LITMIR.BIZ

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Ripples in the dirt rose, and then it seemed to telescope inward, rocks crashing downward. She knew that she was dozens of yards from ground zero of the blast and that the caverns below would absorb most of the concussive force of the detonation, but even so, the earth surged and heaved.

      Jets of rancid air and dust blew out from cracks burst between solid rock by the shattering explosion. Clouds rose into the midmorning sky, thick and roiling, turning a sunny day to darkness. The roar of crushing rock from below fooled her, for an instant, into believing that the mother of all thunderstorms slashed down on the six people.

      “Grant doesn’t fool around when it comes time to blow shit up,” Lyta said softly.

      Nathan shook his head. “Considering what they did to the Kongamato, I’m not surprised.”

      Lyta glanced to one side. Thurpa stood alone, looking down into the dirt. His interest had been momentarily snagged by the explosion, but now he withdrew back into himself and stared at the ground.

      The cobra-like young man, who had shown her such care and concern a few days before, no longer let himself feel like one of the group. She walked over to him.

      “Thurpa?”

      Amber eyes opened, turned toward her.

      “Come on, let’s get going before we’re wearing an inch of cemetery dust,” she said, leaning toward him, bumping her shoulder against his.

      Thurpa turned up one corner of his mouth. “I’ll join you guys in the truck.”

      Lyta reached up, lacing her fingers with his. She could feel the hardness of the scales on the inner pads of his fingers and across his palm. At first, he seemed reluctant to give her a squeeze, but she pressed harder. The scale pads had been stiffer than normal skin but not sharp edged; they obviously were worn down by day-to-day operation, or maybe it was just a case of natural evolution. Pointy, jagged edges on a palm got in the way of everyday life. With too tough a set of skin on the bits that needed tactile feedback, they’d be effectively crippled, not as if it had been the scales on the soles of his feet.

      He was warm, and his scales were soft and smooth. When he squeezed her fingers, managing a little bit of a smile, he was gentle. “Kane mentioned that you might be interested in me...”

      “That man may be jumping the gun. I just lost my fiancé,” she whispered.

      Lyta quickly stood on her tiptoes, bringing her full lips close to his ear hole. “But he ain’t barking up the wrong tree.”

      Thurpa leaned away, looking her over. “I wish that I could...”

      Lyta cut him off and elbowed him in the ribs, pointing to the sky. “Looks like we’re gonna get...”

      “Come on!” Brigid Baptiste shouted from their pickup truck, untouched for days since the Cerberus group hid it to the side in order to ambush the militia group who had her in a slave queue.

      The two ran for the truck. Nathan was in the bed, holding up a tarp. Thurpa lifted Lyta up and under the canvas, then bowed his head as dust, sand and tiny pebbles came raining down. Lyta reached out and took his forearm, pulling with all the strength of her legs to bring him up and into the truck bed. Kane also was under the canvas, helping Nathan hold up the protective tarp, while Grant and Brigid settled into the cab.

      The sound of tiny objects rattled off the roof of the cap, snapping and popping on the canvas that Nathan and Kane used as an improvised umbrella.

      Grant fired up the engine once most of the debris settled around them, turning on headlights and windshield wipers to see through the remaining cloud of airborne particles and to scrape layers of dirt from the glass. He looked through the back sliding window into the cab as Kane pushed the tarp back, letting the gravel spill out through the netting and the lowered tailgate. As the pickup gained speed, the gravel and dust poured as a trail behind them, kicking up a swirling cloud.

      The four people in the bed of the truck immediately got to work making certain the dust was swept out. The last thing they needed was an easy way for someone to track them. Without the dust fully expunged, there’d always be something kicking off the truck, leaving a smoky trail showing recent passage and making them much more visible from the air.

      So far, except for the Kongamato, Durga and Neekra hadn’t shown means of aerial surveillance, but then, Durga himself had kept an Annunaki skimmer in his employ back in Garuda. If the Nagah prince had the wherewithal to find cloning facilities, a means of pumping out mutant soldiers like the not-so-bright “brothers” of Thurpa or the aforementioned Kongamato, aerial surveillance wasn’t out of the question at all.

      Lyta had been lucky enough not to have seen the beasts and their wing-arms with musculature and power akin to a bull-gorilla’s. Blobs reanimating corpses, making them like legendary vampires in strength and agility, were bad enough. The Kongamato themselves, with their bat-wings, had been a pure nightmare.

      A nightmare that she, and her three companions in the bed of the truck, kept an eye out for by scanning the skies. While Grant set up the explosives in the underground cavern, Lyta and Nathan went to work gathering ammunition and extra firearms and loading them into storage lockers on the truck. It was hard work, but preparation was necessary. They had been going up against the tomb that Neekra sought and didn’t have an idea of what they could expect there.

      They had picked up rocket launchers among the arsenal, though Lyta had been present when the others opened fire on Neekra’s latest avatar and wasn’t convinced that rockets would be enough. That feminine body, composed of no more than human flesh, ignored entire magazines of automatic gunfire and close-range blasts of hand grenades. Maybe an antitank rocket could have done some damage to that incarnation of her.

      What were they going to find at Neekra’s home?

      What else could Durga call upon?

      Thurpa looked worried, but his concern seemed to be much more than what they would run into; it was also what his role would be. The young man had learned that his presumptions of being a recent recruit had been simply an illusion, false memories entered into his mind. He had been able to transmit the healing energies of Nehushtan, Nathan Longa’s responsibility, to Durga. What other controls and connections did that fallen prince hold over Thurpa?

      She reached out, resting her hand on his knee. It took a few moments before Thurpa’s vision focused, instead of gazing glassily at the recently swept bed of the pickup truck. He rewarded her with a slight smile, resting his hand atop hers.

      “You have friends here,” Lyta said.

      “I know that,” Thurpa replied. “Which makes me all the more worried of what I might do to you.”

      “We’ll be expecting trouble,” Kane mentioned. “We don’t want to hurt you, and we know you don’t want to cause us any trouble. But we can protect Lyta and Nathan if necessary.”

      Lyta glanced toward Kane. He was a large man, six feet in height, with powerful ropes of muscle in his upper body, akin to the musculature of a wolf. His eyes were a cool blue, and now, in the light of his words, those orbs seemed especially predatory. The warrior had done some amazing things, first rescuing her, then protecting her from the freakish amorphous blobs of Neekra, and then in subsequent battles.

      She thought about how Thurpa measured up to him. The young man gave up four inches of height and thirty pounds to the explorer from America. While the Nagah had fangs and venom, and a layer of scales that might armor him somewhat, Lyta had little illusion that those would make up for Kane’s greater size, strength and experience.

      The hardness in Kane’s gaze softened, and he added, “We won’t let you hurt them or yourself.”

      “Thank you,” Thurpa said softly.

      * * *

      GRANT, BEHIND THE wheel of the pickup truck, kept his voice low, allowing the Commtact on his jaw to do most of the work of transmitting sound into Brigid’s and Kane’s Commtact receivers. Between the jostling of the truck on the roads and the relative solitude of

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