Death Cry. James Axler

      Bullets clipped the ground at his feet, ricocheting off trees and rocks all around him, cutting lethal tracks through the snow as they sought their target.

      Still running, Kane held the Sin Eater across his body and reeled off a quick burst of gunfire. The 9 mm bullets zipped through the air in the direction of the Scorpinaut before slapping harmlessly on the armor plate at the front of the vehicle in a shower of sparks. Kane kept running to his right, checking over his left shoulder to make sure the vehicle was still following. Wearing the black shadow suit, he wouldn’t be hard to spot, and having taken a few shots at the Scorpinaut, he figured the crew would be just about mad enough to forget about his colleagues until they had finished with him.

      Over to the right, at roughly the same height on the snowy bank as he now found himself, Kane saw a pair of trees. Their trunks were thin and their branches loaded with snow like cotton wool. Head down, he forced himself to run faster, kicking his legs high to get clear of the snow that threatened to pull him over or slow him. He aimed his body toward the trees, a plan forming in his mind.

      At that moment, a loud crack split the air and a 40 mm shell hurtled over Kane’s head, slamming into the snow-bank twenty feet above him and exploding with an almighty crash. Kane felt the shock wave of the explosion as it slammed into the right side of his abdomen, and dislodged snow tumbled past him as it slid down the slope.

      Kane looked back over his left shoulder and saw that the Scorpinaut crew had brought the tail cannon into the fray. The flexible cannon arm was doubled back to shoot over the main body of the vehicle, launching its massive shells in his direction. While the crew could not get the swivel arm low enough to hit its target, if enough snow was dislodged or one of those trees cut down so that it knocked Kane off his feet, then he was done for. He whipped his head back and pushed his body harder, limbs pumping, determined to keep ahead of the approaching vehicle.

      Bullets riddled the ground as the Scorpinaut’s foreclaws spit lead at the running figure. Kane skipped to one side, his breath coming heavily now, the cold air burning his nostrils and throat. He was almost at the trees, and the Scorpinaut was just behind him. In fact, it was so close that suddenly he found himself inside the foreclaws’ arc of fire and he realized, horrified, that the millennialists would be just as happy to mow him down.

      The snowfall was turning into a blizzard now, everything becoming white on white, so heavy that Kane could barely see two body lengths ahead as he ran. He glanced behind him once more, the dark shadow of the approaching Scorpinaut an ominous presence just a few feet away, its grinding engine loud in his ears. He heard the drums of the machine guns in the foreclaws spin as they reloaded and prepared to shoot once again, and he looked ahead once again to see the two thin trees just feet away. As the machine guns began blasting, Kane threw himself forward, diving between the tree trunks and hurtling face-first into the cushion of the thick snow, bullets racing overhead. There was a sudden, resounding crash, and Kane felt the jarring impact as the Scorpinaut slammed into the thin tree trunks in its way. They were thin but Kane had judged that they had to be hardy, growing there in the harsh wilds of North Dakota.

      Still lying on the ground, Kane looked behind him and saw that the Scorpinaut was tangled between the sturdy trunks, its foreclaws still spitting leaden death into the air. It had become wedged at an angle, its claws tilted and pointing into the sky at thirty degrees; good now only for shooting birds, there was no way that the crew would be able to target anything on ground level. Kane heard the angry spluttering of shifting gears as the driver attempted to reverse or move forward, desperately trying to disentangle the vehicle from the trap he had driven into at full speed.

      Kane smiled, his breath clouding before him as he watched the millennialists struggling to free their vehicle. Then he pulled himself up, brushing snow from his shadow suit and rolling his shoulders to loosen them after the hard landing. Kane holstered his Sin Eater and made his way back up the hill at a fast jog and continued in the direction of the Mantas.

      The snowstorm was so heavy that Kane almost ran straight past where the Mantas were stowed close to a clump of trees. Kane had assumed he would recognize the formation of the trees, but by the time he got there they had been covered with thick snow, blending into the white landscape.

      As he jogged by, Kane spied a flash of sunset-red and recognized it for Brigid Baptiste’s brightly colored hair. She was brushing snow from her hair and face when he approached, the white scarf now draped loosely over her shoulders.

      “What kept you?” she asked, favoring Kane with a knowing smile.

      “A little—” Kane thought for a moment “—horticulturalism.”

      Brigid tilted her head querulously. “Were you picking flowers again?”

      “More…rearranging trees,” Kane replied evasively, displaying a knowing smile of his own.

      Grant appeared from inside one of the Manta craft as he slid down the subtle curve of its bronze-hued wing. Two of the strange aircraft were parked in the clearing by the trees. They had the general shape and configuration of seagoing manta rays. Flattened wedges with graceful wings curved out from their bodies to a span of twenty yards, with a body length of close to fifteen yards and a slight elongated hump in the center as the only evidence of the cockpit location. Curious geometric designs covered almost the entire exterior surface of each craft, with elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols all over. The Mantas were propelled by two different kinds of engine—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation air spikes.

      “Computer’s all packed,” Grant told both of them. “You about ready to move out?”

      Kane looked at the heavy snow falling all about them. “I think we’ve pretty much outstayed our welcome,” he decided. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to navigate in this horrendous weather by sight alone, but the remarkable transatmospheric vehicles had a dizzying array of onboard sensors that would alert them to any danger long before they eyeballed it.

      Brigid leaped into the Manta behind Kane, in the same spot that Grant had secured the computer in his own vehicle. Then, moving together, the two craft took to the skies and blasted away from Grand Forks, heading back to the Cerberus redoubt far to the west.

       Chapter 3

      When a weary-looking Kane, Grant and Brigid entered the ops center of the Cerberus redoubt, Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh rose from his swivel chair and rushed across the large room to greet them enthusiastically. Called Lakesh by those who knew him, the doctor appeared to be a man of perhaps fifty years of age. He was a distinguished man who held himself upright, with an aquiline nose and refined mouth, dusky skin and sleek black hair showing the first hints of white at the temples. However, Lakesh was older than he appeared—much older. He had been a physicist and cyberneticist for the U.S. military before the nukecaust back in 2001, and had spent much of his life in cryogenic suspension.

      The ops room was large with a vast Mercator relief map of the world spanning one wall, forming a panorama over the wide door through which the field team entered. The map included more than a hundred tiny lights, each illustrating a point where a known, operational mat-trans unit was located. A plethora of colored lines linked them in a representation of the Cerberus network, the central concern of the redoubt when it had been built over two hundred years before. Strictly speaking, Cerberus was a nickname for the headquarters.

      Like all of the military redoubts, this one had been named for a phonetic letter of the alphabet, as used in radio communications. Somewhere in the long-forgotten computer logs and paper files stored deep within the three-story complex, Cerberus was still Redoubt Bravo, a facility dedicated to monitoring the use of the miraculous mat-trans network. But lost somewhere in the mists of time, a young soldier had painted a vibrant illustration of a vicious two-headed hound guarding the doors to the redoubt, like Cerberus at the gates of the underworld. The soldier was long since forgotten, but his bold version of the hellhound lived on as a lucky charm and a mascot to the sixty-plus residents of the complex.

      The redoubt was located high in the Bitterroot Range in Montana, where it had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years