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  DARK PASSAGE

  Dedicated to the survival and protection of postapocalyptic earth and their human race, the Cerberus rebels have forced the invading alien Annunaki into retreat. But defending mankind’s freedom to exist remains daunting in a world of shifting danger from forces human, alien…and dead.

  HELL’S SOLDIERS

  A glitch in a quantum portal traps Kane and his team in another reality—an alternative world where evil has triumphed. On the decaying streets of Dead Earth, life itself is a crime. Legions of Dark Magistrates patrol the fetid landscape, wielding the destructive power of their Soul Eaters. They are the soldiers of a hybrid baron ready to extend his terrifying power beyond the borders of his own decaying reality. Cerberus is all that stands between the real world and the invasion of the dead.

  The sylphlike figure of Helena Vaughn took another step down the stairwell toward him

  Kane squeezed the trigger on his Sin Eater, unleashing a stutter of 9 mm lead bullets. The shots sounded loud in the enclosed space of the stairwell, and bullets rattled off the concrete walls and steps beside and behind the naked girl. She seemed unaware of them.

  Kane gritted his teeth as his discharge passed through her pale, ethereal flesh.

  “You aren’t real,” he spat out. “You can’t be.”

  Helena Vaughn just stood there amid the barrage of bullets that pummeled her body, the dark shadows of the stairwell obscuring her sad expression, turning it into something much more haunting.

  Kane eased his index finger from the blaster’s trigger. The girl looked up at him through her bangs, the blond hair tangled and in disarray. Kane watched as her mouth opened and she let loose a soft sigh before drawing a tiny stutter of breath…as if in pain.

  Other titles in this series:

  Parallax Red

  Doomstar Relic

  Iceblood

  Hellbound Fury

  Night Eternal

  Outer Darkness

  Armageddon Axis

  Wreath of Fire

  Shadow Scourge

  Hell Rising

  Doom Dynasty

  Tigers of Heaven

  Purgatory Road

  Sargasso Plunder

  Tomb of Time

  Prodigal Chalice

  Devil in the Moon

  Dragoneye

  Far Empire

  Equinox Zero

  Talon and Fang

  Sea of Plague

  Awakening

  Mad God’s Wrath

  Sun Lord

  Mask of the Sphinx

  Uluru Destiny

  Evil Abyss

  Children of the Serpent

  Successors

  Cerberus Storm

  Refuge

  Rim of the World

  Lords of the Deep

  Hydra’s Ring

  Closing the Cosmic Eye

  Skull Throne

  Satan’s Seed

  Dark Goddess

  Grailstone Gambit

  Ghostwalk

  Pantheon of Vengeance

  Death Cry

  Serpent’s Tooth

  Shadow Box

  Janus Trap

  Warlord of the Pit

  Reality Echo

  Infinity Breach

  Oblivion Stone

  Distortion Offensive

  Cradle of Destiny

  Scarlet Dream

  Truth Engine

  Infestation Cubed

  Planet Hate

  Dragon City

  God War

  Genesis Sinister

  Savage Dawn

  James Axler

  Outlanders

  Sorrow Space

  Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche,

  1844–1900

  The Road to Outlands—

  From Secret Government Files to the Future

  Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

  Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

  What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

  Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible author­ity, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

  In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

  Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

  But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

  Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

  Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

  For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

  After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

  With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influ-ences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

  Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

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bsp; Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 1

  It wasn’t here yet, but already Domi could feel it. Its approach played at the edge of the albino woman’s heightened senses like the half-remembered words to an old, old song. The woman’s pale nose twitched and her ruby eyes darted left and right as she searched for the source of the irritation.

  “Something’s coming,” she murmured, giving voice to her thoughts.

  Domi had always been sensitive to changes so subtle that others failed to detect them: changes in temperature and air pressure, changes in the electromagnetic fields. These were the signals that sent animals scurrying to their nests and burrows prior to an eclipse, that made cows lie down before a storm broke, and Domi felt them all.

  Domi had grown up a child of the Outlands, and some mistook her highly tuned senses for evidence that she had more in common with animals than with civilised humans. Certainly she didn’t appear entirely human. An albino, Domi stood a little over five feet tall. Her skin was the pale alabaster of chalk, and her short-cropped hair was the creamy color of bone. Her hair was arranged in a ragged, pixie-style cut, framing the sharp planes of her face and drawing attention to her eyes, twin pools of a vibrant scarlet the color of blood.

  Domi’s clothing, too, was unusual in comparison with the other people in the cavernous operations center of the redoubt. There were almost twenty personnel working diligently at the twin aisles of computer terminals that ran the length of the room. Each technician wore a standard uniform, a one-piece white jumpsuit with a vertical blue zipper running down its center. Domi, however, was dressed in cut-down denim shorts and a crop top that left her legs, arms and midriff bare. Her feet were also bare, and like the clothes she wore, showed smudges of dried earth, tree sap and berry juice, traces of some personal jaunt beyond the corridors of the Cerberus redoubt. A combat knife was strapped to Domi’s left calf just above the ankle, its wickedly serrated blade a solid nine inches of razor-sharp steel. The knife was a memento from Domi’s previous life, where she had been held as a sex slave in the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville.

  The busy operations room was the central hub of the Cerberus complex, a fully-staffed facility hidden from prying eyes in a former military redoubt high in the Bitterroot Range, where it had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a strange mythology had grown up around the mountains with their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

  The redoubt was manned by a full complement of staff, some of whom were cryogenic “freezies” from the twentieth century who had been discovered in suspended animation in the Manitius Moon Base and many of whom were experts in their chosen field of study.

  Tucked beneath camouflage netting, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for the Cerberus team. Gaining access to the satellites had taken many man-hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Now the Cerberus staff could, at any time of the day or night, draw on live feeds from the orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat. This arrangement gave the staff in residence a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of Earth, as well as providing almost instantaneous communication with field teams around the globe.

  Domi’s eyes flickered once again, ignoring the hustle and bustle of the operations room as she felt a subtle change in the atmosphere. The room was a vast space carved out of the mountain itself, and it was dominated by the two rows of computers that were used to monitor and process the satellite feed data.

  Across the back wall, a huge Mercator relief map stretched high above the operators’ heads, showing the topography of the planet prior to the nukecaust of 2001. On that fateful day, the borders had been redrawn and fault lines had been shocked into action, plunging vast chunks of the West Coast of the United States of America—and elsewhere—into the ocean.

  The Mercator map was dotted with glowing points that were connected by a web of colored lights like decorations on a Christmas tree. These lights showed the available pathways of the mat-trans network, an advanced transportation system that involved shunting matter through quantum space to a chosen destination. The Cerberus redoubt had been involved, from its earliest stages, with research into the transfer of matter from one location to another. Later, the mat-trans units were involved in exploration of other planets and even alternate dimensions.

  While the other Cerberus personnel continued to monitor their feeds and analyze the data they were receiving, Domi’s piercing red eyes fixed on the mat-trans unit itself, her gaze playing across the brown-tinted armaglass that surrounded it. The mat-trans was located in a separate chamber that stood as an adjunct to the ops room. Hexagonal in shape and eight feet in height, the chamber featured a locked door set within the protective armaglass structure. The device was operated by a control terminal located outside of the mat-trans chamber itself, where a specific destination could be selected by inputting destination coordinates.

  Most recently the unit had dispatched a field team to meet with an arms supply ring that was threatening to destabilize the already volatile area of the western United States.

  There was something about the mat-trans, however, that served to unsettle Domi right now. She padded toward it on her bare feet, sniffing at the air as she felt that eerie wrongness wash over her. The mat-trans tampered with quantum energy, but it also involved standard mechanical processes, including the automated air-filtration system that functioned when the unit was in use, clearing the gases that were expelled during teleportation.

  As Domi brushed past him, a Cerberus operative called Farrell peered up from his post. Farrell had a shaved head, a thin, goatee-style beard and a gold hoop earring in one earlobe, and he had been poring over a printout. “Domi?” Farrell asked, peering over the papers. “Everything okay?”

  “Who’s coming through the mat-trans?” Domi asked, addressing Farrell without looking at him.

  “No one,” Farrell assured her. Then, as if in afterthought, he checked the monitor before him, confirming his statement. “No one.”

  Domi’s eyes remained fixed on the chamber. “Wait,” she said in a low voice.

  “Domi,” Farrell began, “there’s nothing coming. The unit’s powered d—”

  He stopped, the words drying in his mouth as he heard the familiar hissing and whirring that accompanied the activation of the mat-trans chamber.

  “Incoming!” Farrell shouted, glancing across the operations center for the security detail that waited close to the room’s main door. “The mat-trans is live.”

  From his post at the back of the ops room, Mohandas Lakesh Singh rose to his feet. The founder and director of the Cerberus operation, Lakesh had been a part of the original team of scientists who had operated here in the twentieth century, when it was a military research facility dedicated to matter-transfer research. Visibly in his fifties, Lakesh was of medium height with dusky skin and clear blue eyes that were the product, as was his longevity, of organ replacement. Lakesh had sleek black hair with just a trace of white at the temples and sides, slicked back from his forehead, and an aquiline nose over a small, refined mouth. In his time as Cerberus director, Lakesh had seen many s
trange things, so it took more than an alert regarding the mat-trans to shock him.

  “Mr. Farrell, status report,” Lakesh demanded as Edwards and Sinclair came charging along the double aisles of computer terminals, their weapons drawn. “I heard no request from Kane’s team. Why did you activate the mat-trans?”

  “I didn’t activate it,” Farrell confirmed. “It just...activated.”

  “Troubling,” Lakesh murmured.

  Edwards, a former Magistrate, was a muscular man with a bullet-bitten ear and hair cropped so close to his skull that he appeared almost bald. Sela Sinclair was a slender, dark-skinned woman with a fierce expression and short black hair in ringlets. Both Sinclair and Edwards had served with Cerberus for a long time, and they well understood the mat-trans procedures. The incongruous figure of Domi stood before them in a semicrouch, her nose twitching as the chamber powered up. Behind this group, the remainder of the Cerberus staff watched from their designated positions behind their terminals, with several of them standing up to better see what was occurring.

  And then the mat-trans chamber seemed almost to shake. Lightning streaked through the air within the hexagonal chamber, joining the ceiling and floor tiles in bent lines of dazzling whiteness as something solid was dragged from the quantum ether to materialize within. The whole operations room suffered a dramatic temperature drop at that instant, as if struck by an icy blast of air. Hidden motors hummed and chuntered as the chamber powered down again, the familiar whine of whirring fans drumming from their hidden alcoves.

  Still in her semicrouch, Domi stretched forward, peering into the chamber as the mists cleared, feeling the coldness like a weight on the atmosphere. As the fog parted, Domi and the others saw a figure standing within. No, it wasn’t standing—it was moving, propelled toward the door.

  Unconsciously, everyone in the operations room reared back as the thing in the chamber slammed into the locked door, making not the slightest sound through the barrier of the armaglass.

  “Open it,” Domi instructed, not looking away.