Shadow Born

DOMINION PLAGUE

Earth remains the tortured battleground of near-immortal aliens. But these god kings never anticipated unified resistance from a group of humans possessing the tenacity and spirit to reclaim their planet. In the ongoing war for independence, the Cerberus fighters forge an epic showdown, as evil shape-shifts and unfurls its grand design….

UNSTOPPABLE JUGGERNAUT

The madness surrounding entombed secrets of an ancient race puts Kane and his allies on a death chase across the African subcontinent. Facing relentless attack from winged hell beasts and marauding militia, the rebels are forced into an unholy alliance with a deadly foe. Only the dark goddess spawned of humanity’s most brutal overlord can challenge a superhuman interloper and navigate an ancient ziggurat that guards a nightmare. The price for miscalculation will be paid in blood—with the eternal damnation of the human race.

“Get out of my head!” Kane growled

He wrestled against the forces assailing him. The other entity—a shadowy form zooming between Kane’s view of the world and his embattled mind—looked over its shoulder at the ongoing struggle.

Kane heard a voice no human on Earth ever had. It was deep, rumbling, pervasive. It might have been male, but there was an odd quality to it that seemed almost sexless. “Your friends are going to die.” The vibrations of those words burrowed deep into him—like termites chewing through the heart of a tree.

Kane writhed in the smothering grasp of his opponent.

“You’re going to shoot them,” the shadow taunted. Kane’s right arm tore free from the engulfing mass of darkness, and he reached out, fingertips brushing the icy flesh.

“I’ll rip you out of my skull first!” Kane bellowed. “I’ll shred you into ribbons!”

Shadow Born

James Axler

Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force, one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.

—Leon Trotsky,

1879–1940

The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the 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.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

The Road to Outlands

Prologue

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

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Copyright

Prologue

Neekra dreamed of ages past, her memories stretching far back through the delirium and pain of the orichalcum scepter jammed through her avatar’s torso. She sought escape from the incalculable energies held within the unstable alloy scorching through her hijacked cellular structure. The superstring biological computers that she’d molded into her core, powerful transmitters that allowed her incredible telepathic ability and the power to sculpt human bodies as if made from clay, misfired and shuddered...

But she fought for her consciousness. She still could find a back door, a way to escape the dissolution of the lost fragment that had managed to escape from where the rest of her body was imprisoned.

“It’s the only way we will ever be free,” a voice whispered in her ear.

She felt the strength of a lover’s hands running down the length of her body, warm whispers brushing her earlobes. Was this a dream, a fevered remnant of a time when she was merely Annunaki and not the being she sought to return to in resurrection?

Then she was tumbling, careening across her own time line, before her father, Enlil, burdened her with the horrible task as punishment for her all-too-human weakness...

...and there was Neekra, bastard child of Enlil, kneeling on the hard floor, her legs curled beneath her shapely thighs, her chin touching her chest, eyes closed.

She didn’t dare open them, even as her father paced in front of her, his ponderous tread shaking the ground for emphasis. Enlil reached down, hooked her chin with a crooked forefinger and drew her to look up at him.

“Open your eyes!” At the sharp command, her eyes popped open and she looked Enlil in the face. He was tall, magnificent, clad in a simple silk sash adorned with a gold chain as his belt. Muscles rippled beneath his fine-scaled skin; Enlil would have been an inspiration to the greatest human sculptors.

As divine as his appearance was, he was also a commanding force, his voice cementing her in place with its deep, vibrating tone.

“Sweet child,” he whispered, a hiss with all the warmth of an Arctic wind. “You disappoint me.”

“I’m...I’m...so sor...” Neekra began.

His fingertip touched her lips together, cutting her off. Neekra was so frightened, even the urge to shiver cowered somewhere between her shoulder blades.

This has to be memory, she thought, and for a moment, Neekra was confused at where that realization came from. This is just a fantasy, a delusion created by my suffering.

I have not feared Enlil in millennia, came the conclusion.

And almost as if the Annunaki overlord had overheard the defiance she’d displayed twenty-five centuries hence, Enlil wrapped his long fingers around her throat and neck, craning her head up.

“I can smell the stink of his sex on you,” Enlil growled.

“I can explain...” Neekra’s younger-self sputtered, not daring to break her stare from his.

“The explanation is simple, my little girl,” Enlil huffed. He slid his fingers through her crimson-streaked black locks, claw-like nails scratching along the back of her head. There had been times when such a caress might have been the beginnings of rough intimacy between herself and the god of her world. Now she felt menace in his clutch. Electric bolts of pain sparked through his nails.

“Please...”

He hurt you, but don’t give him that satisfaction, Neekra thought. Don’t let him have his victory in seeing you cry.

Yet Neekra’s memories had been cast in stone. She could not change that past, that history, and she could not alter the memories that stuck in her brain.

Enlil’s revenge was as unspeakable among the Annunaki as it would be with any less evolved, so-called barbaric race. It was his manipulations, his cruelty that nurtured Neekra into what she was, what she had grown to be. That hate had poisoned her, blackened her soul so that thousands of years could not erase the fury she felt toward her father.

Perhaps she could have found a better way out of the hell she’d been stuck in, a better mentor or lover, a better teacher, someone who could have laid the groundwork for redemption. She’d seen those things inside of Kane’s mind, and the minds of others who’d opposed her spawn, the darkness with which she infested the world. Rather than giving in to hatred for an abusive, sadistic father, she could have found worth in making her life better, making the world better. She could have rebelled like her half sister, Malesh, and fought for independence against the global order that their fouler kin had wrought upon humanity.

Instead, Neekra took solace in the arms of Negari, the Igigi whose affection and intimacy had drawn the wrath of Enlil.

Negari had promised her gifts and talents that would make Enlil tremble before her, rather than lord over her. Work was being done across the planet, on the opposite shores of a mighty ocean, far beneath the waves at one of the deepest realms yet known to the Annunaki. There, in experiments shielded from the rest of the world by six thousand feet of water, 191 atmospheres of pressure, they had discovered a form of life that made even the mightiest of the overlords tremble. Even Enlil himself could not survive the bone-crushing pressures of one and a quarter tons of weight per square inch.

And so Neekra crawled forward in time, further along the path she’d already endured, fully aware that in this fever dream, time passed much more swiftly than in the real world, where Kane and Nehushtan had impaled her, attacking her avatar’s cellular structure with energies equivalent to the output of a dying sun.

Through her continued psychic retreat, she arrived at the night when Negari caressed her ravaged form, working with healing technologies that could negate the torment that Enlil used as his signature on her flesh. The puckered skin, the torn muscle knitted back together. Neekra still felt the rent wounds in her spirit. Even Negari could do little for that, but as he nursed her injuries, kissed and comforted her, gave her tenderness, he whispered of the wonders that they had discovered within the protein structure, a living virus that had brought madness and devastation across the lands of Sumeria until the overlords combined their might to stop it.

“It’s magnificent,” Negari whispered. “It’s one consciousness, a complete mind in each strand of complex molecules, smaller than a single chromosome, yet able to tap into immense knowledge.”

“How can that help us?” Neekra asked. Her injuries faded, and a warm sensuality bathed her entire body, cellular regeneration within the “healing coffin” having an effect on sexual desire.

“It means we can shed these bodies,” Negari said. “And if we wished, we could become one being, or we could exist among the teeming millions of apes sprawled across the face of this planet. Or even further.”

Neekra raised an eyebrow, and Negari answered her curiosity with first a kiss. “We could become the totality of the Annunaki race. They would become puppets, marionettes on strings of self-replicating protein that would infest them.”

“That sounds...tedious,” Neekra responded. She brushed her lover’s cheek.

“It seems like it would be, but the samples we captured, isolated down at the Tongue, they don’t show that feeling of limitation,” Negari said.

“Of course not,” Neekra stated. She smiled. “It’s trying to seduce you. Trying to let it into your brain and then to escape. Father has done everything in his power to limit its existence, yet...”

“Yet he still makes us toil, unraveling the secrets built into it on an atomic scale,” Negari responded. He rose, then gently lowered himself between her open thighs. His hands cupped her face tenderly, his emerald eyes meeting her crimson gaze. “I can advance us without letting the totality loose on the world, without having it infect us. We would be ourselves, mightier than anything this world could hope to contain.”

Neekra reveled as Negari put his words aside and utilized his tongue and lips for other, much more pleasurable things. His kisses, his nibbling of her newly revived flesh provided an escape from the agonies inflicted upon her, at that time from the rage of Enlil, and outside of the memory, from the assault of Kane.

The time of needles came up next, after years of Negari’s experimentation. He’d isolated the particular protein chain that could be turned into the base root of a world-encompassing hive mind. The first experiment was on himself, and slowly the natural telepathy of the Igigi race became stronger. Within him, the proteins reproduced, growing, laying the groundwork of sheathing along his nervous system, which acted as the conducting antenna coil for his thoughts. As soon as that happened, he reached out to Neekra.

He spoke to her, mentally, without outside Annunaki technology, reaching blindly around the globe, over a mile of ocean water or, even more impressively, through the crust of a planet.

That night, Neekra’s body came alive with the touch of a lover who no longer needed to be in the same room. Neekra cried out, thrashing at his ministrations, biting down hard on her lip to prevent her uttering his name.

Still, she was found out. She was cornered, quizzed, whipped and battered by an enraged Enlil.

Negari had gone too far, committed himself to an experiment, become something that was greater than Enlil, and this was a world where none could be greater than he. He had not crossed a universe to become the second-best in his own Olympus. He was to be Zeus, the mightiest of the mighty, yet Negari dared to slap their leader in the face.

Igigi had been meant to be the servant class—never mind that Neekra was the result of Enlil’s night with one of those serfs.

“What is good for you, Father, is forbidden for me?” Neekra gasped, stretched against the wall, naked and helpless. She wouldn’t shrink, not even as vulnerable as she was now.

Enlil pressed against her. “You act as if I care what happens to you.”

Then Enlil showed Neekra exactly how much he “cared” about her, brutally, slowly grinding her cheek against the wall with his forearm as he drove into her again and again. All he was doing was stoking the fires of hatred, the hunger for revenge that would cross centuries unabated, growing only in depth of spite and disgust.

Soon, Neekra whispered into the ear of her younger self, something that did as little for the remembered image as if she’d given promises to a baby photo of herself.

The dream broke. A little bit of vision was still left in the dead eyes of Gamal, and she saw collapsed figures all about her. She’d gone to full armor in an effort to protect herself, her “piggyback brains” from being assaulted by the humans who caught on to how she’d reconfigured the man’s body to accommodate the telepathic organs, the biological computer that granted her the seemingly impossible powers necessary to shake the world.

No one around her was conscious. She tried to move, but all around her was crust; her flesh turned to ash with black, ugly sap crawling from cracks in her surface.

Don’t have long, she thought. Nehushtan will awaken the least injured with the least energy first, then tap into him.

Neekra stretched to reach for one of her spawn. Some must have been left alive.

And there were. She could feel two of them, staying deep in the rubble of crypts that had been struck by grenades and bullets. Those two hid, knowing that there would be others to come to her aid immediately. Neekra had programmed them that way, making certain she had a backup plan in case things went to crap.

They had gone beyond crap. The spark of life in the carcass she inhabited was fading fast, and as she did a mental inventory of herself, she saw the deterioration of the protein strings that made up her “telepathic antennae”—the webbing of natural materials that turned her into a living psychic transmitter, able to manipulate thought as well as cellular structure. The protein “biocomputers” also could create the telekinetic fields that gave her superhuman strength and durability far beyond even her father’s brute force at his prime.

She pushed out a blackened polyp of tar, separating cracked chunks of Gamal’s ashen corpse. Gamal had been one of the people she had been drawn to, three charismatic figures who would be attuned to her, to be her pawns. Neekra’s body was somewhere, operating on autopilot, chosen by Enlil to be the guardian of the tomb of Negari, her lover. Neekra was an excised intelligence, her lobotomized body an engine of destruction whose sole purpose was the death of anyone foolish enough to attempt a rescue of the Igigi who dared to ascend to unearned godhood.

Whether Neekra’s wandering ghost was an afterthought, or a callously calculated punishment, she knew she was a nomad. She was an infection, capable of only infesting one host at a time. To find that host, she was limited to a psyche that could handle the power of her mind and spirit; otherwise she would burn him out, but it still needed to be a mind that she could overpower.

Now, all she had for a body, for a means of travel, was the combination of two blobs of semisentient snot that she’d birthed from Gamal’s body. She could last in them for a while, but it was nothing like she could do with a host such as her last one.

She injected what little of herself was left into their cytoplasm, mixing with them, letting the two amorphous entities unite. They each had undamaged protein string centers—four, in fact—which she laced together into a matrix that could sustain her until she could recover.

With that, the blob carrying her consciousness stretched out pseudopods, latching on to imperfections on the ground, swinging itself along, making for the corkscrew that would lead her to the surface.

The light-sensitive sensory organs in the membranes of her host body cringed at the overabundance of sunlight, even though dawn wouldn’t break for another five minutes.

All she needed was to scurry to a thicket of thorns, burrow under the sand and wait.

Hiding was her only solace, at least until she could find someone, something.

And then it would be a game of catch-up.

Kane and Durga had been put on a trail now. They had been after her hiding place. There, they would subdue her body and then attempt to destroy it. But by battling her, they would loosen what bonds held Negari in place.

Doing that would free him, and if Neekra had caught up by then, she’d retrieve herself and awaken as she was meant to be.

She crawled under the graying, ever-lightening sky across the arid dirt toward the dry grasses of the tree line.

A scaled foot set down in her path.

It was Durga. He’d vowed to destroy her, and now she was vulnerable to him. The mega-cellular form she was trapped in couldn’t withstand the deadly venom he stored in his fangs. He had used enough to blind her previous avatar, but...

“Don’t cringe from me,” Durga spoke gently.

He knelt before her on the dirt and reached out, cupping her balloon-like form.

“You and I have a journey to complete,” he whispered, cooing to her as if she were a baby, scooping her up and cradling her in his arms.

“Come now, darling,” Durga said to her. “We have to find your tomb.”

Confused, weak, unable to communicate for the moment, she was wound in a blanket that prevented her from stabbing Durga’s skin with cilia, tiny little barbed stingers that could suck the blood from his flesh. The blanket protected her primitive visual stimulus organs, though, and concealed her from the burning heat of the sun.

She now rested in a bucket seat and heard the rattle then rumble of an engine firing to life. They had been in a jeep belonging to the Panthers of Mashona, the militia run by her old host, Gamal.

“Tell me where to drive, my sweet,” Durga whispered. Except it wasn’t a whisper. He was contacting her with his thoughts.

Neekra thought back to the pain and fire of the staff within her torso, a reminder of another era when the ancient artifact was used to send her to flight. When Suleiman Kahani battled the thing within the crypt after it had slain the slavers.

Neekra recognized what her father had wrought from her and recognized landmarks about her. Her battle with Kane had been the final key to remembering where she and her lover had been interred. Neekra, at Durga’s mercy, passed on that information.

She prayed that she would not regret this decision.

Chapter 1

Kane made certain that there was nothing left down below in the necropolis. For the past two days, his friends had been prisoners down there, captives of the two beings he searched for traces of. An apocalyptic battle with one of them had ensued after her erstwhile companion seemed to turn on her, warning Kane about his plan about destroying their alliance and the avatar of their ally.

The her was Neekra, a bodiless entity who had taken possession of a militia warlord by the name of Gamal. Neekra’s power was such that she was able to turn a tall, muscular, powerful man into a crimson-skinned goddess full of voluptuous curves and able to give “birth” to amorphous spawn. Those things she created had been the basis for vampire mythology, semiliquid entities that inserted themselves into corpses, wearing their carcasses like suits of meat. Neekra, or her issue, had been around the world, creating a universe of mythologies surrounding the walking dead, but here, in Africa, was where she “lived.” When Kane came to Africa, summoned by an artifact that had been ancient in the time of Atlantis and was attributed to King Solomon of the Bible, Neekra sought him out and psychically attacked him and the one Kane learned later was her ally.

Neekra’s psychic imprisonment of Kane was a testing of the waters. Kane shuddered at the thought that instead of the warlord Gamal, it could have been him, his physique telekinetically sculpted, organs reattributed and external appearance mutilated until he became the same rust-red feminine goddess who sought domination of the necropolis.

Neekra’s host was nearly invulnerable, ignoring grenade blasts and bursts of full-automatic gunfire directly into her face. Yet she wanted Kane and others to hunt for her prison, the place where she’d been interred for dozens of centuries, mind and flesh amputated from each other.

Gamal’s body had only been destroyed by the combination of the venom that was innate to a race of pan-terrestrial humanoids called the Nagah and the burning energies within the staff once wielded by Solomon and Moses. Neekra’s host was reduced to ash, tar-like blood turning the collapsed mound into what Kane’s dear friend Grant called “a greasy smear.”