Wings of Death

by James Axler

  There were enough other forces in Africa that would be perfectly willing to take sides in a battle between two civilized societies and pick up the bloody pieces.

  “We’ll call back to home base,” Lomon announced. “Warn them of a raider force. But tell them not to send reinforcements.”

  “If we did get help, chances are they might be jumped,” Shuka muttered.

  “You said that before,” Jonas stated.

  Shuka nodded. “Doesn’t make it less true.”

  Jonas shook his head. “Nope.”

  “You two done?” Lomon asked.

  They both nodded.

  “And you,” Lomon said to Nathan. “You might want to take that stick and get it out of here if and when those things clear out.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he answered.

  With that, Lomon looked back toward the doors. They could hear the thump and echo of mighty blows against the heavy hatches, but they would hold.

  Nathan desperately prayed that they would, at least.

  * * *

  THE SILENCE OF the observation room was disturbed only by the breathing of four men. Nathan, drained by his ordeals and lulled into a false sense of security by the soundless assault on the doors of the redoubt, allowed his eyelids to shut, lured by the temptation of sleep. Almost immediately, he felt himself start to fall. With a flash of movement, he shook himself, and realized that he was leaning on the black staff of Suleiman, and was on his feet, not slumped in a chair.

  Nathan looked around and found the other three were asleep. The video screens were flickering, but his mind couldn’t make sense of them. There were flashes of imagery, but instead of focusing on what should have shown the winged horrors hammering at the doors, he turned and walked through the exit.

  Something hummed, a distant calling. It murmured at the back of his consciousness, slowly growing in strength. Nathan moved forward numbly, realizing only after he’d gone fifty yards along the twisting halls that the staff seemed to be directing him. Each step he took was accompanied by a lift of the stick, and then a push forward, as if it were dragging him along.

  “So creepy,” he muttered to the silent weapon. “Why can’t you make things easier to understand?”

  This had to be a dream, Nathan mused. Otherwise, there would have been someone awake in the security command center. They would have been too wired, too nervous about the heavily muscled creatures that had pounded through the inch-thick steel fire door into the complex, many of which had survived direct hits from rifles and kept on attacking, with the strength to rip arms from sockets.

  The damned cryptic staff kept needling him, pushing him along. He gritted his teeth and realized the only thing he could do was relax and allow it to drag him along. Nathan was getting sick of the stick’s stubborn will. He was about to curse the black, woodlike thing, but then remembered his father’s insistence that he carry it.

  He remembered the scene he’d come upon, with his father fallen beneath the shadowy form of another person. Nathan had turned on his flashlight and the stranger had fled, moving ahead of the light. The horror of his father’s wounds had transfixed Nathan, slowing his pursuit of the killer. Nelson Longa had been still alive, though with every exhalation, air bubbled through the horrific wound in his throat, and blood sputtered over his lips.

  There was one thing that Nathan knew, however. It wasn’t one of the alien, misshapen things that had assaulted the Zambians, killing twelve heavily armed men with only their fangs and claws, who had assaunted his father. The figure had been too...human. Nthan couldn’t make out details in the dark, although even now he could remember the rustle of a cloak.

  He wanted to know who had killed his father, but the urge to bring the staff to its “rightful owner” was too strong.

  The young African couldn’t let his father down.

  The door that stood before him was akin to the ones a hundred feet above that were holding back the swarm of winged beasts. It showed signs of damage, burns from where blowtorches had attempted to cut into it. Nathan reached out and touched the surface. The scars had long been cooled, so he couldn’t tell when the damage had been done, but at least the door remained in place. The electronic panel to one side was a mess, wires dangling, for no apparent rhyme nor reason.

  Nathan blinked.

  He could feel the metal, the burned surface.

  “What are you doing here?” a voice asked. Nathan jumped, whirling and bringing up the point of the staff. It was Lomon. Nathan’s heart was going a mile a minute, and he lost his footing, toppling over and crashing against the burn-scarred door.

  The scream that came from him was hardly one to be proud of, but as his head bounced against the steel of the strange door, he winced and slid to the floor.

  When Lomon knelt over him, Nathan tried to speak, but his mouth was dry, cottony with shock.

  “Dream...” he managed to sputter.

  “Sleepwalking?” Lomon asked.

  Nathan let go of the staff and sought the floor, gathering his strength to get up. Lomon, pistol in one hand, hooked his hand beneath Nathan’s armpit, pulling on him, getting him to his feet.

  “Stick,” Nathan grunted. He hated not being able to speak clearly. He glared at the snake-entwined staff, which he thought had fallen to the floor, but was now leaning against the tangle of electrical wires poking from the dismantled security panel. It seemed to be watching him with those odd, carved eyes. He’d never noticed their ability to focus on him before, but now his brain was swimming. Was it a real phenomenon, or merely the result of his sudden jolt of panic at being jarred from walking in his sleep?

  “I noticed you were missing,” Lomon said. “You left your guns behind, and hadn’t gone toward any of the storage areas.”

  Nathan looked up and saw a camera in the corner of the ceiling, pointed toward the entrance to the sealed chamber. “What is this place?”

  He scraped his tongue with his teeth, trying to get saliva flowing so it would be easier to speak. It wasn’t helping, and only reminding him of how much he needed a drink of water, or some food, or something else to keep him going. He’d been on his trek for so long he didn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. But with the flood of adrenaline while fighting against the olitiau, and in the tense minutes after getting to the control center, his exhaustion had been cast aside.

  “According to the government, it’s nothing,” Lomon told him.

  “What about according to you?” Nathan countered.

  The eldest of the Zambian guards looked around. “It’s something top secret. We thought maybe it had something to do with the nuclear reactor running this facility.”

  “Nuclear reactor. What about the hydroelectric power produced by the falls?” Nathan inquired.

  Lomon glanced at him, then back to the doors. “Trust me, we’ve been trying to get into the grid. The reactors themselves are buried even deeper than this redoubt. We’re safe from radiation exposure by dint of at least a hundred feet of granite.”

  Nathan looked at the door. “The control room for the reactor?”

  The other man shook his head. “No. The government found that. And it’s why we had a platoon of men guarding this place. We’re trying to keep the nuclear power plant a secret, but since we can’t even reach the fuel rods, there’s no real worry about you finding this door. There’s nothing on the other side, except for what looks like a computer laboratory.”

  “You’ve opened it?” Nathan asked.

  Lomon nodded. “Just jiggle a couple of those wires together and...”

  With that pronouncement, the snake-entwined staff started to shift. A spark flew as wires brushed each other, completing a circuit. With a hiss and groan, the door slid open.

  Lomon’s eyes went wide at the coincidence. He glared at the snake-entwined staff
, and frowned. “That stick is spooky.”

  “No shit,” Nathan returned. He reached out and plucked the staff back into his hand. “But I was dreaming about it dragging me here.... It’s been leading me to this place for days.”

  “Leading you?” Lomon asked. “As in talking to you?”

  Nathan shook his head. “Nothing so easy.”

  Lomon took a moment to figure out his meaning. “I see.”

  Nathan stepped through the doorway. Motion-activated lights flickered on, revealing a hexagon-patterned set of glass walls around a base pad through another door. There were heavy computer systems off to the side. He walked to the entrance of the chamber, looking it over, curious, but keeping enough distance so he didn’t accidentally step onto the pad, or even lean through the doorway.

  “It’s some kind of a laboratory, but we’ve run Geiger counters and all manner of tests on it,” Lomon said. “We as in the scientists who might know something about what it could do. But there’s no power to these consoles, and the GUI—graphical user interface—locks out any attempt at discerning what it actually does.”

  Nathan walked around to the consoles. “My father told me to follow the staff’s lead. And to get it across the Atlantic.”

  “You’ve mentioned that,” Lomon replied. “You think this might be a shortcut?”

  He shrugged. “Why would I wake up and wander here?”

  Lomon looked at the staff. “Crazy stick. Then again, that platform, the door, the computers...it reminds me of something.”

  “An old TV show?” Nathan asked.

  Lomon nodded. “Stylistically, it’s nothing like those old vids, but damned if this doesn’t remind me of a transporter room.”

  “Step onto the transporter mat, punch in the coordinates, and zap. I’m there,” Nathan mused. “But this doesn’t look as if it works. You said the GUI locks out any attempts at exploring what it does.”

  Lomon looked at the consoles. “Yeah. And we’re not completely without computer savvy....”

  “I’m not doubting it,” Nathan said. He spent a few moments looking over the thing, then glared at the twin robotic serpents on the staff. “Anytime you feel like giving me some supersecret pass code, I’m all ears.”

  “Has it ever answered a question put to it?” Lomon asked.

  “Never,” Nathan grumbled. “But you mentioned how to open the door, and it followed that suggestion.”

  “Coincidence,” Lomon said. He almost looked as if he believed it.

  Nathan shrugged. “Let’s turn this thing on. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” the Zambian repeated. “Where a couple centuries of computer experts haven’t been able to.”

  Nathan sighed. “Dumb luck, stick magic. Who knows what it’ll take, but it’s brought me this far.”

  The two men went to work at the console.

  * * *

  THE SHRIEK OF a creature slashed over Kane’s head, and his gaze snapped up to it. For a moment, he mistook the thing for a bird, but the leathery expanse of wings wasn’t avian. He remembered the pinwheeling, gliding forms of pterosaurs against the lava-tube glow of an underground kingdom’s “roof” when he’d been down in the Dragon’s Spine.

  This wasn’t underground, though. The sun was bright, the sky was blue and the air wasn’t tainted with the stink of a heavy, overoxygenated atmosphere or the funk of grown saurians. Kane tried to remember how he’d gottten here, and wondered if he wasn’t on Thunder Isle, the subject of a time-trawling experiment.

  He looked down at himself, and noted he was wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans. He was barefoot, but at least his belt had a sheath for his foot-long fighting knife. Kane grimaced, wondering why he was in the forest of Thunder Isle all barefoot, like Domi on one of her feral field trips.

  Maybe this wasn’t the island, he mused. He wrapped his hand around the grip scales of the knife and felt reassured that he wasn’t completely helpless. He’d have been a little more comfortable with the folding Sin Eater that was both the badge of office of a magistrate and a deadly weapon in his highly trained hands.

  “Not so different from my time with Sky Dog’s tribe,” he said out loud. He felt the timbre of his voice, the vibration of his words, hoping he could tell the difference between reality and a dream. The checkers of the grip scales were real against his palm and finger pads. The air smelled wild and free; the sun tingled on his skin, promising tanning from exposure to UV rays.

  Kane pursed his lips. He still didn’t remember getting here, and dived deep into his thoughts, looking for hints and clues. Maybe he’d been deposited here, somewhere that pterosaurs took to the skies but was temperate enough for him to wander half-dressed and armed only with a foot of razor-sharp steel. He wouldn’t put it past the technology of any of his enemies, the overlords, Sindri, Major Thrush, to scoop him up and leave him, amnesiac, at a battleground.

  There’d be easier ways to kill him, but the overlords and Major Thrush were the type to engage in complicated, circuitous schemes to prove their superiority and cleverness. Sindri, though they had recently parted on slightly less than friendly terms, was prankster enough to dump Kane into a mess. There could be other explanations, too.

  This could all be a fever dream from a bad mat-trans jump. He’d encountered them before, transcendental experiences where he’d become privy to strips of secret history lost in the annals of time. Kane looked around, studying the trees, the grasses, checking for signs of life other than the lone, leather-winged shadow that had disappeared overhead.

  “This feels familiar,” he mused to himself. “I’ve been here.”

  He strode through the grasses, and so far, he could tell that they were different from those that grew in the shadows of the Bitterroot Mountains around Cerberus redoubt and the mountain it had been built into. This was vaguely familiar ground, but the trees were all wrong. He was familiar with the firs and pines of the forests around the redoubt, and these were different species. He might not have Brigid Baptiste’s encyclopedic knowledge of scientific minutiae, but he could tell that this also wasn’t the foliage on Thunder Isle. He was somewhere completely new.

  Kane frowned, thinking of why this seemed so familiar.

  The forests of India and China? No, those were different, too. This wasn’t Europe, either.

  “Throw me a bone here,” Kane murmured, feeling frustrated at the hints that nibbled at the edges of his consciousness.

  He brushed his jaw, and while he could feel the pintle leads surgically implanted for the Commtact, the plate that they would hold in place was gone. Again, the plate could have been removed, or he simply had been dropped here from sleep.

  Trouble was, he didn’t usually sleep with a belt knife at Cerberus. He found himself fighting off consternation, kneeling and looking for some sign of where he was.

  He tried the earth, picking up a pinch of it. Dry and claylike.

  If Brigid Baptiste were here, she would know where they were. He drew the knife and pressed the point to his fingertip. He felt the searing heat of the razor tip cutting into the pad of flesh. This couldn’t be a dream, and yet...he remembered feeling the swords of his enemies, the chopping blades of the men who slew Cuchulain as he rose to the defense of Morrigan.

  He returned the knife to its sheath, then took a slurp of the bead of blood drawn by the knife point. Rather than stand idly waiting for answers, he let his restless nature draw him to the tree line. Beyond the grove was a cliff overlooking the surrounding countryside. Once out of the open, away from the grassy field, he’d have a little better chance of figuring where he was, while feeling less exposed.

  The sun was already starting to set by the time he reached the trees. Kane tried to get his bearings on the passage of time, but couldn’t recall exactly what the azimuth of the sun had been when he’d start
ed his march. But once there, he took out his knife and started chopping at thorny trees and bushes in the nearest thicket. The briar branches took some effort to gather, and when he’d finished, his hand was covered with pinpricks and stung.

  Still, he was more than certain that this wasn’t a dream, and began to feel as if he were in Africa somewhere. It didn’t feel like the Congo, which he’d been to months ago when he sought out the treasure of Prestor John, but there were enough similarities in the foliage. He withdrew a flint from the hollow butt of the survival knife and scraped it against the crosspiece until he sparked a good camping flame. So far, he hadn’t heard or seen wild animals, but that could easily change come the sunset. Nocturnal hunters were infamous in the African wilderness.

  A fire, and a thick-trunked tree at his back, would provide him some measure of security, which would be enforced by his light sleep and keen senses.

  With the campfire blazing, Kane took a seat, held the knife in his grasp and waited for darkness to flow around the improvised camp.

  He wondered what mysteries would come to him in the night.

  Chapter 3

  Kane’s head started to droop beneath the tree branches that filtered out the full moon above. He was on the edge of the forest, so the canopy above him was thin enough that he could glimpse the relatively clear night sky, even as the ground seemed to ooze mist, rising up like ghosts from a graveyard. It was silent, but there was no eerie quality, no hushed desperation to the quiet.

  Indeed, it seemed calm, free, loose. A gentle cloak of slumber wrapped about him like a blanket. The mist held no threat, no malice. As a result, he was starting to lose his struggle to stay awake and alert. The forest was seductive, charming, enchanting, drawing him into a state of relaxation he felt only when he was among the Lakota. As much as he didn’t want to sleep, there was no conscious, logical reason for him to be on edge, except that he was most studiously not being threatened.