Nightmare Passage

by James Axler

  Krysty groaned so loudly and deeply the tiled walls threw back the echoes. He put his hands around her waist. Her flesh felt like a bundle of charged electric cables covered with silk. She looked back over her shoulder at him as he slid a hand over her belly, through the crisp mat of hair and found the tender, responsive bud of swollen flesh nestled there. He rolled it between thumb and forefinger as he began pumping recklessly back and forth within her. Krysty twisted, moving in rhythm to his thrusts, grunting and gasping.

  Suddenly, she began to speak, in a guttural, hoarse, moaning whisper. "The august god found her as she slept in the beauty of her palace. She awoke because of the savor of the god, and she laughed in the presence of his majesty…"

  Ryan, lost in his own orgiastic madness, only partly heard her, and that part he didn't understand, or at the moment, care about. His steady, pounding pace didn't falter. Steam, lust and sweat blinded him. He cupped one of her dangling breasts, squeez­ing the desire-hardened nipple.

  "He came to her straight away. He was ardent for her. He gave his heart unto her, let her see him in the form of a god after he came before her."

  Krysty lifted her face from the cushion of her forearms. Between clenched teeth, she hissed, "She rejoiced in beholding his beauty. His love went through her body, then the majesty of the god did all that he desired with her. She let him rejoice over her. How great is your fame!"

  Her body suddenly stiffened. Back arching, she propped herself up on her elbows. She tossed her head, whipping her long, damp tresses back and forth. She sobbed, "You have united me with your favors! Your dew is in all my limbs!"

  She convulsed and shuddered in a spasming or­gasm so fierce and unrestrained that even Ryan was surprised. He felt her inner muscles rippling around and massaging his rigid cock with an amazing, in­sistent strength.

  He knew from long experience it was useless to hold back when she exerted that extraordinary con­trol. He trembled in a contraction, pressing his lower belly against her buttocks as he burst deep inside her, an eruption of liquid fire that seemed to last forever. He gripped her tightly by the waist to keep himself seated within her as his hips jerked back and forth in an explosion of orgasmic energy.

  Gasping, Krysty sagged beneath him, collapsing facedown on the floor. Ryan fell forward, supporting himself above her by quivering arms, straining briefly against her upturned backside, unwilling to accept he had spent himself within her clutching heat. Slowly, his senses returned to him and his hips stopped moving.

  Krysty's breath came out in a heavy, prolonged sigh of release, then her sigh became a sudden, sharp intake of shock. She lifted her head, looking over a bare shoulder at him, her wet hair plastered to her face, only one wide green eye visible.

  "Ryan?" Her voice was high and wild with anx­iety and confusion. "What's going on?"

  It took a moment for the strangeness of the ques­tion to penetrate Ryan's postclimactic fog. She squirmed away from him and sat up quickly, raking her hair from her face, staring around in a near panic.

  "How did I get here?" she demanded, fear and suspicion mingling in equal measures in her tone.

  Ryan frowned. "I guess you walked."

  She crossed her arms over her breasts. Haltingly, she said, "I was asleep. Last I remember was lying next to you. I was asleep."

  Ryan moved toward her. She scooted away, eye­ing his softening penis distrustfully. His first flash of irritation faded when he realized she was genu­inely confused—and frightened. Softly, he said, "Mebbe you sleepwalked."

  Krysty forced a half smile to her face. "Somnam­bulist sex? That's a new one for me."

  Ryan chuckled, getting to his feet, extending a hand toward her. "First time for everything, lover."

  For a moment, Krysty appeared reluctant to take his hand. She reached out, caught it, and Ryan pulled her up, holding her against him. He tried to kiss her, but she averted her face.

  "Something's wrong," she said in a troubled whisper. "I was too exhausted to move, much less do what we just did."

  Despite the heat, Ryan felt a chill tiptoe up the back of his spine. What was left of his erection van­ished. "What are you saying?"

  Almost stammering, she replied, "I remember do­ing what we did…but it was like I was somebody else…or you were somebody else."

  Krysty pushed him away, hugging herself. Goose-flesh pimpled her arms, and she shivered. "Some­thing controlled me, like I was a puppet, testing my…sexual responses…seeing what I could do, what I would do."

  Ryan's belly turned a cold flip-flop. Though Krysty's Gaia-linked empathic abilities were honed to detect danger, neither he nor she could deny they had been liabilities in the past. He immediately thought back to their encounter with the plant entity in England. It had used Krysty's connection with the geo-energy of earth as a channel to temporarily take control of her. He had been forced to render her unconscious.

  As if sensing his recollections, Krysty said, "No, it wasn't like when the Other possessed me. This was on a deeper, far more primal level than that."

  Hesitantly, he asked, "Like the time when you were under Kaa's influence?"

  She wheeled, not responding to the question and hurriedly walked out of the alcove. Ryan turned off the water and went to the bench where he had left his clothes. Krysty was dressing quickly, worming into jeans, not bothering to dry herself. Her crook­edly buttoned white sleeveless blouse clung to her wet breasts.

  As Ryan pulled on his pants, he said, "At least you had enough presence of mind not to walk around the redoubt buck-ass naked."

  She didn't respond. Her hair was tight at the back of her neck, and her lower lip quivered.

  Impatiently, Ryan said, "Talk to me, Krysty. Something must have happened to you when we made the jump."

  Her eyes bored in on his face. "Why do you say that?"

  "Because something happened to me, too. But it didn't make me sleep-screw or spout poetry in the middle of it."

  She squinted. "I did that? Wait…I remember now. Not poetry exactly."

  "No, not exactly. I didn't catch very much of it. Had to do with a god's favors and some such over­blown romantic shit."

  She smiled wanly. "You're a true sentimentalist, lover. But you're right—something happened to me during the jump."

  Ryan shrugged into his shirt. "Like what?"

  She moved her shoulders uncomfortably. "I dreamed I was in a palace room, beautifully fur­nished. I was aching for my beloved to join me in bed."

  "Me?"

  "Yes. No." Krysty shook her head. "I don't know. Anyway, I got scared. I called for you—"

  Ryan's eye widened. "I heard you."

  She drew in an unsteady breath. "I ran out of the room. Then I saw…him."

  "Him," Ryan echoed. "Let me guess. He had eyes burning like the fires of hell."

  Her face registered her surprise. "Yes! You saw him, too?"

  "Saw it," he said grimly. "He had a skull instead of a face."

  Running a nervous hand through her hair, Krysty said, "That's not what I saw. He was a big man. He wanted me."

  "Wanted you for what?"

  Wearily, she answered, "I'm not really sure. Wanted me for his mate, for his queen. For his… mother."

  Ryan angled an eyebrow at her. "All of those in one package? He doesn't want much, does he?"

  "I can't be sure of the impressions I received." She looked fearfully around the room, as if she ex­pected to see someone—or something—crouching in a corner. "There's only one thing I am sure of. Whoever he is, he knows we're here. He knows I'm here. He's been waiting for me a long time."

  "Who?" A note of menace lurked at the back of Ryan's voice. "Who has been waiting for you?"

  Krysty's eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head to one side, as if trying to listen to the murmur of unimaginably distant voices. Quietly, she said, "A god."

  Chapter Six

  Mildred continued to examine the material that ex­plained Dr. O'Brien's role at the installation.


  Phase One of Mission Invictus had been con­ducted on primates and was already a biological fait accompli before Connaught O'Brien joined the staff in early 1999. The subject animals' cells and DNA retained their structural integrity despite exposure to radiation and its concomitant free-radical damage. The only side effect of the genetic recombination had been a bizarre pigment change in the eyes when the test animals reached maturity. For a reason the scientists could only speculate upon, their eyes turned red, though their vision was apparently un­impaired.

  When Overproject Excalibur resettled the twelve mission personnel—eight men and four women, in­cluding O'Brien—in the isolated redoubt, the apes had to be put down. Though deeming Phase One a success, the overseers didn't want a race of super-chimps running around the installation, like some­thing out of a bad sci-fi movie.

  O'Brien found this objection amusing. "You who made that decision had, in effect, made apes of your­selves when you demanded the creation of a super­human," she said.

  According to her, Phase Two had proved more difficult. For months, the hardships to build upon Phase One posed a puzzle to the scientists. Out of a group of thirty fertilized ova, only ten survived the first in vitro gestation period. Five were stillborn, and three others suffered from hydrocephalus, a con­dition in which the skull contained too much cerebrospinal fluid. These unfortunates were regretfully euthanized. Only two survived the entire neomutagenic process.

  Yes, there were failures, O'Brien conceded. Ab­rasions, she called them. But, she explained, in any work so unprecedentedly technical that it combined all aspects of biophysics and cell-fusion techniques, no one could possibly have anticipated all the vari­ables.

  Stabilization of the basic genetic material—human beings—when exposed to the synthetic mutagen had proved to be a problem. Though it had eventually been overcome, the solution arrived after the nuclear firestorm reshaped the face of the world.

  However, once the fundamental limitations of Phase Two were overcome, the Phase Three level was quickly achieved. The two surviving subjects, a male and female designated as Alpha and Epsilon, matured to the toddler stage within a month. Instead of being exultant, O'Brien accused, fear was the pri­mary reaction.

  "You are ordinary men, no matter how powerful you think you are," O'Brien said grimly. "You cannot envision my concept of a superbeing, bred to survive in the world you created. You wanted me to return to the original project of generational accelerated growth cycles. That I could not do. What you believed would require ten years or more was re­duced to a mere eighteen months."

  The Alpha and Epsilon subjects showed extraor­dinary manual dexterity and heightened cognitive abilities almost from the moment they emerged from the incubation chambers. The infants possessed IQs so far beyond the range of standard tests as to render them meaningless. They mastered language in a matter of weeks, speaking in whole sentences, albeit grammatically incorrect.

  Physically, Alpha and Epsilon were the epitomes of perfect human development. The structural prop­erties of their bodies had been successfully modified while still in their in vitro wombs. As O'Brien put it, "All of God's design faults in human physiology were corrected."

  Yes, the infants were perfect, despite the ruby red hue of their eyes. Some of the scientists on staff had problems relating to them because of this character­istic, referring to them half jokingly as "children of the damned."

  As the children grew at an astonishing rate, O'Brien made a point of stopping by their nursery every night to tuck them in. Epsilon would always smile up into her face and with pudgy baby fingers toy with the strands of her long red hair, asking her questions in her high, piping, sweet voice.

  Alpha, on the other hand, would gaze solemnly up into her face and never smile or reach for her. He silently studied her, examined her, inspected her. And, she suspected, judged her.

  When the infants had developed to the physical age of three and half years old, but chronologically only six months out of the incubation tanks, the ac­cident happened.

  A door-lock mechanism jammed, a pressure gauge malfunctioned and a routine test in a hyperbaric chamber went horribly awry. The purpose of the experiment was to test the response time of the children as compared to normal subjects of their physical age. Epsilon was in the chamber at the time, and when O'Brien realized something was wrong, she lost all of her scientific objectivity.

  The child's eyes behind the glass of the chamber were wide and sad, and Dr. Connaught O'Brien screamed frantically at the technician in charge to do something, to do anything. Epsilon suffocated, and O'Brien's heart broke.

  The child's death was the demarcation point be­tween what the mission had been and what it be­came. The atmosphere of the redoubt resembled that of people trapped aboard a slowly but inexorably sinking ship. O'Brien grew obsessively protective of Alpha. He, too, seemed changed by his sibling's death. His face took on a fixed, watchful expression.

  In the months following Epsilon's suffocation, staff members began complaining of insomnia, and when they managed to sleep, of nightmares. Acci­dents became the uale rather than the anomalies. At first, O'Brien attributed the occurrences to stress. After all, the mat-trans unit was the only way in or out of the redoubt, and everyone was afraid to use it without Overproject Excalibur's permission, afraid of what horrific new situation they might jump into. O'Brien suspected that their fear of what was being bred within the walls of the installation was far greater than what the holocaust might have spawned outside them.

  By the first anniversary of Alpha's emergence from the artificial womb, he had read voraciously of the volumes of books in the database. He absorbed the wisdom amassed over thousands of years of hu­man history, and he began to extrapolate on that wisdom. Though O'Brien encouraged his exposure to such "survival of the fittest" proponents as Spen­cer and Hobbes, he wasn't much interested in their philosophies.

  Alpha's area of special interest lay in ancient his­tory, specifically the civilization of the Nile. Egypt, with its dynasties of mighty god-kings bestriding the earth, its culture, architecture and religions, obsessed him. The rebellious Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh, Akhnaton, in particular fascinated him.

  His hyperactive mind pondered the same ques­tions that had perplexed the pharaoh thousands of years before—human history appeared to be essen­tially one war after another. For every golden flash of harmony, there were hundreds of blood-splattered conflicts.

  Was it that man was unable to control his animal instincts and therefore his environment in order to attain a perfect society?

  Alpha was certainly aware of the hellish condi­tions outside the shielded redoubt, but he didn't yet know who he was or what he was capable of doing. He sought an answer to that mystery by searching through the historical database. In a short time, he acquired a working knowledge of nine of the ancient written languages of the Nile Valley. In those doc­uments, he found more than an identity; he found a means to an end. The information copied from the aeons-old papyri contained more science and less mythological esoterica than he expected.

  While he studied, more of the parahuman abilities bred into him began to exhibit themselves. The mod­ified and improved regions of his brain, specifically the hypothalamus, which regulated the complex bio­chemical systems of the body, continued to adjust any slight metabolic imperfections.

  Alpha learned he could control all autonomous functions of his brain and body, even the manufac­ture and release of chemicals and hormones. He could speed or slow his heartbeat, increase and de­crease the amount of adrenaline in his bloodstream.

  He possessed complete control over that myste­rious portion of the brain known as the limbic sys­tem, a portion that scientists had always known, in a detached, meaningless way, possessed great re­serves of electromagnetic power and strength.

  With this mastery of the mind, Alpha was both telepathic and empathic—and something else en­tirely, something quite unexpected and frightening to everyone but O'Brien.

&nb
sp; He could—and oftentimes did—subtly influence the emotional states and thoughts of others, partic­ularly if they were fatigued, depressed or asleep. He knew instantly if one of the mission personnel dis­liked him. One man, Carlson by name, made no se­cret of his antipathy toward the child. In a casual conversation, he referred to him as "Old Hell Eyes." The name stuck thereafter.

  It didn't seem to offend Alpha—very little did—but O'Brien forbade anyone to say it, even in jest. A week after Carlson first coined "Hell Eyes." he was found dead in his bunk of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Over the subsequent year and a half, four more mysterious deaths followed. As O'Brien pointed out, they were duly recorded and reported.

  By the time of the last death, Alpha had reached the physical-development stage of sixteen years old. He was already edging six feet tall. Perfectly pro­portioned, with the flat-muscled body of a young Hercules, he wore his hair close to the scalp, like an ebony skullcap. His features were beautiful, yet at the same time, undeniably masculine. Only his crim­son eyes detracted from his beauty. They made him a freak.

  It was during this stage that Alpha passed through puberty, but he didn't suffer.

  Connaught O'Brien said, "At this time, another aspect of Phase Three began to assert itself. The gene-introduced life-force that determined his be­havior and vitality came to the fore. The visceral desire to procreate. Obviously, with the loss of Epsilon, Alpha began to look elsewhere for a mate."

  The woman paused, and a slightly abashed smile tugged at the comers of her mouth. "He showed no interest in the other female staff members, though they are younger than myself. He chose me."

  O'Brien shrugged. "Yes, of course I realize he stimulated my very basic sexual urges. On another level, how can a mere mortal refuse a god? For the past three months we've been engaging in coitus regularly—oh, why be coy about it? We've been fucking. I doubt Alpha understands the concept of love. He understands only the instinct to spread his seed."

  She sighed sadly. "Unfortunately, I cannot help him fulfill that instinctive desire. I'm barren—I al­ways have been. I'm sure the increased levels of radiation leaking in through the shielding have ren­dered the other women here sterile, as well."