Judgment Plague

by James Axler

  DePaul reached idly for his right forearm with his left hand, playing the stubs of his nails across the burning skin there, picking at the scabs.

  “Now, now, son,” a familiar voice said from the doorway, “you want to keep your hands to yourself.”

  DePaul looked up, willing the embarrassed blush that threatened to rise to his cheeks to dissipate. Standing in the doorway was Salvo, unit commander of the magistrates, with ultimate authority over rookies like DePaul. Salvo was a broad-shouldered man in his early thirties, sallow faced, with dark hair cropped close to his skull and showing threads of gray. He wore the uniform of a magistrate, the flexible black armor with the crimson shield over the left breast, black gloves and boots. He held his helmet under his arm like an astronaut waiting to board a rocket. He wasn’t a big man, but he was big enough to instil fear in every rookie who had ever graduated under him.

  DePaul gave a brisk salute, straightening up as he lay in the bed. “Sir, yes sir.”

  Salvo stood just inside the hospital room, his brown-eyed stare fixed on DePaul, almost burrowing into him. “A week away from the job,” he said without emotion. “I don’t know how I’d handle it, rookie. But we all get hit by a bug sometimes. Even the jabs the baron gives us in his benevolence cannot immunise a body against everything.”

  DePaul was struggling to meet his superior’s gaze and hold it, finally did so only by force of will. “I hope to be back on patrol soon, sir,” he said firmly. “If I had my way, I’d be out there right now, enforcing the law.”

  Salvo flashed him a hint of a smile; it was very brief and slightly unsettling. “I’m sure you would, but these things take time and I can’t have a sick man out there on the street, no matter how good he is.”

  “My test scores are the highest in my year, sir,” DePaul said. He was not bragging, merely stating fact.

  “Test scores aren’t the same as experience, boy,” Salvo said, a note of warning in his voice. “Never make that mistake.”

  DePaul nodded once, chastised. “I will get well. I will return to the force and I will bring the law to the masses, the deserving and the undeserving alike. To make this a better world. To stop the rot.”

  Salvo’s eyes narrowed as he gazed past DePaul, out through the window of the recuperation room. “Pleased to hear it, son,” he said absently. “See that you do.”

  With that, the commander turned and left the small room with its single bed and lone occupant. DePaul listened for his booted feet as they crossed the tiled floor outside, making their way to the exit of the medical wing. Alone once more, he cursed the disease that had laid him low, some dirty outlander crap that had got mixed up in his system during that bust out west, when they had broken up the illegal mutie sweat farm.

  It was the radiation that had weakened him, the docs had said, left him susceptible to some airborne strain of disease that had slipped into his lungs and manifested in the red rash that was dancing around on his skin like a Tartarus slut on payday.

  He wanted to be out there, to be catching perps and making Cobaltville safe, but this damned outlander disease had laid him low and left him weak. When he closed his eyes he saw the mutie ranchers, all swagger and poise; felt the sin eater kick in his hand as he blasted them. Watched them drop as they were hit, just like shooting the targets in the rifle range. Every bullet was a line from the law book, a passage delivered straight to the brain, the heart, the gut of those damned lawbreakers.

  He hated them, those lawbreakers. Lying there, incapacitated in the recovery bed with nothing to do but wait, he learned to hate them all.

  * * *

  DEPAUL SNAPPED BACK to the present, watching the stream of data flicker across his multiple screens. The top one showed the sunken-cheeked man reach out to him, then tumble away, groaning in agony and desperation. DePaul had recorded a man in his death throes, the stain smeared across his face, desperation burning in his darkened eyes. The outlander was no longer rational, but was running on some basic instinct. He reached for DePaul, the ragged nails of his dirty hands passing across the camera lens. He wanted to pass the sentence on, wanted to gift it to others. But in his confusion he had mistaken DePaul for another weak lawbreaker, and DePaul was never weak.

  He muted the sound on the screen, watched as the outlander fell to the ground.

  Chapter 10

  Up close, the SandCat looked beat-up.

  Kane, Grant and Brigid had trekked out from Freeville into the unforgiving desert of old Colorado, following the coordinates that Brewster Philboyd had given them over the commtacts. The terrain was unremarkable, one dusty ridge much like another with its cacti and scrubby bushes.

  “Just keep going, one foot after the other,” Grant said as they began putting distance between themselves and the ville of death.

  Brigid was less confident. The thought of marching four miles out in the open desert did not fill her with excitement. “Don’t you two ever get tired?” she asked as she hurried to keep up.

  “Tired doesn’t come into it,” Kane replied, keeping his steel-gray eyes fixed on the distant horizon. “Like Grant says, you keep going and you keep your mind active until you reach your destination. That’s the way Salvo told us, so that’s the way it’s done.”

  Salvo. Brigid had heard the name before. The man was a magistrate and Kane’s genetic twin. He had been Kane and Grant’s superior back when they were magistrates in Cobaltville, had ridden the loose cannon Kane about protocol. The two had even come to blows in an alternative timeline.

  Via satellite surveillance, Philboyd continued watching the enclave where the SandCat had parked, and he advised the Cerberus field crew as they neared the site.

  Kane and his team could see the vehicle from over a mile out, visible as a black box in the distance once they ascended a sandy ridge. It stood out, sharp lines against the pale landscape. Once they could see it they were aware that whoever was onboard could likely see them, too, but they knew that should not be a problem unless they approached it with blasters in their hands. After all, the Outlands was full of nomads and roamers, people who trekked across the spaces between the villes, surviving and making what little they could of their lives. In all likelihood, the approaching figures of Kane, Grant and Brigid would be mistaken for such.

  The SandCat showed no signs of responding as they neared. The twin barrels of the USMG cannon in its bubblelike protrusion remained still.

  “I think it’s empty,” Kane told the others as they came within fifty feet of the vehicle.

  “Seems that way,” Brigid agreed.

  Grant said nothing, just brushed his index finger to his nose once more in the one-percent salute. It was a reminder of the conventions that ruled their lives: odds, ever changing; danger, always lurking.

  There was no road here, just red-gold sand, but there were tire tracks going off in different directions. Grant eyed them a moment. “SandCats,” he confirmed. “One or many?”

  “Two at least,” Brigid replied, pointing to a dark shape that was almost hidden behind the SandCat. The second vehicle was covered with camouflage sheeting so that it blended in with the red-brown terrain, so had not shown up on Philboyd’s satellite scan. It was beat-up like the first, with a damaged door on the driver’s side—bent in with a chunk missing, glass shattered.

  Keeping their distance, Kane and Brigid scanned the parked SandCat, while Grant warily checked on the second. The first vehicle was old and dirty with desert dust, and the caterpillar tracks were worn, with a replacement track—brown where it had once been black—visible over the starboard rear wheels. The magistrate shield—Cobaltville red—was scratched and sprayed with the backwash of sand from its passage across the desert. The SandCat had taken a few strikes here and there, scuffs and dents showing on the ceramic armaglass shell.

  “She’s taken a few hits,” Brigid observed.
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  “That armor’s designed to take small-arms fire,” Kane pointed out. “No magistrate would leave it in that state, but those dents don’t look recent.”

  “I agree,” she said, nodding.

  “Could be stolen,” Grant suggested, joining his companions in their assessment, having checked on the second.

  Brigid flashed him a look of surprise. “From the magistrates? I thought they were infallible.”

  “Lot of stuff ends up in the Outlands,” Kane told her, “even mag stuff that shouldn’t be here. Could be a patrol got jumped.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Does that happen much?”

  “Not officially,” Grant told her, “but there are a lot of people gunning for mags once they leave the ville walls. Sometimes there are incidents.”

  “‘Incidents,’” Brigid repeated, weighing the word. It was an interesting way to phrase what was most likely a massacre of the vehicle’s occupants.

  Philboyd had told them about the underground bunker as they journeyed here. Back at Cerberus, Lakesh and his desk team were still trying to find concrete information about the bunker’s use, hoping he wasn’t sending Kane’s crew into a potentially fatal scenario. However, the most they had come up with was that lab animals had been shipped to the location back in the 1990s, suggesting it may have been a research lab specializing in weaponized diseases.

  “A plague factory,” Brigid had summarised when Lakesh finished reading out from the information he had unearthed.

  The use of the word plague disturbed Kane, given what they had seen back in Freeville. “You think something could have escaped?” he wondered.

  “Two hundred years for a virus to make a jailbreak?” Brigid replied. “That’s asking a lot.”

  But the presence of two SandCats and their users did not bode well, and thoughts were prominent in each of the team’s minds that maybe someone had released something that had spent two centuries in incubation, waiting for its chance to strike.

  “Two SandCats and a hidden base,” Grant summarized. “Could be a magistrate black ops group.”

  “Could be. We’re going to have to go inside,” Kane stated, saying what they were all thinking. “That’s the only place we’ll get to the bottom of this and find out what’s really going on out here.”

  Grant and Brigid agreed, and without more than a few words, the group split up to search for defenses that might be activated if they entered the underground bunker. The entrance was not hidden, but was located close to the SandCat, a few feet from the driver’s door. It looked like a buried pipe standing on its side, the oval opening sunk so that it stood above ground level, but low enough to be mistaken for another mound of sand from a distance.

  After satisfying himself that the SandCat was empty, Kane surveyed the opening, looking for cameras or the stubby protrusions that marked a gun muzzle. He could see a gap above the pipelike entrance, presumably where a camera had once been located, but the hole was empty now, its protective grille bent. Other than that, it appeared clear.

  As Kane examined the door, first Grant, then Brigid returned from their quick recon. “No defenses around,” Grant said. “Just dirt.”

  Brigid nodded in agreement.

  Kane looked pensive. “If this is a mag hangout, then there should be more defenses than a door,” he mused.

  “If it’s a mag hangout,” Brigid said.

  “How’s the door look?” Grant asked.

  “Coded lock.” Kane pointed to a recessed panel holding a numeric keypad. The keypad had a metallic sheen and was set deep in the recess to protect it from the elements.

  Without any further discussion, Brigid reached into a secure pocket on her pant leg and pulled out a small handheld device roughly the size of a pocket calculator. It was sealed in a plastic bag, and once she opened it, sat snugly in the palm of her hand. This was an electronic skeleton key, designed to fire off a series of high-frequency probes to obtain the correct code for an electronic keypad without disturbing it. Brigid held it near the recessed panel and activated the scanning software. Diodes flickered on the face of the unit as it ran through hundreds of different combinations in a fraction of a second.

  “Five-number lock,” she said, staring at the key’s tiny display. “Got it. One-seven-eight-eight-zero.”

  “Zero,” Kane said with a smirk. “I could have guessed it, except that last number.” As he spoke, he tapped the code into the keypad, while the others stepped back. There was always the possibility that the door was booby-trapped, even for someone who knew the code, and that a shutoff would need to be activated within a short period of the door opening. While Brigid and Grant eased away, Kane commanded the sin eater into his hand and pressed the confirm button that would release the lock.

  The metal door drew back on silent runners, revealing a dark corridor that led within.

  Kane stepped inside first, while his partners waited outside for the all clear. The walls were poured concrete, gray and featureless. It was old, too; he got the sense that nothing much had changed in the two hundred years since this facility had been built.

  Kane reached out with his honed senses, trying to locate any possible forms of danger. Nothing came at him. The corridor was just that, strangely quiet after the whistle of the desert wind over the plains.

  A moment’s hesitation, then he took another step forward, making his way warily down the hallway. It was unlit and ran twelve feet in length to where a second door waited. Kane paced to it, six strides in all, and realized that this short tunnel functioned as an airlock. This door was metal, with a clear, reinforced armaglass panel that acted as a window into the next part of the subterranean facility. No keypad was visible here, but when Kane pulled at the handle, the door held tight. He guessed that it would open only when the other one was closed.

  He made his way back up the corridor, explained to his partners waiting there what he was going to do, then shut the exterior door. Overhead lights flickered on as he did so, illuminating the gray-walled corridor.

  Kane went back to the second door and pulled at it. This time the lock gave with an audible electronic tone and the portal swung back. He stepped forward, standing on the threshold. Another corridor waited there, peeling away to his left, with a mat on the floor before his feet. The area was unlit, apart from a dull emergency light located above the door itself and a few specks of illumination coming from the diodes on several computer processors in alcoves. The machines whirred quietly as fans kept them cool.

  Kane stood there for a moment, listening and watching. Nothing came to challenge him. The place felt strangely deserted, but he wondered about the computers. Were they live because someone was using them, or had they been brought to life when he had unsealed the door and entered the facility?

  He turned back, sealed the interior door, then made his way to the outside door, which he opened.

  “Looks clear,” Kane told the others, before waving them into the subterranean corridor.

  A moment later, all three were sealed inside, making their way to the second door, which they entered.

  They stood together in a second corridor, this one at an angle to the first and ending in a wall to their right, meaning they could only proceed to the left. There was emergency-style lighting here, a dim bulb over the door through which they had entered, along with several similar lights boxed in at distant intervals along the way. It lent the space a shadowy, twilight feel. Kane estimated that the corridor stretched twenty-five feet, end to end.

  He sniffed the air. “Recycled,” he said. “Once the door’s closed this place is hermetically sealed.”

  “Makes sense,” Brigid agreed. “You’d want the place sealed tighter than a drum if you were investigating chemical weapons here.

  “You notice how clean this place is?” she continued, running a gloved fingertip over the ed
ge of the door. When she pulled it away it was clean of any dust or debris. “It’s spotless.”

  “Nothing unusual in that,” Kane said. “It’s a science facility, right?”

  “Yeah, but one that, if our records are correct, was abandoned before the nukecaust,” she reminded him. “The SandCat outside implies that someone’s using it now.”

  Kane shrugged and gestured to the floor mat at the door. “Better wipe your feet then,” he said as he proceeded down the corridor.

  Brigid and Grant followed, the bulky ex-magistrate bringing up the rear. Grant looked around suspiciously, thrusting his sin eater out before him. “I don’t like this,” he stated in his low, rumbling voice. “You hear something? A cry, maybe?”

  The trio stopped. Kane cocked his head, listening, but no further sound came. “Nothing. Baptiste?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she admitted, but none of them could be certain if they were just getting jumpy or if Grant had really heard a cry.

  They passed the computer banks and reached the end of the corridor, which branched in a T.

  “So?” Kane asked the others. “Left or right?”

  Before either of his colleagues could reply, they heard a loud animal-like screeching coming from somewhere down the right-hand corridor.

  It seemed that the decision had just been made for them.

  “Told you,” Grant said.

  With a curt nod in that direction, Kane led the Cerberus trio to the right, heading deeper into the underground base, toward the sound of screeching. A moment later they reached a large room.

  Kane entered first, and was greeted by a cacophony of screams and shrieks from the room’s nightmarish residents.