Hell's Maw (24 page)

In answer to the woman's unfinished question, de Centina raised his blaster and shot, sending a 9 mm bullet through her throat, shattering her voice box before she could finish her query. De Centina had been a Pretor longer than almost anyone in the Hall—he had had many years to think about the weak spots of the Pretor armor, and knew just what he was doing when he targeted the woman's throat.

Behind de Centina and Ruiz, Bazán and Cadalso were marching in the door in step, their own weapons armed and ready.

The older woman was still screaming as her partner went crashing to the floor in a heap, her vocal cords a bloody splash where her throat had been. Ruiz swept her gun around and blasted again, delivering a 9 mm bullet to the woman's outstretched hand where it rested against the door frame. The woman yelped in agony as her hand was ripped apart and then stumbled back into the stairwell that waited behind her.

De Centina led the way to the stairs, Ruiz marching just a step behind him.

In the lobby, Cadalso and Bazán made short work of two perps who had been brought in for cautioning and were just waiting for the final records to be completed so that their possessions could be returned. Both died whimpering as the sound of church bells tolled through the open door, masking the reports of gunfire.

There was no one to challenge them on the stairs. Each Pretor was equipped with an identity tag that triggered a sensor at the door upstairs, granting them access to the squad room. De Centina led the way, while the others filed in behind him.

Inside, the squad room was alive with activity. Pretors were working at their desks, interviewing suspects, interviewing crime victims, filing reports, making
caffeinated drinks. There were Pretors in full street uniform, others dressed in the light, armor-weave suits of the higher-ranking investigative officers. Several glanced up from what they were doing as de Centina and his team walked in, but they all knew de Centina, no one thought anything strange of his coming through the squad door at this time of day.

Some people could be turned, but many resisted the charms of Ereshkigal's spell, needing her personal attention to receive the formula that would send them to despair and, from there, into the triumph that was the after-death. For them, the easiest solution was a quick death after which Ereshkigal could apply the formula at her leisure, reviving the corpses and showing them new ways to live. Her Terror Priests—these newly revived dead—were tasked to create those corpses.
Corpses for their mistress!

A Pretor called Millas, six years out of training and with an arrest record second to none of his graduating year, looked up again after acknowledging de Centina and his group entering the room. There was something about de Centina's face, he realized.

When Pretor Millas looked again, he saw the sparkling lines like fluorescent tubing had been sewn inside de Centina's face, the way it glistened like moonlight on water. “Hey, de Centina—what happened to you? Is everythi—”

Dead Cadalso shot from behind de Centina, blasting over the older Pretor's shoulder and delivering brutal death to the unsuspecting Millas. Millas's right ear exploded into a bloody spray, and Cadalso's second shot bored through his face in an instant.

The squad room was alerted then and, immediately, trained Pretors went diving for cover and reaching for weapons.

Ruiz, Bázan, Cadalso and de Centina tracked across the room, blasting over and over, felling six Pretors and four
ordinary citizens who moved too slow. It left seven Pretors alive along with three civilians, six hiding behind desks while a Pretor and a norm had slipped through the door on the far side of the room and into the corridor beyond.

The four reanimated Pretors strode through the squad room fearlessly as Pretors appeared from hiding to blast shots at them. De Centina blasted another Pretor the moment he appeared from behind a filing cabinet, while Bazán leaped atop a desk and aimed her pistol straight down, spraying the space beyond with 9 mm bullets and executing a Pretor and two civilians in an instant.

Cadalso took a shot to the arm, ignored it and moved on through the room, blasting in the direction of the shooter. He was rewarded with a cry from that area as his bullet met flesh, then disappeared through the doorway and into the corridor.

In the corridor, a female Pretor called Grosella was busy loading a Copperhead assault rifle while a female civilian wearing too much makeup and a short skirt cowered beside her. The Copperhead featured a two-foot-long barrel, with grip and trigger in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handedly. It also featured an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. In short, it could create a brisk level of destruction like few other guns in its class.

Cadalso shot the blond-haired Pretor even as she raised the subgun and fired, watched her head explode as a line of 4.85 mm bullets peppered the wall a foot to his right. Pretor Grosella crashed down to the floor in a blurt of spraying blood, while the civilian screamed in horror.

Cadalso looked at the civilian with disdain, eyeing her
garish clothes and painted face. “Corpses for my mistress,” he said as he brought his Devorador de Pecados pistol up and shot her through the forehead.

* * *

B
ACK IN THE
squad room, de Centina, Ruiz and Bazán were making short work of the remaining Pretors. Bullets struck them, buried in their bodies, chipped away chunks of their flesh, but they just kept coming. They were beyond death now, in the blissful place that Ereshkigal had introduced them to, her new Terror Priests for the new order. She believed only in death and they believed only in her. The world of man had been judged, and sentence was being passed. Perfect, mathematical sentence.

A Pretor eight weeks from retirement took four shots in the belly before finally slumping over the desk he had used for thirty-seven years. Bazán cruelly made sure, striding over to him and blasting him in the back of the skull from point-blank range even as another 9 mm slug buried itself between her shoulder blades.

Ruiz found herself tackling a Pretor who had unhooked a fire ax from its holding place on the wall, presumably realizing that bullets were doing no good against this enemy. The Pretor—a muscular man with a good foot and half in height on Ruiz—swung the ax with the vigor of a woodcutter, driving it downward, where it cut through Ruiz's left arm. The arm seemed to hang for a moment, drooping from the shoulder and swinging lifelessly. Then, before the Pretor's startled eyes, the arm seemed to extend, the space between shoulder and amputation filling in with new nerves and sinews, twining up and in on themselves as they rebuilt the arm until it was six inches longer than it had been before.

Ruiz kicked the man in the groin as he goggled in surprise, then brought her automatic around and blasted
him in the chest, pumping the trigger until her third shot pierced his armor and he finally stopped squirming.

Across the room, de Centina and Bazán made short work of the remaining Pretors, taking several hits without so much as slowing down until they finally overwhelmed the living.

Bazán shoved one struggling Pretor through a water cooler in an eruption of spilled water, before kicking him with enough force to dislocate his jaw. After that, a well-placed shot finished the man.

In the aftermath, the squad room looked like a charnel house, dead bodies strewed across the floor and on chairs and behind desks. The four reanimated Pretors surveyed their handiwork with pale, devolving eyes. Death rewards those who accept it, they knew. Ereshkigal may yet come here to share her gift.

Outside the Hall of Justice, the bells of Zaragoza continued to chime, repeating their eerie, one-note refrain.

Brigid and Kane watched as one figure stepped off the roof of the hospital and dropped, plummeting like a stone to the pavement below. They struck with the inevitability of nightfall, the sound of their impact carrying across the silence like a peal of thunder. In its wake, the church bells chimed once more, droning once in unison, creating a period to the jumper's death sentence.

Even as the jumper landed, the next one was stepping over the edge of the roof, and in a moment that one was falling, too, careening down the outside of the building toward their inevitable death.

“We have to do something,” Brigid gasped, turning away.

Kane glanced down at the bike rider in his arms whom he had rescued, glanced back at the roof of the hospital where people were lined up like lemmings on a cliff. “No time,” he said. “We need to find Grant first—”

“No, Kane!” Brigid was insistent. “People are dying.”

“Killing themselves,” Kane agreed. “But so many—I figure they've been, I dunno, instructed to do this. To commit suicide.”

“Why would— How would—” Brigid could not form the question, she was so distraught.

“I don't know,” Kane admitted. “Mass death cult maybe?”

Brigid looked sullen. “It's possible,” she admitted. “But this is so huge. It's hard to imagine—”

“And that's why we need to find Grant and Shizuka,” Kane insisted. “Think! If they're caught up in this, then we could be about to witness one of them jumping off that roof.”

Reluctantly, Brigid nodded. She needed no further convincing. “We can't ignore everyone else, though,” she said.

“We won't,” Kane assured her, trotting toward the hospital with his burden. “But since Grant is here, if he's not caught up in this madness, then he may have some insight into just what the hell's going on.”

* * *

T
HE HOSPITAL WAS CHAOS
.

Just making their way to the lobby doors, the Cerberus warriors saw numerous distraught faces peering out of stalled automobiles, figures slumped on benches covered in blood from unknown wounds. More figures leaped from the roof, falling on the hard, unforgiving asphalt. Brigid reported what they were seeing over her Commtact, relaying it back to Cerberus HQ in an emotionless monotone. It was the only way she could distance herself from the event.

Inside was worse. Whatever had taken hold of the city had clearly done so in stages, which meant that some people had had time to get here and seek help before they had been entirely caught up in the madness. But by the time they had got here, they had begun to lose all rationality, seeking instead only their own deaths and those of the people around them. Now the lobby looked like a charnel house, with blood lashed against two walls and the windows looking out onto the asphalt strip, and dead bodies strewed across the furniture. At the desk, the on-duty nurse was using a scalpel to cut open her own wrists, drawing a long, vertical line from wrist to elbow, the smile widening on her face as she pushed the blade deeper. There were others in the large lobby space wandering aimless
as sleepwalkers, two hanging from nooses that they had attached to a metal sign overhanging the desk.

“I…I don't know what we can do,” Brigid admitted, looking around her at the picture of insanity.

Kane spotted an empty—and blood slick—bench and strode across to it, placing the wounded moped rider there. He figured that patching the man's wounds was the least of their priorities just now.

“Keep moving,” Kane told Brigid solemnly, “and hope it doesn't catch up to us.”

Outside, distant, the bells of Zaragoza chimed once again, sounding the final heartbeats of a dying city. Through the lobby windows, another body could be seen crashing to the ground from the roof, feetfirst, his ankles shattering on impact and turning his legs into jagged geometric shapes.

* * *

A
T THE
C
ERBERUS REDOUBT
, Farrell had been joined by Lakesh and Donald Bry as Brigid's report came in.

“It's not unprecedented,” Lakesh told Brigid reasonably once she had described the scene. He worked the advanced Cerberus database as he spoke, bringing up further information, following his instincts. “There have certainly been documented instances of mass hysteria, wherein whole communities have behaved irrationally,” he reported. “Mass hysteria generally begins with one individual who exhibits symptoms during a period of extreme stress. The symptoms then manifest in others, unconsciously copying the first until a full-blown epidemic ensues.”

“People are killing themselves, Lakesh,” Brigid responded. She sounded withdrawn.

“Mass hysteria has been known to go to the point of self-harm,” Lakesh stated. “In Strasbourg 1518 they witnessed the Dancing Plague or Dance Epidemic. Dancing in the
streets, often for very long stretches of three or four days. Within a week, thirty-four people had joined the initial dancer, and within a month there were around 400 dancers. Some died from heart attacks, strokes or simple exhaustion. There is no logic as to why people did this—they drove themselves to it, caught up in the mania.

“And then there was the Tanganyika laughter epidemic…1962. A school had to be closed down after most of the student body—almost one hundred in total—couldn't stop laughing. It spread to Nshamba, a nearby village that was home to several of the students. Over two hundred people had what appeared to be laughing attacks, and the epidemic continued to spread. Thousands of people were hit. Lasted over a year. Reports at the time stated that the laughter was frequently accompanied by pain, fainting, flatulence, respiratory problems, rashes, attacks of crying and random screaming.”

Bry stared at Lakesh with his usual look of shock. “They laughed themselves to death?” he asked.

“They tried to,” Lakesh stated grimly, covering the pickup mic on the Commtact headset.

Brigid's voice came over the Commtact, sounding firmer than it had before. “So there may be a precedence,” she said. “Lakesh, are you aware of any specific examples which involve self-immolation or suicide on a massive scale?”