The Day of the Nefilim by David L. Major Page A

saved the corporal.
    The General swore. Pursuing them through the darkness was not an option.
    Thead, too close to the General and his gun to consider the same maneuver, cowered back against the rock. He was trapped.
    The General was about to send Thead the way of Kali when his potential victim had the brainwave that would not only save his life, but also open up a new career path for him.
    “I can read their writing. I’ve studied it for many years,” he blurted, gesturing towards the Nefilim, who were busy with an array of devices that had appeared from somewhere. “I’m fluent in it.” At this point, Thead had not much else going for him.
    The stranger knows something , the General thought, and he’s scared as well. He won’t be trying anything .
    “You stay in sight,” he said to Thead, who nodded vigorous agreement. “If you move – if you do anything – you’re as dead as your friend there.”
    If this new arrival could in fact read the Nefilim writing, he might be useful. And delivering him to the Secretary-General would help the General’s return to favor. If not, the stranger could always be executed.
    Thead slid down the wall onto the floor. It was infinitely preferable to death, he reminded himself, sitting as he was only a few yards from the cooling corpses of Kali and the soldier.
    The General turned his attention back to the chamber. There were at least a dozen of the creatures, and they had been busy.
    The female archaeologist (whose name he had never bothered to learn and which now mattered to no one) and the equally nameless and hapless soldier had been placed on large stone slabs that had risen from the floor. The slabs and their occupants were surrounded by columns of intense silver light.
    It was time to meet their new allies. He gestured with his gun to Thead, indicating that he should stand up and walk in front of him. Slowly, with an unwilling Thead in the lead, they entered the chamber.
    Each of the humans was being attended by two of the Nefilim. They were having some sort of probes or terminals attached to their heads, their limbs, and their torsos. They weren’t temporary, the General noticed. They were being inserted deep into the two bodies.
    The subjects had been paralyzed. The only control they had was over their eyes, wide with panic and staring in terror at what was happening.
    At each of the three other sites around the world, a male and female had been kept on hand for precisely this moment, and in the last few minutes they would have been delivered over to the Nefilim for this same procedure. The soldier and the woman were being wired into the Nefilim grid. The earth would once again pulse with the power that had maintained and invigorated it in distant times – except this time, the Nefilim would have an ally. The world’s governments and the inhabitants of the distant past would be of much use to each other. Combined, they would be invincible; something which the uncooperative parts of the planet would soon come to appreciate.
    Thinking this, the General felt invigorated as he stood among the Nefilim.
    One of the creatures turned to him.
    ‘You are early.’
    “It was not something we could avoid. And surely not a problem?” His conditioning was working well. No sign of panic; he felt totally in control. The trickle of sweat running down the back of his neck was due to nothing more than the heat.
    The Nefilim laughed, if you could call the sound that, as it tightened an attachment connected to a tube inserted into the thorax of the archaeologist. Her head twitched slowly in response. The Nefilim leaned over, making small clucking sounds, and tightened something. The twitching stopped.
    ‘There is no problem,’ it replied. ‘You have done well. We will be able to work efficiently together, your species and ours. We hope that your race will last longer than our last… friends. But then, they didn’t have the pragmatism of you humans. You have been watched, with