by James Axler
“Shit.” Grant spit as he turned to face the newcomers. “These things are all over.”
The lead corpse was tall, almost inhumanly so, while one of his companions was no bigger than an eight-year-old child. The third was roughly Brigid’s height, and he walked with the aid of a branch, propping it beneath one arm in the manner of a crutch.
“They must be smelling us out somehow,” Kane realized, taking in the newcomers before turning back to the weird headless figure shambling toward him from the other direction.
“Opposites attract,” Brigid pointed out. “True for magnets, maybe true, too, for the dead to the living.”
With professional exactitude, Grant and Kane formed a perimeter while Brigid pondered the code reference Kane had reminded her of moments earlier. Inspiration struck an instant later and she engaged her Commtact, calling up Cerberus. “Brewster? This is Brigid out in the field,” she began. “I need you to check something for me.”
Then, in front of Brigid’s startled eyes, the headless corpse lunged forward. Kane kicked out, his foot striking him hard in the upper chest and forcing him back several steps. The corpse-thing regained his balance and lunged again at Kane with bent, clawlike hands.
At the same time Brewster Philboyd’s steady voice came over Brigid’s Commtact receiver, its calmness at odds with the situation unfolding in front of Brigid’s eyes. “What can I help you with, Brigid?”
“See if Lakesh knows anything about the following,” Brigid stated into the hidden Commtact. “RWI077-093-d. It’s a military code, prenukecaust.”
On the other side of the road, Brigid saw, Grant was tracking the towering corpse-thing with the muzzle of his Sin Eater, watching warily he took another step toward them while Kane fended off his headless colleague. Meticulously, Grant began to fire, single rounds puncturing the rotted skull of the towering brute, tossing chunks of wizened brain matter high in the air. The thing kept on plodding toward him.
“Everything okay, Brigid?” Brewster asked over the Commtact. “You sound a little distracted.”
“Just get back to me with the information, Brewster,” Brigid replied before disengaging the Commtact and lending her own firepower to Grant’s attack on their lumbering opponents.
A moment later the creaking, eerie insect song of the bayou was joined by the loud symphony of gunfire, splitting the air for miles around.
Chapter 7
“RWI077-093-d.”
Brewster Philboyd read out the sequence of numbers from his notepad as he stood beside Lakesh, who was seated at a desk in the ops center of the Cerberus redoubt.
Sucking thoughtfully at his teeth, Lakesh shook his head. “The number means very little to me, I’m afraid,” he said in his mellifluous voice, “other than the string at the end. It’s certainly nothing to do with the mat-trans development project.”
Adjusting his black-framed spectacles, Philboyd looked up from his notepad with disappointment, realizing that the chances of finding an easy answer had evaporated with Lakesh’s statement. “And the string at the end?” he asked.
“The 93 refers to the year—1993,” Lakesh explained patiently. “And the d is an acknowledgment that whatever the project was it had been decommissioned. It was no longer active at the time this file was created.”
“I see,” Philboyd acknowledged.
“The old database would likely be able to give you a summary of the project,” Lakesh suggested.
Philboyd blushed, ashamed he had not concluded this himself. “Of course,” he muttered, making his way back to his own console. Cerberus dealt with so many esoteric and downright weird things that now and then the presence of an artifact about which they might genuinely have information seemed almost more baffling than those they had to piece together from sketchy data.
Lakesh watched as the tall man returned to his place in the double line of desks in the high-ceilinged ops room, sat and began accessing the powerful Cerberus databanks. Still under Lakesh’s scrutiny, Philboyd tabbed through a series of screens to access the legacy system on which the current Cerberus databank was built, tapping quickly at the keys as a password prompt appeared. As Philboyd continued to work, Lakesh’s clear blue eyes flicked to the clock in the top right corner of his own computer display, and he saw it had been almost two hours since they had been alerted to the initial incursion at Redoubt Mike. Two hours was a long time in military terms; two hours could both start and end a war.
Lakesh shook himself, dismissing such morose thoughts. He was tired, despite only being on shift for four hours. It seemed that, more and more, he was wearying in the most ordinary of situations. Things he had once taken for granted seemed to be taking that little bit longer, that little bit more concentration and effort.
Working the keys of his computer, Brewster Philboyd entered the relevant password codes and brought up the file on RWI077-093-d. The data was vague, and the details of the project it referred to were highly restricted. But just the basic summary invited a sense of dread as Philboyd’s eyes skimmed the page.
RWI077-093-d.
Project: Red Weed Initiative (decommissioned 1993). File ref. 077.
Subject: Airborne biochemical weapon.
Strand/Type: Bacillus-compound.
Project aim: Eradication of organic life (plant and animal) in enemy territory.
Effectiveness: Total (99.8%, lab conditions). Humans, canines, cattle, avian, insects, plants (including moss; fungus; gut flora).
Time required: Less than three hours from deployment for initial effectiveness.
Projected use: Restricted areas only. Red Weed is a highly virulent airborne weapon, able to regenerate rapidly, with a lifespan of (+/-) 12 hours.
Usage: Laboratory conditions only. Field test unattainable.
Computer model: Yes. Conclusion: Highly effective.
Restriction: Not for use on domestic soil under any circumstances.
Exception(s): Def Con One by Presidential release.
Brewster Philboyd stopped reading, his heart pounding and his throat suddenly dry. RWI077-093-d, or the Red Weed Initiative, involved a weapon designed to eradicate all forms of life in the space of just a few hours. While it could exist out of the test tube for a maximum of twelve hours, that did not matter; according to these notes, the weapon was so effective it didn’t need any more time to utterly eradicate anything it encountered. This thing had been tested in the lab—Philboyd paused at the line that suggested it would be effective on humans, wondering how they had tested this—but never used in an external area. No wonder it had been decommissioned, since a biological weapon this vicious could, unchecked, destroy the world in a matter of days.
He peered again at the screen, taking in the details a second time. The words “Bacillus compound” nagged at him and he turned to Cerberus physician Reba DeFore where she worked at a terminal close to the main doors of the room.
“Reba?” Philboyd asked.
The physician peered at him, her brown eyes twinkling in the harsh lighting of the ops center. She was a stocky woman with long, ash-blond hair that trailed halfway down her back. Today, DeFore had tied her hair back in an elaborate French braid, with twin corkscrews of hair trailing down beside her ears.
“Do you happen to know what a bacillus compound might refer to?” Philboyd asked.
DeFore nodded. “Bacillus is the basic bacterial component of anthrax,” she said. “Potentially lethal to humans and animals.”
Thanking the physician, Philboyd turned back to his monitor and read the details over once again, his eyes gradually losing focus as he realized the enormity of the data there. File RWI077-093-d was a modified version of anthrax, ramped up to destroy everything it came into contact with. Coming as he did from the era that had been all but destroyed by nuclear war, the word everything held a terrible resonance for the twentieth-century astrophysicist.
Pulling himself out of his lament, Philboyd stabbed at the call button on his desk and placed a headset over his ear, pre
paring to alert Brigid Baptiste to his horrifying discovery. As he did so, he became conscious that Lakesh was standing behind him, and he flipped over to speaker phone so the Cerberus leader could hear Brigid’s responses.
“Your file number is for something called the Red Weed Initiative, a lethal airborne cocktail that can literally kill anything in its path, plant or animal,” Philboyd explained.
“Sounds just dandy,” Brigid replied. She seemed a little out of breath and her words were labored.
“Once unleashed, this thing works like anthrax,” Philboyd continued, “only about a hundred times more thorough.”
“Is that an accurate estimate,” Brigid queried, “or just a figure of speech?”
Despite himself, Philboyd smiled. “Believe me, if you’re in the way of this thing once it’s unleashed, it won’t matter. Red Weed’s efficiency was over ninety-nine percent under lab conditions.”
“What about in—uh—the field?” Brigid asked after a pause. It was clear her attention was being called elsewhere.
Philboyd and Lakesh looked at one another, wondering at their colleague’s struggle, and Philboyd asked what was going on.
“Just a little local trouble,” Brigid explained tersely. “Keep going.”
“Red Weed requires a catalyst compound to become active. It was never tested in the field,” Philboyd elaborated. “Looks like the project was decommissioned before that ever came about.”
“So it’s untested,” Brigid confirmed.
Lakesh leaned close to the communications array at Philboyd’s desk. “I wouldn’t rely on that as any kind of saving grace, Brigid, dear,” he said, his eyes scanning the file still illuminated on Philboyd’s monitor screen. “Work on the presumption that if you do get in the path of this thing when it’s unleashed, you’ll die.”
“Avoid dying,” Brigid acknowledged. “Good plan. Gotta go.”
Abruptly the communication ended, leaving Philboyd and Lakesh staring at the speakers like faithful hounds waiting for the return of their master.
“Why do you think it was decommissioned?” Philboyd asked after a half minute, his voice seeming too loud as it broke the silence between the two scientists.
“Conscience,” Lakesh said with a teasing smile, turning from Philboyd’s desk and striding across the room to the exit doors beneath the Mercator map.
Philboyd called after him as Lakesh reached for the doors. “Do you really believe that, Lakesh?”
“Given what you yourself know of the military mind,” Lakesh said, “what do you think?”
With those enigmatic words, Lakesh exited through the doors and disappeared into the corridor beyond the ops center.
Feeling alone, despite the numerous personnel busy at their own desks with their own projects, Brewster Philboyd shook his head. There were occasions, without doubt, where Lakesh could prove insufferable.
OUTSIDE THE BUSTLING ops room, Lakesh found himself in a huge corridor that served as the central artery for the Cerberus redoubt. He glanced toward the heavy, rollback exit doors at the end of the corridor. It felt cold out here, after the heat of the busy ops room, and Lakesh reached his hands around himself and rubbed at his upper arms for a moment, feeling the chill through the white jumpsuit he wore while on duty.
The corridor had been bored into the rock of the mountain itself. Lakesh had visited many redoubts during what he thought of as his first life, over two hundred years before, and while they were each unique in certain respects they seemed uniform in their brutality, the ruthless efficiency with which they had been constructed from whatever materials existed in a given location. Despite its familiarity, Cerberus could seem a harsh environment, an unforgiving place to spend one’s time, all hard surfaces and heavy doors.
Entering the personnel elevator, Lakesh was soon on the floor that contained his own apartment, the one he shared with wild child Domi. Though many years younger than him—even in the relative terms that ignored Lakesh’s cryogenically compounded age—Domi was Lakesh’s lover and the most cherished friend he had in this strange new world.
As Brewster Philboyd had been running through the horrors of this Red Weed Initiative and everything that it might entail, but Lakesh had been struck by how much he needed a break from the ops room. He had not even spoken to Donald Bry, his second-in-command, to inform his lieutenant to take over the supervision of the ops center, he noted with surprise. Lakesh sighed, shaking his head—he would comm Bry from his apartment rooms in a moment, explain the situation. He needed familiar surroundings but not those of the bustling, harshly lit ops room.
There’s something going on with me, Lakesh told himself. Something terribly familiar and terribly wrong. I’m getting old again.
Though ancient, Lakesh had had a degree of his youth restored by the Enlil, the Annunaki lord, while in his guise of Sam the Imperator. Over recent months, Lakesh had begun to suspect that that blessing had in fact been a curse. He feared that he was beginning to age once more, and at a far more rapid pace than was normal. Now, it seemed, he was becoming more and more tired, dogged by a bone-weariness that threatened to overwhelm him with no warning, coming upon him with the speed of a storm.
“I should talk to Reba,” Lakesh muttered, saying it out loud as if that might make him acknowledge what he knew already deep down. Reba DeFore was the Cerberus physician and she would be more than happy to give him a once-over, Lakesh knew, and yet he had walked out the ops center, past her desk, ignoring her. Now, he remained here, lurking outside his own apartment, frightened somehow of facing this dark shadow that threatened to overwhelm him.
His chest felt tight as Lakesh pushed at the door and entered his private quarters, smelling something burning even as he stepped through the door.
His feet hurried across the carpeted floor, head turning left and right as he searched for the source of the smell. There, in the walk-in kitchen area, something was burning beneath the overhead broiler. Lakesh took two long strides that brought him to the small oven, switching off the broiler as smoke billowed from the bread that had been left there to toast. The bread was charcoal-black.
“Domi?” Lakesh asked, raising his voice but careful to keep the edge out of it. Removing the burned bread from the grill, Lakesh turned and paced through the little, self-contained apartment unit.
Domi was sitting on the floor of the bedroom, naked and staring into space. She was a curious sight. An albino by birth, her skin was alabaster-white and her hair the color of bone, cut short in a pixie style that framed her sharp, angular features. At barely five feet tall, Domi’s small frame was like that of a child, her bird-thin limbs and tiny, pert breasts more like those of an adolescent girl going through the first flush of puberty. Strangest of all, however, were Domi’s staring eyes—colored bloodred, they made her look like something eerily satanic, a demon from some terrible hell.
Domi was a true child of the Outlands, her manner and fierce temper the legacy of an upbringing where survival was a daily challenge, and where one lived by one’s instincts alone. Domi had been with Cerberus since its early days, though her adoration of Lakesh had developed much later. While a trusted member of the team, Domi remained something of a loose cannon, her actions unpredictable, her morality far more malleable than that of Kane, Grant or the others.
Right now, Domi was sat cross-legged, staring at the floor, her eyes unfocused. Lakesh took a step closer, wondering what the remarkable girl had seen or sensed. Domi relied on her instincts in a way few could truly comprehend, and Lakesh had known those infallible instincts to save his life on more than one occasion. Tentatively he spoke her name again, this time pitching his voice a little above a whisper so as not to disturb her.
“Domi? Dearest one? What are you doing?”
“Hmm,” Domi responded, her murmur noncommittal.
“Dearest,” Lakesh tried again. “Is there trouble?”
For a moment Lakesh suspected Domi wouldn’t answer, but then she turned her head and, as if seeing
him for the first time, smiled, her white teeth dulled to cream by the proximity of her chalk-white skin. “I cannot get it to work,” she said.
Confused, Lakesh watched as Domi jumped up from her sitting position, brushed off her rump with a slap and paced over to kiss him.
“Dearest one,” Lakesh said, holding her at arm’s length and looking at her strange, statuelike features with utter bewilderment, “I have no idea what it is that you are talking about.”
“The rug,” Domi said, using the big toe of her bare right foot to point to the carpet that lay across the floor of the bedroom to the side of the bed. “Brigid’s rug. I cannot get it to work.”
The rug was one of the strangest and most esoteric items that the Cerberus team had encountered in their recent adventures. Although it was found in a disused Soviet military installation in Russia, the rug itself was Persian and ran to almost eight feet in length. Threaded with vibrant colors, its design showed a series of expanding golden circles and squares that originated from its center. The gold design rested on a cerulean background, colored like a cloudless sky, and the intricate design was decorated with similar repetitions all over its surface, each finished in green or red amid the blue-and-gold body. The design was called a mandala, a device used to facilitate meditation. In memorizing every complicated detail, it was said that a person might transcend the physical plane and achieve a certain spiritual dimension, reaching deep within to attain a higher level of human consciousness. The remarkable design had proved to be the gateway to a hidden area of the human mindscape dubbed Krylograd, but only Brigid Baptiste’s phenomenal eidetic memory had been sufficient to memorize the exceptional design with the necessary speed to allow access to this dimension. What happened in Krylograd had been the catalyst for a whole series of problems for the Cerberus team, including an assassination attempt on Lakesh. The Cerberus rebels had decided the best thing to do with the rug was to store it in the redoubt, where it could do no further harm.
