Hell's Maw (19 page)

When the young nurse saw Corcel she stood to attention, a furtive expression on her face. “P-Pretor,” she said, her hands twitching nervously at her desk—a small wooden unit housing a flat computer screen with just enough room beneath it for one person to put their legs. “May I—may I help you?”

Used to this reaction—and knowing it was to his badge of office, not him—Corcel offered the nervous carer a winning smile, a row of white teeth materializing in his tanned face. “Three people were brought in yesterday,” he said before giving their names.

“Th-through here,” the nurse stuttered, leading the way down the clinically clean corridor. The corridor, like much of the hospital, was lit by fluorescents located behind grille-like tiles.

Inside the patients' room, the atmosphere was still. The blinds had been drawn, painting the room in a semidark gloom. Two people shared the room, both of them men, lying in two beds that had been set five feet apart. Both men appeared to be asleep.

“Zorrilla is next door,” the nurse explained in Spanish before leaving Corcel and Shizuka alone in the room. Shizuka regretted not being able to speak the language.

Keeping his voice low, Corcel had the good manners to translate for Shizuka. His English was flawless but accented in such a way that the hard edges of syllables seemed to have been planed down. “These two look to be asleep,” he said quietly, stepping between the beds.

Shizuka paced across to the head of one of the beds. The man there had a lined face and looked to be in his fifties or perhaps his early sixties. His eyes were closed, his expression serene, but there was bruising around his throat where the noose had been wrapped before he had been cut down. She turned her attention to the occupant of the other bed. This one was younger and appeared well
built from the span of his shoulders that was visible under the covers. He had dark hair, sleep-ruffled now, but obviously trimmed neatly. Like his fellow patient, his eyes were closed and there were dark bruises across his neck.

“I wonder what they are thinking of,” Shizuka said quietly.

“We'll only know that when they wake up,” Corcel said, glancing at the monitors that were wired to the two patients.

One of the men stirred, but when Corcel tried to speak to him he only grunted and turned his head away.

“We'll try the other patient,” Corcel told Shizuka, leading the way quietly to the door.

* * *

I
T WAS NOT
clear that they had entered the basement level, Grant thought, as the elevator doors drew back to reveal a starkly lit corridor painted in a pastel shade. The floor, too, was pastel, a barely there green color that had so little confidence it looked like a shirt that had been washed a thousand times until the color was almost gone. It was just like every other corridor of the hospital, and similar to every corridor of every medical facility that Grant had ever attended.

“No bold colors,” Grant said, addressing Cáscara. “You ever wonder about that?”

Pretor Cáscara's brow was furrowed when she looked at Grant. “Huh?”

“They never paint hospitals in bright colors,” he told her as they trudged along the airless corridor. “It's always soft shades that look like they spent too long in the sun.”

Cáscara shrugged. “Maybe they're afraid that anything too bright will scare the patients,” she suggested. “No fear of that happening here, though,” she added, directing Grant toward a set of double doors that led into the
morgue. The doors featured glass roundels at head height, just enough that one could see who was approaching but not look into the room itself.

Within, the room felt cold. Despite his shadow suit, Grant felt the temperature drop against his bare hands and face.

The room was large and featured three walls of drawers running floor to ceiling, each door big as that of a filing cabinet. The fourth wall—the side from which Grant and his companion had entered—was blank with a long mirror running its length, before which stood a small desk with an anglepoise lamp, a computer and a mobile tablet. A man sat at this, his expression haggard, his hair prematurely thinning, staring into the computer screen as the Pretor and the Cerberus man entered his domain. He looked up and smiled when he saw Cáscara, self-consciously brushing at the hair on his head. “Pretor Cáscara, h-how are you?” he said in Spanish. “I—I mean, what are you doing here? Which is to say, can I help you with why you are here?”

“Julio,” Cáscara replied, “are you busy?”

The man called Julio shrugged. “So-so,” he admitted. “The dead keep on dying.”

“Would you have five minutes to show us the bodies that came in last night from the hotel incident?”

“For you,” Julio said with a blush as he stood up, “I can make time. Who's your friend?”

“This is Grant,” Cáscara explained.

Grant saluted casually.

“He's American. Helping us on a case.”

“Lucky stiff,” Julio said as he led the way to one of the banks of drawers. He counted them in his head, despite the fact that each was labeled, then pulled at one of the handles that was just below hip level, one up from the bottom. A drawer slid out on runners, long as a bed and
containing the figure of a man in his midforties, naked and with a deathly pallor, his eyes closed.

“Looks dead, sure enough,” Grant said, peering at the body. He thought he maybe recognized the corpse from the night before as one of the hanging suicides. As he looked closer, he saw the darker skin around the neck and throat along with a little chafing.

“You see the wound around the neck,” Julio observed. “Consistent with death by hanging.”

“I know,” Grant replied.

“Are you a doctor?” Julio asked, surprised.

“No,” Cáscara told him. “He was there.”

The morgue technician did a double take. “Seriously? That must have been some nasty, nasty business.”

Grant didn't answer the man, just gave him a grim smile that said he had seen it all before.

“There are more?” Cáscara checked.

“Twelve in here,” Julio confirmed, “with two in the theater waiting for final report.

“Let me close up Frankie here,” he continued, reaching for the handle to the drawer, “and then I can—”

The technician stopped as Grant's hand gripped his wrist.

“Wait,” Grant said. He had seen something. A movement in the body, just a minute twitch of the fingers. “You see that?” he asked. “He moved.”

“Bodies will often shift position as they begin to decompose,” Julio explained. “You think you can let go of my arm, man?”

Reluctantly, Grant let go.

And then the dead man moved again.

* * *

T
HE WOMAN IN
the second room was awake and, thankfully, far more loquacious than the other patients who had been recovered from the hotel. In her midfifties, she lay in her
hospital bed with a frizz of dyed red hair that encircled her head like a bird's nest and spoke to Corcel and Shizuka with a husky voice caused by the previous night's hanging.

“I heard music,” she said.

“There was a band there,” Corcel told her, “a quintet.”

“Yes, I recall,” the woman, whose name was Maria Zorrilla, said, “but this was different. It was better than the music that they played, more…sensual. I felt it here, in my—” she tapped her chest “—heart.”

“What kind of music?” Shizuka asked once Corcel had translated. He translated her words for Zorrilla.

The woman in the bed spoke rapidly as she reached for a glass of water beside the bed.
“Era exquisita.”

“The music was absolute pleasure, a thing of absolute beauty,” Corcel translated. “It was exquisite.”

Shizuka studied the woman's face, saw the sincerity there.

“I would return to it in a heartbeat,” she said. And then, without warning, she shattered the glass against the bedside cabinet, breaking it with a vicious strike so that the top broke into a jagged line, spilling water everywhere.

Shizuka leaped back as the water struck her. She and Corcel watched in stunned horror as the woman called Maria whipped the jagged remains of the glass up and drew the sharp edge across her throat in a deep gash.
“Era exquisita,”
she said as the sharp edge drew blood.

* * *

O
UTSIDE
,
ON THE
streets of the ancient city of Zaragoza, the church bells had begun to chime. They sounded in a slow drone, regular as a heartbeat but with each note characterized by almost a minute of silence between each sound—a very slow heartbeat, then. The noise had begun at one church in the south, close to the walls that surrounded the city. However, with each slow chime, the noise seemed to spread, the beat being picked up and mimicked by the
next closest church, spreading across the city like a virus as each new church tower picked up the call. By the time it reached the center of the city, where the hospital stood, over a dozen churches were ringing their bells, and the streets seemed to be quietening in their wake.

* * *

“H
E MOVED
,” G
RANT
insisted as the dead man's arm shifted on the cold bed of the morgue drawer.

Before Grant could say more, the whole body of the dead man whom the lab tech had called Frankie shifted, rolling in place and reaching his right arm up to grab for Julio. Dead Frankie snagged the lab technician around his left wrist and drew him close with a powerful yank, dragging him off his feet and pulling his whole body down until he was sprawled across the dead man's lap.

Julio screamed.

The dead man's eyes were still closed, pale lids over the eyeballs like a veil.

By then, Frankie was sitting up, and he pulled Julio farther until he was almost lying across his knee. He was strong, then, Grant assessed, darn strong. He was moving Julio like a puppet.

Grant and Cáscara responded in the same way. Two seconds into the attack and both of them had stepped back to put a little distance between them and the moving dead man, and both of them drew their blasters, commanding pistols into their waiting hands.

“Let him go!” Cáscara demanded, training her long-snouted blaster on the moving corpse.

Julio continued to scream, too panicked to even fight the corpse off.

Grant stepped forward again, Sin Eater raised and ready, and reached for the lab technician with his free hand. “Hold on to me,” he said, and Cáscara translated it into Spanish a moment later.

As the female Pretor spoke, Grant detected a waver in her voice. She was turning, looking at the other drawers in the room—they were beginning to rattle on their runners. Whatever was inside the morgue drawers was trying to get loose!

Outside Nippur, Mesopotamia
Circa forty-fifth century BC

She would use the repetitive nature of music, Ereshkigal concluded as she stood in the ventilation room of the underground complex that served as her home and work space, listening to the rhythm of the nearby river. It was a spot in her laboratory complex where, if she listened carefully, Ereshkigal could hear the churning sound of the mighty River Euphrates. She loved the sound of the rushing water, ceaseless as the Annunaki but ever-changing in a way that the Annunaki struggled to replicate.

Ereshkigal had been working on her sum, figuring out the involved mathematics that would shift the living to death without a physical breach. The apekin were easy enough to physically breach, of course, but that was hardly the point. This was an attempt to prove that the living things could be made dead things by altering and reversing the equation that made their lives proceed, that triggered growth from baby to adult. A living human and a recently deceased human weighed the same and had the same basic chemical components—there was no reason that the formula that moved one state into the other could not be tapped, shunted and even reversed. It was just mathematics; that was all.

The complex had been built on land given to her by
Lord Enlil, and constructed by slaves to her specifications. Located twenty steps beneath the surface, the complex ran a quarter mile underground, with tunnels leading to different hubs where Ereshkigal could pursue her experiments in solitude.

One room of the vast complex had been given over to her experiments with the life/death equation she had stumbled upon. Thirty paces from wall to wall, the cavernous room was perfectly round with a sloped ceiling that rose to a peak in the center. Being inside it was a little like being inside a volcano. It was lit by a complex system of mirrored surfaces that were used to reflect natural sunlight during the daytime and turned over to torchlight after dark.

Like the rest of the complex, this room was warm, kept at a consistently balmy temperature. Ereshkigal liked heat; like all of her race, she was cold-blooded, so heat was a luxury she reveled in whenever she was able.

Ereshkigal came striding into the laboratory now, her expression serene. Her wings had flourished in the six years since she had descended into this underground complex, budding from her back in twin lines so that their feathers now trailed behind her like a cape as she walked. They were artificial, created by the bioengineers of the Annunaki, built by Ningishzidda from her designs. Ereshkigal liked the way that they moved, following perfect wave forms whose complex logarithms belied the grace they sought to produce. When she watched them flutter, she saw the math behind the movement, each formula a thing of wonder and beauty.

As she descended the steps, Ereshkigal was thinking about the rhythm, working out the way in which her formula could be adapted to create its shapes, its beats. The apekin were simple, she knew—they responded well to rhythm. If she could shape her equation into a rhyme that could be sung, then she could deliver it with all the surety
of a sword blow, sending the instruction straight to her victim's brain.

She would still use her papers—she was a mathematician after all—but every calculation began in her head, committed to writing only when she had need to shift its planes and dimensions, to make the figures bisect and form new geometric shapes in her mind's eye.