James Axler - Shadow Born

In that moment of eerie physical calm, Kane threw his grenade. His little hand bomb seemed to careen wildly away from the truck, almost as if it had been flying at a right angle to where the man hurled it, but that also was an illusion. The wheels hit the dirt, and Thurpa grunted as Lyta mashed him deeper onto the floor of the truck bed, knocking the breath from him. Nathan grimaced as his shoulder struck the same bit of rail that his head nearly had been dashed against.

“Sorry!” Grant bellowed over the racket, obviously in apology for the landing after their short flight.

On the heels of Grant’s shout, Kane’s second grenade went off. This time, the explosion sounded louder, and the rising jet of smoke and debris from the blast was accompanied by a flaming object that tumbled end over end through the sky. Thurpa hung on, watching the trail of the burning thing through the air until he realized that it was a human arm, or what used to be one.

“Direct hit!” Thurpa shouted.

“No time to celebrate,” Kane answered. “We’re slowing in three.”

Thurpa counted down in his mind, scrambling to his knees and bringing his rifle back to bear. The pickup’s brakes squealed and dirt flew. The desert wilderness might have made things harder for Thurpa to see targets, but that worked both ways. Instead of going full speed forward, they backed at a slower speed deeper into the ever expanding clouds of kicked-up dust.

Kane had pulled his hood up and put on the faceplate of his shadow suit. The skin-tight, advanced polymer uniform had undergone several upgrades, one of the most useful being a set of high-tech optics built into the cowl’s faceplate. Thurpa might not have been able to see a foot past the back of the pickup truck, but that didn’t stop Kane, and he could see where the man pointed.

Backing farther into their dust trail also bought the Cerberus expedition more time. The militia opened fire at the far end of the cloud of debris, missing the pickup by yards.

“Now!” Kane ordered.

Thurpa fired in the direction that Kane pointed, pulling the trigger as fast as he could. He surely couldn’t put out the amount of lead that a machine gun could in this manner, but he would make sure that his bullets were on target and not wasted. Kane himself used a borrowed battle rifle, and his training with full-automatic meant that he could control the kick of powerful recoil. Kane’s rifle was louder, and from the cab, Thurpa could make out a sidelong muzzle-flash.

Brigid was using her own shadow suit’s optical technologies, shooting out the window of the cab with a weapon. Thurpa didn’t care what she was firing, just that what lead they threw at the Panthers of Mashona had an effect. Thurpa had seen what this militia was like when he was still beside Durga and the Millennium Consortium expedition. They had soured him on people, and the marauders only continued to make bad impressions when they discovered Lyta and the other survivors of her frontier village held as slaves.

Lyta was half starved, dehydrated, and left bloody and scarred by heavy chains. That kind of abuse turned Thurpa’s stomach, especially in the light of meeting good people, like the Zambian military at Victoria Falls and of course Kane and his allies from Cerberus. When he saw the creatures who were to feed upon the Panthers’ captives, his patience for them was totally discarded.

He didn’t raise a finger to help them when Neekra’s horrifying spawn attacked another of their units, only moving or shooting to protect Nathan and Lyta. Thankfully, in the presence of the ancient staff, they became invisible to Neekra’s vampiric horde.

Thurpa wanted every bullet fired through his rifle to strike one of the Panthers and cause irreparable harm and pain to them. The militia had been the reason two city-states had come together as allies, because the Panthers of Mashona sought out technology and slaves. The marauders had been thieves, scavengers, parasites. They gave nothing to the world.

The pickup truck roared to life, jolting forward, but this time Thurpa was prepared. He’d braced himself, as had Nathan and Lyta.

“How’d we do?” Thurpa asked, seeing Kane throw one last hand grenade before they got to full speed. Kane remained quiet, but he looked toward Thurpa to acknowledge the question. Moments later, Thurpa heard the detonation of Kane’s good-bye bomb. Once more, screams filled the air, and the militia continued shooting wildly.

Finally, the man in the black high-tech suit spoke. “We’re doing okay.”

The pickup swerved, swinging around into the tracks of the enemy vehicles. As they cut across their pursuit’s trail, Thurpa glanced into the distance. No more vehicles were on the horizon, but the look he got was fleeting, and he was certain that he’d miss something. He only had his human eyes, not built-in telescopic or infrared receptors on a moon-built faceplate.

As it was, Kane didn’t sound too glum, despite his conservative estimate of their success. He just kept perched in the truck bed, eyes peeled for their foes.

This explosion didn’t sound as vigorous as the one that sent a flaming limb soaring through the sky. Gunfire still rattled from whichever vehicles were still in the chase. They were not safe, not by a long shot. The battle was still to be won.

Grant shouted through the small window between the cab and the bed. “Found some tree line! Going for it!”

Kane gave his partner a thumbs-up, and once again, those in the back of the pickup truck held on for balance. Grant shifted the gears expertly, this time going for maximum traction and performance from the tires, not kicking up dust clouds to cover their tracks. As such, Thurpa was surprised to see how little a rooster tail of dirt was kicked up as he changed course. This was not to say that the transit over the lumpy ground was any smoother, but it was faster than he’d seen Grant take the truck in this car chase.

Kane patted Thurpa and Nathan on the shoulders, motioning toward his belt. Instinctively, both young men reached up and gripped the webbing tightly for support.

Once again, the Cerberus leader’s big rifle erupted, staccato bursts of gunfire sizzling out the muzzle as the weight and leverage of Nathan and Thurpa anchored him enough so that he could devote both hands to controlling the weapon. Thurpa looked toward racing vehicles on their trail, watching one of them swerve off course. It teetered on two wheels, then struck a rut and went nose first into the ground. Men flew, cartwheeling through the sky and screaming as their technical flipped end over end. When the militiamen hit the ground, they didn’t bounce. They burst like ripe fruit, splattering their blood in huge splashes of crimson.

Thurpa couldn’t hear over the sound of Kane’s rifle, but his mind filled in the ugly, crunchy and wet noises made by men striking the earth hard enough to pop them like balloons.

Kane dropped an empty magazine and fed another into his weapon before continuing to hammer away at the opposition. Because Grant was going for speed, there was a lot less variable in terms of how the truck would bounce, and Kane’s short bursts compensated for recoil and amount of time on target. One of the closer enemy jeeps had smoke pouring from its hood where high-velocity, heavyweight rounds punched through its radiator and engine block. As the driver swerved, attempting to maintain control of his vehicle, a dead militiaman bounced from the side door, strapped in place by a seat belt, his head and left arm bashed to bloody pulps.

A few more short bursts, and the smoldering jeep jerked violently, brakes squealing, before it skidded into a sideways roll, bouncing away from the mechanized patrol.

So far, three enemy vehicles had been taken out. The two left weren’t pulling off the chase.