Judgment Plague

by James Axler

  As he drove closer to the ville walls, he saw two figures emerge from the base of the observation tower—the full complement of its personnel. The mag to the left wore his helmet, hiding everything but his mouth and chin beneath its sleek lines, while his partner was more casual, carrying his under his left arm, revealing a mop of tight blond ringlets atop his head.

  Seeing the mags, DePaul crossed his hands over the steering column and stroked his thumb along his right sleeve, checking that the sin eater was still there. The weapon had been in the SandCat when the intruders had arrived in his laboratory, and he had been forced to improvise, using the Streams of Judgment against them, as he planned to do to all of Cobaltville. But first, he needed to gain access to the ville itself.

  One of the magistrates, the one in the helmet, stood directly in the path of the SandCat, framed in its windshield with palm held up as DePaul approached. DePaul touched the brake, bringing the SandCat to a halt.

  * * *

  MEERS WAITED BY the door to the observation post while Stover flagged the SandCat down. The vehicle was covered in dust churned up from the desert, and it looked real beat-up, with a hunk of the grill missing and bullet scoring running along the right wing, plus scrapes across the magistrate shield that was displayed on the side.

  Stover walked around to the driver’s door and tapped on the window. “ID and state your business,” he said, before stepping back.

  As he did so, the gull-wing door popped open, swinging up on its soft release. Inside sat a magistrate like none the other two mags had ever seen before. He was dressed in regulation black, including what appeared to be a uniform raincoat that was worn when the Cobaltville weather was bad. But in place of the standard helmet, he wore one that covered his full face, encasing his head in its weird structure, a beaklike protrusion emanating from the nose.

  “Long journey, huh? Going to need to see your ID, brother,” Stover stated, watching the mystery mag warily.

  Crossing his right hand over his chest, DePaul commanded the sin eater into his palm with a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons, and fired the trigger, sending a triple burst of 9 mm bullets into the magistrate’s chest. The man went down in the hail of bullets, slumping backward before sinking to the ground.

  The other mag looked surprised, but he moved quickly, his instincts kicking in. He was raising his right hand, his own sin eater rocketing into his grip in the blink of an eye. DePaul leaned out of the cab and blasted, his arm moving in a smooth arc, squeezing the trigger at its optimum point and sending the bullet straight into Magistrate Meers’s forehead. The back of Meers’s head exploded, sending a burst of skull and brain matter out across the wall of the observation post in a grim smear.

  DePaul was out of his seat by then, stepping onto the soil and drawing his weapon around to target the first mag again.

  The man was lying on the ground grimacing, his chest armor singed where the first bullets had struck. Stover was scared, and he was trying to bring his own weapon into play, raising it to target the intruder in the fright mask. As he raised his blaster, DePaul stepped forward and sent a bullet into his right wrist, severing the tendons there and shattering the bone through the leather of the glove. Stover’s sin eater cracked apart with a flash of exploding propellant, and he shrieked in pain.

  DePaul leaned down, raising his left hand close to Stover’s face. Then he triggered the catch there and a burst of dark, viscous liquid jetted out into the man’s wailing face.

  Stover choked as the liquid rushed into his open mouth and down his throat.

  DePaul had no compunction about killing mags. They were as guilty as anyone else in Cobaltville. No man was guilt-free—Irons had taught him that. If you looked deep enough you would find some blemish on the record of even the most seemingly innocent man. Avarice, greed, lust—not even magistrates were immune to these vices. And even if they didn’t act on them, they were still guilty in thought, and thought was only precursor to deed, after all. If they deserved it now or if they deserved it ten years from now, it didn’t matter. Preemptive law enforcement was the most effective of all, wasn’t it?

  DePaul watched for a moment, emotionless, before releasing the trigger of the plague agent. The aperture sealed and the rush of dark liquid stopped. DePaul marched past the other mag, the one with his brains now decorating the side of the observation post, and strode inside. His boots clattered as he hurried up metal steps, reaching the monitoring room in just a few seconds. Then DePaul triggered the gate release, using an old magistrate code, but one that had not changed in ten years, since he had last been on the force.

  Down below, a grilled security gate, perfectly camouflaged to blend with the wall behind it, slid back on oiled runners, revealing access to the roads that the waste trucks used once a month.

  DePaul was back down the stairs and outside the observation tower in no time. Stover was lying on his side, gagging from the gunk that had adhered to the inside of his windpipe. DePaul stepped past him and started up the SandCat’s engine once more, settling into the driver’s seat and tapping the recall button for the drone SandCat to follow. He slipped the rig into reverse, bumping the caterpillar tracks over Stover’s sprawled body, where the magistrate lay, trying to catch his breath. Then the SandCat lurched forward with an animal roar of engine, disappearing through the gate and into Cobaltville, closely followed by the drone. As DePaul passed, the security gate shuddered back into place, sealing behind the SandCat.

  He was in.

  * * *

  DEPAUL USED THE service roads to travel deeper into the heart of the ville, following the winding paths that the garbage took so that it would never be seen by the residents of Alpha, Beta and Cappa Levels; as if waste was somehow too offensive and might sour those people from their valuable work contributing to the ville. The drone SandCat followed obediently.

  He reached Delta Level without incident. His SandCat was beaten up, but it was still a magistrate vehicle, stolen when he had jumped two mags on patrol outside the ville walls six years before. He had killed them, though one had taken a while to die and had pleaded long after DePaul had stopped listening.

  He found an empty bay in Cappa Level, where the magistrates were based, making the area much more dangerous to be caught wandering around in. After parking the SandCat, he worked his way deeper into the ville on foot. The drone SandCat located its own space and shut down.

  Anyone who saw DePaul they would shy away from his appearance, he figured, or he would merge with the shadows if he spotted a magistrate. Mags were easy enough to spot even from a distance; they had a certain walk, a confidence that normal citizens did not have. DePaul ducked aside a few times to let them pass by.

  The drone SandCat had a remote in it, which he could activate when he was ready. For now, he needed rest. Tomorrow would be big and he needed somewhere to bed down, far from any magistrate’s prying eyes. As if he could sleep.

  The two mags at the gate would be discovered soon enough. Once their shift ended, their bodies would be found by their replacements, or it would be noted that they had not returned and a search squad would be assembled. DePaul had little fear of capture on that score. The gate had sealed behind him and no outlander knew the codes to the trash gates. They would look outside the walls in any case, not within.

  He made his way to an exclusive elevator, tapped in the mag override code and stepped inside. It was good to be home.

  Now to find a place to lie low. Somewhere they wouldn’t look; somewhere out of the way. DePaul pressed the button for his destination and started to ascend.

  * * *

  MARINA GLASS WAS thirty-nine and beautiful. She had long dark hair that cascaded in curls halfway down her back. Her dark eyes matched her hair. They were inquisitive, intelligent eyes that, when they looked at you, would melt your heart. At least that’s how Sam Jeffries felt whenever she looked at
him.

  Sam was a year younger than Marina, but his hair was already receding at the temples and he had noticed speckles of gray appearing in its once black sheen. It made him feel old.

  Marina felt old, too, in a way she could put her finger on without hesitation. She was thirty-nine and had not had children. She wanted kids, had wanted them from the moment she’d left education and home and her three sisters, with whom she’d grown up. Her sisters all had children—one each, two girls and a boy. Even her younger sister, Franny, had a little boy now, an adorable ten-month-old blob of giggles and gurgles who melted her heart just the way that she melted Sam’s every time she looked at him.

  Marina wanted kids. But she was an archivist in the Cobaltville Historical Division and the job came first; that’s what her supervisor said, and he assured her that it had come straight from the baron’s mouth.

  No one had seen the baron in a while now, not for years, in fact, but Marina didn’t know that. She was too low down on the food chain to warrant the baron’s attention when he had been here, so whether he was around now or not made no difference to the way she viewed him.

  Like all the walled villes, Cobaltville had a specific population quota, which it rigidly maintained. That meant that any procreation was strictly regulated, and having children was a communal decision based on the needs of the ville as a whole.

  Marina had applied for a child license eighteen times since she had turned twenty-one, and eighteen times she had been refused. Her nineteenth application was in, but she didn’t have much hope now. She was good at her job and her job was essential, diverting information and rewriting predark history to make it more palatable to the public.

  And she was thirty-nine.

  Which meant that, biologically, her window to have kids was closing. Soon there would be so much longing inside her that there would be no room for a baby to grow.

  So she’d met Sam, who did something crucial with IT, and she’d wooed him. Wooing men was easy, she discovered. A stolen glance, a brush of fingertips, a smile at just the right moment. That and a too-tight blouse on the day when her computer sighed its last was really all it had taken.

  They had met outside of work, tentatively at first, and never telling their supervisor or anyone else in their division. Marina had insisted on that. “Workplace affairs are so gauche,” she’d told Sam when he asked why. But the real reason was she passionately wanted a child and didn’t have a license to get one, so the only way to do it was to have sex.

  Marina made it pretty clear on the first date that she was keen to sleep with Sam. They had made love that first night, with the lights off and the sheets over them, pressed together in desperation—hers for a child, his for her body.

  After that they had met a lot, but always in secret. There was little need for them to go out and be seen, and with the right words and the right underwear, Marina discovered that Sam hardly needed convincing to stay inside and fumble under the covers.

  So they made love night after night, meeting after work four nights in every five, liaising whenever they could.

  That afternoon, they had both left work early, skipped dinner and met at Marina’s residential block as the sun set. Her place was a small, single occupier apartment, with a small bedroom that opened onto the compact kitchenette. Sam knocked once on the door—unnecessary, because all apartments in Cobaltville were unlocked, as they had always been since the instigation of the Program of Unification; but he liked to knock anyway, another gesture to days long passed.

  “Be still, dear heart,” Marina called from where she sat in the lounge, watching the door. She had been rewriting ancient poetry to pass the censor all week at work, and was trying to get the sense of it into their lovemaking.

  Sam pushed the door open just far enough to enter, stepped inside and quietly closed it behind him. He let out a breath of admiration when he saw Marina. She was sitting surrounded by scented candles, shades drawn, her body luminescent in the firelight. She wore a cerise-pink dress that cinched tightly across her breasts and barely covered her hips, and she had teased her hair so that curling strands tumbled down past her ears and cheeks, a single curl just beside her right eye.

  She was pleased to see him, too, the way he dressed just for her—or at least she imagined he had. He wore a white, buttoned-down shirt with a high collar, and a vest over it, in a deep maroon like wine. His pants were dark, with a matching stripe of maroon woven into the fabric, one stripe running down each seam. His hair was brushed and parted, and he had shaved, leaving that telltale plumped look to the skin on his cheeks and chin. He smiled; straight teeth, full lips.

  Sam could not take his eyes off Marina. She looked more beautiful every time they met. More beautiful and more appetizing. You look delicious, he wanted to say. But what he said was “Something smells delicious,” and he made a show of inhaling through his nose.

  “Dinner,” Marina whispered in her treacle voice, “will be chicken in a pseudo-alcoholic sauce. But it’s too early to eat yet, isn’t it, sweet Sam?”

  He nodded eagerly, pacing across the room to her. He felt hot, and not just from the candles—he was hot in all the right places. “Far too early,” he said, admiring the glistening, smooth legs that were stretched along the sofa. “But how will we spend so much time until it’s ready?”

  Marina’s answer was to reach up for Sam, place her arm behind his neck and pull him toward her. He could smell the candles as he came close, and the musk of her scent—illegal but still available if you ventured into the Tartarus Pits or had a contact who would.

  Marina pulled his pants off first, and Sam took his shirt off over his head. They made love on the couch, Marina still wearing the dress she had sourced from Historical—a copy of something some starlet had worn on the red carpet of some show’s premiere two hundred years before, hitched up so that Sam could gain access to the place between her hips where all her longing had taken root after eighteen barren years.

  The room had a smell to it afterward; a smell of sweat and bodies and chicken cooked too long in pseudo-alcohol until the sauce had begun to burn. They ate it anyway, sitting in one another’s arms, bodies coiled together like the coiling flames in the room’s slight breeze.

  Marina wiped sauce from Sam’s chin and then licked it from her finger, her eyes still on him. “I love you,” Sam said. “I never want to leave this spot, leave your arms.”

  Marina looked at him, feeling the warmth inside her where he had spilled his seed once again, wondered if she would feel the difference when it worked—if it worked. “Then don’t leave,” she said. “But we’ll get hungry one day.”

  “And maybe they’ll find us dead, like this,” Sam said, “all for the sake of a chicken dinner we couldn’t be bothered to reheat.”

  Marina laughed at that. “Angling for seconds?” she teased. She hoped that he was; she wanted him strong and healthy, good father material.

  Before Sam answered, the front door to the apartment crashed open and a figure came striding in, dressed in black, a helmet over its face.

  “Oh no! Magistrates!” Marina yelped, staring up at the ominous stranger.

  But it wasn’t a mag, or at least it was one unlike any that Marina or Sam had ever seen before. The figure wore what looked like a magistrate raincoat, black with the familiar red insignia at the breast, coupled with a helmet that covered its entire face and looked like something out of a nightmare.

  Before either of them could say another word, the mag raised his right hand, the sin eater materializing there even as he did, and fired, two shots, pumped straight to the head of his victims.

  * * *

  DEPAUL TURNED BACK from the scene of carnage, reaching for the front door and sweeping it closed. He didn’t want anyone to see what he had done to the two lovers, that he had executed them. Their names and details flashed across his Heads Up,
but he didn’t care.

  Doors were always open in Cobaltville—that was the law, ever since the introduction of the Program of Unification and its wondrous rules for a harmonious existence. Nothing had barred his way. He could have chosen any of a hundred different apartments, a hundred different doors, and walked in and shot whoever he found inside. What would it matter who he chose? They were all guilty, weren’t they?

  The woman lay with her head tilted back, blood in her dark hair, vacant eyes staring up at the ceiling. The man must have turned as the bullet struck, and he had lost the side of his head, just beside his left eye, leaving a gaping red wound where his temple should have been. Both were dead.

  “Illegal sexual liaison,” DePaul muttered, recognizing the signs. “Seen it before. Consider your relationship terminated.”

  The candles flickered as he passed through, checking the other rooms of the apartment to confirm that they were unoccupied. They were. The place would do. He could set up his base here, rest until the next day, until he was ready to strike.

  Chapter 21

  It was an ordinary patch of the Sonoran Desert, barren and unearthly still beneath the sliver of moon that lit the sky. The terrain, undulating like the creases on a bedcover, stretched as far as the eye could see. The only sound was the haunting moan of the desert winds as they coiled across the sands, whipping up particles and dropping them a few yards away, like some elaborate game of pick-up sticks.

  Suddenly, a swirl of impossible light came into being, cutting a hole in reality as it formed a single, spiraling whirlpool of colors, a rainbow window into infinity. Colors swirled and merged within that whirlpool, and witch fire played across its vast depths. The swirl had proportions impossible for the human eye to comprehend. It seemed to sprout from the ground in a cone, but that swirling cone was mirrored beneath it, sinking deep into the soil to create an hourglass shape.

  Two figures emerged, stepping out of nowhere and onto solid ground even as the hourglass swirl collapsed in on itself and disappeared. The two were Kane and Brigid, and between them stood a one-foot pyramid cast in metal, with a chromium sheen. The pyramid, a travel device called an interphaser, had cut a hole in quantum space, instantly propelling the two Cerberus agents from the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana to the edge of Cobaltville.