Dragon City. James Axler

      Chapter 3

      The silent drums were beating and Farrell looked wasted. He was a young man but he was looking old, his sunken skin drawn and pale where he had rapidly lost weight over the past few weeks. His gold hoop earring hung low on his ear, his goatee beard looked a little more ragged than normal and his usually shaved head was growing out in mismatched tufts of ginger and brown. But when Sela Sinclair looked at him across the dilapidated room they found themselves hiding in, the thing she most felt was not sorrow or worry or even desperation—it was hunger. Seeing a man that drawn, that sallow cheeked, made her stomach growl. She wanted so much to feed him, to just see him eat.

       That was stress, Sinclair told herself as she looked at him. That was what it had done to him. Was doing to him.

       Farrell had been a technician at the Cerberus redoubt, one of those perennial staff members who could turn his hand to any background task to keep things running smoothly. His favorite post had been running the mat-trans and he could often be found checking the diagnostics on the computer terminal linked to the man-made teleportation unit.

       When Cerberus had come under attack, Farrell had been among the staff who had been caught with their pants down. Quite how Ullikummis’s forces had penetrated the redoubt remained a mystery to Farrell—hadn’t they had a security perimeter to stop this very type of attack? Somehow, whatever it was that they faced in this Ullikummis creature, it was a threat that could change the rules. And, like the rest of the complement of personnel at Cerberus, Farrell had been overpowered and imprisoned by those invading forces, incarcerated in Life Camp Zero to be indoctrinated into the ways of this new would-be master of the world, this new world order.

       Farrell had played only a minor role in the subsequent breakout. Having spent days locked in a single cavernlike room with no amenities and only the most basic foodstuffs, he had been utterly bewildered when the door had pulled back and a beautiful woman and her scruffy mongrel dog had stood framed in the volcanic light, granting his release. Everything since then had been a blur. Kane and the woman—Rosalia was her name, Farrell learned later—had overpowered the troops of Ullikummis but they knew their freedom would be short-lived should reinforcements arrive. It seemed that the cult of Ullikummis was growing into a religious movement that was sweeping the country at an alarming rate, and the Cerberus people were considered a very trivial but very dangerous threat to that movement. Thus the decision had been taken to evacuate the redoubt-cum-prison, to split up the targets and keep the fifty or so Cerberus personnel safe. Farrell had been partnered with Sela Sinclair. Sinclair was a lean-muscled black woman, ex-U.S. Air Force, and had been cryogenically frozen back in the twentieth century to be revived two hundred years later. Thanks to her military background, Sinclair had acted as security detail for Cerberus, and was frequently involved in field missions. If nothing else, Farrell should be safe with her.

       Lakesh had made swift contact with a black-market trader called Ohio Blue, an old friend of the Cerberus operation whose underworld contacts gave her ideal access to hiding places for the Cerberus team. Thus, Farrell and Sela Sinclair had engaged in a mat-trans jump that sent them to what had once been the southernmost edge of Arkansas, way out near the border of Louisiana, where Blue’s operation was centered. Ohio Blue was a glamorous figure. Farrell guessed she was in her late thirties, with a cascade of long blond hair that reached halfway down her back and was swept in peek-a-boo style to mask her left eye entirely. Like her name, Ohio always wore blue; the first time she and her security crew had greeted Farrell and Sinclair at the entrance to the old military redoubt, she had been dressed in a floor-length sapphire gown that glistened with sequins and had a hip-high split that left her right leg bare when she walked.

       Farrell and Sinclair had traveled with six other Cerberus staff, including Brewster Philboyd and a weeping Reba DeFore. All of them were split into pairs at the destination redoubt, where Ohio’s people led them to various safehouses dotted across the area.

       Ohio’s people had escorted Farrell and Sinclair to a dead town that had once been a suburb of Bradley. It looked as if a bomb had hit it, which was very likely what had happened. The asphalt of the streets was churned up into broken chunks, weeds and plants and whole great trees emerging through the wreckage that had sat, unrepaired, for two hundred years. Once upon a time, this had probably been a nice neighborhood, the kind of place where you’d let your kids walk their new puppy, where the evening sun would keep you warm as you sat and read a book on the rocking chair hitched on the wooden veranda, the balmy air granting you that indefinable sense of contentment. Now, it looked like a suburb of hell. One half of the street was just gone; it was simply not there, only the occasional markings where houses or apartment blocks had once stood, old pipes overflowing with swarming plant life and buzzing insects.

       The other side of the street still looked somewhat like a street. There were houses there, eight or nine of them, but it was hard to be sure given the state of the last two, which looked more like something that had washed ashore from the ocean depths even out here, two hundred miles away from the nearest shore. The other houses stood on ruined foundations. Three of them had sunk into the ground, crumbling so that they sat like the steepled fingers of a pair of hands, propped against one another for support. A conifer grew out of one and into the roof of another, its cone shape striving up through the eaves of the second house and into the sky where birds flocked all around it, cawing and chirruping. The other houses were dirty, weather-beaten and overgrown with moss and mold, but they at least looked durable. If nothing else, the street seemed about right for the state that Farrell found himself in—a blue funk.

       The suburb of Bradley was surrounded on all sides by swamp and jungle and forest, much of it impassable even in these days of so-called civilization after the Program of Unification had brought humanity back from the brink of extinction. There were pathways through those jungles, hidden routes that Ohio Blue and her men knew, ways to reach all of these forgotten little corners of middle America that had been largely ignored since the nukecaust.

       Sinclair and Farrell had holed up in one of the broken buildings, choosing the place with the strongest walls and traipsing back and forth to furnish it as best they could from the bombed-out remains of the other houses in the street. Ohio’s people visited every three or four days, bringing with them parcels of food, some of it fresh but much of it tinned or dried goods, cured meats that would keep despite the lack of refrigeration or power in the ruined shack. The place itself smelled like the cloying atmosphere of a hothouse, as if they were living in an arboretum. Mold grew a dark greenish-brown up the walls, and some kind of fungus had taken over the bathroom, pretty violet spores popping and bursting from the walls, ceiling and floor the first time Sinclair had pushed open the door. After that, they had left the room shut, and converted what had once been a downstairs home office into a latrine.

       In the forty-two days that they had been here, Farrell and Sinclair had barely spoken. They were both in shock, and both were quite unable to comprehend what was going on around them. Days had passed where not more than two words would be grunted between them. Farrell took to staring through the gap in the boarded window at the front of the house, watching the churned-up street as if waiting for a parade to arrive, some kind of parade that only the Devil himself could bring. Ex-military, Sela Sinclair lost herself in a punishing fitness regime, exercising obsessively, well into the night. At least, she thought, if we do get attacked I’ll stand a chance.

       She was doing push-ups, listening to the sound of distant drums, when Farrell called her to the window.

       “Sela? Come quick, look.”

       Sinclair expelled a hard breath as she curtailed her routine, wiping sweat from her neck and underarms on a dirt-stained towel as she made her way across the cramped front room, boards creaking as she walked.

       “What is it?” she asked.

       Farrell sat motionless at the window, and the sunlight painted a single stripe across the bridge of his nose where it cut through the gap in the boards.