by James Axler
“Maybe,” Grant said, eyeing the AC grille high on the wall. He wasn’t so sure. His eyes couldn’t help but be attracted to the pallid form of the woman who had set off the bomb in the baby carriage just a few hours before. There was something very off about her.
As the Pretors sat down, immediately the woman who may or may not be Bella Arran looked up with those disconcerting eyes of hers. Corcel took the lead, introducing the other people in the room. And then he asked her name.
The woman glared at him and spit on the desk she had been chained to.
“Nice,” Grant muttered, from his position standing beside the door with Shizuka. Waiting there, the two of them looked a little like bouncers.
Corcel looked at the spittle on the desk for a few seconds. It had flecks of gray in it, like ash from a cigarette. “That won’t get us anywhere,” he told the woman in Spanish. “You’re here until I say you leave, so the sooner you answer our questions, the sooner we can be done with all of this.”
The woman’s pinprick eyes flickered from Corcel to Cáscara on the chairs, and then over to Grant and Shizuka by the door behind the Pretors. Slowly, her expression changed into a sneer of superiority.
Cáscara picked up the questioning. “You can speak, correct?” she asked.
The woman glared at her, saying nothing.
“She shouted something when she came through the doors,” Grant remarked helpfully. “‘Corpses for my mistress.’”
“You can speak?” Cáscara asked again, more insistent this time.
“Yes,” the woman replied tonelessly as if this was the first time she was being asked.
“Please give us your name,” Corcel asked gently.
The woman continued to glare at him, her mouth sealed tightly.
“A woman went missing a little over a week ago,” Cáscara began after thirty seconds had passed. “Stop me if this begins to sound familiar. She was a waitress at a café on fiftieth called Oscuro. The woman’s name was Bella Arran. Do you want me to stop yet, or should I continue?”
The woman watched Cáscara with pinprick eyes, her expression unreadable.
“Are you Bella?” Corcel asked. “We suspect that you are and that perhaps you are in trouble.”
“Trouble which we may be able to help you with if you will speak to us,” Cáscara added gently.
The woman’s eerie gaze switched back to Corcel, watching him with that piercing stare. “You believe that I am her,” she said at last, “the woman, Bella Arran?
“Bella Arran is dead. But what came afterward, that is me. I see now how life was wasted, its purpose rudimentary, banal and pointless. My mistress showed me the true worth of the soul, and I followed her down into the darkness of the womb’s embrace. I remembered as I went into that darkness how life had begun and how its promise had been squandered, over and over, year after year. How what I had been was as nothing to what I could have been, to what I still can be. And she showed me how all I needed to do was give myself to her and die and then I could be happy.”
“And are you?” Cáscara asked. “Happy?”
“I feel happiness now the like of which I could never describe,” the woman who had been Bella Arran said, her voice wistful. She closed her eyes as she spoke these words, pale eyelids dropping down before her unsettling gaze like a store’s shutters. The lids were too pale and too thin—they looked as though they had been poorly cut from tracing paper.
“I embrace the light behind the darkness that waits at the grave,” Arran said, “for only with light can the darkness ever be seen. I am future, while your past is already racing away.”
“She says she’s dead,” Grant translated into English for Shizuka as he listened to the Commtact’s translation.
Shizuka looked at him with concern, saying nothing.
“You’ve spoken of your ‘mistress,’” Corcel said. “Who is she?”
“The great lady under the earth,” the dead woman replied, her eyes remaining hidden behind those awful tracing-paper lids. “Your judge in the world that is coming. You are corpses-in-waiting, flowers to be plucked by my mistress, Ereshkigal.”
As she spoke the name Ereshkigal, something seemed to change in the woman’s physical makeup. Before the startled eyes of the two Pretors, Grant and Shizuka, the woman’s previously pallid flesh began to glow in patches, like paper catching light. A moment later and without warning, her whole head was engulfed in a plume of black smoke through which only the licking flames could be seen. The flames and something else—the bright teeth of her widening smile. Her exposed skin billowed smoke, filling the air above her like ink dropped in water.
Closest to the fire extinguisher located at the far side of the door, Grant grabbed it, hefting it up in both hands and clamping down the firing nozzle even as the two Pretors leaped out of the way of the expanding cloud of smoke and flame. A jet of white foam emerged from the fire extinguisher, spraying across the room as Grant targeted the burning woman.
“My mistress shall come for you soon enough,” Bella Arran stated quietly from behind the curtain of smoke, her voice unhurried, its tone eerily normal.
As the flame-retarding chemicals struck the woman, her eerie voice chided them from behind the curtain of black smoke. “You cannot avoid her steps. And when she comes, her love will be all that you shall know.”
Shizuka pulled at the door handle but the room had locked automatically when it had closed, sealing in the prisoner and interviewer as a safety feature in case the prisoner somehow overpowered the Pretor. A request was needed to open the door, which was monitored at all times.
Corcel was at Shizuka’s side in a moment, hammering against the reinforced glass panel in the door to call the attention of his fellow Pretors outside.
“Let us out,” he shouted. “Quickly—there’s a fire in here.”
With Pretor Cáscara behind him, Grant continued dousing the burning woman with the extinguisher, the sound of its loud jet muffling her chanting voice so that he only heard fragments of her words. “You are corpses-in-waiting, every one of you,” she said. “Each of you shall know bliss and shall embrace that bliss with absolute love and absolute joy. You shall embrace the grave willingly and only then will you know the loving touch of Ereshkigal.”
The room was filling with the thick, noxious black smoke that was billowing from the burning body. It reeked of burning fat, hissing and cracking as the skin blistered and the flesh beneath it cooked.
A moment later, the door to the interview room opened with a click as the magnetic seal was unlocked from without.
“Go! Go!” Pretor Corcel shouted, ushering Shizuka outside past the shocked faces of three Pretors waiting by the door.
“Liana?” Corcel encouraged as he stood in the doorway, holding the door open with his back. His partner backed away from the burning figure at the desk, trotting out through the open door as one of the uniformed Pretors entered with another fire extinguisher.
“Grant?” Corcel called.
Grant continued to douse the burning body for a few more seconds, but the flames were out now and it was just smoke billowing in thick, inky clouds from the body. The voice had stopped chanting, the white teeth still visible, locked in a rictus grin amid the blurred blackness of the head. “She’s out,” he said.
“Come on,” Corcel encouraged. “Don’t breathe any more of this ash.”
Grant nodded, striding across the room and placing the spent fire extinguisher on one of the chairs that the two Pretors had been using. “Thanks, man,” Grant said, coughing to clear his dry throat as he exited the room past Corcel.
Corcel waited a moment longer in the doorway as more Pretors were hurrying along the corridor outside to assist. The Pretors carried firefighting equipment and wore breath masks and oxygen packs.
Bella Arran’s body had slumped back after the fire, her head fallen back as far as it could go, exposing her charcoal-black throat so that it was almost in line with the ceiling. Her clothes had burned away along with her ski
n so that she was just a mangled mire of bones and burned flesh now. Dark smoke rose from the corpse, leaving the stench of burning meat on the air.
Corcel turned away, letting the cleanup squad do their job.
Chapter 13
“Well, that was downright creepy,” Grant stated grimly. He was standing by the window in a communal room in the Hall of Justice, taking the disposable cup of coffee that Pretor Corcel had just poured him.
The room was small with green-painted walls that reminded Grant of pond weed and an arrangement of low, comfortable seating that had seen better days. A coffee table dominated the center of the room, and Pretor Cáscara had taken a seat opposite Shizuka while Corcel worked the percolator in the corner. The room was two stories up with a barred window overlooking the rear of the building. The window looked down on a service road that ended in an underpass leading into the multistory parking garage at the side of the building and featured a locked area where trash cans were stored for pickup.
The smell of smoke hung heavily on everyone’s clothes.
“She had nothing on her to trigger that,” Corcel confirmed. “We checked her pockets before she was put in the interrogation room. She was clean.”
“Have you ever heard of spontaneous human combustion?” Cáscara asked the room.
Shizuka was sitting opposite her, erect on one of the sagging seats, her body poised, alert. “Mr. Krook in Bleak House by Charles Dickens dies in such a way, if I recall correctly.”
Cáscara nodded. “It is a documented phenomenon, although of questionable veracity. According to the reports, a human body combusts without any external source of ignition—no wick, no fuel.”
Grant turned from the window. “And you think that’s what our suspect, Bella Arran, just did?”
Cáscara fixed Grant with a stern look. “Do you have a better explanation?”
“Scientific evidence for spontaneous human combustion is a gray area,” Corcel chimed in, taking a chair beside his partner. “While there have been multiple reports dating back hundreds of years, the real reasons for the phenomenon have never been satisfactorily confirmed. For a body to just—pop!—set alight without an external trigger defies all that we understand about science, surely.”
“Does it matter why it occurs?” Shizuka asked. “The fact that we just saw…something happen in front of our eyes cannot be denied. That woman set alight, and there was no external source to trigger that.”
“It was as if she willed it to happen,” Cáscara observed.
“Yeah, after she’d said the name of her mistress,” Grant added. “Ereshkigal. Whoever she is. You know her? She a local player?”
Cáscara shook her head and so did Corcel. “I don’t recognize the name,” Corcel confirmed, and his partner agreed.
At that moment, a Pretor’s head popped around the edge of the open doorway, drawing everyone’s attention. The Pretor was young and female with round, freckled cheeks and blond hair neatly tied back in a bun. “Juan, Emiliana—your subject is dead,” the Pretor said. “Couldn’t be revived. It was pronounced by Baroja two minutes ago.”
Corcel nodded. “Thanks, Dor.”
The uniformed Pretor departed, leaving the group to their discussion.
“You think she was alive?” Grant asked bleakly after a moment’s consideration.
The two Pretors looked at him strangely.
“Before the fire?” Corcel queried. “Are you suggesting that Ms. Bella Arran may have already been dead when we interviewed her?”
“That’s what she told us, isn’t it?” Grant asked. “No reason to question that, is there?”
“There’s every reason, Grant,” Corcel said. “Dead people are dead. They don’t answer questions.”
Grant was shaking his head. “Now, that’s a very narrow view of what it constitutes to be alive or dead,” he said. “I’ve seen reanimated corpses move under their own power. Never had cause to interview one, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t speak.”
Corcel laughed uncomfortably. “You have alluded before to a rather colorful history,” he said, “but this? Well, it sounds preposterous, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”
Grant sipped his coffee before speaking. “I won’t deny that it does,” he agreed, “but you have to admit that something wasn’t right about that woman. She spoke about already being dead and, from what we just saw, she commanded her own body to combust, ending any chance we might have had to learn more.”
“Not ending any chance,” Cáscara piped up. “There are three survivors of the hotel incident who have been placed in recovery in the medical center. Hospitalized, but alive.”
“Three,” Grant acknowledged. “What about the bodies?”
“They’re there, too,” Cáscara told him. “In the morgue.”
“Maybe we should go examine both sets,” Grant proposed.
Corcel nodded. “You sure you’re both up for this?” he asked, and his gaze rested on Shizuka.
“Wherever Grant goes, there, too, go I,” Shizuka told him.
“Yeah, let’s see what we can find out,” Grant said.
“Good,” Corcel said.
“But since we all smell like fire-damaged stock just now,” Cáscara added, “I think we all need to change clothes and freshen up.” She looked at Grant and Shizuka, addressing them. “There are showers on-site and I’m sure we can find something for you to wear. What are you, Grant—XXXL?”
Before Grant could answer, Shizuka raised her hand. “We have clothes at our hotel,” she said, “and it would be convenient to use this time to pick up something I have left there.”
Grant nodded. “Good idea.”
“I’ll arrange a patrol wag to run you over,” Corcel told them both, “and we’ll reconvene in ninety minutes outside the hospital. I’ll give your driver the details.”
“Sounds good, thanks,” Grant said. He was already thinking about something he intended to pick up from his hotel room, but he also planned to use the time to check in with Cerberus and see if he could gather any information on the name Ereshkigal. He suspected that the two Pretors would be doing the same.
Chapter 14
“Ereshkigal,” Brigid Baptiste read from the computer screen in the Cerberus redoubt, “was the queen of the underworld in Mesopotamian myth.” The screen showed a transposed copy of an ancient book, detailing the fragmentary myths of ancient Babylon and its surrounds.
Brigid looked very different from the woman of action who had helped topple the land pirate walker just one day earlier. Now she wore a pair of square-framed spectacles, and her brows were furrowed as she read.
She was working at a computer terminal in the busy Cerberus operations room, located in a hidden redoubt within a hollowed-out mountain of the Bitterroot Mountain Range in what used to be Montana. The room was a vast space with a high roof and pleasing, indirect lighting. Its ceiling looked like the roof of a cave. Within that space, twin aisles of computer terminals—twenty-four in all—ran from left to right, facing a giant screen on which material could be flagged. A giant Mercator map dominated one wall, showing the world before the nukecaust had reshaped the coastlines of North America and other locales. The Mercator map was peppered with glowing locator dots that were joined to one another with dotted lines of diodes, creating an image reminiscent of the kind of flight maps that airlines had given to passengers in the twentieth century. The indicated routes were not flight paths, however, but rather they showed the locations and connections of the sprawling mat-trans network. Developed for the US military, the majority of the units were located within North America, but a few outposts could be seen farther afield.
A separate chamber was located in one corner of the room, far from the wide entry doors. This chamber had reinforced armaglass walls tinted a coffee-brown color. Contained within was the Cerberus installation’s mat-trans unit, along with a small anteroom that could be sealed off if necessary.
Right now the mat-trans chamber was empty, but the ma
in ops room was buzzing with life as Cerberus personnel hurried about their business, the dedicated surveillance and protection of humankind.
The redoubt was built into one of the mountains in Montana’s Bitterroot Range, where it was entirely hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military base that had been forgotten and ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust that initiated the twenty-first century. In the years since that conflict, a peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains with their mysterious, shadowy forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. Now the wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated, and the nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away consisting of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog who had befriended the Cerberus exiles many years ago. Sky Dog and his tribe helped perpetuate the myths about the mountains and so kept his friends undisturbed.
Despite the wilderness that characterized its exterior, the redoubt featured state-of-art technology. The facility was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study and some of whom had been cryogenically frozen before the nukecaust only to awaken to the harsh new reality.
Cerberus relied on two orbiting satellites at its disposal—the Keyhole Comsat and the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite—which provided much of the data for analysis in their ongoing mission to protect humankind. Gaining access to the satellites had taken long man-hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Concealed uplinks were hidden beneath camouflage netting in the terrain around the redoubt, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range where they chattered incessantly with the orbiting satellites. This arrangement gave the personnel a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the Earth, as well as providing the almost-instantaneous communication with its agents across the globe, wherever they might be. Just now, the agent on the receiving end of the communication was Grant.
Sitting beside Brigid in the ops room were Lakesh and his second in command, Donald Bry.
