Hell's Maw
Authors: James Axler
HOPE'S BATTLEGROUND
Earth's secret history of alien occupation is challenged by a powerful alliance of warriors driven to reclaim humanity's birthright. But when a cruel, vicious ruler spreads a new wave of terror, the Cerberus rebels must fight for their lives.
DEATH BLOOMS
Beautiful, seductive and deadly, she is called Ereshkigal. Her flowerlike templeâeerie and alienârises out of the desolate, sun-drenched desert of postapocalyptic Spain. The river of blood flowing to her temple doors is just the first sign of the horror to follow. With her army of Terror Priests eager to kill for their queen, Kane, Grant and Brigid must confront her dark power. But Ereshkigal's power to control men's lives may prove stronger than anything the Cerberus warriors have ever faced. And this evil interloper will not be satisfied until she has annihilated everything between her and total domination of Earth.
In the center of the room, Ereshkigal strode into the pool of blood
Kane watched her feet and ankles disappear beneath the surface as she entered by a hidden ramp. Her tail of feathers ruffled behind her, and several fluttered away. A trail of bloody feathers dotted across the floor already, like strange markers.
Kane stepped onto the first of the springy, leaf-like steps descending toward the pool, and something struck him from behind. Suddenly, Kane found himself falling, tumbling end over end down the staircase.
He rolled as he reached the bottom, bringing the Sin Eater up as one of Ereshkigal's Terror Priests leapt from the topmost stair. His torso seemed freakishly long and his limbs stretched impossibly out at his sides like the wings of some bird of prey.
The man was throwing something. Kane saw it flash in the air even as he rolled.
Kane fired.
Across the room, Ereshkigal was still standing in the pool. Blood lapped at her slender hips. She smiled as she fixed Kane with her stare. Her lips moved and she began to speak the words of the chant designed to deliver the equation to the human bodyâthe equation that could kill a man.
Other titles in this series:
Shadow Scourge
Hell Rising
Doom Dynasty
Tigers of Heaven
Purgatory Road
Sargasso Plunder
Tomb of Time
Prodigal Chalice
Devil in the Moon
Dragoneye
Far Empire
Equinox Zero
Talon and Fang
Sea of Plague
Awakening
Mad God's Wrath
Sun Lord
Mask of the Sphinx
Uluru Destiny
Evil Abyss
Children of the Serpent
Successors
Cerberus Storm
Refuge
Rim of the World
Lords of the Deep
Hydra's Ring
Closing the Cosmic Eye
Skull Throne
Satan's Seed
Dark Goddess
Grailstone Gambit
Ghostwalk
Pantheon of Vengeance
Death Cry
Serpent's Tooth
Shadow Box
Janus Trap
Warlord of the Pit
Reality Echo
Infinity Breach
Oblivion Stone
Distortion Offensive
Cradle of Destiny
Scarlet Dream
Truth Engine
Infestation Cubed
Planet Hate
Dragon City
God War
Genesis Sinister
Savage Dawn
Sorrow Space
Immortal Twilight
Cosmic Rift
Wings of Death
Necropolis
Shadow Born
Judgment Plague
Terminal White
HELL'S MAW
It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper airâthere's the rub, the task.
âVirgil
The Road to OutlandsâFrom Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. The aftermathâforever known as skydarkâreshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlandsâpoisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforcedâto atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons' public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technologyâ¦a question to a keeper of the archivesâ¦a vague clue about alien mastersâand their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid's only link with her family was her mother's red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant's clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, communityâthe very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the cruxâwhen Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldn't do. So the only way was outâway, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville's head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Contents
The room was too warm, too dark, and the dry smell of burning dust clung to it possessively.
The small space was made smaller by the drapes that had been hung from the walls and over the doors, patterned in the dark colors of blood and red wine intermingled with the purples and blacks and deepest blues of bruises on human flesh.
The room had no windows. It was located in an underground bunker, a single room in a facility that had once been called Redoubt Mike and had served the US military back in the twentieth century, two hundred years earlier. That name had been cast aside by history now, blown away on the nuclear wind that had reshaped the world and its people.
Where once there had been fluorescent lighting functioning on automated circuits, now there were candles, three dozen of them scattered across every cluttered surface and dotted across the floor like seeds broadcast from a farmer's hand.
The room was cluttered by an odd selection of mismatched objects, feathers and bones, driftwood and skulls, jars of dried spices and plant roots vying for space along the walls, everything lit by the flicker of candle flames.
Everything here looks worn-out and tired,
Nathalie thought as she pushed a hanging scarlet drape aside and strode through the doorway. She was a slim, dark-skinned
woman in her twenties, six feet tall with long, bare legs that seemed to flow almost like liquid in the flickering light of the candles. She wore a calfskin jacket that jutted tightly across her breasts, leopard-print shorts and long, black boots that laced up at the back, the corset-like lacing running all the way up to the top of the boots where they sat just below her knees. The knife sheathed at her hip was as long as a man's forearm and broadened along its length to become wider at its tip. Her hair was an afro of tight black ringlets, encircling her head like some shadowy halo. She wore dyed feathers hanging from her ears, and these seemed to twist and flutter as she entered the room, brushing against the tops of her shoulders. Her face was fixed in a solemn expression that gave nothing away, insouciant mouth unreadable.
A canvas bag hung from her shoulder on a thick strap, colored a dirty olive green but within which had been weaved threads of blue and yellow and silver. The silver threads glistened as they caught the light from the flickering flames.
Nathalie strode across the room toward the figure waiting in its center, admiring the ragged collection of junk with disdain. It was appropriate, she thought, the worn-out junk that cluttered this underground lair. Its tired and broken nature was in sympathy with the tired and broken nature of the man who presided over it, king of the flea pit, who sat in his chair at the midpoint of all the trash.
“Welcome to the
djévo
,” the man pronounced in a rich basso voice. “Enter freely.” His name was Papa Hurbon and his was a large frame with the richly dark skin of an octoroon. His corpulence was barely contained in the straining short-sleeved shirt he wore, and he had a bullet-shaped head that widened from his pointy crown to a bucket-like mouth. When he opened that wide maw, he showed a line of fat teeth, with two missing in the lower
jaw and a golden replacement for his upper left canine. His head was shaved and beads of sweat glistened there. Both of his ears were pierced a dozen times or more, with a line of gold studs running from lobe to shell-like helix, golden hoops depending from the midpoints, and what seemed to be two petrified three-inch-long fetuses hanging from the lobes.