by James Axler
* * *
TRAPPED INSIDE THE TIGHT hospital storeroom, Brigid was dancing backward, getting out of reach of those scrabbling hands as five dead Magistrates pulled themselves up over the lip of ruined wall. She had the shotgun, of course, one bullet chambered.
No, Brigid realized. That won’t be enough.
She spun around, sweeping an armful of items from the nearest shelf and sending them at the Magistrates’ helmets. A bottle slapped against one Mag’s helmet with a clunk, another took a box of disposable wipes on his chin, knocking him backward with surprise more than force. But Brigid needed something better, and she needed it quickly.
She reached around in the darkness, found a stool waiting between the shelves close to the storeroom’s door. Two feet high, the stool was designed to help people reach the higher shelves. The metal stool had wheels to make it easy to maneuver, but was spring-weighted so that it would not slip while it was in use. Brigid grabbed it, swinging it around her with one hand. Metal and rubber, the heavy stool clunked against the chest of the first Mag who had revealed himself through the wall, knocking him back and out before he got his legs over the lip.
Brigid followed through, using the momentum of her swing to bat another of the Dark Magistrates from the wall even as his blaster materialized in his hand. The Magistrate never had a chance to fire it, as he was already toppling from the building’s face, falling to the street with a burst of stuttered screeches from deep in his throat, his regen suit hissing with expelled gas where Brigid’s strike had punctured it.
Still swinging in Brigid’s hand, the heavy stool struck one of the shelving units, knocking it from its housing so that it came crashing down against its supports. Once upon a time, the metal frame of the shelving unit had most likely been secured to the exterior wall on one side. Without that wall to support it, the whole unit went caroming out the gap, taking two more Magistrates with it, and clipping a third, on its journey down to the street.
Brigid was back at the gap in the wall now, where one last Magistrate was climbing in. Peering over the side, she could see more of the dark-clad figures clambering up the walls on their fixed lines, death shrouds hurrying to stop her. The nearest Mag reached out for Brigid’s ankle, but she sidestepped, driving the heel of her boot into his grasping fingers. The Mag let out a squeal of pain, the noise a popping hiss.
Brigid stamped again, kicking out at the Mag’s withered fingers until he lost his grip. She watched grimly as he went plummeting to the street. This wasn’t how she had wanted to play it, but there was something about these Magistrates that was inhuman. Their presence made her flesh crawl.
More of the Dark Magistrates were hurrying up the wall. Holding the stool close to her chest, Brigid took careful aim and dropped it, letting it plummet down the side of the building and onto the unsuspecting head of one of the Magistrates a floor and a half below her. He tumbled from the wall, arms flailing as he lost his grip, stool following.
Brigid was out of the hole in an instant, scampering along the narrow ledge as she rushed to the room containing the mat-trans. As she ran along the outside of the building, Brigid felt something cold and wet hit her left cheek. It was rain.
* * *
IN THE UPPERMOST ROOM OF the Magistrate Hall, a gateway to another world had opened. Kane and Grant watched from their separate positions as the dimensional rent tore wider, the image of the Cerberus ops room becoming more pronounced inside the illuminated hoop at the farthest end of the room.
Baron Trevelyan looked overjoyed as lightninglike energy flitted across the surface of his gateway. “The first strike must be quick,” he told Grant as more of his dead warriors prepared themselves before the crackling gate, securing the hoods on their protective environment suits, hiding their rotted faces. There were men and women among them, some too short or too weedy to have ever made Magistrates in life. Grant knew then the full horror of Burton’s creations: the professor had given the baron an excuse to exterminate everyone on the planet so that they might serve him in death with unswerving loyalty. Every human being on this Earth was dead except for Burton, and every corpse had been reanimated to serve in the baron’s invading army.
“Do you really think the people there will just lie down and let you do this?” Grant demanded.
“Whether they will or they won’t will not matter,” Trevelyan gloated. “In two days everyone on the planet will be consumed and indoctrinated into the glorious army of your baron. Praise me.”
Grant and Kane watched helplessly as the first squadron of reanimated dead men stepped into the dimensional breach to invade their home.
Chapter 28
“Something’s coming,” Domi said, the words more certain this time.
Lakesh and the Cerberus ops team were already moving into action, ready this time for Domi’s alert. The last time, they had been caught unawares, with the mysterious woman appearing via the mat-trans before anyone could really comprehend or process what was happening. The woman had died within a minute, dissolving as if her body had no stability. Since then, Lakesh had ordered his team to trust Domi’s instincts, putting his faith in her incredible ability to detect things at the very limits of human sensitivity.
“Where, my love?” Lakesh asked as the ops room went into high alert all around him. The main lights switched to an orange hue, warning everyone that they were now in alert mode.
“Same place,” Domi said, her scarlet eyes narrowing as she stared at the armaglass-walled chamber. “Mat-trans.”
“Mr. Farrell—report!” Lakesh demanded.
At his monitor beside the mat-trans doors, Farrell was nervously running a full scan, searching the receiving patterns. Sweat beaded on his brow, droplets glistening on his shaved head. “Nothing showing as yet, Dr. Singh,” he stated. But as he spoke, his voice seemed to falter and he watched the digits on his screen with marked intensity as they altered before his eyes.
“Mr. Farrell?” Lakesh prompted, striding across the room from his desk with Domi trotting along at his side. Domi had drawn her Combat Master handgun from the waistband of her shorts, flipping its catch to check for the reassuring shine of brass in the chamber.
“Is there something?” Lakesh asked.
“Temperature’s dropping,” Farrell said, still reading from his screen. “Rapid. Real rapid.”
As he continued, Lakesh was indicating for the security team to join them from the rear wall of the ops room. Two men hurried over with Edwards joining them from where he was operating the coffee percolator. “Shape up, team—this is it,” Edwards barked.
Domi looked vexed for a moment as her loyalties were split. She loved Lakesh and her instinct was to protect him by remaining at his side. At the same time, she wanted to be where the action was, wanted to be more than her lover’s personal bodyguard. As if sensing this, Lakesh glanced up from where he stood analyzing Farrell’s terminal and gave Domi a nod. “Go,” he mouthed with a reassuring smile.
Domi strode over to meet with Edwards and his team, making her way toward the smoky armaglass walls of the mat-trans itself. At the rear of the room, more sec men were hurrying through the doors into the operations center while the nonessential personnel were ushered out.
Standing before the mat-trans, Domi could feel coldness emanating from the smoky-brown glass, radiating toward her with a physical presence. It felt like a haunting. She reached forward, bringing her splayed fingers close to the glass.
“Temp’s falling ten degrees a second,” Farrell warned. “More’n that.”
Lakesh looked up, advising Domi to take care. “What is the reading now?” he asked Farrell.
“Minus ten, minus fifteen, eighteen, twenty.” Farrell couldn’t read the figures fast enough, they were changing so rapidly. “Now at...minus thirty and still dropping.”
“If it keeps plummeting at that rate,
” Reba DeFore said, watching the mat-trans, “it’ll soon be below the temperature that a human could withstand.” More Cerberus personnel had joined Lakesh and Farrell before the mat-trans computer link, including Brewster Philboyd and Donald Bry and his team. Lakesh was grateful for their show of camaraderie, but he worried for their safety. If it came to it, he would clear out the whole room.
Lakesh looked at the stocky blonde Cerberus physician as she ran her eyes over the plummeting temperature gauge. “How low would it need to drop before human survival became impossible?” he inquired.
“Off the top of my head? I couldn’t tell you,” DeFore admitted. “But temperatures in the Arctic Circle can go below minus-one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Cold that intense can affect a person’s mind before they realize it. You’d die mad as a hatter of the ultimate brain freeze.”
With that revelation, Lakesh made a decision, ordering all remaining nonessential personnel from the room. “Donald, I need this area evacuated. Security personnel only, along with myself, the good doctor here and...Mr. Farrell?”
Farrell nodded, but his expression was one of gratitude. Lakesh may be a hard taskmaster at times, but he did so with the support of his staff. Had Farrell wanted to leave he knew that his chief would not stop him or respect him any less.
Lakesh continued to discuss the survival probabilities with DeFore, while his second-in-command, Donald Bry, led the staff out of the room, hurrying everyone to the doors and ushering them through.
Within thirty seconds the ops room had been evacuated, with only Lakesh, DeFore, Farrell, Domi and eight security personnel remaining. Brewster Philboyd, who had been monitoring the communications and satellite feeds, had nabbed a radio headset before leaving. With it, he could operate away from his desk, running the feeds quickly through a portable laptop-style computer for the duration. He took up residence on the floor just outside the ops room door, transferring the essential functionality to his portable deck as he sat there with his back propped against the wall. If anything happened, he did not want to be too far from the action.
“Temperature’s just hit minus eighty,” Farrell reported. “Minus ninety. Shit, this can’t be right. Gotta be a glitch in the sensors...”
Farrell’s words died in his throat as the mat-trans came to life, its mechanics whirring as the unit booted up.
“I’m not doing it,” Farrell announced, his eyebrows raised. Beside him, Lakesh and DeFore were watching the counters blur on his screen.
A crackle of lightning appeared inside the armaglass chamber, visible through the smoked glass of the walls, cutting from ceiling to floor like a lash of spilled white paint in the air. Edwards was barking orders at the sec team, while Domi had her Detonics Combat Master .45 in a two-handed grip, thrust steadily before her, targeted on the sealed door of the mat-trans. With a dull silver finish and a stubby nose, the weapon was a small, compact pistol but it still looked large in Domi’s petite hand as she trained it on the mat-trans door.
“Now at minus one-twenty,” Farrell stated emotionlessly, holding himself in check. “Minus one-forty and dropping.”
There came an almighty grinding sound then as the armaglass of the mat-trans chamber began to crack, frosty air seeping from the rent.
“Everybody back,” Edwards ordered, motioning to his people. “You, too, Domi.”
With reluctance, Domi took three steps back, still eyeing the fissure that was opening on the surface of the mat-trans wall. It was not deep enough to crack right through; in fact, it appeared to be only on the inside of the glass.
The ops room was silent, all eyes but Farrell’s on the mat-trans chamber now. The lightning continued to fire through the mat-trans chamber, thunderclaps emanating from the contained room.
* * *
A WORLD AWAY, KANE WAS powerless as the dimensional portal throbbed and bulged before his eyes at the end of the long room. Its circular proportions were shifting as the space around the gateway hoop began to lose integrity, metanormal energies spitting and fizzing around its edges. The first four dimensionauts stepped into the fiery window and their bodies were racked with coruscating energy as they began to shift from one world to step into another.
Standing a few feet before the cuffed figure of Grant, Baron Trevelyan gestured grandly at the dimensional rift, a hideous grin on his lips. “It begins,” he squealed. “The keys to the multiverse—mine to turn.”
Grant moved, angling his body forward and headbutting Trevelyan right in the nose.
“Do you never shut the fuck up?” Grant growled.
Baron Trevelyan staggered backward with a shriek as blood began streaming from his pale nose.
Three Magistrates hurried to restrain Grant, grabbing him from behind as the ex-Mag lunged a second time at the hybrid baron. Grant ducked, barging with his shoulder into the baron’s chest, shoving the shorter man off his feet.
Hidden among the Magistrates, Kane saw his cue. As three Mags struggled to restrain Grant, Kane commanded his Sin Eater to his hand with an instinctive flinch of his wrist tendons.
Despite having his hands still cuffed together at his back, Grant was making a good show of tangling with the Magistrates. He rose from the floor, driving head and shoulders into the first Magistrate, flipping him over his body. The second was upon him by then, bringing a nightstick around for a brutal swing at Grant’s face. But Grant was faster, drawing his leg around in a sweep, yanking the Mag off his feet before the blow could connect.
The third Magistrate took no chances. His Soul Eater was already in his hand as he crept behind Grant, finger squeezing the trigger. But as he did so, the weapon exploded in his hand where Kane shot it, the blaster and two of the Magistrate’s desiccated fingers spiraling to the floor in an instant. The Mag turned at this new attacker, a strained squawk emanating from deep in his throat as putrid-smelling gas began to stream from the stumps of his missing fingers. Kane snapped the trigger again, running across the room to create a moving target as the other Magistrates began to react to the infiltrator in their midst.
The Mag went down in an instant, a single, perfectly placed bullet lodged in his forehead, splitting through the protective armor of his helmet.
“Grant?” Kane yelled as he dodged an attacking Magistrate’s outthrust fist. “You okay, partner?”
“Forget me,” Grant snarled as he heaved himself up off the floor, driving his head into the gut of another Dark Magistrate. “They’re attacking Cerberus. Close the gateway.”
Kane knew good advice when he heard it. He spun on his heel, drawing his Sin Eater around toward the glowing hoop at the far end of the room. Grant was on his own.
* * *
INSIDE THE CERBERUS operations center the lights were flickering as the whole facility suffered an enormous power drain.
“These readings are impossible, Dr. Singh,” Farrell uttered as the maelstrom continued to build in the mat-trans chamber.
“Go ahead, Mr. Farrell,” Lakesh ordered with remarkable calm. His eyes were still fixed on the light show that played through the mat-trans in the corner of the ops room, turning it into a lightning cage.
“The sensors are indicating the chamber is now at minus four-hundred-and-sixty degrees Fahrenheit,” Farrell reported, staring at his monitor screen in disbelief.
“Absolute zero,” Lakesh said, his breath catching in his throat. The cold could be felt here, several feet away from the chamber’s door. It was bleeding out across the room, a coldness almost beyond comprehension.
“Has that ever been proven?” Reba DeFore asked. As a physician she had an understanding of such principles, though nothing compared to Lakesh’s knowledge.
“According to the laws of thermodynamics,” Lakesh recalled, “said temperature is impossible. We are below absolute zero, where the thermal energy of matter ceases.”
“Meaning?”
Domi asked, her Combat Master still trained on the door to the mat-trans chamber as a wave of cold energy swooped over them all.
“Entropy halts,” Lakesh said. “The laws of our universe cease to operate at below minus 459.67 degrees. In essence, nothing is possible, no movement, nothing.”
Domi continued eyeing the fissure in the mat-trans chamber, with the eight-man security team behind her. Even if the concepts themselves were beyond the albino girl, she knew what Lakesh was saying. “We’re in trouble,” she deciphered.
“The readings can’t be right,” Farrell said with false conviction. He sounded for all the world like a man trying to convince himself.
“Right or wrong,” Lakesh said, “there can be no doubting that something is happening here that is beyond our current level of understanding.”
The orange-lit ops room fell to silence, the only noise coming from the commotion within the mat-trans chamber, muffled to a dull tapping by the protective armaglass. The Cerberus personnel watched as the crackling lightning coalesced into a figure standing dead center of the mat-trans floor’s grid.
“Impossible,” Farrell muttered.
As he spoke, another figure appeared, then a third, a fourth, dark silhouettes behind the tinted glass.
“Lock the mat-trans,” Lakesh commanded. “Now.”
Farrell’s fingers danced across his keyboard, shutting down the mat-trans. For all the good it would do them. Already the network had been infiltrated, and their mysterious user had shown complete contempt for any of the security protocols put in place by Cerberus.
“Unit’s powering down,” Farrell stated. “Door’s locked.”
As he spoke, a clacking sound came from the chamber’s door where its magnetic locks slid back and forth in their housings, as if rattling to escape.
“Mr. Farrell?” Lakesh prompted.
“I locked it,” Farrell said. “I swear I...”
The chamber door rattled in its housing as the lock snapped apart in a shower of sparks.
