James Axler - Infestation Cubed

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 and took a handful of the meshy sack and tore it off 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.

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Where ere we tread, ’tis haunted, holy ground.

—Lord Byron, acclaimed poet and

founder of Romanticism

World’s full of ghosts. They ain’t real, but they’re

everywhere. Maybe learn from ’em. If we

do, maybe we don’t make their mistakes again.

—Domi, survivor, pragmatist and fighter for a rebuilt future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Cerberus redoubt had repelled the invasion by Ullikummis and his cult, but at great cost. Brigid Baptiste was missing, and Manitius base scientists such as Clem Bryant, Daryl Morganstern and Henny Johnson were dead.

Mohandas Lakesh Singh took another step, his breath coming raggedly in the relentless New Mexican heat. Ahead of him, the feral albino outlander girl Domi scouted, pausing to look back over her shoulder every few moments, concern etched across her porcelain features. The wild woman had already fashioned a head wrap from the scientist’s shirt, tying the sleeves around his forehead, then flipping the tails of the shirt over like a hood. Lakesh felt like something out of Lawrence of Arabia, but he had to admit that the cover kept him from sweating too much, and what moisture he lost was wicked away by the garment.

Domi stopped and crouched low, her ruby-red eyes sweeping the edge of the scruff ahead of them. Back before the nukecaust, engineered by the Annunaki overlords, the ground they covered had been a highway that cut through the desert. Now Lakesh was getting his kicks on the cracked and centuries-worn Route 66. Ironically, thanks to the desertification of “the Mother Road,” it had not been considered a vital target for Soviet nuclear missiles, and long stretches of the old interstate highway were relatively intact and easily traveled.

Lakesh pulled a map from his pocket, feeling the tremors in his hands. Of late he’d been growing increasingly tired, and he realized that the gift of returned youth was being stripped from him by Enlil. As the imperator, Sam, had once cured Lakesh of the effects of two and a half centuries of cryogenic sleep and cybernetic organ transplant. With but a touch, a horde of nanites had descended upon his cellular structure, turning bionic life systems into the matter necessary to reconstruct his slowly aging and failing organs.

What Enlil had bestowed, he could take away, and Lakesh hadn’t noticed that until he physically passed the age of fifty a while back. Now his knees popped and crackled with each step, and his back couldn’t stand the burden of even a small backpack. The subtle shake of his fingers as he fumbled to unfold the map was an indication that everything was failing him. His genetic code had been laden with a deadly little bomb. Whereas Lakesh had previously been able to maintain control of his body, even at his advanced age of 275 years, two hundred of which had been negated by suspended animation and cloned organs, Lakesh knew that this time, as his body continued to collapse at Enlil’s will, his brilliant mind would be quick to go.