by James Axler
“Watch your feet!” Brigid warned. “It’s gone nearly two dimensional and is conforming to the ground!”
The grasses of the clearing began to move as if beset by phantom breezes. Though Brigid couldn’t feel the moving air on her skin, her faceplate registered that there was no wind in the vicinity. Whatever caused the knee-length grass to rustle was movement caused from below.
“We need to make it pull into a more cohesive form,” she said.
“Right. It’s not big enough or thick enough to keep a shell inside it,” Grant agreed. “Edwards?”
The burly CAT Beta warrior aimed his less-lethal shotgun at the ground, but rather than triggering the 12-gauge, he cut loose with the under-barrel Taser. The twin darts zipped out and into the moving grass blades. As soon as Edwards saw that the wires connected to the barbs were moving along, he triggered the battery.
Suddenly a tarlike mound bubbled up over the top of the grass, the amorphous creature unleashing its wail in a spine-scraping warble of a million different tiny voices. Tendrils whipped out toward Edwards, thick, cloying strands winding around his arms and shotgun.
There was a brief pulse of panic for Brigid as she saw those slack pseudopods tighten around his arms, but then Smaragda drew her sword and lashed at the snarling tentacles. Her falcata pierced the tarry blackness of the amorphous anomaly. At the same moment Sinclair gave Edwards a zap with her Taser, the shadow suit at once insulating her teammate against the voltage sent from her shock weapon and conducting the electrical energy into the remnant flesh that clung to him.
As the charge rolled through, tiny sparrows fluttered away on the wing, while rodents toppled to the dirt. Elements that had been halved by Smaragda’s sword stroke fell in wet, bloody splatters.
Too bad there were no weapons that could direct electricity on a larger scale, Brigid thought, but she maintained her concentration. Where one “bubble” of the abomination faded, two more rose, and Grant pumped a tear gas shell into one of them. Domi’s knife was out, and the feral girl slashed and flickered, intercepting pseudopods and tendrils, Kane mirroring her actions on the other side. Blades and tear gas cartridges were keeping this horror at bay, but they were battling a creature whose biomass was measured in tons, and the shocked elements being broken off measured in ounces per organism.
That meant a load of CS or ketone was going to have to be disgorged into the heart of the beast and that required an almost suicidal tactic. Then again, as Brigid recalled, the soldiers taken by this plasmoid terror were still alive.
“Kane. Gas canister,” Brigid ordered. “Anyone else with a hand-thrown unit. To me!”
Kane lobbed his tear gas gren to her.
Brigid quickly drew a length of cord from a belt pouch, slipping it through the ring pins of the two grens. She was pleasantly surprised that Edwards had brought enough for the whole class. Seven of the shells lay on the ground in front of her as she quickly strung the cotter pins to be tugged out all at once.
At the same time, ferret rounds, bullets and blades slashed violently, batting away or burning into the writhing, surging Stygian force that threatened to overwhelm the Cerberus explorers.
Already, through her peripheral vision, Brigid could make out the slowing of her allies, their arms growing tired, not to mention that their supply of shotgun-based gas rounds was running out, and no one was interested in burning off the last of their more ineffectual rounds. Regular bullets were mere pinpricks to the rubbery flesh of this fiend.
“All right, let it grab me!” Brigid shouted.
“No,” Smaragda called. “I owe this thing!”
Brigid looked toward the woman. She admitted to herself that she didn’t relish the concept of being swallowed whole and smothered by the spawn of Charun and Vanth, but so far, she was of the opinion that she couldn’t allow anyone else to go through this dangerous course of action. It was her “harebrained scheme.” She couldn’t let anyone else risk absorption.
But Smaragda, behind the transparent faceplate of her shadow suit hood, was deadly serious as she extended her hand to catch the cluster of tear gas grens that she’d just made.
If there was one thing Brigid Baptiste was certain of, it was that the New Olympian soldier had more than sufficient motivation to deliver a load of chromosome-damaging chemicals into the heart of the creature that had frightened every lick of color from her hair, on top of kidnapping her closest friends and allies in the world.
Brigid lobbed the circlet of tear gas grens to the Greek woman, who put them into her breadbasket rather than clutch at the cord connecting them. Smaragda’s wits were about her, and simply snatching one out of the air would have wasted that gren canister as she removed its safety pin.
Smaragda gave her falcata a whirl, handing it off to Edwards handle-first.
“Cover me,” she said.
The biggest member of CAT Beta nodded grimly, his fist closing around the haft of the sword. “All the way to the gates of hell.”
With that solemn pronouncement, the two people turned toward the bloblike horror. The five other Cerberus warriors stopped shooting and retreated, pulling back to let their friends become the bait for an abomination.
* * *
TO EDWARDS, THE LOGIC was simple. The Cerberus teams might have been willing to sacrifice an ally to the formless alien monstrosity, at least as far as the callous Etruscan deities would have assumed. The Annunaki contemporaries were masters of cruel disregard. Edwards could even imagine Enlil assuming that CAT Beta themselves were nothing more than disposable cannon fodder to buy Kane and the others time to succeed, so Vanth and Charun couldn’t be that much different.
And as soon as Edwards threw in with Smaragda, standing fast to shield her with three feet of hooked, battle-sharpened sword in his hand, the bloblike abomination realized that there was something up, something that could threaten it. Or maybe it was one of the demigods back at the pyramid who was doing the thinking for the tarry tons of biomass being wielded as a gigantic weapon. After all, no amount of the tiny brains of mice and birds could assemble into a single cohesive consciousness willing to endanger itself in battle with humans.
Edwards had yet to enter a field where birds were present and the flock didn’t choose to turn and run, at least without the presence of eggs or chicks to defend. No, the abominable amalgam was being controlled by telepathic puppet strings. Powerful wings wrapped around Smaragda and Edwards, fingers reaching out to each other to intertwine and completely encircle the pair of warriors. Yes, this creature was doing things no normal mammal or avian would do. It was more amoeba than even the most coherent swarm.
“This had better work,” Edwards said.
Smaragda remained impassive as she wound tape around the hulls of the tear gas grens. Now it was no longer seven loose canisters, but a solid whole. One tug of the safety pins and the spoons holding the nozzles shut would release. Tear gas grens didn’t explode; they vomited out their payloads. And all Edwards had to do was to make a proper opening.
The creature swelled, and suddenly all of that pudding skin parted, showing off grisly pink inner tissues, raw nerve endings stretching out to web over the two humans.
Edwards realized that he wouldn’t have to split open the outside of the creature to get the tear gas inside.
Tarry black lips of flesh elongated, blotting out the sky over the pair as Smaragda clutched her weapon as if it were a prize.
Edwards swung his sword, the keen edge severing threads of neurons and axons as if they were gossamer, continuing to put up the charade that he didn’t want Smaragda and himself swallowed by their enemy.
Even inside the fully sealed shadow suit, Edwards realized there was very little that could be done to resist the horrible creature that was bringing down its rubbery bulk. He lashed out, the falcata cutting deep into a pink semblance of muscle, but more wormlike tendrils of pink, white and red flesh snapped out and seized his sword arm. Now, panic rushed through the CAT warrior. There was no need to act, as the streng
th of the Stygian entity was beyond anything he could hope to match. His boots left the ground and he kicked wildly. There was no leverage, so he was a plaything in the grasp of a giant that didn’t respond to punches or bullets.
Suddenly an arm wound around his waist. This one had weight to it, but it was nothing like the grasping power slurping him up into the tissues of the alien shape-shifter. He couldn’t see for the mass pressing against his faceplate, turning his universe into a window of tumors and throbbing polyps.
He didn’t need to see Smaragda, however, to know that it was her. With Edwards in the midst of being swallowed, she’d leaped up and joined with him. There was suction tugging the skintight polymers from Edwards, trying to draw away the shadow suit to create a direct contact with his skin. He remembered Brigid and Smaragda’s description of how the thing had swallowed an entire platoon of New Olympian troops, and knew that the slightest touch to bare flesh would prove paralyzing.
That suction had to come from somewhere, though, and as soon as the turgid, inflamed flesh was around Smaragda, the whole throbbing mass suddenly began tossing Edwards as if he were trapped in one of the laundry machines back at the redoubt. Hurled and twisted around, he could now see that Smaragda was inside this cavity with him, as was the tear gas unit. Seven jets of white, eye-burning chemical blew outward, and the rippling pink flesh around them started breaking down, twisting apart as rabbits and squirrels started filling this chamber of mutated meat.
The falcata fell between the squirming voles and field mice, and Edwards reached for it. His first instinct was to begin chopping his way out, but to do that would be to give the tear gas a means of escape into the atmosphere rather than into its bulk. The birds provided enough of a skin and cohesion that it kept the spreading, choking clouds through its system. Whatever technology altered the cellular structures of the local fauna into this entity, at least for the mammals, was being counteracted by the chemicals that seemed to directly damage the chromosomes of a good portion of its total bulk. With coughing and wheezing tiny creatures twisting and clawing, gnawing for their means of escape, the tarry black form was being assailed from within in a second wave of torment.
Smaragda scrambled to Edwards’s side, holding out her hand for him. He grasped hers and looked at the disintegrating walls around them. Chemicals and alien powers were waging war around them, as Edwards noticed some of these critters being slurped back into the biomass, but even with each mouse swallowed, a half-dozen squirrels were released from the bulky mass. Tear gas blinded and agonized animals chewed, and jets of blood erupted, smearing the whole mess.
“How much longer?” Smaragda asked, batting away at enraged or simply confused creatures bounding to escape the seething clouds.
Arcs of cracked blue rippled along the skin. Weakened and disoriented by the bad meal it had eaten, the tarry abomination was now victim to hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity from Tasers and stun guns Edwards had been hauling all of this time. As the shocks ripped through the creature, the sky appeared above them, sky that was filled with fleeing songbirds, crows and hawks, all bursting to freedom from the nightmare of oneness they had suffered under the forces of the Etruscan demigods.
Sinclair and Domi rushed to their allies as Kane, Grant and Brigid continued pumping Taser shocks into the remaining pieces. But this time, however, the blackened, rubbery entity was disintegrating without the inducement of electrical charges.
Vanth and Charun had released their tiniest of pawns, and now the Cerberus teams were together in a vacated field. The former segments of the biomass had separated, and except for a few scores of dead creatures, all of them were running or flying all out to escape the area.
“Did we kill the big bad beast?” Edwards asked, slowly getting to his feet as Sela and Domi had an easier time lifting the smaller Smaragda than they ever could hoisting him up.
“We dispersed its biomass sufficiently that Charun no longer maintained its structural integrity,” Brigid said.
“Smaller words?” Edwards asked. The tug-of-war and rumblings in the belly of the abomination had left him with little patience for technical jargon.
“The mice and birdies are alive. The crap keeping it together is gone,” Brigid clarified.
Edwards smiled. “That, I understood.”
Kane and Grant gave the big man claps on his broad shoulders. “Feeling better?”
“Better how?”
“Not beating yourself up over falling once?” Kane added to his question.
“Are you going to hit me with that stale old shit about ‘fall down once, stand up twice’?” Edwards countered.
Kane wrinkled his nose. “If you’re going to put it that way…”
“I’m yanking you, man,” Edwards said, disarming any tension with a chuckle.
“One threat down,” Brigid pronounced. “But we’ve still got two demigods and their Stygian minions.”
Edwards felt his shoulders slump. “I wish I hadn’t understood that.”
The thunderous footsteps in the distance warned the Cerberus adventurers of the gravity of their position.
This thing was far from finished.
Chapter 23
Charun sliced through the skies, headed for where they had lost contact with their protean emissary only moments ago. His wing harness propelled him along as if he were a bullet, any sense of wind resistance deleted by the very bubble of antigravity that pushed him along. The field deflected the air in front of him, part of the mechanism that allowed him to smash through Grant’s Manta days before.
There was a touch of regret on the part of Charun as he sailed toward the battlefield, his hammer clutched in his mighty hands. Grant and the others, they had been so easily mentally disarmed, given to feel a sense of camaraderie with the two godlings, buying into a tale of need and mistaken identity or translation of thoughts. He could have had them as part of his world, if it all had not been for the damned woman, Brigid Baptiste.
Grant showed his worth, the way in which he was able to handle the mighty hammer, learning the true symbiotic nature of the intelligent metals that made up the weapon. Where Kane had struggled with the artifact, Grant knew that a Zen approach, a bonding with the hammer, was the means by which one took control of the deadly piece of alien weaponry and focused its power with deadly efficiency.
The body that Charun currently was burdened with was starting to lose its cohesion, while Grant’s would give the demigod years more to survive in this world while the million brains at the bottom of the pyramid engaged in forcing open the aperture between universes, the route to home and to his beloved minions.
Back home was the true form that could contain the power of Charun’s soul. The poor fool who had been present when his seed was planted. Not the beautiful, dark woman Nathalie, the one who actually sowed him, but rather the local guide, an Italian farmer well on in his years, who’d told her of the hidden pyramid.
Charun recalled having been tempted to make the woman his bride, to implant her with the genetic information to create a brand-new Vanth, but his hand was stopped by a subconscious command, a force from beyond him. The name Hurbon was associated with the hesitation, one that told Charun there were more important things for Nathalie to do than serve as a temporary shell.
Instead, simmering inside the skin of the now-erased farmer, Charun had returned to the man’s home and found the local’s wife. She had been as withered as Charun’s “human suit,” sixty years making her skin hang in wrinkled drapes on her skeleton. All it took was a kiss, a penetration of energy, and the seed that had been one became two.
The rest of the sons of Styx who inhabited the pyramid were composed of a chicken-coop full of birds. The genetic data, and the feast of the Stygians upon every other living creature in the barns of the farm, turned the small poultry into the reedy but powerfully built warriors who could be grown even larger and more powerful.
Once Charun had brought his family back together, there was only the task
of amassing those necessary.
At first it was a town or two disappearing. Over the past several months the disappearances became epidemic; convoys vanishing, even expeditions from the coast arriving to wonder why the center of the peninsula became a black hole from where thousands were never seen again. Several hundred thousand human brains, and even all of the larger mammals that Charun hadn’t crafted into the meat suit for their recently fallen cyclops, or the small creatures molded into the Abyssal blob, were now gathered in the city-size prison beneath the pyramid.
“This is disrupting us, love.” Vanth spoke across the miles with her mind touching his. “We were so close to the final equation and now…”
“Continue your focus, my bride,” Charun admonished. “The humans will surrender or they shall be crushed.”
“Crushed,” Vanth repeated.
Charun knew that tone of mind, her disdain stinging him like an open-handed slap. “Bride, mind thy words.”
“They have cast down others of our ilk before,” Vanth warned. “Just because you have girded your loins and brought yourself to them at the peak of your armor and weaponry does not mean that you will fare better.”
“Already, you think that I have not learned my lesson,” Charun growled as he hovered above the clearing where he and Vanth had last felt the presence of the Abyssal. He scanned around, his armor augmenting his already formidable senses, and yet found nothing on the ground. It was mere minutes after the savage battle and there was no sign of human life.
He alit, his draconian wings folding back against his shoulder blades. There were signs and elements of the battle, shell casings and the bisected corpses of sparrows and voles. He bent and lifted one halved creature.
He cursed the luck that they had come equipped to deal harmlessly with groups of mind-controlled people, and the very gases they intended to slow and dispel throngs of thralls had also proved to counteract the atomic matrices that turned millions of tiny creatures into an unstoppable whole. He crushed the half squirrel, its delicate bones snapping and its meat liquefying in his powerful grasp. He wiped his palm against the ground and stood tall, looking around.
