Outlanders 15 - Doom Dynasty Read online

  He nodded curtly. "Pollard and his party came mis way, so I guess we can too."

  Kane checked his wrist chron and saw with a twinge of surprise they had been walking for a little over forty-five minutes. He was on the verge of ask­ing if anybody wanted to take a rest break when Domi's high, stressed-out voice squawked through his helmet comm-link and into his right ear. "We're be­ing followed!"

  Grant and Kane pivoted almost simultaneously on their heels, peering into the murk behind them. They saw no sign of Domi. Grant growled into his trans­ceiver, "Where the hell are you?"

  "Heard noises," her voice responded, the tone so sharp it made both Kane and Grant wince. "I hung back for a recce."

  "Get your ass back up here," Kane commanded.

  "But—"

  "Now!"

  He turned to Brigid. "Did you hear anything be­hind you?"

  She hadn't heard Domi's side of the brief conver­sion, but she easily guessed what it was about. "Not a thing. I didn't even notice she'd dropped back."

  Within a couple of minutes, Domi emerged with a ghostly grace from the gloom. She stared defiantly at Kane and Grant, saying doggedly, "Definitely some­body behind us. They know how to move fast and quiet, and they're wearing some kind of metal on their clothes."

  "How do you know that?" Grant asked.

  "Heard it scrape against rock a couple of times. I figure there's more than one tracking us."

  Kane groped for a dismissive response but instantly recalled all the times in the past when the girl's sharp senses had alerted them to danger.

  Planting her fists on her flaring hips, Domi de­manded truculently, "You believe me, right?"

  "Right," Kane replied brusquely. "How far be­hind are they?"

  "Can't be sure. Like I said, they're moving fast."

  "Take a guess," Grant suggested.

  The girl's chalk-white brow furrowed in concentra­tion. "Mebbe thirty minutes. Mebbe less."

  Kane swung around toward the field of stones. He gestured. "Let's get across and find a place to lay up for a bit. Mebbe we can find out who it is."

  "What about Pollard and his prisoners?" Brigid inquired, her tone slightly troubled. "Why did they come this way instead of retracing their steps?"

  Grant replied, "To throw off tracers. The ground is harder here and won't hold prints."

  "What I meant," Brigid said, "is if Pollard doesn't make camp and decides to cross the desert, we could lose him while we're laying low."

  "Even if he crosses tonight," Kane stated, "we know where he's heading. Let's move out. Stay as quiet as you can. Don't even breathe hard."

  Carefully, Kane stepped forward. The loud crunch of a shard of shale under his boot lifted the hair on his nape and sent a jolt of adrenaline surging through his body. He froze in midstep, angry and embarrassed. Behind him he heard Domi doing a poor job of muf­fling a cruel snicker, then Brigid hissing her to si­lence.

  Taking a deep, calming breath, Kane began walk­ing again, feeling the flush of shame heating his face and neck. The warmth quickly faded, replaced by the chill of mounting tension. His point man's sense in­sistently rang as he approached the double row of upright boulders. The ophidian coilings chipped into the rock faces were more visible the closer he came, and he repressed a shudder of loathing.

  He had always prided himself on being free of pho­bias, but with a touch of chagrin he realized he had developed a fear of reptiles over the past year. It wasn't an irrational fear, but derived from unpleasant experience. First there was his encounter with Lord Strongbow and his mutagenically altered Imperial Dragoons, with their scale-ringed, snakish eyes. That was bad enough, but his fear reached its culmination during his nightmarish battle with Kukulkan atop a ziggurat in South America.

  When Kane reached the first pair of standing stones, he tensed his wrist and the Sin Eater sprang into his hand. He glanced behind him and saw not only Grant with his weapon filling his hand but Brigid and Domi fisting their blasters, as well.

  Kane continued striding forward, doing his best not to break into a sprint. He sensed other presences, felt malignant eyes watching him from the shadows where his night sight could not reach. The feeling ate at his nerve ends like acid.

  Passing between the boulders, he saw that three of them bore bullet pocks, all near the base. He knew they were recent, probably less man an hour old.

  Buzzing rattles, like a combination of a snarling chain saw and a stick being dragged over a picket fence, penetrated even the polystyrene lining of Ms helmet. He rocked to a sudden halt, his throat tight­ening in almost painful spasm.

  Out of small burrows in the bases of the megalithic stones reared the wedge-shaped heads of diamond-back rattlers. Hissing sibilantly, they slid out and looped themselves into sinuous, twisting coils, then-tongues flickering out to taste the human scent.

  In a panic-stricken fraction of a second, Kane re­alized mat although the snakes were large with heads the size of his fist, they weren't monstrous in size like the mutie they'd seen earlier. Unless, he thought sourly, these were fresh hatchlings and the enormous mother slithered somewhere nearby.

  Despite the fact his Sin Eater snapped up automat­ically in reaction to the threat, Kane didn't press the trigger stud. In an urgent whisper, he said over his shoulder, "Don't shoot unless you have to. Keep moving."

  Gritting his teeth so tightly his jaw muscles ached,

  Kane concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, his eyes darting back and forth beneath his vi­sor. He tried to keep to the exact center of the aisle between the standing stones so as to maintain a dis­tance of at least four feet between him and the snakes. He was aware however, the distance wasn't a safe one since all the snakes looked to be a minimum of six feet long, and he knew they could strike more than half of their length.

  One of the snakes struck at his left leg, its jaws closing with a snap barely six inches from his knee. It required all of his willpower not to jump aside. Such an action would bring him within reach of the snake on his right.

  Cold sweat beaded on his forehead beneath the lin­ing of his helmet. It was a frightful trap and he won­dered briefly both about the diabolical brain that had concocted it, and how he could put a 9 mm hollow-point round through it.

  Obviously, someone had to tend the diamondbacks, bring them food, pamper them in order to keep them in the vicinity. If he hadn't already witnessed how the Amazonian Indians deified their mutated anaconda, he wouldn't have believed humans would serve a ser­pent.

  Kane continued walking and the rattlesnakes con­tinued to hiss, shake their tails and strike. Their venom-dripping fangs came within fractional mar­gins, but they missed. At the edges of his hearing, he heard Grant mumbling under his breath behind him.

  "Oh, I love this, I really get a fucking big kick out of this…"

  Kane closed his mind to Grant's profane mantra, focusing only on reaching the end of the ghastly gauntlet. He wasn't particularly worried about himself or Grant, since the fangs of even the biggest dia-mondback wouldn't penetrate their armor, but Domi and Brigid weren't so protected. Although they wore high-topped jump boots of thick leather and trousers of tough whipcord, he wasn't sure if the material of either article was dense enough to deflect penetration of needle-tipped teeth.

  If the women were as uncertain of it as he was, they gave no sign. They didn't utter a sound, not so much as an outcry of disgust, so he ceased to worry about them. Even if one of them were bitten, Brigid's medical kit contained ampoules of antivenin.

  By the time Kane passed between the final pair of megaliths, his heart trip-hammered as if he had just sprinted two miles flat out. Sweat flowed down his body beneath his Kevlar undersheathing. He kept walking, not turning his head to check the progress of his companions until he was well past the last of the standing stones.

  Within seconds Grant joined him, then Brigid, her jade eyes startlingly bright in a face drained of all color. She was almost as pale as Domi. All three peo­ple tremble
d slightly from the adrenaline coursing through their bloodstreams. They waited for Domi to complete the gauntlet, watching as she cautiously strode along the aisle, expression composed and de­tached.

  Her composure broke when a snake on her right, its temper evidently more aroused than its brethren, squirmed away from the base of the megalith to block her path. It reared up, jaws agape, rattle buzzing.

  Grant lunged forward, the bore of his Sin Eater centering on the serpent, but Kane restrained him with an arm. "Wait!"

  Silver suddenly gleamed in Domi's fist. All of them recognized the serrated, nine-inch-long knife. It was her only memento of her six months as Guana Teague's sex slave. It was the same knife with which she had cut the man's triple-chinned throat.

  Domi took a tentative step forward. The diamond-back's flat-snouted, wedge-shaped head struck at her leg. Not crying out, Domi's convulsive movement to evade it brought her within reach of a serpent on the other side, and she shifted like lightning to avoid the flash of its fangs.

  Then all the snakes swayed and struck at her feet, ankles, calves and knees, whatever portion of her limbs chanced to be nearest to them. Domi couldn't leap over them or pass between the stones to safety. She could only whirl and wheel and twist her body to avoid the strokes, and each time she moved to dodge one diamondback, she put herself in range of another.

  She shifted position constantly, even though she could move only a short space in any direction, and the venom-filled fangs menaced her with every mo­tion. Only someone with the reflexes of the wilderness born could have lived more than ten seconds in the aisle.

  Domi became a blur of bewildering motion. The heads missed her by hairsbreadths, and she matched her coordination and eye against the speed of the coiled, darting demons. The long blade in her hand flickered almost as swiftly as the forked tongues of the rattlers. It sliced the air in flat, circular arcs, then cleanly sheared through scales, muscles and bone. A fanged head leaped from a mottled, scaled body amid a spouting of blood, black in the dim light.

  It seemed to Grant, Brigid and Kane the snakes struck with a rhythm, as if they worked in tandem. If sp, Domi and her slashing knife attuned themselves to the rhythm. Even in the uncertain light, they saw the hard, stitched-on smile creasing Domi's lips as if she enjoyed herself immensely.

  As she skipped lightly among hissing, rattling ser­pents, her long knife flashed in quick strokes. With each motion a headless, blood-spurting trunk thrashed in postmortem spasms.

  Amazingly, the diamondbacks began to retreat to­ward their nests at the bases of the megalithic stones. They still struck at her, but now it was in self-defense, and their button-tipped tails buzzed in fear, not with menace.

  Domi slid gracefully between two of the diamond-backs and at the precise instant they struck at her, she performed a pivoting pirouette, and the pair of blunt heads collided with a sound like two blocks of wood knocking together. The snakes, driven to a hissing, rattling frenzy of terror, attacked each other, their bodies intertwining and knotting, fangs sinking re­peatedly into scaled coils.

  Domi's spin brought her to the end of the aisle, and she half fell into Grant's arms. Her fierce eyes glit­tered like polished rubies—or drops of fresh blood. She panted hard, but not from exertion. The expres­sion on her scarlet-spattered face was beatific, sati­ated, as if she had just undergone a sexual experience.

  "Are you all right?" Grant demanded, his anxiety turning his tone into a husky half snarl. "Did any of them bite you?"

  Pushing herself away from his armored chest, Domi swayed dizzily for a few seconds. She turned her head and spit contemptuously toward the field of stones. "Not fast enough to bite me." She brandished her knife, the blade carmined and sticky. "Bit them instead. Taught them big-time lesson."

  "Yeah," Kane said, not bothering to disguise his sarcasm. "Once word gets out, all the snakes in the world will think twice about provoking you again."

  Domi stared levelly into his face. Confidently, she declared, "They will."

  Kane opened his mouth to respond, decided not to waste his breath and contented himself with shaking his head in exasperated disbelief.

  Dabbing at the sheen of tension-induced perspira-tion at her hairline, Brigid commented darkly, "Let's be on our way."

  They did so, Domi affecting a jaunty, hip-swinging swagger. Whatever had wrought the change in the girl's personality over the past few weeks, it had turned her from a spirited but reliable ally into a wild card, and Kane wasn't comfortable with the transfor­mation. Judging by the frown tugging at the corners of Brigid's lips, neither was she.

  They strode into a narrow pass framed by perpen­dicular ramparts of stone. They weren't very high, less than twenty feet. The cleft ran fairly straight and at the far end, moonlight shimmered on the desert sand. The sky was clear and speckled with stars. Be­fore they were halfway through, they came across the body of a man lying facedown in the pebble-strewed dirt.

  When Kane rolled the body over, the cause of death was immediately evident. The man's face and limbs were swollen to half again their normal size and tinged a purplish-blue from the venom injected into him through the six puncture marks on his legs.

  Kneeling beside the corpse, Kane eyed his coarse, homespun clothing. "An outlander, one of Pollard's prisoners. When they came through the snakes, he was one of the unlucky ones."

  Grant nodded. "That's the reason for the shots we heard. The Mags panicked."

  "Can't blame them much," Brigid said wryly.

  Straightening, Kane looked around. "Whoever is the warder of the snakes can't be too far away, since he or she or they have to feed and water them. They probably heard the shots."

  "Mebbe," Grant conceded. "But if they saw the Mags, they probably dug a hole and pulled the dirt in after them."

  "I hope you're right," Kane replied. "This is about the best place for an ambush I ever did see."

  From ahead and above them came the scuff and scutter of feet. Rocks suddenly fell into the pass, tum­bling from both sides of the narrow pass. It wasn't an avalanche; it was a barrage.

  Brigid uttered a wordless cry of surprise, and Grant half roared a curse. Kane dodged a square block of stone that thudded to the ground less than an inch from his right boot. Swinging his head up, he caught only a glimpse of wild, scabby creatures with hair hanging in knotted masses to their waists.

  Then a rock twice the size of his head smashed into the crown of his helmet and sent him plunging into darkness.

  Chapter 6

  The evening prayer service of the Ophidian Way was interrupted halfway through. Father Jaramillo chanted, "And blessed are the rattle and the skin of the great worms."

  Before the congregation could shout back the tra­ditional response, "The Lord loves the worms of the earth, all that crawls and stings," the breeze carried the unmistakable crackle of blasterfire.

  Father Jaramillo's flock of thirty twisted on the benches made of flat stones, mouths agape in fearful wonder. Blasterfire was rarely heard over the past couple of decades. Some of the younger members had never even seen a blaster, much less heard one fire, so there was much whispering among themselves in their own dialect.

  Jaramillo cut off their apprehensive murmurings with savage gestures of his bare, scab-encrusted arms. "Unbelievers cross the Sepulcher of Sacred Snakes!" he shouted, champing teeth that had been worn almost to the gums from a lifetime of eating roots with a high silicon content. "Infidels!"

  His congregation gaped at him incredulously. Nico, his nephew, gasped, "No way!"

  "Way!" Jaramillo snapped. "Very much way! In­fidels with blasters, draggin' their shit 'crost our holy ground! They violate a sacred place, erected by Brother Mote himself!"

  His voice bit a high, trembling pitch of scandalized outrage, and his congregation picked up on it. Spittle flying from their lips, they howled in unison, "They violate a sacred place!"

  The men of Jaramillo's clan were short and stocky, with spindly limbs. Thick hair grew low over their br
oad brows and hung in matted braids about their shoulders and backs. For the most part, they wore breechclouts and moccasins. The women were very slight of build, almost fragile, except their bare arms and legs rippled with wire-taut muscles. Their pinched faces held the furtive, cunning expressions of she-foxes.

  Physically, Jaramillo was no different than the other men in the gathering. However, he wore the minister's mantle, a long apronlike garment decorated with swirling designs worked in red thread to repre­sent the movements of sidewinders. Because he wore the mantle, Jaramillo knew the spirit of the scale and rattle would demand blood and souls in retribution, so he began a passionate, shrieking tirade, turning the evening service into a hate rally, pumping up his fol­lowers with the heat of religious zeal. Since all of his male forebears had ministered the tenets of the Ophid­ian Way, he knew exactly how to do it, what trigger words to use.

  Jaramillo reminded the clan of its duty, telling his followers how it was laid out in the texts of Brother Mote, the basis of most of the congregation's lifestyle and belief system.

  Generations ago, according to legend, the Ophidian Way had been founded when Snakefish was a thriv­ing, populous ville. Every home in the township dis­played the holy snake emblem. Brother Mote, the founder of the order, had reputedly carved the sym­bols in the rock, the same symbols, ever after called the Sepulcher of the Sacred Snakes. Like Mote, Jar­amillo was its guardian, the caretaker of the serpents.

  As a rite of passage, before they could father chil­dren, all male congregation members were required to walk the sepulcher. If they were bitten and recov­ered, then it was believed they had been cleansed of their sins. If they died, they were viewed as righteous sacrifices to the sacred snakes.

  True, there weren't as many sacred snakes as there had been during Brother Mote's day, certainly very few of the gigantic ones, but there were still enough for the congregation to maintain its fundamentalist faith.

  The diamondbacks living in the sepulcher ate bet­ter, frequently more often than Jaramillo's clan. Field mice, rats and vermin of all sorts were trapped and fed to the snakes, not just to keep them in the area but in the hopes they would grow as large as their huge antecedents. That hope was pretty much a vain one. Only in the past ten years had a rattler been hatched that actually attained a size comparable to the holy worms of yesteryear.