by James Axler
Lying on his back beneath the flickering lights, the colossal form of Ullikummis stretched his arms out and pushed himself up into a crouching position before easing up off the floor. He was moving slower than before. He was wounded, Kane realized. Kane snapped off another burst of bullets at the creature’s back, targeting the spot at the top of his armored spine where acid still bubbled. Ullikummis seemed oblivious, ignoring the bullets as they embedded themselves into his skin.
Then he inclined his head, peering over his antlerlike shoulder ridge at Kane with those glowing magma pools of light that formed his eyes. “You’re impressive,” the beast intoned, his voice like grinding millstones, “for an ape.”
“Yeah,” Kane snarled. “Impress this, you son of a bitch!” And with that, the ex-Magistrate’s Sin Eater spit a continuous stream of bullets as Ullikummis padded toward him, his trunklike feet crashing against the floor of the redoubt’s tunnellike jackhammers, picking up speed as he ran for his opponent.
FARTHER BACK ALONG THE TUNNEL, unseen by either of the combatants, Rosalia emerged from the stairwell, her face half-hidden within the folds of her hooded robe. The noise of the battle drew her, and she hunkered in the open doorway, her hand on the dog’s neck, both of them peering out at the incredible fight that raged forty feet away.
“Kane,” Rosalia said, the word barely louder than her breath. “Magistrate man Kane.”
She knew Kane from before, from back when they had encountered one another in the coastal village of Hope. For all his irritating morality, Kane was an adept fighter, she knew, and he would stand up to protect others. When they first met, he had even recruited her into helping save the victims of a tidal wave that had crashed into the fishing village from the Pacific. Yes, Kane could be annoying, but he would stop at nothing to achieve the things he believed in. And if she played him right, one of those things might just be her freedom.
Beneath the shadows of her hood, Rosalia smiled. “Things have just taken a turn for the very interesting,” she murmured to herself.
BULLETS SLAMMED AGAINST Ullikummis’s smoldering features as he rocketed toward Kane like an enraged bull. Kane saw the giant’s stone arm sweep through the air at him, and he leaped aside, springing high and kicking out, his feet slamming against the stone monster’s chest and flipping him over Ullikummis’s shoulder, drilling bullets into his face from just inches away.
Then Kane was landing on the far side of the monstrous would-be god, rolling over to disperse the momentum he had built up in those brief instants of furious movement.
Ullikummis turned, sweeping a hand across his face where the bullets had struck. Kane watched as the monstrous, malformed figure used his rugged fingers to pluck a bullet from his acid-damaged cheek, flicking it to the floor. Five more followed, a tinkling of misshapen titanium shells smattering against the tiles.
Kane stood his ground, the Sin Eater poised before him. The weapon was having some effect, he could see, but would it be enough?
Kane turned, looking around him for something else to hit the monster with, something more powerful. Ullikummis’s troops seemed to have stopped in place, stunned spectators to this battle between man and god.
Frantically, Kane scanned the scene as the great stone figure took another stride toward him, his rough, rocky hide lit in staccato bursts by the flickering lights. In that instant, Kane shifted his aim, pointing the Sin Eater directly above his head and unleashing a triple burst of bullets as Ullikummis gathered his pace. Twenty feet above the combatants’ heads, Kane’s bullets smacked into the lighting rig that flickered there, bursting one of the cylindrical tube bulbs before catching the chains that secured it in place, riveted to a scaffold that spanned the width of the tunnel. The long metal light fixture swung free, dangling for a moment from its remaining chain link before its own weight, coupled with one of Kane’s perfectly placed bullets, broke that fragile link and it plummeted to the floor.
Kane dived backward as Ullikummis charged at him, just as the fixture dropped from the high ceiling. The light crashed down onto the stone colossus in a shower of sparks, and Ullikummis dropped to his knees, bellowing in pain.
In the wake of that explosion, the tunnel-like corridor seemed to go silent. Kane crouched, his breathing heavy as he watched the motionless figure of Ullikummis sprawled on the floor, like the wake of an avalanche.
Kane stared for a long moment, feeling slightly unreal. His breathing chugged from his open mouth like a steam engine, and he struggled to bring it back under control, feeling the cooling beads of sweat on his brow.
It was over.
Reluctantly, Kane turned, bringing his Sin Eater up to cover the handful of hooded figures who stood in stunned silence barely two dozen feet from the wreckage of the battle. Brigid Baptiste lay among the debris there, the floor ripped apart beside her in what looked like an open fault line in the mountain itself.
With effort, Kane stood, feeling his strained muscles threatening to rebel. Using his left hand to steady the Sin Eater, which shook in his exhausted grip, Kane drew the silent pistol across each of the stunned hooded figures in turn.
“Your god is dead,” he snarled. “You can either stand down or I’ll make sure you follow him into the pits of Hades.”
For a moment, no one spoke, and the only noise in the wide artery that spanned the redoubt came from the tinkling overhead bulbs as they flickered and sparked. Then a voice shouted from behind Kane, calling out his name. It was Domi, issuing a desperate warning.
Kane half turned even as he heard heavy footsteps behind him, and Ullikummis rushed toward him once again. Then the stone monster swept out one of his long arms, striking Kane in the back of his neck. It was like being hit with a boulder.
Kane was shoved forward, his boots skidding across the floor. At the same time, Domi’s blaster boomed, drilling a bullet into Ullikummis’s flesh. Then he was falling down, striking the tiled floor with his chin as he skidded across it toward the robed figures.
Whatever happened next, Kane couldn’t recall.
KANE OPENED HIS EYES, looking around the now familiar rock-walled, eight-by-six cell. The faintest glow of orange lava came from a tiny circular rent where the rough wall met the ceiling. His breathing was labored and he released a sigh through gritted teeth as he tried to calm himself down.
Kane didn’t remember it all even now. But he remembered enough, and he had pieced the rest together in his mind. He had taken on a god and had come up wanting.
As he lay there in the semidarkness, his back resting against the rough stone floor, he muttered to the ceiling above him, “Baptiste, where the hell are you when I need you?”
For the moment at least, the ceiling chose not to respond.
Chapter 14
“Stupid dog, take your shit already,” Rosalia muttered, watching Belly-on-legs running around the windy little rock ridge outside the prison.
Not a prison, she reminded herself. A life camp. That’s how they referred to it. A place where people came to be reeducated, to open their eyes to the joy of the future. How had Ullikummis explained it to his supposedly loyal troops?
“A death camp is a place people are brought to die, but a life camp is where they come to be born.”
“Ptah,” Rosalia muttered. Mumbo jumbo, that’s all it was. Semantics and bullshit, that’s all this Ullikummis creature fed them, a steady stream of lies dressed up as philosophy.
She had met with him out in the old province of Mandeville, heard him speak briefly as he addressed a thousand of his followers, every last one called Stone. Some idiot rally, like the others that First Priest Dylan had hosted, where he had told people all about heaven and utopia and some fairy-tale future where he was a big man and Ullikummis would be their benevolent god. A baron by any other name, Rosalia recognized. Bullshit, all of it.
“Bullshit-flavored bullshit,” she muttered as she thought back, brushing the loose strands of hair from her windswept face.
Before her, the dog was
hurrying down the slope as the wind blew through the leaves around him. It was May, and spring was turning to summer, the blossoms giving way to green leaves, berries and cones. Rosalia wasn’t supposed to be out here, not officially. But the dog needed to run, and she wasn’t going to hurry behind it inside the prison caverns, picking up after it as it urinated and defecated when it felt the need. Nature didn’t like being caged.
The main entrance was well guarded, of course. Despite the security of the sealed cells, there was always the risk of their guests escaping—indeed, rumor was that one of them had tried, the Magistrate man called Grant, and that Dylan was sore as hell about it, concerned that this lapse would be fed back to Ullikummis and that his priesthood might be stripped away.
Turned away by the guards at the main entrance, Rosalia had explored the facility on her first day here, mutt in tow, until she’d located an area set aside for vehicles. The vehicle bay featured a huge rollback door, and a smaller side entrance presumably used for scouts or sentries. The door was sealed with rock, but Rosalia’s obedience stone had opened it, the same way it could open the cells. With Belly-on-legs running back and forth at her heels, she had led the way out the door, onto a steep slope where the forest grew thick. The tree cover was cleared only around the rollback door itself, enough to allow vehicles free passage should the hangar bay be used. Beyond that, the area was given over to trees, a perfect place for her dog to exhaust itself with its silly dog games.
She had smiled when she had found it, this little secret area that no one else visited, remembering a childhood story that the nuns had told her. A secret garden, right here in the shadow of the life camp.
On the rocky slope now, Rosalia’s dog was scampering around, hurrying between the trees, sniffing at a burrow it had found among the foliage. It was a mongrel, Rosalia figured, half coyote, half something more soppy, all stupid. The beast had no common sense, got scared at the silliest things, and had the palest eyes she had ever seen in a dog, so pale they looked almost white. She had found the hound in the desert, or maybe it had found her—she wasn’t sure. It had been following her ever since, keeping watch sometimes when she slept, sharing her food without greed. Calling it a good dog was being too generous, she thought, but it was a companion in a harsh world where everyone else was geared to screwing their fellow man over, or indoctrinating him into this growing cult religion of Ullikummis the savior.
Savior? What kind of savior was he, to come and terrify people, brainwash them, break their necks? Rosalia thought back to her schooling, out in the nunnery at the Mexican border. Less than two centuries ago, the whole of this country had been devastated, a so-called death-land, its people eking out a meager subsistence amid the radioactive debris of nuclear apocalypse. In that context, Ullikummis as savior made sense, Rosalia thought. In his harsh way, he had vowed to change the world for the better. Their world now was the product of the Deathlands, a struggling emergence from the end of the world, where civilization sat side by side with the pioneer spirit, where survival still came at a price.
There was a bark then, and Rosalia looked up as the mountainous wind whipped around her. Twenty feet ahead, the dog was gazing into the dense branches of a tree, yapping at something it could smell there, running back and forth trying to see what it was. Squirrel probably, Rosalia knew; there were no people living close to Life Camp Zero. The camp was high in the mountains, surrounded by trees and seemingly bottomless ravines, but the forest that surrounded it held plenty of wildlife, groundhogs and timberwolves and the like. All these things fascinated Belly-on-legs; the stupid mutt would chase after anything once it got the scent. Rosalia had heard that the nearest settlement was to be found in the flatlands some miles away, leaving this rocky prison facility utterly undisturbed. Even so, Life Camp Zero remained well guarded. People could live without fresh air, perhaps, but dogs—got stir-crazy quicker than human prisoners. However stupid the mutt might seem, Rosalia knew it packed a savage bite if it was roused. She had seen it defend her back when they had been sleeping in the fishing ville of Hope.
The dog barked again, turned its head briskly as something scampered across the branches above and leaped to a nearby tree. The dog scurried after it, running farther down the slope.
“No,” Rosalia called, stepping sideways down the steep slope to stop the canine. Its yapping could be mistaken for a wild animal, but if the guards above her spotted the dog it might draw attention; and neither of them should be out here, anyway.
Stupid men and their stupid rules. The guards were as much prisoners as the prisoners.
Rosalia caught up to the dog, speaking softly to keep it from panicking so she could grab it by the scruff of its neck.
“You do your business,” she encouraged, “and then we go inside. Won’t do for either of us to be missed. They put another one of those stones in me and I’ll forget to feed you.”
The dog pulled back its lips from big teeth, yipped once in delight, tail wagging.
“Come on, stupid mutt,” Rosalia urged. “We’re getting out of here soon enough. You just play along for now, okay? For me?”
The dog opened its mouth, made to bark again, and Rosalia stroked it, tickling it behind the ears. As if understanding her, the dog pulled away and headed back up the slope toward the hidden door, stopping once to urinate on the side of a tree.
Back at the doorway, Rosalia pushed her dark hair behind her and brought the hood of her robe up to cover it once more. She took one last look at the mountainous vista as the wind shook the branches of the trees. Soon she would be out of here. Things had turned so hostile that she might not last out there on her own, but with the Magistrate man at her side…? She would have to convince him, and convince him it was his idea.
Chapter 15
To Mariah Falk, it seemed that she had been crying forever. For the past several hours she knew she had been lying in this sealed cavern, neither asleep nor truly awake, just dwelling on what had happened to Clem in some twilight dream state. How long, Mariah couldn’t be certain. But ultimately, something within her seemed to snap to attention, and she rolled off the hard, unforgiving floor and sat up, opening her tear-hot eyes for the first time in what seemed a lifetime.
She had paid scant attention to the cell when she had been placed inside, but now she looked at it, really looked at it, for the first time. It was rock; the whole cell was rock. The walls, the floor beneath her, the ceiling above.
In her day, Mariah had been a renowned geologist; her area of expertise was rock. When she had been assigned to the Manitius Moon Base along with numerous other valuable military and scientific personnel, and cryogenically frozen as some kind of gift to the future, Mariah had never really thought much of her specific role. She had volunteered, feeling that it was her patriotic duty, her personal responsibility, one of those nebulous concepts that speak of morality and selflessness. But in all honesty Mariah knew she had mostly taken up the opportunity because it promised adventure. How many people got the chance to see the world two hundred years after their birth? Even if it wasn’t the plan, Mariah felt like—who was that guy?—Buck Rogers, zipping off to the future and finding out how wonderful everything had turned out.
Except the future hadn’t turned out to be very wonderful at all. In fact, she had woken to a society just barely storing the concept of civilization, the memory of the brutal era known as the Deathlands still fresh in people’s minds. The establishment of the Program of Unification was a threshold in the recent past that spoke of withdrawing from the brink of apocalypse, and it had come at a terrible price: the subtle subjugation of humankind under the all-powerful alien race called the Annunaki, then disguised as allies.
Like her fellow Manitius refugees, Mariah had been adopted into the Cerberus operation, which was led by another man from the twentieth century—Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh. But while her fellows had been doctors, physicists, cybernetics engineers and other explorers at the very edge of scientific discovery, Mariah had never f
elt her contribution matched up. She was a geologist, an expert on rocks. Rocks weren’t at the cutting edge of scientific invention. Rocks were those things people stood on while they invented, and then they got carved into statues to celebrate the discoveries.
Now, sitting alone in the tight little cave, its walls seemingly sealed all around her, Mariah Falk peered into the gloom and laughed. Ullikummis’s troops had sacked Cerberus, killed some of her friends, imprisoned the majority. And they had imprisoned them in rock.
Stretching her weary limbs, Mariah ran her fingers across the floor, feeling the thin bed of sand there. She pawed at the sand, burrowing beneath it with her fingertips. Less than one knuckle’s depth below the surface she found the solid floor. She scraped at the sand, leaning close to peer at the exposed rock. It was the same kind as the walls. The cocoon of the cell reminded her of a honeycomb.
Beneath the dim light that glowed from a small panel above her, Mariah studied the rock for a moment, checking it and comparing it to the wall before her. It was igneous rock, she suspected, formed by magma flow. Very little natural porosity, which meant it would be very solid—solid and heavy. But a corrosive could damage this, she knew.
More importantly, the suggestion that this had once been magma gave Mariah some clues about its origin. She had seen Ullikummis up close, had seen the rivers of lava that seemed to flow through his veins. Igneous rocks—the rocks around her—were formed of lava, and it didn’t strain credulity to suggest there might be a link between the two.
When placed in a cave, it was only natural to assume that the cave had always been there, and not to question its structure. But what if this cave was some kind of manipulation? Mariah wondered. What if Ullikummis had created this cell, had utilized his seemingly mystical power to draw caves in place the way an artist might paint them onto a canvas?
