by James Axler
The motor pool was devoid of life, just water and the dinosaur carcasses of ancient vehicles. As they checked the vast space, Grant spotted something in the water, its flat line like a streak across the polymer night lenses. He trudged into the water until it was as deep as his midcalf. Reaching down, he plucked the item from the water and stared at it with a chilling sense of familiarity.
Kane and Brigid stopped what they were doing and turned to look at Grant, somehow sensing that the big man had discovered something. He held it aloft for them to see, not saying a word. They all recognized it—Domi’s knife, the one she had kept with her like a good-luck charm ever since she had tried to gut Guana Teague with it all those years ago in Cobaltville. Like any good-luck charm, this was one item that Domi would not intentionally leave behind; it was precious to her, a razor-edged hunk of sentimentality with blood in its past.
The discovery did not bode well. CAT Beta had not reported in since mat-trans jumping here. All the knife confirmed was that they had arrived—what had happened to them once they got here was still in the realm of speculation. But if Domi had discarded her knife then things could not have been good.
Kane motioned toward the far doors, recalling the layout of the redoubt and the location of a second stairwell back there. The team followed him, weapons ready, alert to dangers as Kane led the way past a stack of mold-dappled crates and through an open doorway into another passageway.
Kane’s nose twitched. There was a smell here, emanating from somewhere down the corridor, a kind of perfume that he could detect even over the smells of mold and stagnant water. He held up a hand, indicating to the others to cover him while he investigated.
Grant dropped back, pressing himself against the wall to give him the optimal view of both the motor pool and the corridor. Brigid, meanwhile, stuck with Kane, her TP-9 held ready as he led the way down the corridor.
They passed several sealed doors for storage rooms. Then, to his right, Kane peered through an open door that led into a long, narrow cafeteria featuring two long tables arranged with their short edges together so that they ran the length of the room. There was water on the floor here, three inches deep and dark with detritus.
Behind Kane, Brigid took a moment to check the doorway on the other side of the corridor. An aging sign declared that it led to the facility’s restrooms, and there was a little mold growing along the bottom sill of the door.
Kane sniffed the air again, sensing that scent wafting from somewhere within. Cooking? No, it couldn’t be that...could it?
Kane moved into the darkened cafeteria, everything brought into stark, unforgiving clarity by his night lenses. There were more bodies in here, slumped at the tables in an almost comical manner. Kane checked them swiftly, recalling the nightmarish things he had faced here once before.
The smell was coming from deeper in the room, from behind the serving hatch with its shuttered window.
Kane turned back, motioning Brigid to join him in the room. He had a sense of unease here now, the old point-man sense ringing like an alarm in his mind. His heartbeat sounded loud in his ears, his breath seemed shallow. Was it the smell, the air or just the memory of what had happened here all those months before, when he had used a blessed sword to fight the legions of the undead, that made him so tense?
An open doorway was located beside the wide serving window, leading into the food preparation area for the redoubt. Kane stepped through, feet shushing in the water that flowed in ripples from room to room.
Like the rest of the redoubt, the food preparation area was in darkness—but this only drew attention to the single green light that was located on a far wall. The light seemed bright in Kane’s night-vision glasses, burning like a miniature sun at the back of the room.
He paced forward, walking toward the light, Brigid Baptiste hanging back inside the doorway to the room. The light was knuckle small and square and it was affixed to the wall on a metal plate, molded into it as part of the design. Kane had seen one like it before, recalled it from the Cerberus redoubt, but it still took Kane a moment to recognize what it was; an activation light for a refrigeration unit.
The fridge was still in use. Kane was amazed. It didn’t seem normal, not when everything else was broken and shut down the way it was.
But the smell was coming from the fridge, a sickly smell up close, like rotting fruit—or meat.
Reaching for the chrome-plated handle to the refrigeration unit, Kane pulled at the door, feeling that familiar heavy weight as the seal broke to allow freezing air to escape.
It was cold in there, ice-cold, and a brilliant light came on as the door was pulled back.
Inside, three human bodies hung upside down like cured meats. Three familiar human bodies: Edwards, Sinclair and Domi.
Chapter 23
Kane drew a sharp intake of breath as the bodies gradually rotated in the breeze he had created when he pulled the door open.
“Edwards? Domi?” Kane whispered. “Sinclair?”
His breath hung in a cloud in the wake of his whispered words, dissipating slowly like mist on the wind.
The bodies had been hung from hooks by chains that had been cuffed to their ankles. The result left them swinging with their arms hanging down so that their fingertips remained just above the floor.
Domi’s face turned to face him first, and Kane saw that her eyes were closed. There was blood on both of her legs and across her belly, a cut on her arm. The others had suffered similarly, Kane saw, his gaze flicking from one figure to the next to the next, trying to process everything with the emotionless clarity of the Magistrate.
Kane took a step into the room, seeing other things hanging behind these three, some people, some animals, mutated things he did not even have a name for. It was a walk-in refrigerator, designed to store food enough for all the personnel who might be stationed at a redoubt of this size. Some of the figures were incomplete, people with arms and legs missing, chunks of their torso removed...eaten? There were shelves along the walls, more shelving units to the rear of the room, with white tiled floors and ceiling and walls.
“What happened to you?” Kane whispered, reaching gently for Domi where she hung like the Hanged Man on the Tarot Card. The smell he had detected earlier was coming from her, or at least from the room, the sickly sweet smell of meat decomposing. He was standing in a meat locker, a vast meat locker where people were stored before...
Before what?
Kane could imagine some things—strange rituals, cannibalism. He had witnessed some truly disturbing behavior during his lifetime as a Magistrate and a Cerberus operative. His eyes flicked for a moment to the other bodies in the room, human and animal, the ones with pieces missing, neatly sawn off while the rest of the meat was left to hang and to twist.
Sickened, he stepped from the refrigerator and made his way through the kitchen area and out into the canteen, leaving the refrigerator’s door open behind him. “Baptiste,” he called, keeping his voice low. “You need to see this.”
Brigid was leaning against a table at the far end of the room, close to the entrance, her TP-9 held ready in a steady grip. “What is it?” she asked without turning her head.
“I’ve found CAT Beta,” Kane said.
* * *
WAITING AT THE FAR end of the corridor, Grant had heard the sudden noise of a motor at about the same time that Brigid had disappeared through the canteen doorway after Kane. He turned, searching for the source of the noise, the Copperhead ready in one hand while the other still clutched Domi’s knife.
It was the elevator, he realized after a moment. The damn thing was working, or it sounded as if it was—the whirring was coming from the shaft.
Grant quietly paced across to the elevator, its doors sealed, glancing just once behind him to make sure nothing was coming from the motor pool.
Then he pressed his ear to the doors, listening to the sound. It was definitely coming from the shaft, a faint humming that echoed up its enclosed length as the elevator ascended. He might not have even noticed it had the redoubt not been so deathly quiet up until now.
* * *
BRIGID JOINED KANE in the kitchen area, staring into the walk-in refrigeration unit.
Brigid crossed the tiled room and pressed her hand to Domi’s face, feeling the icy chill. “They’re frozen,” she stated.
“Yeah,” Kane agreed. “We need to get them down from there and get everyone out of here.”
Brigid pushed a stray lock of red-gold hair from her face, frowning with concern. “What are they doing here?” she asked. “How did they get here?”
“Something got them,” Kane explained. “See the wounds—” he pointed “—here and here. Something in this redoubt attacked them.”
“But why hold them here?” Brigid asked.
“Prison,” Kane said, “or food store. Look around you. I suspect the latter.”
Brigid’s eyes flicked to the corners of the room, took in the state of the carcasses hanging from the ceiling hooks. “Damn,” she muttered. “This is sick, Kane. Sick.”
Kane grasped the chain from which Domi was suspended, pulling it closer and causing her body to sway where it hung. “Let’s just get them down.”
As he spoke, Grant’s voice hissed from somewhere just beyond the threshold of the kitchen, calling to Kane and Brigid in a low tone.
“Guys, we’ve got company. Nasty company.”
* * *
LESS THAN A minute earlier, Grant had stepped away from the elevator and considered calling for Kane and Brigid to join him before realizing there would not be time. Swiftly, he trotted backward down the corridor, keeping his gun pointed at the elevator doors as he skipped to the open doorway where he had seen Brigid and Kane disappear.
He had almost reached it when the sound came to an abrupt halt, accompanied by a thump like a drumbeat in an echoing hall. A moment later, the twin doors to the elevator began to part, flooding light into the waterlogged corridor. The light flooded across the darkness, casting a widening rectangle of luminescence across the floor where it spilled. And framed in that widening rectangle were two silhouettes.
One was a low, boxy shape with a head—someone in a wheelchair, Grant realized.
The other was a tall and broad-shouldered humanoid figure with the added protrusion of a thick, serpentine tail. Annunaki.
Grant ducked into the open doorway to the cafeteria just as the figure emerged from the elevator, glancing behind him to see who was in the room.
It was empty, but there was a light—showing as a firework glare on his night lenses—emanating from another open doorway in the farthest corner of the room. The doorway was located beside a serving hatch, two long, twenty-four-seater tables between it and Grant.
“Guys, we’ve got company,” Grant hissed, hurrying back toward the illuminated doorway. “Nasty company.”
* * *
KI HAD AWOKEN feeling ravenous.
She emerged from the elevator with Papa Hurbon at her side, ducking the frame as she strode into the waterlogged corridor. Hurbon followed, wheeling forward with his hands on the rims of his chair’s wheels, pushing with a little effort against the water that slowed his progress.
It was dark here, dark as pitch beyond the little rectangle of light cast by the open doors to the elevator. Hurbon stopped just beyond the lip of the elevator doors, reached into his bag for a candle.
Despite the darkness, Ki saw everything in vibrant tones through her reptilian eyes, well beyond the reach of the rectangle of illumination spilling from the elevator cage.
Behind her, Hurbon lit his candle, casting a tiny circle of flickering light around himself. He watched in awe as Ki walked forward. She was magnificent, graceful and sleek, a sight to behold.
Ki was older than most Annunaki, mother to Enlil and his fractious siblings. She was considered the first female of the Annunaki, who had walked the Earth with her brother and consort, Anu, long before the family had arrived. Anu had loved her so much that he had named the planet after her, dedicating it to her as a lover’s gift.
She stood reborn, eight feet in height, naked, her scaled skin like armor plate rippling across the muscles of her newly reborn body. Her scales were luminous blue, the color of the ocean in sunlight, almost translucent in its purity. A great spiny crest protruded from her skull, seven sharp spikes poking in a radiant circle that began roughly two inches above her brow. Beneath those pointed spines, her heavy brow protruded down to her eyes, which were the brilliant, deep orange of sunset in the tropics, and beneath that her face was almost flat, her mouth a cruel slash across the scaled skin.
Her body was muscular, and each step she took gave the impression of a giant moving with a heaviness and determined balance to every stride. Behind her, a prehensile tail swished and curled, wrapping itself momentarily around her left leg before unlooping and swinging free once again, assisting her balance as she strode down the corridor in search of the apekin meal located close by.
Ki was reborn, walking on Earth for the first time in millennia. Ki was reborn and she was hungry.
And if she had any inkling that she had once been Nathalie, had once worked with and admired Papa Hurbon, houngan of the Louisiana société, then that thought had been lost once the transformation had taken hold. That transformation had burned through the organic building blocks that the woman’s shell had provided, using them like fuel to create this majestic and graceful creature.
“This way,” Hurbon urged, casting the light of the candle ahead of him as he wheeled through the water, leaving twin trails of water in his wake. Ki remained a few paces ahead, hungry for food and for experience, new experience after all those millennia locked away as a sliver of DNA coding.
* * *
“TWO OF THEM, I think,” Grant explained from the doorway to the kitchens as he slipped Domi’s knife into his belt. “Only saw their shadows. One’s in a wheelchair, the other looks Annunaki.”
“The wheelchair will be Papa Hurbon,” Brigid said.
Kane shot her a sideways glance. “You’re jumping to conclusions,” he said, warningly.
“Fits the facts,” Brigid insisted. “Location and the voodoo ephemera. If I’m wrong, I owe you a meal.”
Grant hurried back to the cafeteria doorway, hefting the Copperhead in both hands. He had put the rifle down—its weight would only slow him here and its long-range advantages became hindrances in close quarters. He could see flickering light emanating from the open doorway, getting slowly brighter as it moved closer. He could hear the splash of water, too, as whoever it was drew near.
Kane and Brigid followed, moving swiftly out of the food-preparation area and into the cafeteria. As Kane emerged from the kitchens, the first figure came through the open doorway at the far end, beyond the two long tables laid out with their sad, skeletal occupants.
The Annunaki stood in the doorway, her skin an almost luminous blue in the flicker of the candlelight that followed. Grant raised his Copperhead, aiming through the laser sight. The Annunaki turned its head, glaring at him with a piercing stare. It had seen him.
“Apekin,” the Annunaki spat in a mellifluous duotonal voice that sounded as if it were being spoken through a spirit flute. “I’ve been waiting for a hot meal longer than your feeble mind can comprehend.”
“Hot meal?” Grant growled in response. “Try hot lead!” He raised the barrel of his Copperhead a half inch, squeezed the trigger and sent a bullet just over the Annunaki’s head.
At that moment, Papa Hurbon wheeled himself to the doorway, just as Grant’s bullet streaked past in a whistle of parting air. “What th—?” he began, dodging back so swiftly that he almost tipped.
; “Hurbon!” Kane called, recognizing the wheelchair-bound houngan where he was framed in his night-lensed vision. “What’s going on here? What did you do?”
Hurbon wheeled himself away from the doorway in retreat, rapidly disappearing from view.
As Hurbon wheeled back, the blue-scaled Annunaki leaped at Grant, clambering over the furniture in the room with bared teeth.
It was so on!
Chapter 24
Grant squeezed the Copperhead’s trigger, sending a swift burst of fire toward the approaching Annunaki as she rushed toward him. A line of 4.85 mm steel-jacketed slugs spit from the subgun’s muzzle, striking against the Annunaki’s hard skin with momentary flares of metal on armored flesh. The Annunaki ignored them, kept coming for Grant with her arms reaching forward.
Grant ducked as the first grasping hand reached for him, fired again sending a second burst of bullets at the reptilian creature. Once again the bullets struck uselessly against her shell, dancing away in lethal ricochets.
Behind Grant, Kane and Brigid were providing covering fire, splitting up as they directed a cross fire of bullets at the reborn Annunaki.
“Who is that?” Kane shouted over the loud reports of gunfire.
Brigid, whose eidetic memory made her the expert on such matters, cursed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “No one I’ve ever seen before.”
Kane held down the trigger of his Sin Eater, launching a cluster of 9 mm bullets across the room at the blue-scaled Annunaki as she reached again for Grant’s neck. “Fair enough,” he growled. “Appreciate there aren’t many photos of the Annunaki, what with them first being here however many millenniums ago it was!”
“Millennia,” Brigid corrected automatically, her own blaster sending bullet after bullet at the Annunaki figure as she scrambled across the room. “Kane—someone needs to go after Papa Hurbon! He’s tied into this somehow, and if he has one pet Annunaki, then chances are he could have another!”
