James Axler - Oblivion Stone

Behind them, four more lumbering zombies were making their way through the corridor while their living colleagues strode warily beside them, daggers ready.

Kane engaged his Commtact once again, informing Grant of their location, but his only response was dead air.

WATCHING THROUGH the rifle scope from his hiding place amid the dense undergrowth of the marsh, Grant saw the sunlight flash off a sword blade. A moment later, Kane appeared in the shadowy doorway to the low shack. Grant breathed a sigh of relief in seeing Kane still alive, but he didn’t relax for a moment. Instead, his finger rested against the trigger of the sniper rifle, waiting to take out any hostiles.

As soon as Kane had stepped from the building and out onto the raised wooden platform that surrounded it, Grant saw the familiar, svelte figure of Brigid Baptiste as she ran through the doorway accompanied by the trader, Ohio Blue. Even held in place by her dark snap-brim hat, Brigid’s fiery red hair was instantly recognizable.

Three for three, Grant realized with relief, a brief smile crossing his lips. The smile disappeared a moment later when he saw a lumbering form come striding through the doorway. Kane spun to face the figure, the sword held high in a two-handed grip.

Kane shouted something to his colleagues, and the words echoed back to Grant amid the chirruping background chorus of the swamp: “Get back!”

That confirmed it. Grant leaned into the SSG-550 and waited for the gaunt form of Kane’s attacker to be framed in the crosshairs. Behind the strange, pale figure, Grant could see more figures emerging from the shadows of the doorway. In an instant, he stroked the sniper rifle’s trigger and the lead figure’s head exploded in a shower of bone and pus.

Grant ignored it, shifting the rifle infinitesimally as he centered the next of the attackers in the scope’s crosshairs.

STANDING ON the wooden veranda, Kane leaped back as the zombie’s head exploded in a splatter of foul-smelling ooze. Glancing over his shoulder, he ran to meet with the next zombie attacker, but even as he moved, the next attacker’s face blew apart in a similar spray of pus and brittle bone.

Kane stood in place, the two-foot-long blade of the ceremonial sword held low to the ground. As the next zombie walked through the doorway and out into the sunlight, Kane heard the crack of the rifle somewhere behind him. Suddenly a messy hole appeared on the zombie’s neck, a great gob of flesh blasting from it and splattering the wall. Another gunshot, and the zombie fell to the ground, a gaping wound where its chest had been just moments before.

Grant, Kane realized with a bitter smile.

“Grant has us covered,” Kane told the others as he turned from the doorway. “Let’s get out of here.”

Brigid and Ohio ran ahead while Grant’s shots rang through the swamp, felling the eerie, undead men as they emerged from the voodoo temple.

Ninety seconds later, Kane, Brigid and Ohio were reunited with Grant in the undergrowth.

“What the hell happened in there?” Grant asked, his right eye still fixed on the view through the sniper scope. Nobody had attempted to leave the shack in almost a minute.

“Bumped into a girl you know,” Kane said obliquely.

“That so?” Grant asked, intrigued.

“Yeah,” Kane spat. “Little misunderstanding.”

“Oh, her.” Grant laughed. “She does like to visit us wherever we go, doesn’t she?”

“However,” Kane continued, “I have another problem—my Commtact’s dead.”

“Mine, too,” Brigid explained. “We think there may have been a jammer in the temple.”

Grant raised the rifle and stood up. “No, it’s affected mine, too,” he explained wearily. “Can’t raise Cerberus and the tracker’s scragged, too.”

“Shit,” Kane growled. Then he turned to Ohio, favoring her with an anxious smile. “Looks like we may have some problems of our own, Ohio. We’ll get you back wherever you need to go, as promised, but we won’t be able to stick around.”

Ohio gave him an up-from-under look through the curtain of her thick blond hair. “Oh, my handsome prince,” she cooed. “You’re always in such a rush. I’m going to start to think you’re only after one thing from me.”

“That would make things a lot less complicated,” Kane growled as he led the way through the swamp toward Grant’s hidden airboat.

From there it would take them almost an hour to reach the hidden redoubt that contained the mat-trans they had used to travel here. For the entire journey, Kane, Grant and Brigid took turns trying to raise Cerberus through the Commtacts, but they received no response.

“The Hindus believe that everyone should bathe in the Ganges at least once in their lives,” Clem Bryant explained, a mischievous twinkle in his clear blue eyes. He was a tall man in his late thirties, with a trimmed goatee and dark hair swept back from a high forehead.

Bryant’s companion, Mariah Falk, looked at him dubiously. “You want me to—” she air quoted “—‘bathe’ in that?” A slender woman in her midforties, Mariah had short brown hair streaked with gray. While not conventionally pretty, she had an infectious smile and an inherent inquisitiveness that made her a delight to be with.

Both Bryant and Falk were Cerberus personnel. He was an oceanographer turned chef, while she was an expert geologist. Like many of the Cerberus personnel, the pair shared an unusual bond—as government employees, they had been cryogenically frozen at the end of the twentieth century and placed in the Manitius Moon Base, where they were protected from the subsequent nuclear holocaust that ravaged the Earth. They had been awoken two hundred years later, and found themselves in a world blighted by the horrors that had superseded civilization in the United States of America in the wake of the nukecaust.

“I’ve done it,” Clem told her as they stood at the head of eight wide stone steps leading down to the flowing, muddy waters of the mighty Ganges River in India. The steps were a pale sandy color and there were numerous other people there, locals going about their business, washing their clothes, filling buckets that they rested on yokes across their shoulders, Brahmans washing the soles of their feet. No one seemed to take much notice of the two Westerners who were dressed in the immaculate clothes of the Cerberus redoubt, and whose skin was so much paler, as if they had never seen the sunlight.

Wrinkling her nose, Mariah looked out over the silty wash that swirled past the foot of the steps. “I don’t know, Clem,” she said. “How long ago did you do this?”

“I took a gap year after college,” Clem told her. “Traveled a little. Many Hindus believe that the Ganges is the source of all life. They hold it in the highest respect. They say that Brahma washed the feet of Vishnu here and they believe that it has the power to wash away an individual’s sins.”

“I don’t have any sins,” Mariah said, shaking her head and turning away from the murky water as sunlight twinkled across its surface in dazzling white highlights.

Clem took Mariah’s hand and squeezed it, looking into her bright eyes. “I’m sorry, Mariah,” he said. “Bad choice of destination. Next time you can choose where we go.”

Mariah looked from Clem to the wide river, then back to Clem once more. “You really bathed in it?”

Clem shrugged. “I…paddled,” he admitted evasively.

Mariah let go of the oceanographer’s hand and crouched down, unlacing the dusty white pumps she wore on her feet. “Okay,” she said, “I can do that.”

The sun beat down as, hand in hand, the two Cerberus personnel made their way down eight sand-colored steps to the water’s edge.