Infestation Cubed

One, Lakesh, was on a journey to what used to be the West Coast of the United States of America in the hope of finding something along the Pacific Ocean that would give them an edge over Ullikummis. The other, Brigid Baptiste, was missing, perhaps a prisoner and tortured by the very stone being they were being pursued by.

Kane looked at the corpse for a few moments more, the last of the tumorous growth dissolving and sliming off the dead man’s pate.

“Where are you, Baptiste?”

Chapter 6

Miles to the south of the hammock that Kane and his allies stood upon, a rusted old ship bobbed beyond the breakwater of the river delta. The reddish mottling and decay on the hull and the superstructure were a disguise, a sham propagated to lower the profile of the groaning craft. The master of this vessel, a being known as Orochi, looked through plastic sheeting that had been dimmed and silk-screened on one side to be impenetrable, resembling ancient glass, but provided him with a clear view of the waters and the shore.

Orochi was a tall man, and just for his height he would have been unusual for a Japanese, but the truth of the matter was that his resemblance to most humans went no further than the shape of his body and its ability to fit into a sleek black uniform with yellow trim. Orochi’s skin was a shimmering sheet of small, reptilian scales that flowed and flexed like silk. Bright yellow-green eyes shone from under a heavily scaled brow, whose thick octagonal plates formed a ridge where the short hairs of eyebrows would have been on a mammal. Across his upper lip, under a short, oddly human nose, was a similar line of lengthy, slender scales. They were stiff but hairlike, flowing in curving waves to droop over the corners of a wide, thin-lipped mouth, and on the chin, another nest of these thin, translucent scales dangled, giving him the appearance of a classic Southern gentleman with a blond Vandyke.

Orochi was of the Watatsumi, a race long exiled from the shattered ruins of their original home in what used to be the islands of Japan. There were thousands of islands that were the remnants of the island nation, smashed apart and shattered, akin to a plate dashed to the floor.

That was the appearance aboveground, where the sea had rushed in to fill the cracks between the remaining bits of land. There were people still in the archipelago aboveground, but the nuclear onslaught that formed skydark had been far more transformative than the survivors had ever expected. Beneath the surface the Watatsumi lived in an extensive system of tunnels and caves, empty lava tubes. They had remained hidden from humankind, nestled in the network they had called the Spine of the Dragon until the cataclysm happened. When the earthshaker nukes shook the very edge of the tectonic plate that Japan sat upon, things became much worse. Some of the lava tubes and caverns had been closed off for millennia, so that the humanoid reptilians didn’t have remaining records of their existence. Shattered walls of heavy obsidian glass formed doorways to a primeval forest below even the Wyvern’s realm, a jungle filled with monstrosities not seen since millions of years before man walked the Earth.

Things were not completely fine, Orochi knew. There was a reason why he’d been sent to the other side of the globe to seek out a spot to engage in experimentation. The Watatsumi were in need of some way to control monsters that had shared their caves. Only the discovery of the piggybackers here in the bay that used to be known as Gulf Breeze gave them an idea, an opportunity by which they could tame the massive and powerful reptiles who shared their home.

Orochi frowned as he heard the buzzing alert from the ship’s comm station. “What is it now?”

Kondo, a younger member of the crew, turned from his console, looking upon the group leader with a momentary reverence, a sign of unwavering respect that had been instilled in all of the Wyvern’s military since the day they were old enough to be called grown. “Captain, we lost contact with two of the drone units who were acquiring new conversion subjects.”

“Confirmed loss of contact?” Orochi asked, striding toward the young officer.

“Absolutely,” Kondo replied. “Electronics damaged. A third had been struck, but its neural net is still working, though transmission is spotty.”

Orochi’s chartreuse eyes narrowed as he looked at the screen.

“The moment we started experiencing malfunctions, we called them back,” Kondo said.

“Good,” Orochi said, looking at the monitor, distracted from his subordinate’s reassurances. He wasn’t the kind of man to take a sudden change in luck lightly. Someone, after a year of experimentation, had figured out something about their hooded minions.

“I want you to activate a pod of gators,” Orochi said. “Set them after the group the men had difficulty with.”

Kondo looked up at his commander. “We’re still not sure if we can keep the alligators under control if we set them into action.”

“Well, that’s the whole damned point of this journey. If the parasite works well enough for us to remotely control crocodilians, then we can turn around and go home,” Orochi countered.

The officer nodded.

Orochi stood back from the console. He was under orders from the Watatsumi high command to utilize the secrets of the Gulf Breeze discoveries to combat the monsters from below the Dragon’s Spine, but he also had a second mission, one that he had managed to expand. Under the guise of influencing more complex mammalian brains, testing the limits of the electronically influenced parasites, he’d grown an army of specimen retrievers.

Separated from home by thousands of miles, half the surface of the Earth, in fact, Orochi had free reign to alter paradigms, something made easier by recruiting scientists and officers who were true to the cause. The surface of the Earth had been denied to the Watatsumi for too long.

The parasitic entity would be their key to ruling the surface of this scarred, tumultuous world again.

THE CAJUN HEARD THE sound of gunfire in the distance, then looked back at the people who had hired him. Agrippine was not someone who relished the idea of venturing into these swamps, thanks to the disappearances of the past few months. But when the New Order’s missionaries arrived, bearing payment and a bounty for the heads of two people in particular, both of them former Magistrates, he wasn’t going to let easy money get away from him.

The woman who was in charge, a strange figure who was tall, despite the cloak that reached up over the top of her head, shadowing half of her face, seemed as if she knew the sound.

“Sounds like we’re close,” Agrippine said.

The woman nodded. She didn’t speak much. Indeed, she had simply laid down a bag of coins and photographs of the two targets and said, “You will get the rest when they are mine.”

Since then, she’d remained silent. Agrippine didn’t mind, especially since she kept to herself, staying out of the way as the motor launch crawled down the river. She hadn’t come alone, but the rest of the New Order minions with her were both talkative and cooperative when it came to running his ship. In return, Agrippine had been given the money to stock up on weapons so that he could equip them to aid him in the hunt for Kane and Grant.

She looked over the weapons, examining them as if she was investigating an ancient, outdated artifact, her shadowed face expressionless as her fingers went along the surfaces of the guns.

“Do they meet with your approval?” Agrippine asked.

She looked up from the rifle in her hands, then extended it, butt first, so he could take it from her. She stayed quiet.

This was a matter for employees, not her, Agrippine surmised from her reaction.

“Mistress, should we move in?” one of the New Order’s expedition asked.

She lifted her hand, halting any further discussion.

Whoever this woman was, she had authority enough to silence a man easily one hundred pounds heavier and larger than she was. Her focus was on the distance, lips shut, breathing easily.

She turned to Agrippine, and for the first time in a week, she spoke.

“This is where I take my leave,” she said. “Grogan is in charge.”

Agrippine looked at the big man who had asked to be loosed upon the source of the gunfire. Grogan, aside from being much heavier than the woman, was tall and carved from lean, long muscle. He was formidable, and had been much more talkative than the woman, though he continued to defer to her leadership.

“Right,” Agrippine said. “And what will you be doing?”

“That is not your concern,” she replied coldly. She had a satchel with her that she picked up, swinging it over one slender but muscular shoulder. “Your concern is earning the rest of your money. Fail, Grogan kills you. Succeed, Grogan pays you.”

“What if Grogan dies?” Agrippine asked, casting a sideways glance toward the man.

“I selected him for this task. He will not fail,” she said. It was if her proclamations were etched into stone. No inflection of doubt haunted any of her words. She nodded to one of the New Order crewmen, who extended a plank toward the shore.

“Where are you going now?” Agrippine asked.

“I have a task to attend to elsewhere,” she answered.

“Where?” Agrippine pressed.

Green eyes flashed in the shadows of her hood. Her mouth turned down into a frown, then she took a cleansing breath. “If you insist on knowing, then I am off to Africa.”

Agrippine tilted his head. “What?”

She strode down the gangplank, moving with grace and balance, her satchel seeming to glow with a brighter intensity.

“Africa? That’s across an ocean!” Agrippine shouted.

The woman turned and pointed to Grogan, who rested a large, muscular hand on the Cajun’s shoulder.

“Do not shout. You may be heard,” Grogan explained.

“But…how is she getting there?”

There was a flicker of light out of the corner of his eye, and when Agrippine turned his head to identify the flash, he noticed that the woman was gone.

“She has her ways,” Grogan answered. “She is beloved of Ullikummis, and her gifts are endless.”

“What…what the hell?” Agrippine asked.

“Mistress Haight is on her way,” Grogan said. “We should be on ours.”

Agrippine turned, wondering just where Brigid Haight really was going and how she’d disappeared so fast. If he’d known of Annunaki technology, and the gemlike threshold she’d carried in her satchel, his understanding might have been more complete, but as it was, there was no way he could even imagine that she possessed the means of opening up holes in space-time and projecting herself through them with but a thought.

Brigid Haight’s caress activated the alien artifact, itself a weapon that made even the assault rifles that Agrippine had supplied seem like mere sharpened twigs by comparison.

And then, if Agrippine was aware of such power, such advanced means of matter transmission, he would have wondered why he and his guns were needed in the first place.

Haight had her reasoning and purpose.

It was for neither he nor Grogan to know.

THE REFUGEE CAMP WAS quiet, which unnerved Grant slightly. Even in the depths of the Tartarus Pits, the slums that nestled in the shadow of the barony of Cobaltville, there was usually the chatter of laughter, pipings of music, a constant drone of conversation amid the squalor and everyday struggle for life.

Grant towered over the people who had populated the camp. Young and poorly fed, dark eyes tracking his every step, children stopped their chores to watch him closely.

Grant was something that people didn’t see every day. Well over six feet tall, with a powerful body crammed into a suit made of skintight space-age polymers, he was an impressive sight. His skin was dark, being an African American, but his tone was even deeper than the sunburned flesh of the people who lived in the wiregrass region. The people here were a mix of ethnicities, ranging from Caucasian to American Indian, and all of them had been sun-roasted to a similar bronzed hue several shades lighter than Grant’s.

It was the size, the easy power that he carried in his stride, that attracted the most attention. His own attention was drawn to the fact that he saw very few men.

Demothi had said that the raiders had been persistent in attacking this particular camp, stealing away with the few men who had managed to escape the initial harvests by the Hooded Ones. Seeing the makeup of the population of the camp was still a surprise to Grant.

Close to three hundred people were present. The raiders didn’t seem to be interested in women, which was unusual. In his dealings with pirates and bandits, Grant had never known them to pass up the chance to take females into captivity. If they couldn’t be used for easy sexual gratification, they were often easy to cow into servitude, made to do the chores that the cold-bloods felt were beneath their interests.

Suwanee had been quiet as they walked along, her face drooped in sullen shadow. She’d only looked up to navigate particularly soft and spongy terrain, struggling to keep her balance like the rest of them. Grant had attributed that to her distrust of the newcomers among them—himself, Kane and Rosalia—but with the gender imbalance in the camp, he was starting to understand the anger seething just below her surface.

The people here were quiet, focusing on menial tasks out of the need to distract themselves from the losses in their families. Grant could figure why Kane had been astute enough to restrain himself from opening fire on the Hooded Ones. Between the disgusting growths and the electronics attached to their heads, the men they had battled were more drones and victims than actual villains. Something was spreading an infestation among the men, creating an army that would be under long-distance control. The electronics had to be operated by cybernetic impulse, the growths some form of parasite that had either hallucinogenic or will-numbing excretion.

Grant rubbed his brow. “You’ve been hanging around Brigid too much.”

Kane paused, looking over his shoulder at his friend. “Thinking about what’s happening to this camp?”

“It’s like she’s still here with us,” Grant answered. “I can almost hear her talking about mind-control secretions.”

“You’d almost think we were capable of learning, eh?” Kane asked.

“We’d be damned fools if we didn’t. Other than that, this is pretty grim shit,” Grant said. “I don’t see a man who isn’t as healthy as Demothi around, unless we’re looking at 12 or under.”

“That’s what I made out, too,” Kane said. “About 300 here, we can see about another 150 men, given the adult women present?”

“One hundred and fifty men,” Grant murmured. “That’s a lot of people wearing those funky blobs.”

“An army,” Kane added. “Minus two, and they died because we damaged them.”

“I know that I was looking for a real knockout past those heavy hoods,” Grant said. “What about you?”

“I was tired of the guy I was fighting getting back up,” Kane said. “I wasn’t aiming to kill him, though.”

“The one Rosie shot, he took a chest full of bullets,” Grant added. “I don’t think he’ll last too long. He’ll bleed out but he didn’t die.”

Kane frowned. “Not right away, which means if they come at us in force, we’re going to need a lot of luck or head shots to put them down.”

“You’re talking about the freaks?” Rosalia asked.

Kane nodded. “Especially the one you tried to chill with a full magazine.”

“Still, you two did well enough dealing with them when you weren’t trying to leave them dead,” Rosalia replied. “We can’t say that they’re unstoppable.”

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