Oblivion Stone

“Oh, you gone done it now, haven’t you, girl?” Hurbon muttered, and a rich laugh came from deep in his chest.

As the four of them watched, the thorns were turning into tendrils, reaching out from the surface of the chair’s arms like a plant’s shoots emerging from the soil. In a second, the waving tendrils latched on to Brigid as she struggled to get up out of the chair, wrapping around her arms before she could pull away.

“What’s it doing?” Brigid asked, an edge of panic in her tone as she found she could no longer rise from the alien seat.

The tendrils continued to pull Brigid’s struggling form back down into the seat, wrapping around her wrists and bonding them to the armrests like manacles.

“I can’t move,” Brigid said as she struggled against the squirming tendrils.

Kane fixed his steely stare on the voodoo priest. “You have to switch this thing off right now,” he insisted.

Hurbon shrugged. “Ah, the chair chooses her own lovers,” he said, a mellow laugh peppering his words. “I only find them for her.”

As Hurbon continued to chuckle, the shoots rushed upward, grasping the underside of Brigid’s right arm as her bare skin brushed against them. In a split second, the tendrils wrapped around her arm, more and more of them branching from the first few that snapped around her, spreading to form a network of veins across her flesh. Brigid gritted her teeth as her arms were yanked down toward the armrest, the budding tendrils wrapping over them to lock her in place. Despite her physical fitness, the chair seemed to have no trouble pulling Brigid down, drawing her closer with the viselike grip of those thin, plantlike tendrils.

“What’s happening?” Brigid asked fearfully.

“You triggered it,” Hurbon stated, laughing once again.

“I just touched it,” Brigid said. “You tricked me.”

Despite her struggles, Brigid was pulled back down into the seat once more, and she squirmed at an angle as she tried to right herself and get away from the alien chair.

Calmly, Kane bent down and pulled a combat knife from the sheath he wore at his ankle. “Quit struggling, Baptiste,” he told her. “You’re just making it worse.”

Brigid’s eyes went wide with shock when she saw Kane move toward her with the lethal-looking blade. “Kane, don’t do anything crazy, okay?” she said through gritted teeth, letting out a yelp as the thorns pressed against her supple flesh.

Kane eyed the tendrils as more and more appeared, growing from the arms and back of the chair and then wrapping themselves tightly around his beautiful companion’s struggling form. The strange tendrils were already cinched over both of Brigid’s arms and had reached around to encompass her pale, slender neck, pulling her so that she sat upright despite her squirming. “Stay still,” Kane instructed. “I’ll cut you free.”

Hurbon laughed louder when he heard that, as though the whole thing was nothing more than a joke.

Ohio Blue fixed the voodoo priest with a fierce look. “Is this your idea of a game?” she challenged. “I had a collector lined up for this piece, but I don’t think it’s money you’re after.”

“You’re astute for a nonbeliever,” Hurbon growled. As if to punctuate his response, Papa Hurbon swung one of his meaty arms at the blue-clad trader, moving fast despite his size and disability. In a second he had knocked her to the floor with a loud, open-palmed slap.

Ohio cried out in pain as she slid across the wooden floorboards, a loose nail tearing the thin cotton of her pant leg.

In the Annunaki chair, Brigid was straining back and forth, shaking her head left and right as the thorny appendages began to burble around her face, covering her eyes. “It hurts,” she yelped, and Kane saw the tiny runnels of blood begin to snake across her flesh amid a glistening sheen of sweat.

“Stay still,” Kane repeated, pressing his left hand against Brigid’s for a moment. Then he swept the knife rapidly through the tendrils, cutting through the first dozen strands that had laced up her arm.

But before Kane could get any further with his task, the vast form of Papa Hurbon reached for him from behind, pulling the ex-Mag away from the chair in a mighty bear hug before flinging him to the floor. Kane slid across the worn floorboards before thudding into the far wall next to Ohio Blue with a bone-shaking crash.

“The chair’s chosen,” Hurbon barked. “You leave her be now, boy.”

Head reeling, Kane struck out from where he lay, sweeping his legs out and catching Hurbon’s own wooden leg as the massive figure loomed over him. With a howl, Hurbon’s bulbous form fell sideways and he lost his balance, arms reaching out as he slammed against the wall.

“You chose the wrong victim for your little scheme,” Kane snarled, pulling himself up off the floor.

“Ain’t you been listening, boy?” Hurbon snapped as he struggled on the floor like a beached whale. “I don’t choose—Ezili Coeur Noir’s chair does that.”

Writhing in the chair, Brigid yelped as the weird tendrils squirmed around her face, wrapping around her, covering her eyes. Then she felt the tendrils worming up into her nostrils, pushing between her lips, and she felt as if panic might consume her at that moment.

But something even stranger than that was happening. Within her mind, hovering in her field of vision, a star chart appeared with crystal clarity. Planets rotated in their orbits, and as Brigid’s eyes were drawn to them, tags appeared to identify each, written in a script that even she could not decipher despite her incredible base of knowledge.

It was terrifying, that feeling of being trapped in the all-encompassing embrace of the nightmare chair, and a part of Brigid felt the rising panic of claustrophobia as the tendrils snaked over her face. But another part of her, her rational mind, marveled at that star chart playing across her eyes, shifting with the movements of her irises, shifting with her very thoughts themselves.

Across from Brigid in the wooden-floored room, Kane spat a curse at Hurbon as the corpulent priest lay flailing on the floor, unable to right himself without help thanks to the wooden leg he wore.

Papa Hurbon’s only response was to look at Kane with defiant eyes as that broad, indefatigable smile formed once more on his lips. Kane dismissed him from his mind, glancing down at Ohio’s semiconscious form before returning to Brigid in the chair. But as he did so, three new figures stepped into the room via the far doorway. Each of them was male, muscular and held a vicious-looking blade. They glared at Kane as he stood before the fallen body of their leader.

“I don’t make the choices,” Hurbon reiterated, cackling a wicked, wheezing laugh, “the chair does. We are just its faithful servants.” His next command was addressed to the newcomers: “Kill him.”

“I knew it’d come down to this,” Kane muttered to himself as the first of the shirtless voodoo worshippers took a step forward and swung a filthy eight-inch blade at Kane’s face.

The ex-Mag stepped back just enough to be out of range as his attacker’s blade cut through the air. Then he stepped forward once more and delivered a brutal knee to the man’s crotch. With a pained howl, Kane’s attacker doubled over and dropped heavily to the floor like a sack of coal.

Though the others watched the falling form of their colleague, Kane himself ignored the falling man. Instead, the ex-Mag rushed forward and swung a swift right hook at the nearest of his two remaining foes, his fist slamming into the man’s jaw with tremendous force. Even as the man reeled from the blow, Kane was ducking down and whipping his leg out to connect with the kneecap of the other voodoo worshipper. With a sharp crack, the third man’s knee snapped backward, bending his leg at an awkward angle, and his arms flailed as he struggled to respond.

Kane was a trained Magistrate, and these penny-ante sec men weren’t even enough to make him break a sweat. In six seconds, Kane had eliminated all three men from the fight, leaving two sobbing in pain and the third tossing and turning in semiconscious delirium.

“Now,” Kane snarled, turning his attention back to the languishing figure of the priest, “how do I switch off the chair?” He held the knife where Hurbon could clearly see it, menace in his eye.

“Can’t be done,” Hurbon said defiantly. “Once she starts, the chair takes whatever she wants.”

“Screw that,” Kane spat, whirling back to his partner, who remained struggling against the clawing grip of the eerie chair.

Brigid Baptiste had almost entirely disappeared amid a cocoon of wavering tendrils. Outside the room, Kane could hear the clomping feet of more voodoo warriors as they ran to investigate the sounds of battle that had come from this inner sanctum.

Biting back a curse, Kane leaned down and began working once more at the tendrils, snapping them aside as rapidly as he could with his combat knife. As he did so, he activated his Commtact—a tiny communications device embedded beside his mastoid bone that allowed him to speak with his teammates in real time via satellite linkup. “Grant? We’re making a hasty exit and we’ll be needing some covering fire in two to three minutes. That suit you?”

The rumbling voice of Grant, Kane’s longtime partner and equal, responded in Kane’s Commtact. “I read you loud and clear, buddy. Just let—” With that, the communication went abruptly dead.

For a moment, Kane waited, his busy knife still working through the swirling mass of spindly tendrils as they reached for Brigid’s now static form. Had something happened to Grant? The Commtact shouldn’t just go dead. Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. In theory, even someone completely deaf could still hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact. As well as radio communications, the units could also be used as translation devices, providing a real-time interpretation of foreign languages on the proviso that sufficient vocabulary had been programmed into their data banks. Loss of communication through them, while not unheard of, was exceedingly rare.

“Grant?” Kane asked in a low voice, and he listened for a moment for any indication of his partner from the Commtact. “Grant, you read me?”

Beside Kane, Ohio Blue was just coming back to her senses, her thick blond hair in disarray as she struggled up from the floor. Swaying a little, she looked around the room at the scene of devastation. “Kane, my sweet, sweet prince,” she said, urgency in her voice, “I think it’s time we were leaving.”

Kane turned at Ohio’s voice, but his attention was distracted by the people appearing behind her. Two new figures pushed through the doorway, and Kane saw immediately that there was something wrong with them. They were tall and emaciated and they walked with a shambling gait. When Kane saw the way that their eyelids flickered over unfocused orbs, he concluded that they were either drugged or something worse. The word zombie flashed through the ex-Mag’s mind.

Kane spoke into the Commtact again. “Grant? Do you read me? Please respond.” After a moment’s silence, he tried patching his signal to home base. “Cerberus? This is Kane. Do you copy? Please respond, Cerberus.”

And still the only response from the Commtact was a deafening silence.

Chapter 3

Grant stood well over six feet tall, with impressively wide shoulders, deep chest and a solid mass of hard, taut muscle. His dark skin was a rich shade of mahogany, and he wore his black hair close-cropped to his skull, with a drooping gunslinger’s mustache curving down from his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate, and their partnership went all the way back to their time together in Cobaltville, years before the formation of the Cerberus operation. Grant was several years older than Kane, and the trust between them was absolute. They had seen combat across the globe, saved each other’s lives on countless occasions and there was an unspoken understanding between them that went as deep as the bond between brothers.