Serpent's Tooth. James Axler

poison-blinded guards and bearers had been neutralized.

      The explorer trusted only two things to get him out of harm’s way—his booted feet. They stomped through leaves, breaking saplings and low branches, putting distance between himself and the savage hisses behind him. Out of his peripheral vision, he could see the sinewy Nagah lunging at blinded, agonized humans, curved knives and distended jaws slashing into pink and brown flesh alike. Dagger and fang carved through human skin, cutting agonized wails short.

      “Him!” Durga bellowed. “Get that miserable ape and drag him before me!”

      Fargo noticed one millennialist unaffected by the gushing clouds of vision-destroying venom. His machine pistol hammered loudly, bullets chopping one snake man who staggered but still continued to advance. Mere handgun rounds deflected off the tough chest plate armor of the Nagah, though hits to the finer scales of the arms and thighs betrayed bloody swathes where copper-jacketed lead tore the weaker reptilian armor. Fargo left the fool to stand his ground, charging toward the frontier. The millennial gunman stopped firing, and the guard’s fate was broadcast by a strangled death cry as hinged jaws and folding fangs stretched into a face-piercing lethal bite.

      Other guns chattered sporadically, but were quickly overwhelmed by the coordinated assaults of the Nagah’s ambush force.

      Behind him, Fargo could hear the snap of branches and rustle of leaves. That could only mean that others were rushing through the thickets after him. As no bullets speared through the foliage, it had to be the knife-and fang-armed Nagah. The cobra-hooded warriors were in hot pursuit of the fleeing archaeologist.

      Move, he commanded himself, legs pumping. Vaulting over roots, rocks and ruts with the ease of a man who’d run for his life across six continents, Fargo avoided tripping and stumbling. The Nagah hunters behind him snagged their feet on vines or stepped into open space where they expected solid ground. The snake men’s yellow eyes had been focused on Fargo, not the ground before them. For a moment, the archaeologist was elated that, despite their venom and tough scales, they were as fallible and clumsy as any human. The crack of a rifle, accompanied by the eruption of a tree trunk, informed Fargo that the Nagah were perfectly willing to make use of modern tools to slay their foes.

      Fargo changed course and allowed gravity to drag him down a muddy hillside. He rocketed to the bottom of the slope and sprang into a dead run through a copse of trees. Rifles chattered behind him, but Fargo kept up his frantic pace. Soon the single shots changed to fully automatic fire as machine guns were added to the mix.

      Fargo plowed on, ricochets pinging and whining all around him. Trunks thumped as they caught the storm of bullets meant for him. He remembered his mental map, visualizing a steep cliff bordering off into a turgid river. It had forced the expedition to change its course by five miles, slowing the trek to a tedious crawl. He remembered that the height of the drop-off was around forty feet.

      Boots filled with sloshing mud, wet pant legs clinging to his calves and thighs, Fargo knew his pace would rapidly slow off from constriction and lack of sure footing. One misstep would be the end of Fargo’s explorations of the Kashmir region. While he would consider himself likely to catch an instantly fatal bullet, the ideal outcome was a splash in the river, its powerful current carrying him south and away from the serpentine assassins on his tail.

      On foot, the Nagah warriors would not be able to keep up and shoot at Fargo at the same time, he suspected. The trees thinned out and the ground began to slope. Fargo’s mud-caked boots turned into wet slicks, his footing dissolving into an arm-windmilling effort at balance as gravity whipped him into a wild slide. The rattle and crack of bullets around him faded as the slope pulled him below the arc of fire laid out by the cobra men. The skid downhill came to a sudden end as Forgo rocketed out into the air over the roiling waters beneath.

      There was an odd, queasy moment of weightlessness as Fargo sailed to the waters. The surface of the river shimmered like ribbons of living, writhing glass. The world had gone silent around him, an envelope of calm providing him with a respite from the frantic race for his life. The snake men had stopped firing, it seemed, and in his peripheral vision, the millennialist trespasser knew why. Just before he knifed into the river, he had caught sight of a helicopter hanging over the tree line like a bloated, mechanical bee.

      Fargo plunged under the surface of the roiling river, momentum pushing him nearly to the bottom as the water exerted its braking force on him. The current shoved hard, toppling him into a spin that he kicked out of, arms and legs dragging him toward the silty bottom.

      With a twist, he looked up through the surface of the river, seeing the warped image of the sky and ledge hanging over him. Fargo knew that he had barely a minute before his lungs forced him to surface, but cold dread of that helicopter stilled his urge to swim upward.

      Seconds ticked on as his lungs burned, wanting to return to their normal schedule of inhalation and exhalation. The helicopter’s black shape poked out of the overhang of the ledge. Its fattened fish profile blotted out the sun while rotor wash created a flat dish in the water, creating a lens that the Nagah could see through.

      Fargo had no trouble seeing the huge bulk as it hovered, and given the clarity of the river, he was easily visible to the airborne pursuers. A cobra man leaned out of the door and fired his automatic rifle, bullets knifing toward the millennialist. One plucked at his forearm, but Fargo bit his tongue to resist the urge to cry out, expelling needed air from his lungs in the process. The current dragged him along, a cloud of dark blood smearing behind him in a corkscrew.

      Had it not been for the refraction of the crystal-clear water, the Nagah sniper would have riddled Fargo’s chest. The explorer kept his cool, playing dead. His lungs burned as the enemy helicopter ascended and joined two more aircraft. Together they whirled in the sky for a moment before they broke north, back past the forbidden frontier that Fargo had dared to penetrate.

      In three strong kicks, he broke the surface, sucking in sweet, life-giving oxygen. His arm ached badly. The bullet had glanced off his ulna, one of the strongest bones in the human body. Fortunately, the imprecise hit didn’t have the power to cause more than a hairline fracture. Fargo knew it wasn’t broken because he could still move his fingers, albeit stiffly.

      He dragged himself to shore, crawling between two dense bushes to shield himself from discovery in case the humanoid snake warriors saw fit to return.

      With his good hand and his teeth, he tore a scarf from around his neck and fashioned a compress and bandage for his gunshot wound, sealing the puckered injury to control further blood loss and stave off infection. He had a strip left over from the bandages, but it wouldn’t support his arm properly. He slipped his belt out of the loops in his pants and cinched the wounded limb to his torso, immobilizing it above the elbow. He wound the last strip of scarf around his forearm and the belt, multiple loops providing sufficient stability to the injured limb.

      It would be dark soon, and he needed to get to a warm shelter. A fire was out of the question, not this close to the enemies who had killed more than a hundred trespassers with quick, ruthless efficiency.

      No, Fargo needed something just a little better, perhaps the tall, intertwined roots of a tree or a nice cave, provided there were no native, actual serpents present within. The irony of dying from a real cobra bite after escaping a hybrid of man and snake would shame Fargo to no end.

      The Millennial Consortium wouldn’t be pleased at the loss of the expedition, especially now that it had been proved that there were operating aircraft in the stockpiles possessed by the Nagah. When the millennialists were disappointed, they tended to shoot the messenger. Already, though, the redoubt raider had a plan to minimize the blame and to appease the consortium.

      For the plan to work, Fargo had to get to the Bitterroot Mountains.

      The outlanders Kane, Grant and Brigid Baptiste could succeed where a consortium expeditionary force had failed. If they didn’t, they would still inflict horrendous losses upon the snake men, giving a new millennial strike team sufficient advantage to finish the job. Should Kane and company prevail, then a force meant to crush an army of serpent warriors would be more than enough to deal with the Cerberus interlopers.

      It