by James Axler
Domi was especially sensitive to changes in the atmosphere around her, some curious byproduct of her up-bringing in the savage Outlands, and the albinism that defined her. Now she lay crying beneath the dim light of the magma pod. Its flickering was faint, and others less sensitive than her might not have even noticed the changing frequency. But she saw it, felt it deep within her brain. It was giving her tangle-brain, the same way that the towers of the villes gave her tangle-brain when she was cooped up within them for too long.
Domi glanced up from the stony floor, scanning the rocky ceiling seven feet above her, where the single indentation of light glowed with all the intensity of a cooking ring, a little blister of orange in the blackness of the cave. It wasn’t just a light, Domi realized, it was a broadcaster. It sent out a signal that could dull a man’s thoughts, could make him placid. But the broadcast beacon did not work on its own. A broadcast unit needs a receiver.
Instinctive and emotional, Domi was considered by many of her peers to be a barbarian. And they were right to an extent, but it was folly to confuse a barbarian with a simpleton. Domi was smarter than many gave her credit for; her smarts just worked in different ways from the likes of Lakesh and Brigid and all the other scientists and doctors and big brains that inhabited the halls of the Cerberus redoubt.
Domi had figured out that the broadcast signal required a receiver to do its work. Sure, the lights could affect the brain in a dull sort of a way, but to really work to their fullest extent, they needed a pickup unit to feed the transmission to their victims.
They had tried to give Domi a receiver before they’d locked her in this cell. A tiny stone no larger than her thumb joint had been placed at the hollow of her wrist. She had been in the main corridor of the Cerberus redoubt at the time, close to the now-sealed rollback doors where the gaudy painting of Cerberus, the hound of hell, watched over everything with six fearsome eyes. She had gazed in horror as Kane had fallen to the might of the stone god, where Brigid and Grant had already been dispatched by this inhuman monstrosity. Domi had tried to help Kane, but her energy was spent, used up by crawling in the ventilation system of the redoubt, too much running, too long a fight against superior might. Half-giddy and light-headed, she had been dragged by the hooded figures to join her colleagues at the end of the corridor, where Lakesh, Falk, Bry and the others waited, hands knitted behind their heads like good little prisoners. Grant’s unconscious form had been dragged along, too, but Kane had been left where he lay, the bloody wounds on his grazed face glistening, the shadow suit torn where it had taken unimaginable punishment at the hands of Ullikummis and his men. Domi peered at Kane through narrowed eyes as she was dragged past his motionless body, and she silently hoped he was still alive.
Farther down the corridor that ran the length of the redoubt, Brigid Baptiste lay on her back, her hair spread about her head like a fiery halo. She twitched and moaned as she lay there, unconscious but restless, and Domi struggled to reach for her, shrugging away from the grip of the hooded figures who held her.
“Let me go,” she’d snarled. “I have to see if Brigid’s okay.”
One of the hooded figures reached for Domi, grabbing her wrist and pulling her back like an errant child. She had hissed at the contact, baring her teeth at her attacker.
Then another of the hooded intruders grabbed Domi’s other hand and, as she tried to kick out, two more grabbed her by the legs, carrying her between them like a splayed star. After a moment, Domi stopped struggling, realizing it was hopeless, that she was expending energy for no purpose other than to indulge her own temper. A short while later, she was tossed in among the other captured personnel, the robed guards watching her with contempt, the way one would watch a rabid animal.
Daryl Morganstern, the theoretical mathematician Domi and Brigid had been defending in the upstairs lab, had also been dragged down to join the others, and he looked close to death, his face bruised and bloody, his eyes wandering and unfocused. Domi wanted to ask how he was, but the rumbling voice of the stone god burst into her thoughts like a hurricane smashing into an old barn.
“Obedience,” Ullikummis stated, his burning eyes flicking across the group, “is your key. Obedience will open up the new world for each of you. And through obedience you will learn progression, such as it ever was writ.”
Domi tried to make sense of the stone monster’s words, studying where his face and chest had been burned by the acid, a blackened charring, black on black. He was talking about conformity, she realized, and that was something Domi had little tolerance for. Until she had reached her teens, she had avoided ville life for that very reason, only arriving in Cobaltville as a sex slave in the Tartarus Pits. Domi was no scholar of history, but she had picked up things from Brigid and Lakesh, and she recognized that history was often built on agreements and obedience. What Ullikummis was bringing them was an old, old story, a scenario that had been with man since the dawn of civilization. It was a scenario that seemed ingrained within the very genetic makeup of humankind.
Ullikummis strode along the group of wary prisoners, studying each in turn the way a sergeant major might study his troops.
“Submit,” he explained, “and the future will be yours. We shall build utopia together. Embrace the future. Submit.”
And then the great stone god had touched his upper thigh, brushing the rough, lumpy stonework there until he came away with a dozen flecks of stone, snapped from his body like scabs. A moment passed as Ullikummis scanned the group sitting before him. Domi could feel the irritation emanating from this stone creature as he looked them over. The people of Cerberus had caused him trouble, more so than he had expected when his troops had infiltrated the mountain redoubt. Kane had dropped him, hurt him, almost defeated him in one-on-one combat. Perhaps this Annunaki prince held himself above the simple apekin that cowered before him, but Domi sensed he was angry, that he wanted to conclude this swiftly so he might move on, wash the burning acid from his body, pluck the bullets from his flesh.
Ullikummis paced for a moment, his footsteps echoing loudly in the tunnel, looking at each of the exhausted figures resting there on the cold floor of the redoubt— Lakesh, Philboyd, Sinclair, Falk. His stonelike flesh still bubbled and misted with the corrosive effects of the acid, although it had dulled to a whisper of smoldering trails now when he walked. Finally, the stone giant stopped, standing before Daryl Morganstern, the most recent addition to the prisoner group. Kane was being dragged to join them now, along with Brigid, but both remained unconscious. Morganstern, at least, was awake.
Ullikummis reached for Morganstern where he knelt, plucking him from the floor with an easy show of his phenomenal strength, lifting the mathematician into the air with one hand. In his other hand, Ullikummis rattled the clutch of stones he held, shaking them like dice. Then, still holding Morganstern’s trembling body three feet off the floor, Ullikummis reached out with his other hand and brought one of those strange stone growths toward the man’s forehead, rubbing it against the bloody skin of his head with a misplaced sense of gentleness.
Delirious from his earlier beating, Morganstern struggled to maintain eye contact, burbling something at the monster who held him, the scabbing blood streaking down the side of his face in red and black.
“Submit,” Ullikummis instructed, his voice eerily calm. Then he pressed the fleck of stone he held to Morganstern’s forehead with his thumb, forcing it into the skin in the space between the man’s eyes.
Morganstern began to scream, and several of the Cerberus prisoners gasped or turned away. Mariah Falk muttered a prayer she remembered from high school, turning away from the vision before her as the man struggled in Ullikummis’s grip, his legs kicking out and his voice hoarse with screaming. The bloody gash at the side of his head was oozing blood once more where the scab had broken.
“Please stop,” Lakesh pleaded from the group of captives. “Please don’t do this terrible thing. The man is doing you no harm now. No one is.”
&nbs
p; Ullikummis ignored him.
Domi just watched, saying nothing. She had grown up in the Outlands and had seen worse sights than this.
Ullikummis pushed the stone into Daryl Morganstern’s head, exerting incredible pressure with just his thumb, forcing the small stone against the man’s skin until it ruptured, embedding the stone there like a tack.
Then, with a casual brutality that surprised Domi, Ullikummis dropped Morganstern like a rag doll, letting the slender mathematician tumble to the floor. The man was still gasping, tears running down his cheeks, his fists clenched and his limbs twitching in agony. He cried out in pain as he landed on the floor of the tunnel.
Domi and the others watched in amazement as the stone at Morganstern’s forehead began to sink beneath the skin, like a pebble dropped in milk, disappearing under the surface with just a circling ripple of skin marking its passage. Where the skin rippled, the scab at the side of Morganstern’s head tore open wider, and a rich line of red spilled down the side of his face. Daryl Morganstern cried out in agony, slapping his palms against the floor as the alien thing drilled into him. “Make it stop,” he cried. “Make it stop.”
Ullikummis looked down at the writhing figure and breathed a single word: “No.”
Rolling on the floor, his limbs twitching, Morganstern looked at the stone god with pleading eyes. “Please,” he cried, “make it stop.”
“Submit,” Ullikummis instructed, “and the pain will pass.”
“N-no,” Morganstern muttered, but it wasn’t clear anymore if he was talking to Ullikummis or the agony that was gripping him inside his head. Then he shuddered, and a bloody rent opened on his forehead, oozing another thick ribbon of blood down his face. “No,” he screamed as his head literally tore apart.
Domi watched, keeping a tight rein on her emotions as Daryl Morganstern’s head was ripped apart by the thing that Ullikummis had placed there. The theoretical mathematician lay twitching in a scarlet puddle of his own blood as his head disintegrated before Domi’s eyes. His hair fell away, clumps of it dropping to the floor, matted with blood. Suddenly the brain was visible, brain stem glistening as the man’s skull fractured, parting as though cut with a blade. And still he cried out, seemingly longer than he should have the conscious will to do so. But finally his struggles ended, and his body stopped twitching, its horrifying dance of death ceasing at last.
Ullikummis turned back to the remaining Cerberus exiles, who knelt before him and his people on the floor of the redoubt tunnel. “Submit,” he instructed.
Then Ullikummis held out the other stones he had plucked from his body, passing them to the hooded figures, who began to move among the crowd, choosing who would suffer the intrusion of the strange stones. To Domi’s relief, her lover, Lakesh, was passed over, described as “too old” for what these people had in mind. It was understandable. It was evident that the procedure was physically traumatic, and Lakesh had been getting more and more infirm over the past few months. Although Domi did not know why, he was suffering from accelerated aging, his body leaping years in the space of weeks. The man had been plagued with bouts of exhaustion for the past several months now, and he seemed only to be getting worse. For once, Lakesh’s ill health might prove his unlikely savior.
However, where Ullikummis had placed the stone in his victim’s head, the hooded figures instead used people’s arms as the insertion points for the stones, pressing them into the soft flesh of the inside wrist, holding them there until they burrowed beneath the skin and attached themselves to their unwilling hosts. Some people screamed as the stones drilled into their bodies, while others wept quietly. Several of the stronger members of the facility remained stoically silent, letting the stones infiltrate their bodies without complaint. Perhaps these last had already submitted mentally, resigning themselves to their fate, as Ullikummis had urged.
Domi watched warily as several of the robed figures turned toward her, and to her surprise she recognized one of them with a start—it was Edwards, the ex-Mag turned Cerberus rebel whom she had accompanied on field missions time and again. The broad-shouldered ex-Mag was doing Ullikummis’s bidding, doing it willingly. As he stepped closer, Domi saw that Edwards had a scuff mark on his forehead like some dark pimple, and she concluded that the man had one of these terrible stones buried there, hidden at the front of his brain. How long had he had that? Could Edwards have been carrying this evil seed ever since he first encountered Ullikummis—perhaps three months ago? Had Edwards been in the Annunaki’s thrall all along?
Domi recalled how Edwards’s Commtact unit had ceased working while they were out in the field recently. The radio unit was inserted in his mastoid bone, but its contacts had failed somehow, some kind of blockage to the sensors rendering it inoperative. Could that have had anything to do with this whole affair? Could the buried stone have somehow disrupted the comm device?
But if Edwards was a sleeper agent, then it was obvious how Ullikummis’s troops had gained access to the redoubt. Edwards had let them in.
Domi felt fear rise within her, more so than it had when these beastly attackers had arrived, more so even than when she had seen the looming form of Ullikummis striding through the Cerberus redoubt—through her home. She realized for the first time in a long, long time that they had been caught napping. The whole of Ullikummis’s deadly plan had been put in motion months ago, when he had first fallen to Earth in a meteor shower, and he had had the foresight to recruit operatives like Edwards into his band of followers, had merely waited for the right moment to call on them, and so to strike.
Cerberus had spent years defending humanity, uncovering conspiracies and facing deadly foes. But somehow they had become lazy, had trusted things to stay as they were because that’s how they always had been. Now, Ullikummis was the catalyst for a change that would fundamentally alter their world. And they had let him come, had done nothing to stop him, had failed to understand the bigger change that his appearance would bring. With all the tools and expertise at Cerberus’s disposal, they had entirely failed to look beneath the surface of Ullikummis’s plan until it was too late, and the Annunaki and his followers were among them, wearing the faces of their colleagues.
Led by Edwards, the hooded figures held Domi down while Ullikummis watched. They placed one of the dark stones, this one the size of Domi’s thumb joint, against her wrist and held her down, held her as the stone burrowed into her body and disappeared beneath the pale flesh like a grub burrowing into a corpse. Once the stone had disappeared, the skin of Domi’s arm went smooth, no cut visible. There was a lump there, like a blind boil forming, but no cut, no clear demarcation point where the stone infiltrator had entered.
Domi cursed and screamed as the stone tried to bond with her, and then she had done something remarkable, something that Ullikummis’s troops had not seen before. The second they let go of her, Domi had grasped at the disappearing stone with her right hand, snagged it with her busy fingers the way one might find a splinter hidden in the skin, and she had plucked it from her flesh in one hideous tearing movement. Blood spurted from the wound she’d created with her nails, red runnels pouring down her arm like spilled paint. The stone thing seemed to pulse in her hand as if alive, and Domi tossed it to the floor of the redoubt tunnel. It writhed there a moment, a hideous mockery of life as Domi felt the warm blood pouring from her torn wrist and out across the planes of her small white hand.
Then Edwards stepped forward and, with a smile on his lips, struck her across the face. Still in shock from the terrible surgery she had just performed on herself, Domi staggered back, glaring at Edwards with bloodred eyes.
“Temper down, freak girl,” Edwards snarled, drawing his fist back to strike her again. “Always had you figured for a waste of time.”
Then he’d pumped his fist at her head, and she saw something dark and shiny glistening between his knuckles. It was a flat stone, used like a blackjack to cuff a disruptive foe. Domi stepped aside, crying out as the blow struck her right sh
oulder instead of her face. Her shoulder burned with pain and her arm went numb instantaneously, but she was determined not to go down without a fight. She jabbed the flat of her left hand at Edwards’s hooded face, bringing the heel up to meet his nose as droplets of blood flew from the open wound at her wrist. Edwards avoided the blow by the smallest margin, then brought his hand up once again to strike Domi with the blackjack.
Already weary, Domi stepped back, avoiding the arc of Edwards’s savage punch by the merest fraction of an inch. He stumbled, misjudging his balance as his swinging punch glided past the albino girl.
“Hah,” Domi taunted. “Too slow.”
Edwards glared at her as he brought himself back up to his full height, the monstrous form of Ullikummis watching from behind him, volcanic veins glowing across his stone body like magma rivers.
Despite her exhaustion, Domi remained light on her feet, bare skin slapping against the tunnel flooring as she stepped out of Edwards’s reach. But as she did so, she found herself surrounded by four more of the hooded figures, each of them reaching for her with grasping hands.
“Hold her down,” Edwards snarled, drawing his fist back once again.
Suddenly, Domi was being yanked off her feet, drawn backward until she tumbled over and slammed against the floor with a blurt of breath from her lungs. She reached up, tried to push the intruders away from her as Edwards’s dark shadow loomed above her, but her right arm still felt numb and it wouldn’t react, while her left wrist poured with blood.
“Dammit Edwards, don’t—”
IN HER CELL, Domi lay huddled into herself, crying with despair. What Edwards had done then had been mercifully brief, and when she had awoken she had found herself in this eerie, doorless cavern.
