Distortion Offensive. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ stopped, standing protectively before his partner and child even as the group continued to circle them. “Get away,” he instructed. “We need to eat, too.”

      “No, Mr. Man,” the lead punk said. “Not you.”

      Rosalia stepped forward then, while the eyes of the teenage gang members were fixed on the man and his wife, intimidating them with the threat of casual violence. With two long-legged strides, she was next to the nearest punk, and without warning her hand jabbed out and drove into the soft, fleshy part beneath his rib cage. He yelped and fell to the ground, his eyes wide and his tongue lolling in his open mouth. Though he didn’t know it yet, his kidney had ruptured under the impact, and internal bleeding would fill and devour him in the next two hours.

      As one, the group of would-be robbers turned to see the hooded woman in their presence.

      “Who th—!”

      Rosalia didn’t give the little punk enough time to even finish his sentence. Already her right leg was swinging high off the ground to kick the gang member in the face, and his nose exploded in a hideous burst of scarlet.

      As the punk fell backward, Rosalia dropped and lashed out behind her as another of the gang slashed at her with his knife. The blade whizzed over her head, and Rosalia continued backward, driving the sharp corner of her crooked elbow into the young hoodlum’s groin. The punk screamed out as white-hot pain speared through his genitals, and Rosalia heard something soft squelch beneath the impact of her savage blow. The knife-wielder toppled forward, his cry of pain echoing in the enclosed space of the narrow street, and Rosalia snatched the blade from his hand as she flipped him over her back and into the next gang member, who was running toward her.

      The running gang member collided with his flailing comrade, and both of them crashed to the street with finality.

      Still low on the ground, Rosalia turned to see the final would-be robber grab the woman’s hair and drag the knife he held across her exposed throat, just short of cutting her but still close enough to make her cry out. Behind her, Rosalia’s dog barked once, but she dismissed him from her mind, her hands a practiced blur of movement. An instant later, the stolen knife left her hand and sailed through the air, connecting in less than a second with the final gang member’s right eye, plunging deep into the eye socket. The punk screamed as he staggered backward, the hostage he had been holding forgotten.

      “You fucking bitch, you blinded me,” the punk cried as he staggered back against the wall behind him. The knife was embedded in his eye, viscous liquid oozing down his cheek.

      “No, I haven’t,” Rosalia told him calmly as she stood up and approached her struggling foe. “Not yet.” With that, she pulled her own eight-inch blade from its hiding place in her voluminous sleeve, and thrust it into the worthless punk’s remaining eye socket, ramming it so hard that she heard the bone crack.

      As the frightened young couple ran down the street away from the scene of carnage, their child wailing in terror, Rosalia checked the pockets of her fallen foes. Riffling through their possessions, she snagged a half-dozen ration bars and two bottles of water. Not much, but enough for her and the mutt. The dog whined hopefully as it saw its mistress break the foil of a ration bar, snapping the end off. Rosalia handed the mongrel the broken end of the ration bar, telling it to make the food last, even though she knew it wouldn’t understand or heed her advice.

      As the gang lay there, groaning and struggling to recover from the woman’s deadly attack, Rosalia and the dog exited the street and disappeared into the night.

      Life in Hope could be hard. Only the strongest would survive.

      Chapter 3

      The Cerberus trio had spent the night in the spare rooms of the church warden, an aging man whose name was Vernor, but they awoke early and made their way out to the beach at Brigid’s insistence.

      “We spend half our lives cooped up inside a mountain,” Brigid had insisted, referring to the hidden Cerberus redoubt in Montana where the team was based, “and the other half fighting for our lives. Let’s go take a look at the ocean and remind ourselves what it is we’re fighting for.”

      Grant agreed and, albeit with a reluctant grunt, Kane ultimately agreed, too. He’d much sooner spend another hour in bed, catching up on some much-needed rest, but he knew there was no reasoning with the red-haired archivist when she got like this.

      When the three of them reached the beachfront, Brigid rushed off toward the rolling waves while Grant hung back to talk with Kane.

      “Everything okay?” Grant asked, his voice a low rumble like distant thunder.

      “What, with me?” Kane replied. “Sure. Why do you ask?”

      “You just seem—” Grant shrugged “—I dunno, like you’d sooner be somewhere else.”

      Kane looked at Grant, fixing his trusty partner in his steely stare. “No, this is… Well, it’s nice,” Kane said, sweeping his hands before him to take in the vista of the sandy beach and the churning turquoise waves of the Pacific as a quintet of seagulls swooped across its surface, squawking to one another. “Just makes a weird change from the usual.”

      “Beating the crap out of Annunaki stone gods and their screwed-up minions, you mean?” Grant asked lightly, the humor clear from his tone.

      Kane laughed. “Yeah, something like that.” With that, he and Grant joined Brigid at the ocean’s edge, where she had removed her boots to wade in the spume-dappled water.

      Though meant in jest, Kane knew that Grant’s statement had an air of truth to it. Just ten days before, Kane and Grant had found themselves battling with a stone-like being called Ullikummis, who had returned from the stars after almost five thousand years in exile from his Annunaki brethren. The Annunaki had been a constant thorn in the side of the Cerberus warriors since their earliest days as a team. Once mistaken for space gods, the Annunaki were lizardlike, alien visitors who assumed different aspects in their ultimate quest to subjugate and subvert humankind, denying it from reaching its full potential. Primary among those so-called gods was the ruthless Enlil, whose subtle planning and mastery of deception made him a formidable foe.

      Ullikummis was, in fact, Enlil’s son, his lizardlike body genetically altered to serve a specific purpose—to be his father’s personal assassin. But approximately five thousand years ago, something had gone wrong in Ullikummis’s assassination attempt on a god called Teshub, and Enlil had disowned his scion, exiling him to space, imprisoned within an asteroid.

      Less than a month ago, Ullikummis reappeared when his rock prison crash-landed in the Canadian heartland, and the stone-clad Annunaki prince had soon indoctrinated a small group of loyal followers from the local populace. Three Cerberus operatives had been among those would-be followers, including Brigid Baptiste herself, who had found the stone lord’s Svengali-like instruction almost impossible to resist. Accompanied by their colleague Domi, Kane and Grant had led an assault on Ullikummis’s stone base, freeing Brigid and the others and destroying the eerie headquarters that Ullikummis had created from the rocks and named Tenth City. Ullikummis himself had been pushed into a superhot oven by Kane, where his rock body had been blasted with jets of fire until it was reduced to ash.

      “Come on, guys,” Brigid called, her cheery voice intruding on Kane’s somber thoughts.

      Kane looked up and saw Brigid wading in the shallow waves of the ocean, her pant legs rolled up to just below her knees.

      “It’s СКАЧАТЬ