Judgment Plague

by James Axler

  * * *

  KANE STOOD ALONE amid the tire tracks, watching the retreating plumes of sand get farther away.

  “Dammit,” he muttered again, shaking his head.

  Then he activated his commtact. “Cerberus? This is Kane. I need a spy-eye on two—repeat, two—moving SandCats, launched from my location.”

  Brewster Philboyd’s voice came back over the commtact in response. “On it, Kane.”

  “You see them?” Kane pressed.

  There was a pause while, at the other end of the connection, Philboyd adjusted the surveillance satellite to locate the vehicles Kane had identified. “Got them. Tracking.”

  Kane watched the two vehicles disappear over the edge of the bleak horizon. He had lost them—but Cerberus hadn’t.

  * * *

  “GRANT?” BRIGID CALLED, shaking him by his shoulder. “Grant, wake up.” Please be alive, she thought, please be alive.

  Grant rolled a little with the force of Brigid’s shaking, then his eyes flickered open and he smiled. “What? Did I miss something?” he asked. His voice sounded weak, as if he had just woken up, and his eyes were bloodshot.

  “I thought you were zoning out on me,” Brigid told him, showing a brief smile of flawless white teeth. “Don’t do that again.”

  Grant began to promise he wouldn’t, but the words were lost as he began coughing, rolling himself on his side and covering his mouth with his palm. When he drew his hand away, it was spattered in black spittle. “Wh-what is this?” he asked, bewildered. He didn’t sound like an ex-magistrate to Brigid anymore, but like a lost child, frightened by something he didn’t understand.

  “I think you may have become infected,” Brigid said, hating the words as they exited her mouth; as if saying it somehow made it happen, made it real. “That one who jumped you—he...spit at you.”

  Grant’s head lolled on his shoulders in a heavy kind of shake. “I don’t know. It all happened fast.” He blinked, a hard blink, scrunching up his eyes. “Whoa, I could just fall asleep right here, I swear.”

  “Don’t,” Brigid insisted. “Just don’t.”

  “Miss my company?” Grant said, his voice weaker already.

  No, scared that you’ll never wake up, Brigid thought, but she simply nodded and lied. “You wouldn’t leave me alone with Kane, would you? The jokes’ll kill me.”

  Grant smiled at that, letting out a laugh that was little more than a breath.

  Come on, Kane, Brigid thought. Get back here already. She tried the commtact, but the shielding on this subterranean lair played havoc with the functionality—a known limitation of the otherwise miraculous communications device—and she couldn’t raise him or anyone else.

  * * *

  THREE MINUTES LATER, Kane returned, his face fixed in an angry scowl.

  Brigid had moved Grant from the room of cells, dragging his body as best she could, and she had propped him up against a blank wall of the corridor that led back to the exit. The dwellers of the cells remained where she had found them, adhering to her instructions to wait until she could be certain that the danger had passed. They seemed listless and timid, and Brigid estimated that most of them were barely ten breaths away from death, anyway. She wondered if Grant would end up like them, if he had been infected by whatever was killing them.

  “Kane?” Brigid said as she saw the man striding along the corridor toward her. “What happened?”

  “Lost him,” Kane explained, “but Brewster’s trained an eye on him.”

  “Took the SandCat?” Brigid guessed.

  Kane nodded. “Took both of them. One must be a drone, linked to the lead vehicle with some kind of follow-the-leader program. How’s my partner?”

  “Still alive,” Brigid said, pushing herself up from her crouch and intercepting Kane before he could come any closer. “Keep your rebreather on,” she instructed in a quieter voice. “I think Grant’s been infected.”

  “Infected? By what?” Kane demanded hotly.

  “Whatever we saw in Freeville,” Brigid replied. “Maybe a chemical weapon, maybe some kind of virus—I don’t know.”

  “And that guy in the fright mask did this?” It was barely a question the way Kane growled it, more like an accusation.

  “Maybe he’s trying to cure it,” Brigid retorted. “Did you think of that?”

  Kane snorted. “Did you hear what he said to us? What he called us? Fugitives. Outlanders.”

  “I didn’t hear all of it,” Brigid replied.

  “He knew we were ex-magistrates,” Kane told her, “called us wanted men. He said he would bring some kind of judgment or something.”

  “Judgment?” she repeated. “You mean, like a magistrate passing sentence?”

  “Yeah,” Kane said thoughtfully, “exactly like a mag passing sentence. A death sentence.”

  Brigid looked at him, knew the man well enough to recognize his body language. “Kane, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking we need to find out who this fright mask is and just what the hell he’s been doing out here in the middle of nowhere,” Kane said. “But before all that, we need to get my partner back to Cerberus.”

  Brigid looked thoughtfully at Kane. “You only ever call Grant your partner when you think he’s in serious danger, you know?”

  “Just see what you can find, Baptiste,” Kane told her, before crouching down beside Grant’s propped-up form. Carefully, he picked him up. “You okay there, pal? You hanging in there?”

  Grant groaned, his limbs floppy and his body heavy as a slab of meat in a freezer.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Kane said, making his slow way back down the corridor with Grant in his arms. “Why don’t you tell me again about how you met Shizuka?”

  * * *

  KANE RADIOED FOR backup and waited outside the subterranean facility. It was good to be out in the open. It gave him a chance to remove the rebreather and suck in fresh air once more. The obvious way to return home was how they had come, but given Grant’s condition and the simple factor of the distance involved, Kane could not chance that.

  Cerberus could provide a variety of fast-moving systems with which to transport Kane and the others back to base.

  A little over an hour later, two Deathbird helicopters arrived. The Deathbirds were modified from the AH-64 Apache helicopter design, and featured a chain gun in the chin turret, as well as a stock of missiles. They swooped toward the location like great black insects cutting a path through the cloudless skies above what had once been Colorado.

  By that time, Brigid had joined Kane outside, having swiftly scanned over a batch of printed computer records she found in the small complex. She had also confirmed that the area contained simple sleeping quarters, enough to bunk six people, but there was no evidence that it had been in use, other than a single pallet whose film-wrapped pillow showed a light indentation where a head had rested.

  “Why is it film-wrapped?” Kane asked.

  “It’s just a sterilized covering, like from a cleaners, or when it came out of the factory,” Brigid explained, brushing the detail aside. “Maybe whoever slept there was too tired to remove it.”

  The detail nagged at Kane’s mind, arousing some detective instinct that he couldn’t yet frame into words. For now, he left it, letting the odd fact sink in.

  No one else seemed to work in the underground facility, and the other dwellers—call them prisoners, victims or lab experiments—had slunk back into their cells after a few minutes of freedom, too lethargic and too scared to do anything but sit and wait.

  After a brief exchange over the commtacts, the two Deathbirds swooped down and landed close to where the three teammates waited. Once the dust had settled, the door of the nearest vehicle popped open and its pilot called to Kane. Edwards was another of Cerberus
’s field operatives, an ex-mag like Kane and Grant, who specialized in security and didn’t shy away from a fight. He was a tall man, broad shouldered, with his hair shaved so closely in a crew cut that you could see his scalp peeking through. The short hairstyle seemed to draw attention to his mangled right ear, which a bullet had struck some time ago. Edwards was dressed in combat pants and an undershirt, and he wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses, the better to see while flying east.

  “I hear you girls need a ride home,” he said as Kane approached the Deathbird.

  “We have a man down, Edwards,” Kane explained. “Grant took a face full of something noxious while we were exploring, and it’s laid him out.”

  “A good man, then,” Edwards acknowledged, his bravado giving way to admiration. He and Grant had had their disagreements in the past, finding themselves on different sides when the Cerberus redoubt was infiltrated almost a year before, and coming to blows more than once. Edwards might treat him as a rival, but he had a lot of time for Grant and knew he was a great man to have by his side in the field.

  The other chopper disgorged three Cerberus medical personnel, led by physician Reba DeFore, while pilot Sela Sinclair doubled as security. DeFore was a stocky woman with ash-blond hair she wore up in an elaborate French twist. All four were dressed in haz-chem gear, their helmets under their arms.

  “There’s some nasty shit in there, DeFore,” Kane warned her, as Edwards shrugged free of his safety webbing.

  “Brigid briefed us on the way over,” DeFore said, donning her helmet. “Whatever’s happened to those people, we’ll do all we can to help them.”

  Edwards was just disembarking from his Deathbird. “Meanwhile, I’m your ride home,” he told Kane. “Let me give you a hand getting Grant in the chopper. He’s a heavy bastard.”

  “It’s all muscle,” Kane told him.

  “I can believe that,” Edwards agreed. “Tussling with Grant is like wrestling a grizzly bear. And believe me, I speak from experience.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” Kane replied, but his mind was still on what Brigid had said about the pillow. It nagged at him and he couldn’t figure out why.

  Reba DeFore stabilized Grant, giving him a sedative to help him rest, before okaying him for travel. Though obviously in a weakened state, Grant was fit and the Cerberus medic was confident that he was strong enough to be moved. Getting him back to the redoubt, where a full medical team could be assigned, was his best option.

  Edwards and Kane secured the big man’s semiconscious form in the back of the Deathbird, while Brigid explained what DeFore’s team needed to do here at the site. “From what I can gather, our mystery man’s been working on a few projects. So we don’t know precisely what’s incubating in there,” she said. “Be careful and keep the facility in lockdown until you can discern what it is.”

  “Will do,” DeFore acknowledged, before ducking her helmeted head and leading the way into the underground compound.

  Less than a minute later, Brigid was sitting in Edwards’s Deathbird as it took to the air. The chopper turned north and began the frantic rush back to Montana, where the Cerberus redoubt was located, high in the Bitterroot Mountains.

  * * *

  THE JOURNEY HOME took several hours, but felt longer than it should have. Kane divided his time between gazing out one of the windows and watching Grant, secure in the crash webbing, groaning and sweating with fever.

  At one point, somewhere over a place that had once been called Wyoming, Kane’s attention was distracted by a whimper. When he looked over he saw that Brigid had her head tilted away, to look out the window, but he could see tears glistening on her cheek. To his relief, the tears were clear, not the disturbing black color he had seen from the dying inhabitants of Freeville.

  “Something wrong, Baptiste?” Kane asked, the words coming a little harsher than he meant them, so that they could be heard over the whir of the chopper’s rotor blades.

  “What? No, I’m fine,” she insisted, turning from him.

  “You’re crying.”

  Brigid pressed her fingers to her cheek and saw that he was right. “It’s nothing. Just...nothing.”

  “Don’t try to kid me, Baptiste,” Kane told her. “I’ve known you too long to fall for that.

  “Look, Grant’s going to be okay,” he continued. “We’ll get back to Cerberus and get him the medical attention he needs. Lakesh said Shizuka’s already dispatched two of her finest doctors to assist, and DeFore will be back to oversee things before you know it.”

  “Yeah,” Brigid said, her voice cracking.

  Kane stared at her, and his blue-gray eyes seemed to be penetrating her soul. They were linked, these two—soul friends, anam-charas. Their bond was something arcane, something beyond reason. Where Kane went, Brigid would follow, and vice versa—throughout a thousand different lives and a thousand different faces. Always, Kane would be there to watch over Brigid, and she him, ever and eternal.

  “You’re worrying about something,” Kane said gently, his eyes fixed on hers.

  It was a little nothing of a sentence, but it was all he needed to say. The floodgates seemed to open and a new burst of tears was given life. “It’s my fault,” she said, wiping at her cheeks. “Oh heavens, it’s my fault.”

  “What’s your fault?” Kane snapped. “That he went first? That’s what we do, Baptiste. Someone has to go first and sometimes that’s the guy who takes the first shot.”

  “No,” Brigid insisted with a shake of her head. “Not that. This.” She opened her clenched fist and showed him what it was she had there. It was the rebreather—Grant’s rebreather, the one he had left with her after she had lost hers in the redoubt earlier that day. “I’ve killed him, Kane. I’ve killed Grant.”

  Chapter 16

  “He’s not going to die,” Kane said with more conviction than he felt.

  Brigid shook her head, her eyes shifting to stare at Grant’s prone form where he had been stretched across the bench seat in the rear of the Deathbird helicopter. “Don’t say that, because you don’t know. Reba was worried.”

  “Grant’s strong,” Kane said, but it came out more like a plea than a statement.

  “I killed him,” Brigid stated, and her words were like icicles jabbing into Kane’s gut.

  He didn’t know what to say to that. Brigid was convinced, so nothing he could say seemed able to alter that. The silence between the two Cerberus colleagues stretched out, a palpable wall between them as they sat in the rear seats of the Deathbird, its thrumming rotor blades whirring above like shifting sands through an hourglass, marking Grant’s final hours. Kane sat dumbstruck, staring at the rebreather in Brigid’s outstretched hand. He simply could not take his eyes from it.

  Eventually, Edwards unknowingly broke the silence, calling out over the internal speakers. “Four minutes out,” he said. “Prep yourselves for landing.”

  Kane looked past Brigid, out through the chopper’s windows. Out there, he could see the familiar silhouette of the Bitterroots, like jagged teeth thrust into the sky, wisps of cloud flickering past his view as the rotor blades cut through the air. It looked unwelcoming, cold and harsh, and yet it looked like home, and Kane was glad of that. His glance flicked for a moment to Brigid, where she sat clutching the rebreather she had acquired from Grant, and he wondered what he could possibly say.

  Edwards busied himself talking with Cerberus flight control over his commtact, confirming who he was and explaining the nature of their cargo. Kane had already radioed ahead when they took off, which meant that a medical team was already in place, waiting for the chopper to come home.

  An ex-magistrate, Edwards could handle the Deathbird as if he was born to fly it, and was trained to handle most air vehicles in the redoubt. He might not be the best pilot Cerberus had—he lacked the flourish and quick thinking that both Kane
and Grant displayed during combat, for instance—but he was eminently capable. He brought the Deathbird down in a smooth descent as they made their approach to the Cerberus mountain base, swept through the opening hangar bay doors and brought the ’bird to an effortless stop without jarring the passengers at all.

  “Nice landing, Edwards,” Kane said, reaching for the side door and sliding it back.

  Outside in the hangar, three medical staff and two security people were hurrying over with a gurney, while behind them, a number of other Cerberus personnel were watching anxiously, including Lakesh, the albino warrior called Domi, and Grant’s girlfriend, Shizuka.

  Kane recognized Dr. Kazuko, a man in his early forties, of Japanese ancestry, leading the group with the gurney. Kazuko was on secondment from the Tigers of Heaven. He had a bronze tan to his features and short, black hair swept back from his forehead. As usual, he wore a simple two-piece cotton outfit with slippers, augmented by an ornamental short sword, a wakizashi, sheathed at his waist.

  Ruling the island of New Edo off America’s west coast, the Tigers of Heaven were a band of warriors with very close ties to Cerberus, not least because their leader, a modern-day samurai called Shizuka, was Grant’s lover. Shizuka herself watched from a respectable distance, conscious that she should not get in the way of the medical people as they checked over him. Not even the worry on her face could distract one from her beauty. She was a petite athletic figure, with long, luxuriant, straight black hair and a pale gold complexion, her lips like rose petals. Her delicately tilted eyes met Kane’s gaze, her unspoken question clear.

  He nodded to her in acknowledgment, then he and Brigid accompanied the medical personnel as they rushed Grant from the hangar to the medical bay, briefing them along the way.

  “Do you have any idea what has infected him, Kane-san?” Dr. Kazuko asked, taking the lead as they rolled the gurney into a waiting elevator.

  “Not sure,” Kane admitted as the automatic doors slid closed. “We ran into a small ville of people who’d succumbed to some kind of...I dunno...plague, maybe. Lot of dead, only a few still living. Could be the same thing, but it’s hard to say for certain.”