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“The girl can use some closure,” Grant replied. “And if we send her back, she’ll just break from the group and follow us, maybe make a mistake which gives us away. At least we can keep an eye on her.”
“Baptiste?” Kane inquired.
“She has a powerful desire to know. And when something like that hits, it’s hard to resist,” Brigid responded. “She’ll definitely end up following us. We can keep her out of trouble.”
“Pretty much my feeling, too,” Kane said. “We might actually have some luck bringing her with. She seems smart and determined.”
“Any sign of the Panthers regrouping?” Brigid asked.
Kane swept the forest. It had been twenty minutes since they’d driven the militia away, and their footprints had cooled to the temperature of the surrounding foliage. The blood of the injured was still only a few degrees warmer than the background ambient heat, showing signs of where the gunmen had escaped. Scanning between the trees, using the telescopic optics in conjunction with infrared and light amplification modes on the shadow suit hoods, he couldn’t see any sign of them returning. Even so, he and Grant had moved along their path for a good distance, keeping their eyes open and scanning as far as the advanced suits would let them, but also making time for the rest of their senses, as well. Infrared tracking could be beaten, especially with the use of a shield of “room temperature” woven foliage that blocked out the heat signatures behind it.
For all the advantages that the two former Magistrates possessed, there were still ways for the enemy to sneak past them. Caution and alertness were the order of the day.
“Nothing so far, but I still want those people on the move to someplace safer,” Kane said. “I noticed a couple of vehicles in the camp that they could use.”
“We’ve fit as many as we could, those with the least ability to walk back,” Nathan explained over the shared frequency. “Tell me we’re not going to bring my cousin with us.”
“She’s family?” Kane asked him.
“Yeah,” Nathan responded. “I’d rather not have her join us. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t have any innate advantages like experience, cobra scales or a mystical artifact.”
“No, but she does have frontier militia training,” Brigid spoke up.
“Fifteen rounds a month shot at a paper target on a wall,” Nathan countered.
“Her advantages don’t matter,” Kane said. “She seems dead set on joining this expedition. So let’s have her with us, rather than tripping over her.”
Nathan grumbled, “I guess that makes sense.”
“Don’t pout over it. Our job will be a little trickier, but she’s the one who asked to come with,” Kane offered. “She knows where we’re going is dangerous. We can only hope to survive with her help, just like she survives with ours.”
“All right,” Nathan answered. He sounded much less sullen. It’d take a while for him to be comfortable with the idea of having a cousin along or their journey, but, in the end, Lyta was determined to join them.
“Kane,” Grant warned over the Commtact. “I’ve got contacts. Seventy-five yards out. Three, no, five. Armed, moving low to the ground.”
“Test force?” Kane asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Grant said. “None of them appear wounded. They don’t seem to have any night optics, so they might not be expecting us to have the same.”
“Don’t engage unless they make the first move,” Kane returned. “Keep an eye on them.”
“Right,” Grant said.
“Baptiste, they’re early,” Kane told her.
“Already back to the group,” Brigid answered. He could hear her shouting orders for the prisoners to pack up and start moving out. In the distance, Kane could hear the low rumble of engines starting. He was glad that it was the audio sensors in the shadow suit hood. Still, he kept ready for Grant to tell him that the enemy were reacting to their vehicles powering up.
At the same time, he continued to sweep for signs of other foes in the forest. There might only have been five left uninjured after the initial assault, but Kane didn’t feel like he was that lucky. If anything, they wouldn’t put all their forces in one spot, especially not in the flanking maneuver that Grant observed.
Something else was happening. His nerves were on edge.
“Grant, status on the group moving up.”
“They appeared, but they only advanced about twenty yards,” Grant returned. “Then they hunkered down. Every so often, they look back, but that’s it. Why?”
“There’s something going on. I can’t put my finger on it, but those guys have backup on the way,” Kane explained. “I just can’t see it.”
“That void chick, Neekra?” Grant asked. “She could be oozing in?”
Kane thought about it. That’s when he began to feel the vibration. He looked down at the ground. “Grant, get out of the forest. Get back to the truck.”
“Shit,” Grant hissed, and Kane could hear his effort at running, his increased breathing, the thump of his body as he landed on the ground—all conveyed via vibration over the Commtact. Unfortunately, Grant seemed to be moving in slow motion, just as Kane was, in relation to the rising throb of forces seething beneath the earth. Kane charged through the forest.
“Baptiste!”
“Go!” Brigid shouted loud enough to make Kane’s inner ear ring. She was in full command mode, scooting two dozen noncombatants from the area. There were two trucks in the camp, enough to carry about sixteen people, tightly packed, so there were going to be people still on foot.
Running from a force that shook the ground and filled Kane’s spine with ice-water terror.
“Kane!” Grant bellowed. “The ground split ahead of me!”
“Double around!” Kane returned.
Then Kane realized Grant’s dilemma firsthand. He skidded to a halt as suddenly the ground split all around him. He threw himself down, reaching for the far edge of the ever-growing chasm, and he clawed at the ledge, but only for a moment. He hadn’t rooted himself on rock; he’d grabbed a handful of soil. It crumbled beneath his grasp, and gravity sucked him down the face of the cracking cliff.
In free fall, Kane felt absolutely helpless, but that stopped a moment later when he slammed hard against a crag. The sudden alteration of the kinetic force kept Kane from bouncing off the ledge, but even so, every inch of his body throbbed, aching from the abuse it’d just absorbed. He clung to the side of the chasm, listening as the rumble suddenly stopped.
The earth beneath Kane disappeared into inky oblivion. Kane would have used the optics on his shadow suit hood, but somewhere along the way, the seal that kept its faceplate on had failed, probably when he’d planted into the wall while tumbling in flight. He couldn’t find it anywhere, and he realized that most of his equipment was gone.
Sitting up slowly, taking deep breaths and forcing himself not to vomit, Kane brought himself back to a semblance of clearheadedness. He scanned the darkness, one hand absently digging for a flashlight. He clicked it on, and it spilled only a modicum of light. He ran his fingers over the surface. The lens had been shattered. Likely, several of the LEDs embedded in the lens had been similarly knocked out by his plummet.
Now he knew why he felt like a punching bag for the gods. He’d likely rebounded from cliff face to cliff face, spiraling down the chasm until everything in his inventory had been smashed or torn from him. Even his right arm didn’t feel right, as if it were too light. He shone his torch and saw that the hydraulic holster’s arm brace was there, but the Sin Eater was gone, torn off completely. There was no Copperhead to be seen, either, at least not on the ledge with him.
Kane dug his fingers into the cliff face, taking advantage of what light there was from his torch to mark his territory. The ledge was a long one, disappearing out of the spray of LED-emitted light at about twenty-five feet.
He also realized that there was a small lip along the ledge. Slowly it continued to rumble, rising until it stopped, a slender barrier of stone three feet in height. Kane limped over to it, examining it. Over the stone railing, the abyss continued beneath him. He glanced upward, but the night sky was gone. Invisible.
Had the earth shut again?
He checked the floor of the ledge again and noticed that it had a tile-like pattern on its surface.
Kane realized that this was not a random formation along the chasm wall. This was constructed, but he couldn’t tell by which force. He’d seen the rail rise before his eyes. He turned off the light in order to conserve its battery.
Nothing was around for him to see. Whatever had fallen off him had missed the ledge entirely.
And the way my luck goes, that’s not happenstance, Kane mused. A force must have guided me here. That bitch queen who played with my subconscious only a few days ago.
Kane sneered, then checked himself all over. He was relieved when he found that his web belt was still somewhat intact. He’d only retained two grenades and the Colt .45 he’d brought to back up the Sin Eater and the Copperhead. It had only one magazine in it.
He felt for the pouch and found the other magazines; their steel shells were bent and crushed by impacts. Kane figured he could pry shells from the damaged pair of clips to feed the one already in the gun, which meant that he was good for about eight shots before needing to retreat and spend minutes thumbing bullets into the remaining magazine. He checked the pistol for signs of damage, but the frame of the gun was thick enough not to have bent or warped under his impacts against the chasm walls. The grip was splintered on one side, though.
Luckily, Kane still had some duct tape in his kit. He wound it around the splintered wood, evening it out. He made sure the tape didn’t interfere with the magazine release or block the magazine well, but other than that, his pistol was much like himself. Battered, held together by a reliable wonder material, but still ready to fight.
He also had his knife in its leg sheath. The one part of him that felt like it hadn’t been swung at with a sledgehammer was his leg below the knee, where the fighting blade rested.
A knife. A gun. His shadow suit, sans optics. Two grenades. A flickering LED flashlight.
He touched his face. The Commtact plate must have been jarred loose when the face of his shadow suit hood had been torn off. He patted himself down, reaching down the neck of the suit, but he couldn’t find the contact plate.
Maybe it was better this way.
Brigid and Grant had shadow suits, as well, clothing that could have cushioned their plummet down the chasm.
But that was an advantage denied to Nathan, Thurpa and the new girl, Lyta.
He looked up. The sky was gone. Had the earth closed up? And had it been only he and Grant who had fallen? Indeed, had Grant fallen? Or was he still trapped aboveground, kept from advancing by the rift that had opened ahead of him?
Alone in the darkness, Kane knew that there were two ways to go. Up the inclined ledge, toward the surface where his friends may or may not be, or down, deeper into the belly of the underground, where he was certain the trouble originated.
His enemies were likely ahead of him. That meant going down.
Kane descended into the abyss.
Chapter 6
Neekra rode in Warlord Gamal’s skin. She’d carved his psyche out using the telepathic equivalent of a rusted fork, hurling the man’s personality into the void. His body, despite the loss of a foot when his truck-bed platform imploded on it, was more than sufficient for her needs.
Neekra infected his body, occupying his nervous system and limbs, consigning the original mind of the man to a hellish oblivion. She felt a disjointed sense of pain as she took the flesh from one part of his anatomy and turned it into a new foot for her. The effort and the laws of matter conservation had stolen inches of height from Gamal’s skeletal structure, but it also provided her with more room to play with and forge him into a brand-new shape. She took his manhood and much of his muscle and transferred it to fat, to curves, to feminine bits.
Once again Neekra had a body, and it befit the body of the seductress, the queen of the damned who drew men to their doom. Gamal had been one of her first consorts in a good hundred years, mainly because she didn’t find that much ambition, that much grandeur, in the lesser men scurrying past her tomb. Her telepathy projected from where the Annunaki overlords had interred her, but it could only stretch so far. In all that stretching, all she’d encountered were desperate men whose thoughts were living to the next dawn, whose desires were a mere crumb of food, to slay or elude their enemies.
The warlord Gamal was different. He’d organized the Panthers of Mashona into a teeming army, built on a bedrock of terror and brutality. Gamal had the promise to expand beyond being a mere robber baron and seizing the world by the reins. Unfortunately, there were others who had arrived on the continent, others who had their own agendas that were attractive to her.
And Gamal? He’d made the mistake of hurling his might against a set of opponents whose will was simply too much for him to overcome. His failure, even bolstered by his militia and swarms of winged mutates, cooled her interest in the man as a lover, as the savior who would raise her from her tomb. But Durga had been correct in retrieving the fallen warrior from the battlefield.
Neekra now had a skinsuit, a hunk of flesh with which she could interact with the world, even as she flowed through his cells like quicksilver, shaping him into a blood-skinned goddess.
And as her host, as her consort, she had a dozen snake men and their prince, a king cobra who had dared to challenge even the god who’d entombed her, far from man, entrapped without a hope of freedom.
Prince Durga of the Nagah was part of a race of genetically altered humans, spawned by Enki, brother and rival of Enlil, and kept vital for millennia by the cobra baths that could transform human to Nagah or back again, using cellular manipulation similar to what Neekra used on Gamal’s carcass. Durga had cut deals with Enlil and then the Millennium Consortium, in order to cement his place as the emperor of the Nagah’s underground kingdom. His plan would have worked had it not been for the resistance of the other man Neekra had been drawn to. As it was, Durga’s attempt at domination was undone, but not before a thousand had died and he’d wrecked Enki’s fountain of genetic alteration.
Durga had come to her, to Africa, because he sought the means of returning to health. He’d barely survived an immense explosion, thousands of bullets, grenades and knives hacking at him. Durga had abused the cobra baths, utilizing them to make himself into a living juggernaut, but even that invulnerability paled in the face of the efforts of Kane, her other target, and his allies from North America.
Kane, Neekra mused. I tortured him, ripped him from his friends and family, did everything in my power to shatter his spirit. And yet, when he had me on the ropes, he offered me mercy.
Mercy was a concept that Neekra had utilized before; she’d manipulated it in foes who assumed she was a mere mortal, a weakling. She’d appealed to the mercy of others to draw them into her trap.
But for all she had subjected Kane to, he’d stayed his hand and offered her a chance to walk away from the battle. As far as he was concerned, he’d won, and that meant he had no need or desire to murder her cold. That was something she’d never encountered, at least in her memory. At her current age, she wasn’t quite certain of her earlier days, when she had still been mortal.
Neekra would have had no problem with Kane putting the finishing blow upon her. The peace of oblivion would have been just as fine a reward for her as freedom. Anything would be better than confinement within her prison. Right now, inside Gamal’s head, she was only a sliver of what she had been, despite her ability to effect his cellular structure.
In her own body, alive and free, she was nigh unlimited, rather than being a ghost shredding minds on the mental plane or pulling parlor tricks with musculoskeletal reformation. Her senses were dulled, as if she were interacting with the world through a woolen blanket. Trapped in human flesh, she couldn’t even reach out to touch Durga’s consciousness, let alone reach out to locate Kane, the mighty and the merciful, the attractive human who had drawn her to his nobility and strength.
To corrupt such a figure would be delicious. To do it and retrieve her body, to become the goddess she was meant to be, not a corpse buried in concrete, that would be the ultimate. To attempt it, to fail and to be utterly destroyed by such a warrior would be the end of her imprisonment, her torment.
Either way, it was win-win for Neekra.
“My queen,” the prince spoke softly, awakening her from her reveries. “The other has arrived.”
Neekra regarded Durga, realizing that he made no secret of his disdain and jealousy of Kane and her newly spawned interest in him. She smiled at him. “How do you know?”
“The Panthers of Mashona have arrived with their tribute to your servants,” Durga stated. “And now they are under attack. They retreated.”
Neekra pursed her full, lush lips. The face she’d molded was a near approximation of her true beauty, but it was as nothing to her original self. She’d had to deal with mere human flesh, and, as such, it could only hold so much of her majesty. She recalled the tales of Zeus, and one in particular, how even at his most diminished in power, a glance upon his visage by a human turned them to ash.
She wondered if modern man could withstand her true beauty.
“Then send up my children,” Neekra told Durga. “Open the earth, and let them take those on the surface.”
“You would have those things kill Kane, after all the moony eyes you’ve cast his way?” Durga asked.
Neekra smirked. Durga had spirit. Certainly, he had positioned himself as enchanted by her sexuality and her promises of power, but he still retained his own individuality, an unflinching fear of stating his mind in contrast to her wishes. “They will not kill those who I do not wish to harm. I control them.”
Durga barely concealed a shudder of revulsion. When the Nagah had first come to this underground city, encountering the minions within, he had been disgusted by their translucent, wormlike flesh. However, they were among the layers of warriors for the city of Negari, which she’d ruled for centuries until the arrival of a black-clad European. He had traversed Africa, seeking out a young woman, a relative of some other man to whom he owed a debt. In the space of a few days, the traveler had brought the city down, wrecking it completely, causing the death of the pitiful human shell she’d used at that time and bringing dark slaughter to the cultists who’d clung to her.
Neekra could not help but recognize a small spark of that dark, grim Puritan within Kane. She even sensed an echo of the man’s voice within the wails of the tortured twenty-second-century adventurer, as well as a flash of familiarity with his profile as he rose from his psychic dungeon, armed for battle.
She closed her eyes and extended her consciousness to the minions.
They would rue the day they’d come to her city.
* * *
BRIGID BAPTISTE WATCHED as the earth that the prisoners had occupied suddenly began to crack open, then slanted down as if on a ramp. At first her mind reeled. That was exactly where the dozens of captives would have been had they not been freed; they’d be rolling down a slide of stone. The change of the terrain was sudden and dramatic, and as the dust and dirt tumbled down the preconstructed ramp, she realized that this was an ancient design.
She looked as the ramp disappeared into an arched entrance and segments of the floor slid and crunched out into the open. It all slid together with uncanny precision, producing one smooth inclined plane that stretched down into the darkness and out of sight. Even more boggling to her was that as the floor extended, she could see little lips of stone rising, forming a railing.
“What the hell?” Nathan muttered, gripping the artifact Nehushtan tightly.
“It’s an entrance to hell,” Lyta spoke up. “They brought us to the city of the damned...Negari!”
“Negari?” Thurpa asked.
“It was a realm which was thought to be made up by authors in the early twentieth century,” Brigid spoke. “A hidden city, ruled by an eternal...queen.”
Brigid kicked herself. This was the void entity that Kane had described as his tormentor, the one who’d plucked out his mind, taken it to another plane and tortured him on multiple levels.
“Neekra,” Thurpa snapped. “That blood-skinned bitch!”
