Hell's Maw (21 page)

Cáscara had her gun trained on the man's head in an instant. “Don't move!” she shouted.

Grant looked around, checking the walls and their shaking drawers. There was no time to be impressed by Cáscara's move; he had to remain alert.

“Are you okay, sir?” Cáscara was asking. “Were you trapped in there?”

Arching his back, the white-maned figure turned his head slowly, staring at Cáscara with deep-set eyes that were surrounded by dark circles. Except the eyes were still closed, sealed tight. Then, a sinister smile appeared on his face, and he opened his dark-lipped mouth to speak.
“¡Los cadáveres de mi amante!”
he cried from a crackling throat that had no saliva in it.

Grant knew those words all too well. They had lodged in his mind the last time he had heard them, when the bomber had tried to blow up the Pretor Hall of Justice that very morning. Even without the Commtact's instant translation he would have been able to recite the words in English: “Corpses for my mistress!”

* * *

L
YING IN THE
hospital bed, Maria Zorrilla drew the shard of broken glass from her throat. A thin line of blood materialized in its wake, becoming thicker even as it clotted.

Shizuka gasped as she saw that self-inflicted wound materialize, her eyes drawn to it like a moth to a flame. “What is she…?” she began, unable to process what she was seeing. Shizuka came from a tradition of seppuku, the ritual suicide committed by samurai for failure. Even so, this sudden move by Zorrilla was so unexpected, so awful, that it made Shizuka feel queasy.

“Medic!” Pretor Corcel shouted behind him, scrambling across the room to the bed and reaching for Zorrilla's hand. “Give me that, Maria—it's okay,” he insisted. “Medic!”

Still clutching the jagged shard, Maria Zorrilla jabbed out with it, using it like a knife to stab Corcel squarely in the chest. Corcel's eyes widened with the blow, and he lurched to one side, reaching up for his chest. Shizuka saw the shard of glass protruding from the center of his chest like a dagger, low to the pectorals, a bloom of red blood expanding rapidly on his white shirt.

“Pretor?” Shizuka said, her attention flicking between Corcel and the demented woman in the bed. She turned to the open door and shouted for help, hoping that someone on staff understood English or would at least respond to the urgency in her tone. “Help! Please help! We need a doctor or a nurse here right—”

Her words were cut off as a heavy blow struck Shizuka
across the back of the shoulders at the base of her neck. She tumbled forward, sinking to her knees and slamming her forehead against the metal frame of Maria Zorrilla's bed with a hearty clang.

Shizuka was an old hand at combat, and her survival instincts kicked in in the instant between her being struck and her striking the bed. Though her head was reeling, she rolled forward, scampering in an ungainly fashion away from her mystery attacker. As she scrambled, she looked behind her and saw the man standing there—dark-haired with broad shoulders and a healthy Mediterranean tan, dressed in pajamas whose open neck showed the dark bruising that ran across his throat. It was one of the victims from the other room, the one who had been asleep when Corcel and Shizuka had tried to question him.

Across the room, Pretor Corcel was lying in a heap on the smooth floor tiles, head pressed against the floor and eyes open widely in shock. His mouth was open, too, and Shizuka could hear his breathing as he lay there. The breathing was heavy and strained, but at least he was alive.

Shizuka's attacker was striding across the room toward her, hands bunched into fists, a look of insane drive in his wide eyes. “Going to show you the wonders of the grave,” he muttered in Spanish. “Going to bring you to the brink of death where absolute joy awaits.”

Thinking fast, Shizuka scrambled under the bed as the man reached for her, slipping across the floor and popping out again on the other side.

Shizuka got her bearings as she stood, eyeing the dark-haired man who had been caught up in the hotel atrocity.
“You don't want to do this,” she said, holding her hands out before her in a placatory gesture. “Just try to calm down.” She hoped he could speak English.

The man's lips curled back to reveal a grim snarl, while his brows knitted darkly over closed eyes. “Corpse in waiting,” he said in accented English. “You only postpone the inevitable.” Then he came striding swiftly around the metal-framed bed toward Shizuka.

Shizuka glanced around. There were two beds in the room, one with Maria and the second one unoccupied.

Then the man was reaching for her—and he had a long reach, the kind a championship boxer had. Shizuka leaped aside, ducking beneath a second grab and then butting up with her outstretched palm to strike the man in his jaw with the heel of her hand. The blow connected with a slap, and for a moment the man just stood there, shaking off the momentary rush of pain.

Shizuka readied a follow-up move, offering the man a warning first. “I hope you can understand me, Pajama Party, because I'm going to have to disable you unless you back off.”

Then, unexpectedly, Maria—the woman in the bed—threw herself forward, wrapping her arms around Shizuka from behind. The man with the bruised neck came at Shizuka, grinning like a maniac, his eyes closed tight.

* * *

D
OWN IN THE
ice-cold morgue, the white-haired figure caromed toward Cáscara, reaching for her with grasping hands.
“Corpses for my mistress!”
he repeated in that dry-throated rasp of a voice.

Cáscara was fast. She managed to sidestep the naked man's attack and grab his right arm, drawing it sharply up and around so that she was standing behind him with his arm in an armlock.

“Don't make me hurt you, sir,” she insisted in Spanish. “You've obviously suffered a trauma and—”

Another drawer broke open from the wall, its front splitting down the middle as something forced its way out with one devastating blow.

Grant turned his Sin Eater toward it in a two-handed grip, ready to blast whoever or whatever emerged. A hand appeared from the crack, then an arm, both of them deathly pale. But before anything else appeared, another of the drawers—this one located on the wall opposite—came propelling from the wall. It landed on the floor with a clatter of cold steel on slate, disgorging the naked figure of a svelte woman in her thirties, with skin so pale it held a blue hue, and a tangle of dark hair that looked like a rose bush in bloom. She leaped from the drawer even before it had finished bouncing on the tiles, landing in a dead run and powering toward Grant.

Grant took two steps forward, angling his shoulder low and meeting the woman just before she planned to meet him. As they met, Grant flipped the woman with an almighty shove. The woman skimmed against the ceiling as she went up into the air, knocking one of the depending fluorescent tubes so that it pitched and yawed, its illumination rolling across ceiling, walls and floor.

The dead woman crashed down against a bank of drawers, even as another one burst open to discharge a dark-skinned man with a potbelly and a balding pate.

Meanwhile Cáscara was trying to hold on to her own attacker as he writhed in her grip. There came a cracking sound from his shoulder and suddenly the limb hung loose in Cáscara's hand—he had dislocated it. In a flash, the reawoken corpse had thrown Cáscara over his shoulder, tossing her down onto the deck with a loud slam.

Cáscara rolled, trying to catch her breath as she avoided
the man's attempts to stomp on her head with his bare, pale foot.

“How can dead people be attacking us?” Cáscara demanded, desperation in her voice. “How?”

“Don't ask,” Grant replied, targeting the potbellied figure who had emerged beside him. “Just shoot.” With that, he squeezed the trigger of his Sin Eater, planting a 9 mm slug in the man's forehead. The man's head was knocked painfully back on the stem of his neck and he stumbled back under the violent impact.

“Is it really possible to shoot the dead?” Cáscara asked as she pulled herself up into a crouch and blasted at her attacker.

Grant turned so they were back-to-back. “To shoot? Yes. To kill? Jury's out,” he told her grimly.

Cáscara's shots hammered into the white-haired figure who had dislocated his shoulder to be free of her, drilling—one, two, three—down the pale expanse of his torso as he strode across the slate floor. With the second shot, the walking corpse stumbled a little and with the third he turned in place, falling to the floor in a tangle of limbs.

“Cáscara, what's our quickest route out of here?” Grant asked, watching as his potbellied target writhed on the floor, his head a bloody ruin.

Cáscara glanced over to him. “The way we came, back to the elevator,” she said.

“Okay, let's—”

Then something very odd happened. Grant had been backing away, skipping across the room past the gurney-like drawer where the corpse called Frankie still lay, ready to pluck Julio from the floor and keep moving. But as he reached for Julio, Frankie reached out for him, one arm extending—literally extending—to grab Grant by his arm.

Grant yelped as he was wrenched off his feet, flipping almost double over himself.

Cáscara turned at the sound and saw something she could barely comprehend: corpse Frankie was stepping from the outstretched drawer that had been pulled from the wall, still clutching Grant by one hand. His face was marred by a bullet wound to the forehead, but it was his arm that drew Cáscara's horrified attention. The right arm—the one which held Grant—was much longer than any arm she had ever seen on a man. It reached all the way down to the floor, muscles elongated like warm taffy, the pale skin stretched taut over them. Cáscara watched in horror as Frankie loomed forward, his other arm extending toward her like the tentacle of an octopus.

* * *

S
HIZUKA FOUGHT AGAINST
Maria Zorrilla's grip as the man with dark hair came at her, the gleam of insanity in his crazed expression.

“Era exquisita,”
the man hissed, reaching his hands around Shizuka's throat.

Shizuka kicked out, swinging her right leg up and into the man's groin as his fingers reached for her neck. The man grunted, expelling the breath through his clenched teeth as he staggered one step backward.

Shizuka kicked out a second time, struggling to break free of the gripping arms that held her against the bed, right leg scissoring back and forth to snap toe and heel into her male attacker's face in a quick one-two. The man hissed something in annoyance as his nose broke and his blood began leaking down his face.

Shizuka rolled her shoulders, shifting her weight enough to break free of Zorrilla's grasp. An instant later she had spun, stepping away from the bed and her two attackers.

Lying in the bed, her throat bleeding, Maria Zorrilla threw back the bedcovers and stretched out one leg until
it hung over the side. Then she swiveled, preparing to sit up and get out of the bed.

“Stay where you are,” Shizuka ordered. “Both of you.”

Zorrilla ignored her, shifting her weight so that both legs hung over the side of the bed, feet touching the floor on tiptoe.

Beside her, Dark-Hair wiped the leaking blood from his nose, smearing it across the side of his face like war paint as his eyes gradually opened to reveal pale slits. “Don't fight it,” he said in his accented English. “You cannot comprehend the joy you will feel when you let go.”

At that moment, a figure appeared in the doorway—a nurse, dressed in white with her long dark hair pinned up beneath a neatly pressed hat. “Is there a problem?” she asked in Spanish.

Shizuka had almost forgotten that she and Corcel had called for help; the past thirty seconds had been a blur.

As she spoke, the young nurse saw Corcel's body lying on the floor, and she took in the whole scene with a wide-eyed stare. “What's happening—”

Her query was cut abruptly short as something came bursting through the pressed white linen of her smart uniform, sharp and bloody and wide as a meat cleaver. Shizuka watched in shock as the nurse collapsed to the floor, emitting a stifled gasp of pain from her taut lips. Standing revealed behind her was the other occupant of the room next door, the white-haired man who had been caught up in the hotel attack the day before. He wore gray pajamas and held a length of metal in one hand at the near end of which was an anglepoise lamp. The metal was slick with blood where he had forced the screw-in end through the nurse's body from behind.

“What are you?” Shizuka asked, her words urgent, breathless.

“The future,” the white-haired figure told her without
a trace of an accent. “The future of the world.” His eyes were open but uncannily pale, as if the irises were merging with the whites.

The three patients began to advance on Shizuka from all sides, leaving her with nowhere to run.

* * *

D
OWN IN THE MORGUE
, Frankie slid from the drawer, still holding Grant as his bare feet met with the floor. One arm extended inhumanly toward Pretor Cáscara, its length growing impossibly as she watched, bones and joints shifting in nauseating configurations.

In her role as a Zaragoza Pretor, Emiliana Cáscara had seen a litany of disturbing things. Crimes committed on people, on animals, on children. She had seen the devastating results of random gunfire, seen car accidents that would turn a surgeon's stomach, and even walked in on a killer as he was butchering his wife to death. And seeing all those things, she had, she liked to think, become just desensitized enough to make her better at her job. But seeing a man's limbs extend beyond all human proportion was so unsettling, so weird, that she was just left standing stone-still in shock.

The lengthening arm reached for Cáscara's head, index and middle finger extending to jab her in the eyes. Cáscara watched, brain knowing she had to move but somehow failing to pass that instruction on to her body, her limbs.