Shadow Born

Chapter 5

Thurpa’s statement that Kane had gone “bye-bye” was hardly a complete diagnosis of the current mental and physical state of the former Cobaltville Magistrate. However, even as Kane watched his right arm rising, the Sin Eater snapped to extension into his palm, a hydraulically launched weapon that turned a simple pointing motion into a death sentence in most cases, he had to agree someone outside of his skull would get the same impression.

He even could hear Grant’s grumbling over the Commtact as Thurpa lunged, pushing Kane’s hand up and away from his two friends, the youth pitting his personal strength against the possessed Magistrate.

Kane could feel the struggle but only through a numb, dense filter. His psyche had been partially dislodged from his body, allowing his telepathic opponents to move into his limbs.

Kane had to assume that it was multiple opponents because he could “feel” and “see” two entities, though it could have been just his mind trying to make sense of what was going on. Tendrils wound around him, snakelike tentacles of darkness seizing his limbs, squeezing his chest. Even as he was grasped by the alien thoughts, he was reminded of the quicksilver monstrosity that had been the living navigation chair that he, Brigid and Grant hunted down in the swamps of Louisiana. The horror took that form, and now he could understand the horror that Brigid had been subjected to as he twisted, pulled, fought to escape the sticky, clutching tendrils.

“Get out of my head, you bitch!” Kane growled as he pulled against the forces assailing him. The other “entity”—a shadowy form zooming between Kane’s view of the world and his embattled mind—looked over its shoulder at the ongoing struggle.

“Your friends are going to die,” came a voice no human on Earth ever had. It was deep, rumbling, all pervasive. It might have been male, but it had an odd, sexless quality. The vibrations of those words burrowed deep into Kane, like termites chewing through the heart of a tree, and threatened to sap his strength.

Kane’s immediate reaction was to rage further, writhing and tugging himself from the smothering grasp of his opponent.

“You’re going to shoot them,” the shadow before him taunted. Kane’s right arm tore free from the engulfing mass of darkness, and he reached out, fingertips brushing the icy flesh of the mocking void.

“I’ll rip you out of my skull first!” Kane bellowed. “I’ll shred you into ribbons!”

Snatching whips of inky blackness slapped around Kane’s wrist and forearm, and he continued to stretch forward, wrestling loose from the grabby opposition.

Something slammed him in the chest, hard as a hammer, and Kane felt the breath explode from his lungs. This was not a psychic attack; this was something in real life, and he squirmed his head, trying to see around the void-thing that stood before his vision. The taunting monster cackled, brilliant white teeth visible behind tenebrous lips, rows of gleaming, almost luminous fangs, serrated triangles in layers. Kane kicked, driving himself out of the slithering tentacles grasping at him.

“I will end you!” Kane roared.

And the bubble of his perceptions popped.

He was back in the bed of the pickup truck, Thurpa kneeling astride his chest, fighting to keep Kane’s wrists pinned to the metal so that he didn’t fire the Sin Eater inadvertently “Kane! Wake up!”

“I’m up now,” Kane grumbled. “How long have you been wrestling me?”

“Twenty seconds,” Thurpa returned. “We’ve got a dozen Kongs swooping after us.”

Kane glanced around. He could see Lyta and Nathan firing their guns into the sky, the powerful arms of the winged horrors allowing them to swoop, flip and soar, dodging the lead thrown their way, even as the pickup truck twisted and turned on the rocky ground.

Kane rose to one knee, foot braced so that he could pivot against the wall of the pickup bed. He did a quick examination of the Sin Eater, but aside from the magazine needing replacement, it was ready to go. Thurpa had managed to render the gun a single-shot weapon, and Kane could see where the single bullet punched through metal, avoiding Nathan. Kane had to admire the young man’s courage and forethought.

“Our one saving grace is that they are reluctant to go through the clouds of smoke. Their sense of smell must be as acute as their hearing,” Brigid stated. “Use your forearm display panels to turn on the ultrasonic sensors for your hood.”

Kane glanced away from the sky, brushing his shadow suit’s sleeve. He grimaced and realized that he was not going to have the time or dexterity to do so, not when the Kongamato were in full-on assault mode. He did, however, keep his eyes peeled, covering the others. He switched to his rifle, scanning the thick smoke, spotting the things as they barely showed up through the hot clouds of volcanic ejecta.

No wonder Brigid said for them to turn on their ultrasonic sensors. The Kongamato had been operating with their bat-like sonar, putting out “pings” of intense noise, inaudible to human ears, which would bounce off of a solid object. In the spouts of steam and hot sulfur, they were actually cooler and harder to see, disappearing behind bright splotches of reds, yellows and oranges.

“Cover me,” Kane said to his partners in the back. He turned to Grant. “We’re going to need a steadier platform.”

“As soon as I find an inch of ground that isn’t slick as ice or threatening to come apart,” Grant answered. “Tremor!”

The pickup’s brakes screeched and Kane grabbed the edge of the truck’s railing. Gravity didn’t seem to quite work anymore, and he realized that the vehicle was spinning out. Kane held on with all of his strength and he glanced back to see Thurpa hanging on for dear life, Lyta clutching at him to keep him from tumbling loose.

“I said steadier!” Kane snapped.

A cone of sonic illumination blazed around them, and Kane grimaced, realizing that the Kongamato were aware of the sudden distress of the truck. It would be on them in a moment, and the only thing that Kane could do was stiff-arm the rifle, holding it straight out. The truck spun, but he did his best to keep the muzzle pointed toward the end of the noise wedge. He pulled the trigger, spraying bullets out of the rifle. The effort to hold the weapon under control was incredible, his biceps and forearm muscles straining, struggling with the bucking and kicking of the gun.

He didn’t know if he could hit anything, but he was suddenly rewarded as a thick, powerful form erupted from the cloud, blood spraying from a dozen wounds. The rifle was empty, so Kane twisted it around and tucked it under one leg. He flexed his arm, and the hydraulic holster spit the Sin Eater into his hand.

Kane could aim and fire the sidearm as certainly as he could point his finger, and the slugs it spit were powerful, the gun specially designed around high-energy charges and heavyweight bullets capable of punching through even a Deathbird’s cockpit glass.

The machine pistol had proved its worth in blowing big holes in the deadly Kongamato mutants before, and as another of the things swooped down, casting a sonic spotlight ahead of it that easily sliced through the smoke, Kane fired again. Kane hit it in its long snout, the Sin Eater slug shattering a hole in its upper mandible. The impact might not have been damaging, but the equivalent of being struck in the mouth with a sledgehammer sent the Kongamato whirling out of control.

The truck finally found its traction, and Kane could see that Thurpa was back in the bed, Lyta handing over a small submachine gun from their gathered arsenal. The young man’s rifle must have toppled overboard.

It didn’t matter because the Panthers of Mashona had provided a huge stash of weaponry for the Cerberus expedition to rely on, as well as spare ammunition, magazines and other sundry supplies. If it hadn’t been for the necessity of the shadow suits, the rendezvous with Domi at a parallax point wouldn’t have happened.

Kane glanced over his shoulder, seeing Grant’s huge shoulders heaving as he cranked the steering wheel, navigating the treacherous ground.

“Just how much farther do we have to go?” Kane asked as Thurpa and Nathan cut loose in unison, spraying another of the winged monstrosities.

“We’ve gone a mile and a half,” Brigid stated, interrupting her updates to Grant on their current location. “We’ve still got three miles to cross.”

“Miles to go before we burn,” Kane grumbled. He whipped the Sin Eater about and aimed down the throat of another Kongamato swooping through the clouds. Kane pumped a trio of rounds into it, and this one smashed into the rock behind them, wings tangling and ripping as it rolled from momentum. It reached a crack in the stone that Grant had just swerved around, and on striking that bit, immediately burst into flame.

The lava had incinerated the corpse of the cloned monster, the heat so intense that it ignited the fatty tissues within the creature’s cartwheeling corpse. Any fluids burst into steam, vaporizing and leaving behind a small landslide of glowing embers and bouncing chunks of ash.

“And that, boys and girls, is why we leave our hands inside the vehicle at all times!” Nathan shouted.

Kane chuckled as he scanned for anything else in the air about them. Three of their own getting shot up, at least two of them down, had forced the aerial marauders to pull back.

“They’re retreating,” Kane announced.

“Just for now,” Brigid returned. “They’ve been weathering gunfire for at least a minute, but the sight and sound of one of their own bursting into flames has given them enough pause and us a reprieve.”

“How long?” Kane asked.

“Until we get to the other side, or we crash through a lava tube that isn’t empty,” Brigid returned.

“I’m gettin’ tired of your endless optimism, Brigid,” Grant grumbled. “Keep an eye out. We damn near died twice while we’ve been in this volcanic playground. I don’t want any...”

Kane grunted as he was hurled against the back of the pickup’s cab. Luckily the non-Newtonian polymers of his shadow suit prevented anything more injurious than a bruise from forming on his ribs. Even so, the sudden braking action by Grant had knocked everyone in the bed off balance.

He peered down the hood and saw that there was a quick-flowing river of magma twenty-five feet ahead of them. The heat registered on Kane’s faceplate, both the temperature of the running lava and the ambient temperature of the air. If it hadn’t been for the environmental seals on the suits, they’d be drenched with sweat, rather than the moisture being wicked away to keep their bodies from overheating.

Kane still felt the tingling as he was perspiring. The shadow suits could keep them from sun and heatstroke under normal conditions, but the air was suddenly blistering this close to such a large flow of lava.

“Where now?” Grant asked Brigid.

The woman was turning her head up and down, as if she were looking over a projected map. Kane only wondered if it were a computer projection on the inside of her suit’s faceplate, or if it were simply a construct of her photographic memory. Knowing the efficiency of Brigid’s mind, it was more likely she was doing this from her imagination, which was often more concise than most computer reproductions. She’d been able to navigate to an exact location in a nearly featureless desert using the most low-key of landmarks and star positioning.

“Hang right and go 400 yards, and fast. The ground’s going to be cracking under the pressure of this lava flow,” she ordered Grant.

Like the well-oiled machine that the two people had made themselves into, Grant swerved and hit the gas, changing into a higher gear to get more speed.

Once more, sonic beacon bursts flashed in the sky above them. The Kongamato were still about, but they were keeping their distance. Something was up, and Kane swept the terrain about them. The tremors that shook the ground had their own sound signatures, and the substrate beneath the pickup was pulsing and throbbing.

Seismic activity was visible in the same manner that the sonar bursts showed up on their faceplate displays.

“That’s why they gained altitude!” Kane spoke up. “They heard the beginnings of a quake or something.”

Brigid looked through the windshield and frowned. “Bry, what can you see?”

“Things aren’t looking good,” Donald Bry answered from the Cerberus redoubt, where he had access to satellite imagery.

“Earthquake?” Kane heard Brigid ask. He kept his eyes flitting between the Kongamato above the clouds and the heaving ground beneath them.

“Something is acting on the stretch you’re crossing,” Bry explained. “That’s not a natural seismic plain.”

“I believe I’ve noticed,” Brigid said. “What had been a simple barrier between us and the final destination of Durga is expanding, turning into a moat.”

“Moat?” Kane asked.

“Something’s working on the already cracked substrata here and is isolating the tomb,” Brigid said. “The pattern is too regular to be random. The bedrock must already have been scored for such a contingency.”

“How big a ring?” Grant asked.

“We’re looking at a ten-mile inner perimeter,” Brigid said. “The caldera itself is twenty miles at its widest.”

“We’re atop a volcano now?” Kane inquired, an edge of nervousness seeping into the question.

“An artificial one. Yes,” Bry answered. “My God, the Annunaki have some incredible capabilities...”

“Of course they’d put the tomb in the middle of a caldera,” Brigid mused. “They’d need something utterly inhospitable and something that could assuredly destroy whatever was imprisoned.”

“And anyone fool enough to come after it,” Grant agreed. “How bad will it be if the volcano erupts while we’re in here?”

“We’ll survive here in Cerberus,” Bry said. “And you won’t feel any pain.”

That made Kane’s skin tingle. “How bad will the destruction be? How far will it reach?”

“It’ll cause another skydark,” Bry said. “The planet will be thrown into a new ice age. Actual destruction from the pyroclastic clouds will scour the entire continent you’re on.”

Grant swerved and drove, Brigid continuing to point out where he had to move. The zigs and zags came sharper, swifter. The whole ground beneath them was becoming fluid, if not melted by the incendiary temperatures of the lava, then by the enormous seismic pressures being put on the ground.

“What’s our plan now?” Kane asked. “Because things are changing so fast...”

“I’m plotting our course, but it doesn’t look good,” Brigid returned.

Grant jolted the pickup to a halt, but the rear fishtailed until they were facing a surging slab of stone being lifted up by seismic forces beneath it. It was becoming a perfect ramp. “Brigid...is it good?”

The woman glanced to him, a moment’s hesitation, but the answer was on her lips in a heartbeat. “Safe landing beyond. Get to eighty-five miles an hour!”

Grant clutched the wheel, using it as leverage to stand on the gas, shifting up through gears as the motor revved higher and higher. Kane wondered if Grant could get the speed that Brigid suggested in the brief strip of ground before they hit it. The ramplike slab was still teetering, its slope increasing steadily thanks to the swell of forces beneath the surface. At that speed and angle, Kane couldn’t imagine how far they’d fly and what they would hit if Brigid were wrong.

He grit his teeth, praying that the rising altitude of the ramp somehow figured into Brigid’s mental calculations. If not...

Then the time for worry ended; the truck was airborne. Tons of metal ramped off the slab of shifting stone, and they were rendered, temporarily, weightless.

Kane’s tight grip on the side of the truck had his knuckles feeling as if they were about to burst. Kane never enjoyed when a ground vehicle decided to take wing, and he liked the situation even less now that they were soaring over an ever-widening crack of lava. The heat from below was a blast furnace, and under his insulating shadow suit, his skin prickled from the heat that seeped through the environmental seals. Sweat droplets stung his eyes immediately, and he was already swimming inside the skintight uniform.

Then the pickup truck rocked. It couldn’t have been because of a pothole because they were sixty feet in the air, according to the sudden flash of altimeter readings popped up in the shadow suit’s faceplate display. The closest ground was too far away anyhow, as the flare of heat and light from the lava was still gleaming, illuminating the smoke that their vehicle sliced through. If they actually struck a spurt of lava, the superheated rock would be more like a knife slashing through the undercarriage of the pickup.

And when that happened, it was likely that any fuel in the system would instantly ignite from the proximity of the lava’s heat. The deaths of the six people in the pickup truck would be relatively painless as the gasoline vaporized.

A rock, hurled by an explosive release of steam?

Then Kane noticed the motion of a wing on one side of the truck.

His eyes widened even further as he heard what Brigid said next.

“Good...they did catch us! Just as I’d hoped!”

The Cerberus expedition was now held in the talons of the Kongamato mutants, and they were rising farther and farther above the volcanic plain below.

One slip, and even their shadow suits wouldn’t protect them from the impact with the ground.

Chapter 6

Hours before Brigid Baptiste even contemplated the course across the surging lava field, Neekra opened her eyes for the first time.

Neekra felt drunk, unsteady and the very effort of lifting her own eyelids required consummate concentration and will. Her body felt as if it were only half alive. Then she realized the utter silence, the complete darkness of a world she had been in touch with for two thousand years, was a smothering curtain over her. She fought to part her lips, but they were sticky against each other, the very act of breathing draining strength from what little spark of life she retained within herself.

The “dark” world, that horrible void of silence and nothingness, only seemed to make the small sliver of her senses that still worked seem so much brighter. She could make out the dull vibrations, seemingly gibberish at first, but then she began to associate each grunt and spit with language. And it was not the high tongue of the Annunaki. The sun was just rising in what she presumed was the east, and though the vulgar splash of all colors would seem bright to human eyes, Neekra wept for those frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum no longer open to her.

“Why are you crying?” came the guttural tongue of humans and other apes. She swiveled her eyes and gazed upon Durga, who crouched beside her.

“What...did...you do?” she managed to croak out in that mutt language. “Why...”

Durga tilted his head. She thought of him as human despite the cobra hood, a sheet of scaled muscle from the sides of his head to his shoulders, and despite the snake scales that armored his fit, trim body. He was one of “Uncle” Enki’s silly spawn, the Nagah, long surpassed in favor of the hairless apes from which Enki spawned the cobra men.

Enlil had at least told his children, Neekra among them, that Enki had forsaken the cobra men, leaving them as freaks in a world no longer their own. The Nagah were hidden underground for the very reason that they were inhuman. People outside of India feared cobras, rather than respected them as on the subcontinent. Imprisoned in their own tomb beneath the surface of the Earth, they maintained their exile from humanity, even past the collapse of mankind’s civilization.

Although that wasn’t quite true.

Durga’s people had increased in population as others entered the stability of the underground empire. Many chose to remain human; others opted to evolve themselves in the legendary “cobra baths.”

Their corner of India, up until Durga’s attempted coup, had become a relative paradise. Unfortunately, a war between the Millennium Consortium, Cerberus redoubt, Enlil and Durga’s personal guard had left the city of Garuda heavily damaged and thousands dead. It was still recovering.

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