by James Axler
ETERNAL OCCUPATION
The quasi-immortal aliens enslaving humanity underestimated the freedom cry of the human soul. Mankind’s battle to reclaim its independence is spearheaded by a remarkable group of resistance fighters. And now the Cerberus rebels must confront a former adversary on a quest for a relic of mythical power.
EVIL RISING
An old enemy of the Cerberus warriors unleashes Harpy-like killers on the African continent, hoping the blood-hungry winged beasts and their love of human flesh will aid in his capture of a legendary artifact: the powerful staff wielded by Moses and King Solomon. Except the staff’s out of his reach, safe in Kane’s hands. And with the murderous rampage spiraling out of control and an exiled prince bent on unlocking the gates of Hell, the staff is all that stands between the rebels and Africa’s utter decimation.
The powerful beast’s limb struck the ground with a resounding detonation
Grant was certain that if he hadn’t moved, the hammering impact would have tested the non-Newtonian properties of his shadow suit.
The strength of the monstrosity before him was on a par with the impact force of his gun, but this thing could back its power with great claws. The Kongamato lunged out with its other winged arm, but Grant pushed himself on top of the thing, wrapping his brawny arms around it and tugging it off balance. Its beaklike muzzle jammed into the ground, propelled by Grant’s weight. Giving it a savage twist, Grant heard joints and tendons pop inside the sinewy wing, and the beast unleashed its cry into the ground.
Other titles in this series:
Hellbound Fury
Night Eternal
Outer Darkness
Armageddon Axis
Wreath of Fire
Shadow Scourge
Hell Rising
Doom Dynasty
Tigers of Heaven
Purgatory Road
Sargasso Plunder
Tomb of Time
Prodigal Chalice
Devil in the Moon
Dragoneye
Far Empire
Equinox Zero
Talon and Fang
Sea of Plague
Awakening
Mad God’s Wrath
Sun Lord
Mask of the Sphinx
Uluru Destiny
Evil Abyss
Children of the Serpent
Successors
Cerberus Storm
Refuge
Rim of the World
Lords of the Deep
Hydra’s Ring
Closing the Cosmic Eye
Skull Throne
Satan’s Seed
Dark Goddess
Grailstone Gambit
Ghostwalk
Pantheon of Vengeance
Death Cry
Serpent’s Tooth
Shadow Box
Janus Trap
Warlord of the Pit
Reality Echo
Infinity Breach
Oblivion Stone
Distortion Offensive
Cradle of Destiny
Scarlet Dream
Truth Engine
Infestation Cubed
Planet Hate
Dragon City
God War
Genesis Sinister
Savage Dawn
Sorrow Space
Immortal Twilight
Cosmic Rift
Wings of Death
A monster vile, whom God and man does hate:
Therefore I read beware. Fly fly (quoth then The fearefull Dwarfe:) this is no place for living men.
—Edmund Spenser,
1552–1599
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 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 1
Nathan Longa’s throat tightened and he clutched the staff he was carrying as he looked at the gully
below, which was blocking his journey through the forest. It was teeming, alive, and if he dropped into it, he knew he would be doomed to an agonizing death. There was no mistaking the millions-strong horde of siafu ants, a bloodthirsty form of superorganism. Within minutes of landing in the gully, his skin would be gone. At the end of a day, he’d be bleached, picked-clean bones.
With a surge of energy, Nathan hurled himself off the crumbling slope, stretching out, striving to reach the far edge of the gully. When he landed on the other side, his knees buckled and gravity seized him, threatening to pull him down into the rustling force below. He threw his free hand out to stop his fall, and felt the scrape of sharp gravel on his palm, his fingernails bending as he clawed the mud. He finally got his feet beneath him and pushed himself upward, scrambling over the top of the bank. All the while, he kept the staff grasped in his fist.
The bottom of the strange weapon was tapered to a point that never blunted, no matter how many times Nathan, or his father, or his fathers before him, had plunged it into the earth. It wasn’t a keen, arrow-sharp point, but Nathan and the Longa clan had driven it through the chest of many a bandit in its years, eons that stretched back to the dawn of man and the ages of Atlantis.
The top of the staff had two snakes winding around it in a crisscrossing pattern, reminiscent of the old symbol of healing. And yet the raised heads of the twin serpents, their eyes protruding like engine nacelles, had an alien look.
The Longas had held on to the stick for at least four centuries, perhaps longer. Only a few other names had been linked to it: Suleiman, Solomon, Kane....
Nathan’s father, Nelson Longa, had been near death, his throat torn by a creature who’d fled when Nathan appeared with his torch.
“This must go to the West, across the Atlantic,” the dying man had gasped. “It must reach the hands of the one being who can wield it as a sword of justice. Take it!” he’d pleaded.
Nathan had grabbed the damned stick and started running.
There had been times when he wanted to take the black staff and break it across his knee, but the shaft never flexed, even with all his weight on one end, and the other levered against the hardest granite, wedged beneath boulders. It appeared to be wood, but would never shatter, its surface well-worn and smooth, despite the fact that Nathan couldn’t scratch it with his knife.
The staff’s remarkable nature had become apparent the first time he’d grasped it. It had its own inner warmth, even though it was hard as steel. The warmth trickled up his arm, a strange vibration that hummed through Nathan’s blood, carrying a subtle communication that obviously came from some other consciousness. The staff, in fact, guided him. When he awoke in the morning, he knew the direction he had to go, how far. Instinct had taken him across the African continent, pushing him to the north.
And now he was being prodded to even swifter flight, to the point where he couldn’t dare pause in the face of the gnawing, deadly mass of killer ants.
He was being pursued by something even more fearsome than the siafu. He set off running into the thick jungle.
Even as he raced, he heard the rustle and snap of branches, both behind and above.
Then he heard the crash of something falling into the gully he’d crossed, followed by a wild shriek. Whatever had been chasing him had a healthy set of lungs, and the tearing jaws of thousands of ants gave him plenty to howl about.
There was no time to stop, no time to slow down. Nathan charged on, headlong. He had to escape the hunters. Those that were higher up, seeming to bound from branch to branch, weren’t going to be deterred by the slicing mandibles of ants.
He pushed himself harder, and with each step could feel the fibers in his burning thigh muscles stretch and snap. Nathan came from the two-centuries-old postapocalyptic metropolis of Harare. Before the megacull, Harare had been a sprawling place of more than two and a half-million souls. After the hellish weather caused by nuclear winters in the northern hemisphere, and the seismic surges caused by earthshaker bombs, it still held on to its status as a strong, thriving city-state, though imports and exports with the rest of the world had been sharply limited due to the rampant anarchy in surrounding regions of Zimbabwe.
Harare remained a peaceful place, having a large military and police presence, as well as sufficient infrastructure to weather the centuries since the northern continents went into a self-destructive war. Still, population numbers were down to a million and a half thanks to conflicts and disease—especially a rampant plague of HIV, which had taken the country to the limits of its medical abilities.
Striking out beyond the borders was an arduous ordeal. To the east and west were lands of lawless excess, where Harare’s military battled all along the frontier, struggling to keep the wolves at bay and the populace secure. The south was tumultuous, much more so because of drought and the inability to produce food. Harare’s northern location, and its relatively good water supplies and arable land, had allowed it to hold on as a civilization, even in the face of bandits and maniacs trying to invade.
Nathan didn’t think that those following him were from the hunger lands, the frontiers of madness and war. He had run too hard, too far, and burned too many calories to be of interest to flesh-starved cannibals.
These were someone else.
Someone or something.
Nathan kept running. He’d crossed into Zambia this day, and already he could hear Mosi-oa-Tunya—the Smoke that Thundered—in the distance. The staff wanted to get there, was being drawn in, pulling Nathan along toward his destiny. Back in the age before skydark, Mosi-oa-Tunya had been also known as Victoria Falls, the highest waterfall in the world at 355 feet. The seismic shift caused by distant earthshaker bombs had upped that by twenty to fifty feet, according to Harare’s trade partners to the northeast.
He could see a road up ahead through the trees, and knew that his chance of dodging his pursuers was growing thinner. At the same time, with the bellow of the falls, he realized he might actually be close to a settlement. He remembered that the Zambians shared a complex of preskydark power stations with Harare, electricity that was produced by the still-operational Victoria Falls Power Station. The two countries valued their independence from each other, but the shared resource was one that was inexhaustible. Attempting to fight over it would be foolish and needlessly destructive. There were other enemies for Zambia and Harare to stand against.
The road, when he reached it, seemed lonely, desolate. Even if he was close to the falls, that didn’t mean he was near the power station and whichever city or town clung to the place. Nathan didn’t stop to look at a map, but reached down, ripping the stubby but powerful little Detonics Combat Master from its holster. If he were out in the open, he would need to fight, and the staff of Suleiman might not be enough. Not from creatures that danced upon the boughs of a jungle canopy, stalking prey on the ground.
Nathan glanced around, pulling the hammer back with his thumb, ready to unleash a storm of .45-caliber slugs against whatever burst from the branches above. There were lights, electric lights, glowing, silhouetting a knoll covered with brush and long grasses at a curve in the winding road. It was unclear whether the lights were a part of the Victoria Falls Power Station, still in operation after two centuries, though only one of the substations and three of its original generators were still pumping out megawatts, with the assistance of three more jury-rigged generators.
Nathan took a deep breath, then set off again in long, loping strides. His finger was off the trigger, resting against the dustcover, outside the guard. This was one way to keep the gun from going off by accident. He didn’t want to waste one of his vital first seven shots, didn’t want to accidentally blast a hole in his foot. He also didn’t want the sound of gunfire to break the silence and perhaps bring a dozen Zambian soldiers running to the defense of the power station, and perhaps riddle him with rifle fire.
That would be a distinct possibility, after all. While Harare and Zambia were trade partners, only the most naive of nations would be unconcerned about an armed traveler on the road late at night. Nathan hadn’t called ahead, and wished with all his heart that he could have let them know he would be coming.
Judging from the rush of water, he was in the third gorge of Mosi-oa-Tunya, six hundred meters south from the top of the falls. But there was a whole kilometer-plus of river where the station could be. Victoria Falls was huge, and this was the rainy season, as opposed to the dry season, when it was a trickle. This was the time of year when the falls were at their most powerful.
There was a sudden flash of movement behind him, something he heard rather than saw. Nathan whirled, grimacing. He wouldn’t be able to hold his fire, and would possibly have a threat from two fronts.
As he drew the little .45 up toward the figure hurtling at him in the darkness, he paused, eyes wide with horror.
The creature wasn’t as tall as Nathan’s six foot two, maybe a few inches short of six feet, even, but its arms were as long as its body, from its shoulder to the end of its “little finger,” with bulbous, swelling biceps that flowed into a pack of chest muscles as large as melons. Nathan didn’t even think to put his finger on the .45’s trigger, and the creature slammed into him hard.
The gun went skittering across the hard-packed road, dirt interspersed with old crumbled tarmac. But before it landed, Nathan brought the staff of Suleiman up and across, the blackened “wood” of the stick catching a corner of a fang-filled mouth. The creature was horrible, alien. Its mouth extended from its face like some form of beak, but there were long canines jutting from beneath the decurved upper bill, just as others rose, gleaming and sharp, to close on the staff.
Nathan’s instincts, or the staff itself, had saved his face and throat from being savaged by jaws filled with brutal weaponry. The creature grunted, snorted out mucus from its bill-mounted nostrils, and struggled, pushing against the unbreakable rod of Solomon. There was an ugly crunch as it flexed its jaw, and blood erupted from gums where the creature had wrenched its lower canines loose. It had hoped to bite through the stick, and instead only caused itself pain. Nathan winced, spit out the thing’s blood, and shook off his shock.
