by James Axler
“Too close,” Brigid muttered as she breathed a sigh of relief.
WITHIN THE SHELTER of the military redoubt doorway, Kane tussled with the animated corpse he had tagged as Eye Patch. The moving corpse-thing lunged forward, knocking Kane’s Sin Eater aside even as Kane snapped off another shot. The undead man was fast, whatever else, and Kane assessed his fighting style even as the brutish zombie drove his knee at Kane’s groin. Kane turned, blocking the move with the side of his leg, and jabbed out with a swift ram’s-head punch at the undead man’s jaw. The zombie’s head snapped backward with the force of Kane’s punch, but it didn’t seem to slow him in the slightest. Already, Eye Patch was powering forward and he head-butted Kane in the face. The ex-Mag’s nose showered red across his face as something inside burst.
Kane snapped off another punch at the zombie with his right fist, rattling off a burst of bullets as the blow struck him across the rotted remains of his face. As the corpse-thing staggered back, Kane took a breath, wiping at the blood that had splashed from his nose.
His opponent was a fighter, Kane realized. Not necessarily schooled, but without doubt able to hold his own, even against a trained Magistrate. If he had still been alive, Kane knew he would have been an almost impossible challenge to stop, more like an elemental force than a man at all. As it was, even dead the man seemed absolutely determined and incredibly powerful.
Head down, the undead man charged at Kane, his booted feet kicking up dirt as he raced across the gap between them in the shadows of the redoubt doorway. Kane timed his next move carefully, sinking to the ground at the exact moment that the one-eyed zombie would have struck him, and kicking out with both legs, propped by his arms. Kane’s feet struck the undead man as he raced on past where the ex-Mag had been a fraction of a second earlier, and suddenly the corpse-thing was rolling over himself, arms flailing.
Still crouching, Kane turned, snapping off two quick shots before the undead man had ceased rolling, clipping his foe in the hip joint and gut. The zombie struggled for a moment before righting himself and standing on unsteady legs. Then he lowered his head, and Kane knew he meant to charge again.
From his crouch, Kane stilled his mind and targeted the zombie’s right knee as he ran forward, pumping off a burst of fire from his Sin Eater. The bullets met their mark, and the onrushing zombie’s knee popped in a explosion of cartilage and desiccated gristle. Kane rolled away as the zombie toppled over himself, crashing to the unforgiving tarmac of the redoubt’s sheltered road.
OUTSIDE THE ENTRANCE, Brigid scrambled through the fallen branches, outrunning her foe as the zombie recovered. Brigid called to Grant as she rushed toward him, her arms pumping at her sides.
“Grant, I need an assist!”
Grant was still standing over the fallen body of his own adversary and he turned at the sound of his name to see Brigid sprinting toward him in a limping manner, the pant leg torn below her left knee. A moment later a tall, shambling, undead thing crashed out of the undergrowth behind his partner, Brigid’s metal bar clutched in its hands. Momentarily, the undead woman used the bar as a walking stick, pushing herself upright. Then she began to march after Brigid, her long-legged strides eating up the distance between them.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Grant leveled his Sin Eater at the undead woman and began blasting off a steady stream of fire, spraying her rotting body with bullets as he ran at her. The undead woman ran on against the barrage, even as Brigid turned and added her own fire.
Then Grant’s gun clicked on empty, and the ex-Mag just smiled. The undead woman was running at him, pulling back the metal bar to take a swing at him now. The bar cut the air as it raced toward Grant’s head, and his hand snapped out and grabbed it, stopping it in the same way the woman had when she had taken it from Brigid. For a moment the two fighters faced one another, alive and dead, both clutching the metal bar.
Then, with a twist of his wrist, Grant snagged the bar, wrong-footing the zombie woman in the process, making her sink to one knee. Taking a swift pace forward, Grant kicked out, booting the woman full in her ruined face. Her neck snapped back and she sagged to the ground, letting go of her grip on the bar.
Brigid rushed over, helping Grant dispatch the loathsome animated corpse as she struggled her last, finally giving up the fight once her head had been wrenched from her spinal column.
“I hate this,” Brigid admitted.
“It’s dirty work,” Grant lamented. “Just have to get on with it. How’s our timing?”
“Fifty minutes,” Brigid said as she checked her chron. “There’s still time.”
Once they were done, Grant and Brigid turned to see Kane standing over his own foe, who sagged as he knelt on the road leading into the redoubt. Kane had his gun at the undead man’s head.
“Whatever you were,” the ex-Mag snarled, “you ain’t nothing but history now.”
A moment later the undead man’s head exploded like a ripe melon as Kane blasted a stream of bullets through his skull until his weapon clicked on empty.
Wiping at his bloodied nose, Kane looked up at his partners. “Tough bastard, but I don’t think he’ll bother us again.”
Both Grant and Brigid nodded in agreement as they stepped over the fallen corpse of the undead man, his skull shattered and spewing thick brown drool across the entrance to the redoubt. A moment later Papa Hurbon reappeared from his hiding place at the edge of the swamp road and wheeled himself along to join them, the black rag body of the Ezili Coeur Noir doll lying in his lap.
It was time to put an end to this madness.
Chapter 22
One thousand miles away in distant Montana, Mohandas Lakesh Singh and his team cheered as they watched their teammates enter the redoubt via the live satellite feed projected on the main screen.
“Excellent news,” Lakesh said, smiling broadly. Even though it wasn’t over yet, Lakesh found he had the strangest urge to hug someone or to pat them on the back. Thus, he turned to look around for someone with whom to celebrate and the first person he saw was Reba DeFore—and while the stocky physician wouldn’t object to a hug, Lakesh could see she had a far weightier issue on her mind. “Reba?” he encouraged.
“We’ve been unable to find a way to counteract the virus, I’m afraid,” she said, but Lakesh saw the trace of a smile appearing on her lips.
“Do go on,” the Cerberus director said encouragingly.
“Well, I think I’ve figured out what to do with the Red Weed,” DeFore explained, unable to hide her smile now.
At one of the nearby desks, copper-haired Donald Bry was giving instructions to begin the security shutdown on the reactor, and Brewster Philboyd related the timing to Brigid over the Commtact link.
Lakesh touched DeFore’s arm gently, guiding her to a quieter section of the operations room. “That sounds like remarkable news, Reba,” he said. “What do you have?”
“We’ve concluded that the thing Kane saw being mixed wasn’t the Red Weed itself,” she said. “It was the catalyst. It needs to be mixed with the virus to make it go live—without it the Red Weed remains inactive.”
“That’s correct,” Lakesh confirmed. “But the only way to halt that process is to keep the catalyst away from the batch of Red Weed stored in the redoubt.”
“No, it isn’t,” DeFore explained. “We can do an old homeopathy trick. The Red Weed is stored in the lowest level of Redoubt Mike, waiting for the catalyst compound to charge it. But if we effectively flood the room that it’s in, the catalyst will become so watered down by the time it makes contact that it will be useless.”
Lakesh raised his eyebrows as he looked at the physician. “That could work,” he agreed. “Rather than block the catalyst, we’d effectively ruin the batch of the Red Weed itself. That’s certainly thinking outside the box. We’ve all been tackling this as something to halt, not to dilute!
“However,” Lakesh continued thoughtfully, “while the facility is underground and located in swampland, there’s n
o way Kane’s team could get sufficient water to the site, not in the time they have left now. I fear that the ingenious solution you’ve proposed is impossible.”
“No, it’s not,” DeFore said. “We’ve already tapped into the security system for the reactor. If we send a false report that there’s a fire in the lower levels, wouldn’t it set off the sprinklers?”
Lakesh nodded thoughtfully. “They’ve been unused for two centuries,” he said, “so there’s a risk that the system has been drained or simply run dry, you realize?”
DeFore looked chastened.
“All we can do is try,” Lakesh told her, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “And hope.”
“Why?” she asked. “What will happen?”
“The Red Weed is stored on the lowest basement level,” Lakesh said, “which is the same place as the mat-trans and the reactor core. They’re going to be trudging through water before this is over.”
A moment later Lakesh was talking with the field team over the Commtact once again.
AS THE COMPANIONS trekked along the silent underground passage leading to the vehicle elevator, their Commtacts came to life once more. It was Lakesh, and he sounded jubilant.
“Well done getting to the doors,” Lakesh began. “We may have come up with a solution to the Red Weed problem.”
“We’re all ears,” Brigid assured him over the Commtact.
“We’re going to use the sprinkler system to flood the redoubt, including the lowest level where the inactive Red Weed is stored,” Lakesh explained. “This should have the effect of diluting the catalyst if it’s added—a roundabout but perfectly serviceable solution to our problem.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming on,” Brigid said as another of the shambling undead men came toward the group from out of the shadows of the tunnel. Grant and Kane peeled off ahead, their reloaded Sin Eaters blazing as they dealt with the new threat.
Over the Commtact, Brigid heard Lakesh sigh. “Assuming the sprinkler system still has water in it,” he said, “then we’ll be flooding the facility, specifically the level with the mat-trans and the reactor.”
“How deep?” Brigid asked, the practicality of the scenario dawning on her.
“Maybe a foot,” Lakesh mused. “Not terrible but—”
“Getting Ezili Coeur Noir to the reactor in that environment is going to be like wrestling a bear in quicksand,” Brigid concluded. “Plus, we have a wheelchair user with us. Hurbon here won’t be able to manage that terrain.”
Up ahead in the tunnel, Brigid saw Grant punch the skull of the rotted undead figure, blasting with his Sin Eater again and again as each blow made contact. Realizing that his partner had this one in hand, Kane had trudged on ahead, checking the dark tunnel for more of the soulless stragglers.
Brigid turned her attention back to her discussion with Cerberus. “Flip on the sprinklers,” she commanded Lakesh. “I guess we’ll figure something out when we get there.”
Beside Brigid, Papa Hurbon continued fiddling with the dark rag doll that represented Ezili Coeur Noir, providing their only defence against her terrible atrophying powers. He was wrapping the doll tautly in black ribbon.
Shortly thereafter, the group stepped into the elevator at the end of the access tunnel and waited as it began its shuddering descent into the redoubt.
“Time to face the music,” Kane said.
“Let’s just hope it’s not a funeral march,” Brigid added.
IN THE CERBERUS operations center, Donald Bry prepared to give the order to engage the sprinkler system for the distant redoubt. He had rapidly programmed in a computer sequence that would alert the automated fire safety system to a false fire within the redoubt’s walls.
He turned to Lakesh, who stood a pace behind him, anxiously watching the code flash across the computer screen. “If we lock this to one location it will shut down in three minutes,” Bry realized. “The system will detect no heat or smoke and so presume the fire’s out. What can we do?”
Lakesh pondered for just a second. “Tell the security system that the whole redoubt is on fire,” he decided. “Flood the whole facility.”
Bry nodded as he ran the coded sequence and sent the order.
Behind them, at the entry to the ops room, Edwards had returned to his post. But he was not alone.
FAR BENEATH THE SURFACE, Ezili Coeur Noir stood behind the glass-walled laboratory of Redoubt Mike, watching the timer on the centrifuge that was mixing the catalyst for the Red Weed. As her undead servants shambled around, adding the final items to the mixture, the glowing green figures there showed she had eighteen minutes before it was completed.
She smiled then, a death’s-head grin in her deteriorating face. By the humans’ projections, the Red Weed would spread in the space of a single night. By dawn’s first light, humanity would be doomed. It pleased the part of Ezili Coeur Noir that was still Annunaki—that was still Lilitu—to think that the humans would be responsible for their own destruction. It seemed just after the problems the apekin had caused her.
As the timer ticked down to seventeen minutes, water began spraying from above the queen of all things dead, drenching her and the equipment all around. Ezili Coeur Noir peered up above her, grimaced as she saw the sprinklers coming to life across not just the laboratory but the whole hangar area that contained it. Indeed, the sprinklers had been set off across every level of the redoubt, a pouring stream of water jetting from the pipes that webbed the complex.
Ezili Coeur Noir tracked the path of the sprinkler pipe far above, seeing how it came down the wall there. She reached across to the wall and placed her hand against the pipe. She would stop this artificial rain, she reasoned, through the simple expedient of breaking that pipe. Her hand clutched the old metal that ran down the wall and her grip closed even as the eerie taint of death took hold and caused the gray paint coating to peel from its surface. In a moment, the pipe had burst beneath her powerful grip.
But instead of halting the flow, the pipe’s destruction did the opposite; it opened it up so that water could shoot across the room, spraying the lab like a hose.
Angrily, Ezili Coeur Noir stepped away, even as the floor of the lab began to glisten with an expanding puddle of spilled water. As she strode from the lab, her undead servants continued to work at their task, oblivious to the watery assault that drenched them. But something struck her then, not physically but as if from within. It felt like a bubble expanding in her black heart, like a prison cage expanding from inside her.
Ezili Coeur Noir called to her people to help her, her voice something from the far side of the grave.
It was at that moment that the main elevator doors opened and Kane and his companions stood revealed.
WHEN THE ELEVATOR doors opened, Kane’s team found themselves looking out across the hangarlike floor of the redoubt, seeing the army of the damned who waited for them. There must have been forty of them now, Kane guessed, and each undead figure was standing ready in front of Ezili Coeur Noir. From above, a light rain seemed to be falling, spraying out from the fire safety system and slowly drenching the room.
From the corner of his eye, Kane watched Papa Hurbon for a moment as the corpulent man sat in his wheelchair, binding the home-made doll with a strip of black ribbon. It was his spellwork that had caused Ezili Coeur Noir to falter, the proximity of the hex affecting her now.
“Think you can control her?” Kane asked.
Hurbon nodded once, very slowly. “I’ll try my best, Kane. I owe this mad bitch, remember?”
“Baptiste,” Kane said, his eyes still fixed on the army of zombies that stood at the midway point of the hangar, like a wall of death. “Get to the reactor and get ready for Bry’s signal. I want you opening that baby up the second the access plate becomes demagnetized.”
Brigid looked at the undead army blocking the way that they had used before. “How do I get there?” she asked.
“I saw another elevator just off the lab,” Kane recalled.
“I’ll get there,” she assured Kane.
“Grant,” Kane said. “Protect Hurbon and let Brigid do what she needs to do.”
Grant looked at the vast army of rotting flesh that blocked the way out of the room. “Will do, but we’re going to need to get Ezili Coeur Noir downstairs sooner or later.”
Kane reached behind him for the ceremonial sword that Hurbon had handed him in the elevator, drawing it from its ornate sheath. “I’ll handle it,” he told his companion grimly.
With that, Kane strode across the empty section of the huge room, his boots splashing in the pool forming there, marching toward the army of the undead. From overhead, the fierce lighting glinted off the puddles and glimmered along the sleek blade of the ku-bha-sah sword.
“I’ll give your boy this much,” Papa Hurbon told Grant as the ex-Mag rested his grip on the handles of his wheelchair. “He may be a naive fool, but he’s sure as hell a brave naive fool.”
“Only kind there is,” Grant told the fat man as he eyed the approaching army of cadavers.
Behind the line of undead, Ezili Coeur Noir gestured, her spindly finger pointing out toward the interlopers in her presence. “Kill them,” she told her followers, “that they may better learn a life of servitude.”
Thus, the first salvo of shambling figures made their toward Kane, staggering figures trudging across the wet floor in their strange, unsteady gait, determined to destroy the abomination of life. As the first of the undead got within six feet of Kane, he swung the ku-bha-sah, its sharp edge glinting like a ray of sunlight in the enclosed space. The animated corpse stepped straight into its path and the blade cut a line across his torso before sweeping clean at the far end of the arc. Kane stood his ground, the sword held in both hands. The corpse-thing stopped in place, too, standing still as his swollen, maggot-eaten guts spilled onto the floor. His hideous, rotten figure had lost integrity, and in a moment he fell to the floor, his foul-smelling innards staining the metal plating like some terrible accident.
