by James Axler
* * *
CÁSCARA SCOOTED ACROSS the floor of the squad room on her backside as shots whipped past overhead. There were four opponents here, she knew, four that she had seen anyway. She needed something quick to disarm them and put them out of commission.
Kane used light, she realized. If they couldn’t be reasoned with, then she would have to find some way to replicate his defense.
She needed to get the Pretor reports to try to figure out the pattern of what was going on—if there even was a pattern.
She was behind one of twelve desks located in the squad room, crouching with the chair by her side. There was a dead body on the chair, a Pretor called Drid with whom she had shared a break or two over the past six months. He was a good guy, one sugar in his coffee, and now he was dead.
The shots had stopped. Cáscara could hear booted feet pacing across the room, spreading out in a practiced sweep pattern, the kind she had been taught back in training. It was now or never.
“Pretors, I’m one of you,” Cáscara announced from her temporary hiding place. “Here—” and she showed them her shield, holding it above the surface of the desk, having unclipped it from her belt.
The response—a familiar boom of gunfire as two of the Pretors took a shot at her hand.
Cáscara screamed as the shield was hit with a bullet, and she managed to get her hand out of the path of the gunfire just in time. Her fingers felt singed where the shield had been kicked out of her hand by the bullet.
“Okay,” Cáscara muttered to herself. “Don’t say I didn’t try.” Then she commanded her Devorador de Pecados pistol back into her hand, crouch-walking across the squad room as the dead Pretors approached.
Cáscara scrambled under the knee space of a desk, crouching there where she could see the other desk she had been hiding behind. Three of the Pretors stopped at the desk, guns trained and ready, sweeping the area for her even as they discovered that she had gone. She recognized them all. The women were Ruiz and Bazán, street patrol Pretors who were both quite new to the service, while the man was an older Pretor called de Centina. The uniform across Ruiz’s chest was stretched taut around a mess of dried blood, her flesh visible through the rent. The flesh at the edge of the wound seemed to sparkle, as if glitter had been poured there, and her left arm seemed to bend at a strange angle, as if it had been oddly extended by botched surgery.
De Centina had his helmet removed, leaving his face exposed. His eyes were wide, their irises indistinct, as if they were losing integrity. His face showed the scarring where he had fought with cancer a few years before. Now that scar was wide and dark, oozing with glistening beads of whiteness, like stars inside his face. Whatever had taken possession of these people had reignited the cancer and added to it, Cáscara saw, eating up de Centina from within.
Cáscara poked out from the knee space, bringing her pistol to bear on de Centina. She had liked the old hand—everyone in the division knew and liked him, in fact—and she couldn’t bear to see him like this, with his face ravaged with living cancer. She took careful aim and squeezed the trigger, closing her eyes as the bullet exited the blaster’s barrel.
De Centina went down in an explosion of flesh and bone, his already ruined face rent apart by the 9 mm slug.
The other Pretors turned, and Cáscara leaped from her hiding place and blasted, sending a triple burst of fire at the dead woman called Bazán. The bullets struck in a rising arc—gut, chest, head—and Bazán stumbled backward amid a cascade of her strawberry blond hair.
Dead Ruiz blasted at Cáscara, who was leaping over the nearest desk to gain some distance. The bullet struck Cáscara in the right thigh and she felt her balance go even as she slid across the desk and over the side.
“Dammit,” Cáscara muttered, feeling the burn at her thigh like a poker.
Didn’t matter. She had to keep moving, get the reports and get out.
Cáscara looked around, searching desperately for some weapon to use against the dead Pretors, some way to get the jump on them. Across the room, Cadalso, the man whom Grant had shot less than a minute before, was pulling himself up off the floor. His face was smeared with blood and his eyes had that pale, bled-out look that she had observed in the other victims of Ereshkigal; the one Corcel had begun to exhibit in the end. Behind Cáscara, Ruiz was striding purposefully across the room, her pistol held ready before her as she stalked her prey, over-length left arm hanging limply at her side like a child’s lopsided drawing. Living prey in a city of the dead. The beautiful, dark-haired Pretor was trapped on all sides.
Trapped, but not helpless.
Cáscara raised her pistol and fired, targeting the bright red fire extinguisher that resided by the door to the squad room. The moment that the bullet pierced its metal shell, the pressurized gas within blasted outward with supreme force, sending the extinguisher rocketing across the room and knocking Ruiz off her feet with a clang.
Cáscara selected her second target, blasting a light fixture above Cadalso’s head. It was a fluorescent tube strip light, and the bullet shattered its facade in a burst of lightning-bright sparks. Cadalso was momentarily blinded, shrieking like an animal as the tube light fell from its fittings and struck him across the face.
Cáscara leaped up, shrieking in pain at the bullet wound in her thigh. She ran, a kind of hobble-run, but a run just the same, through the squad door and into the incident room that was located beside it. There were two more dead bodies out here, a Pretor and a civilian. There was a map on the wall of the room, showing the city of Zaragoza with the streets marked in different colors, and beside that a second map, roughly the same size but showing the local area surrounding the city. A DDC computer terminal waited on a desk in front of the wall of maps. There were also rows of chairs arranged in a semicircle, and a desk to one side with a coffee percolator whose contents were a dark sludge, a window on the far side of the room overlooking the service road behind the Hall of Justice. The room was unoccupied.
Cáscara turned and slammed the door, locking it before striding over to the computer terminal. She tapped a key and the screen came to life.
She typed in her pass code and then made a request to see recent reports. A whole list of incidents appeared on screen, running in reverse time order—the most recent appearing as the highest on the list.
Which to look at? she wondered.
She stood there a moment, biting her lip as something tried the door handle.
De Centina!
The thought came to Pretor Cáscara then, inspired by the action in the squad room. She tapped in another query, brought up the rota for de Centina. He had been posted on the south gate of the city, she saw.
Behind her, the door handle rattled again, firmer this time, followed a crash as someone tried to force the door.
Cáscara’s fingers rushed across the computer keys, adding search terms as she hunted for the possible source of an incursion at the south end of the city. Nothing obvious appeared, but something else caught her eye. A Pretor patrol squad—a three-man crew with over twenty years’ experience between them—had failed to report in after a standard recce to the southwest of the city. It could be nothing, she knew, but coulds and woulds and shoulds were the things that detective work was made of. She tapped in the command to bring up their patrol route.
* * *
OUTSIDE THE SQUAD ROOM, Shizuka and the Cerberus warriors were feeling helpless to assist their ally. Kane had tried a half-dozen times to batter the door down but it stayed rigid, designed to survive a terrorist attack.
Grant and Shizuka climbed up the stairs to look for another way in, leaving Kane and Brigid alone, listening to the sounds of chaos outside the building.
Kane took those moments to check Brigid’s ankle. He had been a Magistrate once, and while it was certainly not his area of expertise, he knew a little basic field medicine, enough to strap up Brigid’s ankle to help her walk on it, using the sleeve torn from his own jacket as a makeshift support.
&n
bsp; “I think it’ll hold for a while,” Kane promised Brigid. They shared a bond, these two, the anam-chara link of soul friends. It was in moments like this, when Kane would suddenly drop everything just to ensure Brigid’s safety, that that link seemed to express itself.
“I’m going to slow you down,” Brigid pointed out.
Kane met Brigid’s eyes, fixing her with a look. “There’s more to life than running,” he told her. “Now, what do you think Ereshkigal’s grand plan is? What’s her objective?”
Brigid shook her head. “How would I know?” she said.
“You’re the smartest person around,” Kane told her. “Think.”
Brigid stared into the middle distance for a few seconds, recalling the strange vision of the woman they had spied amid the mob, trusting the perfect recollection of her eidetic memory. “She’s unfinished,” she said. “Not yet Annunaki.”
“You’re right, she looked human,” Kane said. “Kinda.”
“Grant said she was human when he first met her,” Brigid reminded him, “but now she’s begun to change. Change doesn’t happen, it’s triggered. It needs some kind of external input to make it occur. You remember the way the Annunaki first reappeared, with the genetic download from Tiamat?”
“Yeah.”
“Like that,” Brigid said.
“Tiamat’s dead,” Kane pointed out. He had been there at the destruction of the dragon ship, not once but twice, the second time on the banks of the River Euphrates where the great starship had been reforming only to rot from within.
“Even the dead give life to something,” Brigid said reasonably. “The worms, the maggots—things thrive on death, even humans.”
“New life from old,” Kane mused.
“Exactly,” Brigid said, “and what could be more Annunaki than that? So what if Ereshkigal needs protein, those genetic building blocks from the dead to re-create her own body? What if that’s why she’s killing everyone?”
“But so many people?” Kane asked and stopped himself as he answered, “Sure, why not? When have the Annunaki ever done anything small-scale?”
Brigid nodded in realization. “It’s just like the ancient myths said. She’s harvesting the dead, Kane, using them to make herself more powerful.”
Chapter 30
Grant found an open window higher up the stairwell. It was not wide enough for him to fit through, but Shizuka, whose petite frame was far smaller than his, found that she could slither her way through it with a little judicious contortion.
Outside was a ledge, two inches wide and overlooking the service road behind the building. Shizuka stood there, two stories off the ground, waiting as Grant passed through the stash of flash-bangs that Brigid and Kane had shared.
“Kane found that these can blind those pre-grave dead folks,” Grant explained. “I’ll look for another entry. Find a window, a way in, and do whatever it takes to get Cáscara out alive.”
“Will do,” Shizuka assured him.
“And, Shizuka? Be careful.”
“Always,” Shizuka said, reaching across from the ledge for a pitted section of wall cladding. A moment later she was gone, traversing the wall in spider fashion until she reached a window lower than Grant could see. She tried it, found it locked and moved on, spanning the surface of the building in rapid fashion.
* * *
CÁSCARA BROUGHT UP the last report from Casillas and his team, the group of Pretors who had been running a patrol outside the city walls to the southwest of Zaragoza. A map appeared on the computer screen, indicating their route, including their location when they had filed their last report.
Beside her, the door was rattling in its frame, and Cáscara could hear the report of a gun as someone tried to blast the lock to smithereens.
She watched the door for a moment, praying that it would hold just a little longer. These dead men were drawn to the living the way sharks scented blood. She could not hope to escape them for long.
The beautiful Pretor scanned the report, searching for clues as to where Ereshkigal had come from. Maybe she could help Corcel. She felt certain that the source was outside the city. The appearance of the reanimated gate guards here in the Hall of Justice, their use in destroying the Pretors, hinted as much. Putting that evidence together with the loss of contact with Casillas and his squad suggested that something had entered the city from the south.
At that moment the door gave, and a Pretor came marching into the room with his blaster raised. It was Cadalso. The visor of his helmet was red with blood and there were pockmarks across his breast where he had been shot more than once.
Cáscara dropped to the floor as Cadalso’s blaster fired, using the desk as scant cover from the assault. Behind Cadalso, a second dead Pretor was entering the room, the strawberry blond Bazán, her helmet now askew and blood marring her hair.
“Corpses! Corpses for the mistress!” the two Pretors chanted as they fired their blasters.
And then the window exploded in a shower of glass and a burst of sunlight radiance, the illumination casting the room into stark whites and defined shadows accompanied by a near-deafening boom.
Cáscara blinked back the pain in her eyes, spots running across her vision so that she could barely see around them.
Shizuka followed the flash-bang, drawing her katana in an effortless, graceful move, and launching herself across the room like a missile.
The reanimated corpses were writhing in agony where the flash-bang had assaulted their deteriorating eyes even behind tinted visors; eyes whose ocular nerves had had to be reknitted to join the brain after death.
Shizuka struck them in a blur of motion, cutting the man down with a brutal slash across his belly before following the move through so that her sword tip ended embedded in the gut of the woman. She withdrew the blade in an instant as both the dead figures fell back, blood blurting from between their teeth as they collapsed to the floor, eyes screwed shut tight behind their visors.
There were more outside, Shizuka saw. Two figures, both dressed in the uniforms of Pretors, one displaying a terrible facial disfigurement, came hurrying toward the doorway, their Devorador de Pecados pistols raised and ready to fire.
Shizuka stepped forward, bringing her sword up as the first of the bullets launched. She cut the bullet from the air, leaping across the confines of the corridor and slapping at the far wall with her free hand as a second bullet glanced past her. The graceful samurai warrior used that slap to propel her whole body up into the air, legs windmilling as she left the floor.
Another bullet fired from Ruiz’s blaster, rocketing down the corridor with the clap of explosive propellant. Shizuka was higher than the bullet, flipping her whole body over until her left foot struck the ceiling. The light fitting there came tumbling down with a flicker, while Shizuka used her momentum to drive herself down and forward, shooting toward cancer-faced de Centina like a javelin.
She struck him sword-first in the chest. The sword pierced the armor weave of de Centina’s uniform, and was followed by the full weight of Shizuka as she barreled into him, driving a vicious punch to his jaw.
De Centina went down, crashing to the floor in a heap while Shizuka leaped free of his falling body. Shizuka was on her feet in an instant, running at the other Pretor, the reanimated figure of Ruiz, whose pixie-short hair was losing its luster the longer she spent not breathing. As she ran, Shizuka set the second flash-bang she had been carrying when she entered, twisting its trigger so that it detonated the very second it left her hand.
For an instant, the whole corridor was bathed in brilliance, accompanied by a thunderous roar of noise.
Ruiz’s blaster fired again during that moment, sending a burst of fire in Shizuka’s direction as the samurai woman hurtled toward her. The bullets went wide, missing Shizuka by inches. And then Shizuka was on the dead woman, driving her katana through the dazzled Pretor’s chest just below the breastbone, pushing upward to pierce lungs and heart.
Shizuka snapped bac
k, drawing the sword from its sheath of flesh with a flourish. In its wake, Ruiz’s body—already dead but reanimated by the mad mathematics of Ereshkigal—started to divide, two halves falling away from one another and revealing a gaping chest wound.
There was no time to celebrate. Shizuka was back through the door to the incident room, calling to Cáscara, her sword catching in the sparking light of the shattered overhead.
“We need to go,” Shizuka stated breathlessly.
Cáscara pulled herself from the floor, wincing from her hip wound and rubbing at her eyes where she could still see spots. “Agreed,” she said, making her way over to the computer terminal once more.
“What are you—” Shizuka asked.
Cáscara reached for the printer that was located beside the terminal, taking the single-sheet report she had printed earlier. “All done. Let’s go,” she said, snapping up the report.
A moment later, the two women were hurrying through the ruined squad room toward the sealed door that opened onto the staircase, Cáscara moving as fast as she could with the wound in her leg. Behind them, the sounds of moving bodies—dead but somehow alive—could be heard as four dead Pretors struggled to right the damage to their bodies and give chase to the beacons of life. Shizuka was determined that they would not get the chance.
* * *
THEY REGROUPED IN the stairwell, with Shizuka, Cáscara and Brigid hurrying back to street level as fast as their wounds would let them while Kane and Grant broke the door frame so that the door could not be easily opened again from within—it would provide a meager defense.
Downstairs, the lobby remained eerily empty, just dead bodies and shed blood, all color seemingly drained from the atmosphere.
“They must have come in as Pretors,” Cáscara lamented, “known and trusted as they were, and committed a massacre before anyone realized what was happening.”
Brigid looked at her with sympathy. “There was nothing that you or your partner could have done,” she said. “If you’d been here you would have simply been caught up in it.”
