Dragon City. James Axler

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 the .38 bullet cut through the air past him and embedded itself in the scarred frontage of the ancient house in a blossoming burst of ruined masonry. What was it Edwards had said?

       “If someone pulls a gun on you, get the hell out of there and don’t look back.”

       Yeah, something like that, anyway, Farrell thought as he ran in an evasive zigzag pattern toward the house.

       Behind him, Sinclair pulled the trigger a second time, aiming her blast at Farrell’s rapidly retreating form. The loud report of the gun echoed in the empty street, and Farrell dropped, crumpling to the ground like a felled oak.

       “He’s still alive,” the man in the robes insisted as he scurried toward the fallen figure.

       Farrell was more than alive; he wasn’t even wounded. Just as Sinclair’s shot had blasted from her pistol he had caught his foot on something hidden in the long grass and tumbled to the ground, the bullet shrieking its angry trail over his head. Lying there now, Farrell looked all around him as he tried to scramble away. The grass was so long that it hid his prone form. And there, less than a foot from his right leg, he spotted the thing that had tripped him—it was a rusted old exhaust pipe, caught up in a tangle of grass and sod. The pipe was perhaps eighteen inches in length and about an inch and a half across. His mind racing, Farrell grasped for the pipe and yanked it from the earth as he drove his body forward toward the house once again. Rusty pipe in hand, Farrell powered onward to the house, keeping his head ducked and his body bent.

       “He’s running,” Farrell heard a woman shout, but he couldn’t discern if that was Sinclair or the woman in the robe. It didn’t matter now, as he was at the door to the house, launching himself at the wooden barricade and powering into the sudden darkness of the hallway beyond.

       He had lived in this house for forty-two days, knew every ghastly, rotting inch of it. As footsteps clattered on the porch behind him, Farrell darted left into the living room that ran one half the length of the building.

       Something had happened to Sinclair, he realized, something that had maybe been there since before they had gone into hiding. That spot on her head, it was his mark—Ullikummis’s. Farrell had heard rumors about other members of Cerberus turning, siding with Ullikummis and his people. It was like a cult, a growing movement that relied on the belief that Ullikummis himself was a god from the stars. Which was ridiculous, of course—Ullikummis was Annunaki, a cruel and heartless race of aliens who had held humankind in subjugation thousands of years ago. But Sela Sinclair knew this. Everyone at Cerberus knew this; Lakesh himself had held an information session in the canteen just a few months before when they had discovered the first evidence that Ullikummis had returned to Earth. And yet Sinclair was under his sway somehow, something physical inside her twisting her will, instructing her like an entheogen.

       Behind him, hideously near, Farrell heard Sinclair and the other two pushing through the house, shouting instructions to split up and find him. The blood was pounding in his ears, and his breath felt warm in his throat, pumping past his gritted teeth like sandblasting. The room was full of old furniture. A settee had collapsed in on itself to become a sculpture of rusted springs and wood that showed the familiar signs of woodworm. A table was splintered against one wall, while another sagged to the floor with two legs bent out of shape. Farrell vaulted it as the figure came through the door after him, the man in the robes. The man was pulling something from an innocuous pouch he wore at his waist, loading the slingshot in his hand even as he leaped the broken settee and rushed through the room. The enforcers of Ullikummis didn’t use guns as a rule, but relied on a more basic weapon, a slingshot-style catapult that launched vicious stones with the force of bullets.

       Up ahead, Farrell saw the second door of the room, the one that broke back into the hall opposite the closet, and he drove himself to it as his pursuer launched the first clutch of stones from his catapult rig.

       Farrell reached out with his free hand, striking the far door frame with his forearm as he ducked through it. Behind him, a scattershot of rocks struck the frame where Farrell had been, their pitter-patter like hail on a window.

       Out in the hallway once more, Farrell found himself face-to-face with Sela Sinclair, the dark metal of the pistol still clutched in her right hand. Farrell caromed into her, slamming both of them against the far wall in a crash of crumbling plasterboard. Sinclair sank back to the floor, spluttering as the plasterboard disintegrated to powder all around her, Farrell landing astride her in a tangle of limbs. Farrell saw the stubby nose of the Colt Mark IV snap up, and he lashed out with the rusty pipe in his hand, knocking the muzzle aside even as it flashed with another ear-splitting shot.

       Then Farrell was on his feet again, driving himself along the corridor as Sela Sinclair brought the pistol around for another shot. Beside her, the man in the hooded robes appeared from the main room, the slingshot in his hand spinning over and over, picking up speed before he launched another clutch of pebbles barely bigger than grains of sand toward the retreating figure.

       Farrell sidestepped into another room to his right, a chunk of plasterboard turning to dust just three inches from his face where the stones struck. He was in the dining room now, once able to accommodate a six- or maybe eight-seat table. It now housed a pile of broken furniture amid scarred, moss-covered walls. Worse yet, it stank of rainwater, the kind of rainwater that perhaps had been mixed with urine somewhere along the way. Farrell ran through the room, leaping over the shattered remains of a glass-fronted cabinet that had been used as the set for a family of badgers. The robed man hurried through the open doorway behind him, his slingshot whining in his hand