Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

by Jerome Preisler

  Her scream swept through the chasm like sonic wildfire, racing closer to Rayden’s newly opened Portal as the mountain walls literally started exploding, the shockwave tearing them apart at a molecular level. Boulders dislodged from their perches and rolled downward. Geysers of rock and soil shot into the air. Across the floor of the valley, architecture that had withstood thousands of years of weather and natural disaster were stressed beyond all endurance. Cracks wove through the ruins in destructive patterns, causing them to founder and sag.

  Rayden mouthed a silent prayer. Everywhere around him, columns were crumbling, buildings were disintegrating, and heroic statues were toppling into heaps of rubble.

  Time had run out.

  “Now!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, then grabbed hold of Sonya’s hand and leaped into the dimensional rift. She in turn reached out for the others, all of them linking hands in a human chain.

  One after the other they were pulled into the Portal, which closed behind them with a brilliant flash of light just as the howling, cursing Outworlders reached it, left behind on Earth.

  “That was fun,” Sindel said, standing amid the carnage she had raised.

  She looked anything but defeated.

  Kahn reined his horse in beside her, a cunning smile on his lips.

  “They have fallen into our trap,” he said. “Proceed as planned. I will await your arrival in Outworld.”

  With a silent nod, Sindel watched as Kahn dug his spurs into the muscular ribcage of his stallion, prodding it to take wing.

  Then he soared off into the lowering gray sky, a black ribbon of laughter trailing behind him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In what seemed the blink of an eye, the heroic band spilled into Outworld from the Portal, which irised shut behind them a final crack of energy.

  Jax stared at his hand, watching it phase from a discorporated state to its normal mass and solidity.

  “My skin is burning up, but I’m freezing inside,” he said. “Feel like I got microwaved or something’.”

  “Passage between the realms requires that our physical forms deconstitute in transit,” Rayden said, dusting himself off. “You never get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it,” Jax said. “And that goes for everything about this place.”

  He scanned his surroundings in horror. The wide thoroughfare stretching off ahead of them was pocked and ravaged, bordered with decaying moss-covered structures and ditches filled with stagnant drainage. Not far from where they stood, the twisted wreckage of a commuter train thrust up from the middle of the road, its ride having dead-ended somewhere between Earth and Outworld. Perched on it like scavenger birds were hundreds of winged Shokans, tearing at the remains of its passengers with covetous hunger.

  “My God,” Liu muttered. “All those people…”

  “It’s the merger of the realms,” Rayden said. “Time is our enemy. Pulled between dimensions without protection, they never knew what happened.”

  Jax was shaking his head. “It’s like a nightmare.”

  “We have to stop this,” Sonya said.

  “I can take us to the prison where Kitana’s being held,” Jade said.

  Rayden studied her features closely. “And where is that?”

  “Over that ridge,” she said, and pointed to a spine of land running across the horizon like the humped back of a dinosaur. “There are thousands captured. The best fighters of Earth.”

  Rayden seemed more than a little suspicious. “You’ve been there?”

  Liu looked at him, annoyed by his reluctance.

  “Listen, if it weren’t for Jade, I wouldn’t be here,” he said vehemently. “And besides, she’s all we’ve got right now.”

  The others exchanged uncertain glances, waiting for Rayden’s decision.

  At last he nodded.

  “We will go with Jade,” he said.

  Liu stumbled across it entirely by chance while following Jade along the royal road. Half covered in mud beside a collapsed wall, it was an intricate mosaic depicting King Jerrod, Queen Sindel, and young Kitana, Edenia’s former ruling family, standing amid the faded splendor of their castle topiary.

  His face lined with sorrow and guilt, he crouched over the tile, brushing a gritty layer of soil off the likeness of Kitana.

  Liu was still staring at the mosaic in reflective silence when he noticed a batch of shadows falling over it, and looked up to see that the others had gathered around him.

  “You okay, bro?” Jax asked.

  Before he could answer, all five of them heard an inhuman battle cry from somewhere nearby, whipped their heads around, and were overtaken by a sudden wave of shock and dismay.

  Sheeva was poised like a Hindu goddess atop a temple across the road, her multiple arms raised around her body, fists beating the air with naked aggression. As they stood there gaping at her, she sprang down from the roof and landed in a cloud of dust.

  “What in God’s name is that?” Jax said.

  “C’mon, partner,” Sonya said. “I thought you liked big women.”

  The sound of booted feet hustling up behind Rayden’s group brought their heads quickly around again. Sindel and a team of Outworld warriors had appeared from inside one of the decayed buildings along the highway, ready to block any retreat.

  “It’s a beautiful day for a massacre!” Sindel said, cackling.

  Rayden’s eyes snapped to Jade. “They knew we were coming.”

  “Obviously,” she said, “they followed us.”

  “Perhaps,” Rayden said. His tone fell just short of outright disbelief. “But it may be a blessing in disguise. We need Sindel to close the Portal forever.”

  “You get the queen,” Liu told him. He gestured at Sheeva. “I’ll get the freak.”

  Rayden nodded his accord. Then they broke in separate directions, Rayden charging Sindel at a full-tilt run, Liu launching himself at Sheeva with a bicycle kick that sent the multiarmed horror crashing back through the temple wall to her rear.

  Landing smoothly on the balls of his feet, he took off after her without hesitation.

  By the time he’d leaped through the gaping hole Sheeva was on her feet again, lunging at him, her arms doing their agile death dance around her body, hitting him with a storm of kicks and punches, each blow faster and more deadly accurate than the last. He blocked, shifted, feinted, but her fists came from all sides at once, making it impossible for him to protect himself. As he cocked his elbows to ward off a double palm-heel strike by both of her upper hands, her lower hands swept up and bent his arms out of the way, prying them apart, opening him up to the full brunt of her attack. Before he could recover, she hook-kicked him in the gut, knocking the wind out of him, dropping him to one knee.

  Dazed, coughing, clutching his middle, he barely recovered in time to avoid Sheeva’s body stomp, tumbling out of the way as she came down flatfooted on the temple floor, shattering its tiles in the very spot where he’d been kneeling. An instant later she launched into the air again, following him, both feet descending with piledriver force. Somehow he managed to stay one step ahead of her, putting spring into superbly developed leg muscles, somersaulting as if on a trampoline.

  But Sheeva was seemingly tireless. Relentless. She pressed in at Liu with incredible speed as he came out of a roll, landing a monstrous uppercut to his chin that lifted him off the ground. He sailed through the air like a rag doll, smashed through the temple’s ceiling, thudded onto an outside terrace, and was still trying to collect himself when Sheeva came climbing up from the hole, the muscles of her upper back and shoulders a corded mass.

  As she came scrabbling onto the terrace, Liu sprang to his feet, cocked his right leg, and delivered a roundhouse kick to her middle, the leg traveling parallel to the floor, his hip and supporting foot rotating slightly, the ball of his foot connecting with shocking impact as the kick reached the end of its arc. She grunted and staggered drunkenly, doubled over, her arms folding around her mid
dle.

  Liu moved in for his follow up, moved in close…

  By the time he realized he’d been tricked it was too late. Her mouth widened in a bellow of rage, Sheeva pulled herself up straight and lashed out with a windmill kick that knocked him onto his back with obliterating force.

  She stood over him a moment, her face a mask of brute, unthinking rage. Then she vaulted high into the air and came hurtling back downward directly above Liu, her knees together, her heels coming straight at his skull.

  Before she could complete her trajectory, however, a kick flashed speedily from behind her, thrusting up and out in a continuous and linear unit of motion, knocking her clear across the balcony.

  “Sorry kids,” Rayden said. He slapped his palms together theatrically, looking more like a cook who’d just fixed a complicated dish than someone who had performed a life-or-death rescue. “Date’s over.”

  From his dazed position on the floor, Liu watched Rayden rush in at Sheeva and pound her with a swift volley of blows. Far from out of the game, she countered with her own offensive, clutching his head with two of her hands while smashing him repeatedly with the other pair.

  Though stunned by her onslaught, he somehow managed to get his legs up to her chest and, using it as a spring board, backflipped out of her grasp.

  “Could it be true?” Sheeva chortled, her eyes madly alight. “The great Rayden on the defensive? Powerless on Outworld?”

  “Knowledge is power,” Rayden said. “And I know I can still beat a bitch like you.”

  “If you truly believe that, then you know nothing,” she said, then cartwheeled over to Rayden and wheel-kicked him into a nearby pile of rubble.

  Rayden grabbed a big chunk of masonry and held it out to protect himself, but a single blow from Sheeva smashed it to little pieces. Taking a great swoop of air, he flipped back to his feet and pounded her in the face with a combination of front kicks, knuckle-punches, and palm-heel strikes.

  The two warriors battled from one end of the balcony to another, mercilessly throwing, kicking and flipping one another. For every punch Rayden threw, Sheeva countered with four of her own, making it impossible for him to gain the upper hand… and he could feel himself beginning to tire.

  Then he noticed several ragged tapestries hanging by a rope on the wall and formulated a hasty, desperate plan – knocking that if it failed, he would only be enraging his monstrous opponent.

  Moving quickly, he grabbed the rope, yanked it down, and stepped in on Sheeva, whipping the rope around her fists like a lasso, getting them fouled in its long, twisty length.

  She roared and thrashed in anger, but Rayden had bought the opening he needed. Without giving her a chance to disentangle herself, he executed a superb quadruple flip that brought his heels into devastating collision with her middle and sent her plunging down off the balcony.

  An instant later, she crashed to the temple courtyard below with a sickening, fleshy thud.

  Rayden leaned over the balcony’s stone rail, saw her writhe and buck in a spreading pool of blood. Then her back arched up off the ground and her eyes rolled up and she rattled out her dying breath, her arms twitching in their final, spastic throes.

  Gasping, every part of him aching like a bad tooth, Rayden turned to see how Liu was doing.

  “Guess something went right for a change,” Jax said, watching Rayden and Liu exit the temple.

  They looked a little banged up, but all things considered seemed in decent shape… which was pretty much the way he felt about himself after his own fracas with Sindel and the Exterminators.

  Sindel and the Exterminators, huh? he thought. Good one. Sounds like the name of a rock group from hell.

  Dragging the unconscious Outworlder over to his companions by her neckband, he let her drop roughly to the ground.

  “Who finished her off?” Rayden said, nodding down at Sindel.

  “I saw you leave to help Liu, and surprised her from behind,” Jade said.

  Liu slung his arm around her shoulders.

  “I told you she’d come in handy,” he said, a vindicated smile on his face.

  Rayden said nothing to show he was convinced. With his boot he rolled Sindel over onto her back. Her chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly.

  “All right,” he said. “We must stay strong. We have in Sindel what we need to close the Portal…”

  “But you don’t have Kitana,” Jade said.

  He looked at her.

  “No,” he said. “We don’t.”

  “This Shokan prison,” Sonya said. “Can you show us a way inside?”

  Jade nodded, then knelt and drew a shape in the dirt with her finger, filling in the details of the prison.

  “There is a secret passage,” she said. “The one I used to escape…”

  They crouched around her diagram and listened carefully.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Many hours and even more miles later, Rayden’s band found themselves standing at the top of a black, ragged cliff that was without soil or vegetation, looking down at the Shokan prison in the gulch below. They had taken turns carrying Sindel in pairs, and her bound, unconscious body lay in a bundle at their feet.

  Jade reached into her waist-pack for a heavy coil of rope, tied one end around a boulder to anchor it, and hurled the slack over the side of the cliff.

  “Even at night, the prisoners are made to work in the prison yard,” Jade said, watching the line unspool. “Kitana will be alone.”

  “I’ll go first,” Liu said.

  He took hold of the rope and began his descent, shimmying hand-over-hand into the ravine.

  After about ten minutes, he reached bottom and moved silently toward the guard station at the yard’s outer perimeter. Springing up from a crouch, he surprised the sentry with a palm-heel slam to the back of the head, knocking him out cold. Then he glanced back over his shoulder and signaled to his friends. All of them except for Rayden – who had been elected to keep watch over Sindel – scaled down the cliffside after him.

  “Everybody clear on the plan?” he whispered when they had joined him. They were crouched out of sight behind a crude mining machine.

  “Yeah,” Jax said. “We get the guards, you get the girl.”

  Without replying, Liu dashed off ahead of the others.

  The passage to the containment chamber was right where Jade had indicated it would be… something Liu promised himself he’d mention to Rayden the first chance he got.

  He emerged from the tunnel onto a rock shelf, crawled to its ledge, and leaned his head down for a hurried recon. Kitana was in one of the small cages hanging from cables that reached to the chamber’s ceiling, looking helplessly out between the wooden bars.

  Liu took a deep breath. Jax and company had already dealt with a great many of the guards out in the yard, stealing up on them, taking them out with quick, silent blows. Now it was his turn.

  Okay, he thought. First things first. How do I get down to the floor without breaking my neck?

  He slid further over the edge of his stony perch. One of the guy wires running up from Kitana’s cage was almost directly in front of him. If he could only reach it, he might be able to climb down…

  He inched forward until the upper half of his body was sticking out off the ledge, then extended his hands as far as he could, his fingers trembling from the strain. For a moment he thought he wouldn’t make it, thought he would lose his balance and teeter over into space… but finally, with a surge of relief, he grabbed hold of the cable, getting his right hand, then his left, firmly around it.

  Filling his lungs with air again, gripping the cable with all his strength, he pushed himself off the ledge and monkeyed down to the bottom of the chamber.

  No sooner had his feet touched the floor than he darted toward Kitana’s cage, craning his head back to look up at it, trying to figure out a way to free her.

  Their eyes made contact.

  “Liu!” she said in a loud whisper, an expression of sur
prise and relief spreading over her face. “There’s a crank of the wall! It lowers the cage!”

  He frantically looked around for the crank and was still searching for it when Baraka stepped out of a shadowy recess behind the cage, his lips stretched across his metal teeth in a forbidding smile.

  “Hello, little man,” he said, moving further into the light. His eyes gleamed with anticipation above his flowing black warden’s robe. “Nobody escapes my prison.”

  There was the deadly snick-snick-snick of steel claws springing from sheaths on his knuckles. Then Baraka dove in at Liu.

  Liu ducked, narrowly missing a swipe from one of the mutant’s clawblades, responding with a sharp uppercut to the chin that staggered him sideways against an empty cage.

  Recovering his balance, Baraka emitted a bestial snarl and lunged back at him, both clawed fists aimed at the center of his chest. But Liu shifted aside an instant before he would have been skewered and, his body a blur of motion, thrust out at Baraka with a crescent kick, knocking him to the floor.

  “Now!” the warden shouted up at the chamber ceiling. Ropes of bloody spittle flew off his gnashing teeth, “What are you fools waiting for?”

  His skin prickling with alarm, Liu shot a glance upward.

  High above the chamber floor – higher, even, than the ledge from which Liu had himself descended – two masked nomad guards were hanging upside down from the rafters like enormous bats. Even as he spotted them, they dropped from the ceiling in precipitous nosedives, their calf-blades shearing the air, forearm swords stabbing out at Liu.

  Caught between the two attacking warriors, he assumed a tightly-coiled bent-knee stance, jumped into the air, and split-kicked them in their faces… only to find that their helmets absorbed most of the impact, robbing his blows of any noticeable effect.

  Inside her cage, Kitana scanned the area for more hidden ambushers and glimpsed another nomad guard swooping down at Liu.