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Genesis Sinister
James Axler
The epic battle between two would-be gods to rule earth may have ended, but the struggle to survive aliens of near-immortal powers–aliens determined to cage humankind–continues. As the freedom fighters of the Cerberus organization regroup and press on, a shattering storm heads toward the planet…the blood tide of a new apocalypse.They're tiny stones that wield shattering power, remnants of the war between the godlike aliens Ullikummis and Enlil, and they lie scattered throughout the Gulf of Mexico. In the wrong hands, these stones could easily be used as biological weapons. That's why Kane and Grant are dispatched to track a notorious pirate–it's believed he has an entire collection in his possession. But in the Bay of Campeche, they realize something much bigger is happening. Something unthinkable: the genesis of a new age. And that means only one thing for mankind. Annihilation.
FOUNDATION STONES
The epic battle between two would-be gods to rule earth may have ended, but the struggle to survive aliens of near-immortal powers—aliens determined to cage humankind—continues. As the freedom fighters of the Cerberus organization regroup and press on, a shattering storm heads toward the planet…the blood tide of a new apocalypse.
EARTH REPURPOSED
They’re tiny stones that wield shattering power, remnants of the war between the godlike aliens Ullikummis and Enlil, and they lie scattered throughout the Gulf of Mexico. In the wrong hands, these stones could easily be used as biological weapons. That’s why Kane and Grant are dispatched to track a notorious pirate—it’s believed he has an entire collection in his possession. But in the Bay of Campeche, they realize something much bigger is happening. Something unthinkable: the genesis of a new age. And that means only one thing for mankind. Annihilation.
Domi lay writhing on the floor
The albino girl was hissing like a cat as the living stones ran across the flesh of her arm and up toward her shoulder, affixing themselves quicker than she could remove them. Domi snatched for another as it clambered toward her throat, wrenching it away with a tearing of her skin.
“Okay, Domi,” Kane said calmly, “I’m right here.”
Domi’s scarlet eyes glared into his. “Kane, get them off me,” she begged through gritted teeth.
His hands just a couple of inches away from her body, he stopped, staring nervously at the stones. Like a swarm of tiny-shelled insects, the hard backs of the stones had massed against Domi’s arm, creating solid bands that wrapped around her like bangles.
He had had a similar stone embedded in him just a few months ago, and he could still recall the pain.
“Kane?” Domi squealed. “They’re pushing into me. I can feel them!”
Genesis Sinister
James Axler
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
“The clock strikes one that just struck two—Some schism in the sum—A Vagabond for Genesis Has wrecked the Pendulum.”
—Emily Dickinson
1830–1886
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 (#u99e95122-6399-5e12-aca6-94609c45b2a6)
Chapter 2 (#u5279a361-4f81-5e66-a9a3-d3fc9e640cea)
Chapter 3 (#u85664c44-e893-5f30-b74d-77f70374c263)
Chapter 4 (#u4c9edab4-92c6-5790-b728-6b9c1ed01bef)
Chapter 5 (#uf5e47fa0-4c7e-5363-848d-6ddee0d3cd3c)
Chapter 6 (#u50a37e70-f148-5fd5-a480-d0a70e1b9663)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1
The Gulf of Mexico
Screams rolled across the waves.
On the deck of a fishing scow, a blond-haired woman was being dragged backward by her hair. She was shrieking and struggling as a pale-skinned man with tattoos down his exposed right arm yanked her across the decking against her will. A snatch of blond curls tore from her scalp as she tripped, and she slammed against the wooden deck with an agonized moan, tears streaming down her flushed face. Another man stepped before her as the one with the tattooed arm cursed. This one had dark eyes the color of midnight, a mop of black hair on his head and dark stubble along his jaw.
“Hold ’er down!” he snarled at his partner.
The man wore leather trousers and an open shirt, and where his chest was exposed the blonde woman could see dark chest hair tufting from his weather-tanned skin alongside a puckering of scars where he had been burned many years before. At his belt, the man had a holster in which he had jammed a long-barreled Colt revolver, its chrome finish marred from overpolishing. His name was “Black” John Jefferson and he was a pirate.
Fern Salt, his colleague with the tattooed arm, obeyed with a nod, grasping the blonde by her wrists and slapping at her breasts to hold her down, stretching her taut as she tried to kick away. Salt pawed roughly at her left breast for a moment, laughing cruelly as he squeezed it. The woman was twenty-two, with apple-red cheeks and a belly already round with child. She screamed again, tears washing down her face.
All around them aboard the listing scow, the sounds of violence played out in a cacophonous symphony, gunshots and screams rolling over the waves. The sea was calm, and it seemed to urge the violence to hush with the sound of every softly lapping wave against the side of the boat.
One of the crew, a cousin to the blonde woman, scrambled across the deck to help her, alerted by her screams and followed by another of the pirates. Glancing over his shoulder, Black John snatched the Colt from its holster and squeezed the trigger, holding it upside down and blasting a single 9 mm bullet behind him. With the boom of discharge, the bullet cut into the sailor’s right leg just below the knee, and he let loose a bloodcurdling scream as his leg exploded in a burst of blood and splintered bone. Another of Black John’s crew, the man following the sailor across the deck, finished the job swiftly with a single bullet to the man’s head.
Black John turned back to his task at hand. Unbuckling his belt and loosening his pants, he reached out for the screaming blonde. His fingernails had been painted as black as his nickname, and they glistened in the sunlight like the shells of insects.
“Quit shoutin’, girl,” he hissed, his eyes narrowed with fury. “Makes no diff’rence to me if you’re alive or dead, just so long as you’re still warm.”
With that, Black John grasped the woman’s skirts with one of his beautifully manicured hands, ripping away the bottom half of her dress to expose her crotch. Then, he got about his business as Fern Salt held her down with one tattooed arm. Salt’s other arm was scrubbed clean and hairless, unnaturally pale where another tat had been removed. All around them, Black John’s shipmates were rushing through the scow, sacking her and dispatching the last of her crew with cold professionalism as the ruined engine spit black smoke into the morning sky.
Beside the scow was a larger boat, and from a distance the pair seemed restful as they floated on the clear waters of the Bay of Campeche, far enough out from the coast that they couldn’t be seen from the shore by the naked eye. The larger of the boats was a sleek sixty-foot cutter, its sides painted the same blue-green as the waves. The cutter was shaped like a dart in the water, flared at the aft with a long body that tapered to a brutal point like a stiletto blade at the front. The cutter’s name was La Discordia, although papers filed in El Cuyo still had her listed by her original name, La Vara de la Esperanza, or The Wand of Hope. La Discordia loomed beside the smaller vessel like an older sibling, her dark shadow cast over the other’s slanted deck.
La Segunda Montaña, the smaller vessel, was listing to one side where it had been wounded. The screams and shouts that had emanated from the scow as the crew of the larger vessel boarded her were dwindling now, the sounds as brief and sudden as bird calls, and, like those bird calls, they were ignored or unheard by anyone who might have intervened.
Aboard La Segunda Montaña all was pandemonium. Harpoons had been used to attach the two boats, trapping the smaller vessel as her captain tried to get out of the larger one’s path. The scow had come all the way from the north, seeking freedom and a new life. Instead, one of those hooks had gone straight through the first mate’s torso, gouging a hole through his chest even before the ships locked together. Now he was wedged upright, his body splayed against the safety rails that lined the scow’s deck, screaming as the harpoon point held him in place, his ruined guts spilling down his legs.
Belowdecks, two pirates called Six and Xia were standing in the fishing scow’s tiny hold. Xia held the sharp edge of his blade across a girl’s throat while Six looked around the shabby little room. The girl had dark hair and pleading eyes, and Xia had already had his way with her.
“What is that?” Six asked, jabbing his outstretched finger at a box in the corner of the living quarters. The box had wooden sides and was open at the top, its lid propped against the wall. The box was half-full of stones, not one of which was more than an inch across; they looked like shale that had washed up on the beach.
The girl shook her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted, the glistening tears still drying on her pretty face. “It was here when we boarded. Belongs to the captain, I think.”
“Belongs to us now, hermanita,” Xia growled, and he drew the blade closer to the girl’s throat, six inches of knife glistening in the light cast by the round portholes. Xia was a large man, broad-shouldered and with a suggestion of Malaysian or Polynesian to his appearance, especially around the eyes and the golden tint of his skin. He wore an undershirt and cutoffs, and a long white scar ran almost the entire length of his left leg, from groin to well past the knee. He had gotten the scar in a knife fight on a plantation that had almost ended with the authorities hanging him. But only almost.
The girl struggled in his grip, trembling with fear.
“Floater this size don’t need ballast,” Six said as he nudged at the stones with the tip of his blaster. Six was broad-shouldered, too, with a gold hoop depending from his left earlobe. He wore his hair in a topknot on his otherwise shaved head, a gunslinger’s mustache drooping down over his top lip. He licked the bristles absentmindedly as he spoke, eyes narrowing as he looked at the strange contents of the crate.
“Something in it, mebbe?” Xia suggested, gripping the girl tighter as she struggled. “You, keep fucking still.”
Six rummaged through the stones with his free hand, turning them over as he plunged deeper into the crate. It was just a little deeper than a foot, and the broad-shouldered pirate reached down until he could distinctly feel the crate’s bottom. “Nothing in there,” he said. “Nothing but stones.”
“Worth something, you think?” Xia asked.
As he spoke, the girl finally pulled herself free, wrenching out of his grip before Xia knew what was happening. Still pressed against her throat, Xia’s blade cut through her flesh as she yanked herself away, and blood began to spurt as her carotid artery was compromised by its touch.
“Shit me, Xia,” Six spit as the girl lumbered toward him, blood shooting from her nicked artery.
The blood seemed to blast out of her neck with the power of a jet, spraying the walls of the cabin and turning the lone porthole red in just three seconds as the girl screamed in agony.
Six leaped out of the way as the screaming girl barreled toward him, sidestepping as she fell toward the crate. The force of the rushing blood was lessening now, the furious jet turning into a steady stream of red that washed down the girl’s tattered clothes. She slumped against the crate, blood flowing across its contents, and Six and Xia listened as her scream turned into a whimper and then to nothing.
“Damn, I liked her,” Xia said. Then he shrugged as Six glared at him. “What? She got free,” he added.
Six nodded. Then, after a moment’s consideration, he reached down and pulled the girl off the crate by her long hair, tossing her to one side. She slumped against the wall of the hold, blood still running down her neck and turning her dress crimson.
Within the crate, the bloodied stones seemed to pulse and move where the blood seeped through them. Six watched for a moment before dismissing the thought as nothing more than an optical illusion. Then he grabbed the box and hefted it from the deck. “Shit like this gotta be worth something,” he decided. “Only thing on this death trap that is.”
Xia glanced at the dying girl before he followed Six up the little flight of wooden stairs and into the main cabin. She stared back, eyes wide with shock, the red pulse at her neck now turned to nothing more than a drizzle. In six minutes she would be dead from blood loss, and already her body was turning cold.
* * *
THE CAPTAIN OF LA SEGUNDA Montaña was a portly Latino called Alfredo. A man of indeterminate age with the leathery tanned skin and cropped hair that could place him anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five, Alfredo struggled with the wheel as the boat listed farther to starboard. He was trying to bring the little scow back to true as his crew fended with their unwanted boarders. Alfredo had traveled a long way with his cargo; he still believed in a higher purpose.
He watched as one of the marauders leaped down from the cutter, brandishing a sword with a wickedly curved blade in one hand. The man had olive skin and brown dreadlocks that clattered with beads as he moved, and he smiled as he spotted the captain standing in his little box of a cabin, wrestling with the wheel.
“Please, señor,” Alfredo called as the pirate approached him. “Don’t hurt me. My ship, she will sink if I don’t—”
The dreadlocked pirate drove the tip of his sword into Alfredo’s chest, wrenching it down through his body from sternum to crotch as the man howled in agony. “What makes you think I’d give a shit about your boat?” he hissed, wrenching the blade free. The captain’s guts came with the blade, spilling over the bloodied deck as he sank to his knees. And he screamed long and loud.
