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Chapter 5
One thing that Kane had learned long ago was that his instincts were generally reliable. If there was a situation he stumbled upon, it was likely that the winning side tended to be the bad guys, especially when they were picking on women and frail old men. His shoulders wrenched and rippled with the effort of pushing the boat through the murky swamp water, his sharp, cold blue eyes locked on the struggle where he could definitely see that the group of attackers, though unarmed, wore a singular uniform hood that identified them as a cohesive force.
That was another thing the former Magistrate had learned. If a group had a uniform, they tended to be up to no good. He remembered his days when he wore the polycarbonate, bullet-resistant shell and merciless grim helmet as a Mag, and he recalled the things that he was not proud of doing under orders. There was the possibility that these men might not have been in control of themselves, perhaps even blackmailed into attacking others while their loved ones remained back home under threat, and Kane’s instincts buzzed with the possibility. It could have been wishful thinking, or it could have simply been colored by his recent encounter with Ullikummis’s minions and the familiarity he had with the mind control the Annunaki prince exerted over the New Order. He was about to leap from the boat, muscles steel-spring taut, when the scull coasted to within yards of the tiny islet’s shore.
Rosalia’s dog exploded into action first, its four legs and lighter mass giving it the advantage of clearing the still waters in a single bound, but Kane wasn’t far behind, determined not to let inaction be the cause of more lost lives. One of the hooded freaks pointed at him and an odd, strangled squeal, like a train engine skidding off the rails, assaulted his ears. All of the strangers drew sharp knives, as if they were possessed of a single consciousness.
That wasn’t good, nor was it good that each of these knife-wielding men had disappeared behind the trunks of nearby trees. As Kane landed on the shore from his initial leap, he let his knees buckle, reducing the shock of his impact on his body. Momentum kept him plunging forward, and he extended his legs, taking long strides. The Sin Eater was in his hand, launched there by a tensing of his forearm, ready to punch out twenty powerful slugs.
However, it was not going to be that easy. There were innocent bystanders in the mix, the very reason he’d bolted from the scull in the first place. One wrong shot, and a bullet could tear through one of the hooded men and kill a person he’d intended to rescue. Restraint was what he needed, which was part of why he was heading into the midst of the knife-armed killers.
Kane was putting himself at risk, making himself a tasty target for these faceless marauders so that they would ignore the refugees who’d been strewed around. In close, there was also the possibility that Kane could take a prisoner, bring down one with a minimum of violence, so that he could get answers. It was triple damned hard to have a corpse respond to your questions, though in some instances, it wasn’t impossible.
As he closed with the group, he saw Rosalia’s dog veer off and launch itself. While the animal might have been part coyote, it had the heart of a wolf, leaping at a knife-wielding stranger, fangs bared. Kane skidded to a halt, his point man’s instinct alerting him to the sudden swish of a mirrored ribbon of steel arcing through the air toward his face. The deep, sharp edge of the enemy blade came close enough to brush Kane’s semilong hair, a faint tug accompanied by the flutter of snipped locks hanging in front of his eyes. Had Kane not stopped, he’d have easily been blinded as the knife lashed across his eyes, if not killed outright.
Kane whipped his fist up hard, driving the protruded middle knuckle hard against the elbow of the hooded blade man. There was a dull crunch, and nerveless fingers released the handle of the fighting blade. Kane pressed his momentary advantage, lashing the tough frame of his Sin Eater against his opponent’s ribs. Again there was the subdued sound of bones breaking beneath muscle and skin, but this time there was no obvious reaction to his impact.
In the brief instant Kane evaluated the situation, mind locking onto his observations and sorting the data out as fast as any computer. There was little way that a hand could maintain a grip with the dislocation of the elbow joint, the strings of muscles leading through the arm veering wide and losing the tension that operated the fingers. A bone-fracturing blow to the ribs, however, might have produced a hard exhalation, but with the sheets of muscle surrounding the spine and the torso, it wouldn’t be that severe a skeletal trauma.
The man Kane was fighting hadn’t even breathed hard under the hammering force of his Sin Eater’s frame, which meant that something was blocking his nervous system. Someone with a normal working sense of touch would have been bowled over by the kind of searing pain produced by fractured ribs. The hooded man brought his other fist around, swinging for the center of Kane’s face.
A swift block with his forearm deflected the momentum of his enemy’s punch, but Kane was unable to make a countermove against the first man. Others had rushed to get behind him, and they hadn’t lost their knives in the brief first contact. Kane twisted as fast as he could, avoiding the stinging touch of one blade point but feeling the shadow suit blunt the impact of another tip. The shadow suits were capable of providing protection from knives, as well as giving the Cerberus warriors a self-contained environment as they traveled the deserts and arctic wastes of the Earth. But armor-piercing ammo would easily cut through the shadow suits and Kane was glad to note that the relatively blunt blade wielded by his assailant wasn’t keen enough to carve between the high-tech material. As it was, Kane felt himself pushed by the sheer strength of the knife man, literally lifted off his feet. If it hadn’t been for the reactive nature of his armor, Kane could easily see himself nursing his own set of broken ribs. As it was, the Cerberus rebel crashed against the trunk of a nearby pine.
“Just shoot the fuckers!” Rosalia snapped as she lifted her pistol.
Grant was out of the boat himself, as well, having picked up a four-foot length of log and using it as an improvised shield against a group of the hooded assailants and their blood-thirsting knives. The edges chopped sections of bark off the thick log, but Grant retreated one step and used the space to heave the chunk of wood at the trio of blade men.
They couldn’t get out of the way of Grant’s missile and were bowled to the ground in a tangle of limbs in the wiregrass. Another of the hooded raiders lunged into view toward the big man, but then Kane’s attention was back in the battle.
Utilizing his Sin Eater as a club, he lashed the barrel of his machine pistol across the jaw of the man who’d stabbed him with such force. There was too much strength in that man to show mercy, but Kane reminded himself that he’d come here as much to investigate the strangeness of this river basin as to lead Ullikummis’s forces on a merry chase. Steel met flesh-wrapped bone and snapped the mandible with a loud, ugly pop. The blow was enough to send his opponent reeling, and Kane turned his attention to the knife man who’d only barely missed him.
Kane brought up his forearm, wrist striking wrist and altering the path of the hooded attacker’s second stab, pushing the wicked point away from his body. The shadow suit had proved enough against one stabbing, but this time the attacker was instinctively aiming for Kane’s face. The thought of a moment before, that this group acted as one, returned even as Kane brought down the butt of his pistol on the side of the man’s neck. There was the crunch of a dislocating shoulder and collarbone, which could be relied upon to drop most men into a puddle of blinding pain.
This chop of the Sin Eater’s butt was loud and nasty, but it hadn’t even dented the determination of his foe. Sure, the hooded attacker’s arm hung limp and numb, knife lost from the failure of his good hand, but the man brought up his fingers, curled like claws, reaching for Kane’s face—his eyes in particular. Kane drove his knee into his foe’s stomach, but it was like trying to kick a tree trunk. No fetid breath exploded from emptied lungs, and there was no stoop in posture from the folding impact. The only thing that Kane had achieved was that the clawing fingertips raked empty air rather than sink into his sockets.
Gunfire boomed, and Kane knew that Rosalia wasn’t showing the same form of restraint that he was. Grant, however, held his fire, once more following Kane’s lead, trusting instincts that had pulled them through countless conflicts and dangers mostly unharmed.
A hooded man hurtled through the air, landing on Kane’s initial opponent. The two bodies crashed into each other, then tumbled through the knee-high, sharp-bladed grass that struggled for survival amid the long leaf pines. Kane knew that Grant had anticipated the sudden, brutal ambush, and used the only weapon he had on hand, one of the hooded cultists themselves. Would such a flying impact be enough to put one of these freaks down for the count?
Kane wasn’t certain, but he stopped holding back. A swift spike of the toe of his boot snapped the knee of his current foe, taking away his ability to stand. Kane sank his fingers into the man’s forearm and twisted, dislocating his shoulder. He brought up his knee again, and he felt it impact against a squishy mass along the side of the man’s head under the hood. There was a shrill keening, an ear-splitting note that locked the attention of all involved in the sudden melee.
The man Kane had kicked in the head let out a strangled stream of gibberish, fingers clawing at the wiregrass in an effort to pull himself through the sudden wave of agony that had spawned his wild, high-pitched howl. Kane shot a glance toward Grant, the larger man instantly understanding his partner’s intent.
Grant balled one of his mighty fists and sent it crashing against the side of another hood. Once more, the shrill wail filled the air, but one more of the faceless raiders was struggling on his knees, felled by the precise blow.
Rosalia, on the other hand, emptied an entire magazine from her pistol into the chest of her opponent, bullets striking the marauder’s chest, seemingly without effect. Out of frustration, the olive-skinned beauty smacked her attacker in the head with the frame of her weapon. It wasn’t as hard as the concentrated knockout blows that Kane and Grant had utilized, but it was more than enough to cause her foe enough discomfort to toss her onto her back and run through the trees, clutching his head as he fled.
The other knife-wielding, hooded men, even the one whose jaw Kane had broken, scrambled away from the trio. Their flight was sudden, and they speared into the surrounding forest before fading away among the trunks like they were ghosts.
Rosalia looked at Kane and Grant, a question burning behind her eyes, yet her lips were unable to translate it to speech. Finally she gave up her struggle and just blurted, “What the hell?”
“That’s my question, too,” Grant said. “What kept you from shooting the hoodies?”
“We’re already behind the curve without Baptiste to evaluate what we’re running into,” Kane answered. “Damned if I’m not going to get a look at why these freaks are covering their heads.”
“Only the two you and Grant hit in the head stayed behind. Everyone else was in full retreat,” Rosalia said, looking around. “That and the people they were bullying.”
A young, pretty woman, a local American Indian by Kane’s quick assessment, sat up, the bright flash of steel in her hand, anger and rage in her dark eyes.
“We’re not going back to the villes, Mags!” she blurted, pointing her knife at Kane.
One or two of the others, an old man with forearms so slender they looked like bones wrapped in sagging cloth and a chubby woman, also wielded their utility knives as if to ward off the trio.
“The villes are history,” Grant replied, loud enough that he could be heard for hundreds of yards, a booming clarion call that, by all rights, should have defused the situation. But the Indians only looked more confused by the giant’s statement.
“What are you doing here then, Magistrates?” Kane’s new “friend” asked, her knife never wavering from him.
“Saving your fused-out asses,” Kane growled in reply. “I’m Kane, he’s Grant. The baronies collapsed when the freaks in charge…quit.”
Trying to explain the situation to these people would have been difficult enough without bringing in the concept of aliens who had manipulated humankind from the dawn of history through the atmospherescorching apocalypse known as the nukecaust. Though Kane had encountered both pan-and extraterrestrial opponents since his first jolt of rebellion exiled him to the Cerberus redoubt, there were times when even he wondered if he simply hadn’t gone insane when dealing with entities such as the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Dannaan, that everything he had encountered was the delusion of a drooling maniac tied up in some dungeon cell. The simplest explanation would be the best answer for now.
“Heard of you two,” the chubby woman said. She pushed in the lock on her knife, folding the blade away into its handle, then pocketing it in her jeans. “The Mags want their asses as much as they want to stifle us, Sue.”
Kane turned and looked back at the woman she’d addressed. “Sue?”
“Suwanee,” the Indian girl replied with a sneer. “Great, so we know each others’ name. Now get the fuck out of here.”
“That’s no way to treat someone who fought the Hooded Ones,” the walking skeleton interjected. He’d put his knife away, so now it was only Suwanee who kept her blade naked and held with hostile intent.
“Fuck off, Farting Gator,” Suwanee cursed. “Once a Mag, always…”
Kane was tired of seeing yet one more blade leveled at him menacingly. With a slap against the flat of the knife, he knocked the tool from the girl’s fingers, sending it crashing to the matted grass tromped beneath dozens of pairs of feet. Suwanee blinked in surprise at the suddenness of her disarmament, lips parted as her jaw fell slightly.
The Indian girl had a lot of fight in her, apparently, as she lunged to pick up her weapon. Kane grabbed her by the wrist and gave a hard yank, making her stand straight by levering her forearm to make her behave. He hated manhandling a woman, manhandling anyone, like that, but she seemed determined to put up a fight, and while it could have been easy to put a bullet into her or crush her jaw with a punch, he had come to save these people, not inflict more harm on them.
“Behave, idiot,” Kane said with a grimace. “I have a gun. If I wanted you dead, you’d have been cold meat the minute you waved that little piece of shit in my face. And you saw me fighting the hoods. You still have a hand attached to this arm. I’m being patient and nice to you, damn it.”
“Anyone fighting the villes got to be a good guy.” The chubby one spoke up. “I’m Hachi. The one she called Farting Gator…”
The old man chuckled at the reference, interrupting Hachi. “I’m Demothi. Just call me Dem.”
Kane nodded and shook the old man’s hand. As thin as he was, there was strength in his grip and his brown eyes were undimmed by age. “If I remember some of the vocabulary I learned from Sky Dog, that means ‘talks while walking.’ That’s a good idea.”
Demothi smiled. “Sometimes the oldest wisdom is the best. Gather your things and let’s roll.”
“What about the boat?” Rosalia asked.
“Shouldn’t take much to conceal it,” Grant replied. “I’ll be able to follow you.”
“By the way, her name’s Rosalia,” Kane added to Demothi.
“A pleasure, young lady,” the old man said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Rosalia replied, looking back nervously toward the boat. “I’m thinking you’re making friends a little too fast here, Magistrate Man.”
“I’d agree with you.” Suwanee spoke up, glaring at the olive-skinned woman. “But you’re the same as them.”
“Quiet, you two!” Kane bellowed. “We’ve got worse things to worry about than your petty little paranoia.”
“Like what?” Rosalia asked.
Kane pointed to one of the unconscious hooded men. He knelt and tore the man’s cowl back, revealing a dark, meshlike covering that, in the shadow of the hood, would render the upper part of his face above his lips completely invisible. It was a cheap effort that produced an unnerving effect, and Kane himself had experienced a momentary pause as he was dealing with the shadow-faced opponents. Only encounters with equally weird and terrifying opponents had given him the ability to act despite the distracting nature of their appearance.
“That doesn’t look right, even with that cloth over his head,” Demothi said.
Kane reached out, took a handful of the meshy sack and tore it off of the unconscious man. It was soaked through, which was strange as he had fallen on dry ground. But as he tugged, stringy mucus stretched between the fabric and gangrenous gray tumors that ringed his skull, the tumors themselves riddled with wires and circuits. The downed man wasn’t bleeding from his head trauma, but the crushed growths where he’d been struck were oozing translucent yellow pus that seeped into the grass under his head.
“What… Oh, God,” Suwanee began. She clamped her hand over her mouth, trying to fight off the urge to vomit, but failed, staggering to the base of a tree and emptying her stomach in an extended, noisy convulsion.
Rosalia looked at the fallen marauder and the gory mess that sloughed off his scalp. Whatever had grown there was quickly rotting, dead material collapsing into inky blue-green molasses and the wrinkled skin of spoiled apples. She glanced over toward the other unconscious man. “No wonder they cover their heads. What…”
Kane took the unconscious man’s pulse at his wrist, wisely avoiding any contact with the goo coming off his victim’s head. His upper lip curled in a sneer as he looked at Rosalia. “Check the pulse on the other guy.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“This one’s dead. That one might be dead, as well,” Kane mentioned.
“That’s one bit of good news,” Grant told him over the Commtact. “I’m strong, but hauling around unconscious men through a swamp wasn’t in my job description.”
Kane spoke softly, so that only his partner could hear over the mandible-mounted communicator. “You’ll never be my beast of burden?”
Grant snorted. “I see Brigid’s been educating you about the old music, as well.”
Kane sighed, frisking the corpse of the man, feeling for any more of the strange tumors or further signs of electronics implanted in his skin. There was nothing, but then, considering he wore a built-in communications device himself, he could make an educated guess as to the purpose of the wires and circuits embedded in his forehead and ringing his skull. He was just too cautious to want to touch even the disintegrating glop that slid off the dead man’s head. Who knew what it was and how contagious it could be.
There were only two people in the world whom Kane could have counted on to provide some explanation for the oddity in front of him.
One, Lakesh, was on a journey to what used to be the West Coast of the United States of America in the hope of finding something along the Pacific Ocean that would give them an edge over Ullikummis. The other, Brigid Baptiste, was missing, perhaps a prisoner and tortured by the very stone being they were being pursued by.
Kane looked at the corpse for a few moments more, the last of the tumorous growth dissolving and sliming off the dead man’s pate.
“Where are you, Baptiste?”
Chapter 6
Miles to the south of the hammock that Kane and his allies stood upon, a rusted old ship bobbed beyond the breakwater of the river delta. The reddish mottling and decay on the hull and the superstructure were a disguise, a sham propagated to lower the profile of the groaning craft. The master of this vessel, a being known as Orochi, looked through plastic sheeting that had been dimmed and silk-screened on one side to be impenetrable, resembling ancient glass, but provided him with a clear view of the waters and the shore.
Orochi was a tall man, and just for his height he would have been unusual for a Japanese, but the truth of the matter was that his resemblance to most humans went no further than the shape of his body and its ability to fit into a sleek black uniform with yellow trim. Orochi’s skin was a shimmering sheet of small, reptilian scales that flowed and flexed like silk. Bright yellow-green eyes shone from under a heavily scaled brow, whose thick octagonal plates formed a ridge where the short hairs of eyebrows would have been on a mammal. Across his upper lip, under a short, oddly human nose, was a similar line of lengthy, slender scales. They were stiff but hairlike, flowing in curving waves to droop over the corners of a wide, thin-lipped mouth, and on the chin, another nest of these thin, translucent scales dangled, giving him the appearance of a classic Southern gentleman with a blond Vandyke.
Orochi was of the Watatsumi, a race long exiled from the shattered ruins of their original home in what used to be the islands of Japan. There were thousands of islands that were the remnants of the island nation, smashed apart and shattered, akin to a plate dashed to the floor.
That was the appearance aboveground, where the sea had rushed in to fill the cracks between the remaining bits of land. There were people still in the archipelago aboveground, but the nuclear onslaught that formed skydark had been far more transformative than the survivors had ever expected. Beneath the surface the Watatsumi lived in an extensive system of tunnels and caves, empty lava tubes. They had remained hidden from humankind, nestled in the network they had called the Spine of the Dragon until the cataclysm happened. When the earthshaker nukes shook the very edge of the tectonic plate that Japan sat upon, things became much worse. Some of the lava tubes and caverns had been closed off for millennia, so that the humanoid reptilians didn’t have remaining records of their existence. Shattered walls of heavy obsidian glass formed doorways to a primeval forest below even the Wyvern’s realm, a jungle filled with monstrosities not seen since millions of years before man walked the Earth.
Things were not completely fine, Orochi knew. There was a reason why he’d been sent to the other side of the globe to seek out a spot to engage in experimentation. The Watatsumi were in need of some way to control monsters that had shared their caves. Only the discovery of the piggybackers here in the bay that used to be known as Gulf Breeze gave them an idea, an opportunity by which they could tame the massive and powerful reptiles who shared their home.
Orochi frowned as he heard the buzzing alert from the ship’s comm station. “What is it now?”
Kondo, a younger member of the crew, turned from his console, looking upon the group leader with a momentary reverence, a sign of unwavering respect that had been instilled in all of the Wyvern’s military since the day they were old enough to be called grown. “Captain, we lost contact with two of the drone units who were acquiring new conversion subjects.”
“Confirmed loss of contact?” Orochi asked, striding toward the young officer.
“Absolutely,” Kondo replied. “Electronics damaged. A third had been struck, but its neural net is still working, though transmission is spotty.”
Orochi’s chartreuse eyes narrowed as he looked at the screen.
“The moment we started experiencing malfunctions, we called them back,” Kondo said.
“Good,” Orochi said, looking at the monitor, distracted from his subordinate’s reassurances. He wasn’t the kind of man to take a sudden change in luck lightly. Someone, after a year of experimentation, had figured out something about their hooded minions.
“I want you to activate a pod of gators,” Orochi said. “Set them after the group the men had difficulty with.”
Kondo looked up at his commander. “We’re still not sure if we can keep the alligators under control if we set them into action.”
“Well, that’s the whole damned point of this journey. If the parasite works well enough for us to remotely control crocodilians, then we can turn around and go home,” Orochi countered.
The officer nodded.
Orochi stood back from the console. He was under orders from the Watatsumi high command to utilize the secrets of the Gulf Breeze discoveries to combat the monsters from below the Dragon’s Spine, but he also had a second mission, one that he had managed to expand. Under the guise of influencing more complex mammalian brains, testing the limits of the electronically influenced parasites, he’d grown an army of specimen retrievers.
Separated from home by thousands of miles, half the surface of the Earth, in fact, Orochi had free reign to alter paradigms, something made easier by recruiting scientists and officers who were true to the cause. The surface of the Earth had been denied to the Watatsumi for too long.
The parasitic entity would be their key to ruling the surface of this scarred, tumultuous world again.
THE CAJUN HEARD THE sound of gunfire in the distance, then looked back at the people who had hired him. Agrippine was not someone who relished the idea of venturing into these swamps, thanks to the disappearances of the past few months. But when the New Order’s missionaries arrived, bearing payment and a bounty for the heads of two people in particular, both of them former Magistrates, he wasn’t going to let easy money get away from him.
The woman who was in charge, a strange figure who was tall, despite the cloak that reached up over the top of her head, shadowing half of her face, seemed as if she knew the sound.
“Sounds like we’re close,” Agrippine said.
The woman nodded. She didn’t speak much. Indeed, she had simply laid down a bag of coins and photographs of the two targets and said, “You will get the rest when they are mine.”
Since then, she’d remained silent. Agrippine didn’t mind, especially since she kept to herself, staying out of the way as the motor launch crawled down the river. She hadn’t come alone, but the rest of the New Order minions with her were both talkative and cooperative when it came to running his ship. In return, Agrippine had been given the money to stock up on weapons so that he could equip them to aid him in the hunt for Kane and Grant.
She looked over the weapons, examining them as if she was investigating an ancient, outdated artifact, her shadowed face expressionless as her fingers went along the surfaces of the guns.
“Do they meet with your approval?” Agrippine asked.
She looked up from the rifle in her hands, then extended it, butt first, so he could take it from her. She stayed quiet.
