Oblivion Stone

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.

Chapter 4

“The Hindus believe that everyone should bathe in the Ganges at least once in their lives,” Clem Bryant explained, a mischievous twinkle in his clear blue eyes. He was a tall man in his late thirties, with a trimmed goatee and dark hair swept back from a high forehead.

Bryant’s companion, Mariah Falk, looked at him dubiously. “You want me to—” she air quoted “—‘bathe’ in that?” A slender woman in her midforties, Mariah had short brown hair streaked with gray. While not conventionally pretty, she had an infectious smile and an inherent inquisitiveness that made her a delight to be with.

Both Bryant and Falk were Cerberus personnel. He was an oceanographer turned chef, while she was an expert geologist. Like many of the Cerberus personnel, the pair shared an unusual bond—as government employees, they had been cryogenically frozen at the end of the twentieth century and placed in the Manitius Moon Base, where they were protected from the subsequent nuclear holocaust that ravaged the Earth. They had been awoken two hundred years later, and found themselves in a world blighted by the horrors that had superseded civilization in the United States of America in the wake of the nukecaust.

“I’ve done it,” Clem told her as they stood at the head of eight wide stone steps leading down to the flowing, muddy waters of the mighty Ganges River in India. The steps were a pale sandy color and there were numerous other people there, locals going about their business, washing their clothes, filling buckets that they rested on yokes across their shoulders, Brahmans washing the soles of their feet. No one seemed to take much notice of the two Westerners who were dressed in the immaculate clothes of the Cerberus redoubt, and whose skin was so much paler, as if they had never seen the sunlight.

Wrinkling her nose, Mariah looked out over the silty wash that swirled past the foot of the steps. “I don’t know, Clem,” she said. “How long ago did you do this?”

“I took a gap year after college,” Clem told her. “Traveled a little. Many Hindus believe that the Ganges is the source of all life. They hold it in the highest respect. They say that Brahma washed the feet of Vishnu here and they believe that it has the power to wash away an individual’s sins.”

“I don’t have any sins,” Mariah said, shaking her head and turning away from the murky water as sunlight twinkled across its surface in dazzling white highlights.

Clem took Mariah’s hand and squeezed it, looking into her bright eyes. “I’m sorry, Mariah,” he said. “Bad choice of destination. Next time you can choose where we go.”

Mariah looked from Clem to the wide river, then back to Clem once more. “You really bathed in it?”

Clem shrugged. “I…paddled,” he admitted evasively.

Mariah let go of the oceanographer’s hand and crouched down, unlacing the dusty white pumps she wore on her feet. “Okay,” she said, “I can do that.”

The sun beat down as, hand in hand, the two Cerberus personnel made their way down eight sand-colored steps to the water’s edge.

Mariah looked down at the murky water, watching the silt swirl within it as the many activities there churned sand up in little cloudlike bursts. “Am I going to catch anything?” she asked Clem, wincing and gritting her teeth.

“Only enlightenment,” Clem assured her as Mariah pulled her hand away from his grasp.

In a final rush, Mariah took the last few paces on her bare feet and waded into the flowing Ganges, letting it lap around her bare ankles and calves as she held her shoes aloft. “Eeeee,” she cheered, “it’s warm.”

Sedately, Clem followed her in, feeling the water flowing over his sandals, splashing around his feet and soaking the bottoms of his pant legs. He turned to Mariah as she held her pumps over the sun-dappled surface of the water and tentatively waded a little deeper, making her way from a group of local women who were busy washing their clothes. To Clem’s eyes, she looked happy and, for all the activity going on around her, she looked at peace.

Clem called to her as he made his way over to where his companion was now standing hip-deep in the flowing river. “Can’t you feel your sins washing away?” he inquired.

Mariah dipped down and, to Clem’s surprise, ducked her head under the water for a moment before resurfacing and shaking the water from her dark hair. “Oh, Clem, how did you ever talk me into this?”

“I don’t recall,” Clem replied with a laugh. “Did I promise infinite being, infinite consciousness and infinite bliss?”

“No,” Mariah said, “you said you’d teach me to scuba dive. And take me dancing.”

Clem shook his head. “I can’t imagine that I would have agreed to the dancing.”

“Are you saying you won’t dance with me, Bryant?” Mariah asked coquettishly, reaching her arms around his shoulders.

Placing his own arms around her waist, Clem pulled Mariah closer and together they danced in the flowing waters of the River Ganges, Mariah’s shoes still dangling from her crooked fingers, while all around them people carried on with their daily chores, oblivious to the couple’s joy.

Mariah was still laughing five minutes later as Clem led her back to shore and they ascended the wide stone steps. “I can’t believe you made me do that,” she said. “I’m soaked through.”

Clem stretched his arms wide and turned his head toward the sky. “The sun will dry you off,” he told her. His own clothes—a light ensemble of shirt and cargo pants—had stuck to him from the soaking that he had received in the river. “I can’t believe I’m back here. I feel like I’m twenty-one all over again.”

Mariah walked barefoot up the steps, her sopping pumps dripping in her left hand. “Me, too,” she said. “With everything we go through at Cerberus, it’s funny to think that places like this still exist. It feels like they haven’t changed in a thousand years.”

“India suffered in the global conflict as much as any country,” Clem told her. “It’s just that New York and Washington, London and Moscow—those locales have been relegated to the history books. While places like this—” he swept his hand about him to indicate the magnificent vista of the wide river “—they’re eternal.”