by James Axler
She turned and took off as fast as her long, athletic legs could push her. For a moment, she regretted having lost Nehushtan, missing the brief surge of strength and grace it had granted her as it allowed her to cross half a mile in a few moments. Practicality took over, though, and she realized that her mental energies were better directed toward navigating in the dark forest.
Already she found herself skidding on the ground, having hit some slick, matted leaves that offered no traction.Her escape nearly ended right then and there as she slid, knee-first, into a tree trunk, but the shadow suit shielded her patella and joint upon impact. What could have been a leg-breaking tumble turned into an uncomfortable rebound, but even so, Brigid landed face-first on hard-packed dirt.
She grimaced as she slid, but quickly sank her fingers into the soil and slowed her progress enough to gather her knees beneath her. Digging in her heels, she shot back to her feet and continued onward, quickly drawing the shadow suit’s hood from within a utility pocket. With a tug, she found her head enclosed, but most importantly, the faceplate was in place, improving her night vision dramatically.
The shadow suits had been designed on the Mantoux moon base by a group of technical geniuses, and were meant to be the prototype of an advanced space suit—a second skin that allowed unlimited agility and prowess, while shielding the wearer from extremes of temperature and radiation. Additional design features in the hoods allowed for vastly improved visual acuity and air filtration.
The faceplate was a marvel of optics, and already Brigid was getting a real-time map of the terrain she was crossing. Moon-kissed highlights on branches and rocks became all the illumination she required, and as she glanced into the distance, tiny microlenses locked onto the object of her attention and magnified the image.
“Commtact tracking has you approximately two kilometers to the north of us, Brigid,” Grant stated. “Did you put—”
“My hood is on and the faceplate adhered to it,” she responded.
Brigid hustled along, cutting between bushes and skirting trees as she locked on to the position of the redoubt as it was located on the faceplate’s head’s-up display. She was receiving real-time information from the satellites as well as the mainframe up at the moon base. That database gave them full global positioning intelligence when necessary. The only drawback was having to be fully enclosed within the confines of the hood.
The data overload could have been unnerving to most people, but luckily, Brigid’s mind was on a higher level, capable of processing incoming data at remarkable speeds, and keeping it in place, perfectly stored so that she could pluck an item of information at whim. The monsters in the forest shrieked behind her, but she maintained her calm, pausing only once to glance back.
The light amplification of the shadow suit picked up four shapes, and she immediately recognized them as the lumbering hulks of gorilla-sized kongamato, their broad shoulders and powerful arms allowing them to swing themselves along the ground as swiftly as they could maneuver through the air. Here in the forest, that had been a necessary adaptation, especially as there was little room for them to spread their wings and catch currents of air. Gliding would be difficult, and full-out flapping of those mighty limbs would have been impossible given all the branches and trunks.
And so the kongamato loped along on all fours, though Brigid knew there would be others, both in the jungle canopy and the dark, starlit skies above, that would be taking advantage of other means of locomotion. Even as she looked upward, she could pick up an inset on her screen, where infrared satellites picked up the presence of more kongamato.
According to the readout at the bottom, there were 117 of them currently in the forest, and they were making their way toward the Victoria Falls station, where Grant and the others had taken refuge.
She grimaced at the thought of being so unceremoniously expelled from the redoubt just as she’d taken hold of the artifact they’d come to know as Nehushtan. A brief flicker of energy had surged through her as she’d touched the staff, but just as soon as that initial contact was made, she was gone, scooped up by energies similar to those of a Threshold, and deposited two kilometers away.
Brigid felt glad that whoever had caused this hadn’t gone to the effort of transmitting her into a solid object.
And then she remembered a flicker, a tinge of electric current as she’d felt herself almost materialize.
Nehushtan hadn’t been able to protect her from the external forces teleporting her, but it had kept her in plasma wave form while she landed on the ground, then was guided up into the air.
It was a brief moment, and she wasn’t even fully human at the time, merely a notion, a concept traveling on waves of magnetic force. But as soon as she’d thought about the Threshold manipulation, she’d been reminded.
Nehushtan provides, but first you have to ask the question, she thought with no small amount of irritation. The impulses that it had communicated with were elusive, so that even her thoughts could scarcely contain their mercurial whimsy. She was wondering what else the ancient artifact had left with her, when she saw something crash to the ground ahead of her.
It was a kongamato, and even as her attention was divided between navigating the midnight jungle and determining how she’d been transported away, she maintained enough awareness to realize that the monstrosity hadn’t caught up with her, but had dropped thirty feet from above, landing with a thunderous crash.
Brigid pulled the TP-9 and aimed it at the creature, even as one part of her mind wondered how a “hollow-boned” creature could have survived such a plummet. Already her intellect was providing multiple responses, from the parachutelike effect of the creature’s leathery wing membranes, to the fact that hollow-boned animals replaced very dense calcium material with pliant, cushioning muscle and blood vessels that kept their skeletons from being too brittle.
The kongamato had landed and was immediately able to whirl and present itself as a threat to Brigid Baptiste.
She fired off two quick shots, but the sudden flash of a wing buffeted her off her feet and hurled her through the air. The cushioning qualities of the shadow suit saved her as she rebounded off a tree trunk and crashed to the ground. Even so, the launch left her unnerved. Fortunately, she’d gripped the handle of her TP-9 so tightly, it remained in her grasp.
The hulking kongamato glared at her with cold detachment, light amplification providing Brigid with a detailed view of its expression. This wasn’t a creature like the ones who had attacked before. This thing possessed intellect and malice, not animalistic rage. The suit’s optics showed where she’d struck the creature center of mass, just as she’d been trained. The muscular chest and keel-like breastbone, however, rendered her 9 mm slugs as little more than nasty thorns in its side.
Seeing its bulk up close, Brigid also doubted whether the Copperhead and its 4.85 mm slugs would have acquitted itself any better. She regretted leaving her big .45-caliber SIG-Sauer with the Copperhead as she’d been on “thinking duty.”
Fortunately, if she survived this conflict, she would never again assume that even the thickest of walls were a guarantee of safety.
Before she could kick herself for disregarding the presence of the Threshold, and the potential of another party within the redoubt capable of utilizing it, Brigid saw the kongamato surge forward. Every ounce of her speed and intellect combined into a less-than-graceful lunge to the side, 250 pounds of vat-bred muscle rushing past her like a freight train. She winced as a tree trunk exploded under the sledgehammer fist of the African myth, the top portion of the tree sliding off the bottom and crashing into the dirt.
Brigid scrambled out of its path tucking in her legs just in time as hundreds of pounds of wood landed where she had been a moment before. Shadow suit or not, if she hadn’t curled up, the fallen tree would have amputated her lower limbs, crudely, painfully.
She rolled
to her knees, heartbeat racing, eyes focusing on the horror that had almost killed her by dropping a towering tree on top of her.
An icy chill raced through her as she saw the monster’s mouth turn up, as if in a self-satisfied smile.
The animal before her was merely a puppet, and the entity in control was far more intelligent than the creatures they had fought before.
Chapter 19
Anam chara, wake up. A woman’s voice reverberated inside of Kane’s skull. He couldn’t make out who it was; the world about him was a slurry of blackness, pain and disorientation. He wasn’t even certain that his eyes were open. Halos with stringy tails kept floating around him in the oblivion before his eyeballs.
We need your help, the voice added.
“Got news for you, honey,” Kane grumbled. “I’m first in line for as much help as there is.”
Even speaking felt agonizing. His ribs had taken punch after punch, so that each intake of breath felt as if he were swallowing a bag of broken razor blades. His feet couldn’t move, attached to each other as they were, with, a long spear running the length of him, and pinioned between his ankles. His arms were spread, and he could tell that they were still attached to his shoulders, and that one hands was pierced. He couldn’t see, but could feel, and imagined a set of jagged iron jaws clamped over his wrist, their sawtoothed edge grinding on the bones of his forearm with each twitch, each bump of his pulse. His other hand was just plain gone, though if he concentrated enough to focus on his sense of smell, he could detect the stink of cooking pork, a sign that something had roasted him, considering the amorphous agony gnawing at the stump where his other hand should have been.
“Durga!” he croaked. “Durga, you stinking worm, maybe together we can pull out of this.”
Nothing. Even as he spoke, the words were swallowed. He couldn’t hear the pulse of his own voice. No vibrations. Nothing.
Kane flexed his muscles, drawing himself together.
This was a psychic plane, or maybe his own mind, but he couldn’t believe that the bits of himself seemingly destroyed were gone forever. After all, he wasn’t suffocating despite the sheer agony in his ribs. He was alone in a soundless void, and yet there was air, and his blood didn’t boil.
The mutilations racking his form on this plane were all in his mind.
“Durga!”
Quiet.
“Been wondering where the hell you’d gone to,” Kane growled.
Stop running your voice for at least a moment.
Kane grimaced, but kept his mind clear. Something was...wrong.
“Who is this?”
A pox upon my house that a descendant should have a tongue which wags endlessly!
Kane tried to focus his gaze, but saw only a silhouette. But what he did see was familiar. A tall, pointed, wide-brimmed slouch hat, the glint of black leather that made up a broad belt thrown over one shoulder, the shimmer of silver on the basket handle of the sword dangling in its sheath. Kane could even smell gunpowder, freshly tamped into the barrels of pistols, ready to launch primitive balls with the force to shatter the skulls of monsters.
“Solomon...”
Just a Puritan named for a wise king.
“And we share the same familial name. For what it’s worth,” Kane added.
The Puritan shook his head, clucking his tongue at Kane’s continued speech, before putting a gloved finger to his lips, gesturing for silence.
Focus.
Kane gritted his teeth and pulled, trying to separate his feet. Again he could feel the scrape of metal on bone as he tried to get off the petard he was hoisted upon. The drag of his flesh on the steel spear pinning his ankles against each other was an illusion.
A leather-clad palm cracked across Kane’s cheek.
Focus!
Kane took a deep breath.
“What do you want me to focus on?” he muttered through clenched teeth. He was getting sick of being abused while stuck in no condition to return fire. “How about you help?”
Because I am merely a memory. In terms you would understand, I’m a gene, a chemical reaction based on a code buried deep within your DNA. I am your brain’s efforts to escape this trap, your subconscious trying to give you a key that only you can turn.
Kane sneered, then thought back. There was something, some scrap of conversation, that nagged at his memory, but what felt like years of torture and mutilation had submerged it deeply.
Focus.
Kane wanted to spit into the memory’s features, but he realized that would be useless. The Puritan was simply a memory, a false image, no more real than the “universe” that he and Durga had been hurled to, nor as truthful as his assumption that the silver threads were simply paths back home. Rather, they were leashes, held on to by an entity who ruled this...
Kane wanted to kick himself.
“I had to free Durga,” he muttered, “and he was going to free me.”
Focus.
“Kane...stop fighting!” Durga hissed. “The more you piss it off, the more it hurts the both of us!”
There was some kind of equation at work that he wasn’t seeing.
“The two of us established that only by hurting each other could we escape from this tether,” he said aloud. He looked down at himself, and there was no sign of the silvery umbilicus that had been the target of so much of his focus since he’d become trapped in this predicament. “And yet the entity holding this tether used it like a whip, a leash, subjecting it to all manner of forces that ended up hurting me all over, but not causing damage to the thread itself.”
Kane began to pull in his arms and legs, drawing himself into a ball. Here, he was an entity of thought, and everything about him was under his control, malleable. He did as his subconscious wished, focusing himself, squeezing himself down.
“The mind is everything,” Brigid Baptiste had told him, quoting an ancient religious figure called the Buddha. “What you think, you become.”
It was that focus, that thinking. Each inch of self Kane could feel, could retain, could control, felt as if it had been ripped through miles of briars. Something had scattered him, filled his perceptions with lies and falsehoods. Now, he couldn’t even determine whether anything over the past years of existence was real. He was lost, without anchor, and seeking out a solid piece of ground seemed impossible.
Anam chara, wake up.
Kane knew that voice. He knew those words.
Brigid Baptiste was summoning him, wresting him from the depths of his unbeing.
That was his anchor.
His focus.
By now, Kane had drawn himself into a ball of white-hot anger. No more; they weren’t going to keep him shredded, torn to pieces and helpless. The imagined wounds, the illusions pressed upon him of all the tortures, were cracking, shattering, flaking off of him like dead flesh.
Anam chara, wake up.
“I’m coming through, Baptiste,” he grunted.
He felt warmth now. An electrical tickle to one side. A rush of air over him.
Brigid Baptiste was real. She was his anchor. His soul friend.
And so Kane pulled through, spikes of psychic energy spearing at him from all sides as he gathered himself back together, forcing himself into a living whole. She needed him. Grant needed him. All those people in the redoubt needed him, be they the local Zambians or even the lost and embattled millennialists.
Even Durga, who Kane was willing to suffer agonies to free.
Kane had no delusions that he was so vitally important, but he was a part of the effort, and here he was, “lying down on the job.” It didn’t matter to him anymore that he’d been laid low by a psychic trauma. He needed to break loose, get back to his body.
And then he remembered who the entity, the voidlike being who
’d toyed with him, batted him around like a cat’s toy, reminded him of. It was Kakusa’s rant. Not word for word, but similar.
The void being was a prisoner, akin to that alien organism imprisoned by the Annunaki, a threat that was something other than human. And it had been riding along with the group, at least as far as Kane and Durga’s separation and their initial conflict with each other.
That void was what had been at the core of the myths that Brigid had referred to, the demons imprisoned by Suleiman and the mighty staff Nehushtan. That same entity had attacked, knowing that Kane had a link to the artifact, trying to protect itself from the mythic weapon.
Kane pulled himself tighter. He fought to ignore the universe, even as hooks of mental energy lashed from the darkened expanse of emptiness about him, sinking into the surface of the psychic sun that he’d become.
Would Kane alone be able to shatter this hold?
The mind is everything. What you think, you become.
“Let go of me, demon,” Kane growled. “Let me go, and I won’t destroy you when I uncover your tomb.”
The void being spoke again, its voice booming, but Kane no longer felt pain or pressure.
“You threaten me, human?” it asked.
Kane wanted to glare at the entity, to hold up a middle finger and spit in its face. But here, there was no true form, no body. He was a searing orb of fire, a blaze stoked by his anger and frustration at being jerked around and forcibly separated from those he loved.
“You’re threatening me?” Kane countered. “Do you know who I’ve battled? Who I’ve defeated? Those who have called for my extermination and found themselves overcome?”
Suddenly Kane felt himself in a body again, but he knew it wasn’t reality. Not unless he’d fallen asleep, clasping a fine Spanish blade from the sixteenth century.
“A fine form you’ve chosen for yourself,” the void entity intoned. It was huge, and looking down upon Kane. About them, the terrain had altered, and they were once more on the shore of the Zambezi River, the sun burning in the sky, the falls releasing their roar of thunder.
