Infestation Cubed
Though her head was held still by the leverage of her own hair, Suwanee could see the others around her, some obscured by the trunks of the pines, but most of them in a position like hers, cowed to their knees. She took a breath to release another scream, but fingers wrapped around her throat.
The snarl of her hair eased, and the man raised a finger to his shadowed lips, a universal signal for silence. Suwanee swallowed, wishing she could make out the features of the man holding her just tightly enough to keep her still, giving her windpipe plenty of room to suck down air.
“Please, no,” she whispered.
The shadow-faced man was not the only one of his hooded kind, and they appeared to be all sizes and skin color. Some of the strange marauders seemed to be women, as well, but none of them spoke, communicating only in hand signals at best, in violence at worst. Suwanee and the other refugees of the Appalachia River Basin had heard of these silent travelers, and how their numbers increased. Where they had first come as stalkers and thieves, making off with the young, unprotected or unwary, their numbers had increased so that few left their guarded communities without sufficient numbers. Somewhere in the muddy waters just off the shore of the hammock lay Suwanee’s weapon, a crudely made single-action revolver cobbled together from parts and what metal scrap the panhandle gunsmiths could accumulate.
Even if she had the gun, Suwanee wasn’t a combatant. Sure, she could hit a tin can resting on a log, but that wasn’t a person, and it wasn’t moving and trying to capture her. The Seminole refugee’s only saving grace was that these hooded men were not armed with guns and weren’t trying to kill them.
Suwanee didn’t want to think of what would happen if they succeeded in this capture.
The hooded attacker froze, his fingers still clutched around her throat, but he was involuntarily squeezing. Something was upsetting him and drawing his attention away from her.
Craning her head, the young woman saw a canoe moving with remarkable speed toward the shore. She lifted one hand, clawing the air in an effort to summon the people on board. The right thing would have been to warn them, to wave them off, but the trio of people in the scull were paddling with all of their might.
A strange, unnatural keening issued from the cavernous shadows of her captor’s hood, and it pointed an accusing finger at the people in the boat. Suwanee sucked in air as it released the death grip on her throat, and she collapsed onto the wiregrass, vision blurred from those fingers closing off the flow of blood to her brain. Suwanee wanted to scrounge for the knife she kept in her belt, a tool that she’d used to crack open shellfish or to clean fish, but the pain of the would-be strangle left her weakened, both hands clutching at the bruised flesh around her windpipe. All she could do was watch, brown eyes blinking to clear her sight as the scull splashed closer and closer.
She thought of the noise the raider made. Such an inhuman cry, issued from beneath the cowl, was not a good sign, either of the marauders’ intent or their origins. Things had been bad already, and it was likely that they were going to get worse.
A sandy-colored bolt shot from the boat, followed by a tall man who moved nearly as swiftly as the dog. Suwanee was about to utter another croak, warning the tall rescuer, telling him of the incredible strength these hooded fiends possessed. But then she saw the flex of his muscles beneath black skin-conforming fabric and the folded weapon on his right forearm. Dread landed in her gut as she recognized the legendary Magistrate’s weapon, the badge of office each of the grim, faceless lawmen wore. The black bodysuit he wore was unlike the shining, polycarbonate shell armor that the Mags were also famous for, but it was still the same fearsome dark shade of brutal authority as the official Mag armor.
Knives suddenly flashed from sheaths and the ring of naked steel being drawn was resounding. Curved, mirror-polished blades sprang quickly into view and the cowled kidnappers moved swiftly, taking cover behind tree trunks, as if they could anticipate the need to avoid the deadly weaponry the Magistrate carried. Suwanee struggled to roll over onto her stomach, to pull herself to her hands and knees to get away from the two warring factions.
In a battle between the Magistrates and these hooded thugs, Suwanee knew that she and her fellow refugees would only be the losers, no matter who won.
She’d rolled onto her side, still gasping for breath, when her assailant gave her a hard kick in the shoulder, knocking her flat on her back. He pointed a gnarled finger at her, and this time she could see the merciless glint of hatred reflecting on the shadow-faced man’s eyeballs.
Then the gunfire began, and the world above her turned into a maelstrom of violence and terror.
Chapter 5
One thing that Kane had learned long ago was that his instincts were generally reliable. If there was a situation he stumbled upon, it was likely that the winning side tended to be the bad guys, especially when they were picking on women and frail old men. His shoulders wrenched and rippled with the effort of pushing the boat through the murky swamp water, his sharp, cold blue eyes locked on the struggle where he could definitely see that the group of attackers, though unarmed, wore a singular uniform hood that identified them as a cohesive force.
That was another thing the former Magistrate had learned. If a group had a uniform, they tended to be up to no good. He remembered his days when he wore the polycarbonate, bullet-resistant shell and merciless grim helmet as a Mag, and he recalled the things that he was not proud of doing under orders. There was the possibility that these men might not have been in control of themselves, perhaps even blackmailed into attacking others while their loved ones remained back home under threat, and Kane’s instincts buzzed with the possibility. It could have been wishful thinking, or it could have simply been colored by his recent encounter with Ullikummis’s minions and the familiarity he had with the mind control the Annunaki prince exerted over the New Order. He was about to leap from the boat, muscles steel-spring taut, when the scull coasted to within yards of the tiny islet’s shore.
Rosalia’s dog exploded into action first, its four legs and lighter mass giving it the advantage of clearing the still waters in a single bound, but Kane wasn’t far behind, determined not to let inaction be the cause of more lost lives. One of the hooded freaks pointed at him and an odd, strangled squeal, like a train engine skidding off the rails, assaulted his ears. All of the strangers drew sharp knives, as if they were possessed of a single consciousness.
That wasn’t good, nor was it good that each of these knife-wielding men had disappeared behind the trunks of nearby trees. As Kane landed on the shore from his initial leap, he let his knees buckle, reducing the shock of his impact on his body. Momentum kept him plunging forward, and he extended his legs, taking long strides. The Sin Eater was in his hand, launched there by a tensing of his forearm, ready to punch out twenty powerful slugs.
However, it was not going to be that easy. There were innocent bystanders in the mix, the very reason he’d bolted from the scull in the first place. One wrong shot, and a bullet could tear through one of the hooded men and kill a person he’d intended to rescue. Restraint was what he needed, which was part of why he was heading into the midst of the knife-armed killers.
Kane was putting himself at risk, making himself a tasty target for these faceless marauders so that they would ignore the refugees who’d been strewed around. In close, there was also the possibility that Kane could take a prisoner, bring down one with a minimum of violence, so that he could get answers. It was triple damned hard to have a corpse respond to your questions, though in some instances, it wasn’t impossible.
As he closed with the group, he saw Rosalia’s dog veer off and launch itself. While the animal might have been part coyote, it had the heart of a wolf, leaping at a knife-wielding stranger, fangs bared. Kane skidded to a halt, his point man’s instinct alerting him to the sudden swish of a mirrored ribbon of steel arcing through the air toward his face. The deep, sharp edge of the enemy blade came close enough to brush Kane’s semilong hair, a faint tug accompanied by the flutter of snipped locks hanging in front of his eyes. Had Kane not stopped, he’d have easily been blinded as the knife lashed across his eyes, if not killed outright.
Kane whipped his fist up hard, driving the protruded middle knuckle hard against the elbow of the hooded blade man. There was a dull crunch, and nerveless fingers released the handle of the fighting blade. Kane pressed his momentary advantage, lashing the tough frame of his Sin Eater against his opponent’s ribs. Again there was the subdued sound of bones breaking beneath muscle and skin, but this time there was no obvious reaction to his impact.
In the brief instant Kane evaluated the situation, mind locking onto his observations and sorting the data out as fast as any computer. There was little way that a hand could maintain a grip with the dislocation of the elbow joint, the strings of muscles leading through the arm veering wide and losing the tension that operated the fingers. A bone-fracturing blow to the ribs, however, might have produced a hard exhalation, but with the sheets of muscle surrounding the spine and the torso, it wouldn’t be that severe a skeletal trauma.
The man Kane was fighting hadn’t even breathed hard under the hammering force of his Sin Eater’s frame, which meant that something was blocking his nervous system. Someone with a normal working sense of touch would have been bowled over by the kind of searing pain produced by fractured ribs. The hooded man brought his other fist around, swinging for the center of Kane’s face.
A swift block with his forearm deflected the momentum of his enemy’s punch, but Kane was unable to make a countermove against the first man. Others had rushed to get behind him, and they hadn’t lost their knives in the brief first contact. Kane twisted as fast as he could, avoiding the stinging touch of one blade point but feeling the shadow suit blunt the impact of another tip. The shadow suits were capable of providing protection from knives, as well as giving the Cerberus warriors a self-contained environment as they traveled the deserts and arctic wastes of the Earth. But armor-piercing ammo would easily cut through the shadow suits and Kane was glad to note that the relatively blunt blade wielded by his assailant wasn’t keen enough to carve between the high-tech material. As it was, Kane felt himself pushed by the sheer strength of the knife man, literally lifted off his feet. If it hadn’t been for the reactive nature of his armor, Kane could easily see himself nursing his own set of broken ribs. As it was, the Cerberus rebel crashed against the trunk of a nearby pine.
“Just shoot the fuckers!” Rosalia snapped as she lifted her pistol.
Grant was out of the boat himself, as well, having picked up a four-foot length of log and using it as an improvised shield against a group of the hooded assailants and their blood-thirsting knives. The edges chopped sections of bark off the thick log, but Grant retreated one step and used the space to heave the chunk of wood at the trio of blade men.
They couldn’t get out of the way of Grant’s missile and were bowled to the ground in a tangle of limbs in the wiregrass. Another of the hooded raiders lunged into view toward the big man, but then Kane’s attention was back in the battle.
Utilizing his Sin Eater as a club, he lashed the barrel of his machine pistol across the jaw of the man who’d stabbed him with such force. There was too much strength in that man to show mercy, but Kane reminded himself that he’d come here as much to investigate the strangeness of this river basin as to lead Ullikummis’s forces on a merry chase. Steel met flesh-wrapped bone and snapped the mandible with a loud, ugly pop. The blow was enough to send his opponent reeling, and Kane turned his attention to the knife man who’d only barely missed him.
Kane brought up his forearm, wrist striking wrist and altering the path of the hooded attacker’s second stab, pushing the wicked point away from his body. The shadow suit had proved enough against one stabbing, but this time the attacker was instinctively aiming for Kane’s face. The thought of a moment before, that this group acted as one, returned even as Kane brought down the butt of his pistol on the side of the man’s neck. There was the crunch of a dislocating shoulder and collarbone, which could be relied upon to drop most men into a puddle of blinding pain.
This chop of the Sin Eater’s butt was loud and nasty, but it hadn’t even dented the determination of his foe. Sure, the hooded attacker’s arm hung limp and numb, knife lost from the failure of his good hand, but the man brought up his fingers, curled like claws, reaching for Kane’s face—his eyes in particular. Kane drove his knee into his foe’s stomach, but it was like trying to kick a tree trunk. No fetid breath exploded from emptied lungs, and there was no stoop in posture from the folding impact. The only thing that Kane had achieved was that the clawing fingertips raked empty air rather than sink into his sockets.
Gunfire boomed, and Kane knew that Rosalia wasn’t showing the same form of restraint that he was. Grant, however, held his fire, once more following Kane’s lead, trusting instincts that had pulled them through countless conflicts and dangers mostly unharmed.
A hooded man hurtled through the air, landing on Kane’s initial opponent. The two bodies crashed into each other, then tumbled through the knee-high, sharp-bladed grass that struggled for survival amid the long leaf pines. Kane knew that Grant had anticipated the sudden, brutal ambush, and used the only weapon he had on hand, one of the hooded cultists themselves. Would such a flying impact be enough to put one of these freaks down for the count?
Kane wasn’t certain, but he stopped holding back. A swift spike of the toe of his boot snapped the knee of his current foe, taking away his ability to stand. Kane sank his fingers into the man’s forearm and twisted, dislocating his shoulder. He brought up his knee again, and he felt it impact against a squishy mass along the side of the man’s head under the hood. There was a shrill keening, an ear-splitting note that locked the attention of all involved in the sudden melee.
The man Kane had kicked in the head let out a strangled stream of gibberish, fingers clawing at the wiregrass in an effort to pull himself through the sudden wave of agony that had spawned his wild, high-pitched howl. Kane shot a glance toward Grant, the larger man instantly understanding his partner’s intent.
Grant balled one of his mighty fists and sent it crashing against the side of another hood. Once more, the shrill wail filled the air, but one more of the faceless raiders was struggling on his knees, felled by the precise blow.
Rosalia, on the other hand, emptied an entire magazine from her pistol into the chest of her opponent, bullets striking the marauder’s chest, seemingly without effect. Out of frustration, the olive-skinned beauty smacked her attacker in the head with the frame of her weapon. It wasn’t as hard as the concentrated knockout blows that Kane and Grant had utilized, but it was more than enough to cause her foe enough discomfort to toss her onto her back and run through the trees, clutching his head as he fled.
The other knife-wielding, hooded men, even the one whose jaw Kane had broken, scrambled away from the trio. Their flight was sudden, and they speared into the surrounding forest before fading away among the trunks like they were ghosts.
Rosalia looked at Kane and Grant, a question burning behind her eyes, yet her lips were unable to translate it to speech. Finally she gave up her struggle and just blurted, “What the hell?”
“That’s my question, too,” Grant said. “What kept you from shooting the hoodies?”
“We’re already behind the curve without Baptiste to evaluate what we’re running into,” Kane answered. “Damned if I’m not going to get a look at why these freaks are covering their heads.”
“Only the two you and Grant hit in the head stayed behind. Everyone else was in full retreat,” Rosalia said, looking around. “That and the people they were bullying.”
A young, pretty woman, a local American Indian by Kane’s quick assessment, sat up, the bright flash of steel in her hand, anger and rage in her dark eyes.
“We’re not going back to the villes, Mags!” she blurted, pointing her knife at Kane.
One or two of the others, an old man with forearms so slender they looked like bones wrapped in sagging cloth and a chubby woman, also wielded their utility knives as if to ward off the trio.
“The villes are history,” Grant replied, loud enough that he could be heard for hundreds of yards, a booming clarion call that, by all rights, should have defused the situation. But the Indians only looked more confused by the giant’s statement.
“What are you doing here then, Magistrates?” Kane’s new “friend” asked, her knife never wavering from him.
“Saving your fused-out asses,” Kane growled in reply. “I’m Kane, he’s Grant. The baronies collapsed when the freaks in charge…quit.”
Trying to explain the situation to these people would have been difficult enough without bringing in the concept of aliens who had manipulated humankind from the dawn of history through the atmospherescorching apocalypse known as the nukecaust. Though Kane had encountered both pan-and extraterrestrial opponents since his first jolt of rebellion exiled him to the Cerberus redoubt, there were times when even he wondered if he simply hadn’t gone insane when dealing with entities such as the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Dannaan, that everything he had encountered was the delusion of a drooling maniac tied up in some dungeon cell. The simplest explanation would be the best answer for now.
“Heard of you two,” the chubby woman said. She pushed in the lock on her knife, folding the blade away into its handle, then pocketing it in her jeans. “The Mags want their asses as much as they want to stifle us, Sue.”
Kane turned and looked back at the woman she’d addressed. “Sue?”
“Suwanee,” the Indian girl replied with a sneer. “Great, so we know each others’ name. Now get the fuck out of here.”
“That’s no way to treat someone who fought the Hooded Ones,” the walking skeleton interjected. He’d put his knife away, so now it was only Suwanee who kept her blade naked and held with hostile intent.
“Fuck off, Farting Gator,” Suwanee cursed. “Once a Mag, always…”
Kane was tired of seeing yet one more blade leveled at him menacingly. With a slap against the flat of the knife, he knocked the tool from the girl’s fingers, sending it crashing to the matted grass tromped beneath dozens of pairs of feet. Suwanee blinked in surprise at the suddenness of her disarmament, lips parted as her jaw fell slightly.
The Indian girl had a lot of fight in her, apparently, as she lunged to pick up her weapon. Kane grabbed her by the wrist and gave a hard yank, making her stand straight by levering her forearm to make her behave. He hated manhandling a woman, manhandling anyone, like that, but she seemed determined to put up a fight, and while it could have been easy to put a bullet into her or crush her jaw with a punch, he had come to save these people, not inflict more harm on them.
“Behave, idiot,” Kane said with a grimace. “I have a gun. If I wanted you dead, you’d have been cold meat the minute you waved that little piece of shit in my face. And you saw me fighting the hoods. You still have a hand attached to this arm. I’m being patient and nice to you, damn it.”
“Anyone fighting the villes got to be a good guy.” The chubby one spoke up. “I’m Hachi. The one she called Farting Gator…”
The old man chuckled at the reference, interrupting Hachi. “I’m Demothi. Just call me Dem.”
Kane nodded and shook the old man’s hand. As thin as he was, there was strength in his grip and his brown eyes were undimmed by age. “If I remember some of the vocabulary I learned from Sky Dog, that means ‘talks while walking.’ That’s a good idea.”
Demothi smiled. “Sometimes the oldest wisdom is the best. Gather your things and let’s roll.”
“What about the boat?” Rosalia asked.
“Shouldn’t take much to conceal it,” Grant replied. “I’ll be able to follow you.”
“By the way, her name’s Rosalia,” Kane added to Demothi.
“A pleasure, young lady,” the old man said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Rosalia replied, looking back nervously toward the boat. “I’m thinking you’re making friends a little too fast here, Magistrate Man.”
“I’d agree with you.” Suwanee spoke up, glaring at the olive-skinned woman. “But you’re the same as them.”
“Quiet, you two!” Kane bellowed. “We’ve got worse things to worry about than your petty little paranoia.”
“Like what?” Rosalia asked.
Kane pointed to one of the unconscious hooded men. He knelt and tore the man’s cowl back, revealing a dark, meshlike covering that, in the shadow of the hood, would render the upper part of his face above his lips completely invisible. It was a cheap effort that produced an unnerving effect, and Kane himself had experienced a momentary pause as he was dealing with the shadow-faced opponents. Only encounters with equally weird and terrifying opponents had given him the ability to act despite the distracting nature of their appearance.
“That doesn’t look right, even with that cloth over his head,” Demothi said.
Kane reached out, took a handful of the meshy sack and tore it off of the unconscious man. It was soaked through, which was strange as he had fallen on dry ground. But as he tugged, stringy mucus stretched between the fabric and gangrenous gray tumors that ringed his skull, the tumors themselves riddled with wires and circuits. The downed man wasn’t bleeding from his head trauma, but the crushed growths where he’d been struck were oozing translucent yellow pus that seeped into the grass under his head.
“What… Oh, God,” Suwanee began. She clamped her hand over her mouth, trying to fight off the urge to vomit, but failed, staggering to the base of a tree and emptying her stomach in an extended, noisy convulsion.
Rosalia looked at the fallen marauder and the gory mess that sloughed off his scalp. Whatever had grown there was quickly rotting, dead material collapsing into inky blue-green molasses and the wrinkled skin of spoiled apples. She glanced over toward the other unconscious man. “No wonder they cover their heads. What…”
Kane took the unconscious man’s pulse at his wrist, wisely avoiding any contact with the goo coming off his victim’s head. His upper lip curled in a sneer as he looked at Rosalia. “Check the pulse on the other guy.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“This one’s dead. That one might be dead, as well,” Kane mentioned.
“That’s one bit of good news,” Grant told him over the Commtact. “I’m strong, but hauling around unconscious men through a swamp wasn’t in my job description.”
Kane spoke softly, so that only his partner could hear over the mandible-mounted communicator. “You’ll never be my beast of burden?”
Grant snorted. “I see Brigid’s been educating you about the old music, as well.”
Kane sighed, frisking the corpse of the man, feeling for any more of the strange tumors or further signs of electronics implanted in his skin. There was nothing, but then, considering he wore a built-in communications device himself, he could make an educated guess as to the purpose of the wires and circuits embedded in his forehead and ringing his skull. He was just too cautious to want to touch even the disintegrating glop that slid off the dead man’s head. Who knew what it was and how contagious it could be.
There were only two people in the world whom Kane could have counted on to provide some explanation for the oddity in front of him.