Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (7 page)

“Go deep into the night,” the medicine man had advised him. “You will not find the Nightwolf. He will find out.”

That had been many hours ago, when there still was some light left to the day. After leaving the cave, Liu had found himself in a barren, wind-scoured desert marked only by humpbacked ranks of sand dunes trooping off into the distance, and, an eternity away, the three graduating, hornlike spires of what he believed was the Hopi Mesa. The dry air searing his skin, using the far-off mesa to guide his bearings, he had trudged through that sunbaked emptiness for a long time, his limbs growing heavier with each step he took.

An American Indian with long white hair and skin like old rawhide, the medicine man had appeared out of nowhere. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. He had, in fact, stepped from behind a clump of scrubby mesquite while Liu was resting in its pitiful shade.

“Who... how did you...?” Liu had said, snapping to his feet.

And, answering neither his spoken nor unspoken questions, the medicine man had told him about going into the night and being found by Nightwolf. And here he was.

Now he held out his torch and slowly moved it around himself in a circle, listening. He had heard something howl, some kind of animal. The sound cut through the silence like a stiletto – a high-pitched, baying cry unlike any Liu had heard before. It had seemed to come from nearby, and that made him uneasy.

He stopped, listened some more. There it was again. Closer now. Much closer. Soaring high above the dunes, lonely and passionate and savage. Liu’s muscles tensed, the hairs at the back of his neck standing out in stiff little points.

Suddenly he heard a soft rustling noise behind him, and whirled to see a huge white wolf leap from the syrupy darkness. There was the low whistle of air being cleaved by a hurtling body. Then, its monstrous jaws snapping, it landed inches away from him, reared onto its hind legs, and pounced, throwing him backward to the ground.

Liu thrashed underneath it, but his efforts to struggle free were in vain. The creature was too heavy, too powerful. He was pinned down, unable to move, certain it would sink its fangs into his flesh at any moment.

Then the impossible happened. With its snout inches away from his throat, the wolf began to waver before his eyes, its shape shifting, melting into another form – that of a young, Native American man.

“Pretty cool, huh?” he said, smiling. His face was so close their noses almost touched.

He hopped off Liu and pulled him to his feet.

Liu was stunned. “Who are you? How did you do that?”

“Ha! Wouldn’t you like to know?” the stranger said. About the same weight and height as Liu, with a shock of gleaming black hair, he wore a traditional patchwork vest over a Stone Temple Pilots T-shirt, bluejeans, and lizard skin cowboy boots. A tomahawk hung from a loop on his belt, and a pair of iridescent Oakley sunglasses hung from the collar of his tee by one of the stems.

Liu gave him an appraising look. There was something in his dark brown, almost black eyes, an unmistakable depth and strength...

“You’re Nightwolf, aren’t you? The one Rayden sent me to find?”

The mysterious young man neither confirmed nor denied this. He circled Liu, sizing him up much as Liu had just done to him.

“So you’re Rayden’s prodigy?” he said. “I’ve seen better.”

Liu blinked, indignant.

“Don’t sweat it,” the stranger said. “I’ve also seen worse.”

“If you really are Nightwolf, you know that I won the last tournament,” Liu said in a defensive tone.

The man shrugged, amusement flashing in his eyes. “The tournament had rules. This time anything goes.”

Liu frowned, tired of his flip, ambiguous replies.

“You’re no older than I am. What can you possibly teach me?”

The stranger’s face suddenly turned serious.

“The body before you may have low mileage, but my soul has been handed down through generations, dating back to the time before the Ancient tribe split,” he said.

“What does all this have to do with stopping Shao Kahn?”

“After the ice melted and the Ancient Tribe of One spread out across the globe, each people was given a battle secret to keep the playing field even, as they say. The keeper of this secret forever lives on sacred land... which is where you now stand.”

Liu remained skeptical. “You’re telling me
you
are the keeper of your people’s secret?”

“Something like that,” Nightwolf said. He unfastened his tomahawk from its belt loop and twirled it from hand to hand, obviously trying to impress Liu – and doing a fair job.

“Look, I don’t have time for these stupid games,” Liu said, starting away. “It was a mistake even coming here.”

“You think you’re ready, Liu Kang. But if you were, would Kitana have been caught?”

That struck a nerve. Liu spun around him, his fists clenched at his sides.

“Can you help me get her back?”

The mischief had returned to the stranger’s eyes. “Maybe. But first you gotta put yourself in a dream state.”

“And just how am I supposed to do
that
?”

Nightwolf was still manipulating his tomahawk like an expert baton twirler.

“Well,” he said, “there’s a slow way, and there’s a fast way.”

Liu’s fists trembled. “We don’t have
time
for the slow way!”

A smirk touched the corner of the stranger’s lips. “That’s what I thought you’d say,” he said.

Liu started to launch into an angry response, but he had scarcely gotten a word out of his mouth when the young man flipped the tomahawk at him so that its blunt end crunched against his forehead.

Sparks exploded between his eyes, rapidly turned cinder-gray, then blackened.

The young Indian’s grin slanted further up his face as he watched Liu crumple to the ground, unconscious.

“Sweet dreams, champ,” he said. “See you when you wake up.”

They plunged through the jungle wilderness, moving as quickly as they could, Jax’s strength-amplified arms sweeping out in front of him to clear a path through the dense clutter of vegetation. Behind him, Sonya tried not to let her bad leg slow her down as she struggled to negotiate an obstacle course of vines, stumps, root tangles, and sucking marl. A single misstep would throw her flat on her face, and with the Outworlders sticking close at their heels, even a brief setback could be calamitous.

All around them, gray streamers of mist were creeping up from the ground and killing the leaves on their branches, turning them from vibrant green to sickly yellow, wilting them before their eyes. Sonya was sure this was another thing that could be charged in full to Shao Kahn’s account – the poisonous atmosphere of Outworld was infiltrating their own like some deadly herbicide.

As if to confirm her thoughts, a coarse Outworld idol suddenly became visible through the screen of foliage ahead of them, its gruesome visage frozen in a stone-carved growl.

“This is the sixth one of these damn things,” Jax said breathlessly. “And each one gets uglier.”

“It’s the merger of the realms,” Sonya said.

Jax frowned in annoyance. “You keep saying that, Sonya. And it doesn’t mean squat to me.”

“I told you,” she said, pushing ahead past the idol. “It’s the end of the world.”

Jax suddenly grabbed her from behind by the arm.

“Goddamnit!” he grunted. “You’re talking to me like I’m some kind of idiot! Take a minute to think about how I feel, would you?”

She looked at him, nodding to indicate she was listening.

“You drag me out of the hospital with some lunatic killers on our ass, put me in a spinning ball, and take me halfway around the world,” he went on. “If I’m gonna die today, at least tell me why!”

“Nobody told me why Johnny had to die. Shit happens, Jax. You’re a big boy. Deal with it.”

Jax searched her face, but her stony expression revealed nothing. “Who the hell’s
Johnny
?

She turned away, leaving him more confused and exasperated than ever.

“I’m your partner, girl,” he said. “If you can’t trust me, who can you–?”

Lightning streaked across the sky, followed by a sudden, violent blast of thunder. Jax felt something sting his face and slapped at it.

“Ahh, damn, what was that?”

They both looked around in growing horror and dismay. Noxious purplish-black raindrops were drizzling from the sky, causing the undergrowth to wither and rot on contact, collecting in oily, steaming pools at their feet.

“Nature’s dying,” Sonya said in a barely audible voice.

“Maybe this
is
the end of the world,” Jax said.

When Sonya turned to him, he saw that her lower lip was trembling.

“Time’s running out, Jax,” she said. “It could all be over in a few days.”

They looked at each other for a moment, their faces somber and heavy. Then, from the very near distance, the sound of brush being thrashed and trampled reached their ears.

“We gonna keep running, or do you want to go out swinging?” Jax asked.

Sonya started to answer, but then something made her change her mind. She put a finger to her lips and cocked her head.

“You hear that?” she whispered.

Jax listened. “Relax, it’s nothing. The posse’s still a ways behind.”

“I’m not talking about the Extermination Squads,” she said. “Whatever I heard was right here with us.”

Sonya’s eyes shifted to a patch of quivering foliage. She tapped Jax on the arm and gestured, but before he could see what she was trying to show him, a split-kick tore through the brush and caught them both in their faces.

Stunned, Sonya and Jax had just enough time to catch a glimpse of their attacked before he faded back into the ground-mist. They looked around in frustration, searching for any sign of him, but it was no good. He was either gone or perfectly camouflaged, and Sonya was betting on the latter.

She cut her gaze this way and that, her eyes trying to penetrate the gauzy fog, and was turning to investigate another hint of movement in the brush when an arm snaked around her throat from behind, roughly yanking her backward.

Gagging and sputtering, Sonya desperately grabbed hold of a tree limb above her head, leveraged herself off the ground, and backflipped up and over her attacked – an angular, exotic-looking woman with eyes like burning coals, and a body as tautly well-conditioned as her smile was vicious.

Sliding her hands between the woman’s limbs, Sonya landed and put her in a headlock, flipping her back into the mist, which poured around her in a churning brew, concealing her from sight.

There was a brief silence. Sonya and Jax exchanged alarmed, wary glances, tension humming between them like voltage.

Then, all at once, the mist in front of Jax coalesced into the shape of the first attacker, who struck out with a rapid succession of blows that snapped his head back like a speed bag. Jax reeled dazedly, bringing up his new arms for a retaliatory combination of punches – but his commands to them were still getting scrambled somewhere en route from his brain. His blows went wild, missing his elusive attacker by several inches, giving him the opening he needed to fade into the mist.

As Jax looked down at his mutinous fists with disgust, cursing them under his breath, the red-eyed woman cartwheeled through the mist and landed with her legs wrapped in a scissor-grip around Sonya’s neck. Screeching with delight, her powerful thigh muscles squeezing Sonya’s windpipe, she repeatedly boxed her ears with the heel of her hands.

Sonya rocked and staggered, gasping for air, but somehow gathered the energy to flip her opponent off her. In the brief pause before the woman recovered, Sonya got her first good look at her – and almost froze in shock.

“Kitana...?” she said.

The woman cackled.

“Name’s
Mileena
, and I don’t appreciate being confused with my virtuous half-sister,” she said. “Just for that, me and my pal Smoke are going to make your deaths extra painful.”

“You wish,” Sonya said.

Mileena ripped out another peal of insane laughter and sprang at her. Unwilling to be put on the defensive again, Sonya drove forward, but Mileena was a hair faster. She caught Sonya in midair with a ferocious spin kick, then went flipping back into the mist, her evil laughter echoing through the jungle.

Smoke simultaneously took form out of the rippling curtain of fog, almost as if their moves had been choreographed. He stepped into plain view and assumed a fighting stance, a three-prong spear snapping from a metal panel in his chest and shooting out at Jax’s ribcage.

Another cyborg, just like the one back at the lab
, Jax thought,
which explains how he can turn himself into, well, smoke.

He raised his arm across his chest, parrying aside the spear a moment before it would have impaled him.

Although his arms had finally done what he wanted them to, Jax wasn’t all that certain they wouldn’t go haywire again. Before they could act up, he grabbed hold of Smoke’s spear and, with a tremendous show of strength, pulled the cyborg toward him and connected with an uppercut that sent Smoke sailing across the thicket.

But the mechanical combatant was far from down for the count. Landing on his feet, he cannonballed up from the mist on rocket-powered boot-thrusters, his head smashing Jax backward into the mist, which closed around him like a heavy curtain.

Smoke scrambled after him, raking his eyes left and right, trying to seek him out amid the thick, concealing billows of vapor – and was greeted by a full-on metal first to the face.

His head lashing back, Smoke released harsh, grating sound that might have been a groan in a human throat. Then he collapsed.

“Gotcha,” Jax said. “Gotcha one
good
.”

Sonya and Mileena, meanwhile, remained locked in a death struggle, barreling on the ground after a fierce exchange of kicks and blows. Rolling on top of Sonya with a snakelike hiss, Mileena whipped a
sai
from a concealed harness and thrust it down at Sonya’s face. Sonya bucked and reared underneath her, mercifully slipping the attack and knocking Mileena off her perch. As Mileena tumbled to the ground on her back, Sonya grabbed the
sai
out of her hand and then brought the short-staff down across her windpipe, pressing down with all her strength until her arms and legs stopped flailing and went limp.