Authors: David Brookover
The soldiers prodded Neo through a side door with his hands zip tied behind him, while a pair of muscular purple Shabaccoes toted Nick. Neo’s head throbbed where the soldier cuffed him, and he felt a little woozy, but he managed to stay ice-ready because Nick always had an escape plan up his sleeve. And besides, he had never seen any of his friend’s alter egos remain so calm in the face of death.
They traveled through a short, dark passage before entering another lighted subterranean chamber where hundreds of Shabacco females and children were crowded at the far end. General Jamison spoke animatedly with what must have been the Shabacco leader for several minutes. The leader’s massive shoulders slumped, and its bulbous amber gaze fell to the floor. The emotionally deflated alien motioned toward a cluster of windows left of the entrance.
Twenty or so purple Shabaccoes entered the chamber from a hidden access between the windows, each pair toting a black, coffin-sized metallic container. Neo presumed they contained the cache of alien weapons Reese Morgan mentioned before disappearing. The Shabaccoes’ cloven hoofs clomped on the rocky floor and resonated throughout the area. General Jamison clasped his hands behind his back and nodded his approval, but the gesture failed to lift the alien leader’s spirits.
The soldiers impatiently milled about the area as they watched the weapon-toting Shabaccoes follow their lieutenant out of the chamber. As the last of the aliens passed Nick, he frowned. His newfound ability to spontaneously absorb people’s thoughts when they were in close proximity paid off once more. Jamison had ordered the lieutenant to kill the Shabaccoes once they loaded the exotic weapons onto a waiting barge moored on the east side of the island, and now the general was about to fulfill Reese Morgan’s instructions to waste the helpless Shabacco females and children huddled in the large chamber. Both were spineless acts of violence, and Nick intended to put an end to their insanity. He caught Neo’s attention and winked at him—their customary call to action.
No one had seen Nick’s silent signal … except the Shabacco leader. It cocked its reptilian head to the side and looked questioningly at Nick, who attempted to telepathically communicate his plan to save the aliens’ lives, but there was no response.
Nick closed his eyes, summoned his remote viewing powers, and sent it out to locate Gabriella and the others. His traveling life-force arrived on the western beach where Gabriella and the others were trapped between two menacing, fifty foot sea serpents. Gabriella looked exasperated … and furious.
Why didn’t she use her magic to escape?
The answer was simple … and deadly. The young witch had somehow neutralized Gabriella’s magic powers, making his fiancée as vulnerable as the humans around her.
He didn’t know where Morgan was at the moment, nor did he care. His fiancé, Crow, Noah, and his aunt were trapped and needed saving immediately. Their situation was critical. The converging serpents blockaded the north and south escape routes, while a sheer cliff and the ocean blocked the east and west routes. They had no place to go except down the serpents’ gullets.
Nick beckoned his life-force back into his body, and he promptly scanned the chamber. During his momentary absence, three soldiers escorted the leader and five of his trusted aides to join the females and children. The alien leader flashed Nick another questioning glance, but Nick’s expression remained stoic. First things first.
He imagined Neo without restraints, and instantly the zip ties around his wrists dissipated. Neo kept his hands behind him as he flexed his rigid fingers so the soldiers wouldn’t see his hands were free … until it was head-bashing time. The Shabacco leader witnessed Nick’s magic maneuver, and to his surprise it nodded slowly, as if it understood what was about to go down. Nick took a chance and winked at it, and it winked back without delay. Nick was surprised a second time … and pleased. Maybe it and its companions would help Neo and him take out the soldiers.
He glanced at the general, who uttered the command for his charges to raise their assault rifles.
“Ready!”
When the rifles were in place, he growled the next command.
“Aim!” They targeted the defenseless Shabaccoes.
Nick’s alter ego willed himself out of the steel netting and leaped to his feet. Reese Morgan’s spell on the netting didn’t affect him because he wasn’t one hundred percent human or
Pureblood
.
As Nick waved his arm at the alien leader, he conjured an assault rifle for Neo, but the big man never got to fire it. While the soldiers and the general’s attention were focused on Nick’s phenomenal escape, dozens of armed Shabaccoes charged from the same chamber entry as their weapons-toting companions used earlier. Before the shocked soldiers spun their rifles around, the alien arrivals fired their long weapons, resembling red muskets, and the potent bursts of rippling translucent rays cremated the soldiers where they stood.
General Jamison sprinted awkwardly toward the exit, but Nick hurled a white lightning bolt at him that skewered his middle. His back arched, and what remained of his spine cracked sickeningly as he buckled into a smoldering heap.
The alien leader herded the females and children to safety through another set of doors behind the assembly. The leader paused at the exit, turned, and winked once at Nick. Nick half-saluted it and rapidly resumed his fighting. Three more lightning spears finished the last of the retreating soldiers, but Neo wasn’t happy. He scowled at Nick.
“I never even fired this baby,” he groused, pointing to the assault rifle. “You and the aliens finished the soldiers off so fast, there was nothing for me to do except stand here like a doe-eyed spectator.”
“Sorry about that, buddy, but I have a feeling you’ll get your chance. Right now, I’ve got to haul ass. Gabriella and the others are in big trouble on the beach. If you wouldn’t mind, help the Shabaccoes clean up all this ash. Okay?”
“Yeah, I suppose,” he grumbled.
Nick disappeared before hearing his friend’s answer. He didn’t like Nick’s new chrome-eyed appearance one bit, and he hated the way the alter ego treated him even less.
Since when did he have to miss out on the action on the beach?
He could battle supernatural creatures with the best of them. Including Nick. He winced at the half-truth. Well, including Nick in his
human
form.
Neo scanned the death chamber and growled at being left behind. When the NNC boys returned
to Old Mother Hubbard’s
in Ohio, the two of them were going to have a heart-to-heart talk on the future of their personal and professional relationship. And Nick wasn’t going to like what he had to say.
An instant later, Neo felt a tug on his wrist, and before he could react, he vanished from the chamber, leaving the astonished Shabaccoes to gape at the vacated space.
The next thing Neo knew, he was standing on a barge in the fog with cinders and embers falling around him like hail. A large hand shoved his head down behind a short stack of crates. He whirled on the hand’s owner, ready to knock him for a loop.
The hand belonged to Nick.
“What the hell…” Neo began, backing away from the writhing scorpion tails.
“Shhh! They’ll hear you.”
“Who’ll hear me?” he whispered, avoiding Nick’s chrome eyes.
“Jamison’s mercenary soldiers,” Nick responded as he skimmed the barge for the hostiles’ locations. Eight sentinels guarded the gangplank spanning the half-moon cove’s rocky shore and the barge. He spotted a tug boat anchored beyond the flat barge, nodding gently atop the modest wave action. The tug crew had joined their barge buddies for a few beers while Jamison was away. It appeared the mercenaries were totally undisciplined. Nick had a news flash for them—their military leader was never returning, so drink up.
“What are we doing here?” Neo persisted.
“You wanted to fire your rifle, so I figured you could take these guys out before they murder the Shabacco weapons bearers. Remember Morgan’s orders to Jamison?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
Nick patted his friend’s shoulder. “I gotta go. Like I said before, Gabriella and the others are in big trouble.” With that, he disappeared in a swirl of fog.
Neo knelt behind the crates. Even though he would get to fire his rifle, Neo still preferred Nick’s orange alter ego. The scorpion tails were too gruesome and … unnatural.
Small rocks tumbled and bounced noisily down the side of the volcano, rustling the nearby vegetation. Neo couldn’t see the shoreline through the pea soup, much less identify who caused the commotion, but his gut told him it was the Shabaccoes. He waited quietly for the tall, spindly backward-ankled aliens to tromp across the gangplank and board the barge. A bearded sentry directed the aliens to pile the weapons near Neo.
“Shit!” he hissed to himself as he speed crawled to another area seconds before the bearers deposited the weighty containers behind the crates where Neo had been hiding moments ago. He quietly propped his rifle against more crates and wiped his forehead with his short sleeve. That was a close call.
Too close.
Once they finished stacking the shiny black containers, Neo peered over the crates at the mercenaries. They smiled and waved as the aliens withdrew and headed across the gangplank, and that was Neo’s cue to eliminate the drunken soldiers. The soldiers meant goodbye, all right—goodbye
forever
.
They rapidly raised their weapons so they could cut the bearers down before they reached the shore. Neo grabbed the assault rifle and stood, but he was too late to fire …
again!
Dozens of green-scaled fish creatures had slipped onto the barge while the mercenaries were occupied with the Shabaccoes. Neo guessed they were the vicious mermen Noah described back in the cavern. The creatures tail-hopped out of the fog toward the slow-witted, inebriated soldiers. The teeth-snapping monsters bit away the mercenaries’ knees, dropping them to their level on the deck, where the mermen finished off their struggling, screaming meals.
Neo couldn’t actually see much of the grisly action through the fog, so he figured they couldn’t see him, either. It was time to follow the Shabaccoes over the gangplank before the mermen discovered his hiding spot. Neo didn’t see another stack of crates behind him as he backed away from the screams, and stumbled into them. They fell noisily to the deck, alerting the creatures to his presence. He spun and dived to the side just as two of the scaly carnivores tail-hopped at him. His trigger finger reacted with finality as a short burst of bullets blew them both to chum.
He winced. Noah didn’t say anything about their faces looking
human
! He shrugged. Oh, well. The damned things should have picked on somebody else.
Neo stared at the gangplank’s vague silhouette. There were more Mermen heading his way and blocking his escape route.
He definitely wasn’t out of the woods yet.
Even as he weighed the odds of making it to the gangplank, more mermen scrambled onto the barge and came at him.
God, what did Nick get him into?
It was now or never. He walked toward his salvation and fired the assault rifle as he went. The steady stream of bullets chewed the marine carnivores to bits, and by the time he reached the gangplank, most of the mermen lay dead. The few survivors fled for their lives into the dark cove waters. He managed to walk to the center of the bowed wooden gangplank when numerous green, five-fingered humanoid hands shot out of the water, gripped the edges on either side of his feet, and rocked his flimsy bridge to freedom.
Neo’s stomach turned to lead. They were trying to spill him into the water, where he couldn’t defend himself. Smart, but deadly. He fired at the hands, splintering the wood, too. Several sharp snaps under his feet added more cause for concern. He was low on ammunition and couldn’t shoot all the mermen’s hands before he fell into the drink. He was a dead man if Nick didn’t teleport him out of there—
now!
His head jerked up at strange twangy sounds coming from the murky beach. The green hands on the gangplank were instantly incinerated, just like Jamison’s mercenaries had been back in that Shabacco subterranean chamber.
“Hurry before wooden bridge collapses!” an unfamiliar voice shouted from the darkness.
Neo snapped out of his amazed stupor and sprinted for shore. There were more cracks and snaps as he ran; the gangplank was breaking apart. He leaped the final six feet to the sand like an Olympic long jumper as the suspended wood buckled and splatted into the water.
When Neo got up and brushed himself off, he saw the Shabacco bearers standing in a line like a firing squad with their long red musket-like rifles at their sides. One of them had morphed its face to resemble a human countenance, but Neo still balked at their pinning a person’s face on a reptilian skull.
“We save you, Earthman.” It spoke with a stilted accent. “We know you were on ship to save us from soldiers.”
“Uh, first off, just call me Neo, okay fellas?”
They nodded.
“I really appreciate your saving my hide!” He glanced at the empty black void between the barge and the shore. “Are you going back there to salvage your weapons?”
The Shabaccoes drooled and coughed.
“Are you guys all right?” Neo asked.
“We are laughing.”
Neo frowned. Those were the weirdest laughs he ever heard.
“Okay, what gives? What’s so damned funny?”
“You.”
Neo clenched his fists. “Oh yeah?”
The humanoid-faced Shabacco held out its curled, clawed hands. “No, don’t be angry, Neo. We not laughing at you. It is what you said. You see, we outwitted the soldiers. The containers on their ship only filled with volcanic rock.”
Neo relaxed and chuckled. “Good one.”
“Thank you. Is there anything else we can do for you, Neo?”
“As a matter of fact, there is.”
“Go ahead. Ask.”
“Is there any way you can take me to the other side of the island, so I can help Nick fight off two sea serpents?”
The talking Shabacco shook its head. “Others of our race tried a rescue a few minutes ago and failed,” it sadly informed him. “The bad magic woman put a solid dome over the entire beach, so no one can enter to rescue your companions.”
Neo swore at his helplessness. “Dammit, there must be something you can do to help them.”
“I am afraid not.”
Neo kicked sand at the barge.
Could Nick defeat Morgan’s spell and slay the sea serpents?
It certainly didn’t look that way.