Читать книгу Oblivion Stone - James Axler - Страница 10

Grant stood well over six feet tall, with impressively wide shoulders, deep chest and a solid mass of hard, taut muscle. His dark skin was a rich shade of mahogany, and he wore his black hair close-cropped to his skull, with a drooping gunslinger’s mustache curving down from his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate, and their partnership went all the way back to their time together in Cobaltville, years before the formation of the Cerberus operation. Grant was several years older than Kane, and the trust between them was absolute. They had seen combat across the globe, saved each other’s lives on countless occasions and there was an unspoken understanding between them that went as deep as the bond between brothers.

Right now, Grant waited in the mouldering marshes of the Louisiana swamps, hunkering down between the low branches of a tree. Clad in camouflaged greens and browns, Grant peered through the sniper’s scope of his SSG-550 rifle where it rested high on its bipod legs. He kept his voice to a low whisper as he spoke into the hidden pickup of his Commtact. “Kane? Please repeat, I didn’t copy.” He waited a moment, listening for any signal from his Commtact over the humming, squawking and chirping of the swamp fauna. “Kane?” he repeated, his voice just a little louder. “Brigid?”

There was still no answer.

Eye locked on the eyepiece of the sniper scope, Grant watched for movement at the entryway to the dilapidated shack. The wooden structure was just one story high yet covered almost 4,000 square feet. Despite its size, the low roof and rotting nature of the building made it appear cramped and unwelcoming.

Grant had seen Kane and Brigid enter the building in the company of the independent trader, Ohio Blue, about fifteen minutes before. They had arrived here via airboat, transported across the marshland by a dark-skinned woman with a toned body and a scarred face, her left leg missing below the knee. Grant had tracked the airboat via the transponder units that were embedded beneath his partners’ skins, using his own uplink to Cerberus headquarters to keep track of his friends as they traveled through the maze of swamps. This had allowed him—unseen—to keep to a roughly parallel route on his own airboat, its huge fan whirling as it carved a new pathway through the dense shrubbery of the sweltering marshes.

“Cerberus, this is Grant out in the field,” Grant spoke to his Commtact once more. “Appear to have lost radio contact with Kane and Brigid. Please advise.”

Grant listened intently, hearing the humming, squawking, chirruping sounds all around him, but the Commtact itself only offered dead air by way of response.

“Cerberus?” Grant repeated. “Anyone there reading me?”

Yet again, there was no response.

Anxious, Grant turned away from the rifle’s scope and reached for the handheld unit he had used to track his partners’ transponders. Its tiny screen was functioning, but it showed no evidence of the transponders—not even his own, Grant realized with a start. He wiped the screen with his fingertip, and then pressed the reset button, causing the little portable unit to run through a ten-second reboot sequence.

“What the hell is going on?” Grant muttered as he watched the tracker unit reboot. Comms were down and now the transponders seemed to have gone offline, as well. Not good. Not good at all.

After ten seconds, the tracker unit returned to full functionality, but still showed no evidence of any transponders in the area—not even Grant’s.

Concerned, Grant bent down to the rifle’s scope once more and focused his attention on the shadowy doorway to the shack, waiting to see what would emerge.

THE HEADQUARTERS for the Cerberus operation was located high in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. A military redoubt, it had remained largely forgotten or ignored for the two bleak centuries that followed the nukecaust of 2001. In the intervening years, a strange mythology had built up around the shadow-filled forests and seemingly bottomless ravines of the mountains themselves. The wilds around the three-story concrete redoubt were virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement was some miles away in the flatlands beyond the mountains themselves, where a small band of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians had settled, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

The facility itself had not always been called Cerberus. For the brief years of its first life, like all prewar redoubts, it had been named Redoubt Bravo after a phonetic letter of the alphabet used in standard military radio communications. In the twentieth century, Redoubt Bravo had been dedicated to the monitoring and exploration of the newly developed mat-trans network of instantaneous teleportation. However, somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a garish rendition of the fabled three-headed hound of Hades to guard the doors to the facility, like Cerberus guarding the gates to the Underworld. The artist—whose signature identified him only as Mooney—was long since dead, but his work had inspired the sixty or so people who had taken up residence in the facility, acting as their lucky—and unquestionably fearsome—mascot.

Tucked within the rocky clefts of the mountains around the redoubt, disguised beneath camouflage netting, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites to provide a steady stream of empirical data for the Cerberus operatives within. These links were the source of field communications through the Commtacts, as well as routing the feeds from the subcutaneous transponders that monitored the health of the personnel, and it was these that Grant had used to track his partners in the field. Accessing the ancient satellites had been a long process, involving much trial and error by many of the top scientists at the redoubt. Today, the Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from both a Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Comsat satellite. Or, at least, that was the theory.

Within the operations center, however, a far different story was being played out. Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh leaped out of a seat that overlooked the vast control room, his swivel chair whirling off behind him on its little plastic wheels. Lakesh had dusky skin and sleek black hair that was just beginning to turn white at the temples. Lakesh had a distinguished air about him, holding himself straight and poised, with a refined mouth beneath his aquiline nose. Though he appeared to be about fifty years of age, Lakesh was in fact a “freezie,” one of a number of military personnel who had been placed in cryogenic stasis when the outbreak of nuclear hostilities began, only to be revived some time after that cataclysmic conflict. As such, Lakesh was closer to 250 years old. A physicist and cybernetics expert, Lakesh was an exceptionally capable individual who served as the founder and was still the nucleus around which the Cerberus operation centered.

“What’s happened to the feed?” Lakesh demanded, his eyes flicking from his own computer terminal to those of his colleagues who sat all about him. Every monitor had cut to static in the same instant, their flow of live data lost.

Brewster Philboyd, a tall, sallow-faced, blond-haired man wearing black-framed glasses and the evidence of acne scars on his cheeks, yanked off the comm headset he had been wearing as a burst of static interference cut through the earphones. “Some kind of glitch,” he stated, gritting his teeth as he glared at the headset. “I’m not sure what it is.”

Lakesh ran over to Philboyd’s desk. “Find out,” he urged.

Philboyd had been monitoring the incoming communications when the link to Kane’s field team had gone down. Replacing his headset, he spoke into the pickup mic, calling to the other CAT teams who were out on assignment. “CAT Beta, do you read?” Receiving no response, Brewster’s fingers played rapidly across his computer keyboard before he tried for CAT Gamma. Then he turned to Lakesh, shaking his head. “Nothing. I’m receiving no response from anyone.”

Cerberus physician Reba DeFore, a stocky woman with ice-blond hair weaved into an elaborate plait atop her head, called to Lakesh from her own terminal where she had been monitoring the feeds from the transponders. “Everything’s gone dead here, too, Lakesh,” she stated, looking uncomfortable at her unfortunate choice of words.

“A massive equipment failure?” Lakesh murmured to himself incredulously, but even as he spoke, another dissenting voice was calling from one of the terminals in the vast operations room.

“Monitoring feed just went haywire,” said Henny Johnson, a young, petite woman dressed in the regulation white jumpsuit of the Cerberus team, her blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended in line with her earlobes. “I can’t see anything. Just static.”

Lakesh looked around the ops room with frustration. The room had a high ceiling and housed two aisles of computer terminals dedicated to the monitoring of the outside world. A huge Mercator map stretched across one wall, displaying the globe patterned by a plethora of blinking lights and stretching lines showing the patterns and uses of the mat-trans system, the now-antique military teleportation network whose operation had been within the original remit of the base.

Tucked away in the far end of the room was an anteroom that housed the mat-trans unit, which was surrounded by tinted armaglass. This mat-trans unit was still operational and used frequently to transport Cerberus operatives all across the globe. The vast ops room itself was windowless and indirectly lit, allowing for better observation of the backlit terminal screens. Right now, the majority of those monitoring screens had devolved into static or dead feeds of data showing just the standard base-level defaults.

“What the devil is going on here?” Lakesh said, addressing the question to no one other than himself.

Reba DeFore spoke again from her terminal as a scrolling data readout raced across her screen. “My system is working,” she stated, “but it’s just not receiving any input data.”

“The satellite’s down,” Lakesh realized, the words leaving his mouth almost before he had acknowledged the thought.

Like fascinated meerkats, the people in the ops room peered up from their terminals, eyes on Lakesh as he outlined his thoughts. “We’ve lost the satellite relay,” he said, his voice more decisive now as a plan began to form in his mind. “I need to know why. Brewster, Henny—backtrack through the logs and locate when we lost contact, both sound and vision, and whether there was an indicator of its imminence.”

Lakesh whirled around, his gaze falling on Donald Bry, an operative with a mop of ginger hair and a permanently dour expression on his drawn face. Bry acted as Lakesh’s right-hand man, and had been known to run the Cerberus ops room when Lakesh himself was otherwise engaged. “Donald, let’s start checking meteorological activity, sunspots, magnetic glitches, anything we can find a record of.”

Donald Bry nodded as he reached across from his own terminal to switch on another vacant one that sat unused beside him. “Aye, sir.” As the spare terminal went through its boot-up procedure, Bry’s fingers began working furiously over his own keyboard, bringing up a stream of data covering the preceding hours leading to the loss of satellite feeds.

Lakesh, meanwhile, was standing in the center of the room, reeling off instructions to the other personnel there. “I want you to manually check our power supply,” he ordered Farrell. “See if anything’s happened to cause a breakdown in service. Get engineering to run a full systems check, both localized to the ops room and for the whole base itself.”

Farrell nodded, his gold hoop earring catching the light for a moment before he briskly walked through the doors and exited the ops room to check the generators.

“Reba,” Lakesh continued, turning to address the blonde physician, “I want you to bring up the final reports from the transponders, make sure everything’s in order and patch the reports through to my screen so that I can double-check them.”

DeFore shot Lakesh a fierce look. “You don’t need to double-check me,” she told him.

Lakesh offered her a concerned look. “We have three teams out in the field. Kane, Grant, Edwards, Morganstern, others. I’ll double-and triple-check everything if it means protecting the life of one person while they’re under my command.”

“Point taken,” Reba submitted. Chastised, she turned her attention back to her terminal and began to run a system history to the point where the live feeds had been interrupted.

Agitated, Lakesh paced across the room until he stood behind Henny Johnson at the satellite-monitoring feed. “What do we have, Henny?”

Henny replayed the feed sequence, watching the locator numbers as they scrolled along the side of the screen in a separate window to the feed images themselves. “They just seemed to pop, vanish,” she explained. “Like someone pulled the plug.”

“So,” Lakesh mused, “let’s figure out who or what pulled the plug, shall we?”

Henny nodded. “Time of signal break—15.37.08,” she began, and Brewster and Reba both agreed with the time from their desks.

“Complete shutdown on both satellites,” Lakesh said to himself as the other personnel continued comparing their data feeds. This could be something very big. Very big and very nasty.

PAPA HURBON was chuckling as Kane spun to face the two newcomers who had stepped through the doorway in their plodding, deliberate way. He watched the grim figures as they approached on heavy tread, their eyes flickering white slits.

“Grant,” Kane said, engaging his Commtact once more. “My Commtact’s not receiving your signal—”

The first zombie swung a vicious blow at Kane’s head, moving far faster than the ex-Mag had expected. Kane ducked the sweeping, meaty fist as the second zombie stepped toward him. Up close, both dead creatures stank, and Kane was reminded of the garbage area of the Cerberus redoubt.

“I’m planning to evac in two minutes via the south exit,” Kane continued into the Commtact, hoping that Grant could hear him. As he spoke, his arm snapped up to block the second zombie as it reached for him, emaciated fingers clawing for his throat with jagged, yellow-brown fingernails. “We may have some company in tow,” Kane continued as he thrust the blade of his combat knife into the zombie’s exposed throat. The zombie simply shook its head, and when Kane removed the blade an off-white pus exuded from the rent in the dead man’s flesh. As Kane pulled his blade away, he heard Papa Hurbon chuckling from his supine position on the floor.

“We are surrounded by hostiles,” Kane continued into the Commtact feed. “Pick off anyone you don’t recognize.”

At that moment, the first zombie connected with a hard blow to the back of Kane’s head, and the ex-Mag staggered forward. Though Kane’s knees bent, he kept himself upright as he slammed against the other lurching zombie.

“I repeat,” Kane stated into the Commtact, “we are surrounded by hostiles. Dispatch on sight.”

With that, Kane drove a powerful fist into the face of the zombie standing before him. The undead creature didn’t move, but its face caved in like a rotten fruit, a cloud of skin dust flaking across Kane’s fist. The creature itself seemed to just wait in place, swaying a little as Kane watched it, the remnants of its face splayed across Kane’s knuckles.

The zombie behind Kane was moving closer, too, and the Cerberus warrior realized that he was hemmed in. Even as he backed away from his twin attackers, he saw that Ohio Blue was finally on her feet once more and had made her way over to the wall where the sword had been mounted. Blue pulled the sword from its twin clips and spun around to face the monstrous figures of the undead.

The beautiful blonde woman stepped forward, swishing the blade through the air and cutting at the zombie behind Kane. Although her blow struck, it was a pathetic effort, and Kane was reminded of his previous contretemps with the female trader out near Knoxville where she had proved to be far more of a con artist than a fighter.

With a foul stench reeking from its rotting flesh, the shambling form of the struck zombie turned to face Ohio Blue as she readied herself for a second strike.

“Ohio,” Kane instructed as he stepped across the small room to her side, “give me the sword.”

Blue didn’t need to be told twice. She handed Kane the two-foot-long sword as the shambling zombies took another step closer.

In return, Kane handed the blond-haired trader his knife. “I need you to free Brigid,” he instructed, stepping away from Ohio to face the zombies once again, sword held upright in a ready position.

The demands of her Outlander lifestyle had made Ohio Blue a very perceptive woman and, although she didn’t comment on it, she noticed that Kane had referred to his partner by her first name. That was unusual—very nearly unheard of, in fact—and though Blue didn’t know it, was a sign of his concern for the beautiful redhead trapped in the alien chair.

As Ohio trotted past the fallen body of Papa Hurbon, he reached out and snatched her ankle, pulling her down toward him. “Not so fast, pretty peach,” he said, that sickly sweet breath exuding from his mouth with each word he spoke. “There are other games we can play, man and woman.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Ohio rammed the short blade of the combat knife into Hurbon’s crotch, and the man let out a pained shriek. “I’ll pass,” she told him as she scrambled away from the overweight priest.

A few steps away, Kane swung the length of tempered-steel blade at the approaching zombies, ignoring the howl coming from the floor behind him. The sword itself was the ritual weapon used to cut the curtain between the physical and the spiritual world in voodoo ceremony. Right now, however, Kane was using it in a less metaphorical manner, as he hacked at the looming figures, slicing chunks from their torsos as they silently strode ever onwards at him in the confines of the room. With a downward slice, Kane chopped off the reaching hand of the closest zombie, leaving the undead man with a stump that oozed putrid white pus. The hand itself slapped against the floor, a cloud of dust puffing up in its wake. Kane elbowed the wounded zombie aside and drove the length of the blade at the other figure’s torso, spreading the zombie’s ribs with the brutality of his attack.

Even as Kane dispatched the second zombie, three more had appeared in the open doorway to the inner sanctum, instinctively obeying the commands of Papa Hurbon as the man himself lay in a widening pool of his own blood. Kane steadied himself and swung the sword at the next wave of attackers.

Just six feet away from the scene of carnage, Ohio Blue ripped the last of the waving tendrils from Brigid’s form and pulled her from the savage embrace of the alien chair. A network of veinlike tendrils clung to the woman’s face and bare hands, and Blue hastily brushed these aside, feeling their spines snag at her own flesh like nettles.

“Are you okay, Ms. Baptiste?” Ohio asked as she swept the last of the tendrils from Brigid’s skin. As she did so, red welts formed and runnels of blood appeared on Brigid’s face in a cobweblike pattern.

Brigid’s breath came in an uneven, stuttered rush as she spoke. “What the—? Where was I?”

“Right here,” Blue assured her. “You were right here.”

Brigid rubbed a hand over her eyes, seeing the eerie alien visions still playing there for a moment. “I saw something,” she said, groping for the words to describe it, “like alien cartography.”

“We need to get out of here,” Blue told Brigid, and the words seemed to snap the former archivist out of her daze. “It was all a setup. Or something very much like it.”

Brigid saw Kane then, and she saw the horde of zombies shambling toward him through the open doorway of the sanctum. “Kane…” she began.

Without turning, Kane batted another zombie aside as it grasped for him from the open doorway. “We about done here, Baptiste?”

“I think so,” Brigid told him, still breathless.

Using the sword’s hilt as a club, Kane slammed another of the undead figures in the chest, forcing it to step backward as a cloud of foul-smelling dust burst from the point of impact. Knocked back, the zombie fell into one of its colleagues, and the two slow-moving figures struggled in the doorway for several seconds. As they did so, Kane turned and indicated the far door—the one through which he and the others had entered with Hurbon.

“Let’s get moving,” Kane instructed.

From his place on the floor, the one-legged priest shouted angrily, “You won’t get far. The chair has chosen her lover. You can’t escape it now.”

As Ohio and Brigid rushed out of the cramped inner room, Kane turned back to look at Hurbon, fixing him with his steely blue-gray glare. “I’ll bring your sword back when I’m done,” he told the corpulent man, whose hands still held his bleeding groin.

With false bravado, Hurbon laughed for a moment, until he saw the grim look on Kane’s face. “I’ll be ready,” he said, blood pooling beneath him.

“No, you won’t,” Kane told him as he stepped through the doorway and out of the inner sanctum of the voodoo temple.

OUTSIDE THE WOODEN STRUCTURE, crouched against the bole of a tree, Grant waited, the SSG-550 sniper rifle leveled in the direction of the building’s rotted doorway. Approximately two hundred feet from the doorway itself, Grant peered through the lens of the rifle’s scope. He had had no further radio contact with Kane since the initial burst when his partner had requested covering fire in two minutes. That had been more than five minutes ago, and Grant was pondering whether he should enter the temple himself and recover his teammates. One thing that was certain was that his Commtact was dead. Not only had he been unable to raise Kane and Brigid, but Grant had also failed to patch through to the Cerberus base. In short, he was out in the field on his own now, with no access to backup.

Irritated, Grant comforted himself with the fact that he hadn’t heard any gunfire coming from the voodoo temple itself. Kane, Brigid and Ohio had gone in unarmed at the request of Papa Hurbon—a standard indicator of trust between two trading parties in the Outlands—but there was no reason to suspect that Hurbon’s people would remain unarmed if trouble arose. And based on Kane’s record, Grant reckoned that trouble would undoubtedly arise.

Grant glanced up over the rim of the sniper scope to check that no one was approaching. All he saw were the clouds of insects that buzzed all about the sweltering Louisiana bayou. He fixed his eye back on the scope and waited; he would give Kane one more minute to show himself. If he didn’t appear by then, Grant would have to go inside and find out just what the heck was going on.

“Come on, Kane,” Grant muttered under his breath, “let’s keep the game in motion.”

INSIDE THE SINGLE-STORY TEMPLE, Kane, Brigid and Ohio were running through the large Djévo room, their shoes banging loudly against the wooden floorboards.

“You okay, Baptiste?” Kane asked as he glanced behind them to see a horde of followers, both the living and the apparently undead, clambering through the doorway of the inner sanctum in pursuit. Several of their pursuers were balancing on false legs, Kane noted, recalling the horrific story that Papa Hurbon had told them regarding his deity’s awful request.

“I’ve been better,” Brigid replied breathlessly, “but I’ll get over it. Just let me breathe some fresh air.”

Jogging along beside her, Ohio Blue chuckled. “You’ll be lucky, Brigid,” she said. “We’re in the middle of a swamp—all you’ll breathe when we get outside is local stink.”

“Stink will do,” Brigid assured the blonde woman as the three of them hurried through another doorway and into a corridor lined with shelves. The shelves contained jars filled with fascinating and disturbing items: human ears and pickled fetuses; shrunken heads; a vase full of dyed feathers; a sealed jar brimming with canine teeth.

“What happened in the chair?” Kane asked, eying the shelves with disdain.

“I saw stars,” Brigid explained, awe coloring her words.

“Meaning?” Kane asked.

“It’s an astrogator’s chair,” Brigid realized. “It projects star charts for the user.”

“Projects them where?” Kane asked.

“In your head,” Brigid explained. “Inside your eyes. It’s an Annunaki navigator’s seat. It must operate by physical contact.”

“Yeah,” Kane growled, “that kind of physical contact I don’t need. Hurbon called it Ezili Coeur Noir’s chair. Any idea how he reached that conclusion?”

“Lilitu,” Brigid said thoughtfully, “the dark goddess of the Annunaki. Not averse to taking on other forms so that she will be worshipped.”

“And she’s a sadistic bitch,” Kane recalled as he thought back to his own meetings with the Annunaki female, whose perverted peccadilloes were boundless. “Instructing her worshippers to remove a leg to prove their devotion isn’t out of the bounds of belief.”

The three of them stopped short as a figure appeared in the far doorway, blocking the exit from the shack. It was a dark-skinned man, so tall his head scraped the ceiling when he stood upright, and with the widest shoulders that Kane had ever seen. A necklace of animal skulls hung over the man’s bare chest. A pair of sweat-stained combat pants ended in ragged cuffs below which his left foot was bare, while his right leg ended at a metal spike that attached to his knee. The man was armed with a thick, curved blade about eighteen inches in length and he smiled wickedly, a sinister half moon across his wide face.

Sword in hand, Kane eyed the brute for a moment. “Step aside,” he instructed in his authoritative Magistrate voice.

In response, the brute merely laughed, raising the cruelly curved blade in his hand as he took a single thunderous step toward the three strangers. Behind them, just entering the corridor of odd delights, the first of a dozen voodoo followers were coming to box in Kane and his partners.

Ohio turned to Kane, fear lacing the songbird tone of her voice. “We don’t have time for this, Kane.”

“Sure we do,” Kane said. He began charging forward, swinging the sword in a great, sweeping arc as he approached the dark-skinned giant in the bone necklace.

“Stay close,” Kane heard Brigid instruct Ohio as he closed in on the brute.

A second later, the corridor resounded with the echoes of clashing steel on steel as Kane’s sword struck the curved edge of the brute’s scimitar. The power in the huge man’s strike was uncanny, and Kane felt the vibration run up and down his arms as he parried the giant’s blows. Even as the towering brute lunged at Kane, thrusting his scimitar forward in a devastating attack, Kane’s mind calmed and his Magistrate training kicked in. Although he was a part of the battle, Kane also seemed to be standing to one side of the action, analyzing his opponent’s strategies and probing for signs of weakness. As he fended off another attack, Kane shifted his balance, kicking off the floor and spinning around. The giant could only watch in amazement as Kane turned in a low arc and slashed the hard edge of his sword against his adversary’s bare leg.

The huge man stood there, rocking in place for a moment as blood began to blossom in red stains across the left leg of his pants. And then Kane was driving forward once more, his left arm powering upward to slam the heel of his hand into his opponent’s nose. The brute’s nose exploded in a shower of blood and mucus, and the fearsome giant howled in agony.

Kane stepped back and glanced over his shoulder in time to see the first of the rearguard meet with Brigid Baptiste as Ohio cowered behind her. Brigid delivered a swift and brutal kick to her would-be attacker’s stomach and the man doubled over the pain.

Trusting Brigid’s abilities, Kane turned back to the brute who was standing on unsteady feet, pawing at his ruined nose.

The giant man snarled, swinging his curved blade at his opponent as Kane rushed forward once more. Kane ducked beneath the intended blow with ease, and his free hand whipped out and snagged the necklace of skulls and bones that the hulking man wore about his neck. In a second, Kane had wrapped the necklace over his hand, doubling it around and around until he was tight up against his foe. Struggling to keep from being dragged down, the brute swung his blade once again, but Kane drew his left arm back, pulling the necklace—and his attacker—off balance. The man choked as the necklace tightened against his windpipe.

Ignoring the man’s cries of pain, Kane yanked at the cinched necklace again. The huge man staggered forward before falling to his knees, the metal clamped to his right leg ringing against the floor with a resounding clang. The brute’s scimitar clattered to the wooden floorboards as he reached up with both hands and tried to loosen the gruesome necklace that was now strangling him. His fearful eyes were wide, their whites turning pink with blood as the man tried desperately to take a breath.

Kane watched impartially as the man danced on his knees, the awful hacking sounds of strangulation coming from his open mouth. Standing over the brute, his left arm wrapped in the hideous necklace, his right still holding the sword, Kane fixed his gaze on the struggling man’s desperate eyes. “I won’t let you die,” he promised in a solemn tone.

The man’s struggles were lessening now, as the strength ebbed from his oxygen-starved body, and whether he had heard the ex-Mag’s vow Kane could not be sure. With a pained croak, the man finally keeled over and Kane released the necklace as his heavy opponent toppled to the floor with a resounding crash. The huge man had blacked out.

Kane turned back to the others and saw Ohio Blue standing with her back to the wall, fearfully watching as Brigid Baptiste struggled to fend off a trio of male attackers while even more hung back, waiting for their chance. Kane marveled at the economy and grace of Brigid’s movements as she dispatched men twice her weight with a series of kicks and rabbit-style punches. She was fluid as a rushing waterfall as she defended herself from the gamut of blows aimed in her direction.

Kane winced as Brigid grabbed one man by the hair and pulled him downward until his face struck her extended knee with such force that three teeth flew from his jaw. She pulled the man’s head back and, before he could recover, snapped a savage right hook into his face, obliterating his nose in a burst of blood. When Brigid finally let go of his hair, the man staggered backward as though drunk, crashing into one of his colleagues before dropping to the floor. By that time, Brigid had already moved her attention elsewhere, ducking the swinging arc of a machete before grabbing its wielder’s wrist and snapping it in a brutally swift movement. The knife wielder stepped back, screaming in pain as he stared at his broken hand, which now drooped at an awkward angle from his wrist.

“Come on, Baptiste,” Kane instructed as he sidled up beside her, the sword held ready. “Door’s open.”

Brigid didn’t need telling twice. She drove her elbow into the face of another of the faithful—this one showing the gossamerlike skin of the undead—and turned to run down the corridor toward the far doorway.

Standing in place, Kane swung the long blade of the sword in a wide arc to fend off their remaining attackers, forcing them to retreat from its lethal edge. Then he turned and sprinted down the corridor after Brigid and Ohio, catching up to them with long, distance-humbling strides.

“Everybody still in one piece?” Kane asked as he leaped over the unconscious body of the brute in the skull necklace.

“I think so,” Brigid said, and Ohio nodded in agreement, though the blond-haired trader was clearly shaken up by the rapid turn of events.

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.