Infestation Cubed

Domi burst to her feet, tossing the knife from her right hand to her left so that she could reach her Detonics Combat Master. The need for silence had disappeared with the luxury of the hunters’ ignorance of their surroundings, and she brought up the locked and cocked little pistol, thumb snapping down its safety. Her arm was an ivory rod, corded muscles spearing the gun ahead of her as her legs shoved against the sand beneath her. She waited until the thumbnail of a front sight was almost swept toward the head of one of the two half-breeds before she applied force to the trigger. With a thunderous crash, the .45 spit out its deadly message. Her aim was off—she had meant to core the skull of her first target, but the fat bullet merely ripped a crease in the side of the beast’s head, missing a dead-on hit to bone and causing the slug to only split skin with a glancing impact.

The blast had done its job in protecting Lakesh, however, despite her miss. The two creatures skidded to a halt. The one that was clipped curled into a ball and rolled toward the cover of a chunk of masonry. The other spun on its heel, letting loose a strange keening wail as it wound back and sent its improvised pipe-ax whirling toward Domi. The albino girl jerked her head out of the path of the cartwheeling scythe. Its crudely sharpened tip ripped a long furrow through the side of her hood, cloth flapping away from the side of her face.

Had it not been for her catlike reflexes, Domi knew that she’d have suffered at least a shattered cheekbone, and perhaps worse given the strength of the hunter’s throw. She adjusted her aim, only a few degrees of movement as she continued her charge to meet the enemy, and pulled the trigger again. At this range, there was no finesse with the shot. She was going for center of mass, the mutant’s broad chest making a relatively easy target to hit. With a squeeze, she pumped the second round in her Detonics, and the half-breed stopped in his tracks, eyes flinching and squeezed shut in pain.

Domi had no illusions about the debate about the stopping power of handgun bullets. The end of a fight was the end of a fight, and she wasn’t about to turn her attention from an opponent until it was down and not struggling to kill her. With a kick, she launched herself through the air, whipping her knife around in a savage arc. The monstrous mutant lifted one of its brawny arms, blocking the swing of her knife, keeping its razor edge from its throat.

One shot to the chest, and the thing still had the speed to block her neck slice, but luckily, Domi intended to bring down the six-foot reptilian with more than just a bullet and a blade. Even with the knife blocked, she slammed both of her knees into its chest, bowling it backward with her weight and momentum. She knew that she wasn’t big enough to win a fight with the half-breed with just her brawn and muscle, but her deadliness came from far more than even the remarkable strength of her steel-cable muscles.

The creature let out a roar as it fell, and its chest seemed to sag a little under one knee as they sailed toward the ground. She’d managed to nail the ribs that her .45 bullet had gone through, and with her mass focused behind the joint, she’d caused the mutant even more damage. Broken ribs parted as they both hit the ground, shards of bone making its chest sag as she landed on top. The teardrop-eyed predator’s face was a mask of pain and fury, and though one arm wasn’t working thanks to skeletal trauma, it whipped its fist toward her face.

Domi’s sun goggles went flying as she barely had a chance to roll with the punch, cheek and forehead grated by scaly knuckles that left her porcelain skin red and raw. The bright sun intruded, searing her eyes and distracting her for a moment. That gave the enemy a chance to shove her off and roll away from her. Domi tumbled and got her legs beneath her, springing to her feet in an instant. The half-breed was on its knees, one gnarl-fingered hand pulling a second of the bent pipe-axes from its belt, ready to continue this battle on more even footing.

Domi snapped the .45 up and fired again, this time her aim striking dead center, her bullet tearing through the left side of its chest. She was going where she assumed the heart was, and from her battles with the Nephilim, she knew that they had the same vitals in the same spots as most other humanoids. Whatever she hit, the bullet’s impact jerked it back and into the ground, weapon tumbling from nerveless fingers. She lunged forward, stooping to make sure the thing was dead with her knife.

Domi didn’t want to waste any more bullets, in case the second hunter was still in the mood to battle or her gunfire attracted more unwanted visitors. Even as the mutant’s lips peeled back in a snarl, talon-tipped fingers rising to grab her throat, the albino girl speared her knife through one of its black, teardrop-shaped eyes, plunging six inches of steel into its brain.

One down, and the other had disappeared from sight, which meant some of these creatures had a glass jaw, or the wounded hunter had enough brains to launch an attack from stealth. Domi wasn’t going to wait around passively to determine what was going on. She locked her attention on the direction she’d last seen her opponent disappear to, and stepped back toward Lakesh.

“Domi!” the scientist snapped in warning.

Lakesh had spotted the movement just before the feral outlander could, but his cry served to focus her attention on it just a shade quicker. It exploded from behind a ramp formed by a collapsed wall, leaping with an ax in each hand. Its face was untouched, but bent in vengeful fury.

Domi pulled the trigger, but even as she did, she knew her first shot missed the fast-moving, high-jumping attacker. The round went low, and it had gone high, but the hunter wasn’t the only one wielding a weapon in each hand. She shoved the point of her knife skyward, twisting to minimize her profile.

Physics was not in Domi’s favor. She was a shade under five feet in height, and no matter how tightly packed her muscles were wrapped in her strong limbs, she was still only half the weight of her opponent, who was not only airborne but tackling her with a sharpened, improvised hatchet in each scale-knuckled grip. She’d managed to slip past the mutant’s flying ax swings, but the bulk of the pouncing hunter drove her into the ground, bowling her easily off her feet as both of them crashed to the sand.

Domi heard the report of a handgun, but she knew it wasn’t her own. She’d kept her finger off the trigger to not waste ammunition or get it shattered in her enemy’s tackle. It had to be Lakesh, and as they rolled through the sand, she noticed him leap to his feet out of the corner of her eye. She’d have yelled for him to stay back, but she was in combat mode. Her throat was closed off; she couldn’t speak anything more than an animalistic grunt. Blood had splattered along her arm, but it wasn’t the ferocious spurt of a severed artery. Her enemy was twice wounded, and it took everything she had to twist herself out of a bone-snapping bear hug. Scales snagged on the fabric she wore, sharp nails blunted as they clawed for her flesh to hold her still.

Domi raked the razor edge of her knife along those scales, parting the skin, but without leverage all she was doing was making the fight messier. Damp cloth matted to her skin, and a fist crashed down on her shoulder with numbing force. The .45 dropped from limp fingers as the entire arm went dead, but Domi wasn’t out of the fight yet. Though her hand was a clumsy lump of inert flesh for the moment, she managed to swing it up toward the mutant’s face. She’d willed unfeeling fingertips into hooked talons, and the ungainly hand raked across one of her opponent’s eyes.

The half-breed let out a pained gargle, leaning away from Domi and giving her the room she’d needed before. With a twist, she had her knife in an ice-pick grip and she threw all of her weight behind its point as she aimed for the marauder’s lower abdomen. The blade had trouble penetrating between the opponent’s ribs as she couldn’t get her weight behind it, but with only muscle and scaled skin to resist, Domi sunk the knife in, her face sprayed with hot gore signaling the creature’s aorta was opened up. Clublike fists rained on the back of her head and shoulders, but the strength of those blows was lessened by shock and rapid blood loss.

Domi wrenched the knife free, turning a six-inch stab into a wide, yawning gulley through skin, organ and muscle. With the blade loosed from the restraining flesh, she was able to back up, her enemy doing likewise.

The mutant’s retreat wasn’t to regather itself, only to keep coils of intestines from pouring out into the Vegas sands. Lakesh fired his handgun again, and the mortally wounded beast was thrown to the ground.

“Stop shooting!” Domi croaked through her adrenaline-tightened throat.

Lakesh lowered the pistol, his hands trembling.

Domi reached out and shoved the web between her thumb and index finger in the V formed by the hammer and the back of the pistol’s slide. That movement happened just in time to keep the hammer from striking the firing pin as a flinch on Lakesh’s part tripped the trigger. He glared down at the weapon as blood trickled from Domi’s alabaster skin around the metal.

“You’re bleeding,” Lakesh said.

“Let go,” Domi whispered.

He did so, and she was able to cock the hammer back, thumb the weapon on safe, and tuck it into her belt. The damage wasn’t much, a minor U-shaped cut where the pistol’s hammer tried to scissor the skin on its way to make the gun fire. Still, Domi licked away the rivulets of her blood and wrapped a relatively clean cloth around it.

Lakesh looked shell-shocked as he realized that he’d nearly shot Domi out of frightened reflex. She’d stopped a tragedy from happening, but his eyes were wide and unfocused.

“Snap out!” Domi shouted, giving him a slap. “Over there.”

She pointed him at the half-wrecked hotel that the pair had come from. Obviously the noise must have alerted others, so she had to get Lakesh into hiding as he was in no condition to deal with another fight. Domi paused long enough to pick up her pistol and fallen goggles. She wanted to leave as little evidence of their presence as possible. There was nothing she could do about finding the small brass casings in such a hurry, but she doubted any predator could get a scent off the hot metal, unlike the sweat-dampened elastic of her goggles or the grips of her pistol. As satisfied as she could be under the circumstances, she dragged Lakesh along by the hand, leading the way into the shadows of a collapsed building.

THE TWO PEOPLE RUSHED through the triangular entrance of Priscilla’s domain without pause, the small girl pulling the larger man behind her. Once in the shadows, the man seemed lost while the girl’s ruby-red eyes glinted in what little light there was. She was moving deftly and pointing out spots where her companion could trip.

Priscilla may not have had a lot of experience with humans, but she knew it was rare for a person to have such sharp senses or crimson-tinged eyes. Could these two have been others like her, creatures who had been altered in such a way that they were not quite human?

Again temptation tugged at her. She’d been lonely since she’d left Area 51, not that she’d felt camaraderie among the more savage of her kind wallowing in the pits of the abandoned complex. Still, there was something inside of her, a need to communicate. She had language, something more than what the others had, and she could hear the brief whispers of conversation between the two. She could understand them, and somewhere in the fog of memories was the recollection that she had been educated in their language while she floated in the nutrient baths. Priscilla wondered if she was meant to interact with these beings. She could understand snippets, words here and there, at least those that she could hear. They’d probably come under attack by the savage mutants themselves.

She also knew the sound of gunfire, and didn’t doubt that the two humans killed their attackers. Priscilla, looking as disheveled and alien, almost as freakish as her brethren, could easily be seen as one of them, perceived as a threat. The murmurs in the nutrient bath spoke of how humans were enemies, dangerous creatures not only to other races, but also to themselves. The only responsible way to handle them was to cull their numbers when they grew too numerous. The thoughts inserted into her brain by Tiamat were that the hairless apes were to be servants to the Annunaki.

Whichever the situation, two sides had told her that interaction with humanity was dangerous. Humans were an implacable enemy, suitable only for controlling, and even then, only in numbers their masters could handle.

Priscilla grimaced. She’d just have to hang back, stay quiet. If they showed that they weren’t a threat, maybe she could present herself. And if they were…

She’d hidden from the hunter mutants for this long.

If her bestial brethren couldn’t track her, no humans ever could.

Chapter 4

Kane felt lucky that Rosalia had come along when she had. Sure, she had been operating under the aegis of Ullikummis’s New Order, but when the time came for a rebellion, she had aided him. Indeed, she was a gun for hire, and she had a piece of the Annunaki prince of stone inside of her, but she’d proved immune to his psychic influence, able to take him off guard during the battle to expel him.

It wasn’t much, but it had been enough for Kane to figure that Rosalia could be useful. She remained aloof, keeping her distance. Even the part-coyote dog that accompanied her hadn’t been given a name, a sign of her reluctance to draw a close attachment to anyone or anything. In the postapocalyptic Earth, while animals had proved useful, even loyal as they had before the fall of humankind, all lives had the potential to be brief, ending in violence or illness. She rarely referred to Kane by his name, either, but it hadn’t affected the former Magistrate much. The legendary security men of the baronies were known only by their family names, better to sublimate their individuality and remind them that they were only a small part of a much larger picture. While Kane had willingly lived that kind of existence, separated from his parents and raised in the academy, that veil of impersonality had been broken by his friendship and the mentoring of the bronze-skinned giant behind him, Grant. In an uncommon instance of loyalty between two Magistrates, Kane had risked his life to protect the injured older man, forging a bond that gave them the strength and will to resist the tyranny of the hybrid barons who had ruled the villes.

Kane had met another who had close ties to his soul, a bond that transcended romantic and sexual interest, becoming a spiritual connection above all else. Brigid Baptiste had been revealed in a jump dream, and in other realities, to be bonded with him across multiple lifetimes.

It had been Lakesh’s opinion that the timeless loyalty between him, Grant and Baptiste had formed a confluence of probability that could defy nearly any odds. The proof had been in countless battles with beings who could rightfully call themselves gods, beings of immense power who had ruled nations, even worlds, or traveled among universes at their whimsy. Kane worried, not for his own safety, but for Brigid’s. She had been a deciding factor in repelling conquest by all manner of monstrosities with her great intellect and her unwillingness to fail, going from academic to warrior in a few short months, ultimately becoming as skilled and battle-hardened an adventurer as any three men Kane had met.

He was ill at ease because he could sense her. He could feel that she was still alive, still breathing, still there, but she was cut off. There was no contact with her via Commtact, and she had disappeared from Cerberus before the final conflict within the redoubt’s walls.

Rosalia was a good woman, and Kane felt she was a trustworthy ally, right down to the instincts that made up his point man’s instinct, a combination of awareness and perceptive insight that made him seem almost psychic.

Kane almost wished that they’d made a conventional mat-trans jump, rather than employing the interphaser, which was instantaneous and didn’t jar his psyche loose to see beyond the normal flow of events. Perhaps a journey through the mat-trans unit would have freed him up enough to look across the world, to feel for Brigid Baptiste. He’d been able to find her, and other long-lived beings, in the visions brought upon by such jumps. Maybe this time he could have retained his focus and his interest long enough to latch on to his lost friend and ally and be that much closer to bringing her back into the fold.

There was always the dreaded possibility that Ullikummis had taken her prisoner, utilizing her intellect through the power of his mind control, the unrelenting force that had buckled even Kane’s indomitable will during his captivity. Even so, Kane would have been able to see that. He just knew that he could have caught a glimpse as his essence sped through the pinholes of reality, temporarily gaining a vantage point above a normal man’s.

No, he told himself. He had to do this the old-fashioned way. There was no way of telling if Ullikummis hadn’t had the ability to monitor the Totality Concept mat-trans units spread across the globe. Lakesh seemed wary of setting up shop, holing away in another redoubt, as well, preferring to go on the run with the utilization of the interphasers to hop away to a parallax point and literally shut the dimensional door behind them. While the Annunaki had proved to have the capability of making such journeys themselves with artifacts called thresholds, the means of tracing and locating such departures and entries was arcane and difficult.

Kane set his jaw firmly. He traveled on foot, or by boat, and made certain that he was seen and recognized in the sleek, black shadow suit that had become the badge of the Cerberus redoubt rebels. People might not have heard the whispers, but their descriptions of him and Grant would reach the ears of those who knew, and the hunt would be on.

The trouble with this plan was that the fury he’d bring down on himself might be that of the New Order, or it could be another set of foes such as the Millennial Consortium or one of the surviving Annunaki overlords who had been forced to do without the awesome resources of the living dragon ship Tiamat. One of those snake-faced assholes would prove just as deadly as Ullikummis and his followers, and the interference of these self-proclaimed gods across the breadth of human prehistory meant that anywhere in the world could be a hideout, a niche, a hidden tomb that held a treasure trove of extraterrestrial technology simply waiting to unleash itself upon an unsuspecting world.

“Hey! Ground control to Major Tom, come in,” came a harsh whisper, cutting through Kane’s musings as they glided through the still waters of the cypress swamp.

Kane blinked, looking back at Grant, an eyebrow raised quizzically in response to the odd way his friend had drawn his attention.

“It’s an old prenukecaust song I dug out for some meditation music,” Grant said. “Seemed appropriate since you looked like you were off in space, or even farther away.”

“Sorry. What did you want?” Kane asked.

“You just looked like you were in a daze,” Grant explained. “I know you’re worried about Brigid…”

“I’m keeping my eyes and ears peeled. I can brood and keep watch at the same time,” Kane answered with an annoyed grunt.

“I was just going to say we’ll find her. We’ve been split up before, and we’ll be back together before you know it,” Grant said. “And once we do, no pebble-faced chunk of dried shit is going to last long.”

Kane squeezed his eyes shut. “You’re the optimist and I’m the grumpy ass?”

“You said it, not me,” Grant replied. “Licky may have turned us upside down, but shit is still in balance.”

Kane scratched his cheek just below his eye. It felt stiff, and had the annoying sensation of a splinter stuck inside. He had tried to get it out with a needle, but it must have just been an illusion, a deep scar that had settled in and turned into a slender thread of gray. “Keep cheering me up, Grant.”

“Keep bitching,” Grant answered. “If we could get Rosalia or that damn dog to spout useless trivia, things would almost feel normal.”

Kane hadn’t broken his rhythmic rowing of the canoe they were in, despite deep thought or conversation with his friend. He glanced forward and looked at the sandy-furred half-breed dog, its dark eyes meeting his, curiosity reflecting in them.

“Maybe he is making small talk about trivia,” Kane said. “We just don’t understand dog. And don’t forget, Baptiste’s trivia was never useless.”

Grant nodded.

The dog continued to concentrate his gaze on Kane’s troubled features. He knew that he had been described as wolflike before, his musculature sharing the lean, sleek lines of the pack hunter, and his senses equally as keen as any canine. However, if there was any common ground between man and beast, Kane couldn’t make heads or tails from it, except that the dog showed sympathy.

As if on cue with that recognition, the dog lifted its paw and rested it on Kane’s knee, taking on an almost noble bearing before turning its attention off in the distance.

“What is it?” Kane asked.

The dog turned its whole body, its nose acting like an arrow directing Kane’s eyes toward a ribbon of water that moved off the main river they were on, rolling toward the shore of a hardwood hammock. He flattened his oar in the water, providing a braking force for the boat.

Grant made an annoyed groan as his friend worked against his progress, but that died off as he followed Kane’s gaze. “What?”

“Dog must have heard or smelled something,” Kane said.

Rosalia looked over her shoulder, disbelief coloring her gaze. “Like he knows something’s happening? It could be a squirrel.”

Kane squinted, silencing her with a raised finger.

“Magistrate Man, you don’t shut me up like—”

Kane turned and glared at her. “Quiet, damn it.”

Rosalia’s mouth closed, lips pressed together tight until her mouth was a thin, bloodless scar on her face.

Grant knew that Kane’s senses were nearly preternatural, and if he was trying to focus on something that Grant himself couldn’t hear or see, then he would follow the point man’s lead.

The silence folded in around them, weighing in as heavily as the humidity and the stench of mold around them. Kane knew something was wrong as the normal lively sounds of the swamp, the chirp of crickets and the warble of birds, had suddenly fallen away. The quiet lasted only a moment before a scream, faint and weak, but still a woman’s scream, reached his sharp ears. Even as he heard it, he noticed that Rosalia’s dog had perked up even more. It turned its big, dark eyes toward the former Magistrate, as if to say, “You heard that, right?”

“Trouble. Let’s go,” Kane announced, and he and Grant put their backs into it, turning the boat and pushing it down the waterway. The only sound they made was the slap and suck of their oars in the murky swamp water.

SUWANEE’S BLACK MANE of silky hair flew as the open hand cracked across her smooth, dark cheek. She struggled to maintain her balance on the uneven ground between the long leaf pines and tumbled down into the wiregrass. Her face throbbed from the force of the impact, and the Seminole woman had one thought—that she was lucky to have been slapped rather than punched. A closed fist would surely have shattered her facial bones and left her unconscious and helpless.

Suwanee dug her fingers into the wiregrass, using it as handles to pull herself up to her knees, but gnarled fingers reached down, snarling in her thick, ebony hair. She was going to scream again in protest, but a firm yank tugged hard on her scalp, follicles popping out at the roots, but most of it holding on as she was jerked to standing on her knees. She looked toward what would have been her tormentor’s face, but it was cloaked in shadow by the droop of his hood’s cowl. She couldn’t even see the glint of what she imagined were the cruel, merciless eyes of the man who handled her so roughly.