Yasseft’s hands reached for his guts. It felt as if he urgently needed the toilet, as if he had diarrhea. He stumbled for a moment, bashing against a wall in the shadow of the looming saurian head and neck.
“What is it?” Panenk asked again.
“Going to…” Yasseft began and then he belched, a watery spume blasting from his mouth.
Panenk let Mahmett’s legs drop to the ground, apologizing automatically as he rushed over to Yasseft’s side. “My grandfather told me about this,” he said fearfully. “Airborne weapons that get inside you, eat you up from within.”
Yasseft was not listening. He stood propped against the bone-white wall of a single-story building, vomiting an odorless mix of saliva and water.
Panenk looked around him, searching for some clue as to where this attack had started. “We’ll leave,” he shouted to the empty buildings. “We’ll go. Just leave us alone, please.”
His voice echoed back to him, its fear magnified.
In the road at his feet, Mahmett shuddered where he lay in a puddle of water he himself had created with tears and vomit, and Panenk watched incredulously as the lad vibrated faster and faster before finally shimmying out of existence.
“Please,” Panenk cried, stumbling away from the pool of water his cousin had been. There was no sign of Mahmett; he had simply ceased to be.
Behind him, Yasseft was clawing at his clothes, pulling his shirt away from his belt as his guts threatened to burst loose. Panenk looked at him, the fear making him shake like a leaf in the wind. As he watched, the older teen began shuddering in place, water streaming from his eyes, his mouth, his nostrils and ears. Water gushed from his hands, spurting from beneath his fingernails and darkening the white walls of the opposite building.
Panenk walked backward, his eyes fixed on what was happening to Yasseft. Yasseft seemed about to scream, but it came out more like a belch, a hacking blurt of noise as if a wind instrument played through water. Then, incredibly, Yasseft seemed to sink to his knees, but his legs had not bent. Instead, he dropped into the ground, his body sinking into the pool of water that had formed around him, sucking him down like quicksand. If he screamed, the scream was lost in the sound of rushing water that washed over his disappearing form. And then, just like Mahmett, Yasseft was gone, and all that was left was a puddle of cool water reflecting the overhead sun.
“Leave us alone,” Panenk cried as he backed away. His voice echoed through the empty white streets. Even as he backed away, he felt the first thrum of water in his stomach like a single drumbeat, and he saw the silvery figures approach.
Chapter 5
Staring into the barrel of the Colt Mark IV in Sela Sinclair’s hands, Farrell took a moment to process what she had just said. She had called him “the nonbeliever” and she looked damn serious about it.
From nearby, Farrell could hear the approaching footsteps of those robed figures, the troops for the stone god Ullikummis, the people who had sacked Cerberus and put him and Sinclair in this impossible position in the first place.
“What are you doing?” Farrell asked, mouthing the words more than saying them as he met Sinclair’s dark eyes.
She fixed him with her stare, and Farrell couldn’t detect so much as a hint of emotion or concern there. If this had been a movie, he knew, she’d smile now or wink or say something coded in such an obvious way that he would know without one iota of doubt that this was a ruse, that any second now she would turn the blaster on their human hunters and they’d get out of here breathless but alive. Come on, Sela, he thought, wishing for that little wink or smile, give me a sign.
Sinclair continued to stare into his eyes, the pistol never wavering as she aimed it at the spot between them.
In a few seconds the twin robed figures had joined them, their hoods still pulled down low over their features.
“Who is he?” the broad-shouldered one said, a man with a basso voice.
“Cerberus,” Sinclair replied, her eyes still watching Farrell like a hawk as he lay sprawled in the grass in front of her.
The hooded figures nodded in unison, and the slender one peered closer at the balding man who lay in the grass. “Is that Kane?” she asked, a Southern drawl to her voice.
“No,” Sinclair said simply. “Guy’s name is Farrell. He’s just a technician.”
“Overlord Ullikummis wants Kane,” the man explained.
Shit, Farrell thought. This should be the point where Sinclair pulled the switch, turned the gun on their enemies, got them the heck out of there. But she wasn’t going to do it, was she? She was following the orders of Ullikummis, whether by choice or design, he couldn’t tell.
Sela Sinclair looked at the pitiful figure of Farrell, with his hollow cheeks and the dark rings around his eyes, and she heard the crescendo of the drums as they beat faster and faster in her head, their rhythm driving to a frenzy.
“Should I kill him?” she asked.
“Ullikummis is love,” the robed woman said. “His will is not to kill.”
As she spoke, the woman pushed down her hood, revealing locks of black hair that reached just past the nape of her neck. Farrell’s eyes were drawn to the woman’s forehead, however, where a bump showed like a spot or a blind boil.
Beside her, the man had pushed back his hood, revealing the graying remains of his hair and the bearded face of a man in his late fifties. Like the woman, he had a protrusion at the center of his forehead, a little ridge the size of a knuckle, resting between and slightly above his eyebrows.
Farrell had made the connection straight away, but still he checked Sinclair’s forehead as he lay in the grass.
“Conversion is preferred,” the man explained in a tone so neutral it was as if he were discussing paint.
“To embrace his love is glory,” the woman added.
“I’ve only met him once,” Sinclair said dispiritedly.
Fuck! Farrell’s heart pounded against his chest, throbbing in his eardrums even as he twisted himself on the scrub and tried to run. Sinclair had it, too, that same telltale lump like a single measle or a boil about to erupt. She had always had it, all the time they had been together. And while he had been worrying himself to an early grave, she had been pumping iron and doing sit-ups, toning her already perfect body into a weapon for her new master. All of this, Farrell thought as he struggled to his feet and began to run back toward the house.
It was a second—less than that—and Farrell was sprinting across the overgrown lawn, Sinclair behind him pulling her gun up to take a shot at him. Farrell ran, the world blurring as the adrenaline blasted through his system like a nuclear explosion. He heard the gunshot, heard the man call out at the same time, ducked his head automatically as he ran.
They had taught lessons in survival technique at Cerberus. Edwards had instructed him in basic hand-to-hand combat on the expanse of dirt outside the rollback door of the redoubt; Sinclair herself had shown him how to load a pistol. A hundred instructions and pieces of advice raced through Farrell’s mind at that moment, as
