Oblivion Stone

Though not a man given to introspection, Edwards was taken aback. “I think you want to be careful what you breathe in around here,” was all he could think to say. “Lot of nasty crap in the atmosphere just now. Quake churned up a lot of shit.”

The stubbled man nodded. “Thank you, sir. Won’t you stay and help us to rebuild?”

Edwards smiled and shook his head. “Not today, ace.”

As the people stood watching the strangers in their midst, grease from one of the cooking birds spit and the fire flared brighter for a second.

Wary of the locals around them, Edwards and Domi made their way slowly out of the sunken building, both of them feeling somewhat unsettled by what they had seen.

“Seven of them,” Edwards growled, “and they’re planning on rebuilding a ville. Waiting for the new baron to appear. Crazy.”

“The villes do shitty things to people,” Domi told him. “Mangle them.” She glanced back, confirming that no one was following them.

“But there’s no barons anymore,” Edwards pointed out. “They all vanished and became overlords. So what’s drawing these people back?”

Domi stopped for a moment, fixing Edwards with her demonic eyes. “Like I said, the villes mangle people. Give them tangle-brain. The Outlanders know this, and that’s why we didn’t come to the villes unless we had to.”

Edwards looked at the petite woman, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Didn’t you grow up in Cobaltville, Domi?” he asked.

“No,” Domi told him, shaking her head. “Settled there for money. Saw the way people were on the inside.”

“Hah.” Edwards laughed. “You make it sound like a prison.”

Domi said nothing. While she had recognized the differences in ville dwellers from Outlanders, she had never seen anything quite like this—people coming back, choosing to live in the ruins while they waited for the next epoch to begin. It was almost as if the villes themselves had some kind of magnetic pull over their citizens. Domi, who had spent a portion of her life as a sex slave in Cobaltville, knew little of the scientific principles of magnetism, but she understood fatal attraction all too well.

Outside of the wrecked skeleton that had once been a building, Domi and Edwards found Harrington sitting on a mound of rubble that looked out over the ruined streets. He had found three chunks of rubble and was juggling them while he waited for his partners.

“You find anything?” Harrington asked when he noticed Edwards and Domi approaching.

“What do you think you’re doing, man?” Edwards barked. “This is a danger zone—gotta keep alert.”

“I am alert,” Harrington replied petulantly. “You think I can juggle like this when I’m asleep?”

Edwards shook his head, muttering something about eccentric scientists.

“We found a wannabe Magistrate,” Domi explained, “and a group of people waiting for the next baron.”

Harrington sighed. “And so the system reboots itself,” he said. “Are we reverting back to…well, the Deathlands era? Jumped-up little barons fighting it out for their little piece of land?”

“There’s no baron,” Edwards clarified. “They just think there will be. So they’re waiting here, eating rats and setting up a hierarchy of Magistrates to keep the peace.”

Domi looked around her, taking in the ruined structures of the ville once more, seeing the mangled struts where its old Administrative Monolith had once stood noble and proud. “Somehow, the villes call to people,” she said. “Like boys in heat, hormones drawing them to the honey trap.”

Edwards shook his head. “You may be right, but it’s all way over my head.”

Chapter 2

“They say that the gods came from the sky,” Papa Hurbon said as he led the three-strong party through the Djévo room, his wooden leg clomping on the decking of the floor.

Ohio Blue’s response was to offer the man an indulgent smile. “I never held much stock in gods,” she admitted as they walked through the large room of the wooden shack, its air as hot and as damp as the night sweats.

Ohio Blue had brought two bodyguards with her—a man and a woman—who followed her and Hurbon as they paced slowly through the room, moving just as fast as Hurbon’s false leg would allow. As per the rules of the meeting, her bodyguards were unarmed, and in return Hurbon had kept his own people out of sight, though it was understood that they could appear in a moment upon his request.

Blue felt the man’s eyes play across her for a moment. She was a tall, slender woman in her midthirties, and her thick, long blond hair was cut in a peekaboo style, leaving only her left eye boldly visible. The eye was a brilliant blue, dazzling as a polished sapphire. She wore loose combat-style pants with a silk vest top that shimmered as she moved. Over this, despite the stifling heat of the Louisiana afternoon, was a neatly tailored jacket that was cut short, reaching barely to the small of her back. Her clothes, like her name, were blue.

“You ever meet one?” Papa Hurbon asked, his voice so low it sounded like the rumbling of distant thunder.

Hurbon was a large man, both tall and corpulent, with the lustrous, dark skin of an octoroon. His skin glistened with free-flowing rivulets of perspiration, which he wiped from his heavy brow as they trudged through the Djévo, passing glass jars filled with herbs, feathers, snail shells and other curios. Hurbon wore a sweat-stained undershirt and cutoffs, with a homemade sandal on his remaining foot. His right leg was missing below the knee, and a wooden strut had been shoved in its place that he used to totter forward with a lunging, rolling gait that looked as though he might overbalance at any moment. Hurbon’s shaved head was shaped like a bullet, wide at the bottom and tapering at the top, and when he smiled it was a gap-toothed maw that seemed to engulf the whole width of that impressive, bucketlike jaw. Both of Hurbon’s ears were pierced in multiple places, both at the lobes and along the archlike helix of the ear, and what appeared to be two tiny fetus skeletons depended from their bulbous lobes.

“I’ve never had that pleasure,” she admitted, her long blond tresses sweeping across her back as Ohio Blue shook her head.

Hurbon offered his wide, all-encompassing smile. “Ain’t no pleasure,” he told her. “You can take my word for that. Ezili Coeur Noir came here one time, ’bout a year ago. Mad bitch took my leg. Laughed the whole time she was doing it, too. When she was done she held it up before my congregation, blood spittin’ everywhere, and she laughed and told them to do the same. Mad bitch.”

Ohio blanched at the story. “And did they?”

Hurbon’s brow creased in a frown. “Did they what?”

“Remove their legs?”

Hurbon nodded. “Some did,” he said, resignation in his voice. “They wanted her blessing, lizard-skinned vision that she was. That sound crazy to you, Mam’selle?”

“Like I said, I never held much stock in gods,” Ohio told the corpulent man as they passed through an arched doorway and into the center of the voodoo temple.

Papa Hurbon stopped for a moment, openly admiring Blue’s shapely figure from head to toe. “With the gams on you, that’s probably for the best, little peach,” he said with a rich basso laugh.

Through the archway, the inner room was much smaller than the Djévo, roughly square and just nine feet from wall to wall. Lit by candles, this was a mirrored room, wherein one side balanced the other. Thus, it featured a door to the far side, precisely opposing the one that Ohio’s party had entered. Several figures could be seen milling about in the room beyond that far doorway, and Ohio’s bodyguards tensed as they eyed them through the gloom.

This inner room was uncluttered, holding just a few objects. A polished broadsword had been placed horizontally on the wall, resting there on two hooks, ornately weaved tassels drooping down from its leather-wrapped hilt. Two matching hooks had been drilled into the opposite wall and they held what appeared to be a human shinbone of roughly the same length as the sword, polished so that it shone in the flickering light of the candle flames. Two foot-high clay pots filled with the dried stalks of dead flowers sat at opposing corners of the room, placed at diagonals to each other.

A curious-looking chair waited in the center of the room. The chair appeared to be carved of some kind of plant root, and it had a seat and a back but apparently had no legs. Instead, the seat itself had been ignominiously placed atop a stack of house bricks, like some stripped-down automobile.

“Here she be,” Papa Hurbon rumbled, indicating the odd-looking chair.

Ohio appraised the strange chair for almost half a minute, pacing slowly around it to view it from all angles before she finally spoke in her soft drawl. “Where did it come from?” she asked, sapphire eye still peering at the chair.

Hurbon pointed to the ceiling. “Tumbled out of the sky,” he said, “just like my people told you. Gift from Ezili Coeur Noir. Instructed me to take care of it, tend to its needs. It gives visions in the head, makes you see beyond the Barriè.”

Blue looked quizzically at Hurbon for a moment until, finally, he elaborated.

“The Barriè, the spirit world,” he said. “So, you want?”

“How does it work?” Blue asked.

“Just sit down,” Hurbon encouraged, “and let the visions flow through you. Simple as that. Chair of the gods, you see?”

Ohio Blue looked dubious as she considered the man’s strange boast. Finally, she turned to her two bodyguards. “One of my people will test it,” she decided, “to verify your claim. If that is satisfactory to you.”

Hurbon shrugged. “The gods deserted me. What do I care?”

Ohio turned to her waiting bodyguards, who had assumed positions at either side of the entry door, their expressions grim. “Brigid? Kane?” she asked, addressing each in turn. “If one of you would be so kind…?”

Kane smiled sourly. A muscular man with steel-gray eyes and short, dark hair, Kane resembled a wolf, for his limbs were long and rangy and his body seemed furiously powerful, a coiled spring waiting to release. He was like a wolf in other ways, too, naturally adopting the role of pack leader and equally comfortable striking out on his own. Despite current circumstances, Kane was not a bodyguard, and nor was he an employee of the blond-haired trader, Ohio Blue. An ex-Magistrate, Kane was one of the Cerberus exiles. The Cerberus redoubt was hidden in Montana, and its residents were dedicated to the protection of humanity, tasked with freeing it from the hidden shackles that the alien Annunaki race had placed upon it. Kane’s role had taken him across the globe and beyond in his quest to eliminate the Annunaki’s nefarious meddling in the affairs of humankind, and his appearance here, as Ohio Blue’s bodyguard, was yet another instance of that ongoing struggle for freedom. He wore a ragged denim jacket and pants over the figure-hugging black weave of his shadow suit, which offered protection from radiation, contamination and could even withstand minor blunt-force trauma.

Ohio Blue was playing her own role admirably, Kane thought. An independent trader, Blue had a solid reputation in the Tennessee/Louisiana area and boasted a whole network of contacts through whom she could locate items of value and interest. As such, she had one important asset that the Cerberus team lacked—credibility among the minor players who occasionally ended up with something the Cerberus exiles might need. A recent meeting with Blue had resulted in Kane saving the woman’s life, and she had vowed to return the favor should he call on her to do so.

This operation, however, had not come at his urging but at hers. Aware of Kane’s interest in alien artifacts, Ohio Blue had contacted him with information regarding a possible sighting out here in Louisiana. In this case, Papa Hurbon, a houngan priest in a small voodoo sect hidden in the swampland, had come into possession of what was rumored to be a section of the Annunaki mother ship, Tiamat. It seemed that this odd-looking chair was that item, although Kane couldn’t be certain. He had been inside Tiamat during that final, frenetic battle that had resulted in the destruction of that incredible Annunaki starship, but he was hard-pressed to remember all of the details of the furniture that he had seen there. Kane nodded dourly toward the other bodyguard, indicating that she was better qualified to examine the chair.

The other bodyguard was a striking woman with an athletic body and vibrant long hair the red-gold color of sunrise. Her name was Brigid Baptiste and she had partnered with Kane ever since the pair had joined the then-embryonic Cerberus operation several years before. Brigid’s dazzling green eyes and high forehead suggested intelligence, while her full lips hinted at a more passionate aspect; in truth she was both of these things and more. An ex-archivist, Brigid Baptiste possessed an eidetic memory—more commonly known as a photographic one—with total recall for any item or text that she had seen for more than a few seconds. Dressed entirely in black, including a thin cotton shirt over her figure-hugging shadow suit and a snap-brim hat holding her hair out of her eyes, Brigid stepped forward and reached tentatively for the chair.

As the others watched, the beautiful redhead sat down on the barklike surface of the seat, settling herself until her back rested against the back of the chair itself.

Papa Hurbon leaned close to Brigid’s face, his broad smile forming once more on his lips. “Just make yourself comfortable there, little cherry,” he instructed. As the large man spoke, Brigid smelled something sickly sweet on his breath. “Let yourself go an’ the visions, they will flow through you.”

Sitting there, Brigid eyed the chair, confirming that it was of the same design as one she had seen when she had been aboard Tiamat with Kane just prior to the great starship’s destruction. Up close she recognized it, despite the damp, swamp-ring stain that had bleached away its original color. It was a seat from the bridge, a piece of salvage somehow fallen to Earth after the mighty spaceship had been destroyed. It was incomplete; the base was missing and Brigid was certain that its back part was missing a headrest. But, just as Hurbon himself had said, it was a chair of the space gods, fallen from the heavens, a gift to him from his lizard-skinned goddess.

Brigid slowed her breathing, closed her eyes and let the mysterious power of the Annunaki chair wash over her, waiting for the promised visions to begin. If what Papa Hurbon had said was true, then the visions from the spirit world might in fact be valuable reconnaissance information about their alien enemy. And if that was the case, then the chair itself could prove to be an invaluable asset to Cerberus.

Behind her eyelids, Brigid saw the familiar light-embracing darkness that was always there, a shadow playing across it as one of the people in the room moved across her field of vision. And for a moment there was nothing else. No great revelation, no fantastic visions of another world. She opened her eyes, fixing Hurbon with her emerald gaze. She was about to ask how long before the visions would begin, but he spoke first.

“Give it time, sweet cherry apple,” Hurbon said, the conviction in his voice clear. “I seen things there the likes o’ which man hain’t never seen before.”

Brigid smiled indulgently. “Time,” she agreed. She realized now what the sweet smell was that wafted off the man’s breath—he was high on narcotics, most likely painkillers for his missing leg. This voodoo priest didn’t need to sit in an alien chair to get visions—he was probably tripping most of his waking life, and who knew what his dreams were like.

Kane’s eyes met with Brigid’s momentarily, and he recognized the bubbling disappointment there. But even as he looked, he saw something change in Brigid’s appearance.

For just a second, Brigid saw something projected over the candlelit room, pinpricks of light hovering in place. “Do you see that?” she asked, her voice quiet, awestruck.

Hurbon chuckled. “The Barriè. Amazing, is it not?”

Brigid looked at the corpulent man as the pinpricks of light swirled across her vision. Stars. She was looking at the stars. It was a map, a star chart that could only be seen by the person occupying the chair. It was incredible.

Papa Hurbon, meanwhile, had turned back to Ohio, that broad, gap-toothed smile tugging at his lips. “Now, your people said something ’bout an art collector out near Snakefish,” he began.

“Ruined Snakefish,” Blue corrected automatically. The whole baronial ville had been wrecked by an earthquake recently and rumor had it there was barely anything of the old structure left. Yet another of the nine baronies fallen with the disappearance of the Annunaki.

“Think this might be something that your buyer be after?” Hurbon asked.

“For the right price,” Blue said nonchalantly. There was no art collector in Snakefishville; that was simply a lure to disguise the true significance of the item. Ohio turned to Brigid, looking for any indication that the redhead might give as to the item’s value to Cerberus, that she might begin negotiations.

Beneath the wide brim of her hat, Brigid offered a barely perceptible nod of her head, her long hair brushing at her shoulders. Right now, the strange chair was an eyesore that happened to have fallen into the lap of a drugged-up cultist. However, there was value here, and certainly Cerberus would be interested in testing the genetic makeup of the object to find out as much as they could about the Annunaki. If it possessed star charts that could locate the Annunaki’s home planet, for instance, such knowledge would be of inestimable value.

“Vision chair like that,” Hurbon continued, “visions as big as the sky, that’s got to be real valuable to your client. Art collector sees visions like that and he won’t need to buy any more art.”

Hurbon laughed at his own observation as Brigid began to rise from the strange rootlike seat. As she did so, her hand brushed against the water-stained armrest and something clicked within. Brigid stared in shock as a series of thornlike spikes appeared along the arms of the chair, and several of them pierced the heel of her hand where it still rested against the chair itself.

“Oh, you gone done it now, haven’t you, girl?” Hurbon muttered, and a rich laugh came from deep in his chest.

As the four of them watched, the thorns were turning into tendrils, reaching out from the surface of the chair’s arms like a plant’s shoots emerging from the soil. In a second, the waving tendrils latched on to Brigid as she struggled to get up out of the chair, wrapping around her arms before she could pull away.

“What’s it doing?” Brigid asked, an edge of panic in her tone as she found she could no longer rise from the alien seat.

The tendrils continued to pull Brigid’s struggling form back down into the seat, wrapping around her wrists and bonding them to the armrests like manacles.

“I can’t move,” Brigid said as she struggled against the squirming tendrils.

Kane fixed his steely stare on the voodoo priest. “You have to switch this thing off right now,” he insisted.

Hurbon shrugged. “Ah, the chair chooses her own lovers,” he said, a mellow laugh peppering his words. “I only find them for her.”

As Hurbon continued to chuckle, the shoots rushed upward, grasping the underside of Brigid’s right arm as her bare skin brushed against them. In a split second, the tendrils wrapped around her arm, more and more of them branching from the first few that snapped around her, spreading to form a network of veins across her flesh. Brigid gritted her teeth as her arms were yanked down toward the armrest, the budding tendrils wrapping over them to lock her in place. Despite her physical fitness, the chair seemed to have no trouble pulling Brigid down, drawing her closer with the viselike grip of those thin, plantlike tendrils.

“What’s happening?” Brigid asked fearfully.

“You triggered it,” Hurbon stated, laughing once again.

“I just touched it,” Brigid said. “You tricked me.”

Despite her struggles, Brigid was pulled back down into the seat once more, and she squirmed at an angle as she tried to right herself and get away from the alien chair.

Calmly, Kane bent down and pulled a combat knife from the sheath he wore at his ankle. “Quit struggling, Baptiste,” he told her. “You’re just making it worse.”

Brigid’s eyes went wide with shock when she saw Kane move toward her with the lethal-looking blade. “Kane, don’t do anything crazy, okay?” she said through gritted teeth, letting out a yelp as the thorns pressed against her supple flesh.

Kane eyed the tendrils as more and more appeared, growing from the arms and back of the chair and then wrapping themselves tightly around his beautiful companion’s struggling form. The strange tendrils were already cinched over both of Brigid’s arms and had reached around to encompass her pale, slender neck, pulling her so that she sat upright despite her squirming. “Stay still,” Kane instructed. “I’ll cut you free.”

Hurbon laughed louder when he heard that, as though the whole thing was nothing more than a joke.

Ohio Blue fixed the voodoo priest with a fierce look. “Is this your idea of a game?” she challenged. “I had a collector lined up for this piece, but I don’t think it’s money you’re after.”

“You’re astute for a nonbeliever,” Hurbon growled. As if to punctuate his response, Papa Hurbon swung one of his meaty arms at the blue-clad trader, moving fast despite his size and disability. In a second he had knocked her to the floor with a loud, open-palmed slap.

Ohio cried out in pain as she slid across the wooden floorboards, a loose nail tearing the thin cotton of her pant leg.

In the Annunaki chair, Brigid was straining back and forth, shaking her head left and right as the thorny appendages began to burble around her face, covering her eyes. “It hurts,” she yelped, and Kane saw the tiny runnels of blood begin to snake across her flesh amid a glistening sheen of sweat.

“Stay still,” Kane repeated, pressing his left hand against Brigid’s for a moment. Then he swept the knife rapidly through the tendrils, cutting through the first dozen strands that had laced up her arm.

But before Kane could get any further with his task, the vast form of Papa Hurbon reached for him from behind, pulling the ex-Mag away from the chair in a mighty bear hug before flinging him to the floor. Kane slid across the worn floorboards before thudding into the far wall next to Ohio Blue with a bone-shaking crash.

“The chair’s chosen,” Hurbon barked. “You leave her be now, boy.”

Head reeling, Kane struck out from where he lay, sweeping his legs out and catching Hurbon’s own wooden leg as the massive figure loomed over him. With a howl, Hurbon’s bulbous form fell sideways and he lost his balance, arms reaching out as he slammed against the wall.

“You chose the wrong victim for your little scheme,” Kane snarled, pulling himself up off the floor.

“Ain’t you been listening, boy?” Hurbon snapped as he struggled on the floor like a beached whale. “I don’t choose—Ezili Coeur Noir’s chair does that.”

Writhing in the chair, Brigid yelped as the weird tendrils squirmed around her face, wrapping around her, covering her eyes. Then she felt the tendrils worming up into her nostrils, pushing between her lips, and she felt as if panic might consume her at that moment.

But something even stranger than that was happening. Within her mind, hovering in her field of vision, a star chart appeared with crystal clarity. Planets rotated in their orbits, and as Brigid’s eyes were drawn to them, tags appeared to identify each, written in a script that even she could not decipher despite her incredible base of knowledge.

It was terrifying, that feeling of being trapped in the all-encompassing embrace of the nightmare chair, and a part of Brigid felt the rising panic of claustrophobia as the tendrils snaked over her face. But another part of her, her rational mind, marveled at that star chart playing across her eyes, shifting with the movements of her irises, shifting with her very thoughts themselves.