Lomon and the Zambians had given him sufficient equipment to deal with most threats. He’d gotten a Heckler & Koch G3 rifle with a stock that collapsed, nearly halving the length of the weapon for easier carry and storage, and a Colt .45 automatic, which shared magazines with Nathan Longa’s own pistol. After the conflict with the Kongamato, Lomon knew that Thurpa would need power and mobility. As it was, Thurpa had almost died in hand-to-hand conflict with one of the creatures, saved only by being out of reach and blinding it with his natural cobra venom. The G3 and the .45 would go a long way toward making Thurpa the equal of most challenges.
Especially if he were beside the explorers from Cerberus and the wielder of the Nehushtan.
The trouble with that thought, Brigid mused, is that we’ve got plenty of enemies who shrug off bullets as if they were grains of rice. Even Durga qualified as bulletproof for a moment.
Brigid slid into the cab beside Grant, who took the wheel.
“Heavy thoughts?” Grant asked.
Brigid blinked, then looked at her friend. “Heavy thoughts. Yes. We’re going into uncharted territory in Africa, hunting a man who nearly killed us as he’s searching for the means of returning to godhood. Kane says that he’s hooked up with a queen who was dangerous enough that the Annunaki imprisoned her, rather than kick her off the planet or kill her, and who has enough power to psychically reach out and even pluck people from their bodies. Add to that we’ve got two young men to take care of, because as much training as they’ve had, they haven’t seen a tenth of the shit we have.”
Grant frowned. “You make it seem as if we’re badass just because we’ve fought gods, dinosaurs and living mountains.”
“We had the luck of surviving and outwitting them,” Brigid said. “Remember, a lot of our friends have ended up dead.”
Grant nodded.
“We’ll do our best to protect them. We always do,” Grant said.
Thurpa rapped his knuckle on the window on the back of the pickup’s cab. “You do know Nathan and I can hear you, right?”
“Not doing a lot of good for our confidence on this mission,” Nathan added.
“Hey, we protected Lomon,” Grant countered.
“And defeated an army of winged monsters,” Brigid spoke up.
“We were there,” Nathan said.
Thurpa nodded. “Not totally impressed with the protecting Lomon’s men part. In fact...”
Grant smiled at Thurpa. “You did some protecting yourself, son. Both of you. That’s why we want to keep you with us.”
“Any particular reason why Kane just doesn’t take the stick himself? He utilized it pretty well when we were in the cloning facility,” Nathan inquired.
“Because I’m not used to running around with a walking stick,” Kane replied. He slapped his hand on top of the pickup truck’s cab. “Let’s go.”
“Sure thing, grouch,” Grant returned. He started the engine, and the Cerberus explorers drove away, waving to the Zambian contingent they’d come to befriend.
Brigid returned to her doubts as they drove toward their future reunion with the Nagah prince Durga and whatever horrors he planned to awaken.
Already Nathan had spoken of an assassin who had slain his father, a mysterious, seemingly amorphous entity with translucent skin that shimmered in the firelight.
The killer with no apparent visible features seemed as if it might have been a trick of the mind or the shadows. But Brigid Baptiste knew a thing or two about human perception, as well as the intricacies of memory, especially since hers was completely photographic. Her time as an archivist had only been enhanced by the ability to recall every detail she’d ever seen, and Kane often wondered aloud if she were a “doomie”—a Doomsayer mutant who had some manner of psychic ability. Brigid doubted that she had transcendent mental abilities, but she presumed that her brain chemistry was somehow different, as her recollection skills and natural curiosity served only to increase the ever-growing database between her ears.
That Nathan Longa didn’t have the same kind of intellectual function as she was not an indication of the untrustworthiness of Nathan’s description of the assassin who’d slain his father, the previous protector of Nehushtan. Also, the moment had been one of intense fear and shock, meaning that Nathan’s senses would have been enhanced by adrenaline, his eyes sharper, probably dilated further to gather even more light, so shadowy hints wouldn’t have been so indiscriminate as he’d assumed. Plus, Brigid had gone with Nathan over the incident a couple of times, and she had asked questions about more than visual descriptors. She’d asked about the sounds, the smells, the feel of the room.
The smell of the murderer was something that made Brigid feel that the description as gelatinous had more validity. The thing smelled, according to Nathan, of salt and copper, two major components of blood. A translucent outline with no physical features, backlit by firelight, could easily have been a nontraditional physical entity. Supporting this observation was that it had disappeared in the brief instant that Nathan had looked away from the killer to see his father on the ground.
There were no windows that a full-grown man the bulk of the slayer could escape through, but there was a window open about three inches high. There was the sticky, slurping sound of fluid as the being moved, and Brigid could imagine an entity with no skeletal structure could easily have compressed itself down to three inches to squeeze out the window. She knew that octopi could fit through any opening large enough to accommodate their beaks, the only hard part of their anatomy, and that small rodents with skeletons could flex their bones to fit through openings only half the diameters of their bodies.
That was the cement for Brigid’s assumption of the assassin being a nontraditional physical entity, an expression she’d coined on the spot. Kane had asked her why she didn’t just call it a “blob,” but Brigid was not certain if it was an entirely fluid-based organism, a mollusk-like humanoid or just one with an extremely flexible skeleton as per a mouse.
Brigid coupled the appearance of that creature with Kane’s account of the void entity he had battled while he’d been comatose, left within a prison constructed in his own psyche. He’d also described her—it had taken on a more feminine appearance and addressed itself as “the queen”—as originally an amorphous, almost fluid-formed entity constructed of void. The limited shape-shifting on her part had a similar “feel” to Brigid’s presumptions about the killer who’d slain Nathan’s father.
The similarity between Kane’s psychic opponent and the elder Longa’s assassin was too coincidental for Brigid’s tastes. She’d studied more than enough mythology and parallel stories to realize that if something was vaguely related in the views of two separate people, there might be even stronger ties once exposed to the light of day.
Thurpa had added to the chain of coincidences. There was a strangely hued woman, Neekra, who seemed to come from nowhere, then disappear, and who could peer into Thurpa’s thoughts. She was at once dangerously alluring and viscerally disturbing, and she seemed cast in rust-or cinnamon-hued flesh that flowed easily.
Mind reading. The ability to appear and disappear like the wind. A voluptuous, curvy woman whom Durga had offhandedly referred to as his “queen.” Mind reading would not be too far off from the skill of telepathy and the construction of mental illusions, such as had been the case
