Hell's Maw (23 page)

“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.

* * *

T
HE 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?”

“Got a little sidetracked,” Kane admitted, glancing up the road and all about him. The streets remained almost empty, just a few distant figures hurrying out of the sunlight, the bells chiming very slowly to punctuate the silence. “Anything from Grant or Shizuka?”

“No, he's not answering my hails,” Farrell confirmed. “And he's also not moved—he's still at the hospital.”

Kane looked at Brigid. “This guy needs to get there, too,” he said, and Brigid nodded. “Farrell, how many blocks is it? Two more?”

“One and half,” Farrell corrected. “Take the next junction and hang a left. I figure you won't miss it.”

“Gotcha,” Kane replied as he gently extricated the wounded moped rider from his vehicle. Carefully, paying attention to supporting the man's neck, Kane lifted him in both arms, adjusting his weight gently. The man continued to mutter in Spanish, the words barely more than the whispers of his moving lips.

Brigid was about to question Kane's plan when she saw the look on his face and remembered who he was. Kane had been a Magistrate once, feared law enforcer of the barons. But Mags were also tasked to help the citizens, to assist in keeping order and steering society away from chaos. Saving lives, one at a time, was all a part of their remit. After the baronies, after Kane had been exiled along with Brigid and his brother-in-arms, Grant, he had regained his humanity, the humanity that had been stripped from him by the Magistrates' harsh training program. Kane had retained the old instincts, all those factors that had made him such a great Magistrate, but he had added something else—the burning need to help people, to save innocents. Kane was a pragmatist and a soldier, but he was not a machine—he cared about who lived and who died. That was what he had achieved since leaving
the barony's clutches; that was the reward that his work with Cerberus had given him.

Kane carried the bloodstained rider and, with Brigid at his side, made his way to the end of the block toward the hospital. Like the others, this street was deserted, just abandoned cars—not parked, but simply left, doors open, sometimes with wipers and lights still on—a dog tied to a lamppost by its lead, barking forlornly.

“Something's very wrong here, Baptiste,” Kane said.

Brigid shot him a look. “You think? Kane, I don't know what we've walked into but it's… I'm finding it very unsettling.”

“Ereshkigal,” Kane said, reminding Brigid of her research.

“But how does someone clear the streets like this? It's—” Brigid stopped, spying something across the street from where she strode beside Kane.

A young woman in the window of a florist's was hanging herself, using the baling wire to hook herself up on the curtain rail that stretched across the windows. She wore a plain dress that ended above her knees, pale pink in color, girly.

Brigid spotted it first and ran across the street toward the store. Its door was open and she rushed inside.

“Stop,” Brigid said in Spanish.

The woman continued in her task, moving in an almost trancelike state.

“Baptiste,” Kane called from outside the store.

Brigid ignored him, pacing across the room, hands held up to show that they were empty. “I won't hurt you,” Brigid assured the woman. “I'm sure you have your reasons. But please, just—”

“Baptiste!” Kane again, more urgent this time.

Dammit, Kane, not now,
Brigid thought as she stepped up to the woman who was preparing to hang herself.

Outside, the bells chimed again.

Brigid reached for the woman's arm; up close she looked as if she was barely out of her teens, maybe not even that. Too young to be contemplating suicide, surely. The young woman didn't even seem to notice her, she was too busy trying to hook the baling wire tightly over the rail. Brigid snatched it back and unhooked it from the rail with her other hand.

“Don't do this,” Brigid pleaded. “Whatever it is that's driven you to—”

Brigid stopped as she caught a glimpse of movement in the back of the store, in a darker room behind the counter. Another figure was moving there, sifting through a cupboard. Brigid caught the glint of metal in their hand as they pulled something free. It was a pair of shears, seen partially in darkness, the kind used to clip the stems from flowers. Brigid watched, horrified, as the person in back jabbed the blades of the shears into their gut.

“No! Stop!” Brigid screamed, leaping over the counter and scrambling into the back room. Behind her, the young woman in the pale dress took the dropped baling wire and began to loop it up around her neck and over the rail once more.

In the back room, an older woman, in her thirties with short, dark hair, was bent over double, drawing the blades of the shears slowly across her belly. Blood was beginning to bud there in spots, seeping into the cream-colored blouse she wore. The shears were a poor weapon, their short, curved blades acting like hooks in the woman's flesh. Imprecise—but devastating.

Brigid grabbed the woman's hand and wrenched the shears from it, throwing them across the room. “What's got into you?” Brigid demanded. “Why are you doing this?”

“Baptiste!” It was Kane's voice again, calling from the open doorway of the florist's. “You really need to see this.”

Brigid stepped out of the unlit storeroom, her heart sinking as she saw the woman whom she had—helped? saved? stopped?—just a few moments before was already trying to loop the noose back around the rail over the windows. Kane was standing in the doorway, the wounded body of the scooter rider still held in his arms. His face was ashen, his expression grim.

“What is it?” Brigid asked, barely able to take her eyes from the woman in the window.

“I don't know,” Kane admitted, leading the way outside, “but it's big.”

Brigid followed Kane outside into the street once more and looked up to where he indicated. Up ahead, the colossus that was the hospital building waited. It was eerily still, the streets around it abandoned. On its rooftop, Brigid could see a line of people, all of them waiting at the roof's very edge.

“Oh, sweet baron…” Brigid muttered.

And as they watched, the first of the figures stepped from the roof.

There were two workmen on the steps of the Hall of Justice, working to repair the ruined door where the bomb had been detonated earlier that morning. The steps and surrounding walls had been blackened from the bomb blast, but the shattered glass from the door had already been swept away. One of the men was nailing a wooden panel in place over where the glass had been damaged, while the other carefully tapped out the glass that remained, dropping it into a dustpan.

Somewhere nearby, the church bells had started chiming, droning on and on in a slow, laborious pattern that seemed to penetrate the skulls of anyone within earshot.

Walking abreast, four Pretors strode up the steps into the Hall of Justice, heading for the door—nothing out of the ordinary. The workman tapping out glass looked up as the shadow of one of the Pretors crossed over his work.

“I'll be just a minute,” he promised, recognizing the uniform and the boots.

The lead Pretor reached down without warning and grabbed the man by his collar, dragging him up to his feet with a jerk before tossing him violently aside.

“Hey, what th—” the workman cried.

The intimidating helmet of the Pretor stared back at him, eyes hidden behind a darkened visor that seemed to be boring into his very soul.

The other worker was knocking a nail in place when
the female Pretor kicked him in the chest. He sagged over with a pained splutter, looking up to see the woman standing over him. Her uniform was torn across the chest as if she had been shot—in truth, she had—and there was dried blood there and something else, a kind of weave of shimmering lights at the edges of a ragged wound that marred her torso.

The Pretor shoved the workman out of her path with a vicious kick before leading the way into the Hall of Justice lobby.

The desk Pretor glanced up as the woman entered, accompanied by her three colleagues. He recognized all four of them.

“Hey, Ruiz,” he said turning back to his computer screen. “You're off shift early, aren't you?”

Pretor Ruiz of the ruined chest raised her Devorador de Pecados pistol and blasted the desk Pretor in the face. His head erupted in a burst of blood and bone as the 9 mm slug penetrated his forehead and shattered his nose.

There were two Pretors at the security door in the building when the shot was fired. The first, a woman in her early forties who spent a lot of time in the facility's gym and liked to brag that she had seen everything in her service to the badge, started screaming. Beside her, her partner—a younger woman with auburn locks that emerged from under her helmet in braids like the snakes of Medusa's hair, looked horrified, her jaw dropping in surprise.

“De Centina, is that—” the younger woman asked, recognizing the old Pretor who had followed Ruiz through the door. De Centina had left his helmet at the south gate, where Ereshkigal had killed him. Now his reanimated corpse was riddled with the cancer that had tried to eat at his face years before, leaving sparkling lines of newly possessed disease trailing across his mug like winking stars in the evening sky.