Dragon City by James Axler

about other members of Cerberus turning, siding with Ullikummis and his people. It was like a cult, a growing movement that relied on the belief that Ullikummis himself was a god from the stars. Which was ridiculous, of course—Ullikummis was Annunaki, a cruel and heartless race of aliens who had held humankind in subjugation thousands of years ago. But Sela Sinclair knew this. Everyone at Cerberus knew this; Lakesh himself had held an information session in the canteen just a few months before when they had discovered the first evidence that Ullikummis had returned to Earth. And yet Sinclair was under his sway somehow, something physical inside her twisting her will, instructing her like an entheogen.
    Behind him, hideously near, Farrell heard Sinclair and the other two pushing through the house, shouting instructions to split up and find him. The blood was pounding in his ears, and his breath felt warm in his throat, pumping past his gritted teeth like sandblasting. The room was full of old furniture. A settee had collapsed in on itself to become a sculpture of rusted springs and wood that showed the familiar signs of woodworm. A table was splintered against one wall, while another sagged to the floor with two legs bent out of shape. Farrell vaulted it as the figure came through the door after him, the man in the robes. The man was pulling something from an innocuous pouch he wore at his waist, loading the slingshot in his hand even as he leaped the broken settee and rushed through the room. The enforcers of Ullikummis didn’t use guns as a rule, but relied on a more basic weapon, a slingshot-style catapult that launched vicious stones with the force of bullets.
    Up ahead, Farrell saw the second door of the room, the one that broke back into the hall opposite the closet, and he drove himself to it as his pursuer launched the first clutch of stones from his catapult rig.
    Farrell reached out with his free hand, striking the far door frame with his forearm as he ducked through it. Behind him, a scattershot of rocks struck the frame where Farrell had been, their pitter-patter like hail on a window.
    Out in the hallway once more, Farrell found himself face-to-face with Sela Sinclair, the dark metal of the pistol still clutched in her right hand. Farrell caromed into her, slamming both of them against the far wall in a crash of crumbling plasterboard. Sinclair sank back to the floor, spluttering as the plasterboard disintegrated to powder all around her, Farrell landing astride her in a tangle of limbs. Farrell saw the stubby nose of the Colt Mark IV snap up, and he lashed out with the rusty pipe in his hand, knocking the muzzle aside even as it flashed with another ear-splitting shot.
    Then Farrell was on his feet again, driving himself along the corridor as Sela Sinclair brought the pistol around for another shot. Beside her, the man in the hooded robes appeared from the main room, the slingshot in his hand spinning over and over, picking up speed before he launched another clutch of pebbles barely bigger than grains of sand toward the retreating figure.
    Farrell sidestepped into another room to his right, a chunk of plasterboard turning to dust just three inches from his face where the stones struck. He was in the dining room now, once able to accommodate a six- or maybe eight-seat table. It now housed a pile of broken furniture amid scarred, moss-covered walls. Worse yet, it stank of rainwater, the kind of rainwater that perhaps had been mixed with urine somewhere along the way. Farrell ran through the room, leaping over the shattered remains of a glass-fronted cabinet that had been used as the set for a family of badgers. The robed man hurried through the open doorway behind him, his slingshot whining in his hand as it spun through the air.
    Farrell sprinted onward, aiming himself for the twin doors of the serving hatch that stood closed at the far end of the room. The wood was rotten, light cutting through it in bold