“Quiet, you two!” Kane bellowed. “We’ve got worse things to worry about than your petty little paranoia.”

Kane pointed to one of the unconscious hooded men. He knelt and tore the man’s cowl back, revealing a dark, meshlike covering that, in the shadow of the hood, would render the upper part of his face above his lips completely invisible. It was a cheap effort that produced an unnerving effect, and Kane himself had experienced a momentary pause as he was dealing with the shadow-faced opponents. Only encounters with equally weird and terrifying opponents had given him the ability to act despite the distracting nature of their appearance.

“That doesn’t look right, even with that cloth over his head,” Demothi said.

Kane reached out and took a handful of the meshy sack and tore it off the unconscious man. It was soaked through, which was strange as he had fallen on dry ground. But as he tugged, stringy mucus stretched between the fabric and gangrenous gray tumors that ringed his skull, the tumors themselves riddled with wires and circuits. The downed man wasn’t bleeding from his head trauma, but the crushed growths where he’d been struck were oozing translucent yellow pus that seeped into the grass under his head.

“What… Oh, God,” Suwanee began. She clamped her hand over her mouth, trying to fight off the urge to vomit.

Infestation Cubed

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Where ere we tread, ’tis haunted, holy ground.

—Lord Byron, acclaimed poet and

founder of Romanticism

World’s full of ghosts. They ain’t real, but they’re

everywhere. Maybe learn from ’em. If we

do, maybe we don’t make their mistakes again.

—Domi, survivor, pragmatist and fighter for a rebuilt future

The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 1

Cerberus redoubt had repelled the invasion by Ullikummis and his cult, but at great cost. Brigid Baptiste was missing, and Manitius base scientists such as Clem Bryant, Daryl Morganstern and Henny Johnson were dead.

Mohandas Lakesh Singh took another step, his breath coming raggedly in the relentless New Mexican heat. Ahead of him, the feral albino outlander girl Domi scouted, pausing to look back over her shoulder every few moments, concern etched across her porcelain features. The wild woman had already fashioned a head wrap from the scientist’s shirt, tying the sleeves around his forehead, then flipping the tails of the shirt over like a hood. Lakesh felt like something out of Lawrence of Arabia, but he had to admit that the cover kept him from sweating too much, and what moisture he lost was wicked away by the garment.

Domi stopped and crouched low, her ruby-red eyes sweeping the edge of the scruff ahead of them. Back before the nukecaust, engineered by the Annunaki overlords, the ground they covered had been a highway that cut through the desert. Now Lakesh was getting his kicks on the cracked and centuries-worn Route 66. Ironically, thanks to the desertification of “the Mother Road,” it had not been considered a vital target for Soviet nuclear missiles, and long stretches of the old interstate highway were relatively intact and easily traveled.

Lakesh pulled a map from his pocket, feeling the tremors in his hands. Of late he’d been growing increasingly tired, and he realized that the gift of returned youth was being stripped from him by Enlil. As the imperator, Sam, had once cured Lakesh of the effects of two and a half centuries of cryogenic sleep and cybernetic organ transplant. With but a touch, a horde of nanites had descended upon his cellular structure, turning bionic life systems into the matter necessary to reconstruct his slowly aging and failing organs.

What Enlil had bestowed, he could take away, and Lakesh hadn’t noticed that until he physically passed the age of fifty a while back. Now his knees popped and crackled with each step, and his back couldn’t stand the burden of even a small backpack. The subtle shake of his fingers as he fumbled to unfold the map was an indication that everything was failing him. His genetic code had been laden with a deadly little bomb. Whereas Lakesh had previously been able to maintain control of his body, even at his advanced age of 275 years, two hundred of which had been negated by suspended animation and cloned organs, Lakesh knew that this time, as his body continued to collapse at Enlil’s will, his brilliant mind would be quick to go.

Domi had twice complained in the past couple of days that she couldn’t understand what Lakesh was saying. Lakesh grimaced, knowing that those lapses in communication were caused by memory lapses and he was speaking his original Hindi. Those brain farts were something that Lakesh could recognize as the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease. Most people only displayed signs of the dementia in their mid-sixties, though he was aware that subjects could manifest symptoms eight years before they reached the point of easy diagnosis for Alzheimer’s. Memory lapses could have been brought on by stress, especially with the horrific events of Ullikummis’s conquest of the redoubt and taking its staff prisoner. The sight of the son of Enlil forcing a stone seed into the broken skull of Morganstern would itself have been more than sufficient to break the sanity of a less experienced person. As it was, the young mathematician’s demise had been sickening. His fight against the assimilation by Ullikummis’s seed ended with his brains burst on the floor, crushed to a pulp.

Lakesh tried to picture that event, but nothing came to mind. Lakesh knew his brain too well, and he knew his coping mechanisms. He’d seen the world he’d known destroyed in a rain of atomic fire and had withstood the shock, retaining details of the annihilation. His ego didn’t sublimate terrible memories, and it especially didn’t do that this quickly. Something had happened to him, and self-analysis told him that he’d obviously reached a point in time where he was being destroyed from the inside by neurological degeneration.

Of course, that now meant he was in his late fifties if he was experiencing the inability to retain recently learned information or recall current events in his short-term memory. He looked around, and wondered where Kane, Brigid and Grant were on this road.

“Where are the others?” he asked out loud. “Didn’t they make the jump with us?”

Domi frowned and gently took the map from his hand. “We didn’t jump, Moe.”

Lakesh looked into her crimson eyes and saw a flicker of recognition in them. “Domi… I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. Told me an hour ago,” she said. She rested her hand on his cheek. “Hour before that, too.”

“How long have I been telling you?” Lakesh asked.

“Past half day,” she answered. “Told me you’re getting tangle brain. Not remembering stuff.”

Lakesh swallowed hard. “I’m so sorry.”

She kissed him gently on the forehead, stroking his thinning silver hair. “It’s okay, Moe. It’ll be all right.”

“We’re still going to Vegas, correct?” Lakesh asked.

“To get away from Rocky,” Domi replied.

“Rocky…” Lakesh repeated. It took everything to drag up the image of Ullikummis. The stone-fleshed giant had swept through Cerberus like a deadly storm, had driven a stone through Daryl Morganstern’s forehead, calling for him to submit. “I’ve been losing my mind for half a day, but how long—?”

“We’ve been away from Cerberus for four days,” Domi told him, slowing her speech down, speaking clearly and fighting not to drop words. Lakesh knew that was a struggle for the wild-born creature who had learned to talk while fighting for her life tooth and nail. She was going above and beyond for his sake, and he could see the exhaustion in the form of gray-and-pink wrinkles under her ruby-red eyes. “We’re almost to Vegas.”

Lakesh closed his eyes. Old information was something he always would have access to. Route 66 swung up north for a bit before crossing just south of Las Vegas from New Mexico to California. The road they were on was as good as any paper map he carried, and there would be a turnoff that would direct them the rest of the way to the deserted city of sin. “About twenty more miles, right?”

Domi smiled, nodding in agreement. “Right.”

Lakesh returned her grin. “I’m not completely simple yet.”

“Never will be,” Domi replied, cupping his cheek once more.

The ancient scientist swallowed, wishing that he had some water to remove the dried gunk from his tongue. As if on cue, Domi handed him a small canteen, and Lakesh took a sip. Domi turned and continued her role of leading him to a promised land.

Lakesh’s heart ached. He knew he was going to forget her as Enlil’s destructive genetic code tore through his intellect. The overlord had found a way to torture the Cerberus founder—attacking his mind but leaving him sufficient cognitive ability to realize what his fate would be. The New Mexican heat and desert winds had dried his eyes out too much for the tears he wished he could bring.

Enlil was stealing Lakesh, dismantling his brain by bits and pieces, almost as if he had been strapped down to a buffet table and forced to watch as carrion birds tore at his flesh and not allowed to die.

“Damn you, Enlil,” Lakesh growled under his breath. He continued to follow Domi, trying to count down to the moment when he forgot this exchange.

After fifty minutes, Lakesh wondered why he had been counting.

THE YOUNG WOMAN HAD stalked ahead of the two men, acting as a scout but also to get away from the stifling feeling of being the outsider among the pair. Though she was beautiful—a shapely, curvaceous vixen with flowing dark hair, tanned olive skin and bright, attentive hazel eyes—she felt a resistance to her presence, despite their asking her for her allegiance. Kane and Grant, the rebel ex-Magistrates and fabled warriors who had taken on the hybrid barons and foiled them in battle after battle, were missing their third counterpart, the tall, flame-haired and brilliant Brigid Baptiste in the wake of an all-consuming battle that had shattered the defenses of Cerberus redoubt. There had been loss of life, but the mastermind of the assault and takeover, Ullikummis, had been repelled.

Now Rosalia found herself alongside the pair as they did what they could to find leads on the stone giant, the spawn of an alien overlord that had been forged by science and cruelty into a living weapon. The trouble with seeking out information on Ullikummis was that they lived in a world where cross-country communication had been severely curtailed. Sure, the Cerberus redoubt had done its best to spread globe-crossing comms to its allies, enabling them to keep close ties to New Edo in the archipelago that used to be Southern California, but as of now, the Tigers of Heaven were on lockdown, preparing for Ullikummis’s attempts to lay siege to them. On the other side of the planet, there was radio contact with New Olympus, but they had been told to lay low, as well.

Ullikummis’s power was simply too big a threat right now. Taking over the minds of war-honed samurai or armored mobile skeletons would mean that the Annunaki prince would become unstoppable. Ullikummis sought the tools to reforge the Earth, to destroy his father, Enlil, and to take his place as a cruel master of human life.

There were friends and allies scattered across the face of the planet, but calling them in against a mind-controlling god who was hewed from living, lava-blooded stone would be folly. Firepower and technology, martial skill and courage, these would only lead to the slaughter of Ullikummis’s thralls.

Rosalia was practical enough to value her life over those sent to attack her, no matter how innocent they were before the stony prince commanded them. She herself had carried the seed of the Annunaki prince within her; it was no secret from either Kane or Grant. At times, she’d feel the tickle of Ullikummis’s thoughts, but her will had proved too much to be kept tamped forever, not when the half-god was working to coordinate the New Order, his rapidly growing cult that had proved mighty enough to breech the walls of Cerberus and leave it in ruins.

Right now Kane had directed them toward the swamplands of what used to be the southeastern United States. Rosalia wasn’t happy with this mission, a run through a dangerous, treacherous terrain that was filled with inbred, crazed outlanders and the remnants of genetically altered species that strove to endure in the freshwater marshes and waterlogged hammocks at the southern end of what used to be called the Wiregrass Region.

This was a running feint by Kane. He and the others had left a trail that even the blind could follow. Her mongrel dog, padding stealthily beside her, turned his attention toward her.

“I don’t like being a target, either,” Rosalia answered him.

A soft whimper escaped the dog’s throat, and it turned its dark eyes toward the shadowed canopy that left the sinking marsh ahead of them in eternal dusk. Fingers of sunlight managed to penetrate, so the swamp wasn’t pitch-black even at noon, but the shadows were long and prevalent, providing hiding places for people or things. Rosalia rested her hand on the hilt of her knife, knowing that with the trail they’d left behind, it was likely that they could have been anticipated.

The New Order might be waiting ahead of them, ready to pounce. Though she still had the alien seed that linked her to Ullikummis’s will, she wasn’t certain if she, or her companions, would be taken alive for reprogramming or outright killed.

Either way, Rosalia didn’t want to press her luck. There were too many enemies in this world for her to let down her guard. Even if Ullikummis wasn’t in wait, there were rumors of vampiric raiders to complement the normal bandits and cold-bloods who stalked the corners of postapocalyptic America. Kane might have enjoyed drawing the ire and fury of Ullikummis’s machinations, but Rosalia had signed on to assist in resisting the godling.

Rosalia’s brow wrinkled as she looked in the shadows of the cypress trees sticking out of the slowly deepening water. There was movement flickering between the trunks, and it took her a moment to categorize them as birds and other small mammals flitting up and down bark, or leaping among the rare “low” branches of these waterlogged trees.

She looked back toward the two men who had been left behind, tending the boat that they had bought a few miles back when they were still working their way along a river toward the wetlands. Rosalia had volunteered for this stretch of scouting, scurrying across the length of spongy, muddy land that was only covered by an inch of water, rather than dipped down into two to three feet depths, teeming with leeches or microbe-laden mud that literally burned skin on contact.

Rosalia dipped her head in disbelief. Here she was, in a place filled with alligators, poisonous snakes, even bull sharks who had swum through the river delta as far as five hundred miles from the ocean to seek prey. Even the river mud seared the skin so that boots immersed in the mush had to be pried off so that bacteria and microscopic fauna could be scraped away from the skin. Rosalia wasn’t sure if such a concoction would eat even through the shadow suit she wore beneath her clothes, but she wasn’t willing to risk that. She was too experienced with swamps to think anything was bulletproof, self-contained environment or not.

Bandits and pirates were known qualities of this region, as well, and there were rumors of beast-men, both apelike and reptilian, who haunted the forested wetlands. The creatures could have been related to the so-called scalies, who had been hunted into extinction once the remnants of humanity in North America had been consolidated in the nine baronies. She’d never heard of any furry muties, but it hadn’t been something outside the realm of possibility. Kane also had delivered a warning about the swamplands of Louisiana, where there were small colonies of the nigh unkillable mutants known as “swampies.” If one pocket survived, then it was likely that the difficult terrain of intermixed marshes, ponds and hammocks would protect the swamp dwellers.

Rosalia turned back to see if the others were in sight. Between the long grass and the fifty-yard stretch of spongy ground she’d crossed, and the fact that the two men were seated in the scull to maintain a relatively low profile for now, she couldn’t spot her companions.

“Sure, Magistrate Man, hide when I’m checking for my backup, but not when a stone god’s hunting for your ass and mine,” she grumbled. She returned her attention to the cypress swamp ahead. Something was in there, and even her dog could sense the ominous stench of wrongness coming out.

There was a rustle behind her and she whipped around, dagger out of its sheath and lashing toward the figure’s throat.

Only Kane’s lightning reflexes prevented her from opening a deadly gash from ear to ear. His fingers locked around her wrist while the blade was still inches from his neck. “I know you’re mad about me being out of sight, but that’s no reason to take my head off.”

“Not funny, Magistrate Man,” Rosalia said with a sneer. “This stretch of river stinks worse than the rest. And not in the traditional sense. This…has a weirdness to it.”

“I feel it, too,” Kane said. “We’d heard about something going on here, something strange, even amid all the stuff we’ve been doing with alien overlords, extradimensional conquerors, even a tribe of dimension-hopping hackers.”

Rosalia shook her head. “Anyone else said any of that, I’d have called them a fused-out tangle brain.”

“Before or after you met Ullikummis?” Kane asked.

Rosalia nodded. “Before. I have to say, the weirdness really took off after I ran into you, Magistrate Man.”

“Don’t blame me,” Kane answered.

“So, you brought us here, leaving a trail of bread-crumbs for the New Order to follow, even when you knew that there was trouble already waiting for us?” Rosalia asked.

“I’ve been at this long enough to know that when you’re on the menu for two enemies, they’ll end up taking bites out of each other to get to you,” Kane said. “And since I’m still here, having two enemies at each others’ throats seems to be a good strategy.”

“Seems, Magistrate Man,” Rosalia answered, her hazel eyes scanning the shadows amid the cypress trunks and roots, “this won’t be just two opponents. We’ll be an open buffet for anything with teeth, and there’s lots of them in there.”

“This isn’t my first dance in a swamp,” Kane replied. “If anything, the terrain is on our side, in that it’s on its own side. It’ll eat anyone and anything that stumbles in.”

“What was the weirdness you’d heard from this stretch of swamp?” Rosalia asked.

“People disappearing, and reptilian creatures,” Kane said. “Sad thing is, we can’t narrow down what kind of lizard men we’re dealing with. A colony sent by Lord Strongbow, a missing detachment of Nagah, maybe even an overlord and his Nephilim followers.”

“Nagah?” Rosalia repeated, hoping for an answer.

Kane shook his head. “Want nothing to do for you. Or me. Or any human for that matter.”

Rosalia’s full, soft lips pursed in frustration, then she looked back. “Dog doesn’t like this.”

“I know. Neither does Grant,” Kane added.

“So, you promoting the mutt or demoting me to animal sidekick?” Grant rumbled over his Commtact. Kane repeated the comment of his grouchy friend since Rosalia couldn’t hear anything broadcast by the implanted communication device.

Rosalia looked down at her belt, noting the conventional radio that she’d had clipped to it. While small and handy, it was nowhere nearly as convenient as a cybernetic transmitter installed in the mandible, capable of transmitting words even if the speaker was whispering. The vibrations of the voice through bone were translated by the small, solid-state technology residing along the bone, pintles connecting the contact plate to the jawline. Kane and Grant could hear everything the other said or even heard, while she had to fumble with even the slim transceiver unit.

It was part of their link that made Rosalia feel so alienated. Of course, since she hadn’t wanted to get rid of the Ullikummis stone inside her, she couldn’t utilize the Commtact, as had been proved with Edwards when he had been infected. The shard had produced interference with the body’s energy flow and disrupted the miniaturized cybernetics. The point was made moot for her, as the field surgery to implant the stone was not possible in the wake of the New Order’s attack. The redoubt had to be put on total lockdown, now that its location was known. To preserve the store of supplies and technology within the underground facility, Lakesh had engaged blast doors and emergency locks. Nothing short of a bomb could cut through the doors of the compound, and explosives that powerful would also collapse tunnels.

The storehouse of vehicles and weaponry alone had to be secured to prevent bandits from suddenly expanding their capability beyond those of their traditional victims.

“So, lizards to the front, stone men to the back and a hungry swamp all around,” Rosalia said. “Can’t say you don’t know how to impress a girl, Mag Man.”

Kane’s lower lip twitched, as if the smile her quip had inspired had hit the brick wall of reality.

This was not going to be fun and games. Kane and Grant no longer had the backup of Cerberus redoubt, and Rosalia, despite her fighting ability, was not capable of the same kind of brilliance that Brigid Baptiste could provide.

Outnumbered, hunted and cut off from their usual support, the outlanders returned to the boat, each oar splash bringing them closer to the dangerous mysteries within.

Chapter 2

Domi could tell that something was in the air as they got closer to the half-buried city in the sand. Somewhere beyond what was once named Las Vegas lay a sprawling facility, heavily guarded and shielded on all sides by nothing but inhospitable desert. The feral girl had been kept there once as a prisoner, taken along with Kane, who was pressed into stud service for the genetically deteriorated hybrids in the months before the barons’ ascendance to the demonic Annunaki overlords. It was there that Domi had overcome her hatred and bigotry toward hybrids, learning that the actions of a few powerful leaders did not paint the total picture of the whole race.

While they were barons, the nascent overlords were cruel and petty, but their health depended on transplant surgery and blood transfusions from unwilling donors. Now the reptilian giants sneaked through the shadows of the world, their minds and bodies complete but their support system shattered with the destruction of Tiamat, the living space leviathan who had awakened the genetic coding within the barons and their Quad V hybrid minions alike.

Domi remembered rows and banks of young hybrids, babies actually, soft and vulnerable, so fragile that they were placed in lexan boxes in sterile, airtight rooms lest an errant microbe strike their nonexistent immune system and kill them where a normal human would shrug the infection off after a few days of sniffles. Domi herself had known the hardship of a less than optimal physiology, though she didn’t think of it in terms of biochemistry, anatomy or genetics. She was an albino, so her fair skin was prone to burning unless she kept herself wrapped, and her ruby eyes—so keen at seeing in the dark—needed to be hooded by a ball cap and sunglasses lest the brightness burn out her pupils.

While she could have made use of a shadow suit, one of the high-tech field uniforms worn by Cerberus personnel, the skintight, advanced fabrics would stick out. Domi already had enough trouble, being a tiny, slender albino traveling with an enfeebled, aging Lakesh. The shadow suit would attract too much attention, something she couldn’t afford when the elderly scientist was slowly losing his brilliant faculties as well as his physical vigor.

It was little things that Domi noticed. Even the mind that had endured centuries of existence and treachery under the barons was slipping, memories fading after only an hour, and he grew tired far more quickly than before.

They looked like prey out here in the desert, a hunter-plagued landscape of cold-blooded bandits, robbers, psychopaths and other killers. Domi knew that there was little she could do to make herself seem larger and stronger, even though she was one of the deadliest fighters who called the Cerberus redoubt home. Behind her wraparound shades, her ruby eyes swept the desert, looking for signs of trouble. Stuffed in a tied-off belt around her hips was a powerful, small-framed .45 automatic, and on her denim-clad calf was a long, wicked fighting knife. She had a backpack with water, food and extra supplies for the long journey, and cradled in the crook of her right arm was something she’d rarely carried, though she’d trained with it.

Domi, through the redoubt’s supply stores, had access to hundreds of weapons of all manner and make. Domi was more feral than tame, and while she was deadly with the semiautomatic Detonics .45 in her belt, the hand blaster wasn’t something she’d need on a long, dangerous loop through the desert. Crucial was something that could reach out across the sands and take down attackers long before they got too close. Because of that, she had a Winchester Model 70, in 7 mm Mauser. The choice was simple for Domi, who had seen fellow outlanders in roving bands dealing with human problems and meat acquisition with equal ease using this caliber. While she’d have to adjust for rise and fall with a .30 caliber, like the .30-06 or the 7.62 mm NATO, the 7 mm shot flat, making it perfect for long-range work.

At close range, the 7 mm would smash through a human torso like the horn of a rampaging bull, something she’d also been familiar with, having seen raiders dropped with their rib cages crushed to splinters when hit at only a few yards. Domi had a box of one hundred rounds in her backpack, as well as spare rounds stuffed into a collar wrapped around the rifle stock, and a few more stuffed into belt loops. There were five in the rifle’s magazine, and Domi had learned long ago that it wasn’t the number of bullets you threw at a problem as much as it was the shots that stuck to an enemy. She wouldn’t spray as fast as she could shoot, and once things got even closer, then it was time to let her Detonics Combat Master speak in its earthy bellow.

“What’s happening?” Lakesh asked. Like her, he was wrapped head to toe against the desert sun, a loose hood drooped over his evermore gray hair. His blue, transplanted eyes looked across the horizon that Domi was watching.

“Nothing,” Domi answered. “Time to sit and rest. Have a sip.”

Lakesh glanced at her, his full lips turning downward in a frown. “You don’t have to baby me, love.”

The albino girl caressed his cheek, soft and wrinkled, and managed a smile. “In the desert, remember?”

Lakesh managed a snort through his large nose. “My mind isn’t completely addled.”

“Keep your strength up,” Domi urged. “We’re almost to the city, and who knows what’s waiting inside there.”

Lakesh nodded. “How long have we been traveling?”

“Couple days,” Domi answered tersely.

“There’s trouble,” Lakesh muttered. “I know you.”

“Didn’t say you for—” Domi began.

“I mean, I know you drop unnecessary wordage when you’re worried about something,” Lakesh said. “Under stress, especially ready for combat.”

“No fight yet,” Domi promised. “But it’s quiet. Too quiet.”

Lakesh took a deep breath, then glanced down at the rifle she cradled in her delicate-seeming hands. He reached out and rested his fingers over hers. “Why did we come here?”

“Fix your tangle brain,” Domi said. “Might find some one.”

“It was a year or two ago, right? Surely they abandoned Area 51, especially with the ascension,” Lakesh said. “Why make any use of a facility for breeding hybrids when—?” He paused and winced. “Tiamat is gone. Right?”

Domi nodded somberly. “Happened a year back.”

Lakesh’s brow wrinkled. “I wasn’t sure.”

“Remember old things pretty good. Now, more fused out,” Domi muttered.

Lakesh sighed. “Enlil giveth. Enlil taketh away.”

“Enlil built 51,” Domi said. “No more Tiamat, no more snake-face council, might wake up old labs.”

“Canny reasoning, except that Enlil is operating on the far side of the globe,” Lakesh said. His face twisted in concern. “I can remember that, but everything else—”

“Not natural,” Domi interrupted him. “Tangle brain caused by something different.”

“I figured that much, probably once an hour for the past several days,” Lakesh lamented.

Domi hoped that her ball cap and sunglasses hid the concern in her eyes, but the scientist still retained sharp senses, even if his memory wasn’t as keen as usual. He cupped her cheek. “You made a smart decision coming here, darling.”

“Maybe,” Domi answered. Her attention was drawn by the flicker of a shadow.

Downtown Vegas had shifted much when Sky Dog’s convoy blasted its way through, past a pitched ambush. Many of the buildings not wrecked in the explosive firefight, or by the tower collapsed to block pursuit of the convoy of Sandcats, looked about ready to collapse in on themselves. The sands had crawled over the cityscape in an effort to reclaim the territory that once belonged. Hardy scrub grew close to where underground streams still sluggishly rolled through old sewer systems, the southern Nevada reservoirs long ago shattered and deteriorated by the earthshaker bombs that destroyed most of California.

Vegas was empty, but far from devoid of life. It was the signs of movement, the leftovers of habitation, that had left Domi on high alert. Someone was still present, or more likely, had been released in the wake of the devastating battle where she had nearly died, plucked instants from death via implode grenade and pulled to safety on Thunder Isle’s remarkable time trawl. Domi was aware that the laboratories in the depths of what used to be Area 51 had churned out a colony of hybrids; she’d seen the nursery, seen the babies.

What if it wasn’t merely hybrids that lived there, or what if the infant hybrids who’d somehow survived had been altered, changed by Tiamat’s awakening signal? Domi wished she could pose these questions to Lakesh, but she didn’t even have a quarter of the vocabulary necessary to convey those thoughts to him when he was at his sharpest, let alone when he was halfway to full tangle brain.

Domi advanced from cover. “There’s a hotel. We can stay there. The sun’s going to hot.”

Lakesh nodded. Where she used to look to him as a source of learning, of protective affection unlike the grim, competitive existence she’d engaged in while growing up, now he seemed much less confident, weaker. Domi loved him with all of her heart. This was a man who had done what he could to teach her, giving her the ability to read at what he called “a third-grade level” and treating her as an adult, a woman who was an equal, despite her relative youth and her wild nature.

That love was still there, evidencing itself in the form of trust in her, trust in her ability to cut through a torrid, hostile desert and into the ruins of a dead city that wasn’t so dead.

Domi couldn’t give voice to many of the thoughts racing through her mind, but she had one clear message.

“I will not let you down,” she whispered.

PRISCILLA STAYED VERY STILL, the eternal shadow of a collapsed casino interior forming its protective cocoon over her as the grunts and snorting inhalations of the hunters resounded on the other side of a barrier of light Sheetrock. The dark might not have been good concealment from her “brothers,” but so far their noses were not keen enough to follow her spoor, even through a thin wall. She was also glad that even if their ears were sensitive, they made too much noise sniffing the air, trying to find her.

She knew all she had to do was wait. Soon enough their interest would fade and they would go elsewhere, seeking some other form of prey. She cursed herself for a fool, allowing them to spot her when she’d assumed they would be snoring heavily during the rising heat of the day. Nighttime had been the cool period, when they could exert themselves without tiring under the blazing gaze of the sun. It didn’t help them much that daylight seared their sensitive eyes, especially in such a sandblasted environment. Priscilla was glad she had the intellect and calmness to make use of items left behind by the humans, like sunglasses. She’d read somewhere of a condition called snow blindness, and it was readily apparent that there could be sand blindness, as well, when the eye is so washed in the reflection of icy white or pale yellow that even the strongest contrasts couldn’t penetrate their vision. Her days of effort, leaving the great dead lake and its abandoned buildings behind, had made her aware of the need to protect her own sensitive eyes.

She’d adjusted her schedule to the daytime thanks to the use of polarized lenses, knowing that the primitive creatures she’d struggled to escape had been forced by experience to adopt a nocturnal hunting pattern. The day was when she could forage, to escape, to breathe and not feel like a stalked animal.

That was the source of Priscilla’s pride. She was not an animal.

She wasn’t human except in the broadest sense of the term. Her limbs were no longer as slender as they once were, and in place of the silky-smooth flesh that covered them, she was adorned with a layer of scales, shimmering, partly erupted in a night of agony that had awakened her and torn her from the protein “womb” she’d been stored in. Gasping for breath, clawing at agar-slicked floor tiles, she’d made her first few steps, brain assaulted by waves of images, body tingling as it tried to grow, but something shorted out her transformation, much like what had happened with the others.

Priscilla was the least affected. Many of her brothers and sisters had changed into the placid beings who, she assumed, were the final result of “the change.” From the thoughts that rained down upon her from Tiamat, she knew that the still, stolid reptilians were known as Nephilim, and they were the end result of a powerful psychic signal that flipped a switch at the genetic stage.

Priscilla floundered in the underground complex, just strong enough to hold off her half-formed brothers one-on-one when they tried to rape her. For some reason she hadn’t descended into a savage half state, but from the behavior of the Nephilim, she realized that they were in a stage of evolution, or rather devolution, from human to alien servant drone.

The hungry savages grew tired of the quiet ones and fell upon them, developing a taste for flesh.

The weak, the infirm, the wounded all became easy pickings for the others, and despite herself, Priscilla found that she preferred when the hunters returned at night bearing meat from some unknown source. She forced herself not to concentrate on what had been killed to fill her stomach, but she had not become de-ranged enough to enjoy the flavor of raw, torn flesh.

Slowly the hunters were learning to work as a team, and there was no way Priscilla would be able to hold off more than one rapist, no matter how much her intellect guided her nascent fighting abilities. She’d run far, all the way to Vegas, finding this little corner in the eternal shadows of the once neon-lit city. Here she’d managed to locate food, clothing and other necessities. Sitting just inside the shade of a looming section of roof, she was able to organize her thoughts better, reading and putting thoughts and descriptions to abstracts that had tumbled back and forth in her brain, scrambled images and concepts that had been implanted via infodumps as she floated in a nutrient bath, growing to full size, and the competing telepathic awakening given to her by a godlike alien mind. Something had given her the ability to be more than a mere savage when the others were snarling predators.

Most of the books had decayed, their ink fading from two centuries of sitting, but there was still more than enough surviving text and information that she was able to make use of the vocabulary that burbled across from the extraterrestrial identity that had wanted to turn her into a mindless servant.

What had failed?

Even here, in the dark, with the grunts of her hated brethren behind a mere inch of brittle stone, she asked herself what had made her so different. Why had she resisted Tiamat’s call so well when they couldn’t?

There was a change in the noises her pursuers made. Perhaps the sun had grown too much for their nocturnal eyes, or the heat had grown too much for them to do more than slump onto their bellies in a few inches of shade. Whatever it was, there was a sudden explosion of breathing and footsteps.

Something had caught their attention, and they were on the move.

Priscilla was tempted to follow them, at least to see who the poor creature was that had drawn their ire.

Whatever or whoever it was, Priscilla felt a pang of regret as she hid in the pitch-black.

At least, she thought, whatever was out there wouldn’t suffer for long.

LAKESH HAD HEARD DOMI stalk away from him, and even in his compromised memory situation, he knew that she was planting the seed of a trap. Born in the wilderness, the slender, pixie-haired albino girl could move with the silence of a cat. If she was obvious enough that Lakesh could locate her by hearing alone, that meant she was baiting someone she had sensed, risking her existence by making herself a target.

Lakesh clenched his eyes shut, squeezing the skin between his brows. Only a few months ago he had the physique and endurance of a man who was less than a fifth of his current chronological age of two and a half centuries. And while he knew that he’d crossed the Nevada desert, deposited there by one of the interphaser units he’d built, he wasn’t certain how much of a liability he had been across the hot, arid sands. Domi wasn’t one to keep her mouth shut about Lakesh acting like a baby, but she was unusually taciturn now.

He was out of breath, and if it hadn’t been for the layers of clothing he wore, his naturally dark complexion still would have burned in the blazing sun. One of the advantages of the multiple layers that were loosely bound around his torso and limbs was that they allowed for pockets of cool air, as well as absorbing sweat and whisking excess heat away. Domi didn’t look as if she had been in a recent conflict even past the hour or so he’d retained his memories for, so there was no other reason for Lakesh to assume that it was anything other than a walk in the sand that had so exhausted him.

“Useless,” Lakesh lambasted himself. He took a quick inventory of himself and found that he had a pistol in his belt. She hadn’t left him defenseless, and since it was only his short-term memory that was failing him, he made sure the weapon was locked safe, but still had a round in the chamber. Unfortunately he had to click off the safety lever to retract the slide enough to see there was a bullet in place. He closed the action and flicked the switch. “Don’t shoot by accident.”

There was the distant sound of grunts that distracted him from the heavy chunk of steel in his hand. It took everything in his willpower to keep from calling out to the feral girl to warn her.

Again, if Lakesh could hear them, there was no way her wilderness-honed senses missed them. He did roll over and peer over the berm of sand Domi had tucked him behind. He spotted a pair of big, bestial creatures. The last time he’d seen anything similar to this was when Quavell, the Area 51 hybrid who had befriended the Cerberus redoubt and Domi especially, resisted the clarion call of Tiamat so that she could give birth. Their skins were mottled with scaly, fine armor, and their limbs had swollen from the usual hybrid spindles to something slender and tightly corded. They were nowhere nearly as bulky and powerful as the Nephilim, but neither did they seem to be something Lakesh could best in a fistfight.

Both appeared to be about six feet in height, and their faces, still looking like those of the original Quad Vs, were twisted in anger. Each bore a length of steel with a hooked end, a bent L pipe that had been made into an improvised hatchet by hammering the tube shut with a rock and scraped to sharpness. They were tool users, and able to improvise, but that was where their civilization and advancement ended. Lakesh was reminded of cavemen, down to the tattered dark sheets that hung around their waists like loincloths.

Lakesh lowered himself behind the sandy berm, his thumb sweeping the safety off on the pistol. The gun felt so heavy, he wondered how he could keep it steady and on target if he had to shoot.

There was a gruff bark, and Lakesh lifted his head again. Domi was nowhere to be seen, and the pair of savages appeared confused. A smile crept across his fleshy lips.

The albino could disappear in plain sight. He didn’t envy the creatures.

Then two sets of black, teardrop-shaped eyes swiveled toward him. Their slitlike mouths curled up, revealing sharpened teeth awaiting inside.

They had seen him!

Lakesh started to lower back down, in the hope that they hadn’t, but the two beasts exploded from a standstill, legs pumping as they rushed to fall upon the former Cerberus redoubt leader.

Chapter 3

There had been two of them, stuck halfway between the snake-faced drones that served the Annunaki overlords and the odd, bigheaded spindles they had grown from. Domi made enough noise to alert the pair, and she continued to stomp until they had nearly gotten into sight. With deft quickness, the feral girl nestled herself in the shell of what used to be an automobile, shadows covering her like a blanket.

These freaks reminded Domi of Quavell in her final, suffering moments, a tormented beast tearing itself out of what used to be a gentle, delicate friend. She remembered the exponentially increasing strength that the hybrid woman had applied to her hand as she held it, lending emotional support to her. She remembered the final promise that she’d made, to protect her baby, the fragile little life for which she fought biology and alien technology to free from the prison of her body before it transformed into a sexless drone.

There was a brief jolt of pain, as Domi recalled when Balam had taken the child, disappearing so that neither the Annunaki nor the Cerberus rebels could claim control of the ninth overlord, which was what the infant had become. Domi had hoped that in the days since the apparent death of the orbiting dragon ship Tiamat, they would have the chance to locate Quavell’s child. Things never went according to plan. One menace had faded from the center stage, and dozens more popped up. Domi had done her best to bury those feelings, but the monsters who reacted to her baiting were just too similar to her dead friend to pass from her thoughts quickly.

“Waiting for more,” Domi whispered to herself, seeking an excuse to deflect her recriminations. So far, despite the long moments she waited, there were no more of the odd, alien hunters stalking in the open. Satisfied that she wasn’t going to be blindsided, she drew her wicked combat knife from its sheath. Just because only two had come to the sound of her footsteps didn’t mean others would ignore the discharge of a firearm.

The two of them would die quietly, and then Lakesh could be taken to shelter in the half-collapsed building they had emerged from. With nearly boneless ease, she slithered out of the derelict car’s window, crawling onto the sand, ruby eyes locked on the monstrosities even through her protective goggles. The rearmost creature would be her first target, and she already envisioned herself clamping a hand over its slit mouth, keeping it quiet as the saw-backed blade tore through the blend of scales and hybrid skin.

The hunters suddenly turned, and Domi’s plans disappeared. They’d spotted something, and out of the corner of her eye she recognized the steel-gray shock of Lakesh’s hair. He’d pulled his hood and cap off to maintain a lower profile as he spied upon the mutated hybrids, and he’d pushed his luck too far. They noticed him, and the swiftness of their response changed the albino’s plans in the blink of an eye.

Domi burst to her feet, tossing the knife from her right hand to her left so that she could reach her Detonics Combat Master. The need for silence had disappeared with the luxury of the hunters’ ignorance of their surroundings, and she brought up the locked and cocked little pistol, thumb snapping down its safety. Her arm was an ivory rod, corded muscles spearing the gun ahead of her as her legs shoved against the sand beneath her. She waited until the thumbnail of a front sight was almost swept toward the head of one of the two half-breeds before she applied force to the trigger. With a thunderous crash, the .45 spit out its deadly message. Her aim was off—she had meant to core the skull of her first target, but the fat bullet merely ripped a crease in the side of the beast’s head, missing a dead-on hit to bone and causing the slug to only split skin with a glancing impact.

The blast had done its job in protecting Lakesh, however, despite her miss. The two creatures skidded to a halt. The one that was clipped curled into a ball and rolled toward the cover of a chunk of masonry. The other spun on its heel, letting loose a strange keening wail as it wound back and sent its improvised pipe-ax whirling toward Domi. The albino girl jerked her head out of the path of the cartwheeling scythe. Its crudely sharpened tip ripped a long furrow through the side of her hood, cloth flapping away from the side of her face.

Had it not been for her catlike reflexes, Domi knew that she’d have suffered at least a shattered cheekbone, and perhaps worse given the strength of the hunter’s throw. She adjusted her aim, only a few degrees of movement as she continued her charge to meet the enemy, and pulled the trigger again. At this range, there was no finesse with the shot. She was going for center of mass, the mutant’s broad chest making a relatively easy target to hit. With a squeeze, she pumped the second round in her Detonics, and the half-breed stopped in his tracks, eyes flinching and squeezed shut in pain.

Domi had no illusions about the debate about the stopping power of handgun bullets. The end of a fight was the end of a fight, and she wasn’t about to turn her attention from an opponent until it was down and not struggling to kill her. With a kick, she launched herself through the air, whipping her knife around in a savage arc. The monstrous mutant lifted one of its brawny arms, blocking the swing of her knife, keeping its razor edge from its throat.

One shot to the chest, and the thing still had the speed to block her neck slice, but luckily, Domi intended to bring down the six-foot reptilian with more than just a bullet and a blade. Even with the knife blocked, she slammed both of her knees into its chest, bowling it backward with her weight and momentum. She knew that she wasn’t big enough to win a fight with the half-breed with just her brawn and muscle, but her deadliness came from far more than even the remarkable strength of her steel-cable muscles.

The creature let out a roar as it fell, and its chest seemed to sag a little under one knee as they sailed toward the ground. She’d managed to nail the ribs that her .45 bullet had gone through, and with her mass focused behind the joint, she’d caused the mutant even more damage. Broken ribs parted as they both hit the ground, shards of bone making its chest sag as she landed on top. The teardrop-eyed predator’s face was a mask of pain and fury, and though one arm wasn’t working thanks to skeletal trauma, it whipped its fist toward her face.

Domi’s sun goggles went flying as she barely had a chance to roll with the punch, cheek and forehead grated by scaly knuckles that left her porcelain skin red and raw. The bright sun intruded, searing her eyes and distracting her for a moment. That gave the enemy a chance to shove her off and roll away from her. Domi tumbled and got her legs beneath her, springing to her feet in an instant. The half-breed was on its knees, one gnarl-fingered hand pulling a second of the bent pipe-axes from its belt, ready to continue this battle on more even footing.

Domi snapped the .45 up and fired again, this time her aim striking dead center, her bullet tearing through the left side of its chest. She was going where she assumed the heart was, and from her battles with the Nephilim, she knew that they had the same vitals in the same spots as most other humanoids. Whatever she hit, the bullet’s impact jerked it back and into the ground, weapon tumbling from nerveless fingers. She lunged forward, stooping to make sure the thing was dead with her knife.

Domi didn’t want to waste any more bullets, in case the second hunter was still in the mood to battle or her gunfire attracted more unwanted visitors. Even as the mutant’s lips peeled back in a snarl, talon-tipped fingers rising to grab her throat, the albino girl speared her knife through one of its black, teardrop-shaped eyes, plunging six inches of steel into its brain.

One down, and the other had disappeared from sight, which meant some of these creatures had a glass jaw, or the wounded hunter had enough brains to launch an attack from stealth. Domi wasn’t going to wait around passively to determine what was going on. She locked her attention on the direction she’d last seen her opponent disappear to, and stepped back toward Lakesh.

“Domi!” the scientist snapped in warning.

Lakesh had spotted the movement just before the feral outlander could, but his cry served to focus her attention on it just a shade quicker. It exploded from behind a ramp formed by a collapsed wall, leaping with an ax in each hand. Its face was untouched, but bent in vengeful fury.

Domi pulled the trigger, but even as she did, she knew her first shot missed the fast-moving, high-jumping attacker. The round went low, and it had gone high, but the hunter wasn’t the only one wielding a weapon in each hand. She shoved the point of her knife skyward, twisting to minimize her profile.

Physics was not in Domi’s favor. She was a shade under five feet in height, and no matter how tightly packed her muscles were wrapped in her strong limbs, she was still only half the weight of her opponent, who was not only airborne but tackling her with a sharpened, improvised hatchet in each scale-knuckled grip. She’d managed to slip past the mutant’s flying ax swings, but the bulk of the pouncing hunter drove her into the ground, bowling her easily off her feet as both of them crashed to the sand.

Domi heard the report of a handgun, but she knew it wasn’t her own. She’d kept her finger off the trigger to not waste ammunition or get it shattered in her enemy’s tackle. It had to be Lakesh, and as they rolled through the sand, she noticed him leap to his feet out of the corner of her eye. She’d have yelled for him to stay back, but she was in combat mode. Her throat was closed off; she couldn’t speak anything more than an animalistic grunt. Blood had splattered along her arm, but it wasn’t the ferocious spurt of a severed artery. Her enemy was twice wounded, and it took everything she had to twist herself out of a bone-snapping bear hug. Scales snagged on the fabric she wore, sharp nails blunted as they clawed for her flesh to hold her still.

Domi raked the razor edge of her knife along those scales, parting the skin, but without leverage all she was doing was making the fight messier. Damp cloth matted to her skin, and a fist crashed down on her shoulder with numbing force. The .45 dropped from limp fingers as the entire arm went dead, but Domi wasn’t out of the fight yet. Though her hand was a clumsy lump of inert flesh for the moment, she managed to swing it up toward the mutant’s face. She’d willed unfeeling fingertips into hooked talons, and the ungainly hand raked across one of her opponent’s eyes.

The half-breed let out a pained gargle, leaning away from Domi and giving her the room she’d needed before. With a twist, she had her knife in an ice-pick grip and she threw all of her weight behind its point as she aimed for the marauder’s lower abdomen. The blade had trouble penetrating between the opponent’s ribs as she couldn’t get her weight behind it, but with only muscle and scaled skin to resist, Domi sunk the knife in, her face sprayed with hot gore signaling the creature’s aorta was opened up. Clublike fists rained on the back of her head and shoulders, but the strength of those blows was lessened by shock and rapid blood loss.

Domi wrenched the knife free, turning a six-inch stab into a wide, yawning gulley through skin, organ and muscle. With the blade loosed from the restraining flesh, she was able to back up, her enemy doing likewise.

The mutant’s retreat wasn’t to regather itself, only to keep coils of intestines from pouring out into the Vegas sands. Lakesh fired his handgun again, and the mortally wounded beast was thrown to the ground.

“Stop shooting!” Domi croaked through her adrenaline-tightened throat.

Lakesh lowered the pistol, his hands trembling.

Domi reached out and shoved the web between her thumb and index finger in the V formed by the hammer and the back of the pistol’s slide. That movement happened just in time to keep the hammer from striking the firing pin as a flinch on Lakesh’s part tripped the trigger. He glared down at the weapon as blood trickled from Domi’s alabaster skin around the metal.

“You’re bleeding,” Lakesh said.

“Let go,” Domi whispered.

He did so, and she was able to cock the hammer back, thumb the weapon on safe, and tuck it into her belt. The damage wasn’t much, a minor U-shaped cut where the pistol’s hammer tried to scissor the skin on its way to make the gun fire. Still, Domi licked away the rivulets of her blood and wrapped a relatively clean cloth around it.

Lakesh looked shell-shocked as he realized that he’d nearly shot Domi out of frightened reflex. She’d stopped a tragedy from happening, but his eyes were wide and unfocused.

“Snap out!” Domi shouted, giving him a slap. “Over there.”

She pointed him at the half-wrecked hotel that the pair had come from. Obviously the noise must have alerted others, so she had to get Lakesh into hiding as he was in no condition to deal with another fight. Domi paused long enough to pick up her pistol and fallen goggles. She wanted to leave as little evidence of their presence as possible. There was nothing she could do about finding the small brass casings in such a hurry, but she doubted any predator could get a scent off the hot metal, unlike the sweat-dampened elastic of her goggles or the grips of her pistol. As satisfied as she could be under the circumstances, she dragged Lakesh along by the hand, leading the way into the shadows of a collapsed building.

THE TWO PEOPLE RUSHED through the triangular entrance of Priscilla’s domain without pause, the small girl pulling the larger man behind her. Once in the shadows, the man seemed lost while the girl’s ruby-red eyes glinted in what little light there was. She was moving deftly and pointing out spots where her companion could trip.

Priscilla may not have had a lot of experience with humans, but she knew it was rare for a person to have such sharp senses or crimson-tinged eyes. Could these two have been others like her, creatures who had been altered in such a way that they were not quite human?

Again temptation tugged at her. She’d been lonely since she’d left Area 51, not that she’d felt camaraderie among the more savage of her kind wallowing in the pits of the abandoned complex. Still, there was something inside of her, a need to communicate. She had language, something more than what the others had, and she could hear the brief whispers of conversation between the two. She could understand them, and somewhere in the fog of memories was the recollection that she had been educated in their language while she floated in the nutrient baths. Priscilla wondered if she was meant to interact with these beings. She could understand snippets, words here and there, at least those that she could hear. They’d probably come under attack by the savage mutants themselves.

She also knew the sound of gunfire, and didn’t doubt that the two humans killed their attackers. Priscilla, looking as disheveled and alien, almost as freakish as her brethren, could easily be seen as one of them, perceived as a threat. The murmurs in the nutrient bath spoke of how humans were enemies, dangerous creatures not only to other races, but also to themselves. The only responsible way to handle them was to cull their numbers when they grew too numerous. The thoughts inserted into her brain by Tiamat were that the hairless apes were to be servants to the Annunaki.

Whichever the situation, two sides had told her that interaction with humanity was dangerous. Humans were an implacable enemy, suitable only for controlling, and even then, only in numbers their masters could handle.

Priscilla grimaced. She’d just have to hang back, stay quiet. If they showed that they weren’t a threat, maybe she could present herself. And if they were…

She’d hidden from the hunter mutants for this long.

If her bestial brethren couldn’t track her, no humans ever could.

Chapter 4

Kane felt lucky that Rosalia had come along when she had. Sure, she had been operating under the aegis of Ullikummis’s New Order, but when the time came for a rebellion, she had aided him. Indeed, she was a gun for hire, and she had a piece of the Annunaki prince of stone inside of her, but she’d proved immune to his psychic influence, able to take him off guard during the battle to expel him.

It wasn’t much, but it had been enough for Kane to figure that Rosalia could be useful. She remained aloof, keeping her distance. Even the part-coyote dog that accompanied her hadn’t been given a name, a sign of her reluctance to draw a close attachment to anyone or anything. In the postapocalyptic Earth, while animals had proved useful, even loyal as they had before the fall of humankind, all lives had the potential to be brief, ending in violence or illness. She rarely referred to Kane by his name, either, but it hadn’t affected the former Magistrate much. The legendary security men of the baronies were known only by their family names, better to sublimate their individuality and remind them that they were only a small part of a much larger picture. While Kane had willingly lived that kind of existence, separated from his parents and raised in the academy, that veil of impersonality had been broken by his friendship and the mentoring of the bronze-skinned giant behind him, Grant. In an uncommon instance of loyalty between two Magistrates, Kane had risked his life to protect the injured older man, forging a bond that gave them the strength and will to resist the tyranny of the hybrid barons who had ruled the villes.

Kane had met another who had close ties to his soul, a bond that transcended romantic and sexual interest, becoming a spiritual connection above all else. Brigid Baptiste had been revealed in a jump dream, and in other realities, to be bonded with him across multiple lifetimes.

It had been Lakesh’s opinion that the timeless loyalty between him, Grant and Baptiste had formed a confluence of probability that could defy nearly any odds. The proof had been in countless battles with beings who could rightfully call themselves gods, beings of immense power who had ruled nations, even worlds, or traveled among universes at their whimsy. Kane worried, not for his own safety, but for Brigid’s. She had been a deciding factor in repelling conquest by all manner of monstrosities with her great intellect and her unwillingness to fail, going from academic to warrior in a few short months, ultimately becoming as skilled and battle-hardened an adventurer as any three men Kane had met.

He was ill at ease because he could sense her. He could feel that she was still alive, still breathing, still there, but she was cut off. There was no contact with her via Commtact, and she had disappeared from Cerberus before the final conflict within the redoubt’s walls.

Rosalia was a good woman, and Kane felt she was a trustworthy ally, right down to the instincts that made up his point man’s instinct, a combination of awareness and perceptive insight that made him seem almost psychic.

Kane almost wished that they’d made a conventional mat-trans jump, rather than employing the interphaser, which was instantaneous and didn’t jar his psyche loose to see beyond the normal flow of events. Perhaps a journey through the mat-trans unit would have freed him up enough to look across the world, to feel for Brigid Baptiste. He’d been able to find her, and other long-lived beings, in the visions brought upon by such jumps. Maybe this time he could have retained his focus and his interest long enough to latch on to his lost friend and ally and be that much closer to bringing her back into the fold.

There was always the dreaded possibility that Ullikummis had taken her prisoner, utilizing her intellect through the power of his mind control, the unrelenting force that had buckled even Kane’s indomitable will during his captivity. Even so, Kane would have been able to see that. He just knew that he could have caught a glimpse as his essence sped through the pinholes of reality, temporarily gaining a vantage point above a normal man’s.

No, he told himself. He had to do this the old-fashioned way. There was no way of telling if Ullikummis hadn’t had the ability to monitor the Totality Concept mat-trans units spread across the globe. Lakesh seemed wary of setting up shop, holing away in another redoubt, as well, preferring to go on the run with the utilization of the interphasers to hop away to a parallax point and literally shut the dimensional door behind them. While the Annunaki had proved to have the capability of making such journeys themselves with artifacts called thresholds, the means of tracing and locating such departures and entries was arcane and difficult.

Kane set his jaw firmly. He traveled on foot, or by boat, and made certain that he was seen and recognized in the sleek, black shadow suit that had become the badge of the Cerberus redoubt rebels. People might not have heard the whispers, but their descriptions of him and Grant would reach the ears of those who knew, and the hunt would be on.

The trouble with this plan was that the fury he’d bring down on himself might be that of the New Order, or it could be another set of foes such as the Millennial Consortium or one of the surviving Annunaki overlords who had been forced to do without the awesome resources of the living dragon ship Tiamat. One of those snake-faced assholes would prove just as deadly as Ullikummis and his followers, and the interference of these self-proclaimed gods across the breadth of human prehistory meant that anywhere in the world could be a hideout, a niche, a hidden tomb that held a treasure trove of extraterrestrial technology simply waiting to unleash itself upon an unsuspecting world.

“Hey! Ground control to Major Tom, come in,” came a harsh whisper, cutting through Kane’s musings as they glided through the still waters of the cypress swamp.

Kane blinked, looking back at Grant, an eyebrow raised quizzically in response to the odd way his friend had drawn his attention.

“It’s an old prenukecaust song I dug out for some meditation music,” Grant said. “Seemed appropriate since you looked like you were off in space, or even farther away.”

“Sorry. What did you want?” Kane asked.

“You just looked like you were in a daze,” Grant explained. “I know you’re worried about Brigid…”

“I’m keeping my eyes and ears peeled. I can brood and keep watch at the same time,” Kane answered with an annoyed grunt.

“I was just going to say we’ll find her. We’ve been split up before, and we’ll be back together before you know it,” Grant said. “And once we do, no pebble-faced chunk of dried shit is going to last long.”

Kane squeezed his eyes shut. “You’re the optimist and I’m the grumpy ass?”

“You said it, not me,” Grant replied. “Licky may have turned us upside down, but shit is still in balance.”

Kane scratched his cheek just below his eye. It felt stiff, and had the annoying sensation of a splinter stuck inside. He had tried to get it out with a needle, but it must have just been an illusion, a deep scar that had settled in and turned into a slender thread of gray. “Keep cheering me up, Grant.”

“Keep bitching,” Grant answered. “If we could get Rosalia or that damn dog to spout useless trivia, things would almost feel normal.”

Kane hadn’t broken his rhythmic rowing of the canoe they were in, despite deep thought or conversation with his friend. He glanced forward and looked at the sandy-furred half-breed dog, its dark eyes meeting his, curiosity reflecting in them.

“Maybe he is making small talk about trivia,” Kane said. “We just don’t understand dog. And don’t forget, Baptiste’s trivia was never useless.”

Grant nodded.

The dog continued to concentrate his gaze on Kane’s troubled features. He knew that he had been described as wolflike before, his musculature sharing the lean, sleek lines of the pack hunter, and his senses equally as keen as any canine. However, if there was any common ground between man and beast, Kane couldn’t make heads or tails from it, except that the dog showed sympathy.

As if on cue with that recognition, the dog lifted its paw and rested it on Kane’s knee, taking on an almost noble bearing before turning its attention off in the distance.

“What is it?” Kane asked.

The dog turned its whole body, its nose acting like an arrow directing Kane’s eyes toward a ribbon of water that moved off the main river they were on, rolling toward the shore of a hardwood hammock. He flattened his oar in the water, providing a braking force for the boat.

Grant made an annoyed groan as his friend worked against his progress, but that died off as he followed Kane’s gaze. “What?”

“Dog must have heard or smelled something,” Kane said.

Rosalia looked over her shoulder, disbelief coloring her gaze. “Like he knows something’s happening? It could be a squirrel.”

Kane squinted, silencing her with a raised finger.

“Magistrate Man, you don’t shut me up like—”

Kane turned and glared at her. “Quiet, damn it.”

Rosalia’s mouth closed, lips pressed together tight until her mouth was a thin, bloodless scar on her face.

Grant knew that Kane’s senses were nearly preternatural, and if he was trying to focus on something that Grant himself couldn’t hear or see, then he would follow the point man’s lead.

The silence folded in around them, weighing in as heavily as the humidity and the stench of mold around them. Kane knew something was wrong as the normal lively sounds of the swamp, the chirp of crickets and the warble of birds, had suddenly fallen away. The quiet lasted only a moment before a scream, faint and weak, but still a woman’s scream, reached his sharp ears. Even as he heard it, he noticed that Rosalia’s dog had perked up even more. It turned its big, dark eyes toward the former Magistrate, as if to say, “You heard that, right?”

“Trouble. Let’s go,” Kane announced, and he and Grant put their backs into it, turning the boat and pushing it down the waterway. The only sound they made was the slap and suck of their oars in the murky swamp water.

SUWANEE’S BLACK MANE of silky hair flew as the open hand cracked across her smooth, dark cheek. She struggled to maintain her balance on the uneven ground between the long leaf pines and tumbled down into the wiregrass. Her face throbbed from the force of the impact, and the Seminole woman had one thought—that she was lucky to have been slapped rather than punched. A closed fist would surely have shattered her facial bones and left her unconscious and helpless.

Suwanee dug her fingers into the wiregrass, using it as handles to pull herself up to her knees, but gnarled fingers reached down, snarling in her thick, ebony hair. She was going to scream again in protest, but a firm yank tugged hard on her scalp, follicles popping out at the roots, but most of it holding on as she was jerked to standing on her knees. She looked toward what would have been her tormentor’s face, but it was cloaked in shadow by the droop of his hood’s cowl. She couldn’t even see the glint of what she imagined were the cruel, merciless eyes of the man who handled her so roughly.

Though her head was held still by the leverage of her own hair, Suwanee could see the others around her, some obscured by the trunks of the pines, but most of them in a position like hers, cowed to their knees. She took a breath to release another scream, but fingers wrapped around her throat.

The snarl of her hair eased, and the man raised a finger to his shadowed lips, a universal signal for silence. Suwanee swallowed, wishing she could make out the features of the man holding her just tightly enough to keep her still, giving her windpipe plenty of room to suck down air.

“Please, no,” she whispered.

The shadow-faced man was not the only one of his hooded kind, and they appeared to be all sizes and skin color. Some of the strange marauders seemed to be women, as well, but none of them spoke, communicating only in hand signals at best, in violence at worst. Suwanee and the other refugees of the Appalachia River Basin had heard of these silent travelers, and how their numbers increased. Where they had first come as stalkers and thieves, making off with the young, unprotected or unwary, their numbers had increased so that few left their guarded communities without sufficient numbers. Somewhere in the muddy waters just off the shore of the hammock lay Suwanee’s weapon, a crudely made single-action revolver cobbled together from parts and what metal scrap the panhandle gunsmiths could accumulate.

Even if she had the gun, Suwanee wasn’t a combatant. Sure, she could hit a tin can resting on a log, but that wasn’t a person, and it wasn’t moving and trying to capture her. The Seminole refugee’s only saving grace was that these hooded men were not armed with guns and weren’t trying to kill them.

Suwanee didn’t want to think of what would happen if they succeeded in this capture.

The hooded attacker froze, his fingers still clutched around her throat, but he was involuntarily squeezing. Something was upsetting him and drawing his attention away from her.

Craning her head, the young woman saw a canoe moving with remarkable speed toward the shore. She lifted one hand, clawing the air in an effort to summon the people on board. The right thing would have been to warn them, to wave them off, but the trio of people in the scull were paddling with all of their might.

A strange, unnatural keening issued from the cavernous shadows of her captor’s hood, and it pointed an accusing finger at the people in the boat. Suwanee sucked in air as it released the death grip on her throat, and she collapsed onto the wiregrass, vision blurred from those fingers closing off the flow of blood to her brain. Suwanee wanted to scrounge for the knife she kept in her belt, a tool that she’d used to crack open shellfish or to clean fish, but the pain of the would-be strangle left her weakened, both hands clutching at the bruised flesh around her windpipe. All she could do was watch, brown eyes blinking to clear her sight as the scull splashed closer and closer.

She thought of the noise the raider made. Such an inhuman cry, issued from beneath the cowl, was not a good sign, either of the marauders’ intent or their origins. Things had been bad already, and it was likely that they were going to get worse.

A sandy-colored bolt shot from the boat, followed by a tall man who moved nearly as swiftly as the dog. Suwanee was about to utter another croak, warning the tall rescuer, telling him of the incredible strength these hooded fiends possessed. But then she saw the flex of his muscles beneath black skin-conforming fabric and the folded weapon on his right forearm. Dread landed in her gut as she recognized the legendary Magistrate’s weapon, the badge of office each of the grim, faceless lawmen wore. The black bodysuit he wore was unlike the shining, polycarbonate shell armor that the Mags were also famous for, but it was still the same fearsome dark shade of brutal authority as the official Mag armor.

Knives suddenly flashed from sheaths and the ring of naked steel being drawn was resounding. Curved, mirror-polished blades sprang quickly into view and the cowled kidnappers moved swiftly, taking cover behind tree trunks, as if they could anticipate the need to avoid the deadly weaponry the Magistrate carried. Suwanee struggled to roll over onto her stomach, to pull herself to her hands and knees to get away from the two warring factions.

In a battle between the Magistrates and these hooded thugs, Suwanee knew that she and her fellow refugees would only be the losers, no matter who won.

She’d rolled onto her side, still gasping for breath, when her assailant gave her a hard kick in the shoulder, knocking her flat on her back. He pointed a gnarled finger at her, and this time she could see the merciless glint of hatred reflecting on the shadow-faced man’s eyeballs.

Then the gunfire began, and the world above her turned into a maelstrom of violence and terror.

Chapter 5

One thing that Kane had learned long ago was that his instincts were generally reliable. If there was a situation he stumbled upon, it was likely that the winning side tended to be the bad guys, especially when they were picking on women and frail old men. His shoulders wrenched and rippled with the effort of pushing the boat through the murky swamp water, his sharp, cold blue eyes locked on the struggle where he could definitely see that the group of attackers, though unarmed, wore a singular uniform hood that identified them as a cohesive force.

That was another thing the former Magistrate had learned. If a group had a uniform, they tended to be up to no good. He remembered his days when he wore the polycarbonate, bullet-resistant shell and merciless grim helmet as a Mag, and he recalled the things that he was not proud of doing under orders. There was the possibility that these men might not have been in control of themselves, perhaps even blackmailed into attacking others while their loved ones remained back home under threat, and Kane’s instincts buzzed with the possibility. It could have been wishful thinking, or it could have simply been colored by his recent encounter with Ullikummis’s minions and the familiarity he had with the mind control the Annunaki prince exerted over the New Order. He was about to leap from the boat, muscles steel-spring taut, when the scull coasted to within yards of the tiny islet’s shore.

Rosalia’s dog exploded into action first, its four legs and lighter mass giving it the advantage of clearing the still waters in a single bound, but Kane wasn’t far behind, determined not to let inaction be the cause of more lost lives. One of the hooded freaks pointed at him and an odd, strangled squeal, like a train engine skidding off the rails, assaulted his ears. All of the strangers drew sharp knives, as if they were possessed of a single consciousness.

That wasn’t good, nor was it good that each of these knife-wielding men had disappeared behind the trunks of nearby trees. As Kane landed on the shore from his initial leap, he let his knees buckle, reducing the shock of his impact on his body. Momentum kept him plunging forward, and he extended his legs, taking long strides. The Sin Eater was in his hand, launched there by a tensing of his forearm, ready to punch out twenty powerful slugs.

However, it was not going to be that easy. There were innocent bystanders in the mix, the very reason he’d bolted from the scull in the first place. One wrong shot, and a bullet could tear through one of the hooded men and kill a person he’d intended to rescue. Restraint was what he needed, which was part of why he was heading into the midst of the knife-armed killers.

Kane was putting himself at risk, making himself a tasty target for these faceless marauders so that they would ignore the refugees who’d been strewed around. In close, there was also the possibility that Kane could take a prisoner, bring down one with a minimum of violence, so that he could get answers. It was triple damned hard to have a corpse respond to your questions, though in some instances, it wasn’t impossible.

As he closed with the group, he saw Rosalia’s dog veer off and launch itself. While the animal might have been part coyote, it had the heart of a wolf, leaping at a knife-wielding stranger, fangs bared. Kane skidded to a halt, his point man’s instinct alerting him to the sudden swish of a mirrored ribbon of steel arcing through the air toward his face. The deep, sharp edge of the enemy blade came close enough to brush Kane’s semilong hair, a faint tug accompanied by the flutter of snipped locks hanging in front of his eyes. Had Kane not stopped, he’d have easily been blinded as the knife lashed across his eyes, if not killed outright.

Kane whipped his fist up hard, driving the protruded middle knuckle hard against the elbow of the hooded blade man. There was a dull crunch, and nerveless fingers released the handle of the fighting blade. Kane pressed his momentary advantage, lashing the tough frame of his Sin Eater against his opponent’s ribs. Again there was the subdued sound of bones breaking beneath muscle and skin, but this time there was no obvious reaction to his impact.

In the brief instant Kane evaluated the situation, mind locking onto his observations and sorting the data out as fast as any computer. There was little way that a hand could maintain a grip with the dislocation of the elbow joint, the strings of muscles leading through the arm veering wide and losing the tension that operated the fingers. A bone-fracturing blow to the ribs, however, might have produced a hard exhalation, but with the sheets of muscle surrounding the spine and the torso, it wouldn’t be that severe a skeletal trauma.

The man Kane was fighting hadn’t even breathed hard under the hammering force of his Sin Eater’s frame, which meant that something was blocking his nervous system. Someone with a normal working sense of touch would have been bowled over by the kind of searing pain produced by fractured ribs. The hooded man brought his other fist around, swinging for the center of Kane’s face.

A swift block with his forearm deflected the momentum of his enemy’s punch, but Kane was unable to make a countermove against the first man. Others had rushed to get behind him, and they hadn’t lost their knives in the brief first contact. Kane twisted as fast as he could, avoiding the stinging touch of one blade point but feeling the shadow suit blunt the impact of another tip. The shadow suits were capable of providing protection from knives, as well as giving the Cerberus warriors a self-contained environment as they traveled the deserts and arctic wastes of the Earth. But armor-piercing ammo would easily cut through the shadow suits and Kane was glad to note that the relatively blunt blade wielded by his assailant wasn’t keen enough to carve between the high-tech material. As it was, Kane felt himself pushed by the sheer strength of the knife man, literally lifted off his feet. If it hadn’t been for the reactive nature of his armor, Kane could easily see himself nursing his own set of broken ribs. As it was, the Cerberus rebel crashed against the trunk of a nearby pine.

“Just shoot the fuckers!” Rosalia snapped as she lifted her pistol.

Grant was out of the boat himself, as well, having picked up a four-foot length of log and using it as an improvised shield against a group of the hooded assailants and their blood-thirsting knives. The edges chopped sections of bark off the thick log, but Grant retreated one step and used the space to heave the chunk of wood at the trio of blade men.

They couldn’t get out of the way of Grant’s missile and were bowled to the ground in a tangle of limbs in the wiregrass. Another of the hooded raiders lunged into view toward the big man, but then Kane’s attention was back in the battle.

Utilizing his Sin Eater as a club, he lashed the barrel of his machine pistol across the jaw of the man who’d stabbed him with such force. There was too much strength in that man to show mercy, but Kane reminded himself that he’d come here as much to investigate the strangeness of this river basin as to lead Ullikummis’s forces on a merry chase. Steel met flesh-wrapped bone and snapped the mandible with a loud, ugly pop. The blow was enough to send his opponent reeling, and Kane turned his attention to the knife man who’d only barely missed him.

Kane brought up his forearm, wrist striking wrist and altering the path of the hooded attacker’s second stab, pushing the wicked point away from his body. The shadow suit had proved enough against one stabbing, but this time the attacker was instinctively aiming for Kane’s face. The thought of a moment before, that this group acted as one, returned even as Kane brought down the butt of his pistol on the side of the man’s neck. There was the crunch of a dislocating shoulder and collarbone, which could be relied upon to drop most men into a puddle of blinding pain.

This chop of the Sin Eater’s butt was loud and nasty, but it hadn’t even dented the determination of his foe. Sure, the hooded attacker’s arm hung limp and numb, knife lost from the failure of his good hand, but the man brought up his fingers, curled like claws, reaching for Kane’s face—his eyes in particular. Kane drove his knee into his foe’s stomach, but it was like trying to kick a tree trunk. No fetid breath exploded from emptied lungs, and there was no stoop in posture from the folding impact. The only thing that Kane had achieved was that the clawing fingertips raked empty air rather than sink into his sockets.

Gunfire boomed, and Kane knew that Rosalia wasn’t showing the same form of restraint that he was. Grant, however, held his fire, once more following Kane’s lead, trusting instincts that had pulled them through countless conflicts and dangers mostly unharmed.

A hooded man hurtled through the air, landing on Kane’s initial opponent. The two bodies crashed into each other, then tumbled through the knee-high, sharp-bladed grass that struggled for survival amid the long leaf pines. Kane knew that Grant had anticipated the sudden, brutal ambush, and used the only weapon he had on hand, one of the hooded cultists themselves. Would such a flying impact be enough to put one of these freaks down for the count?

Kane wasn’t certain, but he stopped holding back. A swift spike of the toe of his boot snapped the knee of his current foe, taking away his ability to stand. Kane sank his fingers into the man’s forearm and twisted, dislocating his shoulder. He brought up his knee again, and he felt it impact against a squishy mass along the side of the man’s head under the hood. There was a shrill keening, an ear-splitting note that locked the attention of all involved in the sudden melee.

The man Kane had kicked in the head let out a strangled stream of gibberish, fingers clawing at the wiregrass in an effort to pull himself through the sudden wave of agony that had spawned his wild, high-pitched howl. Kane shot a glance toward Grant, the larger man instantly understanding his partner’s intent.

Grant balled one of his mighty fists and sent it crashing against the side of another hood. Once more, the shrill wail filled the air, but one more of the faceless raiders was struggling on his knees, felled by the precise blow.

Rosalia, on the other hand, emptied an entire magazine from her pistol into the chest of her opponent, bullets striking the marauder’s chest, seemingly without effect. Out of frustration, the olive-skinned beauty smacked her attacker in the head with the frame of her weapon. It wasn’t as hard as the concentrated knockout blows that Kane and Grant had utilized, but it was more than enough to cause her foe enough discomfort to toss her onto her back and run through the trees, clutching his head as he fled.

The other knife-wielding, hooded men, even the one whose jaw Kane had broken, scrambled away from the trio. Their flight was sudden, and they speared into the surrounding forest before fading away among the trunks like they were ghosts.

Rosalia looked at Kane and Grant, a question burning behind her eyes, yet her lips were unable to translate it to speech. Finally she gave up her struggle and just blurted, “What the hell?”

“That’s my question, too,” Grant said. “What kept you from shooting the hoodies?”

“We’re already behind the curve without Baptiste to evaluate what we’re running into,” Kane answered. “Damned if I’m not going to get a look at why these freaks are covering their heads.”

“Only the two you and Grant hit in the head stayed behind. Everyone else was in full retreat,” Rosalia said, looking around. “That and the people they were bullying.”

A young, pretty woman, a local American Indian by Kane’s quick assessment, sat up, the bright flash of steel in her hand, anger and rage in her dark eyes.

“We’re not going back to the villes, Mags!” she blurted, pointing her knife at Kane.

One or two of the others, an old man with forearms so slender they looked like bones wrapped in sagging cloth and a chubby woman, also wielded their utility knives as if to ward off the trio.

“The villes are history,” Grant replied, loud enough that he could be heard for hundreds of yards, a booming clarion call that, by all rights, should have defused the situation. But the Indians only looked more confused by the giant’s statement.

“What are you doing here then, Magistrates?” Kane’s new “friend” asked, her knife never wavering from him.

“Saving your fused-out asses,” Kane growled in reply. “I’m Kane, he’s Grant. The baronies collapsed when the freaks in charge…quit.”

Trying to explain the situation to these people would have been difficult enough without bringing in the concept of aliens who had manipulated humankind from the dawn of history through the atmospherescorching apocalypse known as the nukecaust. Though Kane had encountered both pan-and extraterrestrial opponents since his first jolt of rebellion exiled him to the Cerberus redoubt, there were times when even he wondered if he simply hadn’t gone insane when dealing with entities such as the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Dannaan, that everything he had encountered was the delusion of a drooling maniac tied up in some dungeon cell. The simplest explanation would be the best answer for now.

“Heard of you two,” the chubby woman said. She pushed in the lock on her knife, folding the blade away into its handle, then pocketing it in her jeans. “The Mags want their asses as much as they want to stifle us, Sue.”

Kane turned and looked back at the woman she’d addressed. “Sue?”

“Suwanee,” the Indian girl replied with a sneer. “Great, so we know each others’ name. Now get the fuck out of here.”

“That’s no way to treat someone who fought the Hooded Ones,” the walking skeleton interjected. He’d put his knife away, so now it was only Suwanee who kept her blade naked and held with hostile intent.

“Fuck off, Farting Gator,” Suwanee cursed. “Once a Mag, always…”

Kane was tired of seeing yet one more blade leveled at him menacingly. With a slap against the flat of the knife, he knocked the tool from the girl’s fingers, sending it crashing to the matted grass tromped beneath dozens of pairs of feet. Suwanee blinked in surprise at the suddenness of her disarmament, lips parted as her jaw fell slightly.

The Indian girl had a lot of fight in her, apparently, as she lunged to pick up her weapon. Kane grabbed her by the wrist and gave a hard yank, making her stand straight by levering her forearm to make her behave. He hated manhandling a woman, manhandling anyone, like that, but she seemed determined to put up a fight, and while it could have been easy to put a bullet into her or crush her jaw with a punch, he had come to save these people, not inflict more harm on them.

“Behave, idiot,” Kane said with a grimace. “I have a gun. If I wanted you dead, you’d have been cold meat the minute you waved that little piece of shit in my face. And you saw me fighting the hoods. You still have a hand attached to this arm. I’m being patient and nice to you, damn it.”

“Anyone fighting the villes got to be a good guy.” The chubby one spoke up. “I’m Hachi. The one she called Farting Gator…”

The old man chuckled at the reference, interrupting Hachi. “I’m Demothi. Just call me Dem.”

Kane nodded and shook the old man’s hand. As thin as he was, there was strength in his grip and his brown eyes were undimmed by age. “If I remember some of the vocabulary I learned from Sky Dog, that means ‘talks while walking.’ That’s a good idea.”

Demothi smiled. “Sometimes the oldest wisdom is the best. Gather your things and let’s roll.”

“What about the boat?” Rosalia asked.

“Shouldn’t take much to conceal it,” Grant replied. “I’ll be able to follow you.”

“By the way, her name’s Rosalia,” Kane added to Demothi.

“A pleasure, young lady,” the old man said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Rosalia replied, looking back nervously toward the boat. “I’m thinking you’re making friends a little too fast here, Magistrate Man.”

“I’d agree with you.” Suwanee spoke up, glaring at the olive-skinned woman. “But you’re the same as them.”

“Quiet, you two!” Kane bellowed. “We’ve got worse things to worry about than your petty little paranoia.”

“Like what?” Rosalia asked.

Kane pointed to one of the unconscious hooded men. He knelt and tore the man’s cowl back, revealing a dark, meshlike covering that, in the shadow of the hood, would render the upper part of his face above his lips completely invisible. It was a cheap effort that produced an unnerving effect, and Kane himself had experienced a momentary pause as he was dealing with the shadow-faced opponents. Only encounters with equally weird and terrifying opponents had given him the ability to act despite the distracting nature of their appearance.

“That doesn’t look right, even with that cloth over his head,” Demothi said.

Kane reached out, took a handful of the meshy sack and tore it off of the unconscious man. It was soaked through, which was strange as he had fallen on dry ground. But as he tugged, stringy mucus stretched between the fabric and gangrenous gray tumors that ringed his skull, the tumors themselves riddled with wires and circuits. The downed man wasn’t bleeding from his head trauma, but the crushed growths where he’d been struck were oozing translucent yellow pus that seeped into the grass under his head.

“What… Oh, God,” Suwanee began. She clamped her hand over her mouth, trying to fight off the urge to vomit, but failed, staggering to the base of a tree and emptying her stomach in an extended, noisy convulsion.

Rosalia looked at the fallen marauder and the gory mess that sloughed off his scalp. Whatever had grown there was quickly rotting, dead material collapsing into inky blue-green molasses and the wrinkled skin of spoiled apples. She glanced over toward the other unconscious man. “No wonder they cover their heads. What…”

Kane took the unconscious man’s pulse at his wrist, wisely avoiding any contact with the goo coming off his victim’s head. His upper lip curled in a sneer as he looked at Rosalia. “Check the pulse on the other guy.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“This one’s dead. That one might be dead, as well,” Kane mentioned.

“That’s one bit of good news,” Grant told him over the Commtact. “I’m strong, but hauling around unconscious men through a swamp wasn’t in my job description.”

Kane spoke softly, so that only his partner could hear over the mandible-mounted communicator. “You’ll never be my beast of burden?”

Grant snorted. “I see Brigid’s been educating you about the old music, as well.”

Kane sighed, frisking the corpse of the man, feeling for any more of the strange tumors or further signs of electronics implanted in his skin. There was nothing, but then, considering he wore a built-in communications device himself, he could make an educated guess as to the purpose of the wires and circuits embedded in his forehead and ringing his skull. He was just too cautious to want to touch even the disintegrating glop that slid off the dead man’s head. Who knew what it was and how contagious it could be.

There were only two people in the world whom Kane could have counted on to provide some explanation for the oddity in front of him.

One, Lakesh, was on a journey to what used to be the West Coast of the United States of America in the hope of finding something along the Pacific Ocean that would give them an edge over Ullikummis. The other, Brigid Baptiste, was missing, perhaps a prisoner and tortured by the very stone being they were being pursued by.

Kane looked at the corpse for a few moments more, the last of the tumorous growth dissolving and sliming off the dead man’s pate.

“Where are you, Baptiste?”

Chapter 6

Miles to the south of the hammock that Kane and his allies stood upon, a rusted old ship bobbed beyond the breakwater of the river delta. The reddish mottling and decay on the hull and the superstructure were a disguise, a sham propagated to lower the profile of the groaning craft. The master of this vessel, a being known as Orochi, looked through plastic sheeting that had been dimmed and silk-screened on one side to be impenetrable, resembling ancient glass, but provided him with a clear view of the waters and the shore.

Orochi was a tall man, and just for his height he would have been unusual for a Japanese, but the truth of the matter was that his resemblance to most humans went no further than the shape of his body and its ability to fit into a sleek black uniform with yellow trim. Orochi’s skin was a shimmering sheet of small, reptilian scales that flowed and flexed like silk. Bright yellow-green eyes shone from under a heavily scaled brow, whose thick octagonal plates formed a ridge where the short hairs of eyebrows would have been on a mammal. Across his upper lip, under a short, oddly human nose, was a similar line of lengthy, slender scales. They were stiff but hairlike, flowing in curving waves to droop over the corners of a wide, thin-lipped mouth, and on the chin, another nest of these thin, translucent scales dangled, giving him the appearance of a classic Southern gentleman with a blond Vandyke.

Orochi was of the Watatsumi, a race long exiled from the shattered ruins of their original home in what used to be the islands of Japan. There were thousands of islands that were the remnants of the island nation, smashed apart and shattered, akin to a plate dashed to the floor.

That was the appearance aboveground, where the sea had rushed in to fill the cracks between the remaining bits of land. There were people still in the archipelago aboveground, but the nuclear onslaught that formed skydark had been far more transformative than the survivors had ever expected. Beneath the surface the Watatsumi lived in an extensive system of tunnels and caves, empty lava tubes. They had remained hidden from humankind, nestled in the network they had called the Spine of the Dragon until the cataclysm happened. When the earthshaker nukes shook the very edge of the tectonic plate that Japan sat upon, things became much worse. Some of the lava tubes and caverns had been closed off for millennia, so that the humanoid reptilians didn’t have remaining records of their existence. Shattered walls of heavy obsidian glass formed doorways to a primeval forest below even the Wyvern’s realm, a jungle filled with monstrosities not seen since millions of years before man walked the Earth.

Things were not completely fine, Orochi knew. There was a reason why he’d been sent to the other side of the globe to seek out a spot to engage in experimentation. The Watatsumi were in need of some way to control monsters that had shared their caves. Only the discovery of the piggybackers here in the bay that used to be known as Gulf Breeze gave them an idea, an opportunity by which they could tame the massive and powerful reptiles who shared their home.

Orochi frowned as he heard the buzzing alert from the ship’s comm station. “What is it now?”

Kondo, a younger member of the crew, turned from his console, looking upon the group leader with a momentary reverence, a sign of unwavering respect that had been instilled in all of the Wyvern’s military since the day they were old enough to be called grown. “Captain, we lost contact with two of the drone units who were acquiring new conversion subjects.”

“Confirmed loss of contact?” Orochi asked, striding toward the young officer.

“Absolutely,” Kondo replied. “Electronics damaged. A third had been struck, but its neural net is still working, though transmission is spotty.”

Orochi’s chartreuse eyes narrowed as he looked at the screen.

“The moment we started experiencing malfunctions, we called them back,” Kondo said.

“Good,” Orochi said, looking at the monitor, distracted from his subordinate’s reassurances. He wasn’t the kind of man to take a sudden change in luck lightly. Someone, after a year of experimentation, had figured out something about their hooded minions.

“I want you to activate a pod of gators,” Orochi said. “Set them after the group the men had difficulty with.”

Kondo looked up at his commander. “We’re still not sure if we can keep the alligators under control if we set them into action.”

“Well, that’s the whole damned point of this journey. If the parasite works well enough for us to remotely control crocodilians, then we can turn around and go home,” Orochi countered.

The officer nodded.

Orochi stood back from the console. He was under orders from the Watatsumi high command to utilize the secrets of the Gulf Breeze discoveries to combat the monsters from below the Dragon’s Spine, but he also had a second mission, one that he had managed to expand. Under the guise of influencing more complex mammalian brains, testing the limits of the electronically influenced parasites, he’d grown an army of specimen retrievers.

Separated from home by thousands of miles, half the surface of the Earth, in fact, Orochi had free reign to alter paradigms, something made easier by recruiting scientists and officers who were true to the cause. The surface of the Earth had been denied to the Watatsumi for too long.

The parasitic entity would be their key to ruling the surface of this scarred, tumultuous world again.

THE CAJUN HEARD THE sound of gunfire in the distance, then looked back at the people who had hired him. Agrippine was not someone who relished the idea of venturing into these swamps, thanks to the disappearances of the past few months. But when the New Order’s missionaries arrived, bearing payment and a bounty for the heads of two people in particular, both of them former Magistrates, he wasn’t going to let easy money get away from him.

The woman who was in charge, a strange figure who was tall, despite the cloak that reached up over the top of her head, shadowing half of her face, seemed as if she knew the sound.

“Sounds like we’re close,” Agrippine said.

The woman nodded. She didn’t speak much. Indeed, she had simply laid down a bag of coins and photographs of the two targets and said, “You will get the rest when they are mine.”

Since then, she’d remained silent. Agrippine didn’t mind, especially since she kept to herself, staying out of the way as the motor launch crawled down the river. She hadn’t come alone, but the rest of the New Order minions with her were both talkative and cooperative when it came to running his ship. In return, Agrippine had been given the money to stock up on weapons so that he could equip them to aid him in the hunt for Kane and Grant.

She looked over the weapons, examining them as if she was investigating an ancient, outdated artifact, her shadowed face expressionless as her fingers went along the surfaces of the guns.

“Do they meet with your approval?” Agrippine asked.

She looked up from the rifle in her hands, then extended it, butt first, so he could take it from her. She stayed quiet.

This was a matter for employees, not her, Agrippine surmised from her reaction.

“Mistress, should we move in?” one of the New Order’s expedition asked.

She lifted her hand, halting any further discussion.

Whoever this woman was, she had authority enough to silence a man easily one hundred pounds heavier and larger than she was. Her focus was on the distance, lips shut, breathing easily.

She turned to Agrippine, and for the first time in a week, she spoke.

“This is where I take my leave,” she said. “Grogan is in charge.”

Agrippine looked at the big man who had asked to be loosed upon the source of the gunfire. Grogan, aside from being much heavier than the woman, was tall and carved from lean, long muscle. He was formidable, and had been much more talkative than the woman, though he continued to defer to her leadership.

“Right,” Agrippine said. “And what will you be doing?”

“That is not your concern,” she replied coldly. She had a satchel with her that she picked up, swinging it over one slender but muscular shoulder. “Your concern is earning the rest of your money. Fail, Grogan kills you. Succeed, Grogan pays you.”

“What if Grogan dies?” Agrippine asked, casting a sideways glance toward the man.

“I selected him for this task. He will not fail,” she said. It was if her proclamations were etched into stone. No inflection of doubt haunted any of her words. She nodded to one of the New Order crewmen, who extended a plank toward the shore.

“Where are you going now?” Agrippine asked.

“I have a task to attend to elsewhere,” she answered.

“Where?” Agrippine pressed.

Green eyes flashed in the shadows of her hood. Her mouth turned down into a frown, then she took a cleansing breath. “If you insist on knowing, then I am off to Africa.”

Agrippine tilted his head. “What?”

She strode down the gangplank, moving with grace and balance, her satchel seeming to glow with a brighter intensity.

“Africa? That’s across an ocean!” Agrippine shouted.

The woman turned and pointed to Grogan, who rested a large, muscular hand on the Cajun’s shoulder.

“Do not shout. You may be heard,” Grogan explained.

“But…how is she getting there?”

There was a flicker of light out of the corner of his eye, and when Agrippine turned his head to identify the flash, he noticed that the woman was gone.

“She has her ways,” Grogan answered. “She is beloved of Ullikummis, and her gifts are endless.”

“What…what the hell?” Agrippine asked.

“Mistress Haight is on her way,” Grogan said. “We should be on ours.”

Agrippine turned, wondering just where Brigid Haight really was going and how she’d disappeared so fast. If he’d known of Annunaki technology, and the gemlike threshold she’d carried in her satchel, his understanding might have been more complete, but as it was, there was no way he could even imagine that she possessed the means of opening up holes in space-time and projecting herself through them with but a thought.

Brigid Haight’s caress activated the alien artifact, itself a weapon that made even the assault rifles that Agrippine had supplied seem like mere sharpened twigs by comparison.

And then, if Agrippine was aware of such power, such advanced means of matter transmission, he would have wondered why he and his guns were needed in the first place.

Haight had her reasoning and purpose.

It was for neither he nor Grogan to know.

THE REFUGEE CAMP WAS quiet, which unnerved Grant slightly. Even in the depths of the Tartarus Pits, the slums that nestled in the shadow of the barony of Cobaltville, there was usually the chatter of laughter, pipings of music, a constant drone of conversation amid the squalor and everyday struggle for life.

Grant towered over the people who had populated the camp. Young and poorly fed, dark eyes tracking his every step, children stopped their chores to watch him closely.

Grant was something that people didn’t see every day. Well over six feet tall, with a powerful body crammed into a suit made of skintight space-age polymers, he was an impressive sight. His skin was dark, being an African American, but his tone was even deeper than the sunburned flesh of the people who lived in the wiregrass region. The people here were a mix of ethnicities, ranging from Caucasian to American Indian, and all of them had been sun-roasted to a similar bronzed hue several shades lighter than Grant’s.

It was the size, the easy power that he carried in his stride, that attracted the most attention. His own attention was drawn to the fact that he saw very few men.

Demothi had said that the raiders had been persistent in attacking this particular camp, stealing away with the few men who had managed to escape the initial harvests by the Hooded Ones. Seeing the makeup of the population of the camp was still a surprise to Grant.

Close to three hundred people were present. The raiders didn’t seem to be interested in women, which was unusual. In his dealings with pirates and bandits, Grant had never known them to pass up the chance to take females into captivity. If they couldn’t be used for easy sexual gratification, they were often easy to cow into servitude, made to do the chores that the cold-bloods felt were beneath their interests.

Suwanee had been quiet as they walked along, her face drooped in sullen shadow. She’d only looked up to navigate particularly soft and spongy terrain, struggling to keep her balance like the rest of them. Grant had attributed that to her distrust of the newcomers among them—himself, Kane and Rosalia—but with the gender imbalance in the camp, he was starting to understand the anger seething just below her surface.

The people here were quiet, focusing on menial tasks out of the need to distract themselves from the losses in their families. Grant could figure why Kane had been astute enough to restrain himself from opening fire on the Hooded Ones. Between the disgusting growths and the electronics attached to their heads, the men they had battled were more drones and victims than actual villains. Something was spreading an infestation among the men, creating an army that would be under long-distance control. The electronics had to be operated by cybernetic impulse, the growths some form of parasite that had either hallucinogenic or will-numbing excretion.

Grant rubbed his brow. “You’ve been hanging around Brigid too much.”

Kane paused, looking over his shoulder at his friend. “Thinking about what’s happening to this camp?”

“It’s like she’s still here with us,” Grant answered. “I can almost hear her talking about mind-control secretions.”

“You’d almost think we were capable of learning, eh?” Kane asked.

“We’d be damned fools if we didn’t. Other than that, this is pretty grim shit,” Grant said. “I don’t see a man who isn’t as healthy as Demothi around, unless we’re looking at 12 or under.”

“That’s what I made out, too,” Kane said. “About 300 here, we can see about another 150 men, given the adult women present?”

“One hundred and fifty men,” Grant murmured. “That’s a lot of people wearing those funky blobs.”

“An army,” Kane added. “Minus two, and they died because we damaged them.”

“I know that I was looking for a real knockout past those heavy hoods,” Grant said. “What about you?”

“I was tired of the guy I was fighting getting back up,” Kane said. “I wasn’t aiming to kill him, though.”

“The one Rosie shot, he took a chest full of bullets,” Grant added. “I don’t think he’ll last too long. He’ll bleed out but he didn’t die.”

Kane frowned. “Not right away, which means if they come at us in force, we’re going to need a lot of luck or head shots to put them down.”

“You’re talking about the freaks?” Rosalia asked.

Kane nodded. “Especially the one you tried to chill with a full magazine.”

“Still, you two did well enough dealing with them when you weren’t trying to leave them dead,” Rosalia replied. “We can’t say that they’re unstoppable.”

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