Hell's Maw

by James Axler

  Shizuka eyed the female Pretor warily. “Can I see him?” she asked.

  “Soon, yes,” Cáscara promised.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  Cáscara left Shizuka then, and the samurai woman was escorted to a safe room—a cell by another name. The room was comfortable and low-lit with white walls and a vase of flowers and a jug of water on a nightstand beside the single bed. It looked like a private hospital room. Shizuka was too tired to argue, but she remained alert for a long time, pacing the room and wondering about Grant.

  In the corridor outside the room, Pretor Corcel met with his partner, Cáscara, to share information as they watched Shizuka pace back and forth through a one-way pane of glass.

  “My guy says he’s innocent,” Corcel said in Spanish.

  “That’s always the first defense, Juan,” Cáscara said dismissively.

  “But there’s more to it than that,” Corcel continued. “He says he’s—get this—an ex-Magistrate, US. He’s retired from service, he’s not shy about explaining that, and he happened to be out here on vacation.”

  Pretor Cáscara pushed one slender hand through the long bangs of her fringe. “So he’s one of us. Do you believe him?”

  Corcel looked thoughtful. “It’s certainly an unusual tactic if he is lying,” he concluded. “What about the woman, Liana? What does she say?”

  Cáscara peered through the one-way glass before replying, watching as Shizuka tidied her hair in the mirror that lay on the obverse side of the glass. “She says she’s the leader of the Tigers of Heaven from New Edo,” she said.

  Corcel let out a grim sigh. “Their stories match. Did she give you anything else?”

  “The name of a restaurant she and the boyfriend were attending when the crime was committed,” Cáscara stated.

  “Yeah, I got that, too.”

  “What do you think? Are they for real?”

  Corcel shrugged. “The man—Grant—is certainly built. And if his story is true, then he’s been trained to kill. He could be our killer—he’s physically capable.”

  “But why come back to the scene?” Cáscara wondered.

  “To remove evidence maybe,” Corcel proposed. “Something he left behind. Or…”

  Cáscara raised a querulous eyebrow as her partner left the sentence unfinished. “Or…?” she prompted.

  “Or maybe they really did just bungle into this mess, in which case we’re no closer than we were before to finding out who’s committing these showpiece murders and how, Liana,” Corcel said grimly. “Except that my suspect claims he saw the killers—or, at least, some people he thinks were at the scene at the time of the ‘performance.’”

  Emiliana Cáscara shook her head heavily. “We already have over two hundred dead in less than three weeks, Juan,” she said. “If this goes on—”

  “It’s unconscionable,” Corcel agreed. “Let’s check their story first, see if it gels with what the restaurant owner remembers. After that—well, we’ll see.”

  Chapter 5

  Crouched among the sacks of corn in the rearmost road wag, Domi watched with a growing sense of disbelief as the weird machine came trundling across the field toward her, and a fanlike aperture irised open on its front surface. An instant later, the aperture began to glow, before unleashing a beam of red-gold energy across the distance between itself and the convoy.

  Domi didn’t hesitate. She leaped up, scrambling across the rear bed of the wag even as the energy beam screamed toward her. It struck an instant later, clipping the port flank of the truck with a shriek, accompanied by a wall of burning hotness that seemed to wash across the wag in a wave.

  As the wave struck, Domi dropped down behind a pile of grain sacks, sheltering behind them as the wall of heat caromed past overhead, rolling over the roof of the wag and leaving the sacks untouched.

  Domi was a strange-looking woman, an albino with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair, red eyes the color of blood. She was petite and slender of frame with small, pert breasts and bird-thin limbs that she habitually kept on show, wearing only the bare minimum of clothing. For this mission, however, she wore a dark hoodie, its hood up to hide her face, and shorts, her pale legs darkened with a smearing of dirt for camouflage. She had kept her feet bare, preferring to feel the land beneath her than fuss with shoes or boots. Strapped to her ankle was a six-inch combat blade with a serrated edge. It was the same blade with which she had killed her slave master, Guana Teague, back in Cobaltville years before, and she carried it with her like a comfort blanket. Domi had another weapon, too, a Detonics Combat Master with a silver finish, which she wore holstered at her hip in a brown leather sheath.

  The wag swerved under the force of the heat blast, one metal side liquefying in a moment until it resembled the remains of a wax candle, the cooling surface creating new patterns in a matter of moments. Behind her, Domi could hear the two men in the cab shout in shock as the heat ray rose the temperature within by a dozen degrees in those instants. One man cursed loudly as the surface he was touching became suddenly too hot to handle.

  The wag bumped off the road for a half-dozen seconds, two wheels running along the uneven ground of the field to the right before the driver righted it.

  As the wave of heat passed, Domi’s Commtact blurted to life—Kane and Brigid both asking for a status update and whether she was okay.

  “I’m fine,” Domi growled between gritted teeth. Already she was unholstering her Detonics revolver, flipping off the safety as she watched the weird box on legs come striding across the abandoned landscape toward the convoy.

  The towering box was moving closer, its long legs perfectly suited to traveling across the uneven ground of the surrounding fields, taking ten-foot strides toward Domi and the wag. As it closed in, Domi saw the secondary attachments running up both sides of the mysterious vehicle—twin railguns located on either side of the boxy cabin, belt-fed and situated in the gap between legs and box. The railguns were mounted on swivel balls, giving them a limited range of fire. But it was enough to cover everything in front of the weird, scaffold-like machine.

  Domi took aim from behind the cover of the grain sacks, closing one eye and focusing on the aperture as it cycled again. The aperture looked flat when it was closed, interlocking metal shutters in a weblike pattern sealing off the hole. There was a flickering of brightness deep within where something was burning, Domi saw.

  That was as much as Domi had time to process before the boxy construction fired again, sending another screaming blast of intense heat toward the wag like a man chucking a spear. Domi narrowed her eyes against the brightness and squeezed the trigger on her blaster, sending a 9 mm titanium-clad bullet toward the box-on-legs as the red-gold beam struck. The bullet was caught in the red wave and it disintegrated, melting down to liquid in less than a second.

  * * *

  TWO WAGS AHEAD, Kane eyed the weird machine as it charged across the rough terrain toward the convoy. It had already blasted the rear wag, and Kane watched as the wag slewed off the road before returning to the track. He could see that it was losing ground—their attacker’s plan was rudimentary, but that was how the classics worked.

  Kane engaged his Commtact. “They’re picking us off from behind,” he shouted, “trying to split us up.”

  Brigid acknowledged Kane’s observation with a “hmf” that seemed to say “well, obviously.”

  Kane shouted to his driver, “Take us back and circle before we lose the back man.”

  The driver—a blond-haired man of twenty with the puppy fat and bright white teeth of a teen—popped his head out of the cab and looked back. “I’ll slow but I’m not stopping, Kane,” he shouted over the roar of the straining engine. “We’ve lost too many people on this stretch of road already.”

  “Good enough,” Kane spit, his eyes fixed on the mechanical colossus on the horizon.

  As the driver spoke, his partner was clambering out of a roof hatch to operate the machine gun that was mo
unted just behind the cab. The man was slender with gangly limbs and a prominent Adam’s apple, his shoulder-length hair decorated with twisted ribbons. Wedging himself behind the cab, the man swung the heavy gun around until it pointed to the rear. Then he squeezed the trigger. “I can’t make the distance,” he said with evident irritation as he watched the shots fall short.

  Kane glanced at him, then back down the road. “Get behind it,” he instructed to the driver, indicating with a circling motion of his hand. “Get behind it!”

  With a shifting of grinding gears, the wag pulled up a slope to the side of the road and the driver began scanning for a clear route on which to comply with Kane’s instructions. “You better not be getting us killed, Kane,” the driver shouted as he fought with the steering wheel. “Ohio won’t never forgive you if you do that.”

  “I’ll do my best to avoid it,” Kane shouted back as he watched the mechanical marvel stride closer to Domi’s wag. It was still charging, blasting another red beam of light ahead of it. Between that and his wag was the other wag—the one that Brigid Baptiste was guarding.

  Kane raced through the possibilities in his sharp mind, narrowing down his options. He was a veteran of combat, but at that moment, watching the heat beam carve another slice from the rearmost wag, he couldn’t help feeling that they had brought a knife to a gunfight.

  * * *

  IN THE MIDDLE WAG, Brigid Baptiste had scrambled across the flatbed to operate the twin tripod guns located just behind the cab. She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, dressed in a black, skintight cat suit—in fact a shadow suit like Kane’s—over which she wore a quarter-length denim jacket and thigh-high leather boots with a TP-9 semiautomatic pistol holstered at her hip. She had long, luxuriant red-gold hair the color of sunset, green eyes like twin emeralds and the slender, perfectly defined figure of an athlete. She had a high brow that spoke of intelligence and full lips that promised passion, but in reality Brigid held both of those aspects and many more besides. An ex-archivist from Cobaltville, Brigid had become caught up in the same conspiracy that had seen Kane exiled and her removed from her post, a move that had landed her with the Cerberus organization. Brigid was well versed in hand-to-hand combat and a crack shot, but it was her eidetic—or photographic—memory that was her greatest asset, and the one that had got her into so much trouble back in her archivist days. Like Kane, Brigid was one of the high flyers of the Cerberus operation, and she had been instrumental in a number of their scientific advances. She had partnered Kane more times than either cared to count.

  Brigid swung the guns around, watching as the lumbering, artificial behemoth came striding across the uneven terrain toward the rearmost road wag.

  The boxy bulk of the unit was long and narrow, curved along its sides with the opening aperture located dead center, the twin railguns situated to the sides, slightly below the center—presumably geared for ground-based attacks rather than air assaults. There was a bank of windows above the heat-ray aperture through which Brigid could see several figures silhouetted. Beneath the cab was a cylinder running the length of the box, welded beneath it and bulging along its length in a series of metal rings. Brigid guessed that this housed whatever was generating the heat beam that their attackers were using to devastating effect.

  Two legs were positioned on either side of the cabin box, running higher than the box itself so that they pivoted above it as it walked, swinging the cab where it hung between them by thick lengths of chain. The whole thing had been left in raw metal, giving it a homemade appearance and blending perfectly with the overcast sky.

  Brigid watched as the machine blasted again, counting the seconds between each fiery burst. Thirty seconds between blasts, she timed. It’s taking that long to achieve full power again. That’s our window.

  She flicked the safety on the left-hand machine gun and pressed down the trigger, sending a stuttering burst of bullets at their fast-moving pursuer.

  * * *

  WRONG-FOOTED, DOMI dropped and started to roll across the bed of the rearmost wag as it began to glow red with heat. The wag careened off the road again, and this time the driver could not fight it. Suddenly they were cutting through open fields of ash and soil, a clutch of birds taking flight as they were disturbed.

  The box on legs followed, stamping across the field in pursuit of the struggling wag. Bullets were hammering against its armored surface from the middle wag, but the distance was too great—too few were scoring hits, and none of those hits were making any difference.

  Domi flipped herself back to her feet, snatching up her blaster where it had slipped out of her hand. Then the wag was bathed in that flickering red-amber light as their attacker launched another volley of heat at them.

  The rear of the truck heated in a second, a faint glow of red appearing in the center of the drop-down gate at the back. Then, with a clap of bursting tires, the back of the truck sank down into the ground where the back wheels had melted under the assault. Domi was jerked left and right as the wag began to spin out of control, bumping over the uneven ground.

  “We’re losing it!” the driver yelped from up front.

  Waves of dirt were kicked up as the wag continued forward for a few seconds, ripped from the ground by the ruined axles, before the wag came to a spinning halt.

  Domi leaped over the glowing side of the wag as it came to a stop, landing on the churned soil with catlike grace.

  Despite her youth, Domi was a seasoned veteran of combat and in peak physical fitness. She scrambled to the front of the wag as the box-on-legs began to power up its heat beam for another blast.

  “Get out of there,” Domi shouted, wrenching open the driver’s door. “Get out of there before—”

  Both driver and passenger—a man and a heavily tattooed woman—were slumped against the dashboard, blood on their faces and splattered against the windshield.

  Domi reached for the driver, a dark-skinned man in a gray undershirt wearing a .44 in a chest rig. “Are you…?” she began, but her words died on her lips as she received no response from the man. He was alive but unconscious.

  Before Domi had any more time to act, a stream of 15 mm bullets rattled against the side of the cab, churning up dirt and kicking against the wag’s side like a kicking mule. It was her that they were targeting now, Domi realized as she ducked behind the front of the cab. No doubt these road pirates didn’t want to ruin the crop that would be their haul.

  * * *

  CRIPPLE THE VEHICLE, disable the crew and then steal the goods—it was a pretty simple plan, Kane saw.

  “We need to circle,” Kane told Brigid over the Commtact. “Get behind these scavengers and take them off the board.”

  “Roger that,” Brigid agreed. A moment later, Kane saw Brigid’s wag bump off-road in preparation of making a circuit around their attacker. He only hoped that Domi was all right.

  Brigid’s and Kane’s wags were both off the track now, splitting left and right to come around and challenge the mechanical assault vehicle. The wags bumped over the fallow fields, dropping down into potholes before rearing up again like scared stallions, their mounted guns blazing.

  The wags were rugged, but they were not designed for this kind of treatment. Their cargo shifted and shook on their beds, and Kane’s companion wailed in frustration as one of the guy ropes tore and three sacks of grain went tumbling over the side.

  “Leave ’em,” Kane instructed. “When we survive this, we can go back for them.”

  The gunner looked at Kane with raised eyebrows. “When?”

  “Stay positive, boy,” Kane told him. “No point losing the fight before you’ve entered it.”

  Bullets spit from the turret, finding their distance now as the wag closed in on the striding behemoth. In the opposite field, on the far side of the broken strip of road, Brigid was working one of the tripod guns while one of Ohio Blue’s troops took the other, sending short bursts of bullets at the towering monstrosity trudging across the fields. Su
ddenly, the box-on-legs turned, slowing its stride as it brought its aperture to bear on Brigid’s wag.

  “Baptiste!” Kane shouted into his Commtact, unable to do anything else.

  Chapter 6

  Brigid had been counting off the seconds in her head. It had been twenty-five seconds since their mystery attacker had last fired that cataclysmic ray—and she knew she should have thirty before it could do so again.

  As Kane’s warning came, Brigid reached across to the other gunner, a woman in her forties with prematurely graying hair and the deeply tanned complexion of a Native American. “Get down!” Brigid instructed.

  The gunner didn’t stop to query the instruction; she just let go of the tripod gun and dropped to the deck behind it. Beside her, Brigid was doing the same.

  Then the ray blasted, zapping a melting beam of incredible heat toward the wag, bathing it in boiling red light. Brigid turned her head away from the blast as it washed over the back plate of the six-wheeler. She could feel the warmth running down her right-hand side as the periphery of the beam lashed against her, her shadow suit compensating instantly. Beside her, the red-skinned woman fared less well, spitting a curse as the tassels of her jacket caught fire, then tamping the flames down with swift pats of her hand.

  As soon as the beam faded, Brigid was back up to work the guns again. The wag was still moving, bumping across the uneven ground of the fallow field, and it took Brigid a few seconds to adjust her aim.

  “Kane, it’s taking them thirty seconds to power up that heat ray,” she said as she drew the tripod cannon around and squeezed the trigger. “That’s how long you have to drop it.”

  * * *

  “COPY THAT,” KANE acknowledged as his own wag went caroming over the bumpy field. “Hey, Paul,” he called to the driver while his partner worked the turret gun. “Get us closer!”

  “Closer? You want closer?” the driver sounded outraged.

  “Just do it!” Kane snarled back as he scrambled to the edge of the wag’s flatbed. A moment later, as the wag sped past the towering machine, Kane leaped over the side, dropping into a tuck-and-roll as he stuck the soil. Above him, the boxy construct began firing with its secondary railguns, sending a swift burst of bullets in the direction of the scrambling wag that Kane had just disembarked, drilling 15 mm shells across the roof and side of the retreating wag. The bullets struck like hail, clattering across the metal and drilling through with a sound like clashing cymbals.