Hell's Maw Read online

  * * *

  THE THREE FIGURES were advancing on Shizuka as she stood on the far side of Maria Zorrilla’s vacant bed. There was nowhere for Shizuka to escape—the room’s sole window was ahead of her, blocked by the dark-haired man whose nose she had just broken, while the exit door and en suite were next to one another, blocked by the white-haired man who was striding across the room wielding the blood-drenched anglepoise lamp.

  Not that Shizuka needed to run. She bent slightly at the waist, bringing her center of gravity down as the menacing figures approached. Then she pounced, moving with the fluidity of a cat stalking its prey.

  Zorrilla was the closest to Shizuka, having just emerged from the bed. Shizuka stepped forward, driving her right hand out in a ram’s-head punch that clipped the woman across the jaw. She may be an innocent—in theory they all were—but they were caught up in something that went beyond Shizuka’s understanding just now, and every moment they delayed her was another moment that Pretor Corcel was bleeding out on the floor.

  Shizuka’s blow struck the woman like a thunderclap, and she was thrown backward, stumbling against the bed with a shriek of surprise.

  The dark-haired man was on Shizuka then, driving one of his meaty fists at her face. Shizuka spun, twisting out of his reach as the blow sailed past, feeling its breeze rush against her cheek.

  Now Shizuka was facing the blank wall by the bed, and she kicked out, pressing one foot against it to launch herself in the opposite direction to where Dark-Hair was still recovering from where his attack had missed. Tucking her head, Shizuka struck him with the crown of her head high in his ribs, knocking the wind out of him and driving him back in a graceless stumble of his unsteady legs. The man fell a moment later, three steps into his awkward dance. Shizuka rolled on the floor, flipping up as she untangled herself from him.

  Three feet away, the third man swung the anglepoise lamp at her head. Sensing the movement, Shizuka ducked, and the bloody struts of metal raced over her head, momentarily entangling in her hair before tearing free and striking the wall to her left.

  Remaining low, Shizuka swung her fist out and up, striking White-Hair in the gut. The blow was poorly executed, however, the angle wrong, and White-Hair just spit out a breath before reaching down for Shizuka with his free hand.

  Throat caught in the man’s grip, Shizuka found herself being pulled forward, and she lost her balance as she went skittering across the floor tiles. He let go an instant later and Shizuka went flying across the room before connecting with the far wall.

  The man with the anglepoise lamp was on her in a second, swinging his makeshift weapon at her head, using the weighty metal shade and bulb like a club.

  “Shit!” Shizuka gasped, rolling out of the way of the assault. The heavy lamp struck the wall behind her with a crash, the bulb shattering on impact.

  Shizuka moved swiftly then, her body responding to the hours of training she had put in to become a samurai. She kicked out, leg swinging to catch her attacker behind his knees, forcing him to step forward or lose his balance entirely. He stepped forward, arms outstretched to remain standing. The move had forced the man to step closer to Shizuka, meaning he was much less able to use the hefty weight of the anglepoise lamp as a weapon.

  Shizuka stepped in closer still, reaching one arm behind the man’s head even as her other hand grabbed ahold of the lapel on his pajama top.

  Before White-Hair knew what was happening, Shizuka flipped him over, tossing him over her left shoulder so that he slammed against the wall directly behind her, headfirst.

  Shizuka scrambled toward the door, halting momentarily to grab Corcel’s arm. “Can you walk?” she asked.

  Corcel mumbled something incomprehensible and began to push himself up from the floor. There was a lot of blood on his shirt where the glass shard still protruded.

  “I’ll help you,” Shizuka insisted, tightening her grip on his arm and adding her own strength to his as he raised himself.

  A moment later, the two of them were lurching out the door and into the corridor beyond.

  Outside, the corridor had descended into chaos. There was blood on the walls and two nurses lay dead or dying, slumped against doors to the patients’ rooms.

  “What’s happening?” Shizuka asked with incredulity. “How—how can this be?”

  From the room behind her, Shizuka’s three opponents had shaken off her attacks and were striding across the room toward the samurai woman. “Corpses for our mistress!” they chanted in unison, the words delivered in Spanish.

  With that, all three began to charge toward Shizuka and Corcel, leaving them with no more time to plan.

  * * *

  DOWN IN THE BASEMENT, Cáscara and Grant hurried to the door of the morgue. Grant had Julio over his shoulders in a fireman’s lift, his Sin Eater still held in his right hand.

  Before they could get there, another figure shoved its way out from one of the wall-mounted drawers, a tall man with long limbs and a muscular torso. He leaped from the broken drawer and barred the way to the doors.

  “I think he works out,” Cáscara muttered.

  “Or he used to,” Grant said.

  Another drawer to their left crashed open, then another, and more animated corpses began to pull themselves out of their would-be prisons.

  “We’re trapped,” Cáscara stated. She was right—there were too many walking dead in the path to the door for them to exit easily—they would have to plan a route through them. Brute strength alone would not be enough.

  “Go back,” Grant suggested, scrambling toward a door on the far side of the room.

  Cáscara skipped ahead of him, reaching for the door. It had a large glass pane in it that ran roughly from waist to crown, granting a clear view into the room beyond. It was in total darkness.

  Cáscara opened the door and held it for Grant, ushering him through as the animated corpses began to swarm toward them. Another of the morgue’s drawers burst open behind them and a pale-fleshed woman came rolling out from within.

  Once they were through, Cáscara slammed the door closed, holding it tightly by the handle. “We need to lock this place up somehow,” she said, her eyes on the moving figures in the next room. “Does he have keys on him?”

  Grant reached up with his free hand and checked Julio’s pockets. The blood was drying on the morgue tech’s neck and he was delirious. “Can’t find… No, nothing,” Grant confirmed. “Just pens and cash.”

  Cáscara cursed in Spanish, still watching the figures emerging from the drawers in the next room. “If they get free, Grant—”

  “Yeah,” Grant acknowledged. “Let me try something,” he said before switching to his Commtact frequency.

  “Cerberus, this is Grant. Kane, do you read me? What’s your ETA?”

  The response from the Commtact was nothing but silence.

  “Cerberus?”

  Cáscara looked at Grant quizzically.

  “I have a radio comm rig-wired in my skull,” Grant told her before trying the frequency again with no result.

  “These walls are lead-lined,” Cáscara pointed out. “Will your radio penetrate that?”

  Grant grimaced. “Evidently not,” he admitted. “It sometimes has trouble when I go underground, too.”

  Automatically, Cáscara reached for the light switch on the wall. The lights flickered on, filling the room with the momentary tink-tink-hum of fluorescents. They were in the theater, where the recently departed were examined when there was medical uncertainty about the cause of death. Two metal examination tables dominated the room, and beside each was a podium containing examination implements. A figure was sitting up on one of those tables, a woman, naked with the top of her chest split open and pinned back to reveal the chest cavity. Behind her, a medical examiner in a white coat was hanging from a noose that had been hooked over one of the depending fluorescent lights made from rubber tubing while another man, naked with the skin of his neck pulled back to expose his throat, was standin
g holding the other end of the noose.

  Behind them, through the window set within the door, more drawers were opening, disgorging their once-dead contents, twelve dead men swarming toward the unlocked door.

  There were no other exits.

  Chapter 21

  Twenty-seven minutes earlier

  Bells were tolling throughout Zaragoza city.

  A graveyard stood beside an eighteenth-century church that was more ruin than building now. The graves were overgrown, their stone engravings mostly lost to the ravages of time. The clear blue sky above remained defiant to the rot below.

  Amid this scene, a swirling blossom of color materialized without warning. Like the leaves of a lotus blossom, the upended cone of color seemed to bud from the ground itself. And more—a second cone appeared directly below this one, delving impossibly into the earth in a fracture of reality itself.

  The cone was accompanied by no noise, except perhaps the excitement of ionized air particles that arrived in its wake. Its depths held every color of the rainbow, swirling amid a black screen like the night sky, where flashes of lightning like witch fire vied for space.

  From this double cone, which defied the laws of physics, there stepped two people—Kane and Brigid Baptiste. Both were dressed for combat, sleek shadow suits hugging their taut bodies, jackets with ammo pouches, grenades and knives finishing the ensemble.

  Brigid had a weapon at her hip, her trusty TP-9 semiautomatic, held in an open holster where it could be accessed immediately.

  Kane, too, had a blaster, though his was hidden in the familiar forearm holster that tucked beneath his jacket’s sleeve, awaiting the command that would launch the weapon into his waiting hand.

  As they stepped from the swirling coruscation of light, the cones seemed to shrink, pulling back to their meeting point where they intersected on the line of the ground. A moment later they were gone, and all that stood in their place was a silver pyramidal structure, roughly one foot high with a mirrored surface. This pyramid device was the interphaser, and with it Kane, Brigid and the other members of the Cerberus organization could travel instantaneously across great distances by accessing the quantum interphase window it was designed to open.

  Kane looked around warily, alert to danger. “Nice place for a vacation,” he deadpanned. “I can see what drew Grant and Shizuka here. Plenty of romance.”

  Brigid was crouched over the interphaser, shutting down as it finished its sequence. She had brought a carry case with her, a little like a rucksack but with a molded, padded interior where the unit could rest safely when not in use. She sealed up the interphaser in its case and glanced around the graveyard. “Do you think we should take this with us, or hide it here for now?” she asked Kane.

  “Leave it,” Kane said. “Let’s explore first, track down Grant and Shizuka.”

  A moment later, Brigid had hidden the carry case deep in the overgrown bushes. Then she and Kane made their way through the tangled undergrowth of the forgotten graveyard, emerging through a set of chained and padlocked gates whose hinges were held together by a combination of rust and sheer bloody-mindedness. As Kane led the way through the rotten gates he used his Commtact to hail Grant.

  “We’ve just arrived,” he said. “Where are you?”

  There was no response.

  Kane had emerged on a narrow street on the east bank of Zaragoza, at the end of which he could see the River Ebro. The street was abandoned. The river’s waters cast dancing lights on the street as they reflected the sunlight from overhead.

  Kane tried his Commtact again. “Do you copy, over?”

  Then he stopped moving, glancing back at the graveyard as Brigid pushed her way through a gap in the broken-down gates beside a crumbling wall. “You notice that?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “The bells,” Kane said, looking up at the ruin of the church. “Someone’s working the bells in there.”

  Brigid shrugged. “Well, it is a church,” she said.

  “Yeah, but look at it,” Kane stated with uncertainty. “The place looks like it’s about to fall down. Who are they calling to prayer?”

  Brigid inclined her head in thought. “This isn’t the only church ringing,” she said after a moment. “I can hear—”

  “Me, too,” Kane confirmed, first pointing up the road and into the city center, then gesturing toward the river itself. “And there, too.”

  “Any word from Grant?” Brigid asked.

  “No,” Kane stated with a shake of his head. Then he activated the Commtact once again. “Cerberus, this is Kane. Can you triangulate Grant’s current position and guide me there?”

  Farrell’s voice replied over the Commtact a moment later from his position at the comms rig of the Cerberus redoubt. “Gotcha, Kane,” he said. “I’m bringing up the data now.”

  * * *

  APPROXIMATELY FIVE THOUSAND miles away, in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, Farrell tapped out a command on his DDC computer. The screen flashed up the data from Grant’s biolink transponder tracking device. Embedded within all Cerberus personnel, the transponder utilized nanotechnology to provide a position locator, as well as reporting back the user’s health, including heart rate and brain-wave activity. Cerberus used these devices to monitor team members in the field, and they had been crucial in saving the lives of several agents.

  “Got him,” Farrell confirmed over the Commtact link as the locator began to broadcast its position on a real-time satellite image of the city. Farrell tapped out an instruction, drawing down a street map overlay on the image and factoring in Kane’s and Brigid’s positions. He could not locate Shizuka, however—since she was a Tiger of Heaven and not a member of the Cerberus operation, she had never had a transponder surgically embedded.

  “He’s four blocks to your north and one west,” Farrell explained. “Looks like…a hospital.”

  “Hospital? Shit! How are his life signs?” Kane asked, concerned.

  “Look normal,” Farrell confirmed after bringing up the relevant information from the transponder. “Heart rate’s fast—”

  “Can you try raising him?” Kane butted in. “I’m having no success this end.”

  “I’ll try,” Farrell said into his headset.

  * * *

  THE STREETS WERE EMPTY. Automobiles stood abandoned, stores open, but there was no one outside, not even sitting at the little café tables that lined the sidewalks outside the eateries. There was barely any traffic noise either, and none of the usual noise of people talking, moving, living. All there was was the sound of the tolling bells, slow but regular, echoing across the city.

  “What happened here?” Kane asked as he and Brigid jogged up a street, heading for Grant’s position.

  “It’s still happening, I think,” Brigid observed, looking from storefront to storefront. There were people in the stores, she could see, but they were moving slowly—all of them—which was disconcerting.

  “Let’s find Grant and Shizuka first, before we start figuring this thing out,” Kane decided. “If they’re caught up in this then—” He didn’t finish the statement, just let it hang there, like a threat.

  They crossed a junction on foot, and Kane spotted people moving along the cross street. They were hurrying into buildings, apartments located above quaint cafés and clothing boutiques, cars pulling over. They looked scared, as if they were frightened to be seen in the light. Kane watched them, trying to figure out what they were hiding from.

  The tolling bells seemed to be getting louder, and with each intersection the echo became more pronounced, a slow beat droning through every street, every alleyway.

  Zaragoza was an old city, and inevitably its streets were haphazard and irregular. Kane and Brigid hurried past a side street that was little more than an alley with a decaying stone arch above that linked building to building. As they did so, a figure on a moped came hurtling out of the alley’s mouth, engine loud in the silence. He wore no helmet and had his hands off the
handlebars and pressed instead to his face. He was shrieking, a strained and painful howl like a trapped animal.

  The Cerberus warriors leaped aside as the scooter came rushing past, watched in shock as it slammed into the building opposite, on the far side of the street, striking a brick pillar with such force that it caused the adjacent store windows to shatter. The sound of the collision seemed absolute in the quiet street, and it was followed by a return to silence so abrupt that it felt like a physical thing.

  In the aftermath, the biker was left lying on the sidewalk with the scooter wrapped around his legs like a snake.

  Kane scrambled across the street toward the rider, calling out to him in English. Brigid followed, repeating the words in Spanish—thanks in part to her eidetic memory, Brigid could speak several languages.

  “What happened?” Kane asked as he reached the rider. “You okay?”

  The man’s hands were still pressed against his face, and now there was blood seeping between the bruised fingers. He wore a shirt and blue jeans, both torn in the sudden fury of the crash, the shirt splashed with a few spots of blood.

  “How did you lose control?” Brigid asked, leaning down to look at the bloody rider. He didn’t respond. “You’re hurt,” she said. “Let me look.”

  Gently, Brigid reached for the man’s hands, pulling his right hand away from his face. As she pulled his hand away, she saw his mouth was stretched taut in a grim smile, blood washing across his teeth. His visible eye was bright, staring into the middle distance, not focusing on her at all. His lips moved, the smile never wavering, and Brigid realized that the rider was saying something, barely audible even in the near-silence of the street.

  “Is he speaking?” Kane asked as he crouched beside the wounded man.

  Brigid nodded. “I think so.” After pulling his other hand away, she leaned closer, straining to hear the man’s whispering voice.

  “‘Such joys I see, such joys…’” Brigid translated.

  Their Commtacts flared as they puzzled over the man’s actions and words. It was Farrell. “Kane, you’ve stopped moving. Everything okay?”