by James Axler
“Down,” Kane ordered, reaching over to push Brigid into the dirt.
Kane and Brigid watched, their breaths held, as the dark figure sniffed about at the opening, poking at it with the stubby barrel of his blaster. They could hear nothing over the angry sound of the howling winds; if the Magistrate made any noise at all it would not carry this far. The dark-clad figure looked up, eyeing the verge that led down to the lake, searching the overgrown vegetation there. Kane waited, still holding his breath.
For thirty seconds, the Magistrate stood there, peering through the hole in the wall, scanning the communal area beyond. Then, satisfied, he turned away, and Kane and Brigid watched as his shadow flickered from the hole they had blasted in the wall and disappeared.
“That was close,” Brigid said with a sense of relief, breaking the tension they both felt.
Kane pulled himself up, his head peeking over the long grass once more.
“No sign of Grant,” Brigid stated, downcast.
Kane ignored her, surveying the building and its surrounds. “What happened here?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” Brigid asked.
“The rooms, the furniture,” Kane said. “It was all melted. And the streets—like a bomb went off.”
“And where are all the people?” Brigid asked. “Other than the Magistrates, it’s as if the whole ville is dead. I didn’t see a single person out there, did you?”
Kane shook his head. “Not just that, there was something else. People have a feel to them. It’s subtle, but you know it by its absence. This ville, its buildings—they all feel like they were abandoned a long time ago. Years.”
Brigid considered this, nodding her head in agreement. “You’re right. It’s as if they all just up and left.”
“So what happened?” Kane asked, pulling himself up from the grass. “Where did they all go?” He offered Brigid his hand as she got up off the dirt.
“A bomb would make sense,” Brigid said, checking her shotgun. “Maybe a biological weapon. That would engender a mass evacuation.”
“You mean some kind of plague?” Kane queried.
“Anthrax, smallpox—the list of germ weapons is inexhaustible,” Brigid said solemnly. “Some of the old, lab-created weapons just have file numbers, they never got to the point of naming them.”
“What about the burning?” Kane said. “It’s hard to ignore the evidence on those walls.”
“Twin attack,” Brigid suggested, her bright hair catching in the wind. “Why kill ’em once when you can kill ’em twice over?”
“Hmm,” Kane growled. “Why didn’t we hear about it? This didn’t just happen, not damage like this. We stepped into the mat-trans to gate back to Cerberus, and suddenly we’re in an abandoned ville none of us had heard of, being chased by Magistrates. Something’s not right about that scenario.”
“Maybe we missed it,” Brigid reasoned as they walked away from the hospital, stepping up to the lake’s edge.
“Cerberus’s satellite feeds would have picked up some evidence of a bomb being set off,” Kane assured her.
“Even satellites can’t see everything, Kane,” Brigid told him. “Maybe Brewster or whoever looked away from the monitor screen at the crucial moment.”
“We’d still see the fallout,” Kane told her with a shake of his head. “Something like this, a whole city abandoned, we’d see repercussions. A change in the radiation levels, a mass exodus—something.”
Brigid was inclined to agree. What Kane said made sense; Cerberus should have picked up some evidence during one of its routine global scans. And yet the name of the settlement remained a mystery, too—Quocruft. There was no Baron Quocruft, that was for sure. Where exactly were they?
Standing at the edge of the lake, Brigid watched the surface ripple as the relentless wind played across it. She stared down at her feet, where her reflection shimmered beside Kane’s on the rippling surface, and for just a second she thought she saw something in Kane’s reflection. “Daryl?” she said, almost without thinking.
“What did you say?” Kane asked, staring at his red-haired partner.
“D— Kane, I’m sorry,” Brigid said. “I thought I saw...” She paused, uncertain, distracted.
“Thought you saw what?” Kane asked, his brow furrowing. “Baptiste?”
Brigid was staring at the water again, looking at Kane’s reflection. Only it wasn’t Kane—the man in the water was of average build, with brown hair and brown eyes. It was Daryl Morganstern, the Cerberus mathematician who had died defending Brigid during a devastating attack on the redoubt.
But he was dead—wasn’t he?
Chapter 15
In the water, Brigid appeared to be standing beside Daryl Morganstern, Cerberus’s theoretical mathematician with whom she had briefly become romantically involved. Less forthright than most of the men in her life, Morganstern had appealed to Brigid on an intellectual level, his inquiring mind challenging hers. But he had died after a stone had been hurled at his skull, the blood cascading down his face. She remembered it, every red drop.
In the water he looked perfect, with his tousled brown hair and those deep brown eyes looking up at Brigid expectantly. The water around him was black, a black so absolute that it seemed like paint. Brigid didn’t think it strange.
“Daryl,” she said, the word coming as a whisper, tripping over her lips fearfully.
Daryl spread his arms wide, reaching up for her. He was naked, or at least shirtless—it was hard to tell. His body was still in the water, hidden in the inky dark. “Come, Brigid,” he crooned. “I’ve missed your touch so much. It’s cold here, so cold without you.”
Her eyes fixed on the rippling surface of the lake, Brigid took a pace forward, one step closer to the lapping edge. “I’m so sorry,” Brigid said, her voice choked. “I left you to die. I had to.”
“I died alone,” he told her, but there was no malice in his voice, just sadness. “Now I’m so cold. Join me, Brigid, and we can keep warm together.”
Brigid took another step toward the lake, her eyes fixed on the vision within. Daryl spread his arms wider, reaching out to pull her in, his smile as perfect as she remembered, just the way it had always been.
“I shouldn’t have left you to die like that,” Brigid declared, her words little more than a whisper. “I should have done something, should have found a way.”
“There was nothing you could have done then,” Daryl reassured her. “But you can change all that now. You can make things right if only you’ll join me. We’ll be happy, oh so happy. My Brigid, my love.”
Brigid took another step, the black waters of the lake lapping at the toes of her boots.
“Daryl,” Brigid said, “I can help you. I want to.”
“Just another step, my dove,” Daryl said. “Just one more.”
Brigid took another step, and the waters covered her toes now, lapping around her boot heels like liquid onyx. If she just held Daryl’s hand again, she knew she could make everything right, could fix everything.
But as she went to take another step, she felt something tugging at her sleeve, pulling her back.
* * *
KANE REACHED OUT, grabbing Brigid’s arm and shaking her. “Baptiste?” he called. “Look at me. Look at me.”
Lethargically Brigid turned, looking away from the water where she stood and staring at Kane. Her eyes were wide, their emerald-green nothing but a sliver where the pupils had dilated. She seemed mystified, as if unable to comprehend what she was seeing.
“D-Daryl?” she asked slowly.
“No,” Kane told her. “It’s me. It’s Kane.”
“Kane? Is that you...?”
“Come on, librarian,” Kane said, shaking her by the shoulders. “Get your files in order.”
It
took a few more seconds until Brigid saw him properly, and even then the daylight seemed to hurt her eyes. “Kane? What happened to me?” she finally asked, breathless.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “You sort of zoned out.”
“Like you back in the waiting room when the Mags first fired,” Brigid realized, her senses coming back to her slowly, like lights in a circuit.
“Yeah, I guess,” Kane said. “You were looking at the lake. You kept saying Daryl’s name.”
“Daryl...Morganstern,” Brigid concluded after a moment’s thought. “He’s dead. But I saw him, there in the water. He called to me. Kane, I wanted to join him.”
Still holding her by the shoulders, Kane looked Brigid directly in the eye. “Join me. It’s a lot drier.”
Kane and Brigid shared a bond like no other, something that pulled them through situations that others could scarcely imagine. It was referred to as anam chara, a friendship of the souls that reached through eternity, outside of time and space. Some had mistaken this for a romance, but it was far deeper than that; it was a trust, a guardianship, akin to the link a man has with his own heartbeat.
“Let’s get out of here,” Kane said, pulling Brigid back from the dark waters. “I don’t like being here, not out in the open like this.” What he failed to tell her was that he had seen something, too, lying there by the lake in the long grass. A glimpse of something he had all but forgotten, something capable of haunting even an ex-Magistrate.
* * *
THEY RAN, WORKING their way westward where the sun’s rays stretched through the clouds like white fingers. Whatever it was that Brigid had seen in the water, Kane chose not to discuss it. They could do that later, once they had found shelter, well away from the dogged Magistrates and their screaming guns. Grant would have to look after himself for now, as there was no sense in all three of them being in danger.
They were in a business district, all office blocks featuring characterless atriums with benches and unobtrusive sculptures at the front, a place where the workers could relax and eat lunch.
The two Cerberus warriors checked some of the buildings, finding their doors broken or unsecured. All were largely the same; abandoned with that same radial pattern of fire damage, as if some incredible heat blast had hit them from the street.
Some of the buildings included clothing boutiques or food vendors at street level, there to serve the people who worked above them. The boutiques were a testament to the power of fire, burned rags clinging to melted metal hangers on melted metal rails. The food vendors had been ransacked or destroyed, and all of them had that same sickening smell of overripe fruit and stale bread, of coffee left too long on the boil.
Kane kept looking. He told Brigid that he wanted to find somewhere they could defend, but there was more to it than that. He was searching for a clue, for evidence of what had happened here to cause the whole ville to be abandoned. But so much had been burned, whatever records may once have existed were likely sacrificed to fire, man’s most ancient god who took everything in return for heat and light.
“Kane, we have to stop,” Brigid said as they entered the sixth office building. Its brutal lines moved away from the street in steps, each level added like the tiers of a wedding cake, the glass front shattered and its paintwork blistered from heat.
In the lobby, Kane half turned, not giving Brigid his full attention. He was scanning the office directory as he had the others, reading the raised characters there through the smoke damage that had obscured them. “You tired?”
“Yes, but it’s not just that,” Brigid said. “We’re getting farther away from the hospital where we left Grant. Without operational Commtacts, we could lose him entirely—he’d have no way of tracking us down.”
Kane looked up at her then, and Brigid noted his unsettled expression. “There are no insects around, you notice that?”
“What?” Brigid asked.
“No matter where we’ve been, there aren’t any insects,” Kane said. “Not any that I’ve seen. Not even when we were crouched in the grass. That tell you anything?”
Brigid pondered this for a moment. “Something hit this ville,” she said. “Something big.”
“Big enough to kill a bug?” Kane asked doubtfully. “I thought the roaches survived even a nuke.”
“They would,” Brigid agreed. It was a generally accepted truism that cockroaches would survive just about any bomb.
“Makes it all the stranger, doesn’t it?” Kane suggested. “These buildings are open, that hospital was missing a whole wall. It’s not as if there’s anything keeping the insects out. So where are they? And the birds, the dogs, anything?”
“If there’s nothing to feed on...” Brigid began.
“Then they’d feed on each other,” Kane told her. “But there’s still food here, nutrition enough for a bug, at least.”
Brigid glared at him with frustration. “Do you have a point?”
Kane stood by the reception desk of the lobby, its faux-marble facade pulled away by what appeared to be incredible heat. “What did you see in the lake?” he asked.
“I told you—Daryl Morganstern,” Brigid said, irritation clear in her tone.
“A dead man,” Kane murmured, talking now to himself.
“A hallucination,” Brigid reasoned. “I’d thought about him earlier, I must have just...I don’t know, mistaken your reflection.”
“No, you didn’t,” Kane told her. “I saw it, too.”
“What? Daryl?” Brigid asked, stepping closer to him in the abandoned lobby.
“No, someone else,” Kane said with a shake of his head. “In the water there. Someone who died.”
For a moment, just one name came to Brigid’s mind, and she hated herself for thinking it. But she knew she had to ask. “Was it Grant?”
Chapter 16
Kane had a faraway look in his eye, as if reliving whatever he had seen there in the black waters of the lake.
“Kane?” Brigid probed. “Was it Grant?”
“No,” he said. “It was someone from a long time ago, from before I met you.”
Brigid looked at Kane, this noble warrior who had regained his humanity by defying the very system he had been indoctrinated to protect, trying to read his expression. He was struggling with this, trying to comprehend it. “You think it means something?” she asked finally.
“I looked in the water and I saw her face, but I knew it couldn’t be,” Kane explained. “She was dead the first time I saw her, just a kid. Helena Vaughn. She couldn’t be here. The only place she still exists is in my head.”
Brigid ran one hand through her hair, trying to understand. It did not make sense, not yet, at least.
“We should keep moving,” Kane said after a moment. “It wasn’t just dumb luck that we ran into that patrol. There’ll be more Mags out there, and we have to assume that if they see us they’ll try to hunt us down.”
Brigid nodded. “Agreed.”
Together the two of them left the lobby and its ruined glass front, returning to the street of howling wind but keeping to the shadows of the buildings’ forecourts.
“What are you looking for, anyway?” Brigid asked as they trekked along the street.
“Someplace high,” Kane told her, eying the skyline. “I’ll let you know when I spot it.”
* * *
THE DARK MAGISTRATES had reconvened outside the hospital with Grant’s body in tow. One of the dark figures—Magistrate South—held a pair of glasses in his hand, turning them over and over as he examined them. Magistrate North had patched up the bullet wound to his leg, wrapping a roll of gauze around it.
The four of them stood over the slumped figure of the Cerberus warrior, speaking in their jagged, screaming language, each fractured syllable like a bird’s caw.
&n
bsp; There had been two others, besides this one with the mahogany skin. They had seen them, sensed them, smelled their bloody scents. They were alive against the baron’s wishes, a crime punishable by death. But this one, whom North had shot with his Soul Eater, needed to be taken back to base, where the baron would decide what to do with him. It had been so long since the living had walked the streets of Quocruft.
The dialogue continued for a few seconds, stopping as unexpectedly as it had started. A decision had been reached.
Two Magistrates lifted Grant’s limp body by the arms and legs, marching him to the nearest access point for the Hall of Justice where he would be picked up. The other two returned to their patrol, scouting the abandoned streets for the other living shells, checking for more. Magistrate South shoved the spectacles in the pants pocket of his uniform—evidence.
Around them, the winds howled, banshee cries from the ghost city of Quocruft.
* * *
KANE FOUND THE KIND OF building he was looking for two blocks later. But as Brigid went to cross the ghostly, abandoned street, Kane stopped her with a gesture.
She eyed him questioningly, worried. He was standing in the shadows, watching something in the distance. When she looked she saw nothing there at first, but after a moment she spotted the movement. It was distant, at least five blocks away, and looked to be two figures carrying another, but it was difficult to tell from this distance. Without Kane, Brigid might not have noticed it from this far out; once again, his point-man sense proved its worth.
“We’ll cross the street on my command,” Kane told Brigid.
“Can’t we find another...?” she began.
“No, look,” Kane told her, pointing up to the roof.
The building was over a dozen stories tall and it was taller than any of the buildings around it. Much of the window glass was missing, a great trail of broken glass lining the forecourt like a barricade where it had fallen. Up on the roof, Brigid could see metallic spines sticking up into the air. It was a radio array, designed to converse with satellites.
