Necropolis

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!”

Brigid nodded. “That was who was spoken of. She is real, unfortunately. And we’ve encountered her machinations already.”

“There’s movement,” Nathan said. He clicked on a light, but the beam, despite an intense brightness, could not reach the edge of it.

And still there were movements visible in the gloom beyond, odd flickers of shapes.

Brigid knew that she had the ability to get a closer look at whatever glimmered in the inky blackness. She swiftly tugged her hood up, feeling her long flowing curls bunch against the base of her neck, but it was something that she could endure for the time being. She swiftly adhered the shadow suit’s faceplate on, switching to night vision and image magnification.

Immediately, her stomach twisted with revulsion as she spotted the creatures rising from the depths. They whipped out their hands, which stretched out on pseudopods, not arms. Stretching out, hurled like lariats, the hands snapped shut as they gripped the walls. It was an obscene parody of how she’d seen amoeba attack and devour their prey.

Her photographic memory flashed back to the story Nathan had told of his father, Nelson, and Nelson’s death. The disappearance of the murderer through a hole that no man with a skeleton could fit recalled a similar “stretchiness.”

There were a dozen of the things, and they were moving toward her, Nathan, Thurpa and Lyta as swiftly as they could. Her mouth went dry, but she whipped up the Copperhead and peered through the low-powered scope atop the compact submachine gun. They were quick, but she anticipated the path of one of the beasts and she cut loose with the Copperhead, spitting high-velocity bullets toward it. The rounds slapped into it, and her shadow suit’s optics extended, picking up on the thing seemingly blowing apart in chunks.

She pivoted the gun’s muzzle, aimed at another and fired.

“What?” Thurpa asked.

“Monsters,” Brigid said. She ripped off a burst into the third of the creatures, but even as she did so, she could see the first of her targets reassembling itself. It’d been hurt, yes, but she was firing into gelatin-like bodies that could reassemble themselves.

Thurpa shouldered his rifle and looked through the scope. He let out a grunt of dismay at the image of the newcomers. “Enki help me.”

“They’re bulletproof,” Brigid shouted. “Move!”

Thurpa grimaced and triggered his weapon.

“I said—” Brigid began.

Thurpa glared at her. “That little gun doesn’t have the punch this does. I can at least break them up, stun them.”

Brigid glanced back and saw that the creatures that Thurpa had struck were down. They still showed signs of life, but the heavier rifle that the Nagah expatriate had used on them had left them stunned and confused.

She glanced after Nathan, who was leading Lyta away as quickly as his legs could carry them both. Thankfully for Brigid, they weren’t enhanced by the ancient staff’s power. She could catch up. “We both go, now.”

Thurpa kept shooting. “Aim for their center line. That seems to disturb and stagger them the most! I’ll hold this line as long as I can....”

Brigid grimaced. She took off, realizing that she could not allow Nehushtan to fall into the wrong hands.

Durga and his queen, Neekra, were definitely the wrong hands.

She sent a silent prayer of hope to Thurpa, knowing what he was risking for their sakes.

The big rifle kicked hard against Thurpa’s shoulder, and he knew that each bullet he put into one of the strange creatures coming up the underworld path bought more yards, more seconds for his newfound friends and allies to get away. He didn’t want to think of what horrors would befall him once they got to him, but, dammit, the fallen prince Durga had led him astray, pushed thoughts into his head and brought him to this countryside.

He dumped the spent magazine from his gun, pushed another one home and worked the bolt. Even as he did so, he realized that two of the things had survived his rain of lead. Technically, they’d all survived, but these two had avoided his shots and had not been slowed. They were only thirty feet away, and they showed no sign of slowing down.

Thurpa let out a roar of frustration as he tracked one of the slippery pair of translucent, stretchy foes, firing bullets to chase it down. As he did so, he felt a hand grasp him by the throat. Within moments, he was sailing through the air toward one of the underground horrors. Thurpa tried to scream, but the elongated limb around his throat cut him off. The strength of the creature was such that it pulled him through the air, feet airborne.

Those fingers clutching at his throat were as strong as iron, and he struck the ground behind the pair of gelatinous assailants. Thurpa blinked, struggling to bring his thoughts back into line, to get his limbs to respond to commands.

The two leapers continued on their path, having forgotten the cobra man after they’d unceremoniously dumped him on the ground. He twisted himself, rolling from his back to where he could get his hands and knees beneath him. Even as he did so, a hammer blow struck him between the shoulder blades, and his face was mashed into the ground, dirt digging into his nostrils. He turned his head, exhaling and clearing his airways, but another rubbery paw pressed down on his cheek and neck.

Out of the corner of his eye, Thurpa could see it was one of the horrors. It had fissures through its flesh and cracks on the surface of its skin. It looked vaguely male, but inside bones hung like pieces of fruit in dessert gelatin. His nostrils were assailed with the sickening, ugly stench of copper and salt, a cloying reek of decaying and drying blood.

The creature’s face lowered nearer to Thurpa’s, and it seemed to sniff.

“No,” came the order from another. “She says...no.”

Thurpa felt a moment of relief, but even so, the slimy, clammy grip on his neck and face was steely, rigid, unforgiving.

“Lucky,” Thurpa’s captor growled. “Lucky you.”

Thurpa wanted to say something, but he knew better. These creatures had some intellect, but they were following the orders of another. Someone who wanted living captives.

If the shimmering monstrosity hadn’t been resting its weight on his shoulders, neck and head, he would have been able to move, to shift the creature’s weight atop him, but the thing was either too well balanced on him or it had somehow laid down roots to make any motion on the Nagah’s part impossible. Seeing glimmering pseudopods digging into the dirt before his eyes confirmed his second suspicion, and he realized that he was a prisoner, pinioned and helpless.

He watched as translucent legs raced past, heading into the forest after Brigid Baptiste, Nathan Longa and Lyta.

Thurpa’s stomach churned with regret that he couldn’t protect the young woman.

* * *

GRANT HEARD THE RATTLE of gunfire and grimaced. He was separated from his friends and allies by the rift in the earth. Kane was gone, down through the pit, and while he was concerned for his friend, he knew his partner was wearing his shadow suit and had the devil’s luck when it came to surviving bad situations and the same devil’s cunning when that luck was not enough.

Right now, Grant knew that Brigid and the others were in combat. With what, he couldn’t tell, but everything he observed told him that this was not the work of a simple militia, even one with as much manpower and firepower as the Panthers of Mashona. This was more akin to the work of the Annunaki or the Tuatha de Danaan, ancient technology, and perhaps a subterranean city. He’d encountered many such hidden societies. One was lodged within a bubble in the basalt that separated the surface of the earth from its molten, fiery interior, a true lost world of dinosaurs, cast-off pan-terrestrial humanoids and ancient horrors.

Whether in the depths of space or at the center of the world, there were millions of secrets still strewn about the planet in multiple forms, and most of what they had encountered was deadly and dark.

Grant looked up and down the rift between him and his friends, and he saw that there was a tree, tottering with its gnarled roots showing out over the drop-off. The trunk of the tree was thick enough for him to walk on and long enough to use as a bridge. Running in either direction, looking for a better crossing, would eat up valuable time while his allies fought against the unseen force.

He rushed to the tree and hurled himself at the trunk with all his might. The shadow suit helped protect his shoulder from potential dislocation by the amount of force he’d thrown at it. Dirt broke and cracked, and he listened to the snap of roots.

One blow and he’d loosened an already half-uprooted tree. He immediately wrapped his arms around the trunk and pulled back. The tree rocked toward him, more cracks, more snaps echoing the distant gunfire, reminding him of the countdown he fought against. Grant surged with all his muscle, weight and leverage, and he felt the tree begin to loosen.

Pushing the tree down straight across the chasm wouldn’t do much. All it would do was rip out the tree by its roots, and perhaps send his only bridge toppling into the depths of the rift. Toppling the tree “inland” would take the ungraceful roots and make them into a grapnel, then leave the upper branches and trunk to rest on his side of the improvised bridge.

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