New Praetorians 2 - Shetani Zeru Bryan Read online

  SHETANI ZERU BRYAN

  R. K. SYRUS

  CONTENTS

  The Sci-Fi Technothriller Novel Series Begins With: NEW PRAETORIANS 1: SIENNA MCKNIGHT

  Books in the New Praetorians Series

  Epigraph

  Begin reading SHETANI ZERU BRYAN

  Thank you for reading

  Books in the New Praetorians Series

  The New Praetorians Need You!

  New Praetorians Wiki

  The New Praetorians Series Continuity

  Copyright

  The Sci-Fi Technothriller Novel Series Begins With:

  NEW PRAETORIANS 1: SIENNA MCKNIGHT

  “Wonder Woman meets Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell.”

  In a world filled with crumbling governments and dangerous, out-of-control technology, Sienna learns the only way to effectively wage war is to follow her own rules.

  —Samuel Morningstar, Author of the Dirk Garrick Occult Detective Series

  “…an intriguing world of futuristic technology, made more familiar by contemporary references.”

  “Radiant descriptions also enhance the story.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sienna was an interesting character. I was happy that she did in fact remind me of Sarah Connor from Terminator, just like the blurb said. She only gets more awesome as the book progresses.”

  —Brittany S., NetGalley reviewer

  In ebook and paperback. Start reading the first of the series today!

  This book is part of the New Praetorians series.

  OTHER BOOKS SET IN THE NEW PRAETORIANS UNIVERSE:

  Start reading today

  Apocalypse series standalone novels

  New Praetorians serialized books

  Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.

  —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Why We Can’t Wait, 1963

  In certain places it is believed the body parts of albinos hold magical powers, that they can make someone instantly prosperous, powerful, or lucky if a witch doctor turns them into a talisman, or a salve, or a stew. A person who wants to quickly become rich is advised to put a set of properly prepared albino legs on either side of his/her door entrance with the toes pointing into the home.

  Raw ingredients are often procured by the witch doctors’ clients: powerful politicians and ascendant warlords.

  A complete set of human albino body parts—all four limbs, genitalia, ears, tongue, nose, and skin—can be sold for up to $75,000 (LCU equivalent) according to the current report by Worldwide Help International.

  One Swahili word for albinos is “zeru,” meaning “ghost.”

  1

  FORTY-THREE YEARS AGO

  SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

  ELAHAJ

  The boy ran headlong through the thornbushes at night. No moon, no stars, the thick-woven canopy above blotted out any glimmer that might guide him. Elahaj stuck one hand out to feel his way. The other held his burden, the reason for his mad dash.

  Behind him, there might be lights. Only electric. No gas, no kerosene. The bush was very dry in this season. He did not look back. Turning, he might stumble. It was enough to know they were not ahead of him. He felt around, tried to be careful, tried with each step to lift his feet over roots and vines. Then he tripped anyway, slid to a stop, skinning one knee. He rose and moved on.

  A long thorn pierced his palm where thumb and first finger met. The world all around was so dark that he could see the pain. It flashed red-orange, then faded to silver. Better his hand than his leg or foot.

  With his mouth, he pulled out the long, needle-shaped intruder. He spat, tasting sap, sweat, dirt, and blood.

  It might have gone all the way through. He could not tell. He squeezed his fingers, felt wet drip. It was not a bad wound. Maybe the dark held luck for him.

  Maybe he could last till day came. In daylight he could find government rangers or strong Maasai who would not be afraid to help. Now, no one would help him. In the dull dead of night, all creatures were on their own.

  He sensed a hollow space ahead and ducked left.

  Somewhere, a hyena laughed.

  Elahaj understood the meaning of the sound as if it had come from a person. This was how they spoke to each other when approached by something more dangerous. Hyenas laughed when they were afraid.

  The weight he carried stirred but remained silent.

  A minute later, Elahaj heard another hyena noise, this one was different.

  “Whoop, whoop.”

  That sound they made to call their clan together for a hunt. If the stories have been told true, they obeyed something that was less than a spirit, yet more than a man. Something that walked on two legs and carried a hunger no natural beast could endure.

  “Whoop, whoop.”

  Were the hyenas closer now? Or had he run toward them in the dark? No way to know.

  These scavengers could run faster than any wild dog. Their ears, eyes, and noses were built for finding wounded prey. Elahaj felt his portion of luck fade. He had no chance. They had no chance.

  Something crawled on him. It wasn’t biting, so he left it.

  He had to think.

  The river?

  Could he find it? By the sun, yes. But in pitch dark by a sickle moon that kept vanishing behind cloud and trees? How? Every turn could run him straight into the hyenas. At a full run, they were as quiet as snakes. He might not know they were there until he was surrounded.

  The river!

  Minutes later, Elahaj felt the maze of bramble bushes open. He felt the jabs and pricks less and less.

  Left. Ah!

  Right. Ow!

  Left. Gah!

  Then no more.

  Even better, a boon. He saw something to guide his way.

  By the meager silver light in the sky, he could make out the Giraffe’s Horns. Two prongs of faraway mountaintops behind a hill. He knew where he was and the way to go.

  He ran. He wasn’t alone.

  A ripple of silence washed through trees and bushes. The silence of insects, the sudden quiet of bird calls, the absence of these things was as alarming as panting snarls. A mute hush spread out around the hunting pack and what followed after them.

  Close? Far?

  Didn’t matter. If he could sense the hyenas, they had marked him long ago. If they caught him, they would not kill him. These were not so merciful as truly wild things. They were cunning servants.

  Once, when he was very young and watching from the low branches of a fat tree, he had seen a guard dog killed. Its neck had been broken silently and bloodlessly. Its body lay on the dirt path, hind legs twitching. The pack of wild hyenas ignored it and worked together to pull a calf over a fence.

  These ones, somewhere out there, were not wild. They were sternly trained. They had been taught to hunt humans and keep the prize whole. Schooled by the lash, marked by the branding iron, they had devoured the carcasses of their brothers and sisters who did not learn quickly enough. This pack would hold them still until the real beast came: the Ghost Eater.

  The side of the river he was on was the same side as his village. On this side, the riverbank was high, like the ledge of a small hill. Before he got to this ledge, he would run into a mud wallow. That place smelled very bad, was hard to cross, and dangerous. Long worms with teeth lived on the bottom. You never stepped there without good shoes, or you’d lose a toe to a biting thing. But now he hoped to feel the squish under his soles.

  He did. Dry hardpack tu
rned to sand. Sand turned to cool mud.

  Just then, the sound of padding came from behind. He looked. Fickle light bounced off five, maybe six pairs of eyes.

  So close. Maybe closer to him than he was to the wide flowing waters of the river.

  He ran.

  Hyena eyes twinkled and dipped and came on.

  That second that separated them, it was enough. Enough for his foot to find the solid crest of a sand bank. The sand was firm enough for his feet to push off from. Elahaj leaped with all his remaining might.

  Air rushed under his arms. He held them up high. High enough so that if he hit deep water, his baby brother would not drown, not right away.

  The unnamed infant held out a hand. He seemed to be reaching up into the sky to grab for the sharply honed sickle moon. Like the moon, his little arm was bone white.

  • • •

  Sometime later, but well before the glimmer of the next day, Elahaj hid where the Ghost Eater and the hunters were least likely to look. He was on a small hill overlooking the road into the village he had just run away from. He crouched there, doing what they would not expect. He had doubled back and was watching them.

  When he’d jumped, he had not flown across the whole river. He would have needed wings to do that. And on the other side, where was there for him to go? Only more flat country. Good for those on four feet, bad for those with two legs.

  Instead, he had leaped from the near bank only as far as he needed to convince the hyenas’ noses and the men with lights that they had crossed.

  As he waded, he’d held the baby higher than he had to. A visitor to the village told him that in his country ghosts, albinos, were not allowed to go near deep running water. He had said it was known their spirit father came upon the earth in the form of a river. This water demon, the traveler’s story went, would gladly take them home at the earliest opportunity.

  Elahaj did not believe this. The only spirit he personally had knowledge of was the lazy one attached to the fat Kigelia trees around the village. On the other hand, why take chances where spirits were concerned?

  He had made his way down river. Sometimes only the ends of his toes touched the bottom of the channel. The wind was behind him the whole way. A gurgling current covered the small noises made by his baby brother. Behind them, white cones of light darted this way and that above the dark waters.

  Then he had found a spot where the river turned and a branch hung; it was thick with leaves. He grabbed it. Elahaj stayed still.

  There he waited, listening. He knew enough English to be a guide. He did not need it to understand what was happening on the riverbank where his footprints disappeared. The language he overheard was universal: fear and pain.

  Under a tattered safari hat, a black-lipped mouth set in a vulture-gray face snarled silently. The Ghost Eater raised his arm and the gnarled leather-bound lash at the end of it. After the first few strokes, the hyenas no longer whimper-laughed, they only grunted, feeling their master’s outrage. Feeling it blow by blow.

  Ten strokes each. Six hardy scavengers.

  Sixty strokes in all. The last three or four were always wet slaps on thick hide as blood welled in fresh wounds. Jaws that could splinter an antelope’s thighbones gnashed in agony.

  Elahaj had witnessed this while standing in the river, bracing himself against its slow plentiful current. Tired, hurt, and hungry as he was, he forced himself to think.

  There were spirits that clung to the trees ringing his village. These spirits sometimes helped people when their need was very great. They were lazy. If he ran too far away, they would not follow. He looked at the shapes of the Kigelia trees outlined by the hunter’s headlights and lamps.

  A plan, dangerous and desperate, fixed itself in his mind. Once punished, the hyenas would slink off to lick their wounds. Perhaps the weakest ones would die. What mattered was their ears and noses would be somewhere else. He could quietly go back to the village.

  He left the river to do just that.

  Their home was barely a lean-to. It stood away from the center of the ring of huts, as befitted the spawn of demons. Theirs was a tolerant community. A community with one traitor in it, whose desire for hard currency had overcome human compassion.

  As dusk had fallen that day, one of their fellow villager’s words had brought doom rolling in on four wheels. The trucks of the albino hunters still stood there in a circle, headlamp lights flaring out so the visitors had light to work by.

  Clothes dripping with river water, Elahaj hid his brother in the baby’s own swaddling crib. The little one was quiet. He only had to remain undetected for a short while longer. In a few minutes, if the plan went well, it would not matter. It also occurred to Elahaj that if the plan went badly, it would also not matter. With that in mind, and with much less hesitation weighing down his feet, he ducked out of the lean-to to prepare.

  • • •

  He worked silently, darting along narrow paths he had followed since he was old enough to walk. They wound their way through the dry brush that ringed the village.

  New voices came from the ring of trucks. Some were angry in the local way, the way a motorcyclist would yell at you to move your cow to the side. Other voices spoke English in very harsh, superior tones. Those were angry in way he had heard on the radio.

  A scream.

  From the pit of hopeless agony, it slashed out and split the night air. It was all Elahaj could do to keep still. He wanted to rush in, just him and a piece of plastic against four, maybe five, men with machetes.

  “Why… why do you do this?”

  A female voice he knew very well came from the doorway of a communal hut. The one used for sorting and mashing grain. He wanted to shut his ears, but the sounds carried clearly.

  “You are from this village,” the same woman’s voice pleaded. “I knew you as a boy. You played and hunted with my brothers. We are your people, I am—”

  “YOU are a demon!” the man said, backing up to the hut’s doorway to give himself room to work.

  The albino hunter’s legs and feet came into view. He wore new leather boots with no socks. The laces were tied wrong, with the top part and tongue flopping. This was not how the foreign safari visitors would have tied them.

  “The magic that gave you life,” he went on, “the beast that lay with your mother and you as well. Your confession is on your skin and the zeru boy’s.”

  The man’s head swivelled around on his long, sweaty neck. Bloodshot eyes wild with greed gazed at the trees. Looked right at Elahaj. Or so it felt. The servant of the Ghost Eater must have seen only the low-hanging Kigelia branches, because a second later, those greedy eyes darted the other way, as if they would catch a valuable zeru just strolling by.

  The albino hunter turned back to the one he had trapped in the hut.

  “We are taking those magics, not human people. Our boss will let the magic out, and he will use it,” he said, leaning back and bracing his arm. “He will pay us. Pay us for every part…”

  Thock.

  “…of you.”

  The machete hacked through sinewy gristle and stubborn joint. Elahaj knew the sound, but it was not a bushmeat animal being cut. It was his own mother.

  Her next sound was more terrifying than a scream. She gave up a wavering exhalation, one cut off by a thick wet sob of utter hopelessness.

  Elahaj had to do something. He could not just sit safely in cover. He breathed in and out. Then did what he came back from the river to do. Unseen, he circled the outermost huts.

  He heard everything but let none of it penetrate his mind like the thorn that had earlier pushed through his hand. If he let one moment in, he would be lost. All would be lost.

  “Please, leave me one hand.”

  “Woman, are you stupid?”

  The machete, now dripping, waved at the trucks and the other helpers.

  “Look around. You tell me ‘take one arm and go’?” The man sounded offended by this unreasonable suggestion. “Everyon
e has to be paid. He told us he needs all of you, and not to come back without the double-demon baby in one piece.”

  Elahaj was nearly done. Suddenly a white man nearly spoiled everything.

  A German missionary came crashing through the trees, much too close to his hiding place. The man and his lamplight were going to reveal him.

  “Mein Gott! Was machst du?” Father Rebmann yelled. He had a light strapped to his head; its beam came close to hitting Elahaj. It didn’t. Elahaj remained motionless against the rough tree trunk. The older man was in such a hurry to get to the communal hut that he saw nothing else.

  “What…? How can you do this? This is barbarism,” Rebmann shouted. “This is against the laws of man and God. Stop! Let this woman up.”

  “Hands off, old fool. Or we will forget we agreed not to harm holy white fathers. I am Maasai. I will not be touched by you.”

  “You, a hunter? And this is your prize?” Rebmann scoffed. “You make me ill. Hack a defenseless woman? She is baptized Rachel. Of my parish. You will harm her no more!”

  “Speak any more tonight, I will silence your nonsense tongue forever by taking it out.” The man with the machete looked down the road with suspicion on his face. “How did you come here? We saw no one coming.”

  “You wouldn’t have, would you,” said another white man sharply as he entered the clearing. This one Elahaj had never seen before.

  He was younger and followed by a city-dressed black man. Both came up behind Rebmann. They wore strange, long eyeglasses, like the head-light of the holy father but flashing a dull green.

  “If you saw our lights you might have had time to cover up this atrocity.”

  A thick thorn vine snapped on the other side of the clearing.

  Everyone, the holy white father, the two new men with him, looked there.

  The Maasai albino hunter by the hut dropped his bloody blade in fear. It was the Ghost Eater. True to his name, he had appeared without warning.

  The Eater’s servant, the black Maasai brute, held out the pale chopped-off arm with both hands. He greeted his master with awe and a humble offering.