The Deadliest Earthling Read online

  It was the one time Orun gave up on his training. The one time he left him with no answer. Johnny didn’t really think about it that way until his first days of combat training. Hamiad asked him about the scar on his arm. Johnny had to tell him and the other recruits that Orun had punished him. That earned him a few awes. In a way, he wasn’t lying, though, was he?

  The Ascendi’s entire body contracted as he extended his fist toward Johnny’s stomach. He cringed and threw out his leg haphazardly to keep him back for that much longer. He grimaced at his own sloppiness. The Ascendi was systematically slowing him with those body shots.

  It occurred to him that if the Ascendi read his mind, he knew all the training he’d done. And that he’d never learned how to beat an Anunnaki while unarmed. Panic gnawed at the edges of his mind.

  The Ascendi made a motion that almost qualified as a ghost from his childhood. The next thing Johnny knew, a punch was stabbing into his ribcage. A liver shot. Agony speared through his body, sucking the strength out of his arms and legs until he crumpled to the ground. It was like the Ascendi controlled his body again. Nothing responded. All he could do was breathe, shallow and quick, and urge his body to move. But the pain ravaged him, and he felt the same dampening pathetic frustration as when Orun beat him with liver shots.

  “Tell me where the Conifer is,” the Ascendi said with grave determination.

  Part of Johnny wanted to surrender. The pain stole every ounce of his determination, sapped him of any volition. The agony oozed outward from his stomach, knotting up the rest of it. He tried to speak, but no words came out.

  He could only lie there, latching on to the idea that he’d gone through this before. Yes, he’d survived this already, hadn’t he? In a weird way there was no difference from when Orun hurt him because he didn’t make it any easier. He didn’t help Johnny afterward or give him any easy steps out. He’d done exactly what his enemy would’ve. Johnny realized he’d prepared him just as he needed to.

  Thinking this, knowing he’d not only experienced this before but spent his whole childhood training for this type of moment, an intense determination formed in him. He couldn’t let all that training be in vain.

  He flushed the Ascendi’s question away and pushed up with his legs. Wobbly, but steadily. Little by little, he poured every seed of effort into working his muscles into his desire to stand. A deep breath broke the rhythm of short, shallow inhalations.

  As he leveled with the Ascendi, he managed to speak, strained but collected. “I told you I’m not going to fall for your mind games.”

  A metallic object flashed toward him. A probing instrument that resembled a cross between a fork and a syringe. This time the Ascendi actually stabbed him. In the exact spot he’d been stabbed once by his own knife, sparring with Orun.

  The pain didn’t spread as fast or strongly as he would’ve expected. He felt the probing tool pierce his skin and the cold knowledge, but he didn’t register any terrible shock from pain. For a second, he decided the Ascendi couldn’t truly hurt him. Looking down, though, a lot of blood glimmered on the floor. He wanted to lash out at the Ascendi with everything he could muster, only he’d die if he didn’t go into recovery mode.

  The Ascendi tore the probe out crudely, raking a red streak up his arm. Correction: He would die whatever he did. Johnny expected to feel more afraid. So afraid he would imagine things being worse than they were. But a second glance at the probe revealed that it wasn’t nearly as sharp or thick as it seemed cutting into him.

  He clasped the wound with his other hand and stepped to the side.

  “I don’t know where the Conifer is,” he shouted. Feigning cooperation was his only hope.

  The Ascendi tightened his fingers around the probe, his arm extending to Johnny’s face. The weapon moved in slow motion, the three needle prongs, the silver fin jutting off the main rod, the grooves of the cylinder handle all clear as glass to him.

  Chapter 30

  The probe crashed into Johnny’s face as he shrank back, but he didn’t feel a thing. Instead, he registered two versions of the Ascendi overlapping. One a hologram. One real, but cloaked. The hologram version had stabbed him with a hologram probe. The real one was sagging to the floor, blood gushing from his stomach. Johnny didn’t believe it. The only explanation was—

  “Follow me,” Orun whispered, still in his Anunnaki form complete with typical Anunnaki combat armor.

  Surprised, Johnny almost laughed. He couldn’t believe it. Orun had broken his one sacred rule. Pretty brutally too.

  He nodded, noting that a shadowy blue aura obscured his body as well. Below him a hologram version of himself bled to death on the floor.

  Ahead, a cloaked Orun led him to the edge of the chamber. Given his past, it made sense that he’d found a way inside an Anunnaki base. Nearly a century before the Naga arrived on Earth, they sent spies to gather information and infiltrate the governments of various countries. Orun among them. And then during the Shroud War, he defected, sickened by the Naga’s treatment of humans, or so Johnny had heard.

  They tore between the standing divisions of Anunnaki until they hit the edge of the pod. The wall was marked with a series of Anunnaki signs, ranging from circles to diamonds with lines crossing through or underneath them.

  Orun palmed the wall. A doorway niche depressed an inch, then slid open.

  As they emerged into the corridor, a mixture of grey figures and black specks flooded his vision. Anunnaki. Dozens of them. All surrounding the pod.

  They would detect his and Orun’s energy signature with their visors. On impulse, he stepped back. Trained to find a shoulder-strapped rifle hanging at his hip, he lowered his right hand to emptiness. The backup plan was his knife. Again emptiness.

  Johnny steeled himself and clenched his fists. At least he was warmed up. Only then did he see the Ascendi hologram disguising Orun. He passed something off to the Anunnaki in Nebirian. Probably along the lines of I’m transferring this prisoner to a different base, because they moved aside.

  They entered into a corridor occupied by two Anunnaki. One said something to Orun that sounded threatening. Just like that, Orun lunged forward and struck the first flicker against the head. The other received a crack to the face. Both hit the floor a split-second later.

  Johnny hesitated. “Where are we headed?”

  “A portal.”

  Johnny bent down and tore a designator from one of the Anunnaki’s wrists. “I’ll need this, then.”

  Pain racked his arm as blood dotted the floor. He wasn’t bleeding nearly as bad as he’d thought before. Part of the blood earlier had been the Ascendi’s. Still, his wound was worsening.

  “Orun,” he urged, motioning to the puncture wounds.

  He raised the Kheper rod. A flash of the metal dust whipped against his arm. “That should slow it for now.”

  They darted through the hall. As they crossed an intersection, something fast and hot whipped past his bare shoulder with a whine. He needed no explanation. Pulse surges from resonance blasters. The Anunnaki were closing on them. Their aim wasn’t as bad as he thought. Red spotted Orun’s shoulder and the Ascendi hologram disappeared.

  Johnny wanted to ask if he was okay, but their sprinting was roasting his lungs and turning his legs to wood. They needed to reach a portal soon, or his body would give out.

  Again searing wind cut past him. He almost tripped. Then Orun grabbed his arm and pulled him inside a new pod.

  The room contained a massive sandpit and five guards. Immediately Orun rushed to the forefront. The guards opened their palms and flicked. The pulse surges hit him dead-on with a snap. He fell back, jerking the Kheper shaft. A silver sandstorm billowed across the chamber. As the metallic cloud wrapped around the Anunnaki, they shrieked and collapsed.

  And then the Kheper storm died, the metallic beads littering the floor like fresh hail.

  Orun groaned, his face strained worse than Johnny had ever seen it before. He was in genuine pain. His armo
r should’ve repelled the Anunnaki’s pulse surges.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve broken the rules, so control of my technological enhancements is being revoked.”

  He inhaled and staggered over to the wall. His fingers ran along a vertical pattern of signs.

  “Hurry up,” he growled, staggering into the sandpit. Johnny joined him as the top layer of sand shifted. By the single lurch it gave and a weak humming emanating from it, Johnny guessed they’d hit a dead end.

  “Did it run out of power?” Johnny asked, a shudder of pain running through his arm.

  “They’ve locked it down,” Orun said coldly, his face creasing with alarm. He held out the Conifer by its chain and slipped it over Johnny’s bare chest. A long sigh escaped him. The kind of sigh that came before a moment requiring the utmost focus. Johnny had heard Orun make this exact sigh before creating mini–obstacle courses of Khepers. When he would set sharp, jagged edges and shapeless masses hovering around Johnny to test his reflexes and his aim at the same time.

  “When you were a boy, you asked me sometimes if I could ever go back to Nebiru. I said only as a last resort. Now it’s time for that last resort.” Orun paused and fished one of his earrings from his body armor. “Get this to the Eagle.”

  Johnny released his hand from his wound and cringed. The room spun from the pain.

  “But how? We’re stu—”

  “You need to rejoin her. Do you understand?”

  Orun had asked him that question hundreds of times in training, demanding a simple confirmation. And yet the words were different now. Formed on a deep sorrow that begged a response rather than demanded it.

  The earring and the edges of Orun’s Anunnaki fingers pressed into Johnny’s palm. Strange, he’d never actually felt Orun’s fingers in any way other than combat. No, that wasn’t true. He reached back into the far depths of his past. The night of his parents’ death, he’d felt these same fingers around him.

  “If I’d truly believed Earth was a lost cause, I could’ve gone back to Nebiru or anywhere in the universe. But I never believed Earth was a lost cause.” Orun squeezed his shoulder and smiled. It dawned on Johnny that he was giving him access to his personal warp gate. The Eagle had mentioned it, but he’d never imagined that Orun would teleport someone else. Let alone him.

  “I learned a long time ago that you were the cause,” Orun said.

  The words seared into Johnny’s mind. Piece by piece, his childhood assumptions about Orun were breaking away.

  “Remember what I used to call you?”

  The seven simple words reverberated inside Johnny. He didn’t blink for several seconds. Finally he opened his mouth. With a tinge of childish softness, he said, “The deadliest earthling.”

  His hand closed around the earring. It was the silver lining he needed, but it barely eased the swirling pain in him of what was to come.

  “I can’t send you far, but the Anunnaki won’t be able to track you,” Orun said, thrumming his fingers along Johnny’s shoulder. “It might feel strange.”

  “What about you?”

  “It’s a one-person, one-time deal,” Orun said, and gestured to his injuries. “Besides, if I’m captured, the Anunnaki will need me alive.”

  Johnny stared blankly, hollowness eating away at him. His eyes and cheeks burned with the realization that he wouldn’t see Orun again. The burning spread to the rest of his body. A duller burn, almost feverish. He knew it was Orun teleporting him away.

  A fresh doorway formed on the other side of the chamber. A much larger opening than before. The Ascendi Major swaggered in with a small army of flickers. Disbelief stabbed at Johnny. On impulse he tried to run, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even yell out. Two giant hands seemed to be crushing the sides of his head. Even as his vision blurred, he saw an Ascendi Major look-alike join the fray with a yellow Conifer. The Ascendi Minor. The next thing he knew, an invisible force threw Orun against the wall. And then everything spun, Orun’s words the last sound he heard. Have faith.

  Chapter 31

  The ground opened up beneath him. His stomach sizzled with panic. Johnny thought he was about to die. Instead, he collided with a bed of dirt. Breathing quickly, he stared at the jagged edge of a rock that missed slicing into his face by an inch. His right arm throbbed in pain, his left arm splayed in front of him, coated with small, stinging rocks.

  He jumped to his feet and grabbed his arm. Felt the stickiness of his own blood. Orun must’ve lacked the strength to fully heal him.

  The thought of Orun seemed almost a distorted memory. One of the Ascendi’s mind games. Too surreal. But that was what made it real. Because he never would’ve imagined Orun killing for him, sacrificing himself for him.

  A gust of cool wind over his back hinted that he was somewhere high up. He craned his head. A sunbaked valley stretched out below. A few miles away, he spotted a collection of bungalows and shacks. Fort Bloodhound.

  In a weird way, he didn’t feel as sad as he should’ve. There wasn’t the blatant despair. The endless well that you dove into when you lost a family member. Still, red-hot tears licked down his face.

  Tremored breaths. Johnny knew the sound all too well from himself, but mostly from that night long ago. He’d cried off and on in the Eagle’s quarters, sitting on that big chair of hers.

  Looking down, he found Orun’s earring lodged in the dirt. He could’ve lost it forever so easily.

  His nose clogged, he steadied himself with a breath through his mouth, and reached down to pick it free.

  The day before his parents deployed for their final mission, his dad had shown him Orun’s earring. He’d said it was thanks to this they even knew how to infiltrate the Anunnaki’s central hub. Johnny wondered then what this earring held. He needed to take it to the Eagle, so it was bound to contain valuable information. About what, though? Maybe the location of the Conifers? He dared to dream of that. It had to be something useful.

  He discovered a crevasse in the mountain slope and crawled inside without hesitation. There was a seven-foot drop to the ground. Johnny felt the impact in his feet and cringed. If he could reach the other end of these tunnels, he could find Morris. Orun said he’d taken him to a village on the other side of these mountains.

  His punctured arm trembled. If he ever hoped to reach the Eagle, patching up the wound would have to be his first priority. Illuminating the tunnel with the Conifer, he considered his jeans. But that wouldn’t work. They were too thick to tear, too big to wrap around his arm, and covered with dirt that could infect the wound.

  On that note, how did the Ascendi recover from Orun’s attack? It looked guaranteed to kill him. He could only assume it was a Conifer. A Conifer of life. Then there was his Conifer of optics. A Conifer of the mind. And a yellow Conifer that levitated Orun and sent him through the air in that chamber. A Conifer of gravity. He wasn’t any closer to collecting them, but at least he knew the dangers they presented.

  The constant stinging in his arm provoked him into a fast walk. At every passage he explored, two or three new tunnels opened up, drawing out the cavern like a freaking maze. Finally he reached a chamber with the shattered remains of a kerosene lamp. He scoured the place for other signs of life. Namely spare clothes. The ground was mostly rock, so any clothes might be clean enough to use as a bandage.

  Ultimately, he found nothing and moved on.

  His wandering seemed to stretch hours, but it might’ve only been minutes. The way he’d exhausted himself, lost blood, and narrowly escaped mental torments, he couldn’t exactly trust his senses. What he did accept was the wear and tear on his body. Despite the cavern’s cool temperature, his lips scraped against each other and his feet throbbed from banging on rocks. His body weighed a million pounds of aches and pains.

  With a groan, he slumped onto the ground. It occurred to him that he needed to find Morris soon. If the Anunnaki had Orun in their custody, they could eventually figure out where he’d traveled via sn
ake hole. And they would know he’d traveled with Morris.

  He fished out the earring and examined it under the Conifer’s glow. The peg-shaped earring rested in his hand. When they lived together, Johnny had heard Orun speak commands in Nebirian that would trigger movements from his earrings or Khepers.

  “Help me find a way out of here,” Johnny said. The earring did nothing. Maybe if Sarah were here. She was fluent in Nebirian. Or had been, he corrected himself grimly. Their last conversation still sounded clear and fresh. The image of her in slave uniform popped into his head. A delusion from the Ascendi and nothing more.

  Johnny swallowed, his throat rough. It didn’t matter, anyway. The odds were so small he’d ever see his friends again, alive or dead. Still, he didn’t want to throw out the idea. Crazy or not.

  “Well, we can figure it out once we find Morris and get back to Kandrazi, right?” he said to the earring, tossing it up. Only, in the darker light of the tunnel, he missed the catch. It bounced a few feet away. He bent down and picked it up. That’s when he saw the tracks in the dirt. Sandals.

  Those have to lead to a way out.

  He followed the tracks, the sting in his arm sharpening off and on. He stumbled a few times and banged his shoulder into the walls. If he stopped, he’d stop for a long time. He only had to escape these caves and he’d find the village. Then Morris could help him. Pray for him. Whatever it was deacons did. But not if he was captured by Anunnaki before he found him.

  Step by step, his legs tightened. The chamber around him swirled, the ground rising and falling. Johnny focused on maintaining the Conifer’s beam and waited for the dizziness to pass. He’d lost a good amount of blood by now. Enough that he might pass out soon.

  He swayed as he reached a steep climb and clawed his way up. The air felt too warm. As the ground leveled, light caught in his eyes and turned away. He dimmed his Conifer, but it wasn’t that. No. There was an orange coin up ahead. Like the eye of an Anunnaki. Except it was the sun. He scrambled forward, knowing if he could just make it outside, the village couldn’t be too far. Hills, then trees, then shrubs rose into his view. And suddenly he was overlooking a down-sloping road, sun bouncing off the sheen of sweat clinging to his bare chest.