LITMIR.BIZ

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aspect as Anu surveyed the lands around him, taking in the new plants, the trees, the texture of the air. Here was a playground that might stave off the crushing boredom of life eternal, at least for a while. He breathed deeply of the air, consuming it through the flat, flared nostrils that resided on his face like the craters of some unknown moon, as he turned back to regard the apekin bowed low before him. This was something he could use and could get used to. These hairy mammals with their smells and their finite life spans could serve to reignite the pleasure centers of the bored Annunaki.

      But when to share his discovery? Anu wondered. Perhaps tomorrow or next week or in a thousand years’ time. For time meant little to a race that knew infinity and resided outside of its wide borders. First he would experiment a little, see what these apekin were capable of, and what they could endure.

      “Come, creature,” Anu said, placing a clawed hand under the apekin’s chin until his head tilted to look at his new master. “Creature. Creature. No, you need an identifier, a name by which you may be referred.” Anu was already thinking of the Annunaki’s slave class, the Igigi, none of whom had ever earned a name. They were devoted and simple creatures, superior, Anu suspected, to the apekin prostrating himself before him, but still uncomplicated compared to the Annunaki. It pleased Anu to think that by naming this first man, he might further subjugate the Igigi, reminding them of their status as slaves to the eternal race. And so he spoke a name, one that would survive throughout man’s history. Not Adam, not that—but Cain.

      * * *

      THE DOME SAT on the shores of Lake Tiamat. It was four hundred yards across and perfectly round as if a giant sphere had been buried in the ground, leaving only its top third visible. The shell of the Dome was colored the silver of clouds, making it almost indistinguishable from the sky into which it towered. Inside, Anu conducted his trials. He was loath to call them experiments; they were really just games that put the local apekin through their paces, testing them to—and beyond—their limits. Anu might be excused the latter—he had no prior knowledge of the apekin, and only by testing them could he hope to determine where their limits were and of what merit such limits were.

      The apekin needed sleep and food, far more so than the Annunaki, who could go without such things for months, even years, at a time. The Annunaki lived outside of time, while the apekin were bound to it in such a way that it afflicted them with a disease called aging.

      Aging. The Annunaki had bypassed that millennia ago, their bodies immune to the ravages of time, their minds playing host to the memories of all of their race, perfectly held for instantaneous recall. And more, they had invested in the genetic shunt, a download of personality which allowed them to be reborn as they were, over and over, to regenerate their minds into new forms, each genetic template held safe in the wombship, Tiamat.

      Anu had spent the past six months on Earth, toying with the apekin and the other creatures who existed on this untouched paradise. He had tested diseases, manipulated DNA, made the apekin serve him, service him and entertain him. He had driven them to madness and to death, called upon them to fight with wild creatures for his pleasure and to fight with one another to the death. He had made mazes and traps to test their intelligence, used mirrors and refraction to throw their senses. Simple tricks all, but tricks that were beyond the apekin’s understanding.

      But the apekin were learning; that was something of which they were eminently capable, Anu had concluded. They took observations from the trials, learned lessons, reached conclusions that made them better at surviving without injury. If they could learn, Anu concluded, then they could be taught.

      Cain had survived all of the trials. Anu’s first test subject, Cain had proved shrewd and wily, and he had learned quickly how to please his master and never to trust him. Cain was strong, muscular for his species. He could kill a man with his bare hands and utilize simple tools that he fashioned himself—shaped rocks, carved sticks. Cain showed the kind of spirit that Anu associated with the eternal, a spirit that might live beyond his time here on Ki, on Earth. Anu had found one other like him, a female of remarkable intellect for an apekin, and there seemed to be a bond between her and Cain almost from the moment that they met.

      Cain was a servant of Anu, which meant he had safety in the Dome, safety from those prowling saber-toothed tigers and their ilk, each one looking for a hot meal that was slow on its feet and wouldn’t fight back. Cain was safe inside, and so he served Anu without complaint. Every morning he would run the circumference of Lake Tiamat, an artificial body of water created from the overspill of Tiamat’s tanks, genetic ooze, waste product expelled after the long journey across the field of stars. The dragon ship resided beside the lake, disgorging her innards in a display of regeneration comparable to anything Annunaki, her fish-scale skin slowly replenishing where it had become blistered by the heat of atmospheric entry.

      Cain seemed to have some ragged notion linking survival to physical prowess, and so, Anu guessed, that was why he ran. He tried to teach the female, the one of remarkable intellect, and she watched him run the circuits around the lake with bright eyes of emerald green.

      * * *

      TIME PASSED AND the trials continued. Until the day that Anu became bored with the Earth and, moreover, bored with the company of grunting apekin with whom he could not hope to do more than play fetch. He wondered about adding a spark to these listless creatures, and consulted with Tiamat’s data banks to design a structure within their DNA that might make them more interesting. He implanted that DNA structure into the ova of the female whom he had observed enjoying the company of many males of her tribe. The twist would make her children more rugged, more hardy, more interesting. It would spread, in time, though that was time Anu no longer wanted to endure on this blue-green marble. His servants, the Igigi, let the female go, scared and confused, to spread Anu’s gift among the apekin. Anu watched her leave, wondering if he might return to Nibiru to tell the others of his discovery here, that they might add texture to the planet and thus make it interesting again.

      Anu was not a monster because of his size or his skin or his otherness. He was a monster because of his heartlessness, his callousness. Because of his evil.

Chapter 1

      Monsters waited beyond the shadows, monsters of another age.

      Located in an underground bunker, the room had no windows and no illumination other than a single flashlight that wove through the darkness in the hands of its lone living occupant. The room was as wide as a football field, and its floor was masked by a deepening pool of stagnant water, the ripples flickering in half-seen crescents as the beam of the flashlight played across them.

      Several vehicles protruded from the water like standing stones—a broken-down flatbed truck, a smaller van with its hood open, three jeeps, each in a state of disrepair. And there were other things—crates and boxes stained with mold, human bones that floated in the darkened water, bobbing horrifically into view before sinking down again to be lost in the cloudy swirl. It smelled, too, of damp and rot. It was a place where the things that reach beyond death flourish.

      The woman with the flashlight stalked along the edge of the waterlogged room like a jungle cat stalking its prey, one long leg crossing the other as she moved, feet tramping in the shallowest depths of the artificial lake. Each step was accompanied by the splash of water, dark and foul smelling, and each time her black-booted foot touched the floor, the water would swirl over it until it covered her ankles, threatening to rise higher as she hurried on. Moss and pondweed floated across the surface of the water, twirling on the rippling currents caused by each step the woman took.

      The woman was called Nathalie. She was in her twenties, six feet tall, slim and dark skinned with dyed feathers hanging from her ears, brushing against the tops of her shoulders. She wore leopard-print shorts and tall black boots that laced corset-like up the back of her calves. She wore a calfskin jacket that wrapped snuggly across her breasts, and there was a knife sheathed at her hip, its blade glinting in the water’s reflection of the flashlight she carried to light her way. The knife was as long as a man’s forearm, broadening along its length to a wide tip. Her hair was a shadowy halo of tight black ringlets that encircled

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