Serpent's Kiss

by Alex Archer

  Growing braver behind her, the beast-men surged forward. They shouted and howled in expectant glee.

  Down in the pit, Rajiv Shivaji turned his flashlight on the beast-men and saw Annja. He pulled his rifle to his shoulder and opened fire as she whirled away from the beast-men and the flashlight beam.

  The bullets thudded into the beast-men and some of them dropped. In retaliation, the beast-men threw spears and rocks down at the pirates. More of Rajiv’s men went down under the onslaught.

  Guttural growls and howls erupted from the other side of the room. When she looked across the pit, Annja saw another doorway on the other side. Evidently the room had been designed as a bottleneck for invading forces. The lip around the pit was wide enough to get around, but only in single file. The beast-men navigated it easily, but they didn’t have to rush. They could trap their enemies and wait them out.

  As Annja watched, the group on the other side of the pit unrolled rope ladders and dropped them down into the pit. They carried spears and swords, and their intent was clear. The pirates redirected their attention to the closer threat, but strategically placed boulders and thick logs provided cover as the beast-men crept among them.

  In minutes, Annja knew it would be over and none of them would survive. She stood her ground and lifted the sword. A beast-man carrying a spear came at her and thrust his weapon.

  Annja lopped off the front of the spear with her blade, then opened her opponent’s throat with the next slash. She spun and kicked the dying man backward. He flailed and took another down with him. They fell onto the pointed stakes below. Annja didn’t see them fall, but she heard the crash and splintering wood.

  She set herself again. She knew the only chance she had to survive the encounter was to somehow get past the group of beast-men that had followed her down the passageway.

  Her desperate fight became a dance of death as she blocked spear and sword thrusts, then returned the fight with her own blows. The beast-men died before her onslaught. In seconds, the tide of battle had turned.

  Annja knew she was covered in blood, none of it her own. Her body felt warm and loose, as if she could continue the fight for hours. Gunfire rattled down in the pit and the flashes begged for her attention, but she remained focused on each of the beast-men that stepped out in front of her.

  In short order, she was back at the entranceway. Gunfire sounded outside the passageway now. A moment later, she saw muzzle-flashes against the stone walls. As soon as she recognized the potential threat of Patel’s men inadvertently shooting her, Annja started to step back out of the way.

  When she gave ground, Annja caught sight of a beast-man launching himself at her. She was too late to do anything. The man hit her at the knees and took her down over the edge of the pit.

  Annja lost the sword in the wild tumble down the almost straight walls. She knew she could get it back as long as she didn’t end up on the pointed end of a stake.

  She managed to roll on top of her attacker as they fell and rode him down the twenty-foot fall. He hit solidly and a stake punched through his chest below his breastbone.

  The sudden stop jarred Annja. She gazed down at the stake thrust through the man and knew that if it had slid through another few inches it would have impaled her, as well.

  The glow of the flashlights scattered across the bottom of the pit backlit the scene enough for Annja to see most of the details. Annja saw that a pirate had already been impaled on the stake. That body had kept the stake from punching through into Annja, as well.

  Lucky, she told herself. She rolled off the dead man and dropped a couple feet to the ground. She willed the sword into her hand and dodged as two beast-men attacked. Both of them had bullet holes stitched across their chests and faces.

  A beast-man sprang at her from behind a boulder. He had surprise on his side and he was extremely fast. Annja blocked his overhead sweep with his single-bitted ax and riposted before putting her blade through his heart. When the sword jammed in between the bones, she left it and willed it into her hand a step later. When it appeared, it was clean of blood.

  She fought amid the stakes, logs and boulders. When an enemy approached her, she cut him or her down. In minutes, a pile of bodies ringed her position. Men among Patel’s group added to the body count.

  In the end, though, there were too many of the beast-men. They came on, hardly breaking stride as they grew more certain of their victory.

  Annja’s breath grew short and her arm grew tired. A beast-man swung a club at her head. She ducked behind a stake that had a body draped over it, let the stake absorb the attack, then swung around the stake and kicked the man in the back of the head.

  “Annja!”

  When she heard Fleet’s voice, Annja glanced up and saw the man dropping a rope over the edge of the pit.

  “Come on!” Fleet urged. “We’ll cover you!”

  Immediately, Annja altered her course and headed for the rope. A pirate tried to climb it and took a spear through the back. Weakly, he fumbled at the rope and fell backward.

  Annja’s next step brought her within ten feet of Rajiv Shivaji. The pirate turned toward her and aimed his assault rifle. Annja dodged out of the way, but she knew she couldn’t stay where she was. The beast-men were only a few feet away and closing.

  “I’m out!” someone yelled.

  Annja knew the man was referring to his ammunition. Once the bullets were gone, they wouldn’t be able to hold the line against the beast-men.

  “I’ll offer you a deal, Miss Creed,” Rajiv called out.

  Annja peered around the corner. Even if Patel’s men saw the danger Rajiv presented to her, he was too deeply dug in to be easily reached.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “I’ll give you your life if you’ll give my son his,” Rajiv said. “I don’t want him to die.”

  The request surprised Annja. She’d been prepared for Rajiv to try to negotiate his own rescue. Goraksh still hung on the stake. Blood soaked his shirt and pants.

  There was no time to think. The confusion in the pit, aided by the darkness, made it hard for Patel’s men to lay down covering fire. Not only that, but a few of them were down in the pit now, too. The beast-men were good with the spears.

  “I’ll do it,” Annja agreed. She willed the sword away and stepped out into the open. For a moment, when Rajiv’s aim rested on the center of her body, she thought perhaps he was going to shoot her anyway.

  But he swiveled around and shot two advancing beast-men. More took their places.

  Annja ran to the stake where Goraksh was impaled. Her quick assessment told her that it was possible nothing vital had been hit. But pulling him off the stake was going to open the wound and let it bleed.

  She called the sword forth and swung the blade. The keen edge passed right through the stake. She let the weapon fade away. She managed to catch Goraksh over her shoulder before he could fall.

  With the slightly built young man over her shoulder, the stake section hard against her back, Annja ran for the rope Fleet had dangling. She grabbed it with her free hand, then pulled her other hand around as she swung her boots against the side of the pit.

  She climbed, but she merely touched a couple of times because Fleet and a couple other men pulled her up the side of the pit. Spears and clubs smacked against the wall but missed her for the most part. A club or a rock hit her between the shoulder blades, and a spear grazed her ribs.

  When she got to the top of the pit, Patel’s men took Goraksh from her. She turned and took a last look in the pit. The beast-men had swarmed over the pirates and dragged them down. Rajiv fought them with his rifle butt, but he lasted only a few seconds. The beast-men fell on their victims and howled at their victory.

  “Come on,” Fleet said. “We’ve burned through nearly all our ammunition. We can’t stay here. There are too many of them.”

  Annja turned and ran. She kept pace with the paratroopers easily. Only a few beast-men tried to block their path. E
ither they’d decided to let them go because they were too dangerous or they’d all focused on the easier prey down in the pit.

  Minutes later, they piled into the boats and sped away.

  Annja hated leaving. It must have showed on her face.

  “It’s not over,” Fleet said. “Nobody’s going to let go of this site until they know for certain what’s here.”

  “I know,” Annja said. “I just want to be part of it.”

  “If anyone has earned that right, Miss Creed,” Patel said grimly, “it’s you. The Archaeology Survey of India is not so hard-hearted that they will forget who brought them here.”

  Annja sincerely hoped so.

  Epilogue

  “They told me I’d find you back here.”

  At the sound of the familiar voice, Annja turned and saw James Fleet approaching her across the interior courtyard of Kumari Kandam II. The site wasn’t actually designated that. It was just something all the workers had taken to calling it.

  Fleet looked rested and happy. He gazed around at the site. “You’ve made a lot of changes.”

  He was referring to the electrical lighting that hung along the walls and lit up the interior of the subterranean city. Several teams of archaeologists, all of them there by invitation only, labored on different facets of the project.

  “I didn’t make the changes,” Annja said. “The ASI did.”

  “Ah,” Fleet said.

  “I can’t say that I agree with them all, but I can’t take pictures in the dark.” Annja held up her digital camera.

  “Well, then, modernization in moderation, I suppose,” Fleet said.

  Annja grinned. “What brings you out all this way?”

  “I was curious.” Fleet walked around and gazed at the walls. “I hadn’t seen it since we left it. I’ve thought about it a lot. The whole thing has made me curious.”

  “Curiosity is a natural trait of an archaeologist,” Annja said.

  “It’s also one of an investigator,” Fleet said. “I’d get my fill of looking at rock murals pretty quickly, I’m afraid. I’m far more interested in the evils that men do than any works of art they’ve created.”

  “They’ve done evil pretty much since they took their first breaths,” Annja said.

  “I suppose it all began when Cain slew Abel.”

  “It probably started even before then. It’s just not recorded,” Annja said.

  “I see the ASI allowed you to work the site.”

  “They did.” Annja picked up a bottle of water from the small refrigerated cooler on the table near where she worked. She offered one to Fleet and he accepted. “It was easy. It was harder finding the time to stay here. I keep a busy schedule.”

  “I figured that.” Fleet sipped the water. “So are you going to be here long?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “Do you plan to eat dinner while you’re here?”

  Annja smiled. “I eat dinner every night, Agent Fleet.”

  “Please, call me James. It takes too long to say, ‘Yes, Agent Fleet, I’d love to have dinner with you the next time the helicopter takes a group out of here.’”

  “I didn’t know I was going to say that.”

  Fleet looked a little rueful. “I was rather hoping that you might.”

  “All right.”

  “Good.” Fleet nodded.

  “But I thought you were busy. That’s why you stayed in Kanyakumari.”

  “Paperwork. It’s done now. I’ve got a staggering caseload, but nothing that can’t wait a few days. The bureau is pretty happy knowing Shivaji is off the books. And the .357 Magnum Patel’s soldiers found is going to clear a lot of cases.”

  Annja turned back to the wall where the demolitions man had blown the secret door apart. “I really wish all the damage hadn’t been done.”

  “Couldn’t be helped,” Fleet replied. “Was much more damage incurred when Patel arrived with reinforcements?”

  “No.” Annja had had to admire the special-forces team. They’d organized and run efforts to remove the remaining residents of the city.

  There had been a few women and children, and the whole thing had been pretty horrible. None of them or the bloodline was going to be salvageable. Almost two hundred survivors were living in old leper compounds outside of Kanyakumari. Medical teams were trying to make them as comfortable as possible, but they were facing certain extinction.

  The saddest part was that they had no real oral history to pass on. Their language so far was indecipherable, and most of it was repetitive and nonsense according to the linguistic experts studying them.

  Clearing the city had taken most of three days and had included tranquilizer darts and knockout gas. Even then the peaceful solution to the occupancy problem hadn’t been totally without loss.

  “Mostly it was just sad,” Annja admitted. “The military knocked out the residents, loaded them into cargo nets and flew them out of here. Their quality of life isn’t going to be very good.”

  “It’ll be safer wherever they are than where they were,” Fleet said. “At least there they won’t be cannibalizing each other.”

  “How is Goraksh?” she asked.

  “Getting better. It’ll still be a while before they release him from the hospital. But I’m told he should make a full recovery.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I’ve done some checking around. By all accounts, he’s not a hardcore pirate like his father.”

  Annja nodded. “He wasn’t anything like his father.”

  “In the end, his father wasn’t like the man I thought I was chasing,” Fleet admitted.

  “The pirate who murdered indiscriminately, yet gave his life to save his son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone has family,” Annja said. “Those bonds tend to be strong. They either lift people up or they weigh them down. In Shivaji’s case, I think he rose to the occasion at the end.”

  Fleet looked around the courtyard. “They tell me there’s no flight back to civilization for another three days.”

  “That’s right,” Annja said.

  “Three days is a lot of time to do nothing.”

  “Maybe,” Annja said with a smile, “we should find you something to do.” She quickly set him to the task of clearing away some of the debris. It all had to be sorted through. If possible, she intended to rebuild the wall. A lot of the history of the people leaving Kumari Kandam was contained on the walls, and she wanted all of it.

  Her phone rang as she turned back to her camera. A quick glance at caller ID showed her that it was a New York number.

  “Hello,” she answered.

  “Annja!” Doug Morrell said excitedly. “Long time no hear from my favorite television personality.”

  Still feeling irritated at the whole memorial DVD collection, Annja leaned against the wall and said nothing.

  “Look, I know you’re busy,” Doug said. “I’ve been trying to keep up with the crocodile people you found over there.”

  “They’re not crocodile people,” Annja said.

  Doug sighed. “That’s too bad. Crocodile people I could make a show out of.”

  “They were cannibals,” Annja said when she decided to throw him a bone.

  “Really? Cool. We can’t get enough shows about cannibals.”

  “This isn’t my story,” Annja said.

  “What do you mean it’s not your story? You found the crocodile people.” Doug sounded a little outraged.

  “This story belongs to the ASI. If I can negotiate some material from them, that’ll be fine.”

  “Work on that. We’re running thin on subject material.”

  “All right.”

  “Look,” Doug went on, “I know you were miffed about that memorial DVD we offered—”

  “More than miffed,” Annja interrupted.

  “—and I came up with an ingenious idea, if I do say so myself, that made the marketing department happy and should make you happy, too.”

&n
bsp; Annja waited, really not wanting to know.

  “Sticker,” Doug said.

  “Sticker?” Annja didn’t see where Doug was headed.

  “Sure. We’re going to change the DVD to read Best of instead of Memorial by putting a covering sticker on every DVD case.”

  Annja couldn’t believe it.

  “Since we changed the artwork on the page, a lot of people are starting to order it again. That’s as much a tribute to you as to anything I could think of.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So when are you going to be out of there?”

  Annja knew he’d already forgotten where she was. “When I get done.”

  “If that’s going to be a while, we’re in trouble,” Doug said. “Our production cupboard is empty. We need a story we can run with for the show pretty soon.”

  Without warning, a yell went up.

  “I’ve gotta go, Doug.” Annja closed the phone and vaulted into action. She couldn’t help wondering if some of the city’s original residents had returned from the jungle where some of them had hidden.

  Instead, the archaeology team gathered in the amphitheater stepped back from a hole in the wall. Steps led up inside the hidden passageway.

  “There’s a library up here,” a young man shouted as he paused almost halfway down to his knees on the cut-stone steps.

  “A library,” Fleet said. “That’s important?”

  “It is,” Annja said, her voice tight with emotion. “None of those people living here were historians. If not for these books, whatever they were before might have been destroyed. It would have been lost forever.” She sighed. “Of course, from everything we’ve seen so far, we can’t read their language.”

  “Eventually someone somewhere will be able to,” Fleet said. “Language is a code. There are a lot of people who love code-breaking almost as much as you like chasing after lost things.”

  “I know.”

  “I take it they’re not going to pass the books around for a while?”

  Annja shook her head. “Not until researchers have had a chance to film the room.” She couldn’t help wondering how large the room was and how many books were inside. “They want to see everything in situ, in case that’s important. It generally is.”