James Axler - Terminal White

—From the journal of Citizen 619F.

Chapter 3

A stream of 9 mm bullets zipped across the temple at the wretched stone monster that had emerged from the fire. Kane watched as the bullets trailed from his Sin Eater, while around him two dozen of the faithful who had joined him on this pilgrimage looked horrified at the sudden turn of events. They believed they were there to give of themselves whatever their god required, even if it was their lives. But Kane didn’t believe—he knew better. He knew that this stone monstrosity was nothing more than a trick. The iron content in the blood it was being fed combined with the trigger inside those stone seeds, bringing it to nothing more than a cruel imitation of life. At least that’s what Kane guessed was happening as he squeezed the Sin Eater’s trigger.

Bullets hurtled toward the stone menace. The first bullets struck its rocky, mismatched hide and the creature let loose a surprised shriek, its distended fingers pulling free from two more sacrifices—a dark-skinned woman with a mop of braided hair and one of the robed acolytes who was ministering the proceedings. The stone monster’s fingers rattled back into the hands, the wrists pulling back and the overlong limbs retracting to a more normal length, returning to the stone figure’s shoulders. In their wake, its two victims sagged to the floor, visibly shaking, neither fully awake nor truly asleep.

Kane’s bullets sparked as they struck the creature’s rough hide, sounding like cymbals being clashed together with every rebound. But the monster only turned, fixing Kane with its dark, shadowy glare.

“You recognize me?” Kane challenged the creature as around him pilgrims ducked out of the way of the fight.

The stone creature tilted its head in the semblance of a nod.

“Yeah, I think you do,” Kane snarled. “I’m the guy who killed your daddy.”

The bastard child of a thousand deluded devotees hurtled toward Kane then, charging across the flame-lit temple floor, screaming an unearthly howl from its gaping wound of a mouth.

Kane’s Sin Eater pistol blasted again, a stream of 9 mm titanium-shelled bullets catching in the light of the flames like fireflies in the dusk.

The monster’s composite arms reached out and batted Kane’s bullets aside, like twin landslides waving impossibly through the air, lines of warm blood rippling between each loose stone.

Kane leaped back but he was too late. The creature grabbed him, shooting one of its extending arms toward him and snagging his Sin Eater out of his hand.

How do I get myself into these jams? Kane wondered as that inhuman arm flicked the Sin Eater aside.

But there was no time to think—only to act. As the stone monster hurtled closer, charging for all the world like a runaway steam train, Kane began running at it. The two figures met in a crash of breaking shale amid the firelit chamber, and suddenly Kane was running up the monster’s body, using its rocky crags as steps before driving his booted foot into the abomination’s face.

The monster wavered in place, great chunks of its still-forming body spilling to the floor like so much thrown sand.

All around the temple, the pilgrims were reacting with horror, calling for it to stop, asking who this man was who would dare violate their god. Kane ignored them as he leaped from the stone edifice that walked like a man, ducking and rolling to the slate floor even as the nightmare figure reached for him with one of its extending, pendulous arms. He recognized it—kind of. It was a pale imitation of Ullikummis, a memory only half-remembered, the details blurry, forgotten.

How do you break a thing that’s already broken? Kane wondered as a lashing arm came sailing toward his head in a flurry of stones and blood.

Kane dropped out of the way of that swinging extendable arm, slid on his buttocks across the slate floor to where his blaster had dropped, snatched it up as he rolled.

A half-dozen pilgrims surrounded Kane as he recovered, their outraged faces glaring at him. Two men took the lead and kicked Kane while he lay on the ground, booting him in the sides. Kane groaned as he felt the first foot strike him on the ribs, followed an instant later by a second kick in the gut, forcing him to double over and expel the breath he held.

Kane could not shoot them. They were victims. Stupid, yes, but victims all the same.

Another foot sailed at Kane’s face and he reacted instinctively, left arm snapping up to block it, then grabbing his attacker’s ankle and twisting. The pilgrim shrieked as a sudden stab of pain tore through his ligaments, and then he crashed to the floor beside Kane, grasping in agony at his twisted ankle.

From across the chamber, the hulking form of the stone monstrosity stalked through the flame-lit darkness, seeking out its next victim and the blood it desperately craved.

“Stop!” It was a woman’s voice, loud enough to penetrate the rabble of panic and confusion, and it was accompanied by a brilliant flash of light and clap of thunder.

Everyone in the chamber turned, all except for an elderly man who walked with a stick who was even now having his blood drained from him by the stone thing that had come to life.

Across the chamber, Brigid Baptiste was standing before the statue of her other self, of Brigid Haight. She had stripped off her jacket and the loose shirt she had worn, revealing the tight black bodysuit she wore beneath—the shadow suit. The shadow suits had been discovered in Redoubt Yankee and were so named because they absorbed light, reducing the profile and visibility of the wearer. However, in the flickering light of the temple, the shadow suit’s similarity to the sleek black leathers, which Brigid had worn while possessed by Haight, “wrapping her body in the dead” as she had termed it then, was impossible to miss. With her grim expression and wild halo of red-gold hair, she looked for all the world like the hateful thing she had been before—Ullikummis’s hand in darkness.

“Stop this, all of you,” Brigid shouted, her narrowed eyes scanning across every face in the room.

For a moment there was silence—shocked silence at this vision of the woman whose statue dominated one wall of the temple chamber. Then, the leader of the robed acolytes cried, “The demigoddess has returned!” He dropped to his knees, arms outthrust in praise.

Beside him, two more acolytes fell immediately to their knees, bending low until they touched the floor with their foreheads, muttering confused praises for the glorious return they were blessed to witness. In a few moments, it seemed that everyone in the temple had fallen to their knees to worship Brigid—all except for Kane, who lay sprawled and bloodied on the floor, and the stone monster that loomed over its latest victim.

Still surrounded, Kane peered between the kneeling bodies of his attackers, and his brow furrowed. “Baptiste?” he muttered incredulously. “Don’t tell me this has all got to you.”

“Hear me now and hear me well,” Brigid announced, pitching her voice in a low timbre of command. “This monster—” she pointed to the stone creature that had been brought to life in the flaming pit “—is a false god. He is not the great one. He is nothing but simple puppetry, brought to life to test your faith.”

A stunned buzz burbled through the worshippers, and one pilgrim loudly cried, “We’ve been tricked!”

“Yes, you have been tricked,” Brigid assured the crowd, striding toward them on her booted heels. “I walk among you now because such heresy cannot be allowed to flourish.”

As she passed Kane, Brigid caught his eye and he detected just the slightest wink of one narrowed eye. Relief sang through him, bolstering his tired limbs and aching body.