Hell's Maw (13 page)

“Their eyes glowed in the twilight,” Casillas explained in Spanish, his thick, drooping mustache working up and down as he spoke, “and they howled at one another like wolves. It was then that my Devorador jammed and, I swear, boy, I thought I was cashing in my ammo right there.”

“And what happened?” Ramos asked, hanging on every word.

“First one comes at me,” Casillas said, “still reluctant because he's worried I'm going to shoot him. I'm trying to reload but the blamed Devorador's stock has got jammed up tight and I can't get the dead clip out of the bastard thing. So, the mutie reaches for me, claws on his hand
like steak knives, and I did the only thing I could. I threw the pistol at his head, whacked him right in the forehead hard enough I'd swear I heard the monster's skull crack—”

Ramos began laughing at that.

“—and then—
wham!
—I kicked the creature in the gut,” Casillas continued, “so hard that it doubled over. As it began to fall back, I hit it with a right cross—used to box for the Pretor league back in those days, and I was ranked when I was young. So I hit this creature and its jaw exploded, teeth spraying out of its mouth. Not normal teeth, you understand…”

“They were curved like fishing hooks,” the turret gunner whispered in time as the older man continued regaling their charge. The gunner was called Torres, and he had been partnered with Casillas long enough that he knew all of his stories by heart now. Still, they were good stories, even though Casillas tended to add to his myth with each retelling. Torres smiled. Let the old guy have his fun!

“Six of them came at me at once then,” Casillas was saying. “My partner was down and all I had was my fists. So I punched the first—socked him right in the nose, blood everywhere. The next one figures he's going to get the jump on me but I grabbed him in a headlock—” the Sandcat swerved a little as Casillas demonstrated the move “—and flipped him over so that he knocked two more muties down like ninepins.”

“Which meant you still had two left,” Ramos counted.

“Oh, yeah, but they were scared now,” Casillas bragged. “And let me tell you something—a scared mutie is a whole lot more dangerous than a—”

“Casillas!” Torres called from the turret, interrupting the man's reverie.

Casillas glanced at the mirror, eyeing his partner. “What is it?”

“On our nine,” Torres said, his voice grim. “Looks like a…building maybe?”

Casillas eased his foot off the accelerator and glanced over to his left, out through the Sandcat's tinted window. For a moment all he could see there was rolling hills, undulating in gentle slopes to a few dozen feet above the strip of blacktop. Then, through a gap between the hills, he spotted a structure colored a deep indigo. “What is that?” he muttered.

“You see it?” Torres checked.

Ramos was leaning over from the passenger seat, trying to get a clearer view. He snatched up the onboard binoculars and pressed them to his eyes.

Another gap appeared between the slopes and Casillas drew the Sandcat to an abrupt halt, pumping the brake. Through the gap the three men could see a tall structure, taller than the lower slopes, curved on its apex and midnight blue in color.

“What is it, can you see?” Casillas asked aloud.

Ramos eyed the strange structure through the binocular lenses. It was hard to see much, most of it was obscured by the scrubland slopes, but he could see vein-like patterning on the surface, lined like the petals of a flower.

“Torres? Ramos?” Casillas asked.

“It's tall,” Ramos said, “and it's…been painted, I think.”

“Any sign of activity, boy?” Casillas barked.

“No, sir,” Ramos confirmed after a moment's observation through the glasses.

Casillas pumped the accelerator and turned the steering wheel, bumping the Sandcat off-road and turning in the direction of the mystery structure. “Then let's take a closer look,” he said.

Ramos cheered with excitement. Yeah, this was what hanging with the old Pretors was supposed to be about—fearless investigations, procedure be damned.

The Sandcat bumped over the rough terrain, tracks gripping the shifting dirt as it ascended one of the bush-dotted slopes. As it came to the top, the mysterious structure that lay beyond came into full view.

Standing there amid the wastes, it looked like a gigantic flower. It was organic with black petals, blue veins running up their centers and edges, folded together like a crocus. Each of those petals was as large as a house.

“What the hell is that?” Ramos spit, leaning forward in the passenger seat.

Casillas shot him a look. “Armor up,” he said, “and stay on your guard.”

On the turret up top, Torres trained his guns on the looming flowerlike structure, gripped by a sense of uneasiness. The thing was otherworldly, its proportions almost too much to comprehend. Where had it come from and how had it come to be here? He switched to well-practiced responses as the Sandcat drew closer to the colossal structure. “No signs of movement,” he announced. “No life.”

In the passenger seat, Pretor Ramos was shaking his head. “No signs of life,” he muttered. “The whole thing looks freaking alive to me.”

As the Sandcat drew even closer, kicking up a plume of dislodged dust in its wake, the Pretors spotted an opening at the foot of the plantlike construction, a dark gap where the petals crossed. The gap was easily tall enough for a man to walk through—in fact, it was as tall as three doors piled one on top of the other.

Thirty feet away, Casillas applied the brake, pulling up short of the towering blue-black leaves. “Me and the lad will go check it out,” he told Torres. “You keep us in your sights, okay?”

Then Casillas grabbed up his helmet, securing it to his head by the clip arrangement at the high collar of his uniform. Beside him, Ramos had already done the same.

The Pretor helmet design featured sleek curves with red flares streaked across the black surface in two single, widening horizontal lines. The effect gave the impression of a bird of prey's head, tapering backward to a slight ridge at the rear below the crown. The helmet stopped above the eye line where a tinted visor began, covering the wearer down to the base of the nose and leaving their mouth and chin visible. A chin strap on the underside featured a built-up structure that protruded to an inch-long point at the center of the chin, designed as a last-ditch weapon if needed in the heat of battle.

The two men checked their Devorador de Pecados pistols before opening the gull-wing doors to the Sandcat and stepping outside. They emerged on either side of the Pretor vehicle, weapons held low but ready, eyeing the otherworldly structure that loomed ahead of them.

Outside the confines of the air-conditioned Sandcat, it was warm and balmy, the rising sun and lack of shade making the whole scrubby plain hot as an oven.

As one, the two Pretors surveyed the area all around and behind them, scanning it with alert eyes before closing the Sandcat's doors. There appeared to be no one around, and all that they could hear was the susurrus of the breeze over the scrubland.

Moving in unison but keeping a wide distance of roughly ten feet apart, the two Pretors warily approached the mysterious, flowerlike structure. The gap in the front seemed taller now that they were closer to it, but its dark depths remained impenetrable.

Casillas raised his blaster and halted, silently instructing Ramos to proceed ahead while he covered him. Ramos nodded, then stalked ahead on light tread, his weapon held ready. He reached the gap between the petals a few seconds later and, gingerly, peered inside.

It was a tunnel, with high narrow walls leading deeper
into the structure of the flower. It was dark, but this close Ramos could see a subtle lighting to the walls, a kind of soft reddish glow like the embers of a fire. Distant noises echoed from those walls, unidentifiable creaks and scratches, which made him suspect something was alive within.

Ramos glanced back, using his free hand to indicate to his partners that he intended to go deeper inside. Casillas nodded, proceeding forward to cover the entryway while Ramos disappeared within.

The tunnel was cooler than outside, the shade bringing the temperature down at least ten degrees. It smelled faintly of decaying plant matter or mulch. Ramos moved swiftly along the tunnel, eyes flicking left and right as well as watching what was up ahead. The walls were patterned with veins, just like the exterior, and there was a glow deep beneath them that backlit them so that the veins stood out like splayed fingers held before a spotlight. The glow was a warm red, the color of blood seen through the skin. That glow was the only source of illumination here, but up ahead Pretor Ramos could see a flickering light casting swirling patterns across the ceiling, like the reflections of sunlight on a
laguna
.

The tunnel stretched twenty feet before it opened up into a chamber, of which Ramos could only see the ceiling until he was almost at the end of the narrow tunnel. As Ramos got closer to the tunnel's end, he heard the sounds increase, noises of splashing and tapping of uncertain origin. He raised his blaster and paused before the entrance, steadying himself and listening to the strange sounds carrying up from below.

Cautiously, Ramos took another step forward and peeked out into the chamber that lay beyond the end of the tunnel. It dropped down in a series of steps, which was why he had only been able to see the roof of the
cavern until now, he realized. The steps wound down ten feet before opening onto a vast chamber formed in an irregular circle. The chamber was dominated by a pool that was thirty feet across. Ramos estimated that that pool took up at least three quarters of the floor space.

The pool was surrounded by a series of dark blue columns that held the roof aloft and was lit by softly flickering flames. The columns were knotted and twisted, like gnarled old tree trunks, each one unique. But it was the pool that caught Ramos's eye. Within its vast proportions, a woman was bathing with her back to him, only her head and shoulders visible above the flickering surface. The woman wore a towering headpiece that looked like twisted branches, or perhaps the horns of a stag. There was something strange about the pool's surface—it swished like water but it was too dark. And then Ramos noticed how the contents drained on the woman's bare shoulders with a trickle of red. Blood, he realized with a start. The woman was bathing in blood.

Ramos could not hold back the gasp as that realization dawned, and although it had been quiet he saw the woman's head turn to look at him, her lustrous dark hair falling over her face to partially conceal it. She was beautiful, Ramos saw—dark eyes full of exotic promise. He was transfixed.

The woman kept her eyes on Ramos as she swam across the red pool, making her way toward the edge. As she swam, she ducked her head down once, dipping beneath the surface.

Behind her, almost hidden beside several of the twisting columns that held the cavernous roof aloft, three people were kneeling before what appeared to be waterfalls, their glistening content filling the pool below. The people had come from the Gran Retiro Hotel and were a honeymooning couple and an older woman who had been on her
first visit to Zaragoza in a decade. Now they were dead, yet still they crouched by the waters, feeding them with their own life's blood.

When the bather emerged there was red on her mouth, a line of blood running from her bottom lip where she had drunk a little of the pool's contents. A moment later, she emerged from the depths, taking haughty strides up a series of steps that were hidden below the surface, her naked body glistening with blood, the weird, towering crown she wore bobbing up and down as she emerged.

Ramos watched, still transfixed by the sight before him. She was tall and elegant, almost six feet in height with another foot and a half granted to her by the towering structure she wore atop her head. The woman's flawless body was entirely hairless, with high breasts and long, shapely limbs. She walked regally, no hurry to her movements, each stride poised and balanced as she paced across the cavern toward Ramos, her eyes never leaving his. But there was something else about her, too, something that swayed behind her, a trail of pale feathers attached to her posterior like a fan.

The woman twirled as she walked toward him, displaying her body with no hint of modesty, limbs moving fluidly like a ballerina on the stage. Ramos could not take his eyes from her, and as he watched it was almost as if she was beginning to glow with a halo of impossible light and color.

The woman passed behind one of the towering pillars that lined the room, and in that moment Ramos felt the spell break. He shook his head, eyes scanning the rest of the chamber where the pool lay, and saw two more figures emerging from the shadows there. They were two men, almost identical, with dark skin and shaven heads, bare-chested and wearing dark pants and boots. They were striding swiftly across the chamber toward
Ramos, looking up at him where he was partially hidden in the tunnel.

As Ramos watched, one of the men reached behind him, pulling something from his waistband at the small of his back. An instant later, the man's arm swept forward, and Ramos saw something glisten in the flickering light as it left his hand. A second later, that same something struck Ramos hard in his chest with a crack of breaking bone, cutting into the Pretor armor and knocking him back until he crashed against the floor on his back.

Winded and with a burning sensation running through his chest, Ramos gasped and tried to get up. As he did, he saw the thing protruding from his chest, lodged high in his breastbone. It was metallic and circular with a jagged edge, three inches across and made from some silvery material. As he watched, blood began to bloom from around the disc-like projectile, and Ramos suddenly felt breathless.

Then the beautiful woman with the feather train stepped up into the tunnel, striding over Ramos's fallen body. He watched her, and her body seemed to glow with impossible light, patterns dancing across his mind's eye, changing what he saw into something magnificent and scary and real.