Hell's Maw Read online

  Then the Wheelfox slammed into the ground with a second thunderous crash, which could be heard two blocks away, nose-first and accompanied by hunks of wall and metal and a great billow of dust. The engines whined for a moment and the vehicle lurched a few feet forward, threatening to overbalance and flip, before coming down again at an angle where it rested, its rear wheel bent and its back port side touching the road.

  * * *

  THE GODS DEMANDED SACRIFICE. It showed devotion, it showed belief, it showed the insect’s awe in the face of a being so much grander than anything that insect could ever fully comprehend.

  Ereshkigal stalked the city in beauty like the night. Her body was becoming more lizard-like now, more absolute and rigid, the skin assuming its hard, armor-like coating that she remembered from her first life, lo those millennia ago.

  Each step was a step of an age-old dance, her tail of feathers shimmying in time to the secret equation she had happened upon when she was still a youth in Enlil’s courtyard. To an observer’s eyes, if such there had been, the dance appeared to be a flamenco, a Spanish dance of death.

  Around her, the city of Zaragoza was dying. Few who heard the chimes in the secret rhythm could resist, their promise of joy eternal too strong a draw to ignore. People came from their apartments to die, pushing a dagger deep into their heart, diving from their open windows or merely throwing themselves prostrate in the streets before the marching mob to be crushed in its wake. The deaths were glorious. Every one fed her within, strengthening Ereshkigal and supplying the rudimentary genetic material for her to finish her birth that had begun with the dragon’s tooth in the hand of that vodun madman, Papa Hurbon.

  Around her, a city was committing suicide in the ultimate proof of her perfect mathematical reasoning.

  Close by, the cattle pens were being opened in preparation for turning man’s city over to the animals, to the wild.

  * * *

  THERE WAS RUMBLING at the very edge of Kane’s consciousness, like thunder over the desert. It woke Kane up. He was the first to awaken. He felt like hell. His head ached, his back and shoulders felt cramped and it hurt when he breathed. But he was alive.

  The rumbling thunder was still distant, a low drumming punctuated by the sudden chime of a hundred church bells all around the city.

  He was lying on something soft. A body. No, a leg. Brigid’s leg, black-clad, the holstered TP-9 digging into his flank. Kane moved, hissing breath through clenched teeth, until he was free of the obstruction.

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  Was the rumbling getting louder? It was hard to be certain, his head was throbbing so much.

  He was in the rear of the crashed Wheelfox, which was lurching now to one side, cobwebs of ruin marring the windows. The light from those windows seemed bright, and Kane took a moment to squint at it and catch his breath.

  He began turning his head, regretted it, and turned it more slowly, taking a slow breath through his mouth. He wanted to vomit.

  Grant, Brigid and Shizuka were strewn about the cabin, Shizuka slumped against Grant’s hulking body, Baptiste jammed up against a window with her legs at an awkward angle across two seats, left foot twisted. None of them were moving.

  “Hey,” Kane called, in a voice that sounded gratingly loud to his own ears. “Hey? Anyone awake? Anyone?”

  No one answered, and Kane took a moment to study his allies. They seemed to be breathing; whatever had saved him had maybe saved them, too. Thirty feet is a long way to drop. Thirty feet in a metal box with wheels…? That could either be better or worse depending on what happens to the metal box.

  Distant rumble, desert thunder, getting closer. Closer. Closer.

  Kane moved slowly, scenting the air. No smoke anyway. Nothing was on fire.

  He leaned forward and peered through the grille partition between the passenger area and the cab. The windshield looked like a mosaic made of broken ice; everything seen through it was like looking at a reflection in a shattered mirror.

  He saw that both driver and passenger had been flung forward so that they pulled at their safety belts. There was a smear of blood on the windshield on the driver’s side. Neither of them was moving.

  “Wake up,” Kane said. “Hey, wake up.”

  There was a murmur from behind him. “You okay?” he asked, not knowing to whom he was addressing the question.

  “Kane-san?” Shizuka’s voice cracked as she spoke, and when Kane saw her in the darkness of the rear, her hair was in disarray across her face, like an old-time shampoo ad.

  “Shizuka,” Kane began, struggling for a moment to bring her name to the front of his brain. “We crashed, I think. You okay?”

  The distant rumbling was louder now, closer.

  Shizuka said something in Japanese, pushing her hair from her face. “Back hurts,” she said.

  “Bad?”

  “Won’t know until I try to walk,” she admitted. “What happened?”

  “Kane, that you chatting up my girl?” Grant spoke, his voice a deep rumble.

  Kane laughed in a kind of snort of breath. “Yeah, you all right, pal?”

  “I think so, yeah,” Grant said, shifting in his seat. “Feels like we hit a wall.”

  “We did,” Kane told him, “straight through and out the other side.”

  “Yeah, now I remember,” Grant said with reluctance.

  The rumble was loud now, like buildings falling down, bricks thumping against the ground like a waterfall torrent.

  Kane pushed at the door to his right. It was locked, standard precaution when traveling in the back of a Magistrate transport. “We need to get out of here,” Kane said, “but the doors are locked.”

  Grant worked the handle on the one to his left, flipping it up and down to no avail. “We need someone in front to work the release,” he said.

  “Pretors?” Kane began. “Corcel? Emiliana? You guys a—wake?” He almost said alive, but thought better of it.

  Nothing.

  Beside Kane, Brigid stirred and mumbled something unintelligible.

  “Hey, Baptiste, welcome to the party,” Kane greeted her.

  She looked at him through lidded eyes. “What happened?”

  “Went through a wall and fell two or three stories to the ground,” Kane summarized. “Vehicle’s immobilized, doors are locked. We’re trapped.”

  Brigid said something in Spanish, tapping on the partition between the driver’s area and the rear of the Wheelfox. No one responded.

  She turned back to Kane. “No backup system that only Magistrates know?”

  “I know Sandcats,” Kane admitted, “but I don’t know these local knockoffs.” He glanced around the passenger area, running his finger along the seams, but nothing revealed itself. “Looks like we’re trapped here for now.”

  Outside, through the fractured spiderweb of glass, they could see figures moving, walking with eerie purpose toward a destination unknown. The rumbling was loud now, hard to ignore. The bells of Zaragoza continued their lethargic chime, one beat every fifty-two seconds. Brigid tried working the catch on the door while Grant put his back to the seat and tried kicking open the door on the other side. The vehicle was durable, and nothing broke free.

  Then there came a groan from the cab, and the Cerberus rebels and Shizuka looked up hopefully. It was Cáscara. She was rubbing her hand gently at her face. “Wha…?”

  “Pretor, you hear me?” Kane asked, then Brigid repeated the words in Spanish.

  “What happened?” Cáscara asked, her voice sounding woozy. “Juan? Are you—” She stopped, staring at the body of her partner where he was pulled taut against his safety belt. His head was cut open and there was dark, drying blood on his forehead. Cáscara reached across and touched Corcel, stroking his arm. He did not react, did not move. His fracturing eyes were open and staring into nothingness.

  “We need to get out of here, right now,” Kane insisted. “Don’t you hear that?”

  The rumbling, like thunder ove
rhead.

  Cáscara muttered something—perhaps it was a prayer—biting on her knuckles and stroking Corcel’s arm once again.

  “I think your partner was possessed by whatever has taken control of the city,” Brigid concluded.

  “Si.”

  Cáscara fumbled around the dash for a few seconds, reaching past her partner’s dead form and toggling a switch on the steering column. There was a click, and the rear doors were unlocked.

  Kane pushed at his door, while the others waited. Outside the thunder was deafening, only it wasn’t thunder—it was the sound of almost fifty hooves stamping against the ground in a stampede. Kane saw the movement at the far end of the street, a line of black-brown, wavering and getting closer.

  Up front in the Wheelfox, Cáscara had worked her own gull-wing door and eased herself out of her seat. She planted her feet on the sidewalk, standing a little woozily.

  “You see that?” Kane asked, pointing to the movement in the distance.

  “Bulls,” Cáscara said, her voice two octaves higher than Kane had heard before. “We have to— Help me… You must… Juan…” She was reaching into the Wheelfox, grabbing for her partner’s safety belt and trying to loosen its catch.

  “Leave him,” Kane said, “there’s no time.”

  The others had exited the Wheelfox via the same door as Kane. With the way that the vehicle was lurching, it was easier that way.

  Kane and Cáscara were watching the charging bulls, a dozen in all, their angry heads down, horns pointed toward them, bobbing up and down as they came ever closer. “Move, people, move!” Kane commanded.

  “The Hall of Justice,” Cáscara said, leading the way toward the steps of the building.

  Grant and Shizuka followed along with Kane, trotting along swiftly, glancing over their shoulders.

  Brigid tried to hurry, too, but her ankle bent and she staggered with a cry of pain.

  Kane stopped, glancing back. “Baptiste? What is it?”

  “My leg,” Brigid replied, leaning down to press against her ankle.

  And then the wave of stampeding bulls was upon them, charging down the street like a hurricane.

  Chapter 29

  The rumble of stampeding feet was deafening. Brigid did not know where to look because there were the angry, flat faces of bulls everywhere, moving like a wall in one of those old-time adventure serials.

  Kane grabbed her by the waist, plucking her up as if she weighed nothing. Brigid was thrown back with the grab, and she found herself hanging from Kane’s arms as he ran away from the charging stampede, watching everything upside down as that wall of dark faces glared at her, seeing red.

  Then Kane leaped, vaulting onto the hood of the crashed Wheelfox transport, running up its sloping windshield as the bulls reached their position. He stopped when he reached the roof, standing there, panting for breath with Brigid in his arms. Less than a foot below them, the tops of the bulls came charging past, splitting like a river meeting an obstruction as they reached the fallen Wheelfox.

  Brigid closed her eyes a moment and let the wave of panic subside while all around her the rumble of thundering feet echoed from the hard surface of every building.

  The wave lasted ten seconds, maybe less. Surreally, the church bells of Zaragoza chimed once more in the middle of it all as a wave of angry bulls who had once been used for entertainment hurried past with all the grace of a raging river.

  As the bulls passed, Kane looked down at Brigid’s face, her skin pale, the vibrant red hair catching in the wind. “Turning into a damsel in distress, Baptiste?” he asked.

  Brigid opened her eyes, two fierce emerald orbs glaring into Kane’s. “How many times have I saved your ass? How many times this month? This week?”

  “I don’t keep count,” Kane told her.

  “Think you can give me this one then?” Brigid asked. Was it anger or wounded pride in her tone? Kane wondered.

  “What happened back there?” he asked.

  “My ankle gave way,” Brigid told him as he gently set her down on the roof of the Wheelfox. “The shadow suits likely protected us from that drop, but I must have twisted something in the impact.”

  “I guess,” Kane agreed. “I’m benching you until—”

  “No!” Brigid insisted. She tried putting weight on her foot, huffed painfully and shook her head. “If I go slow I’ll be fine,” she said. “Just don’t ask me to vault any high walls.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Kane said, helping Brigid down from the roof of the car.

  Cáscara, Grant and Shizuka were standing on the steps of the Hall of Justice, its walls blackened where the bomb blast had gone off just a few hours before. Seeing that damage made Grant realize just how quickly things had been moving. It was kind of insane.

  “Are you all right?” Cáscara asked in her beautifully accented English. “Was it the fall?”

  Brigid nodded. “Armor-weave uniforms,” she explained, referring obliquely to the shadow suits that all but Shizuka wore. Shizuka had been lucky that she had been in the rearmost seat when the Wheelfox had made its swan dive; the others had cushioned her from the fall. “But I must have landed badly.”

  Cáscara led the way up the steps that led into the Hall of Justice. Kane helped Brigid up the steps, and she favored her right leg as she struggled to join the others.

  “Juan’s dead,” Cáscara told Shizuka as she led the way inside. “He’s free of it now.”

  Shizuka nodded. “He was a good man. I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  INSIDE, THE ENTRY lobby to the Hall of Justice looked like a butcher’s store at the end of the day. There were three dead bodies, including the desk sergeant, and blood was smeared across the broken glass in the door leading to the main building, where two more bodies lay. The door was open.

  “That should be locked,” Cáscara said, trotting forward urgently.

  Grant was through the lobby and behind the female Pretor by then, a grim expression on his face. He held his Sin Eater ready. “We’re behind you,” he assured her. He knew what it was to be a Magistrate and to lose brothers-in-arms. The woman had just lost her partner and then to come face-to-face with this had to be hard to take in.

  With Cáscara leading the way, the five-strong group hurried up the stairs toward the squad room. A Pretor lay across the banisters from the upper level, slumped over with blood painted across his helmet. The helmet’s visor was shattered.

  “Damn bloodbath,” Kane muttered as he followed Grant and Cáscara to the second story.

  Cáscara pulled up short as she pushed through the door into the squad room. There were four Pretors there, each one working on the carcasses of anyone else who remained.

  “Welcome to death ville,” Grant muttered as he peered over Cáscara’s shoulder.

  The Pretors turned, sighting the new people with their burning sparks of life.

  “Corpses for my mistress,” they repeated, the chant now familiar to Grant even when spoken in a foreign tongue.

  “Corpse this!” Grant replied, bringing his Sin Eater up in a swift arc until it pointed over Cáscara’s shoulder. His finger pressed against the trigger even as the barrel cleared Cáscara’s arm, and a rapid burst of fire cut through the room.

  A flurry of 9 mm bullets whipped through the air, cutting into the closest of the dead Pretors—the man once known as Cadalso but who no longer had a concept of the individual—and tearing into the flexible, bloodstained armor he wore across his chest.

  “Grant, no!” Cáscara shouted even as the dead Pretor went crashing backward into a nearby desk. “They’re Pretors.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Grant snapped as Cáscara grabbed his wrist to throw his aim. “They’re dead already, Cáscara. All we can do now is try to make them realize it.”

  Cáscara’s face was screwed up in anger as she glared at Grant, but she was distracted from her response by the sounds of weapons being drawn in the room before her. The three Pretors who remained
standing—their names once de Centina, Ruiz and Bazán but now just “the devoted”—were drawing their Devorador de Pecados blasters from the hidden sheathes that ran up their forearms. The thirteen-inch barrels extended even as the weapons materialized from their holsters, and in a fraction of a second all three blasters were firing, sending a triple burst of bullets toward the doorway where Cáscara and Grant were standing.

  “Get back!” Cáscara shouted, pushing Grant out through the door, back into the stairwell. She threw herself in the other direction, tumbling into the squad room in a swift tuck and roll. The bullets peppered the walls and door where she and Grant had been just a moment before, cutting perfectly circular trails of destruction.

  The heavy door on the stairs slammed closed as Grant came tumbling through and he heard the bullets riddle against its other side.

  Shizuka was the first to reach his side. “Grant-san, what is it?” she asked, even as their other companions hurried up the stairs to join them.

  “Magistrates,” Grant summarized. “Dead ones. With guns.”

  Kane cursed.

  “Emiliana’s still in there,” Grant said, picking himself up from the floor and reaching for the door. “Need to get in there and—” He stopped.

  “What is it?” Shizuka asked.

  “Door’s jammed,” Grant said, pushing against it. “No, not jammed—locked.”

  “Must be a security feature,” Brigid proposed. A moment later she spotted the unobtrusive metal box that was attached to the wall across from the door, perfectly in line with it. “There, see?”

  “What is that?” Shizuka asked.

  “Chip reader,” Brigid explained. “Scans subjects as they pass it, unlocks the door for people with the right authority.”

  “Meanwhile the rest of us are stuck outside twiddling our thumbs,” Kane lamented.

  “Maybe not,” Grant said, plucking the blue shield badge from his belt. He waved it across the reader several times but it did not respond. Clearly, his clearance was not high enough.

  Beside him, Shizuka was glancing up and down the stairwell, trying to envisage another way inside.