Mahasona huffed as he stepped back toward her. “Of no consequence. Wretched refuse. They served their purpose. Now all who are not integral will join my kind in the dirt!”
Even before he finished speaking he was on her. His hands had turned to claws that clamped both sides of her head. His bulbous, inflating tongue plunged into her mouth, coiling into both her cheeks. And his penis had become a scimitar-shaped hook of boney flesh that stabbed up into her.
What saved her was that she didn’t go into shock. She was preparing herself with every second he took and every word they spoke. She was not surprised or frightened, so when he came at her, her mind slowed him down. He was obviously expecting a normal human female, not one whose reflexes had been enhanced by her previous ordeals.
Even so, she knew she only had a second before his infection delivery assault would lock in. Then it wouldn’t matter how enhanced her strength was. She had already seen that the chains on her wrists and ankles were merely looped, and affixed in place by small padlocks. The “wretched refuse” who had chained her up obviously had no idea of her reflexes either.
With a constriction of her hand muscles and a twist of her wrist, her hands slid free. The same was true of one foot. But not the other. To her sudden fury, one link dug into her left heel, trapping her left leg in place. Mahasona didn’t seem to notice. His claws kept clamping, his tongue kept surging, and his member kept shoving as his eyes seemed to exult in the grotto ceiling.
“God. Damn. It!” Nichols hissed through gritted teeth, using her free hands to return the monster’s favor. She grabbed his head in both her hands and took a good hard look at him.
Okay, you bastard, she thought. Maybe you can’t be killed, but let’s see how good you are flying blind.
Sinking her fingers as tightly as she could in what passed for his face flesh, she plunged her thumbs as deep into the center of his eyeballs as they would go—fixating on the mental image of crushing grapes.
The howl that came from him echoed through the caverns but only served to deafen her. He did not relax his grip on her, but he did start staggering around the grotto. But with her thumbs deep into his eye sockets like they were a bowling ball, he could only go so far since her left ankle was still chained to the wall.
She felt his impaler go as limp as it could, while his tongue flopped disgustingly around her mouth like a virgin on prom night. His claws, however, remained clamped to her head as tightly as her fingers were clamped on his.
“Come on, come on, come on!” she seethed at her left ankle as she tried to twist it loose while still dealing with the way he was wrenching her back and forth. But it just wouldn’t pop free.
He had started babbling in the Sinhala language until he suddenly stiffened and shouted something incomprehensible in anger. Then still holding her up, he slammed her back against the cave wall, nailing her there with his shaft.
“Modaya!” he screeched—fool in Sinhala. “You want it this way? Then this way you shall have it!”
For the first time since the Cerberus team had rescued her from the Yemen weapons auction, Terri Nichols felt fear. She had done everything she could, but, because of bad luck and a far superior adversary, her mind cried that he’d have her. She could feel the contagion building in his tongue and penis, ready to infect her. She no longer had even a second.
Terri Nichols screamed in agony and frustration as Mahasona screeched in triumph.
Then, only one of their shrieks changed. And it wasn’t hers.
Suddenly he froze, and just as suddenly recoiled with sickening convulsions. His claws snapped away from her head, his tongue snapped back into his own mouth, and the scimitar-shaped thing rammed back into his own body as he lurched.
“Monavada,” he gasped, hunched over as if suffering cramps. “Monavada oba kaja?” What have you done?
Nichols didn’t know what he was saying and didn’t care. The second he released her, she snapped off the left ankle chain with a combination of reward and rebuke, then went speeding out the grotto opening without shame or pause.
If there’s a way in, there’s a way out, she thought, already letting her unpopped eyeballs scour every centimeter of the cavern for it. And I don’t care if it’s only big enough for a squirrel. If it can get out, I can.
In the darkness, she saw a glimmer of light. In the stagnant atmosphere, she felt a whisper of moving air. In the enveloping cave of rock, she smelled the sun-baked aroma of grass. Hardly even controlling it, she let her body take her toward it, only allowing a single instance of checking where her blind rapist was. She saw him stumbling out of the grotto, but the scent of the other hundreds of bodies was already masking her own.
As she gained speed toward the as-yet unseen exit, she didn’t know whether she said it or thought it, but she didn’t care because it was true.
“I’ve been held captive by better assholes than you.”
She said it, and Mahasona heard it. He managed to take one step toward her when he felt a restraining hand on his arm. He didn’t need his eyes to know it was Tajabana. The smell of honeysuckle, rose, and dead flesh was pungent in his nostrils.
“No, my great master,” she said. “Do not sully your magnificent hands with this wen rui.” Gnat in Sinhala. She saw that his ruined eyes were already beginning to reconstitute, then turned her head to watch the naked little redhead disappearing into the twisting cavern tunnels. “I have a much better idea.”
Then, with a small smile, she called forth the remainder of the armed, angry, integral Zaman followers.
Chapter 28
It was a macabre sight, made all the more macabre by taking place in bright sunshine.
The Hindu Kush spooned the Pamir Mountains where the borders of Afghanistan, China, and Pakistan met, and, while the area once had been a significant center of Buddhism, it was now littered with the remnants of statues and temples destroyed by Taliban Islamists.
Nichols emerged from a hole in a sandstone mountain wall. As soon as she dove out, she fell twenty feet but rolled in the air like an Olympic diver and somersaulted across a sand and gravel beach. Coming up in a crouch, she spun her head in every direction to get her bearings.
She stood between what looked like a massive sand castle that bordered a swath of deep flat grassland, leading to trees that looked like frozen explosions of branches and leaves. It was a remarkable wilderness—obviously once a holy land that had been demolished by extremists, and then grown over. As she stepped back, the visual effect was of a gigantic death’s head that had been savaged by both a psychotic dermatologist and dentist.
Nichols was about to sprint toward the copse with the thickest mass of trees, but she heard something ominous behind her. She spun just in time to see robed, burnoosed, turbaned Zaman followers emerging from many other holes in the cliff wall—looking like a desiccated face that was ejecting its own blackheads. They were popping out from cavities all over the cliff face, making her consider trying one of the most extreme life-or-death games of Whac-A-Mole ever.
Thankfully, the holes seemed too small for them to bring their assault rifles with them, but every one, to a man, was gripping at least one Gurkha, Khyber, or Peshkabz knife, which, in close combat, were even more deadly than any gun. Nichols clearly remembered what Daniels had told her.
“Rule one, don’t get in a knife fight. Rule two, what, didn’t you hear rule one? Rule three, if you ignore rule one and two, remember: you’re going to get cut. The trick now is to minimize the damage.”
After recalling that, Nichols played out a literal example of “fight or flight.” One foot slid toward the grass and trees, but the other flexed, sending her up toward the nearest emerging man. He was taken totally by surprise, obviously thinking he was too far up to be reached, but he hadn’t counted on the naked woman’s enhanced abilities. Nichols yanked the man out of the cliff face like a veteran fishmonger yanking out a s
quid’s guts.
The man’s frightened screech was music to her ears as she let her altitude and attitude bring him down to the ground like she was John Henry nailing a railroad spike. The man’s screech was cut off with a sickening thud as Nichols popped the Peshkabz knife out of his grip with one hand while tearing his robe off with the other.
As the man slid to a stop, leaving a bloody streak where his face had smashed the rocks, Nichols was already spinning away. When she stopped, she had already wrapped herself in his short robe, using his turban as a belt, and brought the Peshkabz up for a closer examination.
Hollow-ground, tempered steel, single-edged, full tang blade—broad at the hilt, then beautifully tapered to a needle-edge, triangular tip. She wrapped her fingers over its pair of handle scales, which were fixed to a full-tang grip that had a nicely hooked butt. The seventeen-inch-long weapon snuggled into her hand like a newly born kitten. Nice.
She seemed oblivious to the men who dropped behind her back, to her left, and to her right. They just saw a slim, almost feral, redheaded woman in a robe-dress, hunched before them, her back to them, seemingly paralyzed with indecision or fear. They had the more standard machete-like Gurkha knife or the sword-like Khyber, and raised them like they were going to easily carve her for a cannibalistic pita. They were even smiling in anticipation. They weren’t smiling for long. Just as their arms got to their highest positions, the young, little, redheaded woman moved.
At first she looked like she was trying to dodge or avoid them, but her arms and legs were moving too purposefully for that. The impoverished, desperate, poorly educated men immediately thought of the dancing girls they had been promised in the afterlife as this nymph-like creature quickly weaved among them. Even so, they swung their blades wildly, trying to slice, cut, or chop her as she seemed to get near. But then she was several steps away, her pace quickening.
They stepped after her, not wanting her to escape, only to find that their hands were now empty. They looked around them to find that their knives were on the ground several feet away in three different directions. For a moment they felt elation because they saw that each weapon was bloodied, but then they realized that the blood was not on any of the blades.
The man to the left looked to see his right hand was missing. The man next to him saw that his burnoose was sliced open from hip to hip. On closer inspection, he saw his intestines beginning to throb out over his lap. The third man’s head began to fall back, his eyes filled with sky. It just kept going, the cut from ear to ear giving it no anchor.
Nichols danced back, making a quick count of the others emerging from the cliff wall. There were a dozen, appearing from holes that stretched for fifty yards. No way she’d be able to outrun them forever. And run where? The Cerberus ear-comms were crushed. According to Mahasona they were miles away from where they were last seen, and the Hindu Kush was five hundred miles long and a hundred and fifty miles wide. There was no way anyone on her side would find her in the foreseeable future.
Fuck it, she thought. As Key always said his dad said, “first things first.” Nichols gripped the Peshkabz tighter and raced toward the trees.
Sure enough, the burnoosed men came from every direction behind her, like heat-seeking missiles after a jet. She could outrun them, but they would be relentless and knew the area much better than her. Besides, they had comrades all over the place. The Hindu Kush had almost always been a battlefield, dating from Alexander the Great to al Qaeda. But it was also always a hideout, with venal backstabbers tucked into every imaginable refuge.
She found that out when she reached the trees. Thinking they would give her cover, she was saved from certain death by her enhanced hearing. No matter how quietly the ambushers tried to drop from branches on top of her, she heard them with seconds to spare—just enough time to switch position to avoid their knives, then use their dying bodies as cover when snipers tried to back the knifers up. She heard them too—especially the clack-clack of their bolt-action rifles.
Thankfully, these were mountain villagers, so they were using old Lee-Enfield or Mosin-Nagant rifles that might have had better range and accuracy than AK-47s but only allowed one shot at a time. That was all Nichols would allow them.
Only three tried to ambush her. Each tried to jump on her from above as she passed. She would avoid their knives, hands, and feet, but wouldn’t let them hit the ground. Instead, she plunged her knife up into their chins, chests, or backs, held them up by their heads, sternums, or spines, then let the sniper’s high-caliber bolt-rifle bullet thud into their bodies. No matter how small they were, she was smaller and slimmer, and no bullet could reach her.
By then, some of the knife-wielding terrorists had caught up with her. Not surprisingly, they had learned nothing from what she had already done. Maybe they were too busy scrambling, climbing, and running to have witnessed it, so they simply charged at her, screaming and brandishing their blades—perhaps hoping she’d react like the innocent women, children, and animals they usually used that tactic on. She didn’t react that way. Daniels and Key had taught her. Fighting was as easy as A, B, C.
A, avoid. Don’t be where the knife is aiming. B, balance. If she avoided well, the attacker would automatically be off-balance, so if she was balanced, then it just became a matter of “so many ways to kill you, so little time.” C, closure. A fight wasn’t over until the attacker was incapable of attacking anymore. So Daniels and Key had taught her an encyclopedia of ways to devastatingly end it, the fewer moves the better.
She shifted as the screaming man brought the knife down. At the same time she plunged her knife into his hurtling-past eye with one hand, she dug the thumb and forefinger of her other hand into the nerves of his attacking hand, so his Khyber knife popped free. As the man fell heavily to the ground, already in the process of dying, she plucked his knife out of the air and threw it into the throat of the man just behind him.
As that man stumbled, not quite cognizant of his mortal wound, Nichols grabbed the arm that held his Ghurka knife and used an aikido technique to use the man’s own aggressive energy to spin him in midair so, like a bowling ball, he took out the two men nearest him. Seeing how they fell, Nichols kicked the nearest man’s forearm, so his knife was plunged into his own throat, and tossed the first man’s Ghurka knife into the head of the other.
Then, moving in a quick circle that seemed to be the natural extension of her defensive actions, she located the remaining half-dozen. As she turned toward them in the forest’s clearing, her Peshkabz at the ready, they stopped dead—their eyes wide as they realized that the sheep they thought they were attacking was actually a lioness. A really pissed lioness.
“Enough!”
Nichols let her head cock to one side and her right knee bend as she exhaled, because she recognized the voice. Mahasona appeared from behind a tree some ten yards away, his arms out, his hands open in the universal sign for “stop.”
“That disappearing and reappearing trick is great,” Nichols sighed. “But please don’t give me the ‘slow clap’ thing.”
To her surprise, the man laughed. “Actually I was going to,” he admitted with a wryness that shouldn’t have chilled her, but did. “But since you beat me to the punch—” He motioned his hand back to the tree he had emerged from, and bowed.
“Oh shit,” Nichols groaned when she saw who was with him. “Oh fuck.”
Tajabana smiled at her. There was no mistaking the woman. She stood in a simple robe that was open down to her navel and up to her thigh. Her body and face was Nichols’s idea of perfection. Since Nichols was a green-eyed redhead, she was envious, for some reason, of soulful, statuesque, serene, brunette Earth-mothers, complete with a light dusting of freckles and deep blue eyes. Tajabana was the most beautiful one she had ever seen.
But that was not why Nichols had cursed. She had cursed because Tajabana’s elegant, tanned hand was resting on the elbow of Morton Danie
ls. One look and Nichols knew that the difference between Daniels before and Daniels now probably existed inside the smiling mouth of the brunette.
“I believe you two know each other,” the extraordinarily beautiful woman said in the most soothingly disingenuous tones imaginable.
“We did,” Nichols breathed, trying to get ready to face her teacher, friend, superior, and what she was now certain was a just-infected blood demon thrall. “Once.”
Their eyes locked, and Nichols saw something beyond cold emptiness. She saw Daniels behind his own eyes, locked inside his own brain, feverishly fighting against the darkness that threatened to engulf him at every second. She saw his lips move. She could have sworn she saw him mouth, “I’m sorry.”
Then he attacked.
Chapter 29
“Anyone who attacks is stupid,” Key had said. “How do you know they’re stupid? Because they’re attacking.”
Daniels and Nichols knew that. Mahasona and Tajabana didn’t.
Nichols had seen Daniels’s inner struggle just before he charged her. Trusting the man’s great strength, Nichols used her superior reflexes to A, avoid. He had come at her like Frankenstein’s monster, lurching and grabbing—something he would have never done on the battlefield, and something he had only done once in the gym.
It had been a joke. He was laughing with her about all the bad fight scenes they had seen in movies and on television.
“Yeah,” he had said. “You ever see how the bad guys either lurch around like Frankenstein or, better yet, do that Incredible Hulk thing of just grabbing someone and throwing them? Hell, the Hulk could tear their heads off like taffy, and all he does is toss the guy? Come on!”
She could take a hint, and did—ducking low, spinning, and skittering away. During her retreat she scoured the area for the new landscape. Mahasona and Tajabana were still by a far tree, but now a bunch of terrorists and villagers had made a large, wide, circle around the two Americans—all brandishing or holding their knives or rifles at the ready.
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