DeFore shot Lakesh a fierce look. “You don’t need to double-check me,” she told him.
Lakesh offered her a concerned look. “We have three teams out in the field. Kane, Grant, Edwards, Morganstern, others. I’ll double-and triple-check everything if it means protecting the life of one person while they’re under my command.”
“Point taken,” Reba submitted. Chastised, she turned her attention back to her terminal and began to run a system history to the point where the live feeds had been interrupted.
Agitated, Lakesh paced across the room until he stood behind Henny Johnson at the satellite-monitoring feed. “What do we have, Henny?”
Henny replayed the feed sequence, watching the locator numbers as they scrolled along the side of the screen in a separate window to the feed images themselves. “They just seemed to pop, vanish,” she explained. “Like someone pulled the plug.”
“So,” Lakesh mused, “let’s figure out who or what pulled the plug, shall we?”
Henny nodded. “Time of signal break—15.37.08,” she began, and Brewster and Reba both agreed with the time from their desks.
“Complete shutdown on both satellites,” Lakesh said to himself as the other personnel continued comparing their data feeds. This could be something very big. Very big and very nasty.
PAPA HURBON was chuckling as Kane spun to face the two newcomers who had stepped through the doorway in their plodding, deliberate way. He watched the grim figures as they approached on heavy tread, their eyes flickering white slits.
“Grant,” Kane said, engaging his Commtact once more. “My Commtact’s not receiving your signal—”
The first zombie swung a vicious blow at Kane’s head, moving far faster than the ex-Mag had expected. Kane ducked the sweeping, meaty fist as the second zombie stepped toward him. Up close, both dead creatures stank, and Kane was reminded of the garbage area of the Cerberus redoubt.
“I’m planning to evac in two minutes via the south exit,” Kane continued into the Commtact, hoping that Grant could hear him. As he spoke, his arm snapped up to block the second zombie as it reached for him, emaciated fingers clawing for his throat with jagged, yellow-brown fingernails. “We may have some company in tow,” Kane continued as he thrust the blade of his combat knife into the zombie’s exposed throat. The zombie simply shook its head, and when Kane removed the blade an off-white pus exuded from the rent in the dead man’s flesh. As Kane pulled his blade away, he heard Papa Hurbon chuckling from his supine position on the floor.
“We are surrounded by hostiles,” Kane continued into the Commtact feed. “Pick off anyone you don’t recognize.”
At that moment, the first zombie connected with a hard blow to the back of Kane’s head, and the ex-Mag staggered forward. Though Kane’s knees bent, he kept himself upright as he slammed against the other lurching zombie.
“I repeat,” Kane stated into the Commtact, “we are surrounded by hostiles. Dispatch on sight.”
With that, Kane drove a powerful fist into the face of the zombie standing before him. The undead creature didn’t move, but its face caved in like a rotten fruit, a cloud of skin dust flaking across Kane’s fist. The creature itself seemed to just wait in place, swaying a little as Kane watched it, the remnants of its face splayed across Kane’s knuckles.
The zombie behind Kane was moving closer, too, and the Cerberus warrior realized that he was hemmed in. Even as he backed away from his twin attackers, he saw that Ohio Blue was finally on her feet once more and had made her way over to the wall where the sword had been mounted. Blue pulled the sword from its twin clips and spun around to face the monstrous figures of the undead.
The beautiful blonde woman stepped forward, swishing the blade through the air and cutting at the zombie behind Kane. Although her blow struck, it was a pathetic effort, and Kane was reminded of his previous contretemps with the female trader out near Knoxville where she had proved to be far more of a con artist than a fighter.
With a foul stench reeking from its rotting flesh, the shambling form of the struck zombie turned to face Ohio Blue as she readied herself for a second strike.
“Ohio,” Kane instructed as he stepped across the small room to her side, “give me the sword.”
Blue didn’t need to be told twice. She handed Kane the two-foot-long sword as the shambling zombies took another step closer.
In return, Kane handed the blond-haired trader his knife. “I need you to free Brigid,” he instructed, stepping away from Ohio to face the zombies once again, sword held upright in a ready position.
The demands of her Outlander lifestyle had made Ohio Blue a very perceptive woman and, although she didn’t comment on it, she noticed that Kane had referred to his partner by her first name. That was unusual—very nearly unheard of, in fact—and though Blue didn’t know it, was a sign of his concern for the beautiful redhead trapped in the alien chair.
As Ohio trotted past the fallen body of Papa Hurbon, he reached out and snatched her ankle, pulling her down toward him. “Not so fast, pretty peach,” he said, that sickly sweet breath exuding from his mouth with each word he spoke. “There are other games we can play, man and woman.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Ohio rammed the short blade of the combat knife into Hurbon’s crotch, and the man let out a pained shriek. “I’ll pass,” she told him as she scrambled away from the overweight priest.
A few steps away, Kane swung the length of tempered-steel blade at the approaching zombies, ignoring the howl coming from the floor behind him. The sword itself was the ritual weapon used to cut the curtain between the physical and the spiritual world in voodoo ceremony. Right now, however, Kane was using it in a less metaphorical manner, as he hacked at the looming figures, slicing chunks from their torsos as they silently strode ever onwards at him in the confines of the room. With a downward slice, Kane chopped off the reaching hand of the closest zombie, leaving the undead man with a stump that oozed putrid white pus. The hand itself slapped against the floor, a cloud of dust puffing up in its wake. Kane elbowed the wounded zombie aside and drove the length of the blade at the other figure’s torso, spreading the zombie’s ribs with the brutality of his attack.
Even as Kane dispatched the second zombie, three more had appeared in the open doorway to the inner sanctum, instinctively obeying the commands of Papa Hurbon as the man himself lay in a widening pool of his own blood. Kane steadied himself and swung the sword at the next wave of attackers.
Just six feet away from the scene of carnage, Ohio Blue ripped the last of the waving tendrils from Brigid’s form and pulled her from the savage embrace of the alien chair. A network of veinlike tendrils clung to the woman’s face and bare hands, and Blue hastily brushed these aside, feeling their spines snag at her own flesh like nettles.
“Are you okay, Ms. Baptiste?” Ohio asked as she swept the last of the tendrils from Brigid’s skin. As she did so, red welts formed and runnels of blood appeared on Brigid’s face in a cobweblike pattern.
Brigid’s breath came in an uneven, stuttered rush as she spoke. “What the—? Where was I?”
“Right here,” Blue assured her. “You were right here.”
Brigid rubbed a hand over her eyes, seeing the eerie alien visions still playing there for a moment. “I saw something,” she said, groping for the words to describe it, “like alien cartography.”
“We need to get out of here,” Blue told Brigid, and the words seemed to snap the former archivist out of her daze. “It was all a setup. Or something very much like it.”
Brigid saw Kane then, and she saw the horde of zombies shambling