Judgment Plague

by James Axler

“No, it’s Blythe,” the first mag insisted. “Sounds like a routine patrol just went sour on Beta.”

  Both groups seemed to have reached a momentary impasse. The sheer surprise of having a shooting inside the upper levels of the ville had unsettled them, and the fact that conflicting reports suggested it was the magistrates themselves who were the targets only added to the sense of unreality. Cobaltville was at peace—wasn’t it?

  * * *

  KANE AND BRIGID sneaked through the shadows of the corridors, making careful progress to where the sounds of shooting had come from.

  Kane ushered Brigid back as he spotted a patrol heading this way. There were mags everywhere. It was proving impossible to make any progress.

  “This is your old haunt, Kane,” she whispered. “Where are we headed?”

  He thought for a moment, trying to work out where the shots had most likely come from. “Somewhere around the hangars, I think,” he said, his steel-gray eyes fixed on the corridor as the mag patrol took a left turn and disappeared out of sight. “Come on—quickly.”

  Brigid jogged after him as he hurried along the next stretch of corridor, past two interview rooms with wide observation windows that showed what was occurring inside. One room had an occupant who was covered in tattoos, including a whole series of animal markings etched into his face.

  Kane took a swift right turn and slipped into a storeroom as another magistrate came marching toward him and Baptiste. They waited there while the man passed, then stepped warily back out and hurried along the corridor, emerging outside the reception room that led into the hangar bay.

  The area was littered with the dead and wounded, two magistrates sprawled in their own blood, two more weeping, bleary eyed, with drool smeared on their chins.

  “Kane, look at their mucus,” Brigid said, as the two of them hurried through the room.

  Kane stopped, taking in the faces more closely. There were specks in the drool—dark specks, like flecks of coal. “Is it—?” he began.

  Brigid nodded. “I think so.”

  They kept moving then, hurrying into the hangar itself. What they saw when they entered made their hearts sink.

  The main doors were open, exposing the room to the open ville beyond, and the Deathbird helicopters were powering up, their rotor blades whirring around as they prepared to take off. And there, in the middle of the room, amid the wreckage of a collision between a SandCat and a wall, the nightmarish form of DePaul stood, arms outstretched as he commanded the helicopters to take flight, like some insane conductor before his orchestra.

  They were too late.

  Chapter 30

  Eight Deathbirds rose from the deck, their rotors blowing up a veritable gale in their wake.

  DePaul had loaded each one with a deadly cargo—one single vial of the lab-created virus he called final judgment, taken from the refrigerated store of the drone SandCat. Each Deathbird had been programmed, each one destined to release its deadly payload in a different ville.

  DePaul would handle Cobaltville personally.

  The vials were small, roughly the size of a large flask, enough to hold three mugs of coffee. It would be enough, though; DePaul was certain of that. The virus spread easily, carried in spittle, and with the added ingredient of the hallucinogen glist, its carriers were impelled to kiss, to share the disease.

  Mistrustful, the villes would hail the Deathbirds, and his automatic message would respond, promising a cure for a disease ravaging the Outlands—his disease—an inoculation that needed to be replicated and administered the moment the Deathbirds landed. After watching the accompanying video footage of the plague in action, local doctors would replicate the virus following his instructions—little realizing that they were replicating the plague itself. If they discovered their error it would already be too late; a single host would be enough to make the infection spread. DePaul had tested that in Freeville, was certain the final judgment would spread once it got a foothold. If one flask failed, that would not matter; he had stores enough to try again, to wipe out humankind from the planet and so cleanse the world of all crime. It was wonderful in its simplicity—no humans, no crime, the perfect solution for a magistrate overlooked by his superiors.

  Crime was a disease, clinging to men like bacteria. DePaul’s only regret was that he could not be there to pass the final sentence personally, could not oversee the final obliteration of the crime-sick human race.

  He watched in glory as the Deathbird helicopters rose from the hangar bay.

  * * *

  KANE AND BRIGID stood in the doorway of the hangar, buffeted by the winds as the choppers began to rise.

  “He’s using A.I.—artificial intelligence—to pilot them. We have to stop them,” Kane shouted over the cacophony of whirring rotors.

  “What’s he doing?” Brigid shouted in reply. “How can he—?”

  “No time!” Kane spit, pulling himself forward by the door frame and hurrying into the room. He made it three steps before he began to tumble, but picked himself up and kept running, charging for something he knew was located on the far side of the hangar.

  There, where the bay doors were drawing open, was an emergency override designed to seal the doors in case of an accident or a power leak. If Kane could only reach it, maybe he could slam the doors shut on those choppers before they left the hangar and took to the skies with their deadly cargo.

  The man in the fright mask did not hear Kane—not over the sound of the rotor blades. He was already turning to leave the hangar, marching across the room toward a separate exit, his long coattails whipping up around him in the strong breeze.

  Brigid saw the man move, and hurried into the hangar after him, hoping to cut him off before he could escape. The moment she stepped into the room she almost fell, blown back by the tornado-force blast being created by the rising choppers.

  Behind her, the first squadron of magistrates on the scene were just running into the reception area. The lead mag called for Brigid to halt, but she didn’t hear him over the rising wail of helicopter rotors.

  * * *

  KANE COULD SEE the release button—actually, a red lever, located behind a glass safety panel that needed to be raised before it could be activated. The choppers began to rise forward, moving at an angle of twenty degrees to the deck, rotors spinning as they sailed toward the open hangar doors. Kane wouldn’t make it; there was no way to reach the cutoff switch in time.

  The first of the Deathbirds launched through the opening, picking up speed as it emerged and took to the air in a whine of powerful motors.

  Kane cursed between clenched teeth as he watched it go, cursed again as a second ’bird passed through and began to ascend outside the tower.

  It was now or never, he realized. He couldn’t reach the switch, but he could blast it—though it would need to be one hell of a good shot. Without conscious thought, Kane powered the sin eater into his hand, steadied himself as two more Deathbirds passed him on their way to the open hangar doors, and fired. The bullet left the pistol in a muted roar of propellant, rendered almost silent by the sea of noises all around it. Kane watched hopefully as the bullet raced to its destination, faster than the eye could track.

  The next two Deathbirds were lining up to leave the hangar, nudging toward the open bay doors. Then the junction box on the wall holding the wiring leading up to the kill switch exploded, the glass panel blowing away and the wiring exposed as its fascia was destroyed by Kane’s bullet.

  Kane held his breath as the roll door began to rush down, almost a ton of sheet metal descending until it met the nose of the foremost Deathbird. It slammed against it, punching the aircaft to the floor like a prizefighter, trapping it there in a shower of sparks and a screech of rending metal. The Deathbird continued to charge forward for a moment, the tail pulling up until the blades cut against the se
aled door with a violent shriek of metal hitting metal.

  The fourth Deathbird crashed into the back of its predecessor and an explosion erupted through the garage bay, painting the doors and everything about them with a burst of red-gold fire.

  Kane was tossed to the deck in the cacaphony. He rolled under a workbench and held his arms over his head as more explosions began to erupt, fuel tanks meeting hot flames, running through the garage like some terrible game of telephone.

  * * *

  THE RESULTING EXPLOSION rocked Cobaltville. All four towers shook. Windows shattered and skywalks were torn from their housings, throwing horrified pedestrians out into the open air to tumble toward the distant ground.

  Up in tower four, where the hangar was located, the exterior wall at Cappa Level glowed red with heat, the hangar doors buckling under the pressure as they tried to contain the explosion. At the bottom edge of one, tongues of fire blasted outward, sneaking through the tiny gap that remained where the Deathbird had become trapped by the closing door before it could seal.

  The magistrates’ hangar was located facing the Outlands, naturally, and not the ville itself, and it was this that saved Cobaltville from even worse damage. As it was, large cracks appeared almost instantaneously in the walls of the tower, and almost every window on Cappa Level, as well as levels Delta and Beta to either side, was shattered. The sound of breaking glass was so loud it could be heard five miles away.

  * * *

  BRIGID HAD BARELY made it to the exit door through which DePaul had left when the first chopper exploded. Suddenly, she found herself thrown against the far wall, striking it with a bone-jarring crash.

  The next thing she knew was confusion, as the pain of the impact shocked her back from a momentary blackout. She rubbed her face, muttered, “Not dead.”

  Then a second explosion ripped through the hangar behind her, sending searing heat through the open doorway that led to this space where a freight elevator was located—the elevator DePaul had taken just seconds before.

  Brigid curled herself into a ball, protecting her head as the fireball rushed through the next room, accompanied by the sound of more explosions and things being disrupted and destroyed.

  * * *

  THE SHADOW SUIT saved Kane—that and the workbench—as the fires raged across the room, ripping through the hovering Deathbirds lined up to leave the hangar. The blast grounded them in one vicious slap, fuel tanks exploding as they reached optimum temperature. Around them, the fireball picked up the parked helicopters still waiting in their bays, roared over the ruined SandCat, and burned through the dead technicians and magistrates lying in the area.

  Close to the back of the huge space, where it met with the reception area, the squadron of six magistrates was also caught up in the blast. It turned their skin a deep shade of red in an instant as it roared against them like the breath of a mythical dragon.

  Twenty-five seconds and the whole thing had burned itself out, leaving only the charred evidence of grounded helicopters, blackened walls and a floor littered with tiny fires, not one of them wider than two feet across. Everything that could burn in the room had. Thick smoke hung in the air.

  In the aftermath, Kane lay reeling, still crouched where he had rolled beneath the solid workbench. The bench’s surface had been transformed from varnished beech wood to a mirrored black slab, and the metal vise secured to one end had been melted into what looked like a curving piece of surrealist art.

  Kane pushed himself out from under, rose slowly to his feet and looked around. Fires were burning here and there, one wall flickered with flames as if it were a barbecue grill, and ruined helicopters lay about like the singed carcasses of giant insects caught in a forest fire.

  Kane’s ears ached from the blast and he choked on the smoke as he tried to breathe in.

  “Kane!”

  He turned at the shout, coughed again as soot shook from his hair. It was Brigid, of course, standing in the doorway that led back into the tower, looking dazed but otherwise as beautiful as ever, though her face and hair were smeared with soot.

  “Baptiste? You okay?”

  “Me?” she asked, striding over to him. “What the hell did you do?”

  Kane glanced around him and shrugged. “Closed the door on those choppers. But two of them got out before I could.”

  Brigid looked thoughtful as she considered the implications.

  “We have to stop them, Baptiste,” Kane told her. “You know what’s on them.”

  “Plague,” she said. “But we’re still speculating. We have no solid evidence that—”

  “Guy launched them for a reason,” Kane interrupted, “and he’s only got one arrow in his bow, as far as we’ve seen. We could wait to see what happens, or we could chase them down. Question is, where are they headed?”

  Brigid looked around at the scene of devastation, thinking on her feet. “Eight Deathbirds, eight packages of weaponized virus,” she reasoned aloud. “Likely target would be nearby villes. And I’m guessing he’ll target Cobaltville himself.”

  Kane shook his head, realizing things were suddenly moving faster than he could keep up with. “You stop him?” he asked, stifling another cough.

  “No, he was too fast,” Brigid said. “Went in an elevator through there. I don’t know where he’s going.”

  Kane thought for a moment. “I do,” he said. “Not many places left for the guy to visit now.”

  Brigid was still pondering the scene of carnage. “Fire destroys the virus,” she concluded. “That’s been true way back in history, too. We could use that.”

  “How? Burn down Cobaltville?” Kane challenged.

  “No, but if we could blast the Deathbirds out of the sky before they reach their destinations...” she mused

  Kane looked around in evident frustration. “We’re all out of Deathbirds,” he said.

  “But Cerberus isn’t,” Brigid told him.

  At that moment, there came a clattering of booted footsteps from the reception area, and twelve magistrates marched into the hangar bay, their sin eaters raised.

  “Everybody freeze!” challenged the lead mag.

  Chapter 31

  The elevator ascended quietly through the tower. Inside, DePaul stood alone, his hands behind his back, watching the display panel as the cage moved from Cappa Level to Beta Level, and then began the final ascent to Alpha Level.

  He remembered taking this journey once before, using this very elevator, back when Salvo and Hunt had taken him to see the baron when he was just eight years of age. It had been a traumatic experience.

  Few elevators in Cobaltville could climb to Alpha Level, the place was so heavily restricted. It was an admin area, highly secure. And it was there that the baron lurked—Baron Cobalt, the master of all Cobaltville and the wellspring of the laws that governed mankind. Few ever met him, only the very best, the most trusted.

  DePaul was smiling behind his hideous mask as the explosion hit in the hangar bay. The elevator cage rocked in its housings, and there was a terrible shriek of grinding gears from somewhere in the shaft as the mechanism tried to continue performing while the whole tower subtly shifted shape. DePaul staggered, taking two unplanned steps forward before recovering his composure.

  The elevator continued to rise, passing through Beta Level, where the administrative records were held and monitored, and up into Alpha.

  As the elevator reached Alpha Level, the lights changed, switching from a bright, cheerless white to a softer shade of dim yellow-orange, like the flesh of a mandarin.

  DePaul stilled his mind, summoning the heads-up display inside his all-encompassing helmet. A blinked command, and the map overlay appeared before him, showing him the ideal route, sentry posts and ultimate location of the baron, tapping Cobaltville’s main computer to do a pattern an
d heat analysis.

  He was already in the mental zone when the elevator came to a smooth halt. The HUD map showed four sentries posted right in front of him, magistrates assigned to protect Alpha Level. DePaul shot even as the elevator doors began to slide open, his first bullet felling the closest of the mags on guard duty at the restricted elevator bank. The bullet drilled into the back of his neck, the tiny vulnerable section where helmet and armor did not quite overlap. The man went down like a wet rag, slumping to the floor before the elevator doors were even halfway open.

  The second mag reacted swiftly, whipping his sin eater out and blasting a continuous burst of fire at the freight elevator. His colleagues joined him in seconds, adding their fire to his in a bullet storm.

  However, DePaul had used the two seconds it took for the elevator doors to open to slip to one side, using the eight inches of corner where the control panel sat as cover while bullets peppered the elevator car. The stream of bullets went on for ten seconds before the mags outside finally eased off their triggers.

  “Anyone in there?” DePaul heard one of them shout.

  Then he swung his arm out, just over the protruding edge of the elevator wall, reeling off two shots, pinpointing the speaker’s location by the sound of his voice. The man staggered backward as the bullet struck his chest, but his armor held.

  The other mags responded in kind, blasting again, showering the interior of the elevator with 9 mm bullets. DePaul crouched in on himself as rounds flew all about the cramped space, and then the doors began to close on their automated circuit, bullets rebounding from their reinforced steel.

  As the doors sealed, DePaul heard one of the mags shout, “He’s getting away!”

  But no, that was not the plan at all. He could guess what the magistrates would do next: they would wait a moment and then one of them would press the elevator call button, which would make the doors open again. DePaul had roughly five seconds to get his response in place. He leaped up, grabbing a ceiling tile and shoving it aside, using the wall to help him climb up through the roof access of the car, used when making repairs. Two seconds left.