James Axler - Shadow Born

That threat from Neekra, forever lost from his beloved friends, sat freshly in his mind and threatened to drive him to distraction. And then he’d seen, more and more, like the petals peeling from a flowering bud, what the evil entity could do. The latest nightmare, dredged up from the depths of his genetic memory, was simply the icing on a cake of evil. Neekra, separated from her body, had left her “mortal” form as an insane, terrifying force, a beast armed with natural weaponry that it used to rend healthy, fighting men limb from limb.

That body, combined with her intellect and cruelty, would be menace enough across a heavily depopulated, technologically impaired planet. With the addition of Neekra’s ability to produce corpse-reanimating soldiers, the combination was a global scale threat.

Nothing new there, he thought grimly. We’ve been dealing with that since we got out of Cobaltville that first day.

Sooner or later, he realized, their luck was going to run out. Adding to the sudden jolt of harsh realization was that he knew that Neekra was not simply the goal. No. Her body had been left in that tomb as a sentry, one capable of slaughtering almost anyone, human or Annunaki.

Whatever she guarded was something so terrifying that not even Enlil dared leave it unguarded by anything less than a living juggernaut.

“You’ve got us pinpointed?” Kane asked her.

Brigid nodded. “Within a radius of five hundred yards.”

“Pretty good,” Grant said with approval. “We’ll make an adventurer out of you yet.”

Brigid snorted. “The only thing we have to worry about is getting there in time.”

Kane and Grant pored over the map, crowding her a little bit, but she didn’t mind. The three of them had been shoulder to shoulder for years, in much more confining conditions. She ran her finger across the map. “We have two days of travel ahead of us, barring interference or further attack.”

“Two days,” Kane murmured. “No shortcuts?”

Brigid pointed toward one sector of the map. “This was part of my recalculations. This area seems fairly empty, but I had Bry run some cameras over the region.”

“Radioactive?” Kane asked.

“Seismic wasteland,” Brigid replied. “Put on your faceplates and I’ll give you two some visual data.”

Kane and Grant tugged their hoods over their skulls, then affixed their shadow suits’ faceplates. Almost immediately, the same map that had been a mere flat image a moment ago was now a relief sculpture, wrought in first a wire mesh frame following the contours of the broken land, then filling in, showing off rivers of whitish-yellow lava trickling back and forth through the uneven terrain.

“No radioactivity is present, but ever since the earthshakers went off on skydark, they broke the continent,” Brigid said. “You can see this is an accelerated animation of last night. It’s still in dynamic flux.”

Kane looked at the undulations, tilting his head as it allowed him to see around the area. “Can we get a real-time feed?”

“For what?” Brigid asked.

“We could cut our trip time down to half a day,” Kane answered.

“Driving through the streams of molten rock and constantly opening and closing chasms?” Grant asked. “So we have the equal opportunity to be either burnt to a crisp or flattened like rotten fruit?”

Kane nodded.

Grant smirked. “Sounds like fun.”

“We should ask our compatriots if they wish to endanger themselves in that manner,” Brigid offered. “We can arrive for certain...”

“Or we can get there in time to stop my father and his bitch,” a voice cut into the three people’s discussion. They turned and saw Thurpa, standing alongside Nathan and Lyta, forming a strange mirror image to their own group. They were younger, not that Kane, Brigid and Grant were among the elderly by a long shot. However, for the “locals,” they didn’t quite have the half decade of experience that the Cerberus expedition possessed, though Nathan and Lyta both had grown up in the harsh, often unforgiving frontier of the twin city-states straddling their common border of the Zambezi River, and though likely only a year old chronologically, Thurpa had the memories of Durga as a young officer, fighting alongside his father against an expedition sent by the barons into India.

“The three of you weighed in on this?” Brigid inquired.

Thurpa glanced to Nathan to his left, who clapped the young Nagah clone’s shoulder in support. He turned toward Lyta, who laced her fingers with his and squeezed for support. “Yup.”

“I could end up wrecking our truck,” Grant offered. “And then we’d be running on foot through a volcanic wonderland.”

“Better than dying of boredom or getting taken over by a psychotic blob woman,” Nathan countered.

“Too many lives are at stake to take the scenic route,” Lyta added. “Though, I have to admit, the idea of going through a half-molten desert sounds pretty interesting.”

“This isn’t a game,” Kane warned.

Thurpa frowned. “Oh. Like three-hundred-pound mutants and the Panthers of Mashona were only coming over for a game of chess? We get it. This is serious as cancer. Worse, because every living human remaining on the surface of the planet will end up infected.”

“The longer we spend debating the point, the closer Durga gets to his goal,” Grant threw in. “Either we plunge through the fire and the flames, or we do nothing.”

Brigid nodded in agreement.

“Then it’s unanimous,” Kane said.

Thurpa and Nathan turned immediately to begin packing. Lyta nodded to the three members of the Cerberus team, then turned to join her friends.

“And this is the one we were worried that could betray us?” Grant asked.

“I hate being suspicious of him,” Brigid answered, looking as if she’d sucked a lemon dry. “But we’d all be best on our toes around him.”

Kane looked grumpier than usual as he removed his hood and faceplate. She could tell that something was digging at him.

“What’s wrong?” Brigid asked.

“I just hope we’re not damning them like we did Garuda,” Kane said.

“We’re making up for that,” Grant told him.

Kane thought about the city of the Nagah. Even Durga’s attempt to usurp the family tree of the new queen and her consort, Hannah and Manticor, had been a misfire.

The three Cerberus warriors set about loading up the pickup truck. They hadn’t done much in terms of unloading for the night, just enough to sleep and to keep comfortable. Within a few minutes, the truck was packed, and the six people returned to their spots in the vehicle.

It was time to dare the volcanic plain.

* * *

GRANT AND BRIGID looked out over the hood at the wasteland before them.

“Still think this was a good idea?” Grant murmured.

“You were all up for it,” Kane responded through the window at the back of the cab. “And it’s not as if we’re seeing anything new.”

Grant nodded. All three of them had been on a virtual “fly through,” but this was an imposing scene before them. The ground heaved and shifted, and whereas the computer-generated imagery was soundless and scentless, here on the smoky plain the stench of sulfur hung thick in the air and the grumble of grinding stone and burbling steam and bubbling lava was a constant companion.

The three adventurers had sent a message back to Cerberus redoubt in the wake of their battle in Neekra’s necropolis. Their shadow suits had been damaged greatly, and Kane and Grant both agreed that leaving their allies, Nathan, Lyta and Thurpa, unprotected by the unique uniforms was an unnecessary risk, unlike the journey across this field of lava, crumbling stone and thick, noxious gases.