by James Axler
Durga became aroused as her tongue glided more and more under his skin.
Get out of my body. Get out of my head, bitch!
Neekra lifted her bloodred lips from his shoulder, and he could see that it was as if her claws had never torn him open.
“Don’t be so cruel, my dear,” Neekra said. With a caress of her fingers, Durga was hurled back down to the ground. Once more, his head swam under the impact.
“Your limitations are so sad,” she said with an alluring pout. “You wish you had the kind of power even a female of your pathetic monkey species has—the ability to create life. And deep in that bent brain of yours, you hate yourself for feeling so much joy at inducing pain and destruction, because you’re just a pale shadow of the real gods. Look upon your shoulder and weep.”
Durga tried to fight the urge, but he gazed down at the perfect scales, the tight, ready musculature. His fingertips brushed it.
“You came to me, thinking I could be your weapon, an unstoppable engine of destruction,” Neekra whispered. “But I’m so much more, even in this crippled little shell. I’ve birthed entities that make the dead walk, and I’ve stitched the damaged cells of your body back together with ease, even sexual pleasure, far more than even that artifact can do.”
Durga grimaced.
“And so, you think that I will need your threshold? No, those are the thoughts of others, the humans from Cerberus,” Neekra said. “They are coming, running. They are full of worry, for you, a man who they once swore bloody vengeance upon.”
Her ruby glinting lips turned up into a smile. “I have made your worst enemies care for you. Worry for you. Earlier they swore that they would bring you down, slay you. And now they come to your rescue.”
Durga winced.
Neekra stepped back. “I shall have to teach these children their lesson, just as you have learned yours.”
Durga reached out. “No...”
Neekra turned back to look at him. “What, sweet child?”
Durga murmured, uttering gibberish, looking down at his chest, eyes squinted.
“Speak up, boy,” Neekra ordered.
Durga repeated the nonsense syllables.
Finally, the avatar of the blood goddess crouched before him, her eyes level with his as he sat there.
“Use your words, Durga,” Neekra taunted. Her fingertips tapped against his cheek, and it was all Durga could do to keep his head from flopping to one shoulder. He was already feeling the bruising beneath his scales, the sensation of a fractured cheekbone burrowing in deep and burning in there.
Durga lifted his head and opened his mouth in one swift movement. His venom sacs tightened, and twin streams of venom, the gift of Enki to his serpentine children, shot out and struck Neekra’s puppet in the eyes.
The effect was immediate, as if she’d taken a mace to the center of her face. Her head snapped back as if the squirts of poison had the force of high-pressure hoses. Her glimmering red complexion paled around her eyes and across her cheeks; the skin turned white. The eerie keening that her gelatinous spawn often released now reverberated inside Durga’s skull, and his eardrums flexed under the torturous sonic pressure slamming into them.
When a flailing hand reached out and backhanded him across the jaw, Durga’s brain was already numbed by her wails of pain. Instead of suffering even more under her assault, the Nagah prince succumbed to unconsciousness, toppling from his seated position.
His last thoughts were that Kane and the others better have some way of keeping this hell witch trapped down here.
* * *
THE SHRIEK OF THE QUEEN of the living dead cut through even the salvo of grenade blasts and gunfire that Kane and his allies hurled at the reanimated corpses.
Grant had been correct in his assessment that the huge 12-gauge he’d confiscated worked well against the blob-animated walking dead. Blasts of shotgun pellets smashed apart limbs and joints, crippling them as they attempted to stop the three warriors from Cerberus, while shots to the head not only decapitated the carcasses, but destroyed the “brain organ” that Brigid theorized was present in their skulls. So far, twenty of the things had been put back to eternal rest with shattered skulls and crippled limbs.
Brigid and Kane batted cleanup, while Grant rampaged through the grenade-stunned and scattered vampires. Their rifles barked as the two people cut loose with well-aimed but full automatic bursts of fire that induced enormous trauma on the meat puppets that the gelatinous entities contained within them. Some of the creatures decided that mobility was much better than the insane strength they possessed while riding inside a shell of rotting flesh, and as soon as their chests were burst by Kane or Brigid, they ejected themselves, blowing through the horrendous wounds cut into them or simply gushing out of mouths.
Brigid grimaced at the brutal work, but she knew that these men had already been killed brutally by the banshee-voiced blobs leaving their ruptured corpses. Desecrating the dead was nothing when those dead were being used as weapons and armor for inhuman creatures. She fired again and again, her rifle bucking hard against her shoulder, bullets shredding through unliving flesh and rubbery membrane alike, viscous, clotted blood and cytoplasm spraying under each savage impact.
Kane rolled a grenade toward the creatures she left stunned and scattered, and Brigid whirled back out of the path of any shrapnel. It wasn’t an implode gren, it was just one of the regular fragmentation munitions that the Cerberus explorers had taken from the Panthers of Mashona militia. The six ounces of high-density explosive inside the core still produced a supernova of overpressure that crushed limbs. Bodies flopped on the ground from the first blast. A few walkways over, a second miniature bomb burst, tossing more severed parts around.
And then Grant was back, his shotgun recharged with the big red plastic-hulled shells that were thicker than three of Brigid’s fingers were wide. Grant worked the big, booming weapon. Roars of thunder shook the air, while, downrange of that fat pipe that belched fire and metal, monsters shrieked and broke apart, fist-size chunks of reanimated corpse and stretchy membrane vaporizing. The big former Magistrate continued his advance against the spawn of Neekra, his 12-gauge now empty, but at this point, he was too much on a roll. He drew the four-foot machete from the sheath he’d strapped across his back. It was a two-handed device, meant for lopping through branches and cutting sugarcane. In Grant’s hands, it was a sword.
A no-dachi. Brigid remembered the name for the oversize, dual-handed sword from Japan. The no-dachi, however, was five feet long and meant to be used against horsemen. In Grant’s hands, it was balanced more like a regular three-foot katana, perfectly scaled for the six-foot-four warrior, who wielded it as if it were feathery light. While a katana would have had a much keener cutting edge, this didn’t slow Grant down any. The machete was backed by his melon-size arm muscles, indeed, his full weight and trained strength.
The walking dead moved in to try to stop him, but Grant swept among them, the blade whisking left and right, bodies bisected with one clean slice, carving in two the reanimating gelatinous horrors hiding within. The separation of their internal brains proved lethal. Halved corpses flopped to the ground with cytoplasm bleeding and pumping into the dirt.
Just to be certain, Kane moved up quickly behind his friend and punched bullets into the heads and hearts of each of the fallen. The last thing he needed was to be swarmed by the terrors. Even so, as he looked down at some of the bodies, he noted that Grant had struck the heart as often as not, and the darker, destroyed protein strings in the cytoplasm were as obvious in his shadow suit hood’s advanced optics as if they were glowing green blood.
Brigid brought up the rear, scanning for signs of movement among the dead. However, this time the second end was sufficient to keep them down. She made certain, not because she didn’t trust Grant’s warrior prowess or Kane’s observational abilit
ies, but simply because they were dealing with an alien life-form, one that had shown remarkable resilience to harm. Along the way, she stooped and picked up a standard two-foot machete from one of the fallen militiamen; his torso had been cleaved apart by the raw power of Grant.
“Sometimes, there’s just no substitute for a big-ass knife,” she said.
“That’s the truth,” Kane agreed.
Grant looked back toward his companions, his smirk hidden behind his hood’s faceplate. Considering the path of destruction he’d wrought through the heart of the vampires, the smirk was readily apparent in his stance, if only for a moment. Then he turned back, looking for any more of the revenants, ready to strike out again with his mighty sword.
Then, back toward the very dungeons from where they’d just escaped, came a keening that drowned out the wails of wounded and terrified spawn. It was the banshee shriek of something huge and primal. A wall of sound struck the three people, and even the automatic sonic dampers built into their shadow suit hoods couldn’t keep out the spiking pain in their ears.
“Neekra,” Brigid shouted over the unholy cry.
Kane found a machete, grabbing a bandolier of grenades. “Durga’s hurt her. But that’s not enough.”
“Kids,” Grant spoke into his Commtact. “We need the artifact. Now.”
“We’re on our way,” Lyta responded. Only the transmission of vibration through his mandible to his inner ear gave him any chance of hearing the sound of her voice.
“Do we have a plan?” Brigid asked Kane.
“Pepper the bitch with grenades until we get Nehushtan,” Kane answered. “Then stab her with it.”
Even as the three people gathered themselves for their assault, the surviving spawn of the deadly goddess advanced through the necropolis, hurtling themselves toward the source of the agonized siren of Neekra.
The subterranean battle was far from over.
Chapter 24
Thurpa swooned as he felt, deep within his bones, the sudden rush of horror and pain that struck Durga. The whole thing made his knees go rubbery, but he held his footing, shaking it off. Nathan had Nehushtan, the ancient pre-Atlantean artifact that had passed through the hands of men such as Moses and Solomon, of adventurers and juju men, aliens and humans. Just by holding it, the wound in his thigh was gone. Lyta clenched an assault rifle in her hands, fear on her face from the urgency with which Grant had called them, but not giving in to her urge to run.
With the demon-stopping staff of Suleiman in hand, Nathan could sense his new friend’s sudden swoon, feel a sudden presence of another among the trio.
“Are you all right?” Nathan asked.
“No,” Thurpa answered, opting for truth over his concerns that they might think he was a traitor. “I feel like I’ve been beaten up by a Kongamato mob.”
Nathan looked around. “It could be a psychic attack by Neekra....”
“Then why aren’t the two of you showing anything?” Thurpa asked.
“Lyta was never close enough to her to be influenced by her, and I’ve got this,” Nathan responded. “It’s logical, right?”
Thurpa reached out and touched the staff, but the sensations of a broken jaw, of a slashed-open shoulder, of eardrums rocked by the ground zero bellow of an agonized god, went nowhere. These came to him through some other source. They weren’t inflicted by Neekra, but rather they were echoes, aftershocks of what someone else felt.
“Nathan—” Thurpa started to say.
“We have to move now,” Nathan cut him off. “Our friends need us. We need to fight through this pain. Feel the power of the staff, let it flow into you, cleanse you.”
Even as the young African spoke, Thurpa’s nerves tingled, his muscles trembled, his whole body warmed under the power within the ancient artifact. It had healed him before, bringing him back from near death under the assault of a winged, hulking mutant. This was similar, but as his neurons fired off on all cylinders, there was something different surging inside of him.
And then the echoing sensation once more. He was transmitting.
The knowledge of who he was transmitting to was obvious, and it turned his blood to ice water. He had a direct link to Durga.
Thurpa didn’t want to know why, but then he looked at Lyta and the courage she displayed, descending into the damned underground entrance to Neekra’s necropolis. When the future revealed how he was truly tied to the damned Nagah prince, Thurpa would go to face it, no matter what hell he’d be dragged down into.
* * *
DURGA’S VENOM STUNG, burned with the heat of a sun, even through the dull filter of Gamal’s flesh and central nervous system. Neekra had never known that kind of sensation could strike her so deeply, so completely, especially when it was from a mere human, albeit one that had had its genetic structure “enhanced” by an Annunaki by the name of Enki. And yet, here it was, a blinding, mind-numbing surrender to the flames of a dying star.
She tried to think beyond it, to clear the vision of her humanoid avatar, but there was no response from Gamal’s body. Neekra could feel the bumps of her shoulders against corridor walls, the feel of the ground beneath her bare feet, the cold damp of the forever dark cavern she crawled through.
But Durga’s venom was still slicing, still attacking her.
It has to be affecting the protein strings, she managed to think. The “brains” she’d grown, the telepathic biocomputer constructs by which she could reach out and control others, they had to be vulnerable to Enki’s venom design. Enzymes implanted in his children, the Nagah, had the power to attack her kind’s very core.
And it felt like hell.
It was hell.
We were meant to be the guardians of the earth, of humanity, Neekra. Durga’s thoughts raced past her blurred vision and screaming nerves. Did you really think that Enki would not know about the monsters that his brethren battled?
Neekra gritted her teeth and turned, looking through the shadows. Different spectrums were still obfuscated by her tears, by the venom attacking her system. She could only make out fuzzy blurs, creatures racing toward her in the ebony night of the unlit underground.
Panic overtook her, and she dug her fingers into the wall, ripping a sheet of stone off and collapsing it into the corridor before her. Bleats and squeals of sympathetic pain reached her ringing ears, and she realized what had rushed her.
“My children,” she murmured.
She pressed against the slab of stone blocking the hallway, pushing with all the strength she could draw from the human flesh she inhabited. She could feel the stone crack, start to shift. Rubbery limbs whipped around the sides, oozed through the splits she made in it. As each membrane touched her skin, blood from the murdered militia, only stale by minutes, seeped through her russet skin.
Neekra drank, and the pain of the venom started to subside; it was akin to drinking milk to smother the inflammation of pepper heat. Even so, she still struggled to stay on her feet, to retain her concentration. What salve the blood brought to her besieged senses was minimal.
Gamal’s chest churned, sizzling heat pressing over the former man’s heart and lungs. Her breasts, actually the sheaths for the protein structures granting her psychic power, were overheating as the venom’s enzymes sped through Gamal’s bloodstream. Neekra bit down, lower lip bursting and spilling hot crimson down an already glittering red chin. She drew back one fist and slammed it against the slab of stone. Another crack, another heave and shift of hard rock.
More tendrils reached through, caressing her skin, lending their strength to hers.
“Thank you, my children,” she whispered.
As she said that, hard objects clunked against the other side of the slab she’d intended to protect her.
The odd impacts were metallic, clinking as they bounced off the granite.
Kane and his allies had arrived, and they’d declared war with their thrown explosives.
Neekra’s vision cleared even more, and she watched as tendrils severed by the grenade blasts burned, sizzled, blackened into curled wisps of charred tar.
“Kane!” she shrieked, lifting both fists together and hurling them against her granite barrier. Stone burst, disintegrated into clouds of white dust, and when she stepped through the hole she made, she could make out, numbly, fuzzily, the silhouettes of three people.
“Kane, you will learn your lesson,” she growled.
* * *
KANE THOUGHT THAT HE WAS seeing things when the amorphous blobs were suddenly cut off in the tunnel ahead by a swinging slab of granite, blocking their forward process so thoroughly that even their semiliquid bodies couldn’t seek a way past.
He skidded to a halt, not wanting to draw the attention of the dozen or so rubbery amoebas as they pressed and pawed at the improvised door barring their path.
“Is that something Durga set up?” Grant asked softly, crouching beside his friend.
“No, I don’t think so,” Kane said. “There’s nothing else down here that looks like it could be a trap like that.”
“The material of that barrier is identical to the walls of this particular cavern,” Brigid spoke up. “I’m examining them both through the shadow suit’s optics. Someone broke a piece of the tunnel off and swung it shut like a door.”
“Neekra,” Kane and Grant said in unison.
“Apparently the bodies her spawn take over don’t have the same durability that she does,” Brigid stated. “Otherwise, she’d have never moved that rock.”
