Shadow Born

Thurpa liked his brain, liked independent thought, loved his freedom. That was what frightened him so much about being a mere clone of Durga. But that thought quickly tumbled aside. The brakes locked the tires of the pickup truck, and dust kicked up as the vehicle came to a halt at the top of a ridge. They had been looking down a slope at their pursuit, meaning that the militia had to fire uphill. It’d give them a small edge, and the barked order from Kane spurred Thurpa into action.

He took aim at the windshield of one of the approaching trucks and, from the stable platform of the tailgate, pumped every round in his magazine into the militia vehicle. After the fifth impact, a white spatter of cracked glass was visible, but he kept shooting. He fired on single shot, leaning into the recoil and allowing the barrel not to kick and rise as he poured round after round into the glass. It took him several seconds to empty out half of the magazine when Grant shifted gears.

Lyta lunged out, grabbing Thurpa by the arm to keep him from jolting out of the bed of the pickup. She had the forethought to have her knees pressed against the tailgate.

So far, things seemed to be going well. Thurpa might not have been the best shot, but he peppered the cab of one of the enemy “technicals,” even as the machine gunner on the back was distracted by rifle slugs slicing through the windshield and back window into his legs. The heavy machine guns that the technicals sported might have had steel plates around the back of their frames, to protect the face and upper chest of their users, but the cabs had no such bullet protection. With their legs being torn at, any hope of accurate fire was thrown out the window.

Even so, those bullets whipped and popped through the air over their heads in the pickup’s bed.

Kane surged beside Thurpa, rising to a half-standing position and snapping his arm forward. Thurpa could see a small object leave the ex-Magistrate’s fingertips and knew that he was closing down pursuit behind them. The rear tires kicked up dust and dirt, creating a smoke screen, the engines throbbing just in time as the tread caught traction and the pickup truck moved over the small ridge, racing away from the militia.

Behind, Thurpa could see the concussion wave and smoke from the thrown grenade, a vomitous column that was quickly followed by the sharp crack of the gren’s detonation.

“Reload,” Kane ordered the other three.

Thurpa did so, depositing his mostly empty magazine and keeping it to reload later. He put in another curved stick, rocking it until it was secure in the magazine well of the rifle. Another thirty rounds ready to fly, giving their enemy a reason to slow down. He looked around, seeing that they had made a turn and watching the bend in their smoky trail, and the pickup zoomed along in the rut between two ridges.

Kane kept watch for sign of the militia bursting over the hill they’d topped, all the while keeping another hand grenade ready to throw. The small explosive might not have destroyed an enemy vehicle and its shrapnel might not have caused harm to the men in the backs of those gun jeeps, but the blast would be sufficient to slow pursuit, giving the Cerberus crew and their allies the room they needed to fall back and outmaneuver the marauders.

Kane gave the roof of the pickup a hard slap, and at that moment Grant swerved hard to the right. Nathan, Lyta and Thurpa clutched at what handholds they could find as the force of the turn threatened to send them tumbling against each other like sacks of cement. Thurpa was glad to return the favor to Lyta by cushioning her, and he also managed to lash out his hand, blocking Nathan from barking his temple against the sidewall of the truck bed.

“Thanks,” Nathan muttered as Lyta was sprawled into Thurpa’s lap.

“You’ve done far more...”

Gravity seemed to cut out from beneath them before Thurpa could finish his sentence, the pickup topping the ridge and going airborne for a few feet. Right now they were in free fall, moving at the same speed as the falling truck they rode in, so the illusion of zero gravity was strong.

In that moment of eerie physical calm, Kane threw his grenade. His little hand bomb seemed to careen wildly away from the truck, almost as if it had been flying at a right angle to where the man hurled it, but that also was an illusion. The wheels hit the dirt, and Thurpa grunted as Lyta mashed him deeper onto the floor of the truck bed, knocking the breath from him. Nathan grimaced as his shoulder struck the same bit of rail that his head nearly had been dashed against.

“Sorry!” Grant bellowed over the racket, obviously in apology for the landing after their short flight.

On the heels of Grant’s shout, Kane’s second grenade went off. This time, the explosion sounded louder, and the rising jet of smoke and debris from the blast was accompanied by a flaming object that tumbled end over end through the sky. Thurpa hung on, watching the trail of the burning thing through the air until he realized that it was a human arm, or what used to be one.

“Direct hit!” Thurpa shouted.

“No time to celebrate,” Kane answered. “We’re slowing in three.”

Thurpa counted down in his mind, scrambling to his knees and bringing his rifle back to bear. The pickup’s brakes squealed and dirt flew. The desert wilderness might have made things harder for Thurpa to see targets, but that worked both ways. Instead of going full speed forward, they backed at a slower speed deeper into the ever expanding clouds of kicked-up dust.

Kane had pulled his hood up and put on the faceplate of his shadow suit. The skin-tight, advanced polymer uniform had undergone several upgrades, one of the most useful being a set of high-tech optics built into the cowl’s faceplate. Thurpa might not have been able to see a foot past the back of the pickup truck, but that didn’t stop Kane, and he could see where the man pointed.

Backing farther into their dust trail also bought the Cerberus expedition more time. The militia opened fire at the far end of the cloud of debris, missing the pickup by yards.

“Now!” Kane ordered.

Thurpa fired in the direction that Kane pointed, pulling the trigger as fast as he could. He surely couldn’t put out the amount of lead that a machine gun could in this manner, but he would make sure that his bullets were on target and not wasted. Kane himself used a borrowed battle rifle, and his training with full-automatic meant that he could control the kick of powerful recoil. Kane’s rifle was louder, and from the cab, Thurpa could make out a sidelong muzzle-flash.

Brigid was using her own shadow suit’s optical technologies, shooting out the window of the cab with a weapon. Thurpa didn’t care what she was firing, just that what lead they threw at the Panthers of Mashona had an effect. Thurpa had seen what this militia was like when he was still beside Durga and the Millennium Consortium expedition. They had soured him on people, and the marauders only continued to make bad impressions when they discovered Lyta and the other survivors of her frontier village held as slaves.

Lyta was half starved, dehydrated, and left bloody and scarred by heavy chains. That kind of abuse turned Thurpa’s stomach, especially in the light of meeting good people, like the Zambian military at Victoria Falls and of course Kane and his allies from Cerberus. When he saw the creatures who were to feed upon the Panthers’ captives, his patience for them was totally discarded.

He didn’t raise a finger to help them when Neekra’s horrifying spawn attacked another of their units, only moving or shooting to protect Nathan and Lyta. Thankfully, in the presence of the ancient staff, they became invisible to Neekra’s vampiric horde.

Thurpa wanted every bullet fired through his rifle to strike one of the Panthers and cause irreparable harm and pain to them. The militia had been the reason two city-states had come together as allies, because the Panthers of Mashona sought out technology and slaves. The marauders had been thieves, scavengers, parasites. They gave nothing to the world.

The pickup truck roared to life, jolting forward, but this time Thurpa was prepared. He’d braced himself, as had Nathan and Lyta.

“How’d we do?” Thurpa asked, seeing Kane throw one last hand grenade before they got to full speed. Kane remained quiet, but he looked toward Thurpa to acknowledge the question. Moments later, Thurpa heard the detonation of Kane’s good-bye bomb. Once more, screams filled the air, and the militia continued shooting wildly.

Finally, the man in the black high-tech suit spoke. “We’re doing okay.”

The pickup swerved, swinging around into the tracks of the enemy vehicles. As they cut across their pursuit’s trail, Thurpa glanced into the distance. No more vehicles were on the horizon, but the look he got was fleeting, and he was certain that he’d miss something. He only had his human eyes, not built-in telescopic or infrared receptors on a moon-built faceplate.

As it was, Kane didn’t sound too glum, despite his conservative estimate of their success. He just kept perched in the truck bed, eyes peeled for their foes.

This explosion didn’t sound as vigorous as the one that sent a flaming limb soaring through the sky. Gunfire still rattled from whichever vehicles were still in the chase. They were not safe, not by a long shot. The battle was still to be won.

Grant shouted through the small window between the cab and the bed. “Found some tree line! Going for it!”

Kane gave his partner a thumbs-up, and once again, those in the back of the pickup truck held on for balance. Grant shifted the gears expertly, this time going for maximum traction and performance from the tires, not kicking up dust clouds to cover their tracks. As such, Thurpa was surprised to see how little a rooster tail of dirt was kicked up as he changed course. This was not to say that the transit over the lumpy ground was any smoother, but it was faster than he’d seen Grant take the truck in this car chase.

Kane patted Thurpa and Nathan on the shoulders, motioning toward his belt. Instinctively, both young men reached up and gripped the webbing tightly for support.

Once again, the Cerberus leader’s big rifle erupted, staccato bursts of gunfire sizzling out the muzzle as the weight and leverage of Nathan and Thurpa anchored him enough so that he could devote both hands to controlling the weapon. Thurpa looked toward racing vehicles on their trail, watching one of them swerve off course. It teetered on two wheels, then struck a rut and went nose first into the ground. Men flew, cartwheeling through the sky and screaming as their technical flipped end over end. When the militiamen hit the ground, they didn’t bounce. They burst like ripe fruit, splattering their blood in huge splashes of crimson.

Thurpa couldn’t hear over the sound of Kane’s rifle, but his mind filled in the ugly, crunchy and wet noises made by men striking the earth hard enough to pop them like balloons.

Kane dropped an empty magazine and fed another into his weapon before continuing to hammer away at the opposition. Because Grant was going for speed, there was a lot less variable in terms of how the truck would bounce, and Kane’s short bursts compensated for recoil and amount of time on target. One of the closer enemy jeeps had smoke pouring from its hood where high-velocity, heavyweight rounds punched through its radiator and engine block. As the driver swerved, attempting to maintain control of his vehicle, a dead militiaman bounced from the side door, strapped in place by a seat belt, his head and left arm bashed to bloody pulps.

A few more short bursts, and the smoldering jeep jerked violently, brakes squealing, before it skidded into a sideways roll, bouncing away from the mechanized patrol.

So far, three enemy vehicles had been taken out. The two left weren’t pulling off the chase.

“How much punishment can these idiots take?” Nathan shouted.

“Their egos won’t let them back off,” Thurpa answered, even though his friend wasn’t looking for an answer. “At least not yet!”

Kane’s rifle barked and growled, peppering the last two pursuit vehicles. They were slowing down, even though the gunmen in the back still fired their guns. This time, however, they were simply blasting lead into the sky, making noise.

Grant cut a path through the trees, a slender road that forced Kane to duck before he was clobbered in the back of his head by a low-hanging branch. Just as they passed the tree line, Kane pulled one more grenade from his harness and dropped it at the mouth of the skinny dirt road. Grant kept up his speed, and by the time the grenade’s fuse burned down, they were out of the blast radius of the explosive. A thick, ugly cloud roared at the end of the trail, and though the barrier formed was nothing more than airborne particulate matter, Kane might have slammed a steel door in the face of the angry militia’s survivors. The blast at the mouth of the road through the forest was exactly the kind of face-saving out that the Panthers of Mashona survivors could take.

And they did.

They howled and honked their horns and fired their guns into the sky, standing their ground at the edge of the barren stretch of land. The marauders had driven Kane and his group from the lifeless terrain into “hiding.” They were victorious, and when they returned to their base, they would tell tales of the mighty army that they had driven off at great cost to their comrades who were now scattered and smashed, their blood ground into the already rust-colored dirt.

“If they’d ‘beaten us’ any more, they’d all be dead,” Brigid mused, agreeing with Thurpa and all of the others’ unspoken thoughts.

“Doesn’t matter,” Kane grunted. “Anyone hit?”

“Not by bullets,” Nathan said. Even through his dark, coffee-colored skin, Thurpa could see the redness and swelling of the bruise where his arm had slammed against the side of the truck bed. Thurpa remembered his own aches, the bumps and bruises he’d received as he was jostled about.

The pickup slowed, and Kane kept watch over the tailgate, staring into the distance. He was never going to let his guard down, not until he was dead certain that the militia was sufficiently discouraged and no longer interested in continuing the chase. It was a half hour and three miles of dirt road before he finally allowed himself a moment to relax.

By then, it was late enough in the afternoon for the truck to pull off to the side of the dirt road so they could set up camp amid the trees.

Thurpa found himself sitting close to Lyta as they ate. It was a long time before his thoughts returned to existential worry.

Chapter 3

Stopping for the night, the six companions set up a secure camp for themselves. They had things to do aside from resting themselves and keeping their pickup truck from overheating; first among them was finding the location of the tomb that Neekra had sought.

Once the campfire was lit, Brigid sat Kane down across from her.

“I’m going to hypnotize you, Kane,” Brigid informed him.

Kane nodded. “You think part of the reason Neekra wanted me so bad was that I might have a clue as to where her body is.”

Brigid smiled. “Correct.”

“You’d think I’d remember something like that,” Kane returned.

“Not necessarily,” Brigid explained. “You were affected by the staff in your dreams, intertwining your memories with the memories of a predecessor of yours.”

“Solomon Kane, the Puritan,” Kane stated.

“His adventures here in Africa had been related but imperfectly. However, his connection to the staff Nehushtan and his encounters with non-terrestrial and pan-terrestrial entities have, so far, given us an inclusive view into the secret history of this continent,” Brigid added. “However, locations in those missives are vague at best.”

Kane looked to Nathan, who had fallen into the role of bearer of the artifact. “I thought only weak minds could be hypnotized.”

Brigid turned Kane’s attention back to her. “Willing minds can be put under, as well. In fact, just the very act of focusing on a subject, distracting the part of the mind that can be distracted, works. Just falling asleep is a form of self-hypnosis.”

Kane nodded.

“Get Zen,” Brigid ordered, giving him a backhanded slap on the chest.

Though outwardly Kane didn’t change his stance or position in the slightest, inside his mind he put his intellect to work, ordering his thoughts so that he could enter the mental state Brigid requested of him. The woman lifted her hand, holding her index finger straight in the air. His eyes locked on that finger, and even as he did so, he heard her voice, soft, soothing, a low, constant beat in his hearing. He didn’t know what she was saying, and it could have been gibberish syllables, her way of creating a metronome-like beat to keep his ears focused as his eyes. He allowed himself to mentally drift.

The next thing Kane knew, he was in chains. His clothes had changed. Previously, he had worn a spare shadow suit to replace the one that had been left mostly tattered by the events at the necropolis Neekra had chosen as her base. Now he was clad in folded-over leather boots, belted just below his knees, and, except for the white, simple shirt he wore beneath his vest, he was clad all in black. His hair seemed longer. He felt for his Sin Eater, but it was nowhere to be found, nor was his hydraulic forearm holster. He took inventory of his face, and he became aware of bruises that hadn’t been there moments ago. His wrists were bound together by iron manacles, and the weight of chains pulled hard on his shoulders.

He tried to activate his Commtact, but neither the plate nor the implanted pintles were present. All he had was whiskers there.

He glanced to one side and saw several well-dressed Africans and Arabs, some of them possessing familiar arms. He recognized the fine Spanish steel sword, complete with its simple basket handle, and his belt dangling from the shoulder of a tall, burly African. His pistols were stuffed into sash-belts of others.

And an old Arab man held the shaft of Nehushtan. Kane realized that the man was speaking to him.

“...and Suleiman, he who you were named for, Kahani, chased the demons from his lands into Africa,” the old man told him.

“Enough, you superstitious old lout!” the finest dressed of the Africans, the one who now owned Kahani’s sword, snapped. It didn’t take a genius to figure that the black man earned his clothing and sense of authority from one of the foulest sins of mankind: slavery. Kane did not know if the slave master put his own tribesmen into chains, sending them around the world to toil away until death, or whether he profited from war and conquest, sending the surviving warriors of other nations to buckle under to the white man.

Something about the swagger of the African slave master set Kane’s teeth on edge. Maybe the bastard didn’t give a damn who he imprisoned and condemned to lifelong servitude. As long as the gold that crossed his palm was good, as long as it paid for the rings in his ears and on his fingers and adorned his back and head with the finest silk shirts and turbans, perhaps the slave master would throw anyone in chains.

The Arab who spoke of the legends of Nehushtan, the rod of biblical King Solomon, cringed at the bark in the slave master’s voice and could not meet his gaze.

Others were in the caravan, and they appeared all too similar to the procession of Zambian prisoners whom he, Grant and Brigid had rescued from another group of African human predators. Kane could feel his ancestors’ ire at his own impatience.

The bruises were the only result of his assault on the slavers. Although his sword and pistols had accounted for some of the security force, it had not been enough, not this time. He could still feel the vibrations rolling up his forearms where he’d brought down the knurled butt of a pistol, breaking a shoulder or crushing a jaw. His other hand had swept and sliced, but an injured African slaver trapped the blade against the side of his body, wrenching it from Solomon Kane’s desperate fingers.

The weight of the slavers was too much for even the fanatic’s strength that drove the Puritan to protect and liberate his fellow man, no matter the skin color.

The leader of the caravan had demanded Solomon Kane be taken captive, alive. His reputation preceded him, and the African slave master knew that there were many who would pay exorbitant prices, either to slay him, or to take him as a captive. For now, Kane was trapped in the skin of a defeated warrior, about to be sold for a king’s ransom as enemies would undoubtedly assemble, seeking his hide, tattered or intact.

“Great place to wake up,” Kane muttered to himself.

“Kahani?” the old Arab asked.

Kane narrowed his eyes. Nehushtan had gone through yet another change. Now it was a cat-headed obscenity, almost as if the original face upon the top of the staff had been erased with chisel and sandpaper. No matter the new appearance; the “cat-head” was merely redesigned, but the blasphemy beneath still remained.

It was an unusual aspect, Kane noted, for a many-storied scepter wielded by prophets who were the chosen emissaries of God. Nehushtan, as far as Brigid related, was a holy relic. But in this form, the “juju stick” had an air of dark magic.

“You are to carry this juju staff with you, brother Kane,” came half-remembered words from a witch doctor.

N’Longa, the seer of his tribe, had fought alongside Kane’s Puritan ancestor, just as Nathan Longa, his descendant seven hundred years from now, battled shoulder to shoulder with him, against Neekra, against the Panthers of Mashona, against the inhuman Kongamato and vampire-like blobs and reanimated corpses. After their first battle, side by side, N’Longa handed over the cat-headed staff as a walking stick to guide the Puritan on his journeys for the rest of his days.

The staff returned to N’Longa and remained under his family’s protection since or at least long enough for Nathan to recall it being in his family’s possession for generations.

“Kahani?” the Arab asked, interrupting Kane’s thoughts.

“Why are you so concerned for me?” Kane asked him.

The old Arab looked back to Nehushtan. “This is an amazing piece of history. This stick came from the age of Atlantis. It was entrusted to you, Kahani.”

Kane was getting tired of being in chains, even though he’d been here for what felt like only minutes. Then he realized that it wasn’t boredom but actual physical toil upon the body he was remembering. This empathy swept over him, causing him a transfer of nausea and exhaustion to strike him even harder.

And suddenly, he was fallen back, watching as a helpless observer as the caravan came upon a small stone structure in the jungle. The Puritan watched as the greedy slave master ordered his men to hack at the stone doors, calling for the treasure hidden within the crypt.

He recognized the tomb top, the alien writings carved into the jamb around the slablike doors. Kane could not read the glyphs, but their shape was unmistakable. They were the letters of the Annunaki, and each of them had an eerie glint reflecting in the moonlight. Kane realized that the blue-white tint was not the echo of a full moon, for the sky above was starless.

Something in those runes held their own unholy power.

Solomon Kane’s voice, sounding much like his own, barked a warning, telling the slaver to turn back, to flee this dark place.

The old Arab’s eyes were wide with horror, also realizing that the cuneiform scrawls portended far greater evil than he could comprehend. He turned toward the captive Puritan, fumbling with keys for his manacles, even as hammers bashed at the slab of granite covering the door.

“What are you doing, you old fool?” the African caravan leader asked. In moments, the Spanish steel sword was out, piercing the old man’s back, its point prickling the front of his tunic, turning white cloth dark as the poor bastard was run through.