Judgment Plague

by James Axler

  “What th—?” he exclaimed, unable to believe his eyes.

  Chapter 11

  DePaul peered up from his work at the lab bench where the centrifuge was mixing the latest batch of the final judgment. He thought he’d heard something, his old magistrate senses coming alert like a dog’s.

  He stepped away from the bench, listening.

  It was just the sound of his experiments, screaming as they always did.

  He chastised himself for getting twitchy in anticipation. Soon he would pass judgment on Cobaltville as he had on Freeville. Soon three thousand lawbreakers would feel the wrath of his final judgment.

  * * *

  KANE STOPPED SHORT a couple paces inside the open door, staring around. Grant and Brigid waited in the doorway, peering into the room.

  It smelled strongly of disinfectant—so strongly it almost overpowered Kane as the shrieking continued all around him, echoing from the gleaming walls and walkway.

  The room was large and poorly lit, with just two emergency lights placed at either end of the space, one over each door. The lack of illumination helped mask the horrors inside.

  There were thick metal bars arranged vertically along both walls to either side of Kane, leaving a walkway that was only slightly wider than the narrow corridor from which he and his two companions had entered. The bars delineated cages, ten in all, each one little more than seven feet square. The space left just enough room for the people within to lie down on the ragged blankets that had been strewed in each cell.

  People, Kane thought, was a generous term for them.

  Grant stepped back from the door, held a hand over his mouth. “Should we be breathing in here?” he asked. “I mean, look at them.”

  Kane’s eyes worked slowly around the cells. Their inhabitants were in terrible condition, and the only thing occupying one of the cells seemed to be a fleshy torso surrounded by black ooze. “You’re right,” he said. “Probably best we take precautions from here on in.”

  With that, Kane slipped his rebreather back over his face, ensuring that any air he breathed would be filtered before it reached him. Brigid offered the one she still carried to Grant, who shook his head.

  “You keep it,” he said, “but let’s move quick, okay?”

  Kane paced forward, gazing into the cells as the figures shrieked like screamer monkeys, and rattled the bars as they tried to reach for him. The inhabitants were mostly naked, and the bars were cleaned to a mirror shine, showing the marks where their hands touched them.

  The first three looked disabled, their bodies crooked, their spines bent like a snake’s to accommodate new shapes that a human form should never assume. Their flesh was dark, covered in welts and oozing sores, pus glistening on their bare skin. Kane looked at each in turn, wondering if it was male or female. One had matted hair hanging in strands over his? her? face, while the other two were practically hairless, just a few tufts here and there on their scalps, armpits and pubic regions. They looked underfed.

  The next cell contained two smaller figures, possibly children, their skin callused like a scalie. The scale-skins sat on the floor with their arms wrapped around their legs, rocking back and forth and weeping. Even in this light, Kane could see that their tears were infected, having a milky quality to them that tears should never have. He realized something as he stood watching them: their scaled flesh was very similar to the croc muties his team had met with in the redoubt just a few hours before. It seemed too great a similarity to be pure coincidence, and he pointed this out to Brigid and Grant.

  Brigid’s brow furrowed. “What is this place?” she whispered.

  Kane looked at her. “Don’t you know, Baptiste? It’s a lab and these are the rats.”

  “They’re humans...?” Brigid said, sounding uncertain.

  “Were,” Kane corrected, looking back to the cell with the scaled figures within. Around them, the shrieking was dying down, turning back to pained moans and hisses, a symphony of agony as the occupants calmed after the intrusion.

  Brigid checked the cells quickly, then stopped before one with an inmate who still looked mostly human. The figure was standing in the far corner, a little hunched, with emaciated limbs, and a rib cage showing through her flesh. She was a woman, but most of her female attributes had wasted away, leaving only red raw skin showing around brown nipples. Her hair had once been blond, but there were only wisps of it left, long dangling threads that started halfway down her scalp and looped over her shoulders.

  “Hi, I’m not going to hurt you,” Brigid began. “Can you talk?”

  The figure stood rocking, moving her weight from foot to foot.

  “We plan to help you,” Brigid said through the rebreather mask. “Get you out of here. But we need to know—who did this to you?”

  “Was it magistrates?” Kane added, standing beside Brigid.

  Without looking up, the naked figure in the corner of the cell coughed. As she did, a trickle of black liquid sputtered from her mouth, before running down her chin.

  “Please,” Brigid pleaded, “we need as much information as we can get. We want to help.”

  The woman continued to stand there, swaying slightly as she stared at her feet. The people in the cages around the Cerberus warriors were becoming restless again, their moans of agitation getting louder; sharper.

  Kane put his hand on Brigid’s arm. “Come on, Baptiste,” he said, “this isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  She stood for a moment longer, watching the woman in the cell. “I’m so sorry,” Brigid finally muttered, not knowing what else she could say.

  The woman in the cell looked up at the whispered words, and Brigid saw the way her eyes were—a washed-out black, like the people they had met in the ruined town of Freeville. Tears ran down her cheeks from those dark eyes, black tears mixed with the red of blood. Dead tears, Brigid thought.

  Together, the Cerberus warriors trotted through the room of cells, making their way to the distant exit. The cries of anguish followed them. Kane closed his eyes as he left, letting those cries wash over him like waves on a beach. He had heard similar tortured cries of the abused before in his life, too many times to count.

  * * *

  THE ROOM WITH cells opened into another corridor, this one featuring two doors on the left-hand wall and a heavy fire door at the end. Kane and Grant took turns checking the two doors, but when they pushed them open all they discovered were restrooms featuring toilet stalls and sinks, and in the nearest one, two urinals.

  “Boys and girls,” Grant explained as he exited the second.

  The fire door was much heavier, with a swing-back spring so that it would always seal. Kane waited by it, screening out the anguished howls of the prisoners behind them, listening for any sounds coming from beyond. Uncertain, he pushed at the door gently, letting it inch forward. Then he waited warily again, listening once more. He could not be sure what was beyond; the sound of the air conditioning and the cries of the prisoners were making it hard to discern anything.

  Grant saw the uncertainty on his teammate’s face, raised his sin eater and covered the door. Kane nodded and pushed through.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. The room was dark, but there were patches of very bright light—one over a bench or worktop, another coming from what Kane took at first glance to be a wall of brilliance, but was in fact a bank of separate monitor screens, each one showing a different image. There were more lights low to the floor.

  He became aware of a low humming the instant he entered the room. It was a regular sound, the noise of machinery, running beneath the whirring of the air con’s extractor fans.

  A moment later, Kane’s eyes had adjusted and he saw the room properly for the first time. It was some kind of laboratory, high-tech, with no windows, just the monitor screens that lined one wall. The
workbench was lit by a brilliant line of lights that ran around its edge, and atop it an industrial-sized centrifuge spun, near a bubbling concoction in glass tubes and beakers.

  Standing over the bench was a being straight out of a nightmare. Despite its hunched posture, Kane could see that the figure was tall. He guessed it was human, too. It was dressed in a long black coat with a high collar buttoned up to the throat. The garment looked to be armored, with interlocking plates forming a rigid line of shielding across its whole length, and there were strange tubes and pipes connecting to different parts of it. The hem, which almost brushed the floor, was adorned with a shimmering line of beading through which some kind of dark liquid seemed to bubble, giving the whole scene a spectral quality. But there was something else, too—the figure wore a masked helmet that covered its entire face. The mask contained a wide, ten-inch-long and pointed beaklike protrusion where the nose would be, lending the figure a crowlike quality.

  As Kane stood there, still trying to process what he was seeing, the figure at the desk turned its head and stared at him through two perfectly round, glass eyes that reflected the brilliant, blinding white bench lights. Something else caught the light, too: a familiar red shield sewn over the left breast of the coat. That shield was the badge of office for a Cobaltville Magistrate—the same shield Kane and Grant had worn for most of their adult lives.

  “Who are you?” the figure barked, in a voice filtered and enhanced by the strange mask, so that it sounded impossibly deep and alien. It seemed like a poorly edited recording, whatever filter that operated it cutting out any suggestion of breathing. “What are you doing in my clean laboratory?”

  Before Kane could reply, the dark figure began stomping toward him, flicking something at his face from a voluminous bell sleeve.

  Chapter 12

  There was no time to react.

  Subconsciously, Kane heard the release of a catch hidden within the spectral figure’s open sleeve, the same way his sin eater was hidden in its wrist holster; saw the flash as something shot across the room toward his face. That something was a jet of liquid; dark or colorless, he couldn’t tell which, because it was lost in shadow; only the highlights glistened like a laser beam as they caught the illumination from the workbench. The liquid had a smell, too, a kind of acrid, chemical stench like an oil refinery or a burning tire, though Kane couldn’t tell exactly what through the rebreather mask.

  All this he absorbed in a fraction of a second as the hidden nozzle spit its contents across the room toward him.

  As it blasted toward his face like water from a fire hose, Kane felt something strike him from behind—hard—and he went toppling to the floor, even as the stream of foul-smelling liquid hurtled past the spot where he had been standing.

  Kane slammed into the floor with a bone-jarring crash, his breath huffing out of him, a gush of liquid lashing against the floor behind him like the strike of a whip. Above him, Grant was tumbling over and away, grunting with the effort as he forced Kane aside after a split-second decision.

  Thanks to his teammate’s quick thinking, the unknown liquid had mostly missed him. However, as Grant got up from the floor, Kane could see a stream of the glistening liquid running down the left breast of his coat, catching the light like silvery strands of webbing.

  “You okay?” Kane asked, bringing himself up into a crouch.

  Grant swiped at the gunk with a gloved hand and snarled, even as he powered the sin eater into his fist once more. “Sure,” he said, targeting the strangely dressed figure who had sent the jet of liquid at Kane.

  “Hey, slow down,” Kane called. “We just came to talk.”

  “Trespassers, outlanders, lawbreakers,” the shadowy figure hissed, in that strangely modulated voice. “You bring your filth and your lies here at your peril.”

  Kane held his hands up in a nonhostile gesture, sending his sin eater back to its hidden sleeve. Grant followed his lead, sending his own weapon back to its hidden holster with a flinch of his wrist tendons, aware that he could instantly recall it to his hand if he needed to.

  “You’re a magistrate, right?” Kane stated.

  The black-clad figure gave no response, just stood stock-still, those round lenses of his eyes fixed in Kane’s direction, but giving nothing away.

  “We spotted the SandCat outside, recognized the shield,” Kane lied. “We’re not looking for trouble, just answers.”

  The dark figure continued to watch Kane and Grant. “Who are you?” he asked.

  Kane thought the question over for a moment. Technically, he was still a wanted criminal by the Cobaltville Magistrates, as were Grant and Baptiste. But if this mook hadn’t recognized him, then maybe he could bluff his way through this without anyone else getting blasted or drenched or whatever. “Name’s John. My business partner, Blake,” Kane said, indicating Grant. “We saw the ’cat and figured there might be an opportunity here, if we knew what it was you were doing out here.”

  * * *

  DEPAUL WATCHED THE two men through the lenses of his protective suit as the man called John told him his story. As he spoke, a vibrantly colored heads-up display raced before DePaul’s eyes, guided by the onboard computer processor whose circuitry was woven into the threads of his environmental suit, searching for two things—weapons and faces.

  The Caucasian was armed with a sin eater, as well as a line of metal in his boot that registered as a knife. The black had a sin eater, too, as well as a larger assault gun held in a pouch in the lining of his coat. Sin eaters were magistrate weapons, so were these two mags, he wondered, or had they killed mags and taken their weapons?

  The man called John was speaking about a business opportunity. He was a fast talker, clearly used to thinking on his feet, and he spoke with a Cobaltville accent. Could he and his partner be Cobaltville Magistrates working undercover? He certainly had the bearing of a magistrate, and he reminded DePaul of Salvo, his old chief. The sin eaters were too obvious, though, weren’t they? Why would an undercover mag reveal that weapon unless pressed to do so?

  * * *

  “WE CAME THROUGH a room of experiments back there, I guess you’d call them,” Kane continued, getting into his act. “Wonder if maybe you and your mag buddies might be interested in—”

  “Your weapons,” the dark-clad figure interrupted, his voice filtered through the modulator of the mask. “Are you magistrate killers?”

  “No,” Kane assured him, “that’s not why we’re—”

  “Kane,” the figure stated.

  Kane felt his heart sink.

  “And Grant,” DePaul continued, reading the data from his HUD, heads-up display, where the computer search had finally identified his two intruders. “Ex-magistrates. Wanted men.”

  “Yeah, look, it’s not how it seems,” Kane began.

  DePaul took a step toward them. “You break in.”

  Another step. “You lie.”

  Another step. “How would an ex-magistrate like yourself judge those actions, Kane?”

  Kane’s eyes flicked left and right, glancing around for any backup that this mysterious figure might have. Brigid had wisely stayed out of sight, and that might now be his only hope in avoiding an ambush by a whole squad of magistrates in freakish masks.

  “Well?” DePaul asked, halting a dozen paces from where Kane and Grant stood across the lab.

  “I stopped being a magistrate a long time ago,” Kane replied. “I don’t judge people anymore.”

  “A shame,” DePaul said. “Your statistics are impressive.”

  “Were,” Kane corrected. “Like I said, I quit the job a long time ago.”

  * * *

  REAMS OF DATA were running across the heads-up display. DePaul absorbed it with practiced ease, splitting his attention between taking in the most important parts of the data and watching the t
wo intruders.

  Kane had served as a Cobaltville mag for almost a decade, his partner Grant for a little longer than that. Both had received multiple plaudits for meritorious service. They had been good.

  But something had changed. They had been drummed out of Cobaltville, he saw. Drummed out for some unstated infraction that they could never fix.

  “Lawbreakers,” DePaul summarized, as the data filtered past his eyes.

  * * *

  “WHAT’S THAT?” GRANT ASKED. “What did you say?”

  “You broke the law,” DePaul stated in the modulated tones of his all-encompassing helmet. “You were dismissed. You’re wanted men.”

  “All a misunderstanding,” Kane bluffed. “But we found something close by that does need a mag—”

  But before another word could be exchanged, the dark figure raised both hands toward the Cerberus men and two bursts of liquid came blasting from beneath the bell sleeves like shots from a gun. Each sleeve contained some kind of nozzle hidden within it, Kane realized, fed by a storage pack hidden in the bulky, almost shapeless barrel of a coat that the nightmarish figure wore.

  Kane leaped aside as the stream of foul-smelling liquid spilled across the floor. Close by, Grant dived for cover behind a chair. It wasn’t much, but it was all there was in the room.

  “Judgment is upon you,” DePaul advised the two men. “Surrender to it, or be struck down by it regardless.”

  “Stand down,” Kane ordered, leveling his sin eater at the eerie figure in black.

  DePaul fired again, sending thick streams of the odiferous stuff across the length of the lab. The streams were so dark they were almost lost in the shadows. Only the highlights caught the glare from the workbench, like streaks of lightning rushing through the air.

  Kane rolled, his sin eater blasting as the jet of foul-smelling liquid splashed the floor around him. A 9 mm bullet was propelled from his weapon’s muzzle, whipping across the room toward the ominous figure in the beaklike mask.

  Kane’s aim was true and his bullet struck the mystery man just above the crimson shield he wore over his left breast. Kane cursed in despair as the bullet hit, then rebounded away, ricocheting across the room with an audible ping.