Infestation Cubed

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.

Chapter 3

There had been two of them, stuck halfway between the snake-faced drones that served the Annunaki overlords and the odd, bigheaded spindles they had grown from. Domi made enough noise to alert the pair, and she continued to stomp until they had nearly gotten into sight. With deft quickness, the feral girl nestled herself in the shell of what used to be an automobile, shadows covering her like a blanket.

These freaks reminded Domi of Quavell in her final, suffering moments, a tormented beast tearing itself out of what used to be a gentle, delicate friend. She remembered the exponentially increasing strength that the hybrid woman had applied to her hand as she held it, lending emotional support to her. She remembered the final promise that she’d made, to protect her baby, the fragile little life for which she fought biology and alien technology to free from the prison of her body before it transformed into a sexless drone.

There was a brief jolt of pain, as Domi recalled when Balam had taken the child, disappearing so that neither the Annunaki nor the Cerberus rebels could claim control of the ninth overlord, which was what the infant had become. Domi had hoped that in the days since the apparent death of the orbiting dragon ship Tiamat, they would have the chance to locate Quavell’s child. Things never went according to plan. One menace had faded from the center stage, and dozens more popped up. Domi had done her best to bury those feelings, but the monsters who reacted to her baiting were just too similar to her dead friend to pass from her thoughts quickly.

“Waiting for more,” Domi whispered to herself, seeking an excuse to deflect her recriminations. So far, despite the long moments she waited, there were no more of the odd, alien hunters stalking in the open. Satisfied that she wasn’t going to be blindsided, she drew her wicked combat knife from its sheath. Just because only two had come to the sound of her footsteps didn’t mean others would ignore the discharge of a firearm.

The two of them would die quietly, and then Lakesh could be taken to shelter in the half-collapsed building they had emerged from. With nearly boneless ease, she slithered out of the derelict car’s window, crawling onto the sand, ruby eyes locked on the monstrosities even through her protective goggles. The rearmost creature would be her first target, and she already envisioned herself clamping a hand over its slit mouth, keeping it quiet as the saw-backed blade tore through the blend of scales and hybrid skin.

The hunters suddenly turned, and Domi’s plans disappeared. They’d spotted something, and out of the corner of her eye she recognized the steel-gray shock of Lakesh’s hair. He’d pulled his hood and cap off to maintain a lower profile as he spied upon the mutated hybrids, and he’d pushed his luck too far. They noticed him, and the swiftness of their response changed the albino’s plans in the blink of an eye.