”

  Lightning streaked across the sky, followed by a sudden, violent blast of thunder. Jax felt something sting his face and slapped at it.

  “Ahh, damn, what was that?”

  They both looked around in growing horror and dismay. Noxious purplish-black raindrops were drizzling from the sky, causing the undergrowth to wither and rot on contact, collecting in oily, steaming pools at their feet.

  “Nature’s dying,” Sonya said in a barely audible voice.

  “Maybe this is the end of the world,” Jax said.

  When Sonya turned to him, he saw that her lower lip was trembling.

  “Time’s running out, Jax,” she said. “It could all be over in a few days.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, their faces somber and heavy. Then, from the very near distance, the sound of brush being thrashed and trampled reached their ears.

  “We gonna keep running, or do you want to go out swinging?” Jax asked.

  Sonya started to answer, but then something made her change her mind. She put a finger to her lips and cocked her head.

  “You hear that?” she whispered.

  Jax listened. “Relax, it’s nothing. The posse’s still a ways behind.”

  “I’m not talking about the Extermination Squads,” she said. “Whatever I heard was right here with us.”

  Sonya’s eyes shifted to a patch of quivering foliage. She tapped Jax on the arm and gestured, but before he could see what she was trying to show him, a split-kick tore through the brush and caught them both in their faces.

  Stunned, Sonya and Jax had just enough time to catch a glimpse of their attacked before he faded back into the ground-mist. They looked around in frustration, searching for any sign of him, but it was no good. He was either gone or perfectly camouflaged, and Sonya was betting on the latter.

  She cut her gaze this way and that, her eyes trying to penetrate the gauzy fog, and was turning to investigate another hint of movement in the brush when an arm snaked around her throat from behind, roughly yanking her backward.

  Gagging and sputtering, Sonya desperately grabbed hold of a tree limb above her head, leveraged herself off the ground, and backflipped up and over her attacked – an angular, exotic-looking woman with eyes like burning coals, and a body as tautly well-conditioned as her smile was vicious.

  Sliding her hands between the woman’s limbs, Sonya landed and put her in a headlock, flipping her back into the mist, which poured around her in a churning brew, concealing her from sight.

  There was a brief silence. Sonya and Jax exchanged alarmed, wary glances, tension humming between them like voltage.

  Then, all at once, the mist in front of Jax coalesced into the shape of the first attacker, who struck out with a rapid succession of blows that snapped his head back like a speed bag. Jax reeled dazedly, bringing up his new arms for a retaliatory combination of punches – but his commands to them were still getting scrambled somewhere en route from his brain. His blows went wild, missing his elusive attacker by several inches, giving him the opening he needed to fade into the mist.

  As Jax looked down at his mutinous fists with disgust, cursing them under his breath, the red-eyed woman cartwheeled through the mist and landed with her legs wrapped in a scissor-grip around Sonya’s neck. Screeching with delight, her powerful thigh muscles squeezing Sonya’s windpipe, she repeatedly boxed her ears with the heel of her hands.

  Sonya rocked and staggered, gasping for air, but somehow gathered the energy to flip her opponent off her. In the brief pause before the woman recovered, Sonya got her first good look at her – and almost froze in shock.

  “Kitana…?” she said.

  The woman cackled.

  “Name’s Mileena, and I don’t appreciate being confused with my virtuous half-sister,” she said. “Just for that, me and my pal Smoke are going to make your deaths extra painful.”

  “You wish,” Sonya said.

  Mileena ripped out another peal of insane laughter and sprang at her. Unwilling to be put on the defensive again, Sonya drove forward, but Mileena was a hair faster. She caught Sonya in midair with a ferocious spin kick, then went flipping back into the mist, her evil laughter echoing through the jungle.

  Smoke simultaneously took form out of the rippling curtain of fog, almost as if their moves had been choreographed. He stepped into plain view and assumed a fighting stance, a three-prong spear snapping from a metal panel in his chest and shooting out at Jax’s ribcage.

  Another cyborg, just like the one back at the lab, Jax thought, which explains how he can turn himself into, well, smoke.

  He raised his arm across his chest, parrying aside the spear a moment before it would have impaled him.

  Although his arms had finally done what he wanted them to, Jax wasn’t all that certain they wouldn’t go haywire again. Before they could act up, he grabbed hold of Smoke’s spear and, with a tremendous show of strength, pulled the cyborg toward him and connected with an uppercut that sent Smoke sailing across the thicket.

  But the mechanical combatant was far from down for the count. Landing on his feet, he cannonballed up from the mist on rocket-powered boot-thrusters, his head smashing Jax backward into the mist, which closed around him like a heavy curtain.

  Smoke scrambled after him, raking his eyes left and right, trying to seek him out amid the thick, concealing billows of vapor – and was greeted by a full-on metal first to the face.

  His head lashing back, Smoke released harsh, grating sound that might have been a groan in a human throat. Then he collapsed.

  “Gotcha,” Jax said. “Gotcha one good.”

  Sonya and Mileena, meanwhile, remained locked in a death struggle, barreling on the ground after a fierce exchange of kicks and blows. Rolling on top of Sonya with a snakelike hiss, Mileena whipped a sai from a concealed harness and thrust it down at Sonya’s face. Sonya bucked and reared underneath her, mercifully slipping the attack and knocking Mileena off her perch. As Mileena tumbled to the ground on her back, Sonya grabbed the sai out of her hand and then brought the short-staff down across her windpipe, pressing down with all her strength until her arms and legs stopped flailing and went limp.

  She was still bearing down on the lifeless body when a hand suddenly fell on her shoulder.

  “Hey, relax,” Jax said. He nodded toward the pulverized snarl of metal, synthetic flesh and circuitry that had been his opponent. “It’s over, Sonya. We beat them.”

  She whipped her head around, looking straight at him, something almost feral in her expression. For a moment, he could have sworn she didn’t have the slightest idea who he was. Then her eyes came back from some faraway place – a place Jax really didn’t think anybody in his right mind would want to go with her – and filled with recognition.
/>   She slowly released her grip on the staff.

  “You and those stupid arms,” she said, gasping. “I thought I was gonna have to save you again.”

  “Again? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Forget it.”

  Sonya glanced back down at Mileena’s corpse.

  “She was a pretty good replica of a human being, but it looks like we got another cyborg here,” she said, and pointed to the griffon-like tattoo on her shoulder. “That’s exactly the same as the mark we on Cyrax.”

  “It’s like a goddamned nightmare,” Jax said, watching the tattoo start to move, its wings flapping as it became three dimensional. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this shit. These suckers–”

  He stopped talking.

  He looked at Sonya.

  She looked back at him.

  They both had heard the Extermination Squad pushing through the wooded tangle behind them, and from the sound of things they were coming much too close for comfort.

  “We better roll,” Sonya said. “Pronto.”

  Jax nodded, and a moment later they were dashing off into the mist.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  For Liu it began the same way it would eventually end – with the sense that he was dreaming or hallucinating, helpless to control the surreal flow of events into which he had been swept like a leaf in a gale.

  His eyes flickering open, he tried to move, discovered that he couldn’t, and then realized that he was buried in sand up to his neck.

  This can’t be real, he thought with a surge of claustrophobic panic. Can’t be.

  He tilted his chin up off the desert floor. Night was still with him. So was Nightwolf. The young Native American was a few feet away, circling him with a torch.

  “Glad you could join us,” he said. “We’ve got a ton of work to do.”

  Liu squirmed and felt sand trickle down the back of his shirt, a sensation that heightened his terror to a degree that was almost overwhelming.

  “Let me out!” he shouted. “I don’t have time for this!”

  Nightwolf’s scoffing grin made an unwanted comeback.

  “Really?” He stood over Liu with his feet planted apart and his arms folded across his chest. “Well, I don’t have time for your ignorance. So if you’ve got a problem, why don’t you do something about it, tough guy?”

  “I can’t fight you. I can’t even move.”

  “Excellent, some signs of intelligence,” Nightwolf said, his slantwise smile creeping higher up his face. He knelt close to Liu. “You’ve gotta learn to fight with inner strength, dude. Your moves are important, but even the best warrior can be killed. It’s the fire inside you, your everlasting faith in yourself, that can never be defeated.”

  Liu’s eyes never left Nightwolf as he walked over to a ten-foot high prickly pear cactus and knocked in half with a forceful kick.

  “I know this sounds like a bunch of psychobabble, but it really does work. If your soul is pure,” he said.

  He lowered his torch to the ground and revealed an army of dark, furry spiders swarming from the broken cactus.

  Liu’s eyes widened. “What are you doing?”

  “Here’s the deal,” Nightwolf said. “You’ve got three tests to pass before you’re ready for what lies ahead.” He knelt, filling the pouch with spiders until it bulged and jerked from the inside. Then he smiled his crooked smile. “Now the first thing we’re gonna test is your courage… this part should blow your mind.”

  Liu moistened his lips. “Why does it have to be spiders?”

  “Because you’re scared of them.”

  Standing over Liu again, Nightwolf turned the pouch upside down and emptied the spiders onto his head.

  Cringing with revulsion as they skittered over his scalp and face, Liu tried to shake them off and yelped in sudden pain.

  “The trick here is to overcome your fear.”

  Nightwolf watched him like a scientist studying a new lab specimen. “Every time you move, the spiders bite.” “I know! I can feel it!”

  “Relax,” Nightwolf said, attenuating the a sound. “Their poison won’t kill you, just expand your mind beyond your current boundaries.”

  “If you’re so damn smart and brave, why don’t you fight Shao Kahn?” Liu asked furiously.

  Nightwolf’s face become serious, the fathoms-deep look Liu had seen before returning to his eyes. “If Kahn dares to attack our sacred land, I will be here to protect my people… as I have for the last two hundred years.”

  He stood over Liu for another minute, then began walking away with the torch.

  Night poured over Liu like thick molasses.

  “Wait!” Liu shouted after him. “Where are you going? You can’t just leave me here like this.”

  The words that came back at him from the enveloping darkness were laced with mockery.

  “Wanna bet?”

  His face pale, his skin beaded with sweat, Liu felt his eyelids grow heavy as the spider venom took hold.

  Finally, they dropped shut.

  When Liu came to again, he was standing against a field of what he initially believed were stars, thousands of them, twinkling against the night sky like carelessly scattered diamonds. But as his head cleared, he realized to his horror that they were, in fact, tiny, brightly blinking eyes… malevolent, jack-o’-lantern eyes that flashed from white to emerald green before his own enraptured gaze.

  Then he heard Nightwolf’s voice. Heard it coming from inside his own head.

  “Face your fears, Liu,” it said. “Through them you will find your primal power. Your animal rage.”

  “I won Mortal Kombat!” Liu protested in a voice that seemed oddly detached from him. “What do I have to fear?”

  “You hide your fears with attitude. But here you cannot hide.”

  Demonic faces emerged from the darkness, their outlines shifting and phantasmal except for those gemlike green eyes. Liu heard overlapping whoops of frenzied laughter and instinctively assumed a fighting stance.

  “You let your brother die,” a voice said from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  “You cannot beat Shao Kahn!” whooped another with monstrous elation.

  More voices joined in the taunting chorus.

  “You are a worthless man!”

  “You cannot save the world!”

  “You will fail!”

  Liu punched and kicked at the wraithlike creatures, but his blows went right through them. They whirled and capered around him, untouchable, their strident, overlapping voices tearing at his composure.

  Then, drowning them out in a soundless roar, Nightwolf’s voice pushed back into Liu’s head.

  “The past cannot hurt you, Liu,” he said. “Believe in your destiny. Every man has the power to change the future. Find that power within.”

  Liu clenched his fists without even knowing he had done so. Then he closed his eyes and stood perfectly still.

  “Yes,” he said. “I can feel it.”

  Incredibly, greenish-black reptilian scales began to sprout from his arms. Smoke gusted from his nose. His eyes peeled open, glowing like red lightbulbs, their pupils horizontal slits.

  The Dragon, an inner voice that was his, yet not his, shouted. Loose the Dragon!

  His anger rising within him in a scalding fountain, Liu belched out a gout of flame that torched several of the demons and sent them scattering like meteors in some stellar cataclysm. The others flew off as well, their jeering howls of laughter curdling to fearful, defeated shrieks that soon dwindled out of earshot.

  Liu teetered between a giddy exhilaration over the newfound power throbbing within him like a chrysalis trying to shed its cocoon, and fear of what would become of him if that happened. For a moment he was tempted to find out, to let that terrifying yet seductive force burst free of restraint and take over completely… but the urge was quickly suppressed. He was terrified that if he did that, if the transformation were to complete itself, there might be no reversing i
t.

  Closing his eyes again, he wrestled down his anger, willing it back into whatever fiery chamber of his soul it had sprung from. Slowly his features grew calm, the plated scales on his arms smoothing and softening as they reverted to human flesh.

  Within minutes, a kind of thick, gluey lassitude settled over him and everything went black.

  This time when Liu regained his senses, it was after feeling his eyelids flecked by something wet and stingingly cold. He opened his eyes to find it was daylight, and that he was no longer buried in sand, but lying face up in a large ditch. Light snow was falling. Scorched black, the ground around him was already half hidden under a powdery accumulation.

  “Nightwolf?” he said, rising on his elbows. “Nightwolf?”

  But there was no sign of him, and Liu’s calls were quickly snatched away in a rush of harsh, bitterly cold wind. He got to his feet and surveyed his predicament, shivering violent.

  Covered by a skim of snow, the procession of sand dunes surrounding him now resembled immense polar drifts. Snow rippled and swirled in the air, dissolving the world into soft focus.

  Where was he? Which way was he supposed to go? The maddening truth was he didn’t have a clue. One direction seemed as good as another.

  Miserable and despondent, hugging himself for warmth, Liu started out through the blowing snow.

  Liu had walked a great distance since first awakening in the storm but gotten no closer to any sign of life. His strength was fading. Every step he took left him shin-deep in the mounting white drifts. His hair crusted with ice, his face bluing from the cold, he fell to his knees and began to crawl, his fingers clawing at the frozen ground.

  Liu was almost unconscious when he noticed the orange gleam of firelight playing across the snow up ahead. The muscles of his neck creaking softly, he raised his head… and blinked. Then blinked again. And again, certain he was looking at another hallucination.

  “I am Jade,” the woman standing in front of him said. In her hand was a long wooden staff, the end of which had been dipping in burning pitch to create torchlight. “I have searched the mesa for you, Liu Kang. Nightwolf feared for your life.”