by James Axler
Grant, meanwhile, had joined Kane at the broken exterior wall, and the two men stared out across the desolate city. They stood at a sheer drop, the wall torn away by who knew what. The buildings were familiar, towering high into the overcast sky like the old structures of Cobaltville where both of them had been raised. The buildings were soot-dark, and the roadways looked cracked and broken, abandoned. The streets were arranged in a spiderweb pattern, expanding outward to the horizon. It was possible, Grant realized, that streets would always expand in that manner, no matter where one stood, a trick of architecture. The punishing wind channeled through those streets to create an awful groaning that ebbed louder and softer but never ceased, a terrible banshee wail.
“See anyone down there?” Grant asked.
“No one,” Kane confirmed. He was statue-still as he watched the streets, scanning every road, every window, hoping to find a sign of life.
“Strange,” Grant muttered, taking a step closer to that vertiginous drop. Down there, thirty feet below them, were road vehicles. Some were overturned, others burned out and some just parked, a thick layer of grime obscuring their paintwork and blackening their windows. Not one of them was moving.
Brigid came striding across the messed-up room, peering out at the abandoned city for a moment before speaking. “Bad news,” she said. “I think this is a receiver unit, but I’m not sure it can send.”
Kane looked at her quizzically. “That’s not normal,” he stated.
Brigid shook her head. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “The tech is similar to a mat-trans, but the deeper I explore the less like ours it is.”
“Maybe it’s foreign,” Grant suggested. “Where was it you said we were? Quod—?”
“Quocruft,” Brigid corrected. “At least, that’s where I think we are.”
“And where is that?” Kane asked.
“I can’t tell you,” Brigid admitted. “I haven’t heard of it. The computer’s running in English, but the place name doesn’t sound like anywhere I know of.”
“Places change their names,” Kane reasoned. “Happens all the time. Look at Luikkerville out in the west. Used to be called Snakefishville.”
Brigid looked less sure. “Quocruft. It doesn’t even sound like a word we’d use. I don’t know, Kane, something about it doesn’t sit right with me. All of this feels wrong.”
But Kane had turned back to the open chunk of wall space, his gaze attracted by something. “You see something down there?” he asked. “Something moving?”
Grant and Brigid followed where he was pointing, trying to make out what he had seen. The streets looked empty, the dark buildings looming over them like tightly packed gravestones.
“Missed it. What did you see?” Grant asked after a moment. He had known Kane a long time, trusted the man’s keen eyesight as well as his instinct.
“Looked like...” Kane started, then shook his head. “I’m not sure. Could have been a person, could be a dog or just a bag blowing in the wind. Can’t say for certain.”
Brigid was staring, not at the streets now but at Kane. “I know that look,” she said. “You want to investigate, don’t you?”
Kane smiled, still watching the street below. “We’re in a strange part of a strange town with no backup. I want to find out what’s happened, and I figure the answer’s down there somewhere. Especially if there is someone down there.”
“Curiosity can get you killed,” Brigid warned him.
“So can not knowing. And a hell of a lot quicker,” Kane replied.
“Door’s locked,” Grant reminded them both. “I checked it.”
“The wall isn’t,” Kane said with that brutal pragmatism he sometimes displayed in the face of the unknown. “Let’s find some rope and see what Quocruft has to offer the tourist.”
“I’ll go along with it,” Brigid agreed reluctantly, “but let me go on the record now as saying I don’t like it.”
“Objection noted,” Kane assured her. “Don’t get your panties in a twist.”
* * *
WITH PROFESSIONAL SWIFTNESS, the three Cerberus warriors split up to search the room for some rope. They worked well together thanks to years of familiarity, like a well-oiled machine.
Other than the mat-trans chamber and its control podium, there was little in the way of furniture, certainly not in a state that might contain climbing rope. The desks had been smashed to firewood, and—if there had been any in the first place—there were no chairs left in the room now. However, there was a single line of cupboards running along one wall, six in all, their metal paneling bent out of shape and scuffed with bullet holes. The cupboards were tall, like gym lockers, but the locks were of poor quality, disintegrating with rust. Grant, the strongest of the group, walked the length of metal cupboards and pulled the first open while Kane kept watch on the open external wall, wary. While he could not be certain that there was anyone out there, he was conscious that making an undue amount of noise could attract anyone who was—even over the sound of those howling winds.
Brigid worked speedily through the contents of each cupboard while Grant made his way along the line to open the next. An archivist by trade, Brigid was best suited to sort through the contents for anything useful. However, what she found as she pulled the first door open made her rear back with a shocked gasp. Crouching there, arms clutched around its legs and head bowed beneath the higher shelf, was a skeleton wearing a set of rags.
“You okay, Brigid?” Grant asked as he snapped the lock from the second set of doors.
Brigid swallowed, eyes fixed on the skeleton crammed between the thin metal walls. It looked small, as if its originator was not yet fully grown. But it was hard to tell, Brigid knew, with the flesh wasted away. The loss of flesh made everything seem smaller.
“I’m fine,” Brigid said finally, eyes still fixed on the figure in the cupboard.
Grant was beside Brigid now, and he saw the skeleton crouching there in the gloom. “Sorry, I should have checked first,” he said.
Brigid shook her head. “No need to mollycoddle me, Grant,” she assured him. “Just surprised me for a second.
“I wonder how she got there,” Brigid mused. “Did she hide there or was she locked inside?”
“Maybe someone just put the bones in afterwards,” Grant said, “as a joke or something.”
“Not in that position,” Brigid said with grim certainty. “She was alive when she entered the cupboard.”
“’Nother mystery,” Grant muttered. “Just what we need.”
With that, Grant continued on down the line of cupboards, taking a little more care to eyeball their contents before letting Brigid check for anything they could use. Mostly the cupboards contained desk supplies, rotted away with age. Two of them included bottles, including a whole host of medicine vials, but the labels had long since faded and the liquids had either been used up or had evaporated.
While his colleagues searched the cupboards, Kane was assessing the broken wall itself, wondering if there might be another way down. By the time Grant and Brigid came over to give him the bad news, Kane had already stretched himself flat on his belly, well out beyond the edge, and was dangling upside down searching for handholds.
“Kane, we’ve come up empty,” Grant explained. “There’s nothing here we can use to climb with.”
“Forget it. New plan,” Kane explained. “We can climb down. Just got to be careful where we find our grips.”
Grant peered over the edge once more, eyeing the sheer thirty-foot drop to solid paving slabs below. “You sure about this?” he asked uncertainly.
Kane pulled himself back from the edge, bounding back to a sitting position and offering his companions a broad smile. “Sure I’m sure,” he said with false bravado.
Before anyone could argue, Kane drew h
imself over to the edge, scooting across on his buttocks, and turned, dropping his legs over the side so that he still faced the wall. “Follow me,” he told his companions. “And, Baptiste—bring your blaster.”
Brigid hurried back to the control podium where she had left her shotgun. Since the Mossberg replica had no safety, Brigid unloaded the shells from the breech and dropped them in her pocket before snapping it back together. Her best option was to climb down with it tucked into her shirt—empty wasn’t ideal, but it was better than blowing her own legs off through a false jolt of the trigger. While she was readying herself for the descent, Brigid removed her glasses and tucked them into a protective case in her inside pocket. While she needed the glasses for reading, she could manage without them for most other operations.
Grant was already clambering over the side by the time Brigid returned to the edge of the room. “Watch that first step,” he warned jovially.
Brigid smiled grimly as she knelt down. A moment later, she too was over the edge, following the path Grant took, which in turn followed the route Kane was taking down the rough side of the building.
The wall felt like dried plaster, and Brigid felt her heart skip a beat as a great chunk of it crumbled away in her hand. She reached forward automatically, fingers clawing at the wall until they locked into another crevice above a line of windows. Her red-gold hair whipped around her face in the wind, billowing like a flame. She ignored it, scrambling onward down the wall.
Kane reached ground level first, letting go of the wall and dropping the last six feet to land in a semicrouch. The sidewalk seemed to crumble on impact, the slabs of stone cracking underfoot, dusty powder spilling from their edges. Kane looked down in irritation as the cloud of dust brushed over his boots.
He was so intent on the dust that he almost missed the movement. But his ears detected it, the subtle change in the howling winds as something passed through them. Kane was suddenly very conscious that his partners were still above him, sitting targets as they clambered down the wall.
“Get down here,” Kane called, the echoing words sounding out of place in the abandoned city. “Hurry it up—we have company.”
As he spoke, his eyes twitched left and right, scanning the fan of roads that stretched away. There were automobile wrecks all around, one street playing host to a whole traffic jam of burned-out vehicles, all of them skeletal, just frames of blackened metal. There was no movement now, not that he could see.
Kane was out in the open here, too; he needed to correct that. The building was at his back, and he kept it there, moving across a little until he was closer to one of the hollowed-out wrecks of an automobile. It had high sides and a five-door design, but the windows had been smashed and the whole frame was blackened with fire damage, the wheel rims collapsed to the road.
Grant joined Kane seconds later, the Sin Eater materializing in his hand. He kept silent, recognizing what Kane was doing. Grant knew the man’s body language well enough to identify it—Kane was drawing on his fabled point-man sense, an uncanny combination of his normal senses that made him almost prophetic in a hot zone.
“There’s someone out there,” Kane said. “I’m certain of it.” He kept his voice low, aware of how close Grant was.
“Where?” Grant asked.
Brigid joined them, hurrying from her descent of the wall and ducking behind the edge of the automobile. “What’s happening?” she whispered.
“Company,” Kane said.
As he said it, he spotted the movement down one of the streets. Four figures were moving from behind a burned-out truck and trailer. They strode in step, walking side by side, shoulder to shoulder. Each was dressed in dark clothes, faces hidden behind the brutal lines of their matching helmets, eyes obscured behind tinted visors.
“Magistrates...?” Grant muttered, not quite believing what he was seeing.
Before anyone could say anything else, the distant figures raised their right arms, tensing their trigger fingers as sleek blasters appeared in their hands. And as the bullets left the chambers, there came a screaming like dying children. The agonized shrieks grew louder as the bullets closed in.
Chapter 10
Four bullets came spiraling toward Kane and his companions, screeching like living things as they cut through the air.
The Cerberus warriors were highly trained, and all of them ducked down behind the cover of the burned-out automobile as the bullets struck, cutting chunks out of the blackened metalwork, abruptly ending their loud screams.
“The hell?” Grant spit. “Don’t these guys even ask questions first? What did we do wrong?”
“Probably not the time to ask, partner,” Kane said, scanning the nearby buildings for better cover.
Grant stretched his Sin Eater out before him, eyeing down its sights. “You want to return fire?” he asked.
Kane watched the approaching figures from behind cover, automatically ducking as another cluster of screaming bullets came hurtling across the distance between them. There could be no mistaking the phenomenon now—the bullets really did let out a shriek like a child’s scream as they were expelled from their foe’s blasters. “Once we do, it sets a precedent we may never be able to go back from,” Kane pointed out. “They’re Magistrates. Hold fire—for now.”
Crouched beside the two ex-Magistrates, Brigid was reloading her shotgun. She peered over the hood of the auto, watching the approaching figures with morbid interest as they strode down the street. There were four in all, each of them dressed in the familiar black-leather garb of a Magistrate, just like the uniforms that Kane and Grant had once worn. Though they were each dressed in the Magistrate uniform, they were not matching. The one to the right wore a heavy black duster over his regulation uniform, with bloodred piping that highlighted its neat pleats. The third from the left had a subtly different helmet; a motif was emblazoned across its center in a putrid green script.
Brigid narrowed her eyes a moment, focusing on the man’s helmet. From this distance, the motif looked like a child’s skeleton, curled in on itself. But as he took another step closer, she saw something else there—the humanoid skeleton had a curling tail of bones, reaching up from the base of its spine to wrap around its own neck.
“Hideous...” Brigid muttered, feeling sickened by the image.
But as she spoke, the figures stepped more clearly into the sunlight—what little of it there was—and Brigid’s words seemed to catch in her throat, her mouth suddenly dry as bone.
Beneath his visor, the leftmost figure had putrid sores spreading across his skin, and black pus oozed from them. His flesh was red, like cooked meat, the skin flayed away, leaving the muscles exposed.
To his right, the second figure had a crack running through his tinted visor. Beneath it the skin seemed to rupture, the lidless eyes swiveling as he hunted for prey.
The face of the third Magistrate, the one with the demon child’s skull decorating his helmet, seemed to be oozing away, teeth and bone visible through the torn flesh of his chin, his lipless mouth drawn back in a cruel snarl.
And if the third had been like something from a nightmare, the fourth was infinitely worse. This one’s face was nothing more than blackness, a shining pool of dark in the shape of a skull.
The weapons of these Dark Magistrates blasted again, firing another burst of screaming bullets at the Cerberus exiles. As they came closer, the Cerberus warriors could hear a strange shrieking noise emanating through the streets, screeches and hums that seemed to cut off abruptly like badly edited audio tape.
“Are they...human?” Grant spit, still eying the eerie-looking Mags along the length of his Sin Eater.
“They’re...Magistrates,” Kane said in disbelief. “But they can’t be.”
“They are,” Brigid insisted, “and they’re getting closer.”
“You’re nuts, Bapti
ste,” Kane growled. “If they’re Magistrates, then where the hell are we?”
“‘Hell’ may be closer than you think, Kane,” Brigid chided ominously.
Beyond the blackened car chassis, the fearsome-looking Magistrates took another pace closer to their prey, their Soul Eater pistols bucking in their hands as they blasted in tandem.
* * *
“THEY’RE OFF THE MAP,” Beth Delaney blurted as Lakesh stood over her, staring at the computer screen.
Lakesh scanned the screen for a long moment, studying the map that was projected there. The map featured an overlay grid identifying the largest and most significant locations. That grid should also be showing the glowing report from the transponders of Kane, Grant and Brigid, three shining dots that could be tapped for additional data. But, as Delaney had stated, they were not there.
“What happened, exactly?” Lakesh asked, his gentle tone belying the rising fear he felt at the sudden disappearance of his colleagues. “Track back for me.”
Delaney shook her head, her blond hair brushing her shoulders. “I don’t know exactly,” she said, regretfully. “One moment, we were getting a strong transponder signal from each operative. The next time I looked—they’d gone.”
“So, where are they?” Lakesh demanded.
“I ran a systems check,” Delaney assured him. “It showed everything was intact. We can track our other transponder implants. It’s just Kane’s team that has disappeared.”
“That’s impossible,” Brewster Philboyd chipped in from where he had overheard the conversation from his own workstation just a few desks along. “Even if Kane and company were killed, we would still get a location signal. Their life signs would just be flat.”
Lakesh nodded, welcoming the talented astrophysicist’s opinion. Philboyd was a logical thinker and good with a mystery, he knew. “Unless their bodies were completely obliterated,” Lakesh suggested grimly.
“In that case, you should still be able to track back to the moment of death,” Philboyd insisted. “It would stand out as a sudden peak in the transponder signals, all three going at once.”
