Apocalypse Unseen

by James Axler

  “It only goes down,” Kane said.

  “Yes, I remember,” Brigid said, nodding. She had used this elevator once before, as an exit from the laboratory that was located close by. Brigid never forgot anything.

  Kane marched away from the elevator, down the wide corridor and into the motor pool, urging Brigid to stay back. At the doorway to the motor pool he stopped, surveying the waterlogged expanse for any sign of Grant or anyone else. There was no one, just the still-life image of sinking jeeps and rusted trucks, the bones of dead things drifting slowly in the water.

  Kane turned back, joining Brigid at the elevator doors.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  Kane shook his head. “Let’s go explore,” he said, reaching for the heavy fire door that led to the stairwell. “I have a feeling Grant’s going to need our help before all this is done with.”

  Together, the two warriors stepped into the stairwell and began trotting down its water-slick steps, heading for level BO55.

  * * *

  STANDING TO ONE SIDE of the doorway, Grant reached for the scarlet curtain with his left hand, his right thrusting the Sin Eater pistol out before him. Gently, he moved the drape a fraction of an inch, alert to an ambush or the sound of movement.

  Nothing happened, and Grant let the curtain slip back to where it had been before.

  Then, using the barrel of the Sin Eater, Grant pushed the bloodred drape again, shoving it swiftly aside.

  The movement was met with the loud boom of a shotgun coupled with a wad of shot which cut through the swishing curtain before peppering the wall behind Grant in a radial smudge. Grant withdrew his Sin Eater even as the other weapon discharged.

  Immediately after, the world seemed to drop into an incredible silence. Grant pressed his back hard against the wall.

  “You try that again and I’ll shoot you,” Grant shouted. “Now put the weapon down.”

  “You think I’m afraid of you, Mr. Grant?” Hurbon shouted in reply from his hiding place behind the red drape.

  “Don’t matter to me either way, friend,” Grant told him. “Just put that hog leg down before things get any messier than they already are.” He was a Magistrate now in his heart—a Mag dealing with a psychotic who needed to be disarmed. Funny how all that training came back to Grant when he really needed it, when the situation demanded it. Mags knew how to survive; his life was testament to that.

  Grant waited, hoping that Hurbon would see reason. He gave him a few seconds to consider the proposition, then shouted again. “Look at it this way. You can keep running, keep hiding. Maybe you’ll get a lucky shot in, maybe not. But your soldiers are dead, your pet monster’s being dealt with, and there are three of us against the one of you. An’ that’s without factoring in our reinforcements.”

  “You think I’ll run away?” Hurbon asked, a note of incredulity in his tone. “A man without legs don’t run.”

  * * *

  AT THE END of the corridor, unnoticed by Grant, the door to the stairwell opened again. Kane stealthily edged out from behind the frame, keeping his movements silent, scanning the corridor for signs of attack. As he did so, Grant made his move.

  * * *

  GRANT SWEPT THE RED curtain aside with his left hand, bringing his Sin Eater around with his right, entering the room sideways to make a smaller target.

  He was met with the blast of a shotgun, loud in the confines of the small room of eccentricities, trinkets and charms, bones and swords and herbs in jars, all arranged in such a way as to create a kind of symmetry. Hurbon sat in the middle of the room, still in his wheelchair, resting the double-barreled shotgun across his lap where the blanket disguised his missing legs.

  The first blast struck Grant in his side, clipping his left flank with such force that his own shot, fired at the moment he parted the curtain, was thrown off target.

  Grant had made the decision out of necessity, to enter the djévo room and try to stop Hurbon. Hurbon would hide and fight until he was put down, the same as he had before. Who knew what the man had hidden in here, what he planned to use in his deranged quest to control the world or to destroy it?

  Hurbon had played them the last time they had been here, worked his own agenda even as he gave the appearance of cooperating with them. While the Cerberus warriors had toiled to protect the world, Hurbon had been making his own plans, ones fueled by greed and selfishness.

  Grant’s first shot careened into a glass jar located on a freestanding shelf on the back wall. The jar shattered, spewing its contents—goose feathers—in all directions.

  Hurbon retargeted in that instant, firing again, and this time catching Grant full in the torso. The shadow suit took some of the edge off, not much but some, and still Grant was flipped off his feet with the impact, head and shoulders lurching forward even as his legs went out from under him.

  Grant slammed against the floor, jaw striking with a loud crunch that seemed to ring in his ears long after the blow itself.

  As Grant drifted in and out of consciousness, Hurbon casually reloaded his shotgun.

  * * *

  IN THE CORRIDOR OUTSIDE, Kane and Brigid could hear the sounds of gunfire. They glanced at one another just once, a shared understanding flicking between them; then they sprinted down the corridor toward the commotion. Better to face it than to hide from it.

  Two strangers lay there in the water-slick corridor, bare chested and clearly unconscious, their bodies strewn at uncomfortable angles where they had fallen. Three feet beyond them was the doorway with the red drape, the wall opposite peppered with shot. As Kane and Brigid approached, they heard a second shotgun blast, and the wall was suddenly riddled with another burst of shot.

  “Stay back,” Kane warned, holding his arm out before Brigid.

  “Grant has to be in there,” Brigid told him. “What do we do?”

  Kane’s gaze switched from the torn drape and ruined wall to the Sin Eater in his hand. “We try not to get shot,” he said, pushing forward.

  Kane shoved the red curtain aside, bringing his Sin Eater to bear as he took in the djévo room where Hurbon was poised above Grant’s fallen body, shotgun in hand.

  Kane fired, and so did Hurbon, the voodoo houngan shifting his aim in an instant from Grant’s head to the newcomer framed in the doorway.

  The first blast sailed past Kane, spreading out as it reached for the swinging curtain before ruining the wall beyond.

  Kane squeezed the Sin Eater’s trigger at the same moment, targeting Hurbon’s belly with a 9 mm bullet. The bullet struck Hurbon’s left forearm where he balanced the shotgun, and Hurbon cried out in pain. Almost immediately, a spray of blood spurt from the wound.

  Hurbon fired again, his second shot just as wild as his first, covering the doorway as Kane came rushing toward him. The wad of shot missed his body, but Kane felt something spike against his left shoulder and suddenly he found himself twisting in midstride, thrown off course by the force of the impact. At the same moment, Hurbon bit down hard on something he had hidden in his mouth, breaking it and swallowing.

  Kane fired again, midstumble, and his bullet went wild, racing past Hurbon’s bullet-shaped head and drilling into a mirror whose surface had been painted black. The mirror shattered in a cascade of breaking glass, shards crashing away from the frame like a waterfall.

  The room was small and windowless, lit by candles. Kane could have reached Hurbon in three strides if the shotgun blast hadn’t clipped him and thrown him sideways. Now Kane seemed to be falling instead, tripping over his own feet as he ran, crashing toward a wall draped with fabric the colors of bruised flesh. He fired again, launching another bullet out into the ether, trying to kill Hurbon as his vision reeled. The bullet went wide.

  Then Kane was on Hurbon, smashing into the man in the wheelchair with the force of a jackhammer, knock
ing over the man, chair and all.

  Hurbon blasted again, reflexively. The shot sprayed out into wall and ceiling, accompanied a moment later by the wispy flutters of shredded material and feathers where the drapes that had lined the wall were rent apart, a glass jar of trinkets exploding.

  Kane had his hand on Hurbon’s arm now, pressing it down to the floor so that the man could not use the shotgun again. Kane was on top of him, part of the awkward tangle of chair and man.

  “Don’t do it,” Kane warned, bringing his Sin Eater around so that it pressed against Hurbon’s skull.

  Hurbon let go of his shotgun, allowing it to roll from his lap. “You’re too late, Kane,” he said, his mouth frothing. “It’s all over now.”

  As Hurbon spoke, Kane saw something change in his face, a kind of blistering across the skin like acid damage.

  “What th—?” Kane spat.

  The blistering moved like a wave, covering Papa Hurbon’s skin in an unmistakable patina. Kane recognized it through his night-vision lenses, seen as a play of shadows in the flickering light of the candlelit room. Hurbon’s skin was changing, turning into scales before his very eyes. Annunaki scales.

  “What have you done?” Kane asked, lifting himself up and backing a little away, holding the Sin Eater against Hurbon’s skull at arm’s length now.

  “Kane, what’s happening?” Brigid asked from the doorway. She stood before the red curtain, holding it aside with one hand, her TP-9 semiautomatic clutched at the ready in the other.

  “It’s Hurbon,” Kane said bewildered. “He did something. I don’t know.”

  “He’s changing,” Brigid realized. “Becoming one of them—the Annunaki.”

  “No, he’s not,” Kane said, depressing the guardless trigger on his Sin Eater.

  Boom!

  Chapter 28

  And, just like that, it was over. The 9 mm parabellum-jacketed bullet from Kane’s blaster drilled through Papa Hurbon’s skull as it began to change, ending the whole sorry saga with a bang.

  In the immediate aftermath, Kane stood like an angel of death over Papa Hurbon as the voodoo priest’s corpulent body sagged to the floor, the ephemeral thing we call life ejected from it in the space of a heartbeat. A hole had appeared on his skull, the left temple missing in a blood-ringed circular wound that went right through into his brain. There—gray matter and blood. Hurbon’s brown eyes were wide in shock and something else...still clinging to that contempt he had felt for others even as he died. Hate was strong, but even it had to die eventually.

  Kane kept his Sin Eater trained on the body as it keeled lifelessly to the deck.

  A second later, Brigid hurried into the room and scooted to the floor beside Grant, checking him for life signs. She had seen Kane shoot people before, had shot people herself, when they had deserved it, when her life had been at stake. But there was something in what she had just seen, the nature of it, like an execution, that felt final and morally ambiguous all at once.

  Grant was breathing, at least. He opened his eyes when Brigid touched his face, the trace of a smile appearing on his lips as if he had simply been woken from slumber. “Did...?” he began, but he was unable to put the question into words.

  “It’s over,” Brigid assured him. “Papa Hurbon’s dead.”

  “I think...” Grant began slowly, “I took...a bullet.”

  “I think you did,” Brigid agreed, checking over Grant’s flank and locating the buckshot that had embedded itself in his side, puckering the shadow suit in its wake. It felt rough where the ruined shadow suit had mingled with the torn skin, the whole thing lubricated with Grant’s blood.

  Kane was still watching the fallen form of Hurbon where he was crumpled on the floor. What had he seen in those last moments? Kane wondered.

  “Baptiste?” Kane asked, his eyes still fixed on Hurbon’s corpse. “You said he was changing, becoming an Annunaki. How is that even possible?”

  Brigid looked up from where she was tending to Grant. “I don’t know,” Brigid said heavily. “We should go. Grant needs medical attention. So do you. So do Domi and Edwards and Sela.”

  Hurbon’s face seemed to be more scaly now, becoming more reptilian as Kane watched. Or was that Kane’s imagination? A trick of the flickering candlelight? Kane was spooked, and he was also coming down from the adrenaline high that had ended in killing a man. But things didn’t seem right—blame it on his point-man sense, but things weren’t how they should be.

  “Kane!” Brigid called, snapping him back to the present. “I said we need to move Grant—”

  “I c’n move,” Grant insisted weakly.

  “Yeah, and the others,” Kane said. “I heard.

  “What was Hurbon doing here?” he pressed without taking breath. “How did he start to change like that?”

  Brigid looked up at Kane, exhaustion on her face. “Organic technology,” she said. “The trademark of the Annunaki. They don’t create, they build on top of, like someone cladding a house. Hurbon must have used something that the Annunaki left.”

  “But what?” Kane asked, turning to Brigid.

  “Kane,” Brigid began, her tone warning.

  “This is important, Baptiste,” Kane insisted. “How did he—?”

  At that moment, the once-dead form of Papa Hurbon moved, reaching for Kane’s ankle and yanking the Cerberus warrior off his feet in a sudden movement.

  Kane shouted with surprise as he found himself flopping across the floor. Then the hand still grasping his ankle threw him against the back wall, beside the shattered mirror, before it let him go. Kane flew the four feet through the air, smashed there in an untidy splay of arms and legs like a rag doll.

  Brigid Baptiste had her TP-9 blaster in her hand in an instant, drawing a bead on Papa Hurbon where he still lay tangled in his toppled wheelchair, trapped beneath it. She squeezed the trigger, sending a 9 mm bullet in Hurbon’s direction without so much as a warning.

  The bullet hit Hurbon in his face—his cruelly scaled face—and stuck there. No pain showed on his grinning expression; no blood came; he just took it, smiling, as if a gnat had flown past and he had barely noticed its buzz.

  Brigid watched wide-eyed as Hurbon’s face seemed to alter. The scales were more pronounced now, their sheen no longer the color of human skin, but taking on a golden hue like honey. The edges of the scales were darker, a greenish color as if they had been dipped in duckweed.

  And there was more, too: Hurbon’s body was growing. Where he had been a double amputee before, now legs were growing, extending, fully formed and double jointed, accompanied by something else—a thick prehensile tail that grew from the base of his spine, tearing his clothes.

  Brigid fired again, sending another bullet at Hurbon’s face, and another and another at his torso, his heart. The bullets pinged against his new skin, hurtling away in all directions.

  “You...were dead,” Brigid spat, confused.

  “I worship Ezili Coeur Noir,” the dead thing that had been Papa Hurbon said in a duotonal voice, “loa of all things dead. Her proximity assures my success and your failure, apekin woman.”

  Ezili Coeur Noir. A voodoo spirit that had been reincarnated through Annunaki technology, forming from corrupted pieces of an Annunaki female called Lilitu. She had had the power to revive the dead and make them her slaves, and everything living that she touched was killed. Brigid, along with Kane and Grant, had helped incarcerate the woman right here, in this redoubt, forcing her component parts into the cold-fusion reactor that had provided power to the underground military complex. And when they had left, Brigid recalled, the lights had still been working—where now they were not.

  Brigid’s mind raced, trying to put the whole messed-up mystery together. If Papa Hurbon had somehow channeled the cold-fusion generator to hold Ezili Coeur Noir in one place,
despite her dispersal, he could, conceivably, have held enough of her together to keep a level of consciousness operating. Even if it meant diverting power away from nonessential things, like lighting and ventilation. The elevator would have had to remain, of course—a man in a wheelchair needed that more than he needed light. And the refrigerator—cold storage food for the newborn gods.

  The cold-fusion generator was nearby, Brigid remembered, on this floor. Close enough, maybe, to affect the status of things living and dead here.

  Brigid fired again, scrambling back out of the room, through the scarlet curtain, its material pocked with holes where the shotgun had been discharged against it. Behind her, Papa Hurbon—or the thing he was rapidly becoming—shoved himself out of the tangle of the wheelchair, looming up on two muscular legs to a height of nine feet, head to toe. He bellowed an angry howl as Brigid’s bullet struck, flicking at his torso where the bullet failed to leave a mark.

  He was not Papa Hurbon now. Hurbon had been snorting the powdered bones of Tiamat the dragon ship for nine months, ever since Nathalie had come to him with her find. But that gestation period had needed something more, the fleck of tooth he had hidden in a gap in his own teeth, its substance carefully lanced over and over with a nail and hammer until it had been porous enough to break when he had bitten down on it. Now, the genetic download was running its course, and where Papa Hurbon had been, his body bent and crippled, now stood the first monster, the one who had come to Earth all those millennia ago—Anu.

  Anu had arrived in a starship the last time, when he had discovered Earth and treated it as his own personal laboratory, its inhabitants nothing more than fodder for his experiments. This time he arrived via memory download, the genetic imprint of mind and body coded into every circuit, every cell of the dragon ship Tiamat. If Papa Hurbon had thought he could control this thing, this deific metamorphosis, then he had been an arrogant fool. Anu was Anu; nothing else could inhabit the space where he existed.

  * * *