by James Axler
Warily, Cáscara stepped through into the foyer, her blaster held up and ready. The scene that greeted her was carnage. The walls had been charred by the explosion, radiating circles of smudged black, concentrating at the external doors. Those doors were cracked and hung cockeyed, and one of the hinges had melted so that it was now a smoking glob of brass.
People were strewed across the space, Pretors and civilians, caught up in the shock wave, thrown to the floor. Among them, Cáscara spotted Grant and Shizuka—he lying atop a light-haired woman with her skirt hitched halfway up her thighs, Shizuka lying just to the side of the doors that led onto the street.
Cáscara’s eyes stopped moving as they spotted the gun lying on the ground beside Grant and the woman, and she trotted over toward it, her own weapon held ready, before kneeling down to snatch it up and pocket it. As she did so, Grant groaned and began to move.
Good, Cáscara thought, he’s alive.
Grant’s eyes flickered open and he saw Cáscara leaning over him, her dark hair fallen down over her shoulders, framing her striking face.
“Is something ringing?” Grant asked in a bewildered tone. “I can hear—”
“There’s been an explosion,” Cáscara told him in a soothing voice. “Did you see—”
Grant coughed, swallowing a mouthful of dust that had been disturbed by the explosion. “Stroll—” he began, then coughed again. “Lady with a stroller. No kid, just a bomb. I…I dunno…”
The glamorous Pretor’s gaze raced around the room, searching for the stroller that Grant spoke of. It wasn’t here, which meant it had either been utterly destroyed in the explosion, or it had been moved elsewhere. Cáscara’s glance settled on the woman who lay sprawled beneath Grant’s hulking frame. “You saved her?” she asked.
Grant seemed momentarily confused, then realization dawned. “No,” he gasped. “She came in with a gun. Shouted something—something about death.”
Cáscara glanced back over Grant and the woman he was slumped against. He looked okay, just a few smears of dirt where debris had caught him; the woman meanwhile was unconscious—she could wait.
Cáscara stood up, scanning the room. Other people were groaning now, just recovering from the unexpected explosion. Her partner, Juan Corcel, came walking into the room from the stairwell, his face pale with shock but otherwise looking steady. “Anything?” he asked.
Cáscara nodded solemnly. “Bomb,” she said, and she pointed at the woman lying beneath Grant. “Says she brought it. There was a gun, too—a Firestar M40.”
Corcel nodded, and regretted it immediately as he felt suddenly unbalanced. “You have the blaster?” he asked.
Cáscara confirmed she did before pacing across the room to the outside doors. She waited there a moment, her own blaster raised in readiness, listening for signs of a follow-up attack. Then, tentatively, she pushed the double doors open a crack and peeked through the space.
There was a small porch area there, sheltered from the sun and just two strides across, beyond which was a flight of three stone steps and a ramp leading down to the street. The mangled remains of the baby stroller stood in the center of the space, metal struts jagged and twisted, the whole thing belching thick black smoke. The walls of the porch were blackened with smoke, too.
So that was where the cart had ended up, Cáscara realized, although it didn’t explain how it had got here. Grant had suggested that the woman had brought it inside the foyer—but how had it got out through the doors again without ripping through them?
Beyond the porch, a crowd was amassing in the bright morning sunshine of the street, eyeing the Justice Hall and the smoking debris there, keeping a wary distance for fear of further explosions. Cáscara pushed the door wider and stepped outside to address the crowd.
“Everyone move along,” Cáscara instructed in a loud voice. “Keep this area clear.” She was worried that there might be another bomb or another gunman, worried about everyone’s safety—but she didn’t want to panic the crowd either, just keep them out of harm’s way.
The crowd began to shuffle reluctantly away. Liana Cáscara watched them carefully, trying to detect any hint of someone who was perhaps behaving suspiciously.
* * *
INSIDE, GRANT WAS just shaking off the effects of the explosion, his ears still ringing. Pretor Corcel joined him, offering a few words of sympathy that Grant couldn’t entirely make out. At the same time, Corcel reached for his cuffs and slipped them over the unconscious woman’s wrists where she lay against the floor.
“You did well,” Corcel said, smiling warmly at Grant. “Maybe even saved some lives today.”
Grant acknowledged the words with a nod before turning his head to look for Shizuka. She lay sprawled just a few feet away, arms over her head, fingers laced tightly together. There was detritus scattered on and around her, a scattering of broken glass flecks along with flakes of paint and chips of wood that had been wrenched from the doors. Grant reached forward and brushed the worst of it from Shizuka.
“Hey, pretty lady?” he urged, stroking her face gently. “Can you hear me?”
Shizuka’s closed eyelids fluttered open after a moment, and she smiled when she saw Grant poised over her.
“Did I get it?” she asked. “The bomb?”
* * *
Ninety seconds earlier
* * *
SHIZUKA SAW GRANT race across the room toward the woman who had just entered. The woman was drawing a compact pistol from beneath her skirt—six and a half inches of gunmetal-gray barrel with silver highlights—and she began shouting something in Spanish.
“¡Los cadáveres de mi amante!”
Grant was already knocking the intruder from her feet as the gun spit its first bullet.
Behind the woman a baby’s stroller was just coming to rest on its silver-spoked wheels, a bundle of blankets poking from within. Shizuka’s mind focused on it, realized the danger it represented—either a child was in the line of fire or the stroller contained more weapons, or something even more deadly.
Shizuka leaped immediately, propelling herself across the foyer in a blur of motion, her feet skipping on the tile-clad floor as she raced toward the baby stroller. She moved with the uncanny grace of a warrior borne, years of martial arts training ensuring that her body functioned like a well-oiled machine. She was on the stroller in an instant, even as beside her the woman who Grant had tackled to the floor reeled off a second blast from the Firestar, burying a bullet in the ceiling high above them.
Shizuka did not hesitate. She slapped her hands against the bar-like handle of the baby carriage and pushed, forcing it out through the double doors of the Justice Hall even as Grant’s shouted warning echoed in her ears.
“The stroller!” Grant yelled as Shizuka pulled the doors inward again, closing them off from the cart. “Somebody—”
And then the bomb in the baby carriage went off, sending its booming shock wave through the porch and the foyer beyond.
* * *
GRANT NODDED, A broad smile materializing on his face as he stroked Shizuka’s face. “You got it,” he assured her. “Looks like it did some damage out there,” he said, nodding in the direction of the doors, “but nothing on what it would have caused in here.”
Pretor Cáscara came striding back through the porch doors at that moment, her brow furrowed in concern. She was clearly alert, on edge and ready for anything, her pistol gripped in her hand. “I think the immediate crisis is over,” she announced in Spanish. “Let’s get this place cleaned up and tend to any wounded.”
The man at the desk began giving orders and checking his comms board as more Pretors arrived to respond to the explosion and its aftermath. It had been two minutes since the bomb had gone off; two minutes since the rules of the game had changed.
* * *
A LITTLE LATER Corcel and Cáscara sat in a back room with Grant and Shizuka, a short distance from the hubbub in the foyer where a cleanup op was now under way. The room was pain
ted white, its overhead light harsh, two notice boards on adjoining walls pinned with various notices, updates and warnings, a hissing and huffing coffee machine in one corner and tired-looking plastic chairs arranged untidily about the place. Grant and Shizuka were encouraged to take a seat each, and the two Pretors brought their chairs over to sit opposite them.
Shizuka had suffered a few scratches when the doors had taken the shock wave, including a little bruising across her chest from where she had been thrown against the floor, but she and Grant were otherwise fine. The ringing in Grant’s ears had stopped after about five minutes; now he just felt washed out in the aftermath of the adrenaline burst.
“I believe we owe you an apology,” Corcel began. He had a bandage over the scratch on his forehead now, and it had been cleaned up with antiseptic by one of the medical staff on-site at the Sector Hall. “Because of the circumstances we met, I had misjudged you, Grant. What you did in there, disarming the woman, and you, Shizuka, ejecting the bomb—that was very brave.”
“Very brave,” Cáscara echoed with a nod.
Grant looked indifferent. “I saw the gun and I reacted,” he said. “I was in the line of fire as much as anybody.”
Corcel was shaking his head in disagreement. “From what the Desk Pretor saw, you were very professional in your action. You, too, Senorita Shizuka.
“You told me that you were once a Magistrate—that is correct, yes?”
Grant nodded. “A long time ago.”
“What is it that you do now?” Corcel pressed.
“I’m…freelance,” Grant said vaguely.
Corcel nodded thoughtfully. “You obviously keep yourself active,” he said. “We have a problem here, one which you have already encountered with the incident in the Gran Retiro. Right now, you are my best witness to what caused it, the people who we think are behind it. I am wondering now if you might consider assisting us in our investigations, strictly in your freelance capacity?”
Grant raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You want my help?” he clarified.
“We need your help,” Cáscara spoke up. “I think.”
“Perhaps in sharing information,” Corcel proposed, “we will be able to reach a mutually beneficial position.”
“Perhaps,” Grant said encouragingly.
“Then let me start at the beginning,” Corcel said. “My name is Juan Corcel, and my partner, Emiliana Cáscara—and as you already know we are Zaragoza Pretors, the equivalent to your American Magistrates.
“Three weeks ago, something happened in the city,” Corcel explained. “A group of people were discovered, all dead, in a room of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar in the town center. They were arranged as if they were there to see a sermon, and yet it seemed that they were the performance—”
“Like an art exhibit,” Cáscara elaborated. “All of them poised, awaiting death like so.” She mimicked the expression of fear and shock on their faces, widening her eyes and sticking out her tongue.
“You think someone did this?” Shizuka asked. “Deliberately?”
“Theories circulated,” Pretor Corcel told them. “About a suicide cult, or some kind of prank gone horribly wrong. But they were just theories. No one could be found who had any insight. Emiliana and myself were assigned to investigate along with another Pretor, a man named Herrero.”
“A good man,” Cáscara lamented.
“We had further incidents,” Corcel continued. “One hospital ward of elderly patients became a carnal house. A nasty affair at a local school. Deaths, you understand, mass deaths, but not murders in the traditional sense—almost like suicides, but en masse.”
“That’s worrying,” Grant agreed, “and it sounds a lot like what we saw in the ballroom.”
“Yes, it does,” Corcel asserted. “We began to put together things, eyewitness reports about people in the area. Two people survived the attacks—we found them both near asphyxiation in a theatrical performance where the rest of the audience died—”
“Ninety-seven people in total,” Cáscara elaborated.
Corcel nodded. “Quite. And the survivors spoke of a feeling, a sense of well-being, that had settled in their heads,” he explained. “They said they saw things in those lost moments when they had tried to hang themselves.”
“What did they see?” Shizuka asked, her voice quiet with awe.
“Colors, shapes, magical things,” Corcel said. “When they described them the images defied logic.”
Cáscara picked up the story. “We found something at that scene,” she said. “Unusual but not substantially so—a feather. We did not realize its significance at that time.”
“The woman I chased dropped a feather,” Grant recalled. “I picked it up.”
“We have it. A red feather, the color of blood,” Corcel stated.
“Yeah, but not at first,” Grant told them. “She wore it on some fantail arrangement attached to her butt, like something a carnival dancer might wear, and while it was attached to her it was white. Only when it dropped did its color change.”
“So the color changes over time,” Corcel noted. “That’s interesting.”
“It’s unprecedented, Grant-san,” Shizuka observed. “I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
“Me either,” Grant agreed. “And you say you don’t know what you’re up against here.”
“Sightings of several people seen in the vicinity of these incidents began to match up,” Corcel said. “Three people were spotted at the scenes—the same three people, two men and a woman, over and over. The men were dark-skinned, while the woman was only fleetingly glimpsed. Pretor Herrero came close to apprehending the group on an occasion six days ago. It was not to be.”
“What happened?” Grant asked.
“You saw the discs that they use,” Corcel said. “He was on the receiving end of one of these. It cut his stomach wide-open.”
“He could not be saved,” Cáscara added.
“I’m sorry,” Grant said solemnly. “So what does it all mean? Some kind of nutty suicide cult?”
Corcel shook his head. “There’s no pattern, no logic. The deaths are random, although they always involve masses of people all at once.”
“You’ve analyzed the feathers and the discs, I take it?” Grant checked.
Cáscara nodded. “The discs are steel, sharpened along their edges, nothing special,” she said. “The feathers are a little more of a mystery. They share some of the properties of hen’s feathers, but the DNA is not an exact match. Our experts have been unable to place it.”
“Rogue DNA,” Grant muttered, shaking his head. He wondered if Cerberus might have more success in analyzing it, for they had vast databanks, including hands-on experience in dealing with extraterrestrial threats. Cerberus primarily operated below the radar, which worked well for the kind of threats they usually tackled. To go public could compromise them. On the other hand, there was a possibility that this case was the very thing that Cerberus tackled—only by looking into it further might Grant find out for sure.
“We can help you,” Grant decided. “I work with something—an organization—that has experience in this field.”
“Which organization?” Corcel asked.
“It’s called Cerberus,” Grant said. “You’ve probably not heard of us, and that’s kind of the way we’d prefer it.”
“American?” Cáscara asked.
“Yeah.” Grant nodded. “But we go all over. Don’t like to limit ourselves.”
Corcel turned to Shizuka. “And you?”
“I work with Grant sometimes,” Shizuka told them.
“You can trust us,” Grant said.
“I hope so,” Corcel said. “Just now you’re our only breathing witnesses.”
Chapter 11
Twenty-five miles south of Zaragoza
The morning sun was already high in the sky, peering down on the desolate scrub of an uninhabited region of the Spanish countryside. The ground undulated pleasantly
, a mixture of sand and scratchy long grass, occasional bushes with thorny spikes and leaves that were colored a sickly dark green and had not seen water in weeks. Patches of green ran up the slopes, dotted there like marching armies, spiraled bushes whose branches twisted in on themselves like old, arthritic men.
A single lane of blacktop ran through the desolation, the shifting sands sprinkled across it, grains dancing there with each hot breath of the wind.
A Pretor Sandcat was driving along the blacktop, its sleek, armored sides reflecting the white orbed glare of the sun. Painted black with red detailing, the Sandcat was an armored vehicle with a low-slung, blocky chassis supported by a pair of flat, retractable tracks. Its exterior was a ceramic armaglass compound that could repel small-arms fire, and the vehicle housed a swiveling gun turret up top, which was armed with twin USMG-73 heavy machine guns. The vehicles were exclusive to the law-enforcement divisions.
Inside, three Pretors were running a patrol, checking these barely populated areas for incursions by muties or insurgents opposed to the current Pretor-led regime. Muties had been a problem in these parts before now.
Initially appearing after the nuclear conflict that had torn down Western civilization, muties were creatures with cruelly twisted DNA care of the radiation that had blanketed much of the Earth. Some were feral, some more intelligent—almost human, in fact—but it was the subhuman strands that were the biggest threat. For a while, those mutants had run roughshod over the remains of civilization, taking what they wanted and murdering any who were foolish enough to stand in their way. But society had grown up again, and the rise of the Magistrates in North America and the Pretors out here in Spain had curtailed the mutie expansion, creating new and safe communities for the humans and resettling ones that had been abandoned during skydark.
These days, muties were an occasional sight, and many of the younger Pretors had never even seen one.
On board the Sandcat, a young Pretor by the name of Ramos was asking his older companion—Casillas, the driver of the vehicle—about a legendary encounter the Pretor had had with a gang of muties.
