LITMIR.BIZ

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Kane said with a grimace. “I have a gun. If I wanted you dead, you’d have been cold meat the minute you waved that little piece of shit in my face. And you saw me fighting the hoods. You still have a hand attached to this arm. I’m being patient and nice to you, damn it.”

      “Anyone fighting the villes got to be a good guy.” The chubby one spoke up. “I’m Hachi. The one she called Farting Gator…”

      The old man chuckled at the reference, interrupting Hachi. “I’m Demothi. Just call me Dem.”

      Kane nodded and shook the old man’s hand. As thin as he was, there was strength in his grip and his brown eyes were undimmed by age. “If I remember some of the vocabulary I learned from Sky Dog, that means ‘talks while walking.’ That’s a good idea.”

      Demothi smiled. “Sometimes the oldest wisdom is the best. Gather your things and let’s roll.”

      “What about the boat?” Rosalia asked.

      “Shouldn’t take much to conceal it,” Grant replied. “I’ll be able to follow you.”

      “By the way, her name’s Rosalia,” Kane added to Demothi.

      “A pleasure, young lady,” the old man said.

      “Yeah, yeah,” Rosalia replied, looking back nervously toward the boat. “I’m thinking you’re making friends a little too fast here, Magistrate Man.”

      “I’d agree with you.” Suwanee spoke up, glaring at the olive-skinned woman. “But you’re the same as them.”

      “Quiet, you two!” Kane bellowed. “We’ve got worse things to worry about than your petty little paranoia.”

      “Like what?” Rosalia asked.

      Kane pointed to one of the unconscious hooded men. He knelt and tore the man’s cowl back, revealing a dark, meshlike covering that, in the shadow of the hood, would render the upper part of his face above his lips completely invisible. It was a cheap effort that produced an unnerving effect, and Kane himself had experienced a momentary pause as he was dealing with the shadow-faced opponents. Only encounters with equally weird and terrifying opponents had given him the ability to act despite the distracting nature of their appearance.

      “That doesn’t look right, even with that cloth over his head,” Demothi said.

      Kane reached out, took a handful of the meshy sack and tore it off of the unconscious man. It was soaked through, which was strange as he had fallen on dry ground. But as he tugged, stringy mucus stretched between the fabric and gangrenous gray tumors that ringed his skull, the tumors themselves riddled with wires and circuits. The downed man wasn’t bleeding from his head trauma, but the crushed growths where he’d been struck were oozing translucent yellow pus that seeped into the grass under his head.

      “What… Oh, God,” Suwanee began. She clamped her hand over her mouth, trying to fight off the urge to vomit, but failed, staggering to the base of a tree and emptying her stomach in an extended, noisy convulsion.

      Rosalia looked at the fallen marauder and the gory mess that sloughed off his scalp. Whatever had grown there was quickly rotting, dead material collapsing into inky blue-green molasses and the wrinkled skin of spoiled apples. She glanced over toward the other unconscious man. “No wonder they cover their heads. What…”

      Kane took the unconscious man’s pulse at his wrist, wisely avoiding any contact with the goo coming off his victim’s head. His upper lip curled in a sneer as he looked at Rosalia. “Check the pulse on the other guy.”

      “What’s wrong?” she asked.

      “This one’s dead. That one might be dead, as well,” Kane mentioned.

      “That’s one bit of good news,” Grant told him over the Commtact. “I’m strong, but hauling around unconscious men through a swamp wasn’t in my job description.”

      Kane spoke softly, so that only his partner could hear over the mandible-mounted communicator. “You’ll never be my beast of burden?”

      Grant snorted. “I see Brigid’s been educating you about the old music, as well.”

      Kane sighed, frisking the corpse of the man, feeling for any more of the strange tumors or further signs of electronics implanted in his skin. There was nothing, but then, considering he wore a built-in communications device himself, he could make an educated guess as to the purpose of the wires and circuits embedded in his forehead and ringing his skull. He was just too cautious to want to touch even the disintegrating glop that slid off the dead man’s head. Who knew what it was and how contagious it could be.

      There were only two people in the world whom Kane could have counted on to provide some explanation for the oddity in front of him.

      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

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