Shadow Born. James Axler

in here?”

      “We’ll survive here in Cerberus,” Bry said. “And you won’t feel any pain.”

      That made Kane’s skin tingle. “How bad will the destruction be? How far will it reach?”

      “It’ll cause another skydark,” Bry said. “The planet will be thrown into a new ice age. Actual destruction from the pyroclastic clouds will scour the entire continent you’re on.”

      Grant swerved and drove, Brigid continuing to point out where he had to move. The zigs and zags came sharper, swifter. The whole ground beneath them was becoming fluid, if not melted by the incendiary temperatures of the lava, then by the enormous seismic pressures being put on the ground.

      “What’s our plan now?” Kane asked. “Because things are changing so fast...”

      “I’m plotting our course, but it doesn’t look good,” Brigid returned.

      Grant jolted the pickup to a halt, but the rear fishtailed until they were facing a surging slab of stone being lifted up by seismic forces beneath it. It was becoming a perfect ramp. “Brigid...is it good?”

      The woman glanced to him, a moment’s hesitation, but the answer was on her lips in a heartbeat. “Safe landing beyond. Get to eighty-five miles an hour!”

      Grant clutched the wheel, using it as leverage to stand on the gas, shifting up through gears as the motor revved higher and higher. Kane wondered if Grant could get the speed that Brigid suggested in the brief strip of ground before they hit it. The ramplike slab was still teetering, its slope increasing steadily thanks to the swell of forces beneath the surface. At that speed and angle, Kane couldn’t imagine how far they’d fly and what they would hit if Brigid were wrong.

      He grit his teeth, praying that the rising altitude of the ramp somehow figured into Brigid’s mental calculations. If not...

      Then the time for worry ended; the truck was airborne. Tons of metal ramped off the slab of shifting stone, and they were rendered, temporarily, weightless.

      Kane’s tight grip on the side of the truck had his knuckles feeling as if they were about to burst. Kane never enjoyed when a ground vehicle decided to take wing, and he liked the situation even less now that they were soaring over an ever-widening crack of lava. The heat from below was a blast furnace, and under his insulating shadow suit, his skin prickled from the heat that seeped through the environmental seals. Sweat droplets stung his eyes immediately, and he was already swimming inside the skintight uniform.

      Then the pickup truck rocked. It couldn’t have been because of a pothole because they were sixty feet in the air, according to the sudden flash of altimeter readings popped up in the shadow suit’s faceplate display. The closest ground was too far away anyhow, as the flare of heat and light from the lava was still gleaming, illuminating the smoke that their vehicle sliced through. If they actually struck a spurt of lava, the superheated rock would be more like a knife slashing through the undercarriage of the pickup.

      And when that happened, it was likely that any fuel in the system would instantly ignite from the proximity of the lava’s heat. The deaths of the six people in the pickup truck would be relatively painless as the gasoline vaporized.

      A rock, hurled by an explosive release of steam?

      Then Kane noticed the motion of a wing on one side of the truck.

      His eyes widened even further as he heard what Brigid said next.

      “Good...they did catch us! Just as I’d hoped!”

      The Cerberus expedition was now held in the talons of the Kongamato mutants, and they were rising farther and farther above the volcanic plain below.

      One slip, and even their shadow suits wouldn’t protect them from the impact with the ground.

       Chapter 6

      Hours before Brigid Baptiste even contemplated the course across the surging lava field, Neekra opened her eyes for the first time.

      Neekra felt drunk, unsteady and the very effort of lifting her own eyelids required consummate concentration and will. Her body felt as if it were only half alive. Then she realized the utter silence, the complete darkness of a world she had been in touch with for two thousand years, was a smothering curtain over her. She fought to part her lips, but they were sticky against each other, the very act of breathing draining strength from what little spark of life she retained within herself.

      The “dark” world, that horrible void of silence and nothingness, only seemed to make the small sliver of her senses that still worked seem so much brighter. She could make out the dull vibrations, seemingly gibberish at first, but then she began to associate each grunt and spit with language. And it was not the high tongue of the Annunaki. The sun was just rising in what she presumed was the east, and though the vulgar splash of all colors would seem bright to human eyes, Neekra wept for those frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum no longer open to her.

      “Why are you crying?” came the guttural tongue of humans and other apes. She swiveled her eyes and gazed upon Durga, who crouched beside her.

      “What...did...you do?” she managed to croak out in that mutt language. “Why...”

      Durga tilted his head. She thought of him as human despite the cobra hood, a sheet of scaled muscle from the sides of his head to his shoulders, and despite the snake scales that armored his fit, trim body. He was one of “Uncle” Enki’s silly spawn, the Nagah, long surpassed in favor of the hairless apes from which Enki spawned the cobra men.

      Enlil had at least told his children, Neekra among them, that Enki had forsaken the cobra men, leaving them as freaks in a world no longer their own. The Nagah were hidden underground for the very reason that they were inhuman. People outside of India feared cobras, rather than respected them as on the subcontinent. Imprisoned in their own tomb beneath the surface of the Earth, they maintained their exile from humanity, even past the collapse of mankind’s civilization.

      Although that wasn’t quite true.

      Durga’s people had increased in population as others entered the stability of the underground empire. Many chose to remain human; others opted to evolve themselves in the legendary “cobra baths.”

      Their corner of India, up until Durga’s attempted coup, had become a relative paradise. Unfortunately, a war between the Millennium Consortium, Cerberus redoubt, Enlil and Durga’s personal guard had left the city of Garuda heavily damaged and thousands dead. It was still recovering.