Hell's Maw (32 page)

* * *

C
ÁSCARA BROUGHT UP
the last report from Casillas and his team, the group of Pretors who had been running a patrol outside the city walls to the southwest of Zaragoza.
A map appeared on the computer screen, indicating their route, including their location when they had filed their last report.

Beside her, the door was rattling in its frame, and Cáscara could hear the report of a gun as someone tried to blast the lock to smithereens.

She watched the door for a moment, praying that it would hold just a little longer. These dead men were drawn to the living the way sharks scented blood. She could not hope to escape them for long.

The beautiful Pretor scanned the report, searching for clues as to where Ereshkigal had come from. Maybe she could help Corcel. She felt certain that the source was outside the city. The appearance of the reanimated gate guards here in the Hall of Justice, their use in destroying the Pretors, hinted as much. Putting that evidence together with the loss of contact with Casillas and his squad suggested that something had entered the city from the south.

At that moment the door gave, and a Pretor came marching into the room with his blaster raised. It was Cadalso. The visor of his helmet was red with blood and there were pockmarks across his breast where he had been shot more than once.

Cáscara dropped to the floor as Cadalso's blaster fired, using the desk as scant cover from the assault. Behind Cadalso, a second dead Pretor was entering the room, the strawberry blond Bazán, her helmet now askew and blood marring her hair.

“Corpses! Corpses for the mistress!” the two Pretors chanted as they fired their blasters.

And then the window exploded in a shower of glass and a burst of sunlight radiance, the illumination casting the room into stark whites and defined shadows accompanied by a near-deafening boom.

Cáscara blinked back the pain in her eyes, spots running across her vision so that she could barely see around them.

Shizuka followed the flash-bang, drawing her katana in an effortless, graceful move, and launching herself across the room like a missile.

The reanimated corpses were writhing in agony where the flash-bang had assaulted their deteriorating eyes even behind tinted visors; eyes whose ocular nerves had had to be reknitted to join the brain after death.

Shizuka struck them in a blur of motion, cutting the man down with a brutal slash across his belly before following the move through so that her sword tip ended embedded in the gut of the woman. She withdrew the blade in an instant as both the dead figures fell back, blood blurting from between their teeth as they collapsed to the floor, eyes screwed shut tight behind their visors.

There were more outside, Shizuka saw. Two figures, both dressed in the uniforms of Pretors, one displaying a terrible facial disfigurement, came hurrying toward the doorway, their Devorador de Pecados pistols raised and ready to fire.

Shizuka stepped forward, bringing her sword up as the first of the bullets launched. She cut the bullet from the air, leaping across the confines of the corridor and slapping at the far wall with her free hand as a second bullet glanced past her. The graceful samurai warrior used that slap to propel her whole body up into the air, legs windmilling as she left the floor.

Another bullet fired from Ruiz's blaster, rocketing down the corridor with the clap of explosive propellant. Shizuka was higher than the bullet, flipping her whole body over until her left foot struck the ceiling. The light fitting there came tumbling down with a flicker, while Shizuka used her momentum to drive herself down and
forward, shooting toward cancer-faced de Centina like a javelin.

She struck him sword-first in the chest. The sword pierced the armor weave of de Centina's uniform, and was followed by the full weight of Shizuka as she barreled into him, driving a vicious punch to his jaw.

De Centina went down, crashing to the floor in a heap while Shizuka leaped free of his falling body. Shizuka was on her feet in an instant, running at the other Pretor, the reanimated figure of Ruiz, whose pixie-short hair was losing its luster the longer she spent not breathing. As she ran, Shizuka set the second flash-bang she had been carrying when she entered, twisting its trigger so that it detonated the very second it left her hand.

For an instant, the whole corridor was bathed in brilliance, accompanied by a thunderous roar of noise.

Ruiz's blaster fired again during that moment, sending a burst of fire in Shizuka's direction as the samurai woman hurtled toward her. The bullets went wide, missing Shizuka by inches. And then Shizuka was on the dead woman, driving her katana through the dazzled Pretor's chest just below the breastbone, pushing upward to pierce lungs and heart.

Shizuka snapped back, drawing the sword from its sheath of flesh with a flourish. In its wake, Ruiz's body—already dead but reanimated by the mad mathematics of Ereshkigal—started to divide, two halves falling away from one another and revealing a gaping chest wound.

There was no time to celebrate. Shizuka was back through the door to the incident room, calling to Cáscara, her sword catching in the sparking light of the shattered overhead.

“We need to go,” Shizuka stated breathlessly.

Cáscara pulled herself from the floor, wincing from her hip wound and rubbing at her eyes where she could still
see spots. “Agreed,” she said, making her way over to the computer terminal once more.

“What are you—” Shizuka asked.

Cáscara reached for the printer that was located beside the terminal, taking the single-sheet report she had printed earlier. “All done. Let's go,” she said, snapping up the report.

A moment later, the two women were hurrying through the ruined squad room toward the sealed door that opened onto the staircase, Cáscara moving as fast as she could with the wound in her leg. Behind them, the sounds of moving bodies—dead but somehow alive—could be heard as four dead Pretors struggled to right the damage to their bodies and give chase to the beacons of life. Shizuka was determined that they would not get the chance.

* * *

T
HEY REGROUPED IN
the stairwell, with Shizuka, Cáscara and Brigid hurrying back to street level as fast as their wounds would let them while Kane and Grant broke the door frame so that the door could not be easily opened again from within—it would provide a meager defense.

Downstairs, the lobby remained eerily empty, just dead bodies and shed blood, all color seemingly drained from the atmosphere.

“They must have come in as Pretors,” Cáscara lamented, “known and trusted as they were, and committed a massacre before anyone realized what was happening.”

Brigid looked at her with sympathy. “There was nothing that you or your partner could have done,” she said. “If you'd been here you would have simply been caught up in it.”

“I know,” Cáscara said, nodding. “So much death, it's just hard to process.”

Brigid agreed. She had seen a lot of death—too much, wherever the Cerberus warriors were called. This time they appeared to have lost a city.

Kane and Grant joined the women in the lobby, confirming that they had sealed the level. It was a temporary measure, Kane lamented, but so much of what they did where the Annunaki was concerned had proven to be just that.

“I think this thing, this Ereshkigal, came from the southwest,” Cáscara said, “beyond the city.”

“Any reason you think that?” Grant asked.

“I think she infiltrated through the south gate,” Cáscara said. “I checked where the people in the squad room were posted. A patrol disappeared out there this morning. I suspect that it's all connected.” She showed the others the map she had printed out, which showed the route of the Casillas patrol.

“So we follow the route?” Grant asked.

“And see what we find,” Brigid said, nodding. “It makes sense.” She turned away and fired up her Commtact, and a moment later she was requesting Cerberus headquarters provide some satellite surveillance of the route in question.

Kane looked over the map. “Looks like a whole lot of nothing to me,” he said. “How do you propose we get out there?”

“Sandcat maybe,” Cáscara said. Then she cursed, realization dawning. “The keys are up there, in the squad room.”

“Your Wheelfox is still outside,” Grant reminded her. “Keys are still in it, I guess.”

Cáscara looked uncertain. For one thing, the vehicle had been badly damaged in its would-be death plunge. For another, her dead partner was still sitting in the driver's seat. Pros and cons, then. Something clicked into place in her mind and she nodded. “We're out of options,” she said. “Let's go see whether she'll still run.”

Back at Cerberus headquarters, Donald Bry worked the satellite surveillance software, following Brigid's instructions. He set the Vela-class reconnaissance satellite to sweep the area to the south and west of Zaragoza, searching for anything out of the ordinary. It did not take long to find a likely target.

* * *

T
HE
C
ERBERUS TEAM
, Shizuka and Cáscara were inside the Wheelfox, bashed, battered and generally the worse for wear but still operational even after its drop from the high levels of the multistory parking garage. The vehicle had started on the first try, and now Cáscara was working the pedals, navigating her way through the dead streets of Zaragoza, her eyes fixed on the road through a gap in the cracked windshield. The chimes of the church bells had stopped, and the streets seemed too empty now, the husk of something that had once nurtured life.

The dead body of Cáscara's partner, Juan Corcel, had been sat up in one of the rear seats. Cáscara had refused to leave him behind; she said that the man deserved a proper burial.

Kane was up front with Cáscara as Donald Bry's message came through.

“I've found something approximately twenty-five miles south of the city walls,” Bry stated. “Looks like a stream, but it's not marked on any maps. Furthermore, the stream is a rust color.”

“Rust?” Kane questioned.

“Like…red,” Bry elaborated. “The stream leads to a—well, I'm not sure what to call it—looks sort of like a flower, only it's big.”

“How big, Donald?”

“Sense of scale is difficult to judge where it's surrounded by scrub,” Bry admitted, “but it looks to be as big as a building.”

“But you said it's a flower?”

“That's right, Kane,” Bry confirmed. “At least, I think it is.”

“That's one big-ass flower,” Grant rumbled; he, too, shared the open frequency.

Cáscara passed through the south gate, still open from where Ereshkigal had entered with her demented retainers, before speeding out of the city. Beyond, the great dusty plains of northern Spain stretched in a gradually undulating landscape. “Your people find something?” she asked, glancing across to Kane where he sat beside her.

“Sounds like it,” Kane said. “Bry, you want to give us some coordinates on this thing?”

* * *

A
T HIS POST
in the Cerberus ops room, Donald Bry brought up the telemetry for Kane's transponder and expanded the map on his screen until he could place him in relation to the flowerlike structure. “Keep heading south, follow the road you're on for two miles, then cut right at the pass. I'll guide you in.”

* * *

K
ANE SHARED THE
info with Cáscara as she navigated the slick ribbon of road.

“Do you have any idea what's waiting out there?” she asked.

“Trouble,” Kane told her. “Trust me, it always is.”

* * *

T
HE ROADS WERE EMPTY
. Here and there, the dented Wheelfox passed a parked wag or a line of scrappy tents, but for the most part it was wasteland out here, the same way it had been for the past two hundred years since the radiation had leaked across the continent.

Donald Bry gave directions, following the Cerberus field team's progress in real time via satellite and biolink transponder. When they neared the mysterious flower, he instructed them to go off-road so that they could reach it. “That's all the assistance I can give you, guys,” he said apologetically, “but I'll keep monitoring the situation, and if there's anything you need from me, let me know.”

The Wheelfox bumped off-road and over the dusty terrain. The earth was a kind of washed-out golden color here, with scrubby lines of tenacious grass sprouting in scattered clumps across the landscape.

The Wheelfox bumped over a ridge and suddenly the colossal flower came into view. It stood poised silently amid the wastes, a narrow stream of red blood washing toward it. The stream was no wider than a man's spread legs, and along its edges a line of stakes had been forced into the ground, upon which hung the limp forms of people—some of them Pretors—their exquisitely cut bodies dripping blood into the stream to fill it. The flower's black petals folded together like a crocus, blue veins running up the center of each sloping petal and highlighting their rims. Each petal was as large as a house.

“What the hell is that?” Grant asked as the flower loomed before them, framed in the rectangle of the windshield.

“Organic technology,” Brigid said, “an Annunaki specialty.”

“I think we could have found this without the satellite,” Kane muttered.

Cáscara eased off the accelerator, slowing the Wheelfox
and causing dirt to shift noisily beneath its drive wheel. “They've grown a flower to live in?” she asked, incredulous.

“The Annunaki pull a lot of incredible shit,” Kane told her wearily.

Brigid elaborated, “They're masters of combining mechanical principles with a self-expanding system.”

As they proceeded forward, something metal glinted in the sunlight to one side of the giant flower structure. The Wheelfox pulled to a halt with a whine of brakes as Cáscara recognized what it was. It was a Sandcat, marked in Pretor colors with the Zaragoza city shield on the side. The vehicle was empty, partially buried in the sand with its doors open. It would not have been left like that, Cáscara knew, unless something urgent had called its occupants away. Her heart sank at the thought—it was the missing patrol, Casillas and his team. Dead then, evidently.