Hell's Maw

by James Axler

  “Got a little sidetracked,” Kane admitted, glancing up the road and all about him. The streets remained almost empty, just a few distant figures hurrying out of the sunlight, the bells chiming very slowly to punctuate the silence. “Anything from Grant or Shizuka?”

  “No, he’s not answering my hails,” Farrell confirmed. “And he’s also not moved—he’s still at the hospital.”

  Kane looked at Brigid. “This guy needs to get there, too,” he said, and Brigid nodded. “Farrell, how many blocks is it? Two more?”

  “One and half,” Farrell corrected. “Take the next junction and hang a left. I figure you won’t miss it.”

  “Gotcha,” Kane replied as he gently extricated the wounded moped rider from his vehicle. Carefully, paying attention to supporting the man’s neck, Kane lifted him in both arms, adjusting his weight gently. The man continued to mutter in Spanish, the words barely more than the whispers of his moving lips.

  Brigid was about to question Kane’s plan when she saw the look on his face and remembered who he was. Kane had been a Magistrate once, feared law enforcer of the barons. But Mags were also tasked to help the citizens, to assist in keeping order and steering society away from chaos. Saving lives, one at a time, was all a part of their remit. After the baronies, after Kane had been exiled along with Brigid and his brother-in-arms, Grant, he had regained his humanity, the humanity that had been stripped from him by the Magistrates’ harsh training program. Kane had retained the old instincts, all those factors that had made him such a great Magistrate, but he had added something else—the burning need to help people, to save innocents. Kane was a pragmatist and a soldier, but he was not a machine—he cared about who lived and who died. That was what he had achieved since leaving the barony’s clutches; that was the reward that his work with Cerberus had given him.

  Kane carried the bloodstained rider and, with Brigid at his side, made his way to the end of the block toward the hospital. Like the others, this street was deserted, just abandoned cars—not parked, but simply left, doors open, sometimes with wipers and lights still on—a dog tied to a lamppost by its lead, barking forlornly.

  “Something’s very wrong here, Baptiste,” Kane said.

  Brigid shot him a look. “You think? Kane, I don’t know what we’ve walked into but it’s… I’m finding it very unsettling.”

  “Ereshkigal,” Kane said, reminding Brigid of her research.

  “But how does someone clear the streets like this? It’s—” Brigid stopped, spying something across the street from where she strode beside Kane.

  A young woman in the window of a florist’s was hanging herself, using the baling wire to hook herself up on the curtain rail that stretched across the windows. She wore a plain dress that ended above her knees, pale pink in color, girly.

  Brigid spotted it first and ran across the street toward the store. Its door was open and she rushed inside.

  “Stop,” Brigid said in Spanish.

  The woman continued in her task, moving in an almost trancelike state.

  “Baptiste,” Kane called from outside the store.

  Brigid ignored him, pacing across the room, hands held up to show that they were empty. “I won’t hurt you,” Brigid assured the woman. “I’m sure you have your reasons. But please, just—”

  “Baptiste!” Kane again, more urgent this time.

  Dammit, Kane, not now, Brigid thought as she stepped up to the woman who was preparing to hang herself.

  Outside, the bells chimed again.

  Brigid reached for the woman’s arm; up close she looked as if she was barely out of her teens, maybe not even that. Too young to be contemplating suicide, surely. The young woman didn’t even seem to notice her, she was too busy trying to hook the baling wire tightly over the rail. Brigid snatched it back and unhooked it from the rail with her other hand.

  “Don’t do this,” Brigid pleaded. “Whatever it is that’s driven you to—”

  Brigid stopped as she caught a glimpse of movement in the back of the store, in a darker room behind the counter. Another figure was moving there, sifting through a cupboard. Brigid caught the glint of metal in their hand as they pulled something free. It was a pair of shears, seen partially in darkness, the kind used to clip the stems from flowers. Brigid watched, horrified, as the person in back jabbed the blades of the shears into their gut.

  “No! Stop!” Brigid screamed, leaping over the counter and scrambling into the back room. Behind her, the young woman in the pale dress took the dropped baling wire and began to loop it up around her neck and over the rail once more.

  In the back room, an older woman, in her thirties with short, dark hair, was bent over double, drawing the blades of the shears slowly across her belly. Blood was beginning to bud there in spots, seeping into the cream-colored blouse she wore. The shears were a poor weapon, their short, curved blades acting like hooks in the woman’s flesh. Imprecise—but devastating.

  Brigid grabbed the woman’s hand and wrenched the shears from it, throwing them across the room. “What’s got into you?” Brigid demanded. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Baptiste!” It was Kane’s voice again, calling from the open doorway of the florist’s. “You really need to see this.”

  Brigid stepped out of the unlit storeroom, her heart sinking as she saw the woman whom she had—helped? saved? stopped?—just a few moments before was already trying to loop the noose back around the rail over the windows. Kane was standing in the doorway, the wounded body of the scooter rider still held in his arms. His face was ashen, his expression grim.

  “What is it?” Brigid asked, barely able to take her eyes from the woman in the window.

  “I don’t know,” Kane admitted, leading the way outside, “but it’s big.”

  Brigid followed Kane outside into the street once more and looked up to where he indicated. Up ahead, the colossus that was the hospital building waited. It was eerily still, the streets around it abandoned. On its rooftop, Brigid could see a line of people, all of them waiting at the roof’s very edge.

  “Oh, sweet baron…” Brigid muttered.

  And as they watched, the first of the figures stepped from the roof.

  Chapter 22

  There were two workmen on the steps of the Hall of Justice, working to repair the ruined door where the bomb had been detonated earlier that morning. The steps and surrounding walls had been blackened from the bomb blast, but the shattered glass from the door had already been swept away. One of the men was nailing a wooden panel in place over where the glass had been damaged, while the other carefully tapped out the glass that remained, dropping it into a dustpan.

  Somewhere nearby, the church bells had started chiming, droning on and on in a slow, laborious pattern that seemed to penetrate the skulls of anyone within earshot.

  Walking abreast, four Pretors strode up the steps into the Hall of Justice, heading for the door—nothing out of the ordinary. The workman tapping out glass looked up as the shadow of one of the Pretors crossed over his work.

  “I’ll be just a minute,” he promised, recognizing the uniform and the boots.

  The lead Pretor reached down without warning and grabbed the man by his collar, dragging him up to his feet with a jerk before tossing him violently aside.

  “Hey, what th—” the workman cried.

  The intimidating helmet of the Pretor stared back at him, eyes hidden behind a darkened visor that seemed to be boring into his very soul.

  The other worker was knocking a nail in place when the female Pretor kicked him in the chest. He sagged over with a pained splutter, looking up to see the woman standing over him. Her uniform was torn across the chest as if she had been shot—in truth, she had—and there was dried blood there and something else, a kind of weave of shimmering lights at the edges of a ragged wound that marred her torso.

  The Pretor shoved the workman out of her path with a vicious kick before leading the way into the Hall of Justice lobby.

 
The desk Pretor glanced up as the woman entered, accompanied by her three colleagues. He recognized all four of them.

  “Hey, Ruiz,” he said turning back to his computer screen. “You’re off shift early, aren’t you?”

  Pretor Ruiz of the ruined chest raised her Devorador de Pecados pistol and blasted the desk Pretor in the face. His head erupted in a burst of blood and bone as the 9 mm slug penetrated his forehead and shattered his nose.

  There were two Pretors at the security door in the building when the shot was fired. The first, a woman in her early forties who spent a lot of time in the facility’s gym and liked to brag that she had seen everything in her service to the badge, started screaming. Beside her, her partner—a younger woman with auburn locks that emerged from under her helmet in braids like the snakes of Medusa’s hair, looked horrified, her jaw dropping in surprise.

  “De Centina, is that—” the younger woman asked, recognizing the old Pretor who had followed Ruiz through the door. De Centina had left his helmet at the south gate, where Ereshkigal had killed him. Now his reanimated corpse was riddled with the cancer that had tried to eat at his face years before, leaving sparkling lines of newly possessed disease trailing across his mug like winking stars in the evening sky.

  In answer to the woman’s unfinished question, de Centina raised his blaster and shot, sending a 9 mm bullet through her throat, shattering her voice box before she could finish her query. De Centina had been a Pretor longer than almost anyone in the Hall—he had had many years to think about the weak spots of the Pretor armor, and knew just what he was doing when he targeted the woman’s throat.

  Behind de Centina and Ruiz, Bazán and Cadalso were marching in the door in step, their own weapons armed and ready.

  The older woman was still screaming as her partner went crashing to the floor in a heap, her vocal cords a bloody splash where her throat had been. Ruiz swept her gun around and blasted again, delivering a 9 mm bullet to the woman’s outstretched hand where it rested against the door frame. The woman yelped in agony as her hand was ripped apart and then stumbled back into the stairwell that waited behind her.

  De Centina led the way to the stairs, Ruiz marching just a step behind him.

  In the lobby, Cadalso and Bazán made short work of two perps who had been brought in for cautioning and were just waiting for the final records to be completed so that their possessions could be returned. Both died whimpering as the sound of church bells tolled through the open door, masking the reports of gunfire.

  There was no one to challenge them on the stairs. Each Pretor was equipped with an identity tag that triggered a sensor at the door upstairs, granting them access to the squad room. De Centina led the way, while the others filed in behind him.

  Inside, the squad room was alive with activity. Pretors were working at their desks, interviewing suspects, interviewing crime victims, filing reports, making caffeinated drinks. There were Pretors in full street uniform, others dressed in the light, armor-weave suits of the higher-ranking investigative officers. Several glanced up from what they were doing as de Centina and his team walked in, but they all knew de Centina, no one thought anything strange of his coming through the squad door at this time of day.

  Some people could be turned, but many resisted the charms of Ereshkigal’s spell, needing her personal attention to receive the formula that would send them to despair and, from there, into the triumph that was the after-death. For them, the easiest solution was a quick death after which Ereshkigal could apply the formula at her leisure, reviving the corpses and showing them new ways to live. Her Terror Priests—these newly revived dead—were tasked to create those corpses. Corpses for their mistress!

  A Pretor called Millas, six years out of training and with an arrest record second to none of his graduating year, looked up again after acknowledging de Centina and his group entering the room. There was something about de Centina’s face, he realized.

  When Pretor Millas looked again, he saw the sparkling lines like fluorescent tubing had been sewn inside de Centina’s face, the way it glistened like moonlight on water. “Hey, de Centina—what happened to you? Is everythi—”

  Dead Cadalso shot from behind de Centina, blasting over the older Pretor’s shoulder and delivering brutal death to the unsuspecting Millas. Millas’s right ear exploded into a bloody spray, and Cadalso’s second shot bored through his face in an instant.

  The squad room was alerted then and, immediately, trained Pretors went diving for cover and reaching for weapons.

  Ruiz, Bázan, Cadalso and de Centina tracked across the room, blasting over and over, felling six Pretors and four ordinary citizens who moved too slow. It left seven Pretors alive along with three civilians, six hiding behind desks while a Pretor and a norm had slipped through the door on the far side of the room and into the corridor beyond.

  The four reanimated Pretors strode through the squad room fearlessly as Pretors appeared from hiding to blast shots at them. De Centina blasted another Pretor the moment he appeared from behind a filing cabinet, while Bazán leaped atop a desk and aimed her pistol straight down, spraying the space beyond with 9 mm bullets and executing a Pretor and two civilians in an instant.

  Cadalso took a shot to the arm, ignored it and moved on through the room, blasting in the direction of the shooter. He was rewarded with a cry from that area as his bullet met flesh, then disappeared through the doorway and into the corridor.

  In the corridor, a female Pretor called Grosella was busy loading a Copperhead assault rifle while a female civilian wearing too much makeup and a short skirt cowered beside her. The Copperhead featured a two-foot-long barrel, with grip and trigger in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handedly. It also featured an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. In short, it could create a brisk level of destruction like few other guns in its class.

  Cadalso shot the blond-haired Pretor even as she raised the subgun and fired, watched her head explode as a line of 4.85 mm bullets peppered the wall a foot to his right. Pretor Grosella crashed down to the floor in a blurt of spraying blood, while the civilian screamed in horror.

  Cadalso looked at the civilian with disdain, eyeing her garish clothes and painted face. “Corpses for my mistress,” he said as he brought his Devorador de Pecados pistol up and shot her through the forehead.

  * * *

  BACK IN THE squad room, de Centina, Ruiz and Bazán were making short work of the remaining Pretors. Bullets struck them, buried in their bodies, chipped away chunks of their flesh, but they just kept coming. They were beyond death now, in the blissful place that Ereshkigal had introduced them to, her new Terror Priests for the new order. She believed only in death and they believed only in her. The world of man had been judged, and sentence was being passed. Perfect, mathematical sentence.

  A Pretor eight weeks from retirement took four shots in the belly before finally slumping over the desk he had used for thirty-seven years. Bazán cruelly made sure, striding over to him and blasting him in the back of the skull from point-blank range even as another 9 mm slug buried itself between her shoulder blades.

  Ruiz found herself tackling a Pretor who had unhooked a fire ax from its holding place on the wall, presumably realizing that bullets were doing no good against this enemy. The Pretor—a muscular man with a good foot and half in height on Ruiz—swung the ax with the vigor of a woodcutter, driving it downward, where it cut through Ruiz’s left arm. The arm seemed to hang for a moment, drooping from the shoulder and swinging lifelessly. Then, before the Pretor’s startled eyes, the arm seemed to extend, the space between shoulder and amputation filling in with new nerves and sinews, twining up and in on themselves as they rebuilt the arm until it was six inches longer than it had been before.

  Ruiz kicke
d the man in the groin as he goggled in surprise, then brought her automatic around and blasted him in the chest, pumping the trigger until her third shot pierced his armor and he finally stopped squirming.

  Across the room, de Centina and Bazán made short work of the remaining Pretors, taking several hits without so much as slowing down until they finally overwhelmed the living.

  Bazán shoved one struggling Pretor through a water cooler in an eruption of spilled water, before kicking him with enough force to dislocate his jaw. After that, a well-placed shot finished the man.

  In the aftermath, the squad room looked like a charnel house, dead bodies strewed across the floor and on chairs and behind desks. The four reanimated Pretors surveyed their handiwork with pale, devolving eyes. Death rewards those who accept it, they knew. Ereshkigal may yet come here to share her gift.

  Outside the Hall of Justice, the bells of Zaragoza continued to chime, repeating their eerie, one-note refrain.

  Chapter 23

  Brigid and Kane watched as one figure stepped off the roof of the hospital and dropped, plummeting like a stone to the pavement below. They struck with the inevitability of nightfall, the sound of their impact carrying across the silence like a peal of thunder. In its wake, the church bells chimed once more, droning once in unison, creating a period to the jumper’s death sentence.

  Even as the jumper landed, the next one was stepping over the edge of the roof, and in a moment that one was falling, too, careening down the outside of the building toward their inevitable death.

  “We have to do something,” Brigid gasped, turning away.

  Kane glanced down at the bike rider in his arms whom he had rescued, glanced back at the roof of the hospital where people were lined up like lemmings on a cliff. “No time,” he said. “We need to find Grant first—”

  “No, Kane!” Brigid was insistent. “People are dying.”

  “Killing themselves,” Kane agreed. “But so many—I figure they’ve been, I dunno, instructed to do this. To commit suicide.”