Kitabı oku: «Infestation Cubed»

“Quiet, you two!” Kane bellowed. “We’ve got worse things to worry about than your petty little paranoia.”

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 and took a handful of the meshy sack and tore it off 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.

Infestation Cubed

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Where ere we tread, ’tis haunted, holy ground.

—Lord Byron, acclaimed poet and

founder of Romanticism

World’s full of ghosts. They ain’t real, but they’re

everywhere. Maybe learn from ’em. If we

do, maybe we don’t make their mistakes again.

—Domi, survivor, pragmatist and fighter for a rebuilt future

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.

Contents

Chapter 1

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 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 1

Cerberus redoubt had repelled the invasion by Ullikummis and his cult, but at great cost. Brigid Baptiste was missing, and Manitius base scientists such as Clem Bryant, Daryl Morganstern and Henny Johnson were dead.

Mohandas Lakesh Singh took another step, his breath coming raggedly in the relentless New Mexican heat. Ahead of him, the feral albino outlander girl Domi scouted, pausing to look back over her shoulder every few moments, concern etched across her porcelain features. The wild woman had already fashioned a head wrap from the scientist’s shirt, tying the sleeves around his forehead, then flipping the tails of the shirt over like a hood. Lakesh felt like something out of Lawrence of Arabia, but he had to admit that the cover kept him from sweating too much, and what moisture he lost was wicked away by the garment.

Domi stopped and crouched low, her ruby-red eyes sweeping the edge of the scruff ahead of them. Back before the nukecaust, engineered by the Annunaki overlords, the ground they covered had been a highway that cut through the desert. Now Lakesh was getting his kicks on the cracked and centuries-worn Route 66. Ironically, thanks to the desertification of “the Mother Road,” it had not been considered a vital target for Soviet nuclear missiles, and long stretches of the old interstate highway were relatively intact and easily traveled.

Lakesh pulled a map from his pocket, feeling the tremors in his hands. Of late he’d been growing increasingly tired, and he realized that the gift of returned youth was being stripped from him by Enlil. As the imperator, Sam, had once cured Lakesh of the effects of two and a half centuries of cryogenic sleep and cybernetic organ transplant. With but a touch, a horde of nanites had descended upon his cellular structure, turning bionic life systems into the matter necessary to reconstruct his slowly aging and failing organs.

What Enlil had bestowed, he could take away, and Lakesh hadn’t noticed that until he physically passed the age of fifty a while back. Now his knees popped and crackled with each step, and his back couldn’t stand the burden of even a small backpack. The subtle shake of his fingers as he fumbled to unfold the map was an indication that everything was failing him. His genetic code had been laden with a deadly little bomb. Whereas Lakesh had previously been able to maintain control of his body, even at his advanced age of 275 years, two hundred of which had been negated by suspended animation and cloned organs, Lakesh knew that this time, as his body continued to collapse at Enlil’s will, his brilliant mind would be quick to go.

Domi had twice complained in the past couple of days that she couldn’t understand what Lakesh was saying. Lakesh grimaced, knowing that those lapses in communication were caused by memory lapses and he was speaking his original Hindi. Those brain farts were something that Lakesh could recognize as the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease. Most people only displayed signs of the dementia in their mid-sixties, though he was aware that subjects could manifest symptoms eight years before they reached the point of easy diagnosis for Alzheimer’s. Memory lapses could have been brought on by stress, especially with the horrific events of Ullikummis’s conquest of the redoubt and taking its staff prisoner. The sight of the son of Enlil forcing a stone seed into the broken skull of Morganstern would itself have been more than sufficient to break the sanity of a less experienced person. As it was, the young mathematician’s demise had been sickening. His fight against the assimilation by Ullikummis’s seed ended with his brains burst on the floor, crushed to a pulp.

Lakesh tried to picture that event, but nothing came to mind. Lakesh knew his brain too well, and he knew his coping mechanisms. He’d seen the world he’d known destroyed in a rain of atomic fire and had withstood the shock, retaining details of the annihilation. His ego didn’t sublimate terrible memories, and it especially didn’t do that this quickly. Something had happened to him, and self-analysis told him that he’d obviously reached a point in time where he was being destroyed from the inside by neurological degeneration.

Of course, that now meant he was in his late fifties if he was experiencing the inability to retain recently learned information or recall current events in his short-term memory. He looked around, and wondered where Kane, Brigid and Grant were on this road.

“Where are the others?” he asked out loud. “Didn’t they make the jump with us?”

Domi frowned and gently took the map from his hand. “We didn’t jump, Moe.”

Lakesh looked into her crimson eyes and saw a flicker of recognition in them. “Domi… I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. Told me an hour ago,” she said. She rested her hand on his cheek. “Hour before that, too.”

“How long have I been telling you?” Lakesh asked.

“Past half day,” she answered. “Told me you’re getting tangle brain. Not remembering stuff.”

Lakesh swallowed hard. “I’m so sorry.”

She kissed him gently on the forehead, stroking his thinning silver hair. “It’s okay, Moe. It’ll be all right.”

“We’re still going to Vegas, correct?” Lakesh asked.

“To get away from Rocky,” Domi replied.

“Rocky…” Lakesh repeated. It took everything to drag up the image of Ullikummis. The stone-fleshed giant had swept through Cerberus like a deadly storm, had driven a stone through Daryl Morganstern’s forehead, calling for him to submit. “I’ve been losing my mind for half a day, but how long—?”

“We’ve been away from Cerberus for four days,” Domi told him, slowing her speech down, speaking clearly and fighting not to drop words. Lakesh knew that was a struggle for the wild-born creature who had learned to talk while fighting for her life tooth and nail. She was going above and beyond for his sake, and he could see the exhaustion in the form of gray-and-pink wrinkles under her ruby-red eyes. “We’re almost to Vegas.”

Lakesh closed his eyes. Old information was something he always would have access to. Route 66 swung up north for a bit before crossing just south of Las Vegas from New Mexico to California. The road they were on was as good as any paper map he carried, and there would be a turnoff that would direct them the rest of the way to the deserted city of sin. “About twenty more miles, right?”

Domi smiled, nodding in agreement. “Right.”

Lakesh returned her grin. “I’m not completely simple yet.”

“Never will be,” Domi replied, cupping his cheek once more.

The ancient scientist swallowed, wishing that he had some water to remove the dried gunk from his tongue. As if on cue, Domi handed him a small canteen, and Lakesh took a sip. Domi turned and continued her role of leading him to a promised land.

Lakesh’s heart ached. He knew he was going to forget her as Enlil’s destructive genetic code tore through his intellect. The overlord had found a way to torture the Cerberus founder—attacking his mind but leaving him sufficient cognitive ability to realize what his fate would be. The New Mexican heat and desert winds had dried his eyes out too much for the tears he wished he could bring.

Enlil was stealing Lakesh, dismantling his brain by bits and pieces, almost as if he had been strapped down to a buffet table and forced to watch as carrion birds tore at his flesh and not allowed to die.

“Damn you, Enlil,” Lakesh growled under his breath. He continued to follow Domi, trying to count down to the moment when he forgot this exchange.

After fifty minutes, Lakesh wondered why he had been counting.

THE YOUNG WOMAN HAD stalked ahead of the two men, acting as a scout but also to get away from the stifling feeling of being the outsider among the pair. Though she was beautiful—a shapely, curvaceous vixen with flowing dark hair, tanned olive skin and bright, attentive hazel eyes—she felt a resistance to her presence, despite their asking her for her allegiance. Kane and Grant, the rebel ex-Magistrates and fabled warriors who had taken on the hybrid barons and foiled them in battle after battle, were missing their third counterpart, the tall, flame-haired and brilliant Brigid Baptiste in the wake of an all-consuming battle that had shattered the defenses of Cerberus redoubt. There had been loss of life, but the mastermind of the assault and takeover, Ullikummis, had been repelled.

Now Rosalia found herself alongside the pair as they did what they could to find leads on the stone giant, the spawn of an alien overlord that had been forged by science and cruelty into a living weapon. The trouble with seeking out information on Ullikummis was that they lived in a world where cross-country communication had been severely curtailed. Sure, the Cerberus redoubt had done its best to spread globe-crossing comms to its allies, enabling them to keep close ties to New Edo in the archipelago that used to be Southern California, but as of now, the Tigers of Heaven were on lockdown, preparing for Ullikummis’s attempts to lay siege to them. On the other side of the planet, there was radio contact with New Olympus, but they had been told to lay low, as well.

Ullikummis’s power was simply too big a threat right now. Taking over the minds of war-honed samurai or armored mobile skeletons would mean that the Annunaki prince would become unstoppable. Ullikummis sought the tools to reforge the Earth, to destroy his father, Enlil, and to take his place as a cruel master of human life.

There were friends and allies scattered across the face of the planet, but calling them in against a mind-controlling god who was hewed from living, lava-blooded stone would be folly. Firepower and technology, martial skill and courage, these would only lead to the slaughter of Ullikummis’s thralls.

Rosalia was practical enough to value her life over those sent to attack her, no matter how innocent they were before the stony prince commanded them. She herself had carried the seed of the Annunaki prince within her; it was no secret from either Kane or Grant. At times, she’d feel the tickle of Ullikummis’s thoughts, but her will had proved too much to be kept tamped forever, not when the half-god was working to coordinate the New Order, his rapidly growing cult that had proved mighty enough to breech the walls of Cerberus and leave it in ruins.

Right now Kane had directed them toward the swamplands of what used to be the southeastern United States. Rosalia wasn’t happy with this mission, a run through a dangerous, treacherous terrain that was filled with inbred, crazed outlanders and the remnants of genetically altered species that strove to endure in the freshwater marshes and waterlogged hammocks at the southern end of what used to be called the Wiregrass Region.

This was a running feint by Kane. He and the others had left a trail that even the blind could follow. Her mongrel dog, padding stealthily beside her, turned his attention toward her.

“I don’t like being a target, either,” Rosalia answered him.

A soft whimper escaped the dog’s throat, and it turned its dark eyes toward the shadowed canopy that left the sinking marsh ahead of them in eternal dusk. Fingers of sunlight managed to penetrate, so the swamp wasn’t pitch-black even at noon, but the shadows were long and prevalent, providing hiding places for people or things. Rosalia rested her hand on the hilt of her knife, knowing that with the trail they’d left behind, it was likely that they could have been anticipated.

The New Order might be waiting ahead of them, ready to pounce. Though she still had the alien seed that linked her to Ullikummis’s will, she wasn’t certain if she, or her companions, would be taken alive for reprogramming or outright killed.

Either way, Rosalia didn’t want to press her luck. There were too many enemies in this world for her to let down her guard. Even if Ullikummis wasn’t in wait, there were rumors of vampiric raiders to complement the normal bandits and cold-bloods who stalked the corners of postapocalyptic America. Kane might have enjoyed drawing the ire and fury of Ullikummis’s machinations, but Rosalia had signed on to assist in resisting the godling.

Rosalia’s brow wrinkled as she looked in the shadows of the cypress trees sticking out of the slowly deepening water. There was movement flickering between the trunks, and it took her a moment to categorize them as birds and other small mammals flitting up and down bark, or leaping among the rare “low” branches of these waterlogged trees.

She looked back toward the two men who had been left behind, tending the boat that they had bought a few miles back when they were still working their way along a river toward the wetlands. Rosalia had volunteered for this stretch of scouting, scurrying across the length of spongy, muddy land that was only covered by an inch of water, rather than dipped down into two to three feet depths, teeming with leeches or microbe-laden mud that literally burned skin on contact.

Rosalia dipped her head in disbelief. Here she was, in a place filled with alligators, poisonous snakes, even bull sharks who had swum through the river delta as far as five hundred miles from the ocean to seek prey. Even the river mud seared the skin so that boots immersed in the mush had to be pried off so that bacteria and microscopic fauna could be scraped away from the skin. Rosalia wasn’t sure if such a concoction would eat even through the shadow suit she wore beneath her clothes, but she wasn’t willing to risk that. She was too experienced with swamps to think anything was bulletproof, self-contained environment or not.

Bandits and pirates were known qualities of this region, as well, and there were rumors of beast-men, both apelike and reptilian, who haunted the forested wetlands. The creatures could have been related to the so-called scalies, who had been hunted into extinction once the remnants of humanity in North America had been consolidated in the nine baronies. She’d never heard of any furry muties, but it hadn’t been something outside the realm of possibility. Kane also had delivered a warning about the swamplands of Louisiana, where there were small colonies of the nigh unkillable mutants known as “swampies.” If one pocket survived, then it was likely that the difficult terrain of intermixed marshes, ponds and hammocks would protect the swamp dwellers.

Rosalia turned back to see if the others were in sight. Between the long grass and the fifty-yard stretch of spongy ground she’d crossed, and the fact that the two men were seated in the scull to maintain a relatively low profile for now, she couldn’t spot her companions.

“Sure, Magistrate Man, hide when I’m checking for my backup, but not when a stone god’s hunting for your ass and mine,” she grumbled. She returned her attention to the cypress swamp ahead. Something was in there, and even her dog could sense the ominous stench of wrongness coming out.

There was a rustle behind her and she whipped around, dagger out of its sheath and lashing toward the figure’s throat.

Only Kane’s lightning reflexes prevented her from opening a deadly gash from ear to ear. His fingers locked around her wrist while the blade was still inches from his neck. “I know you’re mad about me being out of sight, but that’s no reason to take my head off.”

“Not funny, Magistrate Man,” Rosalia said with a sneer. “This stretch of river stinks worse than the rest. And not in the traditional sense. This…has a weirdness to it.”

“I feel it, too,” Kane said. “We’d heard about something going on here, something strange, even amid all the stuff we’ve been doing with alien overlords, extradimensional conquerors, even a tribe of dimension-hopping hackers.”

Rosalia shook her head. “Anyone else said any of that, I’d have called them a fused-out tangle brain.”

“Before or after you met Ullikummis?” Kane asked.

Rosalia nodded. “Before. I have to say, the weirdness really took off after I ran into you, Magistrate Man.”

“Don’t blame me,” Kane answered.

“So, you brought us here, leaving a trail of bread-crumbs for the New Order to follow, even when you knew that there was trouble already waiting for us?” Rosalia asked.

“I’ve been at this long enough to know that when you’re on the menu for two enemies, they’ll end up taking bites out of each other to get to you,” Kane said. “And since I’m still here, having two enemies at each others’ throats seems to be a good strategy.”

“Seems, Magistrate Man,” Rosalia answered, her hazel eyes scanning the shadows amid the cypress trunks and roots, “this won’t be just two opponents. We’ll be an open buffet for anything with teeth, and there’s lots of them in there.”

“This isn’t my first dance in a swamp,” Kane replied. “If anything, the terrain is on our side, in that it’s on its own side. It’ll eat anyone and anything that stumbles in.”

“What was the weirdness you’d heard from this stretch of swamp?” Rosalia asked.

“People disappearing, and reptilian creatures,” Kane said. “Sad thing is, we can’t narrow down what kind of lizard men we’re dealing with. A colony sent by Lord Strongbow, a missing detachment of Nagah, maybe even an overlord and his Nephilim followers.”

“Nagah?” Rosalia repeated, hoping for an answer.

Kane shook his head. “Want nothing to do for you. Or me. Or any human for that matter.”

Rosalia’s full, soft lips pursed in frustration, then she looked back. “Dog doesn’t like this.”

“I know. Neither does Grant,” Kane added.

“So, you promoting the mutt or demoting me to animal sidekick?” Grant rumbled over his Commtact. Kane repeated the comment of his grouchy friend since Rosalia couldn’t hear anything broadcast by the implanted communication device.

Rosalia looked down at her belt, noting the conventional radio that she’d had clipped to it. While small and handy, it was nowhere nearly as convenient as a cybernetic transmitter installed in the mandible, capable of transmitting words even if the speaker was whispering. The vibrations of the voice through bone were translated by the small, solid-state technology residing along the bone, pintles connecting the contact plate to the jawline. Kane and Grant could hear everything the other said or even heard, while she had to fumble with even the slim transceiver unit.

It was part of their link that made Rosalia feel so alienated. Of course, since she hadn’t wanted to get rid of the Ullikummis stone inside her, she couldn’t utilize the Commtact, as had been proved with Edwards when he had been infected. The shard had produced interference with the body’s energy flow and disrupted the miniaturized cybernetics. The point was made moot for her, as the field surgery to implant the stone was not possible in the wake of the New Order’s attack. The redoubt had to be put on total lockdown, now that its location was known. To preserve the store of supplies and technology within the underground facility, Lakesh had engaged blast doors and emergency locks. Nothing short of a bomb could cut through the doors of the compound, and explosives that powerful would also collapse tunnels.

The storehouse of vehicles and weaponry alone had to be secured to prevent bandits from suddenly expanding their capability beyond those of their traditional victims.

“So, lizards to the front, stone men to the back and a hungry swamp all around,” Rosalia said. “Can’t say you don’t know how to impress a girl, Mag Man.”

Kane’s lower lip twitched, as if the smile her quip had inspired had hit the brick wall of reality.

This was not going to be fun and games. Kane and Grant no longer had the backup of Cerberus redoubt, and Rosalia, despite her fighting ability, was not capable of the same kind of brilliance that Brigid Baptiste could provide.

Outnumbered, hunted and cut off from their usual support, the outlanders returned to the boat, each oar splash bringing them closer to the dangerous mysteries within.

Chapter 2

Domi could tell that something was in the air as they got closer to the half-buried city in the sand. Somewhere beyond what was once named Las Vegas lay a sprawling facility, heavily guarded and shielded on all sides by nothing but inhospitable desert. The feral girl had been kept there once as a prisoner, taken along with Kane, who was pressed into stud service for the genetically deteriorated hybrids in the months before the barons’ ascendance to the demonic Annunaki overlords. It was there that Domi had overcome her hatred and bigotry toward hybrids, learning that the actions of a few powerful leaders did not paint the total picture of the whole race.

While they were barons, the nascent overlords were cruel and petty, but their health depended on transplant surgery and blood transfusions from unwilling donors. Now the reptilian giants sneaked through the shadows of the world, their minds and bodies complete but their support system shattered with the destruction of Tiamat, the living space leviathan who had awakened the genetic coding within the barons and their Quad V hybrid minions alike.

Domi remembered rows and banks of young hybrids, babies actually, soft and vulnerable, so fragile that they were placed in lexan boxes in sterile, airtight rooms lest an errant microbe strike their nonexistent immune system and kill them where a normal human would shrug the infection off after a few days of sniffles. Domi herself had known the hardship of a less than optimal physiology, though she didn’t think of it in terms of biochemistry, anatomy or genetics. She was an albino, so her fair skin was prone to burning unless she kept herself wrapped, and her ruby eyes—so keen at seeing in the dark—needed to be hooded by a ball cap and sunglasses lest the brightness burn out her pupils.

While she could have made use of a shadow suit, one of the high-tech field uniforms worn by Cerberus personnel, the skintight, advanced fabrics would stick out. Domi already had enough trouble, being a tiny, slender albino traveling with an enfeebled, aging Lakesh. The shadow suit would attract too much attention, something she couldn’t afford when the elderly scientist was slowly losing his brilliant faculties as well as his physical vigor.

It was little things that Domi noticed. Even the mind that had endured centuries of existence and treachery under the barons was slipping, memories fading after only an hour, and he grew tired far more quickly than before.

They looked like prey out here in the desert, a hunter-plagued landscape of cold-blooded bandits, robbers, psychopaths and other killers. Domi knew that there was little she could do to make herself seem larger and stronger, even though she was one of the deadliest fighters who called the Cerberus redoubt home. Behind her wraparound shades, her ruby eyes swept the desert, looking for signs of trouble. Stuffed in a tied-off belt around her hips was a powerful, small-framed .45 automatic, and on her denim-clad calf was a long, wicked fighting knife. She had a backpack with water, food and extra supplies for the long journey, and cradled in the crook of her right arm was something she’d rarely carried, though she’d trained with it.

Domi, through the redoubt’s supply stores, had access to hundreds of weapons of all manner and make. Domi was more feral than tame, and while she was deadly with the semiautomatic Detonics .45 in her belt, the hand blaster wasn’t something she’d need on a long, dangerous loop through the desert. Crucial was something that could reach out across the sands and take down attackers long before they got too close. Because of that, she had a Winchester Model 70, in 7 mm Mauser. The choice was simple for Domi, who had seen fellow outlanders in roving bands dealing with human problems and meat acquisition with equal ease using this caliber. While she’d have to adjust for rise and fall with a .30 caliber, like the .30-06 or the 7.62 mm NATO, the 7 mm shot flat, making it perfect for long-range work.

At close range, the 7 mm would smash through a human torso like the horn of a rampaging bull, something she’d also been familiar with, having seen raiders dropped with their rib cages crushed to splinters when hit at only a few yards. Domi had a box of one hundred rounds in her backpack, as well as spare rounds stuffed into a collar wrapped around the rifle stock, and a few more stuffed into belt loops. There were five in the rifle’s magazine, and Domi had learned long ago that it wasn’t the number of bullets you threw at a problem as much as it was the shots that stuck to an enemy. She wouldn’t spray as fast as she could shoot, and once things got even closer, then it was time to let her Detonics Combat Master speak in its earthy bellow.

“What’s happening?” Lakesh asked. Like her, he was wrapped head to toe against the desert sun, a loose hood drooped over his evermore gray hair. His blue, transplanted eyes looked across the horizon that Domi was watching.

“Nothing,” Domi answered. “Time to sit and rest. Have a sip.”

Lakesh glanced at her, his full lips turning downward in a frown. “You don’t have to baby me, love.”

The albino girl caressed his cheek, soft and wrinkled, and managed a smile. “In the desert, remember?”

Lakesh managed a snort through his large nose. “My mind isn’t completely addled.”

“Keep your strength up,” Domi urged. “We’re almost to the city, and who knows what’s waiting inside there.”

Lakesh nodded. “How long have we been traveling?”

“Couple days,” Domi answered tersely.

“There’s trouble,” Lakesh muttered. “I know you.”

“Didn’t say you for—” Domi began.

“I mean, I know you drop unnecessary wordage when you’re worried about something,” Lakesh said. “Under stress, especially ready for combat.”

“No fight yet,” Domi promised. “But it’s quiet. Too quiet.”

Lakesh took a deep breath, then glanced down at the rifle she cradled in her delicate-seeming hands. He reached out and rested his fingers over hers. “Why did we come here?”

“Fix your tangle brain,” Domi said. “Might find some one.”

“It was a year or two ago, right? Surely they abandoned Area 51, especially with the ascension,” Lakesh said. “Why make any use of a facility for breeding hybrids when—?” He paused and winced. “Tiamat is gone. Right?”

Domi nodded somberly. “Happened a year back.”

Lakesh’s brow wrinkled. “I wasn’t sure.”

“Remember old things pretty good. Now, more fused out,” Domi muttered.

Lakesh sighed. “Enlil giveth. Enlil taketh away.”

“Enlil built 51,” Domi said. “No more Tiamat, no more snake-face council, might wake up old labs.”

“Canny reasoning, except that Enlil is operating on the far side of the globe,” Lakesh said. His face twisted in concern. “I can remember that, but everything else—”

“Not natural,” Domi interrupted him. “Tangle brain caused by something different.”

“I figured that much, probably once an hour for the past several days,” Lakesh lamented.

Domi hoped that her ball cap and sunglasses hid the concern in her eyes, but the scientist still retained sharp senses, even if his memory wasn’t as keen as usual. He cupped her cheek. “You made a smart decision coming here, darling.”

“Maybe,” Domi answered. Her attention was drawn by the flicker of a shadow.

Downtown Vegas had shifted much when Sky Dog’s convoy blasted its way through, past a pitched ambush. Many of the buildings not wrecked in the explosive firefight, or by the tower collapsed to block pursuit of the convoy of Sandcats, looked about ready to collapse in on themselves. The sands had crawled over the cityscape in an effort to reclaim the territory that once belonged. Hardy scrub grew close to where underground streams still sluggishly rolled through old sewer systems, the southern Nevada reservoirs long ago shattered and deteriorated by the earthshaker bombs that destroyed most of California.

Vegas was empty, but far from devoid of life. It was the signs of movement, the leftovers of habitation, that had left Domi on high alert. Someone was still present, or more likely, had been released in the wake of the devastating battle where she had nearly died, plucked instants from death via implode grenade and pulled to safety on Thunder Isle’s remarkable time trawl. Domi was aware that the laboratories in the depths of what used to be Area 51 had churned out a colony of hybrids; she’d seen the nursery, seen the babies.

What if it wasn’t merely hybrids that lived there, or what if the infant hybrids who’d somehow survived had been altered, changed by Tiamat’s awakening signal? Domi wished she could pose these questions to Lakesh, but she didn’t even have a quarter of the vocabulary necessary to convey those thoughts to him when he was at his sharpest, let alone when he was halfway to full tangle brain.

Domi advanced from cover. “There’s a hotel. We can stay there. The sun’s going to hot.”

Lakesh nodded. Where she used to look to him as a source of learning, of protective affection unlike the grim, competitive existence she’d engaged in while growing up, now he seemed much less confident, weaker. Domi loved him with all of her heart. This was a man who had done what he could to teach her, giving her the ability to read at what he called “a third-grade level” and treating her as an adult, a woman who was an equal, despite her relative youth and her wild nature.

That love was still there, evidencing itself in the form of trust in her, trust in her ability to cut through a torrid, hostile desert and into the ruins of a dead city that wasn’t so dead.

Domi couldn’t give voice to many of the thoughts racing through her mind, but she had one clear message.

“I will not let you down,” she whispered.

PRISCILLA STAYED VERY STILL, the eternal shadow of a collapsed casino interior forming its protective cocoon over her as the grunts and snorting inhalations of the hunters resounded on the other side of a barrier of light Sheetrock. The dark might not have been good concealment from her “brothers,” but so far their noses were not keen enough to follow her spoor, even through a thin wall. She was also glad that even if their ears were sensitive, they made too much noise sniffing the air, trying to find her.

She knew all she had to do was wait. Soon enough their interest would fade and they would go elsewhere, seeking some other form of prey. She cursed herself for a fool, allowing them to spot her when she’d assumed they would be snoring heavily during the rising heat of the day. Nighttime had been the cool period, when they could exert themselves without tiring under the blazing gaze of the sun. It didn’t help them much that daylight seared their sensitive eyes, especially in such a sandblasted environment. Priscilla was glad she had the intellect and calmness to make use of items left behind by the humans, like sunglasses. She’d read somewhere of a condition called snow blindness, and it was readily apparent that there could be sand blindness, as well, when the eye is so washed in the reflection of icy white or pale yellow that even the strongest contrasts couldn’t penetrate their vision. Her days of effort, leaving the great dead lake and its abandoned buildings behind, had made her aware of the need to protect her own sensitive eyes.

She’d adjusted her schedule to the daytime thanks to the use of polarized lenses, knowing that the primitive creatures she’d struggled to escape had been forced by experience to adopt a nocturnal hunting pattern. The day was when she could forage, to escape, to breathe and not feel like a stalked animal.

That was the source of Priscilla’s pride. She was not an animal.

She wasn’t human except in the broadest sense of the term. Her limbs were no longer as slender as they once were, and in place of the silky-smooth flesh that covered them, she was adorned with a layer of scales, shimmering, partly erupted in a night of agony that had awakened her and torn her from the protein “womb” she’d been stored in. Gasping for breath, clawing at agar-slicked floor tiles, she’d made her first few steps, brain assaulted by waves of images, body tingling as it tried to grow, but something shorted out her transformation, much like what had happened with the others.

Priscilla was the least affected. Many of her brothers and sisters had changed into the placid beings who, she assumed, were the final result of “the change.” From the thoughts that rained down upon her from Tiamat, she knew that the still, stolid reptilians were known as Nephilim, and they were the end result of a powerful psychic signal that flipped a switch at the genetic stage.

Priscilla floundered in the underground complex, just strong enough to hold off her half-formed brothers one-on-one when they tried to rape her. For some reason she hadn’t descended into a savage half state, but from the behavior of the Nephilim, she realized that they were in a stage of evolution, or rather devolution, from human to alien servant drone.

The hungry savages grew tired of the quiet ones and fell upon them, developing a taste for flesh.

The weak, the infirm, the wounded all became easy pickings for the others, and despite herself, Priscilla found that she preferred when the hunters returned at night bearing meat from some unknown source. She forced herself not to concentrate on what had been killed to fill her stomach, but she had not become de-ranged enough to enjoy the flavor of raw, torn flesh.

Slowly the hunters were learning to work as a team, and there was no way Priscilla would be able to hold off more than one rapist, no matter how much her intellect guided her nascent fighting abilities. She’d run far, all the way to Vegas, finding this little corner in the eternal shadows of the once neon-lit city. Here she’d managed to locate food, clothing and other necessities. Sitting just inside the shade of a looming section of roof, she was able to organize her thoughts better, reading and putting thoughts and descriptions to abstracts that had tumbled back and forth in her brain, scrambled images and concepts that had been implanted via infodumps as she floated in a nutrient bath, growing to full size, and the competing telepathic awakening given to her by a godlike alien mind. Something had given her the ability to be more than a mere savage when the others were snarling predators.

Most of the books had decayed, their ink fading from two centuries of sitting, but there was still more than enough surviving text and information that she was able to make use of the vocabulary that burbled across from the extraterrestrial identity that had wanted to turn her into a mindless servant.

What had failed?

Even here, in the dark, with the grunts of her hated brethren behind a mere inch of brittle stone, she asked herself what had made her so different. Why had she resisted Tiamat’s call so well when they couldn’t?

There was a change in the noises her pursuers made. Perhaps the sun had grown too much for their nocturnal eyes, or the heat had grown too much for them to do more than slump onto their bellies in a few inches of shade. Whatever it was, there was a sudden explosion of breathing and footsteps.

Something had caught their attention, and they were on the move.

Priscilla was tempted to follow them, at least to see who the poor creature was that had drawn their ire.

Whatever or whoever it was, Priscilla felt a pang of regret as she hid in the pitch-black.

At least, she thought, whatever was out there wouldn’t suffer for long.

LAKESH HAD HEARD DOMI stalk away from him, and even in his compromised memory situation, he knew that she was planting the seed of a trap. Born in the wilderness, the slender, pixie-haired albino girl could move with the silence of a cat. If she was obvious enough that Lakesh could locate her by hearing alone, that meant she was baiting someone she had sensed, risking her existence by making herself a target.

Lakesh clenched his eyes shut, squeezing the skin between his brows. Only a few months ago he had the physique and endurance of a man who was less than a fifth of his current chronological age of two and a half centuries. And while he knew that he’d crossed the Nevada desert, deposited there by one of the interphaser units he’d built, he wasn’t certain how much of a liability he had been across the hot, arid sands. Domi wasn’t one to keep her mouth shut about Lakesh acting like a baby, but she was unusually taciturn now.

He was out of breath, and if it hadn’t been for the layers of clothing he wore, his naturally dark complexion still would have burned in the blazing sun. One of the advantages of the multiple layers that were loosely bound around his torso and limbs was that they allowed for pockets of cool air, as well as absorbing sweat and whisking excess heat away. Domi didn’t look as if she had been in a recent conflict even past the hour or so he’d retained his memories for, so there was no other reason for Lakesh to assume that it was anything other than a walk in the sand that had so exhausted him.

“Useless,” Lakesh lambasted himself. He took a quick inventory of himself and found that he had a pistol in his belt. She hadn’t left him defenseless, and since it was only his short-term memory that was failing him, he made sure the weapon was locked safe, but still had a round in the chamber. Unfortunately he had to click off the safety lever to retract the slide enough to see there was a bullet in place. He closed the action and flicked the switch. “Don’t shoot by accident.”

There was the distant sound of grunts that distracted him from the heavy chunk of steel in his hand. It took everything in his willpower to keep from calling out to the feral girl to warn her.

Again, if Lakesh could hear them, there was no way her wilderness-honed senses missed them. He did roll over and peer over the berm of sand Domi had tucked him behind. He spotted a pair of big, bestial creatures. The last time he’d seen anything similar to this was when Quavell, the Area 51 hybrid who had befriended the Cerberus redoubt and Domi especially, resisted the clarion call of Tiamat so that she could give birth. Their skins were mottled with scaly, fine armor, and their limbs had swollen from the usual hybrid spindles to something slender and tightly corded. They were nowhere nearly as bulky and powerful as the Nephilim, but neither did they seem to be something Lakesh could best in a fistfight.

Both appeared to be about six feet in height, and their faces, still looking like those of the original Quad Vs, were twisted in anger. Each bore a length of steel with a hooked end, a bent L pipe that had been made into an improvised hatchet by hammering the tube shut with a rock and scraped to sharpness. They were tool users, and able to improvise, but that was where their civilization and advancement ended. Lakesh was reminded of cavemen, down to the tattered dark sheets that hung around their waists like loincloths.

Lakesh lowered himself behind the sandy berm, his thumb sweeping the safety off on the pistol. The gun felt so heavy, he wondered how he could keep it steady and on target if he had to shoot.

There was a gruff bark, and Lakesh lifted his head again. Domi was nowhere to be seen, and the pair of savages appeared confused. A smile crept across his fleshy lips.

The albino could disappear in plain sight. He didn’t envy the creatures.

Then two sets of black, teardrop-shaped eyes swiveled toward him. Their slitlike mouths curled up, revealing sharpened teeth awaiting inside.

They had seen him!

Lakesh started to lower back down, in the hope that they hadn’t, but the two beasts exploded from a standstill, legs pumping as they rushed to fall upon the former Cerberus redoubt leader.