“Because they had no shadows anymore,” Key said to whoever was listening. “What happened, Craven?”
This time the creature did not pause or gloat. “You happened, hadda. You, and all the other gnats and mosquitoes became so rich, so fat, so poisoned, so polluted—”
“Oh Christ,” Lancaster nearly gasped. Key smiled grimly as he realized that Lancaster was figuring it all out just a few minutes behind him. “We were—we are—their food chain!”
“Yeah,” Key seethed. “Faisal could tell you. Any computer wiz could tell you. GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.”
“HIV, AIDS, SARS, Ebola,” they heard Gonzales say. “All the modern plagues.”
After everything he had been through—after everything he was going through—Key had to throw back his head and laugh along with the monster. “What, did we think that vampires would be immune?” he spat at the ceiling. “These are blood demons. And as our blood got tainted, so did theirs!”
“So,” Lancaster struggled to get his head around this. “All the surviving blood demons teamed with Zaman. But why?”
“Not all the survivors,” Key shot back. “Two survivors. They’re shape-shifters, remember? The Mount Rushmore ‘parents.’ Dr. Dearden and his nurse. Rita Jayson and—Aarif Zaman.”
Lancaster managed not to exclaim “what” again. He was simply thunderstruck into silence.
“He must have been killed in the first explosion,” Key pressed on, interrupted not by Lancaster, but by Craven this time, whose laughter became even more strident and triumphant.
“That was me!” it cried. “That was me!”
“Good for you, you bastard,” Key snarled. “But you wanted more men, didn’t you? You had to lure more men, so your master became the new, resurrected, unkillable leader of the terrorists, didn’t he?”
“Did he?” Craven mused, shaking in his chains.
As the truth began to sink in, Key and the others were distracted enough to ignore Craven’s words, attributing them to the creature’s growing strength and substance.
“But to what purpose?” Lancaster wondered. “Just to kill soldiers rather than civilians?”
“No!” Lailani suddenly cried. “Not to kill! To turn!”
Key smiled with grateful appreciation at their blood demon expert. “Exactly. They had no more shadows, General, so they have to create them. And to make more certain they wouldn’t be nearly wiped out again, they wanted the best of the best. They wanted more than a few good men. The terrorists were used to entrap their quarry, and I bet they will wind up as lifeless food eventually. But the Marines who attacked Paktika, and the ones in Hindu Kush? They may be lifeless, but I’m betting you anything they’re definitely not dead—”
Lancaster heard a horrible screech as Craven tore out of his chains, his thumbs spinning in opposite directions like rubber bullets, and clamped his needle-encrusted form onto Key’s body.
Chapter 26
The last thing Morty Daniels remembered seeing was the glint of Terri Nichols’s green eyes and saying “we’re screwed.” But he couldn’t be sure of even that now.
The blackness that surrounded, and eventually consumed, the jade glint also enveloped him as well. Not just his eyesight, but his entire mind. When his consciousness slowly rose to the surface of his awareness, the first thing he felt was the ache of his shoulders, then pressure on his jaw, and finally pain at his scalp.
His eyes snapped open to see only rock and dirt. When he tried to change his point of view, the ache, pressure, and pain only intensified.
“Fuck. A. Duck,” he grunted, hearing a clacking from his wrists and a squeaking from his chin.
He couldn’t shift his position enough to see what was clamping onto his head and arms, but he could sense them well enough. He was in a small stone grotto, his arms wrenched behind him, shackled together, and somehow shackled again to the cave’s ceiling. The position, called a strappado by ancient torturers, insured that he was bent double at the waist and would remain that way.
But at least in a basic strappado, the victim could move his neck a little bit. Something else had been added to prevent him from making anything but the most minute of chin-wagging. From what he could feel, it was some sort of head halter that cupped his chin and stretched his spine to its optimum length. From the restriction of his skull shackles, it seemed to be somehow attached to the cave wall, or ceiling, as well.
Otherwise, he seemed unfettered. In fact, most of his uniform was missing save for the undershirt and shorts. Before he could completely process that, he heard two words.
“Ah. Awake.”
He couldn’t be sure whether he heard it in his ears or his mind. Ultimately it made no difference, because they seemed to relax him. He was about to test the strength of the restraints, but once the words reached him, he felt calm, even soothed. He even recognized that they seemed to communicate relief and appreciation. His eyes strained in their sockets until he saw the one who pronounced them.
Rita Jayson stood before him, but it was not the same Rita Jayson who had been in his room the night before the ill-fated assault. This woman was even more sensuous, with an expression of sexual hunger, and a uniform that was even more extreme than before. Her starched, tight dress shirt was open, revealing the frilliest, skimpiest, and laciest of push-up bras. Her skirt was slit, revealing lace-top, thigh-high stockings. And the tan heels were impossibly high. The fact that they were all an almost mocking satire of military protocol made them even more potent.
She was rubbing his EQ between her elegant thumb and forefinger.
The body inside the mock uniform was even more perfect than he remembered. Breasts impossibly strong and full. Waist impossibly small, legs impossibly long. Even her ears and feet—which were, to his experience, what ladies seemed to like least about themselves—were perfectly shaped and sized.
“Accent on ‘impossible,’” he murmured, trying, but failing, to look away.
“Ah,” he heard again. “Sergeant.” He felt her impossibly cool, and impossibly warm, hand caress his face right after she crushed his EQ like it was a popcorn kernel.
“Ma’am.” He almost chuckled. “You got me at an obvious, purposeful disadvantage, don’t you?”
“Please,” she said softly, the sound settling his mind more than her fingers did. “Feel free to call me by my name.”
Both her hands settled on his jaw, bringing his head up as far as it could go, so her bulging chest practically kissed his eyes.
“Rita?” he choked.
“Ritigala,” she corrected, letting one hand course through his hair, deftly avoiding the clamp that attached the follicles to another hook in the cave ceiling. “Ritigala Jayasena.”
Daniels cleared his throat, unable to think of anything else to do. “Nice name,” he grunted. “Not exactly ‘Bond, James Bond,’ but it kind of rolls off the tongue, don’t it?”
He felt, as much as saw, her appreciative smile. Her hands kept caressing his face and hair as she looked approvingly down at him.
“Ah, Mort,” she replied, clearly referencing the French word more than his name—the French word meaning death. “Always making jokes, even in the worst of circumstances.” She crouched in front of him, giving him a glimpse of her thighs. “It is yet another admirable thing about you. Just another thing that so attracted me to you—that made me want to help you join us.”
Daniels grimaced as the dead flesh aftertaste of her otherwise sweet and spicy breath reached his nostrils. “Aw, what’s the magic word, sweetie?” he growled. “Never heard of ‘pretty please?’”
She grabbed his hair in a fist and shook his head dismissively before standing and taking a step away. “I underestimated you,” she said firmly. “I always underestimate you.”
He remembered the sound she had made when her mouth had touched his Chain-silk dickie. “Well, you certainl
y underestimated my tailor,” he reminded her. “But before we go any further, might I suggest a breath mint?”
She turned back toward him, her crossed arms creating a balcony for her buoyant breasts. She made a sound between a giggle and a sniff.
“Tried everything,” she admitted. “But when you’ve eaten as much shit as I have?” She walked beside him, idly rubbing his back as she went toward his flanks. “I was only lying a little when I said I was descended from a great warrior. I was actually created from one after I was decapitated in battle.”
Daniels raised his eyebrows. Her words were so soothing, and she was speaking so matter-of-factly, that he was unsure how to respond, or even joke. It got worse, or better, when she coolly crouched by his thighs and reached into his bike shorts.
“My first regeneration wasn’t pretty,” she serenely mused, tenderly fondling Daniels’s penis. “‘Great demon of the graveyard,’ they called me. So what was a poor girl to do—but go on a thousand-year feast of flesh and blood?” She paused in her speech, but not in her gesticulations. “Odd,” she pouted disingenuously. “My subjects are usually erect by now.”
“You tell them the same story?” Daniels asked incredulously, the head harness creaking angrily as he tried to look back at her.
“Oh, no,” she laughed prettily. “I reserve that for only the most special of recruits, sergeant. The ones I know can take it. Like you, dear Mort.” She seemed honestly happy as she continued her consummate hand job. “Oh, I’ve heard them all. How I was torn from my mother’s breast as a demon. How my skin was blue or green or purple or yellow. But always blotched with blood. How red rays erupt from my eyes and smoke pumps from my ears. How I wear a necklace of skulls or intestines, and a skirt of bloody arm or leg stumps.” She paused, pouting. “Funny. The only thing they ever got right was my tongue and my breath.”
“Do me a favor, would you?” he groaned as her expert, even somewhat supernatural, ministrations completely hardened him, despite the situation. “Treat me like a regular Joe, would you?”
Her giggle was annoyingly delightful. “Oh, very well,” she sighed. “If you insist.”
He felt her mouth envelope his manhood in a way no woman ever had, could, or would. Her oral cavity was like a warm, wet tunnel of flesh that could contain his erection without pause or problem. Then her beyond-perfect fingers were back at his scrotum and even anus.
“Oh, God,” Daniels moaned, knowing he shouldn’t ejaculate, but also knowing he had no choice, even with his vaunted willpower. “New world’s record,” he grunted as more semen he ever expected he had all but exploded out of him in a torrent unlike any other he had ever cannoned.
Then he felt something else. As the semen left, he felt a thin, sharpened, bony needle enter his penile canal. Whether it spit something itself he couldn’t be sure, but as he shuddered, he felt another sort of warmth wash over him—a warmth that sedated him more effectively than any man-made drug.
She sucked down everything he shot like an open dam accepting gallons of delicious milkshakes. She patted his ass as she rose.
“Now, that’s more like it, soldier,” she said.
Daniels was completely prepared to glare proudly and defiantly at her when she came back into view, but the woman who appeared to him was not Rita Jayson or even Ritigala Jayasena. It was a perfected vision of a nineteen-year-old Cathy Kelly, complete with summer dress, freckles, strawberry blond hair, and light blue eyes. She was Morton Daniels’s mother.
“Hey!” he moaned. “No! No fair!”
But his young mother—the one before she married his father—the one who was impossibly pretty and effortlessly sexy—only laughed at him.
“Can’t help it!” she said in Jayson’s voice. “This is from your own mind. I asked it who you loved the most, and—” She moved her arms up and down her own form. “Ta-da.”
“You fucking bitch,” he hissed.
“Ah, sergeant,” his perfected teenaged pre-mother sighed as she placed her hands on his skull and back. “You don’t know how right you are.”
Then her mouth sank onto the top of his spine, and the needle-like tongue inside her liver-like tongue, unimpeded by any Chain-silk, stabbed into his first vertebra.
Chapter 27
“Ah. Awake.”
Terri Nichols opened her eyes to see Aarif Zaman standing before her, holding her EQ in one hand and her ear-comm in the other.
Before she even checked her own position she saw the yawning cavern behind him. Her enhanced vision allowed her to see what Daniels would not have seen: piles of bodies, but bodies unlike any she had seen before.
Even at her relatively young age, she had seen her share of corpses—both in person and on film. At first glance, these reminded her of the piles of emaciated cadavers that had been bulldozed into mass graves throughout history and the world. But then she saw they had more of an order than that. These bodies were, for the want of a better word, filed. They looked like gigantic jigsaw puzzles made of human forms, laid side by side and one on top of the other.
And, while she couldn’t make out any specific breathing, they seemed to pulse. Shining, pulsating, nerve wires seemed to stretch over and between them—either feeding, or being fed, for the want of a better term, life force. These bodies weren’t so much resting as they were, somehow, gestating.
Only then did she take stock of her own situation. She was chained to the wall of a small grotto off the cavern, naked. She was instantly reminded of her captivity by Usa Awar as he tried to make her the first human Arachnosaur weapon back in Yemen. But because she had experienced, and survived, that horrid internment, it freed her brain to think clearly. So clearly, in fact, that she felt no need to respond to Zaman’s comment. She looked at his smug face evenly, even calmly.
He seemed to take that as an annoying challenge. He held her earpieces closer to her face to make sure she could see them. “Do you know where you are?”
Again, she didn’t answer, but took the opportunity to closer study her surroundings. The medium-sized chains held her wrists above, and on either side, of her head—as well as holding her ankles wide, a foot or so above the ground. As such, they allowed her to look directly into the tall terrorist’s eyes. Considering what she had seen the blood demons do before, this was not a promising position.
Unlike her Cerberus comrades, Nichols hardly spoke at all. But like at least her team leader, she watched, listened, and studied intently. Nothing got past her, which was probably the reason she had lived so long, even against what many might consider impossible odds. Her nudity didn’t shame her, and her predicament only inspired her to consider all the more options.
Again, Zaman took her silence as a chance to gloat. “Wherever you think you are, you’re wrong,” he said. He glanced back at the cavern full of stacked bodies. “Wherever your people think you, and they, are, is also wrong.” He looked back at her with what she supposed was a superior smile. “Oh, they may drill through the rock blocking them from where you were last seen, but even if they do, they will discover you are nowhere to be found. In fact, you are miles away from where you landed, with no connecting caves or tunnels to lead them.”
Nichols stared at Zaman, her eyes narrowing. The longer he spoke, the more unnatural he sounded. Try as she might, she could discern no Afghan accent of any kind. In fact, no Middle Eastern accent at all. If anything, she recognized tones of South Asia.
And “miles”? If he were truly Afghan or even Asian, he’d use “kilometers” or even “li.” She tested the chains’ strength, making them rattle, but still said nothing.
“Oh, you wish to escape?” Zaman said, his smile widening. “Please, feel free to try. I can assure you that, even if you somehow manage to, you will be in for a great surprise.” She looked at him incredulously, considering the circumstances, which seemed to inspire him to step closer. “Do you know who I am?” he asked, just
inches from her face. “Do you think I am your hated enemy, Aarif Zaman?”
He held up her ear-comms in front of her eyes and popped them as easily as Jayson had. “Could your hated enemy Aarif Zaman do that?” the man in Zaman’s skin and clothes bragged. “I think not. Because, no matter what you think, I am not him. I am your true enemy.”
To Nichols it looked like God’s thumb smudged the man’s face, and, when He was finished, a new face had replaced it—a dark, swarthy, handsome, commanding face, with a strong brow, straight short black hair, crimson eyes, high cheekbones, and a strong chin.
“I am Mahasona,” he said, slowly and purposefully, putting his left hand flat on the stone to the right of her face. “Do you know of me?”
Nichols exhaled. “The greatest demon,” she said, remembering what Lailani had told them and the research Key had shared. “Shape-shifter. Mind and body thief. Chief to thirty thousand demons.”
It was Mahasona’s turn to snort. He straightened, then started slowly, purposefully, unbuttoning Zaman’s shirt. “No longer,” he said, jerking his head toward the bodies behind him. “These will be my new army. The rest? All gone.”
The truth settled into Nichols’s brain as it had for Key and Lancaster. It was the only thing that made sense in an experience that stretched the very definition of “sense.” But by the time she realized what had gone, and was going, on, Mahasona had finished removing his shirt and started unbuttoning Zaman’s pants.
“What was it?” Nichols asked quickly, bunching the muscles at her wrists and ankles. “A slaughter?”
“A plague,” Mahasona said sadly. “A plague of bad blood, bad energy. It made us sick. It made us die.” He glanced accusingly at her as he pushed the pants off his legs one by one. “And with no souls we were dwindling in these flesh shells as they withered and became part of the ground.” He stepped out from the clothing, naked as she. “But not me. Never me. Never again.”
“But what of your soldiers?” Nichols asked hastily, stretching in the chains. “I see what you’re doing to my soldiers, but what of yours—I mean, Zaman’s—the ones who helped you arrange all this?”
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