PASSED AND the trials continued. Until the day that Anu became bored with the Earth and, moreover, bored with the company of grunting apekin with whom he could not hope to do more than play fetch. He wondered about adding a spark to these listless creatures, and consulted with Tiamat’s data banks to design a structure within their DNA that might make them more interesting. He implanted that DNA structure into the ova of the female whom he had observed enjoying the company of many males of her tribe. The twist would make her children more rugged, more hardy, more interesting. It would spread, in time, though that was time Anu no longer wanted to endure on this blue-green marble. His servants, the Igigi, let the female go, scared and confused, to spread Anu’s gift among the apekin. Anu watched her leave, wondering if he might return to Nibiru to tell the others of his discovery here, that they might add texture to the planet and thus make it interesting again.
Anu was not a monster because of his size or his skin or his otherness. He was a monster because of his heartlessness, his callousness. Because of his evil.
Monsters waited beyond the shadows, monsters of another age.
Located in an underground bunker, the room had no windows and no illumination other than a single flashlight that wove through the darkness in the hands of its lone living occupant. The room was as wide as a football field, and its floor was masked by a deepening pool of stagnant water, the ripples flickering in half-seen crescents as the beam of the flashlight played across them.
Several vehicles protruded from the water like standing stones—a broken-down flatbed truck, a smaller van with its hood open, three jeeps, each in a state of disrepair. And there were other things—crates and boxes stained with mold, human bones that floated in the darkened water, bobbing horrifically into view before sinking down again to be lost in the cloudy swirl. It smelled, too, of damp and rot. It was a place where the things that reach beyond death flourish.
The woman with the flashlight stalked along the edge of the waterlogged room like a jungle cat stalking its prey, one long leg crossing the other as she moved, feet tramping in the shallowest depths of the artificial lake. Each step was accompanied by the splash of water, dark and foul smelling, and each time her black-booted foot touched the floor, the water would swirl over it until it covered her ankles, threatening to rise higher as she hurried on. Moss and pondweed floated across the surface of the water, twirling on the rippling currents caused by each step the woman took.
The woman was called Nathalie. She was in her twenties, six feet tall, slim and dark skinned with dyed feathers hanging from her ears, brushing against the tops of her shoulders. She wore leopard-print shorts and tall black boots that laced corset-like up the back of her calves. She wore a calfskin jacket that wrapped snuggly across her breasts, and there was a knife sheathed at her hip, its blade glinting in the water’s reflection of the flashlight she carried to light her way. The knife was as long as a man’s forearm, broadening along its length to a wide tip. Her hair was a shadowy halo of tight black ringlets that encircled her head.
She passed a femur washed up on the strange shores of the underground garage, stepped over it with only a moment’s pause as she headed for a doorway and into the waiting elevator that was located in the corridor beyond.
Nathalie punched the button for a lower floor and waited as the elevator shuddered and dropped, its lights flickering and dimming as it sucked power from the redoubt’s ancient generator. The elevator worked when little else did, a necessity for the redoubt’s other occupant, who had lost both legs two years before.
A few seconds later the elevator came to a halt and its door drew back with a squeak on unoiled tracks.
Nathalie stepped out into a new corridor, one like any other in the redoubt, gray walled with a stripe of color to indicate level and area. Already she could hear the sounds of the generator that ran incessantly at the far end, not for lighting or heat but for that other purpose—to keep the dead thing from dying.
The corridor was lit by a single candle at the far end, held in the claws of a four-foot-high holder, its silver base emerging from the half inch of water that covered the floor here, just as it did in the motor pool.
Nathalie followed the corridor to its end, and as she approached the room there, she could smell the incense on the air, masking the other scents of damp and sweat and death.
This room was much smaller, barely able to contain the towering metal-walled tank that dominated its space. The sound of the generator was louder in here, too, a great thrumming that seemed to thump through the metal plates of the floor, pounding against the soles of Nathalie’s boots so that it seemed she was shaking, that her heart was racing.
The room was lit—almost reverently—by a dozen candles, each one as tall as a child’s arm and propped inside mismatched containers—jars and cups, here the jaws of a monkey’s skull as if it was smoking a lit cigar. There was no water in this room, though its floor was stained dark where water had seeped in before. A lone figure sat in the center of the room, facing the towering structure that dominated the space. He sat not in a chair but in a wheelchair, his back to Nathalie. This was Papa Hurbon, a corpulent figure with wide shoulders and richly dark skin. His head was shaved and shaped like a bullet, a bucket-wide jaw tapering upward to a point at the top of his skull. Earrings dotted his ears, twin lines of gold studs running up their shell-like curves, tiny figures suspended from the lobes themselves.
Clutching something small and ragged like an old woman’s knitting, Hurbon’s eyes were wide as he looked at the vast generator that was housed in the room. The unit towered over Nathalie, its curved metal sides buckled in places where something hard had struck them, a single porthole of six-inch armaglass located in the lone door that dominated its front. This was a cold-fusion generator, designed in the late twentieth century to create energy through nuclear fusion and used to power this underground redoubt when it had been in the possession of the US Army two hundred years ago. A spectral light ebbed from that single porthole, its luminescence a pale, irradiated blue.
“Nathalie,” Hurbon said without turning.
Nathalie bowed her head in deference to Hurbon, even though he had not turned to see. “My beacon, my guide,” she said, her voice shrill in the enclosed space.
She waited then, as Papa Hurbon, leader of the société, master of the djévo, practitioner of the dark voodun arts of the Bizango Priests, studied the ghostly miasma that swirled and flowed across the glass of the cold-fusion generator. There was a face there, the hint of an eye as hollow as the grave, a smile half formed from mist, strands of hair that swept across cheekbones that never fully formed as they were tossed by the ceaseless winds of the generator. Nathalie had never really understood what the thing in the generator was, only that Papa Hurbon regarded it with unmatched reverence.
“I have been t’inking,” Hurbon began without turning his gaze from the ghost in the window, “about what it is to be immortal. Is it a gift? Or is it a curse?”
Nathalie waited as Hurbon seemed to ponder his own philosophical question. She was not given to philosophy; rather, she was young and the blood still ran hot inside her, driving her to action, not to rumination.
“And so I have thought, back and forth, on this topic,” Hurbon continued after a long pause, “and I have concluded that the key to immortality lies here, in the conquering of death.” He opened his hands, bringing forth the little figure that he clutched there. The figure was a fith-fath, what the ignorant called a voodoo doll, and its twisted rag body depicted a woman’s figure with dark eyes and long, skeletal limbs. “But to conquer death, you see—that is a challenge that few can comprehend. Because
