Judgment Plague

by James Axler

  Brigid rose and tried the door, then stepped into the building.

  * * *

  THE MAN STAGGERED unsteadily toward Grant, black drool dribbling from his lips.

  “Can you speak?” Grant asked.

  Three lurching steps. Four. Five. Six.

  The man was two feet away from Grant now. His head moved slowly, as if it weighed too much for his neck, and he peered up through squinted eyes turned black with the gunk inside him. Dark spittle lined the man’s mouth.

  He reached for Grant, grabbing the left lapel of his coat and using him for balance as he drew closer.

  “It’s okay, man,” Grant said, trying to calm him. “I’m not here to hurt you, just to talk.”

  The man groaned again, then hacked up a gob of blackness onto Grant’s coat.

  “Hey, whoa!” Grant ordered. He had been spit at before; it was an occupational hazard back when he was a magistrate doing pedestrian pit patrol in the Tartarus Pits.

  The man’s grip tightened on Grant’s lapel and he raised his head, staring at him through those dark orbs. Spittle glistened around his lips and he began to hack again.

  * * *

  AS THE GIRL leaped at him, Kane brought his arms up, swatting at her even as she reached for his face.

  The rebreather, he realized. She was trying to remove the rebreather.

  Kane shoved the woman away as she grabbed the device, and she staggered back, her grip freed. Kane’s left hand went to the mask to make sure it was still secure over his mouth and nostrils. It was.

  The woman lay against the wall in a tangle of limbs, a low moaning issuing from her throat as she watched Kane through her unwashed bangs. Her head sagged back and she slumped, as if the life had gone out of her.

  She had tried to kiss him, Kane realized—twice. Contact—that had to be the key. Transmission through the mixing of bodily fluids, passing the black tears between victims.

  “Grant, Baptiste!” Kane commanded, after activating his commtact. “Put your rebreathers on, right now. Got a...plague carrier here along with three dead victims. I think it may be passed by saliva.”

  * * *

  OUT IN THE STREET, the dark-eyed figure who had clutched Grant’s lapel aimed a gob of spit into his face. Grant shoved him back, wiping the spittle from his cheek. As he did so, Kane’s warning came through over the commtact. Grant reached into his pocket for his rebreather unit—and stopped. It wasn’t there! He had shared the rebreather with Brigid when they had been forced to swim through the submerged levels of the redoubt, he recalled. She must have been the last one using it, and had pocketed it without thinking.

  The figure in the ragged clothes had stumbled back, and stood like a puppet with a string cut, barely retaining balance.

  “Do that again and I’ll shoot you,” Grant warned, bringing up his right hand and commanding the sin eater to appear from its hiding place in the wrist holster.

  The dead-eyed man swayed uncomfortably, watching Grant through those empty orbs. It was like watching a stalk of corn swaying back and forth in the breeze, barely keeping upright.

  Grant stepped away from the man, eyed the distance where the SandCat had been heading. It had disappeared from view, obscured by the rolling landscape beyond the ville limits. Dammit.

  * * *

  HEEDING KANE’S WARNING, Brigid slipped the rebreather over her face as she entered the building, stepping straight into the room with the circle of chairs. An eerie silence greeted her.

  It was a drinking establishment of some kind, or at least it had been, with a bar taking up the majority of one wall, bottles lined up behind it. Most of the bottles were empty, some missing, some smashed.

  At first glance she thought the floor had been painted black. But when she looked more carefully, Brigid saw that the blackness was glistening, and it felt tacky underfoot, a congealing liquid ooze.

  The tables had been pushed back to the sides of the room, allowing space for the large circle of chairs that had been set out. There were over twenty chairs in all, each one occupied, with even more pushed back near the rear of the room in an abbreviated second row that ran in a quarter circle. No one moved. More people lay on the floor, as if they had fallen there and couldn’t get up.

  “Anyone alive?” Brigid asked, gazing around the room.

  No one answered. Her words merely echoed in the silence for a moment.

  Brigid paced across the room to the circle of chairs, peering behind her as she realized more people were propped against the walls there, slumped over, blackness on their faces, trailing down from their eyes and nostrils and mouths.

  The people in the chairs were the same, sunken faces smeared in black, pools of it congealed on their clothes, settling in their laps and running down the legs of the chairs to feed the mess that painted the floor. It was a kind of infection, she guessed, eating away at the citizens of this ville. Where it came from and how it had killed so many, she couldn’t begin to fathom.

  * * *

  THE TEAM REGROUPED thirty minutes later, discussing their findings over the commtacts before they met up.

  Kane had left the woman in the house. He had considered killing her out of mercy, but decided against it. Based on the evidence he had seen, she would die soon enough, ravaged by whatever black assault had taken her family and was eating through her body. Her desire to contact him, to kiss him, preyed on his mind, though, and he wondered if leaving her alive might be creating problems in the longer term. He locked the house up, breaking down a wooden shed he found in the backyard and using it to board up the doors and windows, locking the diseased woman inside.

  Grant’s would-be dance partner had sagged in the street and just sat there, legs splayed out before him, rocking back and forth with a line of jet-black drool seeping over his bottom lip. He seemed completely unaware of Grant now, lost in the end stage of the mysterious infection.

  Brigid told the two men of the saloon with the corpses, and Grant confirmed that the same scene was repeated right across the ville, dead bodies slumped in rooms and doorways, two lying on sun loungers in their overgrown backyard, faces obscured by the black smear.

  “You think the mags had something to do with this?” Grant asked as the trio strode past the last buildings of the ville.

  “They were here,” Kane said. “That’s all we know just now. But if it’s manmade...”

  “Why would they kill the population of a little place like this?” Brigid asked, shaking her head. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s simply not their style.”

  “Baptiste’s right,” Kane confirmed. “Mags come down pretty hard on lawbreakers, and we...” He stopped, corrected himself. “They’ll track a perp to the ends of the Earth if they’re considered a high enough threat. But poisoning a community—that’s not policy.”

  Grant turned back, eyeing the ville with its single road. A hand-carved sign had been nailed to a post at the edge of the ville: Freeville, a Place Where Barons Can Go to Hell.

  Reading the sign, Kane grimaced. “Lotta hate for the barons and what they did to normal folk,” he said.

  “Lotta hate for the magistrates who enforced their laws, too,” Grant reminded him grimly.

  They were all thinking the same thing—that maybe what they had found here had been done as punishment, after all, for a community that defied baronial law.

  Chapter 8

  Sitting at a desk in the Cerberus operations room, Brewster Philboyd worked the computer software with practiced ease, bringing up a live satellite surveillance feed on the monitor before him.

  The control room was a large area bubbling with the murmur of people working. The room was made up of twin rows of monitoring desks, twenty in all, each with its own computer terminal. Roughly one-half of the desks were currently manned, the on-call team in the mid
dle of an eight-hour shift. The room was lit by soft overhead lights that complemented the glow of the computer terminals, and desk lamps were switched on here and there as personnel worked at their own designated projects.

  One corner of the room led into the mat-trans chamber, its armaglass a tan-brown color. The far wall was dominated by a Mercator map marked with colorful lines that showed the many available pathways of the mat-trans network, in the style of a twenty-first-century map of an airline’s flight routes.

  Philboyd sat at one of the terminals, operating a trackball to bring the satellite feed where Brigid had indicated in her recent communication. Brewster Philboyd was a tall man with dirty-blond hair, a high forehead and acne-scarred cheeks. He wore black-framed glasses, behind which his eyes were fixed on the screen, searching for details in the Sonoran Desert. Like the other personnel on shift, he wore a white jumpsuit bisected by a blue zipper up the front.

  As Philboyd worked, Mohandas Lakesh Singh paced over, a worried frown on his face. Lakesh was of medium height, with an aquiline nose and refined mouth. His glossy black hair was swept back from his face, a sprinkling of white showing at the temples and sides. In contrast to his dusky skin, he had penetrating blue eyes that were alert to every detail. Though he looked to be in his fifties, Lakesh was far older than that—two hundred years older, in fact. Through a combination of cryogenic freezing and organ transplant, he had survived from the middle of the twentieth century all the way through to the twenty-third, where he now functioned as the founder and head of the Cerberus organization. Lakesh was not alone in his strange relationship to the years—the Cerberus redoubt was staffed by a large number of cryogenic “freezies” who had been discovered on the Manitius Moon Base, having been placed in cryogenic stasis by the military at the turn of the twenty-first century.

  “How is it looking?” Lakesh asked briskly, sidling up to Philboyd’s terminal.

  Brewster nodded, using his cursor to indicate the tiny moving shadow on the expanse of red-tinted earth showing on the satellite feed. “Our boy’s moving. He’s roughly two miles out from the location of CAT Alpha,” Philboyd explained, using the official designation that had been assigned to Kane’s exploration team. “Making slow progress over the terrain.”

  Lakesh peered at the screen and nodded. “Keep on him,” he directed. “Let me know if there’s any change.”

  Lakesh thrived in his role of desk jockey to the brave explorers dispatched from the safety of the Cerberus headquarters. The redoubt was built into one of the mountains in the Bitterroot Range, well hidden from view. It occupied an ancient military complex that had been forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a peculiar mythology had grown up around the mountains with their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated; the nearest settlement could be found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

  The redoubt was manned by a full complement of staff, over fifty in total, many of whom were experts in their chosen field of scientific study. Lakesh himself was a physics genius, and had been crucial in the development of the mat-trans system two centuries ago—a means of transportation that his team still relied upon all these years later.

  Two orbiting satellites provided much of the empirical data for the Cerberus team. Gaining access to the satellites had taken long man-hours of intense trial-and-error work by many of the top scientists on hand at the mountain base. Now the Cerberus staff could access live feeds from the orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat, using concealed uplinks that were tucked beneath camouflage netting, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountain range. This arrangement offered a near limitless stream of feed data and provided near-instantaneous communication with field teams across the globe.

  Just now, Philboyd was using the Vela-class satellite to track the mysterious SandCat that Kane’s team had spotted. He watched as it bumped over the scrubland beyond the ville limits, making its way west. Philboyd continued to watch for several minutes, calculating the vehicle’s speed using a tracking program. It was making slow progress, as the terrain made for rough going.

  Eventually the SandCat stopped, having traveled just four miles from where it had first been spotted. Philboyd tapped his fingers on the side of his desk in anticipation, watching the distant overhead view of the vehicle as it waited in place.

  “It’s stopped,” he announced, peering over his shoulder to Lakesh’s desk, which was located at the rear of the large control room.

  “I’ll be right there,” Lakesh said, and made his way across the room between the rows of desks. Once there, he studied the image on-screen. The SandCat—showing as little more than a tiny rectangle of black against the reddish soil—was no longer moving. However, there was nothing noteworthy around it. The shadows of ridges and a few cactuses showed in smears of gray-black, but otherwise the terrain was dead.

  “How long has it been stopped like this?” Lakesh questioned.

  “A little over two minutes,” Philboyd answered, checking the clock that showed in the corner of his computer screen.

  “Did you see any movement?” he queried. “Did anyone leave the cab?”

  Philboyd shook his head, not taking his eyes from the screen. “The resolution’s not good enough. Weather report shows some clouds in the sky, not enough to block our view entirely, but enough to blot the image. I can’t get any tighter in.”

  Lakesh breathed heavily through his nose as he weighed the problem. “Get a map overlay. Let’s see what’s around there, past and present.”

  Philboyd nodded, typing the request into his computer terminal. A moment later, a detailed map of the terrain appeared over the satellite image, although it added little insight into what was, in essence, untouched desert.

  Philboyd continued tapping his keys until a second layer of detail was added to the first, and then a third and a fourth. On and on he worked, drawing more information from the historical records stored in the Cerberus database.

  “This is interesting,” he said as a new layer showed on screen. A blocky compound appeared close to the position of the SandCat, encompassing 120 square feet. “There was a military facility based there in the year 2000.”

  “What information do you have about it?” Lakesh asked eagerly.

  “It was underground, presumably a bomb test site or research center of some sort,” Philboyd summarized after reading the scant detail provided by the file he had tapped into.

  Lakesh nodded. “Is it still there?”

  “I can’t see anything to specifically state that it was deconstructed,” Philboyd said. “May have been a victim to the nuclear devastation, of course.”

  Lakesh pondered this for a few seconds. “An underground facility like that would stand a reasonable chance of survival, however, barring a direct strike.”

  “Do you think it’s still there?” Philboyd asked.

  “I think it bears investigation, good friend,” he replied.

  Brewster Philboyd activated his commtact link, relaying the information to Kane and his team.

  Chapter 9

  The room had been left almost entirely in darkness, lit only by floor lights to guide an individual’s way, and by the vast bank of monitors that covered a whole wall. A lone figure sat in the sole chair in the room, gazing at the different monitor displays. He wore a long coat with the red shield of a Cobaltville Magistrate at his breast, gloves and a helmet with a faceplate that hid his features. DePaul was used to the uniform, so he had no desire to remove it while he conducted his studies.

  He had returned to the ops room to finish the analysis, and he sat now before the vast bank of monitor screens, six tall and ten across, each sc
reen showing a different aspect of the test.

  The test had been an unqualified success. Barely a single lawbreaker had been left alive, and those that had survived this long were close to death now, hardly more than walking shadows, their insides rebelling, the way they had opposed the law in life. Ten days had been enough to kill almost all of them, so this last week was just mop up.

  Behind his faceplate, DePaul smiled.

  The analysis data ran across the monitor bank, picking out new insights, comparing data with previous results, extrapolating projected outcomes based on sliding time scales for optimum results. DePaul’s eyes glazed over as the data flickered past, his mind drifting back to a decade before, when he had been a rookie magistrate in Cobaltville.

  Ten years earlier

  DEPAUL LAY IN the bed, his eyes open, gazing out the window that looked into the hospital room. The skin on his arms was itching and his face burned hot as a newly boiled kettle. He ignored the heat, resisting the urge to scratch at it or rub it; as a magistrate-in-training, he must show absolute discipline if he was to graduate.

  He was on Cappa Level of the Administrative Monolith, which dominated the ville like a proud sentinel, its single red orb like an eye watching over the citizens who lived there. Beside the admin block were the smaller towers of the four Enclaves, joined by pedestrian bridges and running almost like steps away from that towering center, dropping below the height of the window ledge as they continued on to the bluffs and the sublevels, and from there to the walls of the ville.

  DePaul envied them. He, too, wanted to be out there, watching over the streets, able to roam to the edge of the walls where Baron Cobalt’s strict rule remained tight and absolute.

  Outside of those walls, the real lawlessness began.

  Sure, there were perps within Cobaltville—DePaul had collared more than a few in his brief time on active duty, partnered with Irons as the older mag showed him the ropes. But it was nothing like the hell festering beyond the walls, where mutants still walked free, and mutie farms like the one he and Irons and Bellevue had broken up last week sprang up with little fear of recourse.