Judgment Plague

by James Axler

  Grant had adopted a kneeling position, with the chair for cover, and he trained his own sin eater on the nightmarish figure of DePaul. He watched the tall form stalk across the room like a long shadow, marching determinedly toward Kane as the dark-haired Cerberus warrior ran for cover behind the wall of monitors. DePaul raised both arms once more and blasted twin streams at Kane as he skipped backward.

  “Judgment is here, fugitive,” the mag stated over the sound of rushing liquid.

  “Judge this,” Grant muttered, and his index finger stroked the trigger of his sin eater, sending a single bullet at that beaked mask.

  The 9 mm slug struck the fright mask and DePaul reeled in place, the liquid going wild as it spouted from beneath his hands. He recovered in an instant, turned his glass-eyed gaze on Grant. There was a dent in the mask now, above the left jowl. “Fugitives, lawbreakers,” he roared. “Your time has come, your sentence is passed.”

  Grant leaped back as another stream of the rank juice blasted toward him in a torrent. It slapped against his chest, propelled at such force that it knocked him from his feet. Suddenly, he was reeling backward, heels slipping in the pools of hosed liquid that covered the floor of the room, before he crashed to the deck in a heap. He lay there as the dark chemicals splashed over him, washing his coat and legs. The stuff painted the floor now, pools of it catching the flickering light of the bank of monitors, the brilliant illumination of the lab bench.

  The nightmare figure of DePaul stood in the center of the room, sending a rushing stream at Grant as he struggled on the floor.

  Bullets weren’t having any effect, Kane realized, as he watched from his hiding place behind the bank of monitors. “Gonna have to do this personal, then,” he muttered, commanding his sin eater back to its hidden holster.

  Kane began running then, hurtling across the space like a missile. DePaul saw him and reacted, raising his other arm toward him and sending another blast of the ice-cold liquid at his rushing form. Kane zigzagged, deftly avoiding the blast, before launching himself at his terrifying foe. Kane leaped into the air and kicked, striking him hard in the chest with the sole of his left boot.

  DePaul staggered three steps back and the jets of liquid abruptly ceased.

  Kane was on him then, drawing his arm backward, right fist balled.

  Pow!

  Kane struck the sinister figure across the chin, watched as the beaked head went up and back. He drew his fist back again for the follow through. As he did so, DePaul raised his left arm and triggered the hidden hose in his sleeve once more—and suddenly Kane found his feet slip from under him as he was propelled away by the jet of liquid.

  He reeled through the air for a moment, his feet inches above the ground. Then he crashed into the workbench, with its network of tubing and beakers, and the sound of breaking glass rang through the room. The next thing Kane knew, he was lying on the floor behind the bench, his clothes drenched with the unknown liquid, his head spinning as he tried to make sense of what had happened.

  On the far side of the bench, DePaul was stalking across the room like the grim specter of death, making his way toward where Kane had fallen, ready to strangle the life out of him once and for all.

  Chapter 13

  Brigid had been waiting in a crouch outside the heavy door leading into DePaul’s lab. The door was propped open slightly, just enough that Brigid could see a sliver of the room from her position. It was dark in there, the flicker of the monitor bank casting eerie shadows. She had heard more than seen the altercation that was playing out inside, had watched as Grant came crashing to the floor amid a stream of barely visible liquid.

  Then she saw Kane come rushing out from behind the monitor bank and slap against the tall, dark figure with the strange silhouette, only to be knocked away. It was time to reveal herself, before things got any more out of hand.

  “Freeze!” Brigid yelled, stepping through the door and into the room. Her TP-9 semiautomatic was raised in a two-handed grip, and targeted the stranger in black. The floor was wet here, where streams of liquid had been sprayed.

  The nightmarish figure turned, glass eyes flashing as they caught the light, the long proboscis of his eerie mask pointed at Brigid across the length of the room. He looked like an insect caught in the light.

  “You’re outnumbered,” Brigid called. “You can’t take all three of us.” She hoped that the man was alone.

  The figure in the fright mask began to charge at Brigid, and she fired, sending the first in a stream of 9 mm bullets at his hurtling form. He moved fast, ignoring the bullets as they rang ineffectively against his armored clothes.

  Brigid continued to fire her blaster, knowing better than to negotiate with an enraged foe like this. Her bullets sparked as they struck the figure’s coat, before zipping away in loud recoils.

  Then he was on her, batting her aside with a single sweep of his arm. Brigid crashed to the floor, rolling amid the puddles of evil-smelling liquid.

  * * *

  JUDGMENT WOULD NOT WAIT.

  DePaul knocked the redhead aside with a single blow and paced to the door. He heard the woman splash to the floor as he hurried out of the lab. She was right—he was outnumbered. What’s more, he had been caught unawares, and while a magistrate was always prepared, there was only so much he could do against three armed foes in an enclosed space.

  Besides, there was the sentence to pass; that was his most important task. This unexpected altercation was nothing more than a distraction. There were other ways to deal with this trio of blunderers who had somehow found his laboratory.

  They would be judged soon enough, found guilty for their crimes. It was the magistrate way, everything that had been drummed into him from the moment he could understand.

  He hurried on, marching through the corridor and into the holding area.

  * * *

  BRIGID FELT PAIN blast through her side where she had been slammed against the floor. Her head was fuzzy; she had lost her grasp on consciousness for a moment when she had been struck by that nightmarish figure.

  Slowly, she moved, working past the pain and confusion, forcing herself to a sitting position with the pistol raised and ready.

  Behind her, the nightmarish figure had just stepped from the room, the clatter of his boot heels echoing as he strode hurriedly down the corridor beyond.

  Brigid pushed herself up, watching the retreating form for a moment. “Kane, Grant—he’s escaping!” she cried. The words sounded loud even to her own ears, despite being muffled by the rebreather she still wore over her mouth and nose.

  Across the room, Kane heard the words in his confused head, and he forced himself to clamber up from where he had been knocked behind the workbench. His chest burned where he had been struck by the force of that jet of liquid, and his clothes were sodden. He pushed himself to his feet, accompanied by the sound of crunching glass underfoot.

  “What is this stuff?” he muttered, stepping in a pool of liquid. It was viscous, with the thick, runny quality of oil. He stared at a puddle of it for a moment, hands pressed to the top of his legs as he tried to catch his second wind. The liquid was not black, as he had first thought, but rather a kind of washed-out gray, speckled with tiny spots—meaning that, like oil and water, whatever it contained would not mix. Which meant that one part of the compound—probably the gray liquid—was being used as a carrier for the other, active ingredient.

  But active for what?

  “Baptiste?” Kane prompted.

  Brigid was at the door, weapon trained on the opening. “Come on,” she shouted. “We have to stop him.”

  Grant nodded, brushing a chair aside to join them. It slid across the room on its casters, the wheels kicking up sprays of liquid as they passed through the puddles. Grant loaded a new clip in the sin eater as he marched across the room. He joined Kane a
nd Brigid at the door, weapons raised and ready, following the nightmarish figure in black.

  “You think he’s a magistrate?” Grant asked as they hurried down the corridor past the restrooms.

  “Wears the badge,” Kane replied dourly.

  “But the clothes,” Brigid said. “The mask. Hardly standard issue, is it?”

  “There were other divisions,” Kane said. “In all my time on the force, I never got to see all of them. Could be some low-profile department.”

  They stopped talking as they reached the next door. It was closed, which meant anything could be waiting behind it. Silently, Grant held his arm up to instruct the others to wait. He would take the lead now, in case the magistrate—if that’s what he was—had prepared an ambush.

  Grant grabbed the door with his free hand, his sin eater held out before him as he stepped forward into the room of cells. The space was still in darkness, lit only by the twin lights located above the doors.

  As Grant stepped over the threshold, he heard a ghastly, inhuman shriek, and something heavy and as large as a suitcase slammed into him, barreling out of the darkness like a tossed rock.

  Chapter 14

  Kane and Brigid leaped back as two figures came collapsing through the open door. The lower of the two was Grant, crashing back in an ungainly tumble, then slamming into the deck with a bone-jarring crunch. Above him, clinging to him like some gigantic insect, was something that looked only semihuman, arms and legs deceptively extended by its emaciation, its face a black and near-featureless smear. Liquid oozed down its face and naked body, pooling in the indentation between shoulder blades.

  Two black eyes glistened like the eyes of a crow in that smeared dark face. Its mouth opened, wide like a yawn, and it unleashed another cry that was part snake hiss, part wolf howl.

  As the thing spit a spray of black gunk into Grant’s face, his teammates watched in horror, even as they brought their weapons around to target it as the two figures struggled. Then, with a growl, Grant shoved the creature from him, flinging it back through the open door in a single, brutal shunt.

  Brigid followed the thing’s path with the barrel of her pistol, watching as it caromed through the doorway before crashing against the bars of one of the cages.

  “Oh no!” she gasped as she saw that all the cages were open. “Grant—he’s freed the prisoners.”

  Grant pulled himself up from the deck, wiping the black gunk from his face with the back of his hand. “They’re not prisoners, they’re experiments,” he snarled, climbing to his feet. “Failed experiments.”

  He stomped back into the room of cages, steadying the sin eater with his left hand as he shot the creature that had attacked him, delivering a single, merciful bullet to its brainpan.

  Brigid followed, sweeping her pistol left and right as she watched the cruelly misshapen figures that loomed in the darkness. She turned to Kane as he tracked her movements. “Go,” she said, “find our guy. Grant and I can deal with this.”

  Nodding once, Kane bolted through the room of whining prisoners.

  “Everyone is going to calm the hell down,” Grant instructed, jabbing his sin eater threateningly toward the figures in the room. “Otherwise, you’re all going to end up like your dead friend there.” He spit on the floor as if to emphasise his point.

  A swaying figure spoke up, still standing inside its now open cage. “You said you’d help us,” the woman accused, weeping black eyes fixing on Brigid. “Said you’d save us.”

  Brigid looked at the pitiful creature in the cell and lowered her gun. “We will,” she promised. “Grant, stand down. No one else here is going to attack you. They’re just...scared.”

  His pistol remained unwavering before him. “You sure?”

  “They’re victims, Grant,” Brigid replied. “Innocent victims.”

  He remained unmoving, holding his weapon on the group of experimental victims. Then he spit again, and Brigid saw the darkness in the saliva.

  “Grant?” she asked. “Are you—?”

  Without warning, he sank to the floor. Grant was a big man and his fall was like that of a weight dropped from a height. His sin eater clattered against the metal grating that lined the floor.

  “Grant!” Brigid called, scampering across to him and kneeling at his side, the prisoners forgotten for the moment.

  She reached for his sin eater, plucked it up carefully, aware that the weapon had no safety features. Swiftly, she ejected the clip before checking on her colleague.

  * * *

  KANE RAN.

  Legs pumping, one foot in front of the other, he sprinted from the aisle between the cells where the victims had been released, and out into the narrow corridor beyond.

  The corridor was empty, but he could hear the clatter of running feet as his quarry hurried up the next turn in the warren, back toward the exit. Must have taken the guy a few moments to get those cells open, a few moments wasted when he could have been out of here. Kane was working on instinct now, trusting—hoping—that the complex was empty except for the weird magistrate in the fright mask.

  Kane slowed as he reached the blind corner, nosed his sin eater before him. He could hear movement coming from the distant end of the corridor and knew just what it was—his adversary unlocking the airlock door and making his way to the outside.

  Kane sprang into action, whipping around the corner and scrambling up the narrow tunnel. Fright mask was at the end, just as he had guessed, pulling open the door with the armaglass portal. The black figure turned, bringing his free hand up even as he opened the door. Kane ducked as a stream of dark liquid spurted from the hidden nozzle in the man’s sleeve, barely seen in the dimly lit corridor.

  Kane replied with a triple burst of fire, sending three bullets down the corridor even as he felt the rush of ice-cold liquid splash against his face. He turned as the liquid struck, felt it wash over the left-hand side of his face as he sank back.

  Kane’s bullets, meanwhile, hit his target, two of them striking his foe in the arm and torso, the third pinging off the reinforced metal frame of the door. The man staggered, but then seemed to shrug them off, his armor once again providing protection from the small-arms fire.

  The liquid had done nothing. Kane wiped it from his face, brought his weapon up to blast the retreating figure more, only to see the door slam shut before him.

  Kane ran, cursing into the rebreather he wore over mouth and nostrils.

  He reached the internal door and pulled. It held on first try, but gave on the second, presumably as the external door resealed itself, closing the airlock from that end.

  Kane ran, sprinting up the tunnel-like corridor in great strides, his free hand grabbing for the bar that would unlock the exterior door, even as the one behind him sealed shut. He pulled it open, barely slowing as he made his way out into the brilliance of daylight.

  His target was there, slipping into the driver’s seat of one of the SandCats, its gull-wing door wide-open as he got inside. Kane blasted, sending a stream of bullets at the figure even as the door sank back down into its housing. Kane’s bullets struck it as it closed, creating flashes of sparks as the ceramic armaglass shielding deflected the shots.

  Then Kane heard the familiar growl of the SandCat’s engine roaring to life, watched helplessly as it pulled away from the site in a rain of dislodged sand, picking up speed as it hurtled past him.

  The other SandCat, Kane thought. That was still there, waiting for a driver. He ran, chancing a single glance over his shoulder as the piloted SandCat bumped away over the red-brown sand.

  The second vehicle SandCat was waiting just as they had left it, crouched under the camouflage netting, its armor marred by the relentless passage of windblown sand. The driver’s door was damaged, a great chunk missing from the leading edge as if a shark had taken a bite out
of it. Through the gap he could see that the driver’s seat was empty. Kane reached for the door and—

  The SandCat started up without warning, the animal-like growl of its engine taking Kane by surprise.

  “What th—?!”

  Then the beaten-up vehicle began to move, coasting smoothly out from beneath the camouflage netting and bumping over the rough ground, picking up speed as it followed the path that the first had taken.

  Kane cursed as he watched the SandCat hurry away after its twin. It was a drone, linked to the first with a rudimentary artificial intelligence program designed to respond to and compensate for whatever it encountered.

  Kane stood by the sunken opening to the underground bunker, cursing once more as he watched the SandCats disappear, trailed by a billowing plume of dust like a marker.

  “Dammit.”

  He had lost his target.

  Chapter 15

  Inside the bunker, Brigid Baptiste was sitting with Grant as he huddled on the floor of the room of cages. Drool clung to the ex-mag’s chin, and he struggled to stifle a cough. Around them, the prisoners were watching warily, frightened by what Grant had done to their cellmate, scared that one of these mysterious strangers might put a bullet in them, too.

  Brigid looked up, saw the eyes upon her and the way the shambling figures were retreating to the farthest corners and walls of the room. “We’re not going to hurt you,” she said.

  From a cell to her left, something hissed. It was human, or it had been, but what was left had skin like tooled leather, and dull, discolored eyes the gray-black of storm clouds.

  “Everybody calm down,” Brigid said, echoing the words Grant had used a few minutes before.

  Then she turned her attention back to him. Grant’s eyes were closed and there was a new line of drool running from the side of his mouth. The drool was black.