by James Axler
CROSS FIRE OF THE IMMORTALS
The Annunaki, a power-hungry and hate-driven alien race, have returned to take over Earth. This time, permanently. And the hard-core human rebels who fought to repel these self-proclaimed gods have paid a terrible price. Just when they are needed most—as the postapocalyptic threat surges to terrifying new levels—the Cerberus operation lies broken, its key members missing.
PROGENY OF HATE
Ullikummis has chosen Earth as ground zero for a terrifying family reunion. A son born of cruelty, genetic manipulation and infinite power, for 4,000 years the stone god has waited, plotting his revenge against his father, Enlil, the most sadistic of the Annunaki. As father and child unleash their armies in a clash of titanic proportions, the bravest of the rebels, Kane, is humanity’s last hope to halt this deadly war of the gods. Endgame has finally arrived...but who will be the winner?
Another Annunaki was out there
The mother ship had detected his presence immediately, identified him as one of her children.
“Ullikummis,” Enlil muttered, the name lost in the sharp intake of his breath. “So you have returned, my son.”
It should have been impossible, Enlil knew. He had expelled his child into space, sent him to float among the stars for the duration of his near-endless life. And yet here he stood on Earth once again, and with an army of apekin at his beck and call.
But Enlil did not question the facts presented to him. Ullikummis had beaten the odds and returned, and that was only right because he was his son—and what would any son of Enlil be if he could not defy the odds?
Tapping a quick sequence out on the palm link to Tiamat, Enlil called forth the Igigi who hid within the shells of the reborn Annunaki. “We still have much to do.” He spoke to the empty room as if reminding himself. “More than I conceived. Let us begin.”
Tiamat trembled as her mighty cargo doors opened for the very first time.
Other titles in this series:
Savage Sun
Omega Path
Parallax Red
Doomstar Relic
Iceblood
Hellbound Fury
Night Eternal
Outer Darkness
Armageddon Axis
Wreath of Fire
Shadow Scourge
Hell Rising
Doom Dynasty
Tigers of Heaven
Purgatory Road
Sargasso Plunder
Tomb of Time
Prodigal Chalice
Devil in the Moon
Dragoneye
Far Empire
Equinox Zero
Talon and Fang
Sea of Plague
Awakening
Mad God’s Wrath
Sun Lord
Mask of the Sphinx
Uluru Destiny
Evil Abyss
Children of the Serpent
Successors
Cerberus Storm
Refuge
Rim of the World
Lords of the Deep
Hydra’s Ring
Closing the Cosmic Eye
Skull Throne
Satan’s Seed
Dark Goddess
Grailstone Gambit
Ghostwalk
Pantheon of Vengeance
Death Cry
Serpent’s Tooth
Shadow Box
Janus Trap
Warlord of the Pit
Reality Echo
Infinity Breach
Oblivion Stone
Distortion Offensive
Cradle of Destiny
Scarlet Dream
Truth Engine
Infestation Cubed
Planet Hate
Dragon City
James Axler
God War
There is undoubtedly something religious about it: everyone believes that they are special, that they are chosen, that they have a special relationship with fate. Here is the test: you turn over card after card to see in which way that is true. If you can defy the odds, you may be saved. And when you are cleaned out, the last penny gone, you are enlightened at last, free perhaps, exhilarated like an ascetic by the falling away of the material world.
—Andrei Codrescu
1946–
The Road to Outlands—
From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology...a question to a keeper of the archives...a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.
Contents
Chapter 1
&nb
sp; Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 1
It was a little after dawn in Luilekkerville on the West Coast of what used to be known as the United States of America. The morning air still fresh and cool against his face, Minister Morrow rubbed his hand over his clean-shaved jaw and looked up at the golden ball of the sun as it rose over the cathedral. Placed in the exact center of the ville, the cathedral towered over the buildings around it, dominating the skyline.
The ville itself had the air of a construction site, half-built edifices poised along the straight streets, as if patiently waiting in line for their builders to return after a good night’s sleep. So much had changed here since the days when this walled settlement had first grown up from the ashes of bombed-out Snakefishville. Back when it had been ruled by Baron Snakefish, the gates had been kept locked, the high walls patrolled by the Magistrates. Those were things of the past now. These days, under its new and hopeful name, Luilekkerville’s gates were ever open, the new Magistrates welcoming all visitors that they might perhaps join the congregation. Minister Morrow took heart in that, feeling in part responsible thanks to his imparting of firm moral guidance to the newcomers to the ville, encouraging the work ethic that had seen so much rebuilding over the ruins of the old.
A balding middle-aged man with ruddy cheeks and a square face, Morrow was dressed in his simple robes of office: a fustian cassock with a wide hood that could be pulled forward to hide his face in shadow. He was an Alpha, first priest in the New Order that had dedicated itself to a better world under the stone god who had returned from Heaven to spread his message of peace. The god’s name was Ullikummis, but that hardly mattered. What he brought—what he was even now in the process of bringing—was utopia, Heaven on Earth.
Human society had suffered more than two hundred years of blight, first with the nuclear conflict that launched the twenty-first century and wiped out billions in what seemed a determined effort at mutual destruction. Then came the Deathlands era, a hundred years of radioactive hell that only the strongest could survive, clawing their way through the debris as they struggled to reassert some measure of order on the chaos. And then, approximately one hundred years ago, the Program of Unification had finally restored order to the ruined United States in the form of nine settlements called villes, each one named after its baron, who served as its absolute ruler. But even these villes were far from utopian. Unknown to most citizens, their rulers were engaged in a strictly regimented purge of the past, obliterating the details of humankind’s advances prior to the nukecaust.
In their way, too, the villes were exclusive. Each housed a set number of individuals: five thousand aboveground, a further thousand in the Tartarus Pits at their lowest levels. Perimeter walls kept out the so-called outlanders, who were often viewed as dangerous in their nonconformity and many of whom were still affected by residual radiation from the nukecaust. If the baronies had been designed to provide some kind of respite, they had failed, ultimately sinking into chaos when the barons fled.
What Ullikummis and his adherents promised was a truly better tomorrow, a new society unlike anything seen before in the short history of humankind. What was more, the proof of this claim was already visible. The truly faithful, those blessed by the touch of Ullikummis himself, were able to channel his power, turning their flesh into something with the impenetrability of stone; Morrow had seen them in action. These people, the Stones, were the military arm of the new regime, the new Magistrates of the bright promised future.
As his ministerial robes billowed about him in the wind, Morrow stared at the towering structure of the cathedral. Its circular scarlet window dominated the spire like a cyclopean eye, and Morrow smiled. The future was here, so close he could taste it, smell it on the air.
His congregation was large, and even though the cathedral could seat more than eight hundred, it was frequently filled to brimming when he called the faithful to prayer. And not just with the people of the ville itself, but others, outlanders from the surrounding lands who came from near and far to pledge their commitment to the dream of a better world.
This day, however, Minister Morrow would have a special message to impart to his congregation. As he headed toward the always-open entrance to the towering cathedral, he saw the familiar figure waiting inside among the wooden pews. The man was in his late thirties and had the strong build of a farmer, his loose shirt buttoned low. His name was Christophe, and he was one of more than a hundred who had built the cathedral when Luilekkerville was just beginning to emerge from the debris of the old barony. These days,
Christophe helped Minister Morrow with the upkeep of the church, working as a handyman.
“Our love is a rock,” Christophe said by way of greeting.
In response, Minister Morrow nodded. “What brings you here so early, Christophe?”
“Woke up early,” Christophe told him. “Strange dreams, and then I couldn’t get back to sleep. There’s something coming,” he explained vaguely.
“I felt it, too,” the minister agreed.
“Then what should we do, Minister?” Christophe asked.
Morrow looked out across the interior of the vast, empty cathedral, its seats lined up in blocks, all of them facing the central dais, and he knew just what to do. “Ring the bell,” he told Christophe. “Call the faithful. Call them home.”
* * *
“GOOD MORNING, Haight.”
Brigid Haight opened her eyes, the last whispers of the dream leaving her in that familiar whirl of colors, blue, gold and green. Across from the simple cot that she slept in—its bedding made up of an untidy blanket rolled in on itself beneath her head to provide some form of pillow—waited the great giant Ullikummis, her lord and master. He stood eight feet tall, his body formed of rock dark as mud with a weather-beaten look to it that made one think of the ocean batting against cliffs. Veins of magma hurried between the plates of his chest and along the joints of his arms and legs, their orange glow shimmering in the dark room like the ebbing rays of sunset. His tree-trunk-like legs ended in two flaring stumps, the feet long since hacked away in a vicious battle with his uncle, Enki. His body was unclothed, for he needed none. Indeed, he simply was, needing no adornments for his powerful form. Pointing struts reached up from his shoulder blades, forming twin ridges like the horns of a stag, mismatched and pointing inward toward his head in great scything curves. The head itself seemed ugly, misshapen, its ridges hard and uneven. Formed of rock like the rest of him, Ullikummis’s was the face of nightmare, dark stone eroded by weather rather than carved with the delicacy of a statue. A slash of mouth waited grimly beneath a flattened nose, twin eyes burning with magma like pits beneath a thick brow. Humanoid in form, the creature known as Ullikummis was entirely hairless.
He stood in the doorway, the familiar charcoallike muster of his body wafting to Brigid’s nostrils as he waited there, so tall he dominated the room before he had fully entered. A child stood before him, a girl no more than three years old, her long, wispy hair reaching midway down her back in feathery waves of a blond so pale it was almost white. She wore a simple dress, its creamy yellow somehow enhancing the paleness of her skin. The girl was called Quavell or Quav, named after her mother, and she was a hybrid of human and alien DNA. But Ullikummis called her only by her true name, the name of the programmed template hidden within her gene
tic code—Ninlil, the name of his mother. He stood now with his stone-clad hands resting gently on the girl’s shoulders, protective, possessive.
Seeing Brigid’s confusion, Ullikummis spoke again, his voice rumbling like the grinding stones of a mill. “You seem ill at ease, my hand in darkness.”
Brigid shook her head momentarily, willing the feeling of sleep from her body. “I dreamed of shapes...” she muttered, “colors.” Her words seemed confused, as if she was trying to describe a thing just out of sight.
She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, with porcelain skin and vibrant red hair that ran down her back in a cascade of tangled curls. Twin emerald orbs peered from beneath dark makeup that had been smeared like a black shadow across her eyes. Her full lips were darkened to the harsh purple of a bruise, and her cheeks seemed narrow and drawn. While those full lips invoked a tender, sultry side, her high forehead hinted at her formidable intelligence. Brigid pushed the blanket away from her naked body, revealing the trim, slender form of a trained athlete, strong but remaining enviably feminine.
They were inside a sea fortress off the East Coast of North America. The fortress had been named Bensalem by its originator Ullikummis, who had drawn it alone from the depths of the ocean stone by stone, shaping it with the power of his formidable will the way a sculptress might carve a pot. The placement of the fortress had been paramount, sitting atop a hidden parallax point—one of a network of nodes across the globe that served to function as access points for a teleportational system.
Brigid’s room itself was small and cold with a narrow opening in its stone wall that served as a window. Through this, she could hear the waves crashing against the high stone sides of the island fortress, feel the billowing breeze from the ocean and smell its briny aroma as the sun rose. The walls of the room were hard rock, rough and unfinished as if a cliff face had been sheared away. Embedded within those walls, faint lines of
orange-red glowed in jagged rents, each no wider than half an inch and splayed across the walls like the shards of a shattered windshield. Throbbing and pulsing, those orange rents seemed uncannily alive.
