Infestation Cubed

“By the way, her name’s Rosalia,” Kane added to Demothi.

“A pleasure, young lady,” the old man said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Rosalia replied, looking back nervously toward the boat. “I’m thinking you’re making friends a little too fast here, Magistrate Man.”

“I’d agree with you.” Suwanee spoke up, glaring at the olive-skinned woman. “But you’re the same as them.”

“Quiet, you two!” Kane bellowed. “We’ve got worse things to worry about than your petty little paranoia.”

“Like what?” Rosalia asked.

Kane pointed to one of the unconscious hooded men. He knelt and tore the man’s cowl back, revealing a dark, meshlike covering that, in the shadow of the hood, would render the upper part of his face above his lips completely invisible. It was a cheap effort that produced an unnerving effect, and Kane himself had experienced a momentary pause as he was dealing with the shadow-faced opponents. Only encounters with equally weird and terrifying opponents had given him the ability to act despite the distracting nature of their appearance.

“That doesn’t look right, even with that cloth over his head,” Demothi said.

Kane reached out, took a handful of the meshy sack and tore it off of the unconscious man. It was soaked through, which was strange as he had fallen on dry ground. But as he tugged, stringy mucus stretched between the fabric and gangrenous gray tumors that ringed his skull, the tumors themselves riddled with wires and circuits. The downed man wasn’t bleeding from his head trauma, but the crushed growths where he’d been struck were oozing translucent yellow pus that seeped into the grass under his head.

“What… Oh, God,” Suwanee began. She clamped her hand over her mouth, trying to fight off the urge to vomit, but failed, staggering to the base of a tree and emptying her stomach in an extended, noisy convulsion.

Rosalia looked at the fallen marauder and the gory mess that sloughed off his scalp. Whatever had grown there was quickly rotting, dead material collapsing into inky blue-green molasses and the wrinkled skin of spoiled apples. She glanced over toward the other unconscious man. “No wonder they cover their heads. What…”

Kane took the unconscious man’s pulse at his wrist, wisely avoiding any contact with the goo coming off his victim’s head. His upper lip curled in a sneer as he looked at Rosalia. “Check the pulse on the other guy.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“This one’s dead. That one might be dead, as well,” Kane mentioned.

“That’s one bit of good news,” Grant told him over the Commtact. “I’m strong, but hauling around unconscious men through a swamp wasn’t in my job description.”

Kane spoke softly, so that only his partner could hear over the mandible-mounted communicator. “You’ll never be my beast of burden?”

Grant snorted. “I see Brigid’s been educating you about the old music, as well.”

Kane sighed, frisking the corpse of the man, feeling for any more of the strange tumors or further signs of electronics implanted in his skin. There was nothing, but then, considering he wore a built-in communications device himself, he could make an educated guess as to the purpose of the wires and circuits embedded in his forehead and ringing his skull. He was just too cautious to want to touch even the disintegrating glop that slid off the dead man’s head. Who knew what it was and how contagious it could be.

There were only two people in the world whom Kane could have counted on to provide some explanation for the oddity in front of him.

One, Lakesh, was on a journey to what used to be the West Coast of the United States of America in the hope of finding something along the Pacific Ocean that would give them an edge over Ullikummis. The other, Brigid Baptiste, was missing, perhaps a prisoner and tortured by the very stone being they were being pursued by.

Kane looked at the corpse for a few moments more, the last of the tumorous growth dissolving and sliming off the dead man’s pate.

“Where are you, Baptiste?”

Chapter 6

Miles to the south of the hammock that Kane and his allies stood upon, a rusted old ship bobbed beyond the breakwater of the river delta. The reddish mottling and decay on the hull and the superstructure were a disguise, a sham propagated to lower the profile of the groaning craft. The master of this vessel, a being known as Orochi, looked through plastic sheeting that had been dimmed and silk-screened on one side to be impenetrable, resembling ancient glass, but provided him with a clear view of the waters and the shore.

Orochi was a tall man, and just for his height he would have been unusual for a Japanese, but the truth of the matter was that his resemblance to most humans went no further than the shape of his body and its ability to fit into a sleek black uniform with yellow trim. Orochi’s skin was a shimmering sheet of small, reptilian scales that flowed and flexed like silk. Bright yellow-green eyes shone from under a heavily scaled brow, whose thick octagonal plates formed a ridge where the short hairs of eyebrows would have been on a mammal. Across his upper lip, under a short, oddly human nose, was a similar line of lengthy, slender scales. They were stiff but hairlike, flowing in curving waves to droop over the corners of a wide, thin-lipped mouth, and on the chin, another nest of these thin, translucent scales dangled, giving him the appearance of a classic Southern gentleman with a blond Vandyke.

Orochi was of the Watatsumi, a race long exiled from the shattered ruins of their original home in what used to be the islands of Japan. There were thousands of islands that were the remnants of the island nation, smashed apart and shattered, akin to a plate dashed to the floor.

That was the appearance aboveground, where the sea had rushed in to fill the cracks between the remaining bits of land. There were people still in the archipelago aboveground, but the nuclear onslaught that formed skydark had been far more transformative than the survivors had ever expected. Beneath the surface the Watatsumi lived in an extensive system of tunnels and caves, empty lava tubes. They had remained hidden from humankind, nestled in the network they had called the Spine of the Dragon until the cataclysm happened. When the earthshaker nukes shook the very edge of the tectonic plate that Japan sat upon, things became much worse. Some of the lava tubes and caverns had been closed off for millennia, so that the humanoid reptilians didn’t have remaining records of their existence. Shattered walls of heavy obsidian glass formed doorways to a primeval forest below even the Wyvern’s realm, a jungle filled with monstrosities not seen since millions of years before man walked the Earth.

Things were not completely fine, Orochi knew. There was a reason why he’d been sent to the other side of the globe to seek out a spot to engage in experimentation. The Watatsumi were in need of some way to control monsters that had shared their caves. Only the discovery of the piggybackers here in the bay that used to be known as Gulf Breeze gave them an idea, an opportunity by which they could tame the massive and powerful reptiles who shared their home.

Orochi frowned as he heard the buzzing alert from the ship’s comm station. “What is it now?”

Kondo, a younger member of the crew, turned from his console, looking upon the group leader with a momentary reverence, a sign of unwavering respect that had been instilled in all of the Wyvern’s military since the day they were old enough to be called grown. “Captain, we lost contact with two of the drone units who were acquiring new conversion subjects.”

“Confirmed loss of contact?” Orochi asked, striding toward the young officer.

“Absolutely,” Kondo replied. “Electronics damaged. A third had been struck, but its neural net is still working, though transmission is spotty.”

Orochi’s chartreuse eyes narrowed as he looked at the screen.

“The moment we started experiencing malfunctions, we called them back,” Kondo said.

“Good,” Orochi said, looking at the monitor, distracted from his subordinate’s reassurances. He wasn’t the kind of man to take a sudden change in luck lightly. Someone, after a year of experimentation, had figured out something about their hooded minions.

“I want you to activate a pod of gators,” Orochi said. “Set them after the group the men had difficulty with.”

Kondo looked up at his commander. “We’re still not sure if we can keep the alligators under control if we set them into action.”

“Well, that’s the whole damned point of this journey. If the parasite works well enough for us to remotely control crocodilians, then we can turn around and go home,” Orochi countered.

The officer nodded.

Orochi stood back from the console. He was under orders from the Watatsumi high command to utilize the secrets of the Gulf Breeze discoveries to combat the monsters from below the Dragon’s Spine, but he also had a second mission, one that he had managed to expand. Under the guise of influencing more complex mammalian brains, testing the limits of the electronically influenced parasites, he’d grown an army of specimen retrievers.

Separated from home by thousands of miles, half the surface of the Earth, in fact, Orochi had free reign to alter paradigms, something made easier by recruiting scientists and officers who were true to the cause. The surface of the Earth had been denied to the Watatsumi for too long.

The parasitic entity would be their key to ruling the surface of this scarred, tumultuous world again.

THE CAJUN HEARD THE sound of gunfire in the distance, then looked back at the people who had hired him. Agrippine was not someone who relished the idea of venturing into these swamps, thanks to the disappearances of the past few months. But when the New Order’s missionaries arrived, bearing payment and a bounty for the heads of two people in particular, both of them former Magistrates, he wasn’t going to let easy money get away from him.

The woman who was in charge, a strange figure who was tall, despite the cloak that reached up over the top of her head, shadowing half of her face, seemed as if she knew the sound.

“Sounds like we’re close,” Agrippine said.

The woman nodded. She didn’t speak much. Indeed, she had simply laid down a bag of coins and photographs of the two targets and said, “You will get the rest when they are mine.”

Since then, she’d remained silent. Agrippine didn’t mind, especially since she kept to herself, staying out of the way as the motor launch crawled down the river. She hadn’t come alone, but the rest of the New Order minions with her were both talkative and cooperative when it came to running his ship. In return, Agrippine had been given the money to stock up on weapons so that he could equip them to aid him in the hunt for Kane and Grant.

She looked over the weapons, examining them as if she was investigating an ancient, outdated artifact, her shadowed face expressionless as her fingers went along the surfaces of the guns.

“Do they meet with your approval?” Agrippine asked.

She looked up from the rifle in her hands, then extended it, butt first, so he could take it from her. She stayed quiet.