Hell's Maw

by James Axler

  When it happened, it wasn’t obvious. Kane’s attention was drawn to a group of black-feathered birds who had been grazing on the scarred soil some way behind them when they suddenly took flight. The birds had moved when the wags approached, but they had returned to their meager feast almost as soon as the wags had passed. But now, a hundred yards down the road where nothing seemed to be passing, the birds took flight once more, circling in the air and issuing angry caws that could be heard even over the sound of the wag’s engine. There was another sound, too, Kane realized. Low and deep, a bass note that vibrated the air and the ground beneath them as its pitch rose. The sound could barely be heard over the spluttering roar of wag engines, but it was there—a tuneless hum, the deep thrumming noise of something mechanical.

  “Domi,” Kane said, automatically activating the hidden Commtact that was located beneath his skin along the side of his head. “Pay attention to your six. I think there’s something—”

  His words trailed off as he spotted the wispy trail of gray smoke rising against the silver clouds where the birds had taken flight. Not from the road but to the side.

  “You don’t need to tell me how to do my job,” Domi was complaining over their shared Commtact frequency. “I’ve stood guard over more than a sack of corn before now.”

  Kane tuned her out, watching the plume of smoke as it twisted in the breeze. It was not solid, it was little puffs of smoke being emitted at regular intervals—which probably meant it was an engine of some kind, Kane realized.

  “Baptiste,” Kane said, calling on the other member of his field team, “do you see smoke back there, on the road behind us?”

  Brigid’s familiar voice piped into Kane’s ear a moment later. “Puff-puff-puff, pause…puff-puff-puff, pause,” she began, copying the beat of the smoke. “Yes, I can see it all right.”

  Around him, the wag’s engine growled as it struggled to ascend the hill, speed dropping with every foot it gained. The damn thing was overloaded, leaving them vulnerable on the incline—ripe for ambush. For a moment, Kane could see the whole of the road that they had traveled along stretched out behind him, a strip of grass and dirt and broken tarmac that ran in a perfectly straight line through the sparse fields. From this height, he could see the thing that was following them, too—not along the road but to one side of it, scrambling through the fields to his left where the crows had taken flight. It looked like a boxcar, the kind you would find on an old-style train, its dull metal finish almost perfectly camouflaged by the sky behind it. But this was no railroad train. The metal box swung high off the ground, depending from two pivoting legs that clambered over the uneven ground like a gigantic, grounded bird. Thirty feet high, it was moving at some speed, faster in fact than the three wags that Kane’s crew were protecting.

  Kane watched as the strange-looking machine continued forward, getting steadily closer to the back of the convoy.

  “I see it,” Domi said, her words echoing over their shared Commtacts.

  “Me, too,” Brigid chimed in.

  It was at that moment that the strange vehicle unleashed the first of its heat bolts, searing red-amber energy cutting through the sky accompanied by a shriek of parting air.

  “Traffic signal,” Kane muttered. “Right.”

  The red-hot blast carved a path toward them like a slash of blood spraying through the air.

  Chapter 4

  “¡Congelar!” Pretor Corcel demanded, his pistol aimed unwaveringly at Grant where the Cerberus warrior was framed in the doorway to the ballroom.

  Grant knew better than to argue with a man who had a gun. He raised his hands slowly, making sure not to make any sudden movements. “I’m freezing,” he stated in English. “I’m freezing.”

  The doctor who had attended the nightmarish scene had been startled by Corcel’s shout, and he looked up to see the strange man just entering the doorway.

  The sharp-suited Pretor held in place, watching Grant carefully. “American?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Grant replied. He saw that the bodies had been removed from the room. More worrying was the fact that Shizuka was nowhere to be seen. The man with the blaster was twelve feet away—probably too far to rush in an open space like this, Grant calculated, too risky anyway. For now at least, Grant would have to play along and hope he could find out just what the heck was happening.

  Still holding the Devorador de Pecados pistol on Grant, Pretor Corcel’s dark eyes flicked to the razor-sharp disc that his target held in his hand. “Drop the weapon,” he instructed.

  “Okay.” Grant nodded. Then he lowered his left hand, moving it away from his body just slightly before dropping the razor disc. The disc struck the wooden floor with a hollow clang. “That ain’t mine,” Grant said, though he could hear how lame that must sound right now. As he dropped it, Grant studied the man whom he faced, eyeing his smart clothes and the weapon he held on him with professional surety. The man’s blaster was black with sleek lines, compact but of a large bore—probably a 9 mm, Grant guessed. It reminded him of his own weapon of choice—the Sin Eater, side arm of the Magistrate Division.

  Corcel ignored Grant’s comment. “Now,” he instructed, “hands up behind your head, you understand?”

  “Yeah, I understand,” Grant said, moving his hands as instructed until the fingers were laced together behind his head. He knew this move, had used it himself as a Magistrate and after that. It was the move of a professional, which meant his opponent had obviously had training in controlling people. “I think there’s probably some mistake—”

  “You keep quiet and you answer my questions only when asked,” the sharp-suited man told him.

  “Sure, you’ve got the gun,” Grant confirmed.

  Then Pretor Corcel gave instructions to the doctor to go find his partner and bring her here. He spoke in Spanish, though Grant’s Commtact automatically translated the exchange in real time. The discussion gave little away, but Grant tried to piece together what he could. The man in the suit was addressed as “Pretor” by the other man, Grant heard, or Praetor, another word for Judge or Magistrate.

  As the other man left the room, Grant addressed the figure in the dark suit. “You’re a Mag, right?” he asked. “A Magistrate?”

  Corcel studied him warily. “Yes—Pretor Corcel,” he said. “You speak Spanish, then?”

  “A little,” Grant lied. “Only a few words.”

  Corcel nodded sullenly, waiting before Grant with the blaster aimed at him. Grant stood like that for almost two minutes until Corcel’s partner came striding into the room in a suit similar to Corcel’s.

  “Pretor Cáscara,” she introduced herself immediately, flashing an ID badge in Grant’s direction, too fast to read.

  Corcel rapidly explained the situation to his partner in swiftly spoken Spanish, and Grant began to understand what had happened. It seemed that Corcel had had reports of black men with shaven heads who were involved in a spate of murders, and that Grant fit the description. Cáscara stepped over to the sharp-edged disc that Grant had dropped, kneeling to examine it where it lay as the two officers spoke. Corcel explained that the suspect had been carrying the weapon when he had returned to the crime scene.

  “Dumb mistake,” Cáscara lamented in Spanish.

  It would have been, Grant thought, except that I picked this up from the people who actually did do this. I think.

  “You,” Cáscara said to Grant in lightly accented English once she had been brought up to speed by her partner, “hands down, here, behind your back.” She showed him, crossing her wrists together at the small of her back. “I’m going to cuff you. You try anything and Pretor Corcel will shoot you, okay? He’s a good shot.”

  “Top of my graduating class,” Corcel added, his pistol never wavering.

  “Yeah, I get it,” Grant said, lowering his hands as instructed. “You’ve got the wrong guy, you realize?”

  “We’ll figure that out back at the Sector Hall,” Cáscara told him emotionlessly as
she placed a pair of plastic handcuffs on Grant’s wrists. Then she stepped away and produced a pair of latex gloves from a pocket of her jacket, which she slipped over her hands. Along with the gloves, she produced an evidence bag, into which she placed the metallic projectile that Grant had narrowly avoided.

  “Had that thrown at me,” Grant explained. “There’s another one of those out there somewhere. Couldn’t see it, though.”

  The two Pretors did not respond to his comment.

  Once the first evidence pack was sealed, Cáscara returned to Grant, who remained standing close to the open ballroom doors. She reached for the bloodred feather that poked from one hip pocket of his jacket.

  “More of these out there, too?” Cáscara challenged him. It was hard to tell with her not being a native English speaker, but Grant thought that she was employing a sarcastic tone.

  “Look,” Grant said, “I had a partner here. A friend. We came here together—”

  “We’ll discuss that at the Sector Hall,” Corcel cut him off.

  “Sure, I just—” Grant began.

  “Quiet now,” Corcel said in a warning tone, gesturing vaguely with his blaster. “Don’t make me shoot you.”

  “Okay,” Grant said, “I just want to know what happened to her. If she’s okay. Her name’s Shizuka.”

  Pretor Cáscara looked up at that from where she had been labeling the evidence bags with a marker pen.

  “Shizuka…?” Grant repeated hopefully.

  Cáscara nodded firmly just the once. “She’s here. We’ll be bringing her in,” she confirmed. Then she moved closer to Corcel and whispered something to him in Spanish. It was too quiet for Grant to hear, but he guessed he might have inadvertently just turned Shizuka into a suspect. At least she was still alive.

  * * *

  GRANT WAS TAKEN via secure wag past the bullfighting ring to the local Sector Hall of Justice, a grand building in the center of Zaragoza that housed the authorities. The building was four stories high and stretched the length of a block, with tinted glass in the windows and a basement level housing the garage and firing range. The Pretors—the local equivalent of Magistrates—were based here, and they patrolled not only Zaragoza City but also the state beyond, covering an eighty-mile radius that took them well into the radiation-blighted lands to the south and east.

  Once inside, Grant was swiftly processed by a uniformed Pretor—his uniform consisting of flexible armor in black and red, the tailored jacket flaring at the bottom so that it created something approaching a skirt across the hips. The Pretor was armed with a boot knife and had a holster—currently empty—at his hip. Grant could see notches around the high neck of his uniform where a helmet would be secured while on patrol.

  After he had been processed—a simple procedure of taking holographs and prints—Grant was taken to a secure, white-walled interview room and left alone to wait. The room featured harsh lighting and contained a single table to which Grant’s right wrist was cuffed on a short chain, along with four chairs, two to either side of the table. Grant waited almost forty minutes until Corcel, the officer whom he had first met in the hotel ballroom, joined him. Corcel’s expression was unreadable as he greeted Grant, pulling a chair across to him before reversing it to sit on, his arms resting across its back.

  “Your name?” Corcel asked without preamble.

  “Grant.”

  “Grant…?”

  “Just Grant,” Grant confirmed. “Only name I ever needed.”

  “And you are an American, we have already established.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Whereabouts from?”

  “Originally Cobaltville. More recently, all over, but still in that territory.”

  “I see. And your purpose for being here, in Zaragoza?”

  “Vacation, with a friend.”

  Corcel checked something in the little A7 notebook he carried. “And that would be Shizuka, correct?”

  Grant nodded.

  “And what is your relationship to Shizuka?”

  “Boyfriend/girlfriend,” Grant said, eyes locking with Corcel’s, an unspoken challenge there. “Is this going anywhere, Pretor Corcel?”

  “Just establishing the facts. Do you know why you are here, Grant?”

  “I got an inkling,” Grant admitted, “but why don’t you explain how you see it.”

  “You were discovered at the scene of a crime,” Pretor Corcel stated, “the ballroom in the Gran Retiro. You match the description of one of our suspects, which is why you’ve been brought in for questioning. In addition to this, you had certain items about your person that we might expect to find on the perpetrator.

  “Do you know what happened in the ballroom, Grant?”

  Grant tilted his head to show he was uncertain. “When Shizuka and I arrived the place was full of hanging bodies—I didn’t imagine that, right?”

  Corcel nodded. “Go on.”

  “I guess there were twenty-two, twenty-four people hanging from the ceiling in nooses,” Grant recalled. “Didn’t know why.”

  “So you confirm you were at the scene prior to our engagement?” Corcel checked.

  “Yeah. I saw someone I thought was suspicious—three people, all together—and so I followed them while trusting Shizuka to look after the—I dunno what you call them—victims, maybe?”

  Corcel looked intrigued. “When you say you saw someone you thought was suspicious, what happened then?”

  “I followed them through the service door and out into the back streets,” Grant said, “but they threw something at me—the sharp disc-thing you saw—and escaped before I could catch up to them.”

  “I see,” Corcel said, “and could you describe these people?”

  Grant nodded. “Yeah, I got a good look at them and I have a good memory for faces, clothes.”

  “But you yourself had nothing to do with the bodies you saw?”

  “No, sir,” Grant confirmed.

  Corcel watched Grant for a few seconds, searching for the truth among his words. Then Grant spoke up.

  “You’ve had your chance,” Grant said, “so let me now start answering the questions you should have asked, and we’ll see if we can get somewhere on this—”

  Pretor Corcel’s eyebrows rose with surprise.

  “Number one,” Grant began, “I’m an ex-Magistrate—what you’d call a Pretor. So I’m one of you.”

  “An ex-Magistrate…?” Corcel asked, placing emphasis on the first word.

  “Cobaltville Mag Division, but I left,” Grant elaborated. “Little disagreement, but not to do with the law.”

  Corcel gestured for him to explain.

  “Turns out my boss was a snake—literally—so I found myself in an untenable position,” Grant explained. “Me and Shizuka came here for a vacation—she’s an important muckety-muck in New Edo, and I’ve got my own thing I wanted to get away from. My guess is that we should have been at that ballroom when all the hangings happened, but we were running late—ate later than we planned, didn’t leave the restaurant until almost ten.”

  Pretor Corcel’s eyes lit up at this. “Which restaurant was this?” he asked. “Do you think the staff there could confirm you were there when you said you were?”

  “I’d hope so,” Grant said. “Guy like me kind of stands out in your city.” So did Shizuka, from what he could tell, Grant mentally added, recalling that he had seen no other people here of Asian descent.

  Corcel nodded slowly, pondering the information that the hulking man had given him. It could be true, although it didn’t confirm that the man calling himself Grant was not also the killer. He would need to take this one step at a time.

  “So that’s why I followed them,” Grant finished. “Old instincts getting me involved when I didn’t have an invite.”

  “I’ll look into your story,” Corcel told Grant, rising from his seat. “You’re going to have to sit tight until then.”

  Grant nodded. Despite his frustration he could understan
d things from this local Magistrate’s point of view. “Just tell me something,” he said as Corcel strode across the room to the door. “Is Shizuka all right?”

  Corcel stared at Grant, the professional hardness in his eyes softening for a moment. “She’s a little shook up, but otherwise she seems to be fine. We have her here right now.”

  For questioning, Grant guessed. “Just make sure she’s okay for me, all right?” he asked.

  Corcel nodded. “I’ll do that.”

  * * *

  SHIZUKA, MEANWHILE, WAS in a room two flights above from where Grant was being held. She had been checked over by one of the Pretors’ medical staff and now she sat with Pretor Cáscara on a comfortable couch, discussing what had happened in the hotel ballroom.

  There was not much that Shizuka could say that she had not already told Cáscara, but she sketched out a rough timescale of the events and outlined the state of the room when they had entered and how she and Grant had discovered the bodies.

  “You’ve had a traumatic few hours,” Cáscara said sympathetically. “The clinician here wants to keep an eye on you, to make sure you don’t go into shock. Do you think that would be okay?”

  “I should speak to Grant,” Shizuka said.

  “I’ll tell him you’re here,” Cáscara assured her. “He’s fine.”