Infestation Cubed. James Axler

      “Anyone fighting the villes got to be a good guy.” The chubby one spoke up. “I’m Hachi. The one she called Farting Gator…”

      The old man chuckled at the reference, interrupting Hachi. “I’m Demothi. Just call me Dem.”

      Kane nodded and shook the old man’s hand. As thin as he was, there was strength in his grip and his brown eyes were undimmed by age. “If I remember some of the vocabulary I learned from Sky Dog, that means ‘talks while walking.’ That’s a good idea.”

      Demothi smiled. “Sometimes the oldest wisdom is the best. Gather your things and let’s roll.”

      “What about the boat?” Rosalia asked.

      “Shouldn’t take much to conceal it,” Grant replied. “I’ll be able to follow you.”

      “By the way, her name’s Rosalia,” Kane added to Demothi.

      “A pleasure, young lady,” the old man said.

      “Yeah, yeah,” Rosalia replied, looking back nervously toward the boat. “I’m thinking you’re making friends a little too fast here, Magistrate Man.”

      “I’d agree with you.” Suwanee spoke up, glaring at the olive-skinned woman. “But you’re the same as them.”

      “Quiet, you two!” Kane bellowed. “We’ve got worse things to worry about than your petty little paranoia.”

      “Like what?” Rosalia asked.

      Kane pointed to one of the unconscious hooded men. He knelt and tore the man’s cowl back, revealing a dark, meshlike covering that, in the shadow of the hood, would render the upper part of his face above his lips completely invisible. It was a cheap effort that produced an unnerving effect, and Kane himself had experienced a momentary pause as he was dealing with the shadow-faced opponents. Only encounters with equally weird and terrifying opponents had given him the ability to act despite the distracting nature of their appearance.

      “That doesn’t look right, even with that cloth over his head,” Demothi said.

      Kane reached out, took a handful of the meshy sack and tore it off of the unconscious man. It was soaked through, which was strange as he had fallen on dry ground. But as he tugged, stringy mucus stretched between the fabric and gangrenous gray tumors that ringed his skull, the tumors themselves riddled with wires and circuits. The downed man wasn’t bleeding from his head trauma, but the crushed growths where he’d been struck were oozing translucent yellow pus that seeped into the grass under his head.

      “What… Oh, God,” Suwanee began. She clamped her hand over her mouth, trying to fight off the urge to vomit, but failed, staggering to the base of a tree and emptying her stomach in an extended, noisy convulsion.

      Rosalia looked at the fallen marauder and the gory mess that sloughed off his scalp. Whatever had grown there was quickly rotting, dead material collapsing into inky blue-green molasses and the wrinkled skin of spoiled apples. She glanced over toward the other unconscious man. “No wonder they cover their heads. What…”

      Kane took the unconscious man’s pulse at his wrist, wisely avoiding any contact with the goo coming off his victim’s head. His upper lip curled in a sneer as he looked at Rosalia. “Check the pulse on the other guy.”

      “What’s wrong?” she asked.

      “This one’s dead. That one might be dead, as well,” Kane mentioned.

      “That’s one bit of good news,” Grant told him over the Commtact. “I’m strong, but hauling around unconscious men through a swamp wasn’t in my job description.”

      Kane spoke softly, so that only his partner could hear over the mandible-mounted communicator. “You’ll never be my beast of burden?”

      Grant snorted. “I see Brigid’s been educating you about the old music, as well.”

      Kane sighed, frisking the corpse of the man, feeling for any more of the strange tumors or further signs of electronics implanted in his skin. There was nothing, but then, considering he wore a built-in communications device himself, he could make an educated guess as to the purpose of the wires and circuits embedded in his forehead and ringing his skull. He was just too cautious to want to touch even the disintegrating glop that slid off the dead man’s head. Who knew what it was and how contagious it could be.

      There were only two people in the world whom Kane could have counted on to provide some explanation for the oddity in front of him.

      One, Lakesh, was on a journey to what used to be the West Coast of the United States of America in the hope of finding something along the Pacific Ocean that would give them an edge over Ullikummis. The other, Brigid Baptiste, was missing, perhaps a prisoner and tortured by the very stone being they were being pursued by.

      Kane looked at the corpse for a few moments more, the last of the tumorous growth dissolving and sliming off the dead man’s pate.

      “Where are you, Baptiste?”