Hell's Maw

by James Axler

  “I know,” Cáscara said, nodding. “So much death, it’s just hard to process.”

  Brigid agreed. She had seen a lot of death—too much, wherever the Cerberus warriors were called. This time they appeared to have lost a city.

  Kane and Grant joined the women in the lobby, confirming that they had sealed the level. It was a temporary measure, Kane lamented, but so much of what they did where the Annunaki was concerned had proven to be just that.

  “I think this thing, this Ereshkigal, came from the southwest,” Cáscara said, “beyond the city.”

  “Any reason you think that?” Grant asked.

  “I think she infiltrated through the south gate,” Cáscara said. “I checked where the people in the squad room were posted. A patrol disappeared out there this morning. I suspect that it’s all connected.” She showed the others the map she had printed out, which showed the route of the Casillas patrol.

  “So we follow the route?” Grant asked.

  “And see what we find,” Brigid said, nodding. “It makes sense.” She turned away and fired up her Commtact, and a moment later she was requesting Cerberus headquarters provide some satellite surveillance of the route in question.

  Kane looked over the map. “Looks like a whole lot of nothing to me,” he said. “How do you propose we get out there?”

  “Sandcat maybe,” Cáscara said. Then she cursed, realization dawning. “The keys are up there, in the squad room.”

  “Your Wheelfox is still outside,” Grant reminded her. “Keys are still in it, I guess.”

  Cáscara looked uncertain. For one thing, the vehicle had been badly damaged in its would-be death plunge. For another, her dead partner was still sitting in the driver’s seat. Pros and cons, then. Something clicked into place in her mind and she nodded. “We’re out of options,” she said. “Let’s go see whether she’ll still run.”

  Chapter 31

  Back at Cerberus headquarters, Donald Bry worked the satellite surveillance software, following Brigid’s instructions. He set the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite to sweep the area to the south and west of Zaragoza, searching for anything out of the ordinary. It did not take long to find a likely target.

  * * *

  THE CERBERUS TEAM, Shizuka and Cáscara were inside the Wheelfox, bashed, battered and generally the worse for wear but still operational even after its drop from the high levels of the multistory parking garage. The vehicle had started on the first try, and now Cáscara was working the pedals, navigating her way through the dead streets of Zaragoza, her eyes fixed on the road through a gap in the cracked windshield. The chimes of the church bells had stopped, and the streets seemed too empty now, the husk of something that had once nurtured life.

  The dead body of Cáscara’s partner, Juan Corcel, had been sat up in one of the rear seats. Cáscara had refused to leave him behind; she said that the man deserved a proper burial.

  Kane was up front with Cáscara as Donald Bry’s message came through.

  “I’ve found something approximately twenty-five miles south of the city walls,” Bry stated. “Looks like a stream, but it’s not marked on any maps. Furthermore, the stream is a rust color.”

  “Rust?” Kane questioned.

  “Like…red,” Bry elaborated. “The stream leads to a—well, I’m not sure what to call it—looks sort of like a flower, only it’s big.”

  “How big, Donald?”

  “Sense of scale is difficult to judge where it’s surrounded by scrub,” Bry admitted, “but it looks to be as big as a building.”

  “But you said it’s a flower?”

  “That’s right, Kane,” Bry confirmed. “At least, I think it is.”

  “That’s one big-ass flower,” Grant rumbled; he, too, shared the open frequency.

  Cáscara passed through the south gate, still open from where Ereshkigal had entered with her demented retainers, before speeding out of the city. Beyond, the great dusty plains of northern Spain stretched in a gradually undulating landscape. “Your people find something?” she asked, glancing across to Kane where he sat beside her.

  “Sounds like it,” Kane said. “Bry, you want to give us some coordinates on this thing?”

  * * *

  AT HIS POST in the Cerberus ops room, Donald Bry brought up the telemetry for Kane’s transponder and expanded the map on his screen until he could place him in relation to the flowerlike structure. “Keep heading south, follow the road you’re on for two miles, then cut right at the pass. I’ll guide you in.”

  * * *

  KANE SHARED THE info with Cáscara as she navigated the slick ribbon of road.

  “Do you have any idea what’s waiting out there?” she asked.

  “Trouble,” Kane told her. “Trust me, it always is.”

  * * *

  THE ROADS WERE EMPTY. Here and there, the dented Wheelfox passed a parked wag or a line of scrappy tents, but for the most part it was wasteland out here, the same way it had been for the past two hundred years since the radiation had leaked across the continent.

  Donald Bry gave directions, following the Cerberus field team’s progress in real time via satellite and biolink transponder. When they neared the mysterious flower, he instructed them to go off-road so that they could reach it. “That’s all the assistance I can give you, guys,” he said apologetically, “but I’ll keep monitoring the situation, and if there’s anything you need from me, let me know.”

  The Wheelfox bumped off-road and over the dusty terrain. The earth was a kind of washed-out golden color here, with scrubby lines of tenacious grass sprouting in scattered clumps across the landscape.

  The Wheelfox bumped over a ridge and suddenly the colossal flower came into view. It stood poised silently amid the wastes, a narrow stream of red blood washing toward it. The stream was no wider than a man’s spread legs, and along its edges a line of stakes had been forced into the ground, upon which hung the limp forms of people—some of them Pretors—their exquisitely cut bodies dripping blood into the stream to fill it. The flower’s black petals folded together like a crocus, blue veins running up the center of each sloping petal and highlighting their rims. Each petal was as large as a house.

  “What the hell is that?” Grant asked as the flower loomed before them, framed in the rectangle of the windshield.

  “Organic technology,” Brigid said, “an Annunaki specialty.”

  “I think we could have found this without the satellite,” Kane muttered.

  Cáscara eased off the accelerator, slowing the Wheelfox and causing dirt to shift noisily beneath its drive wheel. “They’ve grown a flower to live in?” she asked, incredulous.

  “The Annunaki pull a lot of incredible shit,” Kane told her wearily.

  Brigid elaborated, “They’re masters of combining mechanical principles with a self-expanding system.”

  As they proceeded forward, something metal glinted in the sunlight to one side of the giant flower structure. The Wheelfox pulled to a halt with a whine of brakes as Cáscara recognized what it was. It was a Sandcat, marked in Pretor colors with the Zaragoza city shield on the side. The vehicle was empty, partially buried in the sand with its doors open. It would not have been left like that, Cáscara knew, unless something urgent had called its occupants away. Her heart sank at the thought—it was the missing patrol, Casillas and his team. Dead then, evidently.

  “What now?” Cáscara asked. She was clearly struggling to process what she had seen and learned in the past thirty seconds.

  Before anyone could answer, Ereshkigal appeared on the far rise, leading a group of at least thirty people, many of whom looked ragged and were scarred with dirt and blood. They followed the line of the artificial stream, and the people in the Wheelfox watched in horror as people willingly planted themselves on those upthrust stakes, pushing the old blood-letters aside and forcing the points into their bodies, cutting themselves so that they could add their blood to the river.

  With her two assistants beside her,
Ereshkigal disappeared into the flower, a dozen people in her mental thrall following while the rest assumed their places on the blood river.

  “Time to finish this,” Grant said. No one in the vehicle objected.

  * * *

  KANE, GRANT AND Shizuka exited the Wheelfox together and made their way toward the sprawling structure down the slope. Brigid and Cáscara waited behind, both of them suffering from the wounds they had received and concerned that they might prove a burden.

  “I’ll stay in touch with Baptiste,” Kane assured them both, “let you know what’s in there.”

  A flat plain of dirt led up to the flower itself, a tunnel-like entryway visible where two of the mammoth leaves met.

  Kane paced ahead, his reloaded Sin Eater ready in his hand while Grant and Shizuka followed, he with his Sin Eater, she with her katana sword held tightly in her right hand. Kane stopped before the entrance, peering into the darkness and listening intently, trusting his fabled pointman sense. He could hear uncertain noises like singing, voices droning together in a slow dirge like a funeral hymn. There was a smell emanating from within the tunnel like decomposing mulch. But nothing else, no hint of guards or any other threat.

  Before he entered, Kane glanced back at his companions and smiled grimly, running his index finger along the side of his nose in the one-percent salute. The salute was a superstition shared by Kane and Grant and dating back to their days as Magistrates in Cobaltville. It referred to the fact that no matter how much they might try to make a situation safe, there was always that one percent margin of error, where the unknown might come to surprise them. It reminded both men to stay on their guard.

  The entry was wide enough for two men and led into a tall, narrow tunnel with sloping sides that reached up toward an arch-like apex. Kane walked warily ahead, his blaster held ready. It was dark within, the walls lit by veins that glowed red. Kane described it in a whisper over the Commtacts, and Brigid proposed that it might be a type of luminescent lichen. It reminded Kane of something else, however—a period barely a year before when the Cerberus redoubt had been remodeled by an enemy who could control stone. The familiar walls of the redoubt had been charged with volcanic lava, casting the once-secure base in a hellish red hue. Disdainfully, Kane pushed the memory aside, the funereal dirge echoing faintly from up ahead, voices of men and women groaning out the unclear words.

  Grant and Shizuka entered after Kane, moving slowly, their weapons ready.

  The tunnel stretched twenty feet before opening out into a grand chamber, the light of a pool reflecting in silver flickers across the veined ceiling at the tunnel’s end. Kane stopped at the mouth of the tunnel and peered out, seeing Ereshkigal’s lair for the first time.

  A line of steps wound ten feet down into a vast, cavern-like chamber dominated by a pool of blood. Twisted pillars held the petal roof upright, colored the dark blue of the evening sky, knotted and gnarled like tree trunks. Figures were placing themselves beside those pillars, kneeling in supplication before their mistress. The singing was louder here, forming a bed of sound to the cavernous chamber. The singing came from the kneeling figures by the pillars, Kane saw. Their eyes were screwed tightly closed while their voices were raised in what sounded like wails of pain, strangely musical as the voices blurred in harmony, agony and ecstasy, two sides of the same coin.

  In the center of the room, Ereshkigal had her back to Kane as she strode into the pool of blood, feet and ankles already disappeared beneath the surface as she entered via a hidden ramp or steps. Her tail of feathers ruffled behind her in the breeze, and several fluttered away even as Kane watched. There was a whole trail of bloody feathers dotted across the floor already, like strange markers.

  Kane stepped out into the cavern, leading with his right foot and bringing the pistol poised out before him. As he stepped onto the first of the springy, leafy steps, something struck him from behind, and suddenly Kane found himself falling, tumbling end over end down the steps.

  He rolled as he reached the bottom, bringing the Sin Eater up as something leaped from the topmost stair. It was a man, dark-skinned and bare-chested—one of Ereshkigal’s Terror Priests. But there was something else about him—his torso seemed freakishly long, his limbs stretching impossibly out at his sides like the wings of some dreaded bird of prey.

  The man was throwing something. Kane saw it flash in the air even as he rolled.

  Kane fired.

  A razor-edged disc, three inches in diameter, sliced through the remaining sleeve of Kane’s jacket, tugging at the shadow suit beneath before embedding in the floor.

  The man landed on top of Kane feetfirst, dropping his arms back to ensure he struck with the force of a missile. Kane grunted, the breath going out of him as he tried to absorb the blow. He fired again, uncertain whether his first bullet had hit or not.

  The second bullet skimmed across the man’s torso, burning a line across his developed right pectoral before disappearing into the darkness.

  Grant was at the top of the steps now, and he lined up his pistol, waiting for a shot. “Come on, Kane,” he muttered, “get clear.”

  One of the Terror Priest’s arms came sweeping down in a wide arc toward Kane, momentum driving the punch as he delivered a blow across Kane’s jaw. There was something in that hand, another metal disc, held between middle fingers and grazing Kane’s jaw as it struck. A line of blood spewed from the cut as Kane sank backward, splashing into the blood pool where Ereshkigal bathed ten feet away.

  Kane groaned, then kicked out, shifting his weight beneath the assailant who was poised astride him. His attacker was thrown back, stumbling into the steps that led down into this cavern, the razor disc sailing from his hand with a clang.

  On the topmost step, Grant fired, delivering a single 9 mm slug into the stumbling figure’s head. The man crumpled to the floor in an instant.

  Across the room, the entrancing figure of Ereshkigal was standing within the pool, her head and torso revealed as the blood lapped at her slender hips. There was a smile on her face as she fixed Kane with her stare. Her lips moved and she began to speak the words of the chant designed to deliver the equation to the human body—the equation that could kill a man. Around her, the tempo of the funereal dirge seemed to rise.

  “Círculo alrededor del cuerpo,” she began, “Guarda silencio a moverse más…”

  Chapter 32

  Nippur, Mesopotamia

  Circa forty-fifth century BC

  Nergal was a respected apothecary of the Annunaki. His work had moved into the realms of investigative medicine and he had begun to develop a strand of chemical devices which might be used to either treat or kill the apekin. Enlil had charged him to develop something that might replicate the effects of a pandemic, the kind of plague that could wipe out a whole race. Nergal had extrapolated the data from a number of earthbound diseases, including ones that only affected the settler Annunaki. Thus, he had been annoyed when a messenger from Enlil’s palace had arrived at his workplace with an invitation to attend a royal banquet one day before trial.

  “Damn Enlil and his paranoias,” Nergal hissed, shoving past the Igigu messenger who had recited the invitation. Nergal was an Annunaki of tall stature, thin and skeletal with scales that shimmered between dark red and jet black, a spiny back-slanting crest of red atop his head. The skin of his face was stretched drum-tight over strong, high cheekbones and thick brows, lending to his skeletal appearance. His fierce eyes shone like drops of burnished brass, vertical slits bisecting them. His workplace was clinically clean and he employed six Igigi retainers to probe and test various subjects under his guidance, supported by over fifty of the local humans. The Igigi employees looked up at Nergal’s outburst, then swiftly back to their work when they saw the fury in his red-gold eyes. “Always checking up, always suspicious of whom one associates with.”

  The Igigu messenger who had brought the invitation, a squat, lizard-like humanoid with lusterless green scales and a paunch, bowed his head resp
ectfully. “Am I to convey that as your good sir’s response, my lord?” he asked.

  Nergal glared at the messenger, suspecting he was being mocked. The Igigi had become all too independent of late; perhaps it was time to cull their number in a show that reminded them that while they may be demigods to the local apekin they were nothing but slaves to the Annunaki.

  “No,” Nergal growled. “Please tell Lord Enlil that I am honored and overjoyed that he has seen fit to invite me, and that I shall be only too pleased to attend.”

  “So, that’s a yes,” the Igigu messenger said, glancing up and hiding his smirk—though not quite quickly enough that Nergal did not suspect what he had seen.

  Nergal’s work would have to wait temporarily while he prepared for this pointless exercise in massaging Enlil’s ego. Perhaps as his next project he would work on a disease to afflict the Igigi.

  * * *

  ENLIL’S PALACE WAS draped in swathes of fine cloth and its floors were scattered with rose petals on the day of the banquet. All of the great Annunaki lords attended—Marduk, Zu, the Lady Lilitu, and many others. Nergal cursed having to attend this pointless waste of time, for his research was at a critical stage. But something occurred to him as he scanned the group of attending lords and ladies—Ereshkigal had not been invited.

  Nergal raised the point with one of the Igigi retainers and was pointed to a young Annunaki called Namtar, whose scales were a bronze-brown hue. “Ereshkigal was too immersed in her work to attend,” the retainer explained, “and so she sent her vizier in her place.”

  Nergal was horrified. “Her vizier?” Namtar looked to be about fourteen, still a child. He knew Namtar by hearsay only; rumor around the royal court was that he was one of Enlil’s progeny, no doubt that was why Enlil had allowed the child to take the place of his mistress. After all, Enlil would trust his own offspring—wouldn’t he? Perhaps, thought Nergal, it is time to remind Enlil of the powers I wield, though they be not kingdoms or armies.