Necropolis. James Axler

knife fighter as a master duelist, but she would be able to show a good accounting of herself if she was separated from her pistol.

      That if had come enough times in Brigid’s adventures around the globe for her to know that losing her firearm would be a when. Any distaste for an assassin’s strike had been washed away with Kane’s depiction of how the caravan of prisoners had been treated. Naked and manacled about the neck and ankles, as she could see now, thanks to the light amplification optics in her shadow suit, the captives were in miserable physical condition. They were gaunt, exhausted, with blood dripping down their torsos.

      To a child, they were naked and ragged, and each had to sleep staring straight up into the night sky because the metal yokes about their necks would cut or tear skin if they moved their heads one inch. Brigid’s heart ached for the poor victims of the militia members, and she was able to make out the insignias on the patches of the soldiers.

      They were the Panthers of Mashona, the same group who’d laid siege to the Victoria Falls power station, who’d allied themselves with the mad Nagah prince, Durga, and the Millennium Consortium. They were known killers, murderers, raiders who had no concern for human life except for what they could get out of them.

      Brigid examined the line of prisoners. Women, men, those in their early teens, none of them seeming as if they were good for forced labor, especially after the march that had turned their necks and backs raw with the weight and abrasion of their slave collars. These people were going to be shells of human beings if they had to go much farther.

      Her thoughts went back to the killer who had all but drained the last drop of blood from Nathan Longa’s father. The murderer would have made use of biomass, draining either blood or other moisture and plasma within the human anatomy. Sure, the prisoners spilled some blood, but they still retained more than enough to feed—

      Feed what? Brigid asked herself, but she fought off the urge to visualize the horror or horrors that awaited them. She had her knife pulled from its sheath, the keen edge held in an ice pick grip, and the Panther guard ambled closer on his prescribed patrol route along the chained line of prisoners.

      Concentrate on the horror before you, Brigid told herself. We’ll deal with an entity or entities who’d devour two dozen human beings when we get to it.

      She locked her green eyes on the gunman, who showed no concern for the suffering of other human beings. Slipping a knife between his ribs or into his kidney wouldn’t be a pleasure, but it’d be one step closer to the safe emancipation of twenty-four human beings.

      Brigid promised herself not to take visceral satisfaction in gutting the bastard.

      Grant assembled the recurved bow he’d brought with him. He screwed the two arms into the central riser, the grip that an archer held, complete with an arrow rest where the shaft would stay during the draw. The riser was made of rigid, high-density carbon fiber around an aluminum core. The arms themselves were composed of sandwiched layers of carbon fiber and wood, making the limbs of the bow denser, harder to flex, and thus building up greater potential energy when the string was drawn back.

      Grant also had the yugake glove that Shizuka had made for him. Grant was a student of kyudo, the samurai art of archery, and the yugake was specifically designed for the kind of hold an adherent of the style used, one in which the other fingers trapped the drawn string against the thumb. The yugake had ridges on the thumb designed for securing the drawstring, especially under the pressure of an eighty-eight-pound draw weight. That translated, with the 750-grain broad-head arrows he had, into 58.5 foot-pounds of energy when the recurved snapped straight and hurled the shaft at 188 feet per second.

      The kinetic energy downrange might not have seemed like much in comparison to a bullet that moved much faster, but the dynamics of an arrow, especially with razor-sharp leading edges, translated into better aerodynamic passage through flesh and a larger wound cavity. And the fact that the wound channel was filled with the shaft of the arrow added to the disruption of physical function.

      With this bow, Grant had dealt with a rogue deinonychus on Thunder Isle, a wounded creature weighing in at 250 pounds of lean muscle and reptilian hide. Grant first had assumed that he’d missed his shot, as there was no arrow jutting from the rib cage of the time-trawled predator, but the animal dropped to the ground immediately. Grant’s arrow had punched through the deinonychus’s rib cage, breaking one rib and turning both lungs into slurries of destroyed brachial tissue, and burst out the other side, embedding into a tree just behind it.

      The impact had had such force that Grant had broken the shaft retrieving the arrow, and its hunting tip jammed into the cedar trunk. That kind of trauma was more than sufficient to end the life of a desperate, limping, but still deadly, dinosaur with a single shot. Grant knew that few humans would be able to stand against him. He pulled back on the bow, arms raised in the traditional kyudo draw, his shoulder muscles flexed and tensed.

      His would be the shot that initiated this conflict with the Panthers of Mashona. Through the light amplification sensors on his shadow suit’s faceplate, he could see the others, perched and ready to begin the butcher’s work for this night. Grant, with the reach of his bow, and his speed and grace, was given the task of taking down two more men subsequent to his first target. Kane had another target, as well, but Thurpa, Brigid and Nathan were limited to only one ambush apiece.

      Kane was a veteran of a dozen blade battles, and he had both the swiftness and certainty with which to bring down a militia maniac in a minimum of effort and time, freeing him for a second opponent. Even so, Grant braced himself to fire a fourth arrow in this dark plan.

      Grant cleared his thoughts, entering the samurai state of zanshin, relaxed alertness, his thoughts in a smothered calmness. He was focused on nothing but aware of all around him. It was part of the art of kyudo and as much a mental state as a series of physical movements. He was mentally standing on the razor’s edge, uncommitted to any single action, to leave himself ready for anything.

      The guards were in position, Grant stretched the drawstring back, packing the two-ounce arrow with kinetic energy. The stiff, reinforced limbs struggled to return to their natural state, fighting against Grant’s manipulation of them. He opened his thumb, and the string was freed to slip over the ridges on his glove. Now, at close to 190 feet per second, Grant’s first arrow sliced silently through the night.

      The arrow struck the Panther caravan guard at the knot of muscle and bone where his neck met his shoulders. Razor-sharp steel cracked the man’s spinal column, splitting a vertebrae before the broad head slashed through the trunk of nerves that connected his body to his brain. The arrow would have gone farther, but vertebral bones were designed as thick armor to protect the spinal cord, and the shaft had already expended much of its energy shattering one half of the ring of bone.

      It didn’t matter. The instantly quadriplegic man turned rag-doll limp and spilled to the ground, struck so hard and quickly he didn’t even have a lungful of air to cry out before he was facedown in the dirt. Grant pivoted, drew another arrow from his quiver, nocked it and turned toward his next opponent. In the shadows beyond, he spotted four people emerge from their hiding spots along the tree line and lunge toward four other guards. In a heartbeat, Grant pulled back, aimed and fired his second arrow of the night.

      Grant’s shot met its target in the breastbone, broad head cleaving through rubbery cartilage and squelching off ribs before it shredded two ugly holes in the Mashonan’s aorta. The Panther militiaman’s only sound was a grunt of expelled breath as the impact of fifty foot-pounds of energy slammed into his chest. This arrow wasn’t stopped by the heavy bone of the man’s spinal column, and it burst out from under his left shoulder blade and continued on into the shadows.

      Had the arrow stopped, the two yawning wounds in the man’s main pipeline of lifeblood would have been somewhat staunched, except where the four blades of the arrowhead had widened the wound beyond the diameter of the shaft. With the fletching gone through the blood vessel, causing more tissue disruption of already sliced tissue, the man’s chest instantly filled with high-pressure blood gushing through an entrance and exit wound. That arterial pressure pushed hard on the man’s lungs, making him unable to inhale as he knelt, eyes bulging from his horrific internal