by James Axler
Sure enough, both grens erupted in unison with a good span between them. The implode grenades had a twenty-foot kill radius, at least in flat, open ground. With the multiple buildings of the stone crypts around, that perfect circle of devastation was interrupted. However, since the implode grenade operated on overpressure produced by a thermobaric explosion, the spaces between buildings would only provide actual protection several feet from each corner.
The duel blast rocked the air in the cavern, producing a tumultuous rumble that further dazed and stunned men in its area, even making Kane’s head hurt before the sound filters kicked in to protect his hearing.
That opening salvo took down eight members of the rogue African militia. Screams and gunshots filled the air as staggered soldiers fired at shadowy figures produced by the sudden shift in light as the torches on their weapons wavered, either tossed about by reflex or by reaction to sudden gunfire. Even as the militia were regathering their wits, Brigid popped up with a borrowed rifle and opened fire on two of the men who had rushed into her field of view. The weapon bucked against her shoulder, but she managed the recoil, focusing a stream of slugs into one of the marauders.
The man screamed as bullets sliced through him at a diagonal, smashing one shoulder and cutting down through his rib cage. The gunman collapsed, body ravaged by Brigid’s precision marksmanship, but his companion hurled himself behind cover, just a fraction of a second too swift for her to catch him, which impressed Kane. He would have almost felt respect for the man had it not been that he was part of a group that took other human beings as slaves and thought nothing of dragging them to where they would be tortured.
Any consideration of leniency went out the window, and as soon as the Panther popped up again to return fire against Brigid, Kane punched out a burst of automatic fire into his skull. The heavy slugs mashed the man’s head, deflating it with multiple hammer blow impacts.
Kane scanned around and looked for more enemy soldiers. He got the location of a group of them as Grant opened fire with his confiscated shotgun, plowing clouds of pellets down a walkway. Militiamen shouted as the big 12-gauge thundered, filling the air with a dozen .36-caliber balls per pull of the trigger. The land pirates shrieked, bodies torn and slashed by the sizzling clouds of lead. The huge, powerful Magistrate fired from the shoulder, aiming down the sights of the shotgun. Proper form, good trigger control and riding the recoil of the big gun helped Grant drop six more of the militiamen before he cleared that particular alley.
Kane took notice of another of the Panthers who was pulling the pin on a grenade in his kit. With seasoned reflexes and an intuitive knowledge of where his bullets would land, Kane put three bullets through the man’s chest. One of them took a short trip through his grenade-hand wrist to reach the grenadier’s internal organs. Already rapidly dying, the African let the miniature bomb tumble from lifeless fingers. There was a gurgle of others noticing the hand grenade landing at their feet, and they broke, seeking refuge elsewhere, scattering as quickly as their feet could carry them,
The trouble for the roving bandits was that the original grenade user had been cooking his grenade for a couple of seconds, usually a good strategy that kept other people from scooping up the fallen explosive and hurling it back toward them. However, his allies only had a second to notice that the bomb had dropped in their midst and another to run for cover. And there’d been only a second and a half remaining on the fuse. The detonation of the gren hurled out a wave of high-velocity shrapnel and intense pressure that crushed two militiamen immediately. Fragments whipped into other men, killing one more and injuring the remaining pair who were near the thrower. The blast would easily have killed Grant and Brigid if it had landed where the Panther had intended to drop it. Instead, it did most of the work for the three Cerberus explorers, taking more human predators and scavengers off the face of the earth.
With that group of murderers downed, Kane took a quick inventory of their opposition.
Twenty had come down, seeking to exterminate Neekra’s amorphous spawn. Their number was now only a quarter of that after only nearly a minute of contact. Even so, the gunmen had unknowingly come close to killing the three of them multiple times. All of this was mere prologue to what they would have to deal with when they got past the human murderers and had to deal with the post-human creatures.
“Movement coming down the corkscrew,” Brigid announced. Kane glanced up and saw that there were figures, more militiamen, coming down. But they moved with jerky gaits, as if they were becoming reacquainted with their limbs once more.
“Vampires,” Kane realized. “In the flesh, so to speak.”
“That much I presumed but didn’t want to state without confirmation,” Brigid returned. “How are they in human bodies?”
“They get quicker the more they get used to their skin,” Kane mentioned. “And sometimes they end up breaking their bodies trying too hard.”
“Trying too hard?” Grant asked.
“One kicked a marble column in half but shattered his leg,” Kane explained. “He was aiming for me, and I ducked out of the way avoiding incoming gunfire.”
“Shit,” Grant murmured. “So they’ll mistake the effort necessary to bludgeon us.”
“If they’re coming for us,” Brigid said. “Neekra seemed determined that Kane is one of her keys to freedom.”
“Kane is safe. What about the two of us?” Grant asked. He rapidly fed fresh shells into his spent shotgun in the dead time between scattered militiamen and the arrival of the vampires.
“If anything will guarantee me chasing down Neekra, it’ll be harm to either of you,” Kane grumbled. “We can destroy these things. But it’ll take a lot of power.”
“I dissipated one with a grenade blast and forced others to retreat in pain, but that was while they were without human bodies to manipulate,” Brigid mentioned. “The second blast also splintered a tree, however, and the flying wood may have done most of the work.”
“A knife or wooden stake through the chest or head will do the work necessary,” Kane told them. He reached into his pouch and produced a couple of stakes, tossing them to Brigid. “Decapitation with normal bullets also makes them leave their bodies. Who knows what a machete slice will do, but it can’t hurt.”
Grant nodded. The swordlike length of steel hanging in his improvised belt sheath would be called on to do its deadly work. But for now...“We’ll see how a blast of buckshot does to those interior organs for the time being. Their bodies are still human and will still fall to pieces, right?”
Kane nodded.
The reanimated corpses reached the bottom of the corkscrew. Even as they gathered, standing shoulder to shoulder with each other, their rubbery brethren began to appear from cracks and holes blasted in the crypts where they’d hidden.
“Here they come,” Brigid announced.
Kane handed her a gren. “We soften them up.”
She nodded, watching the others from the corner of her eye as she steeled herself to make her own throw.
But the vampire army didn’t advance toward the explorers from Cerberus. They were also armed, each with rifle in hand, standing as silent, grim sentinels.
“Why aren’t they making any move?” Grant asked.
Brigid narrowed her eyes behind her hood’s faceplate. “They’re keeping us penned up. Away from Neekra and Durga.”
Kane sneered, then activated his Commtact. “Durga, come in.”
“If he’s pulling something sneaky, why—” Grant began before it clicked with the big man. “Damn it, Durga thought he was putting something over on Neekra, but she outthought him.”
“Come on,” Kane murmured. There was nothing on the other end of the line, so whatever was going on, Durga hadn’t left his communicator on. Where once he was irate over the fact that an enemy could listen in, now he was frustrated that Durga had
killed the signal, preventing Kane from warning the fallen prince of the trap he’d stumbled into.
“He has been our enemy, tried to kill us,” Brigid noted. “Should we risk it for his sake?”
“His sake doesn’t matter to me,” Kane growled. “But his scheme was to try to bring down Neekra, or at least slow her down. And if that plan goes to hell, we might not get another chance to take her down, at least not before she’s truly awakened.”
“So we have to determine what she would be looking for that she could only find with Dur...”
Kane didn’t need to know why Brigid Baptiste’s speech trailed off. The woman’s brain worked at lightning speed, and she must have come up with a correlation that explained why Neekra had allowed herself to be trapped with the devious Nagah prince who plotted to destroy her.
“She wants his threshold,” Brigid spoke up. “That’s why she came down here, to look for a means to get to her tomb immediately...”
Kane’s eyes widened. “Blow them up.”
Grant didn’t have to be told twice. He started the volley of grenades, and Kane and Brigid swiftly followed suit.
Chapter 23
Durga walked briskly. He kept his thoughts hidden, but he was fully aware that Neekra’s psychic powers were vast and insidious. Any secret he held within would eventually come to light, either through his own weakness or through penetrating the minds of others he was conspiring with.
He concentrated, though. Neekra walked apace with him as they traveled deeper, down an offshoot of the ancient necropolis. This underground city of the dead had been built by others she’d conquered, much as she’d overtaken Gamal’s body, constructing a base from which to spread out, strike at outposts of the Archons and those whom the caretakers of humanity organized to protect her prison.
A prison that, frustrating to her, she couldn’t find on earth. She knew that there was some place in Africa where her psyche could be generated, but her body was separate. She couldn’t locate it with any more precision than in the continent of Africa.
When she’d found a mind she could piggyback on, she’d searched high and low, seeking out some key, some clue that would bring her back together with her body. The trouble was finding someone who had the ambition to seek out Neekra herself as a bride and the ruthlessness to seek her power. There had been those who had tried, who had the strength of will to be with her, like Gamal, but then there were minds that simply shredded, unraveling the moment she moved in, stranding her in nothing more than a decayed form until some other human stumbled on her.
Durga knew that he was on exceedingly thin ice working next to Neekra. She’d sired horrors whose exploits traversed the planet. Not a single mythology, not even the Vedas of ancient India, was without tales of vampires. Indeed, even the worst of the demons in the Brahmic pantheon, Kali herself, the darkness within Siva the Destroyer, was also that pantheon’s greatest enemy of vampires, destroying them as a service to the world, even the universe. That his home nation’s concept of the devil and the angel of death rolled up in one package was that which Neekra created told Durga that she needed to be stopped.
And she could be.
At least for another century, maybe even more.
This was why he led her deeper into the underground caverns.
He could hear the battle above and behind him. Sure enough, Kane, Grant and Brigid Baptiste were engaging the Panthers of Mashona, doing what they did best—fighting those who would do harm to mankind for the sake of personal profit. Durga had ended up on the wrong side of that battle once, and even gifted with the power to absorb matter and bolster his flesh with it, even with the strength of a god, he had been brought low and left a cripple by their efforts.
Durga knew he hadn’t really changed. He still wanted to carve out a kingdom for himself in this world. What was the use of having a kingdom when there was a menace like Neekra that was more than capable of ending all life on earth, or reducing the dominant species—mankind, Nagah included, Durga added reluctantly—to mere cattle? Neekra gave promises to her human paramours, but those were lies whispered on a pillow, seduction and enticements that would bring her to the thing she wanted. Once achieved, Durga would be food for her.
“We’re not far now from the back way,” Durga said, looking back over his shoulder to her. As he turned to speak to her, there was a sudden rush of wind, and the ground disappeared from beneath his feet.
Neekra hefted Durga up by his throat, slamming his back against the wall. “I was born in the eternal night of deep space, fool. Do not act as if I was born last night!”
The Nagah prince gasped, held in a grip of steel that pinned him to the wall, all his weight resting on his lower jaw. Even without his air being cut off by her iron fingers, Durga’s eyes felt like free-rolling marbles skittering in their orbits inside his skull.
“What...?” he managed to croak.
Neekra let him go, and Durga willed his feet to catch him, his legs to hold him up. Instead, he was prone on the ground, face and chest skidding on the hard-packed dirt.
“What do I mean, lover?” Neekra asked.
Durga winced. He could count the moments of his life dwindling away, falling through cracks and disappearing into the void. The goddess had figured him out. Now she gripped him by his right shoulder, nails stabbing through his scales as if they were soft pudding, blood oozing over her fingers and down his skin. Agonizing fire erupted in his shoulder as she hauled him up to his feet, his eyes level with hers, her aim hefting him as if he were nothing more than a child’s doll.
“Surely you would think that I already knew every inch of this necropolis, wouldn’t you?” Neekra asked.
Durga clenched his eyes shut. “Who said the back door out of here had to be literal?”
His throat was raw, raspy. Her fingers were meat hooks, and muscle fibers stretched as she hung him on them. Durga’s 180 pounds, focused on four talons lanced through his flesh, felt quadrupled. Searing signals from agonized nerves flushed through his consciousness.
“Oh, you intended to take us down here so you would access your threshold, which is notably absent,” Neekra said.
“It wouldn’t be an emergency getaway if I didn’t leave it somewhere with the motor running,” Durga said.
Neekra flicked her wrist, and Durga bounced on the balls of his feet. Tears seeped from behind his clenched eyelids, rivulets of salty pain racing in the patterns between his cheek scales.
“Someone teleports in, grabs us and takes us where?” Neekra asked. “Or would he just take you? Perhaps drop off a package that would collapse this tunnel atop me, stranding my consciousness in a withering form until someone was fool enough to burrow all the way down here, down to this distant chamber?”
She reached into his pocket, plucking out the radio he’d hidden there.
“Your ‘getaway driver’ on the threshold, he’d locate you using this piece of electronic flotsam?” Neekra asked. She flicked her wrist again.
Muscle fibers tore, skin split, scales popped loose. Durga crashed to the ground, landing on his back. He watched Neekra look over his communicator.
“It’s a handsome little device,” she noted. “And would actually be impressive if I didn’t know that it was connected to supercomputers in the belly of a redoubt by a string of satellites. Amazing communications, for someone who doesn’t have telepathy, who doesn’t have strings of proteins that can do the same thing without need for outside power, not even a cell battery.”
She popped the battery case cover off the communicator, plucked them out and inspected them. It looked like a preview of what she wanted to do to him. She tossed aside each battery, letting them plop in the dirt.
Neekra stepped closer, looming over him.
“You’ve been acting out all manner of violent fantasies with this body,” Neekra said. She
traced one toe across Durga’s chest.
The naked goddess’s sex was over him. Durga tried to remember that this was the gelded, mutilated body of a man whom she’d taken over and resculpted in her own image, but there it was, soft, smooth, inviting, atop full, sleek thighs that he knew tasted wonderful, brushed lightly over his tongue, warm and inviting. She played her toe along his chest scales, brushing along his collarbone, tracing it up his throat and lower jaw, gently balancing it on the point of his chin.
“You would cause harm to a work of art as I have created?” Neekra asked.
“No,” Durga murmured, mesmerized, even with his shoulder torn open, pumping his lifeblood onto the ground. Its burning was now miles away from him; his mind was locked on her. This wasn’t his sexual desire. This wasn’t his need for her as a lover. This was Neekra, finally flexing her psychic muscles, finally reaching down his throat and grabbing thoughts and memories from deep within the core of his soul.
He was simply a worm compared to her; he was her plaything, something to use up and toss aside at a whim. The best he could ever hope to do was inconvenience her minimally, play on her good graces long enough for him to die at old age, rather than be flung across a room and dashed against a wall, bursting open like a tomato.
Durga tried to fight her, tried to summon up the will to push out from under her, to at least spit in her face. She pressed her toe down, and once more Durga was racked with pain. This wasn’t the mere weight of a normal woman resting on the point of his chin; this was superhuman strength forcing his jaw back into his throat. Neekra was just short of crushing his lower mandible, collapsing his windpipe, but instead she smiled, eased off, edged away from killing him with a step.
She bent, hooking her hand under his uninjured shoulder, lifting him gently and easily. She lowered her head, crimson ringlets hiding her face, and he felt her wet, sensual tongue lapping at his scales. Hot sparks of sensual energy zapped through his wound as her lips slurped at the torn meat. He tried to pull away, fear stabbing through his mind as she kissed and suckled at the rent muscle tissue, the ruptured skin, but the agony he expected did not come. Instead, warmth flooded down into his chest, tingling through his loins.
