Judgment Plague

by James Axler

  They were normal, no black tears, no dark vomit or saliva. It had not hit here, not yet at least.

  As the two of them reached another wide passageway that led to a sky bridge connecting this tower to its neighbor, Brigid stopped.

  A magistrate patrol was heading in their direction, two tall figures dressed in the familiar black armor of their office, sin eaters strapped to their wrists and ready for immediate access.

  She turned to Kane. “What now?”

  “We’ve made it this far,” he said, stepping into whatever shadows he could find in the well-lit corridor. “Maybe they won’t recognize us.”

  “Big maybe,” Brigid said, following his lead.

  Kane looked past her as the magistrates approached. They were coming this way—there was no question of that—and the Cerberus warriors had nowhere to hide.

  “You there,” called out the mag on the left. “Where’s your ID?”

  “Damn,” Kane muttered.

  * * *

  IT WAS 7:00 A.M.

  The bodies in the living room looked glazed, the blood congealed in dark spots. The artificial heating of the apartment speeded up the process of decomposition.

  DePaul had not slept, nor did he feel any need to.

  He stalked through the room, eyeing the bodies for a moment. Was she beautiful, the woman? It was hard to tell, because a chunk of her face was missing where he had shot her.

  He stopped, staring at her for a moment. She wore a short pink dress, better to show her legs. She looked like a lawbreaker, DePaul decided, and so did the man. They both looked like dirty lawbreakers. Like everyone else in the ville. Like everyone else on the planet.

  He passed through the room, moving to the open-plan kitchen. There was food there, a pot waiting on the stove, boiled dry now, with tiny clumps of chicken clinging to the bottom. He had turned off the heat when he’d arrived, after he had shot the two lawbreakers, but it had already cooked too long. He wouldn’t eat it; there was no need—he survived on protein injections and nutrient feeds, linked directly into his armor by resealable tabs. He dared not touch the outside world directly, for fear of another infection laying him low, distracting him from his mission to save mankind from its base criminality.

  DePaul reached the front door and pulled at it, stepping back into the shadows as he eyed the corridor beyond. He had been fortunate the night before—only a few people about, and no magistrates to challenge him. Today was different; today there was a two-mag patrol striding down the walkway as he opened the door, thirty feet from his position and marching in step. Were they looking for him? Had they been alerted, perhaps after the corpses had been discovered at the sentry gate? He didn’t know.

  He waited, pushing himself back against the wall of the apartment’s entryway, leaving the door open slightly so that he could see out. The mags came, their footsteps echoing as they strode in time, shadows nearing the door beneath the overhead illumination.

  DePaul ducked back, watching the shadows as they passed. Then they stopped, and he heard them discussing something: the open door.

  “Hey, everything okay in there?” one of the mags asked, and DePaul heard his footsteps as he returned.

  “It’s fine,” DePaul replied, his voice eerie through the filter of the mask.

  The apartment door swung open, and the magistrate stood framed within it. “Sir?” he asked, then he balked at the sight of the dead bodies on the couch, and DePaul standing in the corridor wearing the terrifying mask and the pastiche of the magistrate uniform.

  What happened next was a tribute to magistrate training and muscle memory. The mag jabbed out with his right arm, raising it and commanding the sin eater pistol into his hand.

  DePaul witnessed the movement as if in slow motion, seeing not just the magistrate raise his gun hand, but also seeing ahead, knowing just what would happen next: the mag would fire, his bullet striking DePaul, and it would bring down an alert.

  DePaul moved quickly, hoping to intercept the blast. The mag’s sin eater fired the instant it touched his hand, index finger curled around the guardless trigger. DePaul was lunging forward at the same instant, snatching for the barrel of the weapon as it was thrust toward him.

  The sin eater fired, the blast loud in the apartment, the acrid smell of cordite rich in the air. DePaul was faster, smacking the muzzle aside as it fired, and the bullet struck his sleeve with a loud report of metal on armor before ricocheting off and imbedding into the ceiling.

  DePaul’s other hand came up in the same quick movement, fist clenched and jabbing into the magistrate’s unprotected jaw. The mag was knocked back by the blow, thudding against the door frame with a heavy clunk.

  Outside in the corridor, just a few steps away, the second magistrate was staring in astonishment at the scene. In the space of two seconds his partner had gone from peering into an open door, to a full-blown firefight with an unknown assailant. The patrolman activated the radio set inside his helmet, calling for backup.

  Inside the entryway, DePaul yanked the sin eater from the first man’s grip, pulling it free from the feeder that went into the sleeve holster. He yanked so hard that the mag was pulled into the apartment, too, stumbling a comical three steps forward.

  DePaul drove his knee into the mag’s gut, tossing the pistol aside. There was no use holding on to it; he had it by the barrel, and the time he took to turn it around would give his opponent time to recover.

  The magistrate doubled over, exclaiming in pain as he was driven back.

  DePaul backhanded him across the face, his knuckles slapping against the side of the helmet the man wore, and hurried to the door. The second magistrate was there, just calling in the incident over his helmet comm.

  “Altercation at Sector 7-C, Beta Level,” he said, before reeling off the apartment number and corridor identifier. “We’re under attack. I repeat, we are under att—”

  DePaul had reached him then, charging across the few steps that divided them, lifting his right arm forward and bringing his own sin eater into play. The compact automatic shouted angrily in the confines of the corridor, sending its deadly issue spiraling toward the mag. A second later his visor shattered, and he let out a shout of shock and pain as he staggered backward.

  His left eye seemed to flash as the bullet struck, but despite the splintering of the visor, the helmet saved Magistrate Blythe from that first bullet. He turned and pulled his sin eater in one swift, slick movement, whipping himself out of the immediate field of the other man’s blaster and sending a shot at him even as the gun met his hand. The bullet went wild, zipping over DePaul’s left shoulder and impacting with the wall.

  DePaul raised his left arm as Blythe fired again, felt the 9 mm bullet graze his sleeve and rebound from the Kevlar-metal weave. A moment later he had his own weapon trained on Blythe, and fanned the trigger for a moment, sending a clutch of bullets at his opponent. They struck him in a line from sternum to solar plexus, and he went sailing back with their force, crashing against the far wall of the corridor.

  DePaul stepped forward, standing over Magistrate Blythe as he struggled to regain his balance. The sin eater blasted again, delivering a bullet through the fractured visor of the mag’s helmet, straight into his brain. Blythe twitched for a moment before sinking down the wall, dead.

  DePaul looked around, left and right, checking the corridor. People were peering fearfully out from their apartments, a few more gathered at the far end of the hall, where a bank of elevators was located. They were archivists, he reminded himself, timid by nature and not inclined to get involved in a fight. But the report was already out on him, and in a minute or two magistrates would be filing down those corridors, boxing him in.

  He needed to move quickly, up the agenda, get to his destination and cast his final judgment.

  He stared down at the dead mag on
the floor, turned to take in the other one who lay sprawled in the hallway of the apartment where he had killed the illicit lovers. What did it matter that he had killed them? They would all be dead soon. The purge was about to begin.

  Ex-Magistrate DePaul stomped down the corridor toward the bank of elevators, stepping into the nearest and commanding it to Cappa Level, where his penultimate act was needed, before the final outbreak began. As the doors closed behind him, a second elevator arrived on Beta Level, Sector 7-C, its doors opening to reveal a squadron of heavily armed mags who had been scrambled together at the alert from Blythe.

  “Freeze!” the squadron leader ordered.

  But there was no one there to stop, only innocent citizens still reeling from the carnage that they had witnessed.

  Chapter 28

  “I said show me your ID,” the magistrate barked as he stomped up to where Kane and Brigid were standing to one side of the window-lined corridor.

  They weren’t dressed for construction and manufacturing, Kane realized, which was why they’d been pulled up. But if the mags recognized them, Kane and Brigid would be in real trouble.

  The magistrates had marched up to the Cerberus exiles, and the one who had spoken was waiting with his hand out.

  Brigid stepped forward, plucking Colin Phillips’s pass from the tight pocket of her pants. “ID. Of course,” she said, flashing a confident smile as she handed it over. She was the more recognizable, of course, with her vibrant red hair, but Kane was a wanted man here, and his face was known to the magistrates from his time serving with them.

  Kane held his breath as he watched the mag on the left take the pass and examine it.

  The security pass was designed to unlock doors, and it featured no image, just a name and issue identification number. The magistrate looked it over for a moment and tilted his head with confusion. “Colin? That you?” he asked, turning to face Kane with the grim visage that his tinted visor lent him. He paused, checking Kane’s face. “Do I know you?”

  “It’s pronounced ‘Colleen’,” Brigid announced, drawing the man’s attention. “My parents had a pretty screwy sense of spelling. What can you do?”

  “Colleen, huh?” the mag repeated, turning back to Brigid and holding the pass in such a way that she could not see it. “Can you give me the code number?”

  “Of course,” she said, before reeling off the twelve-digit identifier that was printed on the pass. Every Cobaltville citizen would memorize this number from birth, but Brigid had only glanced at it when she took the pass from Phillips. Her recital, however, was note perfect.

  The magistrate nodded, then handed the pass back to her. “Checks out,” he confirmed. “So what are you doing here on Epsilon?”

  “Medical emergency,” Brigid said smoothly. “Guy in the manufacturing hub got his hand caught in a packing machine.”

  “He okay?”

  “Mangled,” Brigid said, “but he’ll live.”

  The magistrate turned back to Kane, clearly wondering about the familiarity of his face. Not all magistrates worked together; they had their own beats and partners. But it was entirely within the realm of possibility that Kane had passed this man in the mag ops center, back before he had been exiled from the ville. “You sure I don’t know you?” the mag asked. “You look kind of—”

  “We work all the levels,” Kane said. “Maybe you were called to a 417 we attended.”

  The magistrate nodded. “Yeah, probably.”

  “Get on with you,” the other mag told them. “And have a responsible day.”

  Kane resisted the urge to breathe a sigh of relief as the two patrolmen went on their way, leaving him and Brigid to continue down the corridor in the opposite direction.

  “That was close,” he said quietly. “Lucky you memorized the pass number.”

  “I didn’t,” Brigid admitted. “Score one for my eidetic memory!”

  Then Kane really did breathe a sigh of relief. “Tricky, tricky,” he said, as they hurried up the corridor and into a walkway that connected to the next tower. Outside, through the windows, the early rays of the sun were painting Cobaltville a fiery gold, but there was no time to stop to admire it.

  * * *

  THERE WERE PATHS between the levels that only the magistrates knew, ways to move between locations without being interfered with. These pathways existed even within the magistrates’ hub itself on Cappa Level, and it was these secret paths that DePaul used now to make his way to the hangar area.

  He stepped from the elevator and took a sharp left as a troop of magistrates marched up the far end of the corridor. A moment later, he had disappeared into a service stairwell located to the side of the bank of elevators.

  The stairway was dimly lit, and was used primarily for repairs and transporting small pieces of equipment. DePaul hurried up the steps, making his way to the correct section of Cappa Level where the nearest hangar was located.

  As he turned the bend in the stairwell, he saw a figure descending. The man had a magistrate’s uniform on, but the maroon flash on his lapel marked him as a mag tech. The tech was carrying a heavy toolbox by its handle, and for a moment he didn’t notice anything unusual about DePaul as he hurried toward him on the stairs. Then he stopped, staring through his tinted visor at the strange apparition before him.

  “What the heck?” the tech spit. “I don’t think you—”

  DePaul raised his left arm and released the hidden catch there, and a cloud of dark liquid blasted from its reservoir beneath his bell sleeve.

  The mag tech turned away, surprised more than hurt, shouting in shock. “That was a pretty dumb thing to do, perpetrator,” he snarled, and he swung the toolbox that he was holding, before throwing it at DePaul.

  As a rain of tools and heavy kit came hurtling toward him, DePaul sidestepped, grunting in pain as a flying wrench caught him in the flank. Then he stepped forward again, ascending the stairs and watching the technician, who was powering his sin eater into his hand.

  DePaul met the man, slapping the weapon aside as it blasted its first shot in the echoing stairwell.

  “Give up! You can’t last five minutes on Cappa Level, you dumb punk,” the magistrate shouted in a show of bravado.

  DePaul batted the sin eater aside once more with his left forearm, then stepped in and kneed the technician in the crotch. The tech grunted in agony and slipped on his feet, losing his balance.

  DePaul grabbed him by the lapels as he struggled to stay upright, punched him hard in the belly as the sin eater fired off another useless shot. The stray bullet shattered a light fitting and plunged that section of the staircase into sudden darkness.

  As the technician dropped backward, DePaul thrust his arm out at the man’s head and blasted a second jet of dark liquid into his face. The tech coughed, spluttering, as it struck his mouth and nostrils beneath his protective helmet.

  The man shook for a moment, staring at DePaul through the tinted visor. The darkness seemed to flicker in front of his eyes and the nightmarish figure—already disturbing in his inhuman mask—seemed to become something more disturbing still. The face seemed to shift and mold, dark feelers emerging from the hard mask, hairy limbs reaching for him.

  “No!” the tech cried. “No, leave me alone. Leave me....”

  Satisfied, DePaul left him, striding past the magistrate where he was slumped on the stairs, ascending swiftly to the next level of the complex. Behind him, the insane screams of the mag tech could be heard echoing from the hard surfaces of the staircase.

  Delta Level

  KANE AND BRIGID could not help but be aware of the cooking smells the moment they emerged from the elevator onto Delta Level. They had checked all four towers of Epsilon Level, watched every face as it passed them, searching for hints of the awful virus that their unnamed enemy had brewed in the lab under
the Sonoran Desert. So far, they had found nothing.

  “Do you think we could be wrong about this?” Kane asked as they strode into the feeder corridor, toward the grand refrigeration plant where fresh food was flash-frozen shortly after acquisition.

  “I hope we are,” Brigid said. “But our guy’s spent a long time preparing himself for this. He knows we’re onto him—poisoning that tiny settlement to the west was bound to be noticed sooner or later.”

  “You think he did that?” Kane asked, as he slipped to one side of the thoroughfare and took in the faces of the food technicians who were passing.

  A group of techs were herding escaped hens back to a cart, while eggs rolled across the corridor in all directions. For them, it was just another day.

  Brigid nodded. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it. That was his test,” she said. “A final chance to refine the properties of this weaponized virus before he unleashes it upon the world.”

  Kane looked at the steady flow of people passing. They wore hairnets and surgical masks. Some of them were moving large containers loaded with ingredients, shifting them from one section to another.

  “We’d better keep moving,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky...or unlucky, whichever it is.”

  Brigid glanced at him, worry plain on her pale features. “The clock’s ticking, isn’t it?”

  “I feel that it is,” Kane said.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MAG proved easier to quell. A knife in the ribs from in close, and DePaul let him slump to the floor.