traction and performance from the tires, not kicking up dust clouds to cover their tracks. As such, Thurpa was surprised to see how little a rooster tail of dirt was kicked up as he changed course. This was not to say that the transit over the lumpy ground was any smoother, but it was faster than he’d seen Grant take the truck in this car chase.
Kane patted Thurpa and Nathan on the shoulders, motioning toward his belt. Instinctively, both young men reached up and gripped the webbing tightly for support.
Once again, the Cerberus leader’s big rifle erupted, staccato bursts of gunfire sizzling out the muzzle as the weight and leverage of Nathan and Thurpa anchored him enough so that he could devote both hands to controlling the weapon. Thurpa looked toward racing vehicles on their trail, watching one of them swerve off course. It teetered on two wheels, then struck a rut and went nose first into the ground. Men flew, cartwheeling through the sky and screaming as their technical flipped end over end. When the militiamen hit the ground, they didn’t bounce. They burst like ripe fruit, splattering their blood in huge splashes of crimson.
Thurpa couldn’t hear over the sound of Kane’s rifle, but his mind filled in the ugly, crunchy and wet noises made by men striking the earth hard enough to pop them like balloons.
Kane dropped an empty magazine and fed another into his weapon before continuing to hammer away at the opposition. Because Grant was going for speed, there was a lot less variable in terms of how the truck would bounce, and Kane’s short bursts compensated for recoil and amount of time on target. One of the closer enemy jeeps had smoke pouring from its hood where high-velocity, heavyweight rounds punched through its radiator and engine block. As the driver swerved, attempting to maintain control of his vehicle, a dead militiaman bounced from the side door, strapped in place by a seat belt, his head and left arm bashed to bloody pulps.
A few more short bursts, and the smoldering jeep jerked violently, brakes squealing, before it skidded into a sideways roll, bouncing away from the mechanized patrol.
So far, three enemy vehicles had been taken out. The two left weren’t pulling off the chase.
“How much punishment can these idiots take?” Nathan shouted.
“Their egos won’t let them back off,” Thurpa answered, even though his friend wasn’t looking for an answer. “At least not yet!”
Kane’s rifle barked and growled, peppering the last two pursuit vehicles. They were slowing down, even though the gunmen in the back still fired their guns. This time, however, they were simply blasting lead into the sky, making noise.
Grant cut a path through the trees, a slender road that forced Kane to duck before he was clobbered in the back of his head by a low-hanging branch. Just as they passed the tree line, Kane pulled one more grenade from his harness and dropped it at the mouth of the skinny dirt road. Grant kept up his speed, and by the time the grenade’s fuse burned down, they were out of the blast radius of the explosive. A thick, ugly cloud roared at the end of the trail, and though the barrier formed was nothing more than airborne particulate matter, Kane might have slammed a steel door in the face of the angry militia’s survivors. The blast at the mouth of the road through the forest was exactly the kind of face-saving out that the Panthers of Mashona survivors could take.
And they did.
They howled and honked their horns and fired their guns into the sky, standing their ground at the edge of the barren stretch of land. The marauders had driven Kane and his group from the lifeless terrain into “hiding.” They were victorious, and when they returned to their base, they would tell tales of the mighty army that they had driven off at great cost to their comrades who were now scattered and smashed, their blood ground into the already rust-colored dirt.
“If they’d ‘beaten us’ any more, they’d all be dead,” Brigid mused, agreeing with Thurpa and all of the others’ unspoken thoughts.
“Doesn’t matter,” Kane grunted. “Anyone hit?”
“Not by bullets,” Nathan said. Even through his dark, coffee-colored skin, Thurpa could see the redness and swelling of the bruise where his arm had slammed against the side of the truck bed. Thurpa remembered his own aches, the bumps and bruises he’d received as he was jostled about.
The pickup slowed, and Kane kept watch over the tailgate, staring into the distance. He was never going to let his guard down, not until he was dead certain that the militia was sufficiently discouraged and no longer interested in continuing the chase. It was a half hour and three miles of dirt road before he finally allowed himself a moment to relax.
By then, it was late enough in the afternoon for the truck to pull off to the side of the dirt road so they could set up camp amid the trees.
Thurpa found himself sitting close to Lyta as they ate. It was a long time before his thoughts returned to existential worry.
Stopping for the night, the six companions set up a secure camp for themselves. They had things to do aside from resting themselves and keeping their pickup truck from overheating; first among them was finding the location of the tomb that Neekra had sought.
Once the campfire was lit, Brigid sat Kane down across from her.
“I’m going to hypnotize you, Kane,” Brigid informed him.
Kane nodded. “You think part of the reason Neekra wanted me so bad was that I might have a clue as to where her body is.”
Brigid smiled. “Correct.”
“You’d think I’d remember something like that,” Kane returned.
“Not necessarily,” Brigid explained. “You were affected by the staff in your dreams, intertwining your memories with the memories of a predecessor of yours.”
“Solomon Kane, the Puritan,” Kane stated.
“His adventures here in Africa had been related but imperfectly. However, his connection to the staff Nehushtan and his encounters with non-terrestrial and pan-terrestrial entities have, so far, given us an inclusive view into the secret history of this continent,” Brigid added. “However, locations in those missives are vague at best.”
Kane looked to Nathan, who had fallen into the role of bearer of the artifact. “I thought only weak minds could be hypnotized.”
Brigid turned Kane’s attention back to her. “Willing minds can be put under, as well. In fact, just the very act of focusing on a subject, distracting the part of the mind that can be distracted, works. Just falling asleep is a form of self-hypnosis.”
Kane nodded.
“Get Zen,” Brigid ordered, giving him a backhanded slap on the chest.
Though outwardly Kane didn’t change his stance or position in the slightest, inside his mind he put his intellect to work, ordering his thoughts so that he could enter the mental state Brigid requested of him. The woman lifted her hand, holding her index finger straight in the air. His eyes locked on that finger, and even as he did so, he heard her voice, soft, soothing, a low, constant beat in his hearing. He didn’t know what she was saying, and it could have been gibberish syllables, her way of creating a metronome-like beat to keep his ears focused as his eyes. He allowed himself to mentally drift.
The next thing Kane
