HUMAN OFFENSIVE

Though the Cerberus Rebels have battled unfathomable odds to defend mankind, victory and sovereignty remain far from assured. As enemies of otherworldly origin push the warriors’ power to the limit, a very human menace emerges, eager to grind them all to dust.

DOOMSDAY CONTAGION

Brothers-in-arms Kane and Grant upheld the inflexible laws of Cobaltville until they finally turned their backs on its wicked regime. Now a fresh threat brings them back to the barony—a mysterious plague that kills with impunity. It soon becomes clear that this murderous pestilence isn’t the result of some random mutation, but the product of a dark and twisted mind. With the disease spreading rapidly, the Cerberus warriors can only hope they’re not too late—or too vulnerable—to save humanity from being snuffed out by one of its own.

“Grant, wake up,” Brigid said, shaking the man by his shoulder

Please be alive, she thought. Please be alive.

Grant shifted a little with the force of Brigid’s shaking, then his eyes flickered open and he smiled. “What? Did I miss something?” he asked. His voice sounded weak and quiet, like he had just woken up, and his eyes were bloodshot.

“I thought you were zoning out on me,” Brigid said, smiling briefly. “Don’t do that again.”

Grant began to reply, but the words were lost as he began coughing. He rolled on his side and covered his mouth with his hand. When he drew his hand away it was spattered in black spittle. “Wh-what is this?” he asked, bewildered. He didn’t sound like an ex-Magistrate to Brigid anymore—he sounded like a lost child, frightened by something he didn’t understand.

“I think you may have become infected,” Brigid said, hating the words as they left her mouth, as if saying them had somehow made it happen, made it real. “That one who jumped you, he…spat at you.”

Judgment Plague

Outlanders

James Axler

It is better to murder during time of plague.

—English Proverb

What, will these hands ne’er be clean?

—William Shakespeare, Macbeth

The Road to Outlands—

From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

Legend

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Copyright

Chapter 1

The Geiger counter on the dashboard flashed red, ticking over into the danger zone. For a moment, DePaul’s fixed expression slipped, his eyes widening as he saw the telltale flicker that meant they had entered a patch of radioactivity.

“Chin up, rookie,” Irons said from the seat beside him. “Nothing out there I ain’t seen a hundred times.”

Irons was a magistrate in the barony of Cobaltville. He was in his mid-forties, with thick hair that had turned steel-gray, lines around his eyes and mouth, and a scar on his chin where some deviant had taken a potshot at him a dozen years before. He wore the uniform of a magistrate—black molded armor that sheathed his body like an insect’s shell, a bright red shield painted across the left breast to show his rank of office. His helmet was poised on the seat behind him, within easy reach. It was Irons’s job to monitor DePaul—a rookie magistrate in his final year of training, following in the footsteps of his father.

Irons sat next to DePaul, flashing him that fatherly smile that spoke of how he was indulging the lad, not teaching him.

Up front, Bellevue was driving the SandCat, navigating the dirt roads that reached out from Cobaltville like spokes, unpaved and unmarked. Bellevue was a tall man with skin so dark it looked like licorice, picking up the highlights of any illumination so that it seemed to have a sheen. Bellevue was twenty-five and had been active in the field for almost a decade. Like DePaul, like Irons, he had followed in his father’s footsteps, born solely for the task of being a magistrate, drilled from a young age in the ways of Cobaltville law.

“Coming up on Mesa Verde,” Bellevue said from his place at the steering wheel.

DePaul peered out the windshield at the towering sandstone structures that dominated the horizon. Brown-orange in color, the colossal rocks had been carved with windows and doors by human hands, hundreds of years before.

“Pretty different to home, ain’t it?” Irons said.

DePaul shook his head in wonder. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” It was true. He had never had cause to leave the walled confines of Cobaltville in all his seventeen years. This was his first trip beyond ville limits and out into the wild.

DePaul was a young man with jet-black hair and a narrow face. His hair was cut magistrate short and slicked back from his forehead, revealing his widow’s peak. He had dark eyes, a darker brown than his father’s, and those eyes seemed to take in every detail, every nuance of whatever was placed before them. He had been small for his age, but the late blossoming of puberty had given him taut muscles and long legs, and now he regularly outmatched his strongest classmates in any test of physical strength. He remained slender, however, giving him the appearance of a spectre when he dressed in the dark armor of a magistrate.

DePaul was well on the way to becoming a full-fledged one. He had excelled in exams, scoring top marks in knowledge and interpretation of the law. That had not come as a surprise to his father; the boy’s memory had been prodigious even at the age of ten. DePaul showed a steady hand in stress tests, was a crack shot and had survived to become last man standing in five of the six simulations he had been placed in with his classmates this year. In the remaining simulation he had come second only when one of his own team betrayed him at the finishing task.

DePaul was quick-thinking and quick to adapt, and he had displayed endurance that belied his slender frame.

Irons liked the kid, had warmed to him over the last few weeks that they had been stationed together. He had taken DePaul on a few regular patrols of the ville and down in the Tartarus Pits. The lad was all right—quiet maybe, but all right. He certainly had a memory on him; his attention to detail was up there with the best of the magistrates. He reminded Irons a lot of his father, a good mag who had taken a knock to the head during a routine pit patrol and never recovered. His son would go far, further even than the old man—Magistrate Irons was certain of that. But his recommendation would come another day, once they had completed a circuit of the Outlands and investigated rumors of a mutie farm located close to the Mesa Verde structures.

Bellevue had had less interaction with DePaul, but he remembered his father and could see the old man’s looks in the kid’s face, and his mannerisms. The youth came from good stock, and that counted for a lot.

The SandCat bumped over a patch of rough ground, its engine emitting a low rumble as it navigated the uneven terrain. Exclusive to the Magistrate Division, the SandCat was an armored vehicle with a low-slung, blocky chassis supported by a pair of flat, retractable tracks. Its exterior was a ceramic armaglass compound that could shrug off small arms fire, and it featured a swiveling gun turret up top armed with twin USMG-73 heavy machine guns.

They were moving out away from Cobaltville on a routine patrol of the surrounding areas. Forays like this were a necessary chore, to ensure there was nothing brewing in the lands near the ville that might challenge the baron’s rule. Baron Cobalt was very shrewd and protective concerning the retention of his power.

Bellevue turned the wheel and the SandCat’s engine growled with a low purr as it bumped over a patch of loose shingle and began to ascend a slope behind the Mesa. Some of this land had been used for research by the barons; some of it might even now be in use, for all the magistrates in the SandCat knew. Bellevue just stuck to the path and followed the target beacon that his onboard software had set before him.

A moment later, the armored vehicle nudged over the incline and began to descend toward a ragtag sprawl of tents surrounding a cattle pen.

“Well, lookee here,” Bellevue muttered as he pumped gas to the engine.

The pen was populated not by cattle but by muties. There were at least fifty of them, and they each wore a see-through plastic, one-piece suit as they sat or lay sprawled out in the scorching midday sun like sunbathers. The muties were humanoid, and looked human enough, except that beneath their transparent coverings they were utterly hairless and their skin was red and cracked, with blisters and sores all over. That may have been the effect of the sun, though some of it was a natural defense for these types. Called sweaties, they oozed a poisonous compound from their sweat glands that, when imbibed, had a hallucinogenic effect on humans. People farmed them sometimes, distilling their sweat and selling it. The plastic jumpsuits they wore had a greenhouse effect, Magistrate Irons knew, and there would be a collection rig set in the rear that gathered the sweat they generated. The poor bastards were so ill-treated and so hot that they could hardly move. It was all they could do to lie there in the dust as the sun beat down on their roasting bodies, cooking them alive.

It was more than the magistrates had expected from the Deathbird’s fly-past report. Bellevue eased off the accelerator and the SandCat crept slowly toward the half-dozen tents that were set out beside the pen.

“What is this?” DePaul asked.

“Sweat farm,” Irons told him, reaching for his helmet. “We’re going out there, rookie. You’re going to need your helmet.”

Obediently, DePaul reached for his head gear. “They’re muties, right?”

Irons nodded.

DePaul had never seen a mutie before, not in the flesh, anyway. “Then what are they doing here? What are they doing to them?”

“It’s a drugs op,” Irons explained, checking that his sin eater pistol was loaded. “They make the muties sweat, then the farmers here take that sweat and refine it, sell it on.”

“Why?” DePaul asked, pushing his helmet down over his face. The Magistrate casque was black and covered the wearer’s skull all the way down the back. The front covered the top half of the user’s head, before meeting with a dark-tinted visor that protected and hid the eyes, leaving only the mouth on display. The result was intimidating, turning the mags into near-faceless upholders of the law.

“People want to get away from what they are,” Irons explained, “especially here in the Outlands. Trust me, kid, it ain’t much of a life that these people have.”

“But they’re breaking the law,” DePaul stated, “which means we stop them.”

“Be glad of it, too,” Irons said, “if any of that stuff is destined for Cobaltville streets. Which it probably is.”

Beyond the SandCat, the illegal ranchers were exiting their tents, watching the familiar mag vehicle pull up. They were a motley crew, six in all, dressed in undershirts and shorts, one woman among them with her hair—blond dreadlocks—tied back with a rainbow-patterned bandana. They all wore breath masks over their mouth and nose, and several openly wore blasters holstered at their hips.

“You got this?” Bellevue asked, as he pulled the SandCat to a halt.

“Sure, me and the rookie can handle these mooks,” Irons assured him. Then he gestured to the turret gun, above and behind where he and DePaul sat. “Keep your trigger finger handy, though.”

“Always do,” Bellevue confirmed, flipping open the secondary control panel on the dashboard that operated the twin USMG machine guns.

Irons swung back the gull-wing door of the SandCat and stepped out onto the dirt, with DePaul following a moment later. DePaul glanced behind them as he did, imagining he might still be able to see the golden towers of Cobaltville waiting like an oasis in the distance. He couldn’t; they were too far from its protective hub.

A rancher from the group spoke up, his voice sounding artificial through the plastic of the breath mask, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, a smug grin on his mustached face. “You lost, Magistrate?”

“No, sir,” Irons replied, eyeing the group. Six people wasn’t enough for a farm like this; given the number of tents, he’d expect at least eight, maybe more if they employed extra muscle. He made a subtle gesture with the fingers of his left hand, enough that DePaul knew he needed to stay alert.

Behind Irons, the rookie looked around, scanning the tents and the plains, the high ridges of the mesa that loomed close by. Plenty of places to hide.

“Then you maybe come to see me,” the farm spokesman said, “but I not remember inviting you. Did I invite you?”

Irons disliked the man already. He was cocky—too cocky, even for a bandit. He thought he had the upper hand here and he wasn’t afraid to let the magistrates know that.

“This here is illegal incarceration,” Magistrate Irons said, gesturing to the pen where the muties agonised in their sweatsuits. “And you are on barony land. Now, we could do this easy or we could do it hard. I’m a little long in the tooth for hard, so what say you let these poor wretched creatures go, and close up this stinking operation, and I won’t cause you any more aggravation.”

“You think you’re going to cause me aggravation?” the cocky rancher challenged, taking a step toward Irons and the SandCat.

DePaul saw a movement over to his left in the distance. Someone was crouching there, behind a cluster of sand-beige rocks as tall as a man.

Irons stepped forward, too, pacing toward the edge of the cattle pen, with DePaul following.

“I’ve made you the offer,” Irons explained. “It’s nonnegotiable. Pack up your tents, close your farm and move on. Otherwise, I won’t hesitate to bring the full force of the law down on you.”

The rancher laughed. “Hah, full force o’ the law? What’s that mean—you and the kid here?”

“Yeah,” Irons said, turning to the rancher. “Me and the kid.” His eyes were hidden by the visor, and yet the rancher could make no mistake that he was being stared at.

“Bored,” the man said. Then he shrugged and made as if to turn his back on the two mags. The shrug was a practiced move, intended to disguise the way his right hand was reaching down for the blaster holstered at his hip. But he never got the chance to unleather it— DePaul saw it and moved quicker, his right arm coming up, hand pointing at the rancher over the shoulder of his instructor. With a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons, DePaul brought the sin eater pistol into his hand from its hidden sheath in his sleeve, propelled by the mechanism he wore strapped there.

A compact 9 mm automatic, the sin eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and was recognized even way out in the Outlands. The weapon retracted from sight while not in use, its butt folding over the top of the barrel to reduce its stored length to just ten inches. The holster operated by a specific flinch of the wrist tendon, powering the blaster straight into the user’s hand. The weapon’s trigger had no guard; the necessity for one had never been foreseen, since the magistrates were believed to be infallible. Which meant that as the gun touched DePaul’s hand, the trigger was depressed and a burst of 9 mm titanium-shelled bullets spit from the muzzle, cutting down the rancher even as he grabbed the butt of his own pistol.

The man toppled to the dirt with an agonized cry, his hand still locked on the pistol he had not had the chance to draw. His breath mask was shattered, blood gushing over his jaw.

All around, the other ranch hands were reaching for their own weapons, some worn proudly on their hips, others stuffed in hidden places in their waistbands or tucked into the pockets of their pants.

Irons had his blaster in his hand a moment later, reeling off shots at the nearest of the illegal farmhands as they reached for their guns. Above and behind him, the twin USMG-73s came to life on the roof of the SandCat, sending a relentless stream of bullets into the ranchers as they ran for cover. The woman with the blond dreads went down in a hail of fire, and so did another of the farmhands, his chest erupting with blood as the SandCat’s bullets drilled through him. Everyone else ran for cover, including the two magistrates, as bullets flew back and forth between the two groups.

Irons and DePaul were behind the armored side of the SandCat in seconds, a trail of bullets cutting the ground all around them.

“Quick thinking,” the older man said as his partner reloaded his pistol.

“Saw him reach,” DePaul said. “Made the decision without hesitation, the way they taught me in the academy.”

Irons nodded, satisfied with the rookie’s reasoning.

The turret of the SandCat continued to send bullets at the retreating farmers, the sound brutally loud as it echoed from the distant mesa walls. Another of the farmers went down when he poked his head out from behind a pressured canister used to collect the mutie sweat. A moment later a bullet clipped the container and it went up in a burst of expelled gas, hissing like some colossal snake as it spewed its contents into the air.

Without warning, a line of bullets rattled against the side of the Sandcat, inches from the magistrates’ heads. Both mags turned, searching for the sniper.

“Spotted someone hiding in the shadows of the rocks,” DePaul commented.

“I saw him, too,” Irons agreed. “We need to pick him off if—”

DePaul was on his feet and running toward the rock face immediately. “Cover me!” he called back.

Irons ducked as more bullets slapped against the ceramic armaglass side of the SandCat. Then he was around its front edge, blasting his sin eater again as another of the farmhands tried to sneak up on him. His play was backed by Bellevue on the turret, whose bullets cut another of the ranchers down before he could take two steps out from cover.

* * *

DEPAUL RAN, the sin eater thrust before him as he ascended the incline toward where the sniper was hiding in the long shadow of the mesa. A bullet whizzed past him, while two more flicked against the ground just a few feet behind. DePaul weaved, shifting his body left and right as more bullets cut the air. He was taking a heck of a chance here, he knew, but sometimes a chance was all you had.

The sniper kept firing, three more bullets burning the air just feet from the sprinting magistrate rookie. Then there came a lull; he guessed the gunner was reloading.

DePaul scrambled up the dry and dusty incline, his rubber-soled boots dislodging loose soil and small stones as he hurried toward the sniper’s hiding place. He saw a head appear between two boulders to his left, a flicker of silhouette glimpsed only for a moment. He ran at the nearest one, keeping his balance as he clambered up its side. The rock was fifteen feet in height and the faded orange color of sand.

DePaul reached the top in seconds, the sound of his footsteps lost in the continued reports of blasterfire coming from the ranch. He crouched down, peering over the side. The sniper was down there, kneeling behind the rock, eye to the scope of his rifle. He had dusty blond hair and wore a kerchief over his mouth and nose to stop him from breathing in the dirt that was being kicked up by the wind. He had obviously lost his target in that brief moment when he had reloaded and the rookie magistrate had clambered out of sight.

Steadying himself, DePaul leaned forward with his Sin Eater and squeezed the trigger, sending a swift burst of fire at his would-be killer. The sniper gave a startled cry as bullets rained down on him from above, but before he could react, one drilled into his skull and he sank down like a wet sheet of paper.

Still crouching atop the rock, DePaul turned, scanning the area all the way back to the ranch. The gunfire was easing now, the constant blasts replaced by occasional bursts of sound as Irons and Bellevue mopped up the last of the farmhands. There was no one else about. Whatever other security the farm had employed had been drawn into the firefight and killed.

DePaul scrambled back down the rock, marching around to its far side and checking on his target. The man was dead, eyes open but unfocused, blood pooling beneath his head. DePaul took the man’s rifle and checked him over, swiftly and professionally, for other weapons, finding a hand pistol and a knife. He stripped him of these before making his way back down to the farm compound, by which time the senior magistrates had finished containing the farmers.

“You did good today, rookie,” Irons told DePaul as he saw him approach. He was disarming the dead ranchers, tossing their guns behind him into the open door of the Sandcat. Bellevue sat on the lip of the seat, taking stock of the illegal weapons.

“Thanks,” DePaul said. “Sorry I missed the main action.”

“You got the main action,” Irons corrected. “Nailed it. That sniper woulda had both our heads if you hadn’t moved so quickly. You did yourself proud.”

“What happens now?” he asked, gazing around at the farm and the dead bodies left in the wake of the firefight. There was a scent in the air this close to the pen, sweet like refined sugar. It was mutie sweat, buckets of it, waiting to be processed and sold.

“We’ll free the muties,” Irons told him, “and leave for the birds and wolves these poor saps who thought they could take on magistrates.”

DePaul nodded. His first patrol of the Outlands had been a success.

Chapter 2

Ten years later

“Well, this royally stinks,” Kane said as he pulled the rebreather mask from his face. Barely covering his mouth and nostrils, the mask fed oxygen in the same way a diver’s breath mask does.

Kane waded through the murky, knee-deep water that covered the floor outside the mat-trans chamber, a scowl on his face as he looked around. He had expected trouble, hence the rebreather, but it was still grim seeing the place in person. He lit the way with a compact but powerful xenon flashlight that bathed the mold-scarred walls of the control room in stark brilliance.

Kane was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early thirties, with long, rangy limbs and a sleek, muscular torso hidden beneath the second skin of his shadow suit. He was handsome, with a square jaw, and had dark, cropped hair and gray-blue eyes that seemed to take in every detail and could look right through you.

There was something of the wolf about Kane, both in his alertness and the way he held himself, and personalitywise, too, for he could be both loner and pack leader.

The shadow suit’s dark weave clung to his taut body, made from an incredible fabric that acted like armor and was capable of deflecting a blade and redistributing blunt trauma. The shadow suit had other capabilities, too, providing a regulated environment for its wearer, allowing Kane to survive in extremes of temperature without breaking a sweat or catching a chill. He had augmented his shadow suit with a denim jacket with enough pockets to hide crucial supplies for a scouting mission like this one, dark pants and scuffed leather boots with age-old creases in them. The boots were a legacy from his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate, copies of the boots he had worn on shift before he had crossed Baron Cobalt and fled from the ville along with his partner and best friend, Grant, and a remarkable woman called Brigid Baptiste.

Both Grant and Brigid accompanied Kane now. They were also wearing rebreathers and were wading along behind him as he exited the mat-trans chamber and made his way through the flooded control room of the redoubt. The trio was the exploration team for an outlawed group called Cerberus, based in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana and dedicated to the protection of humankind.

Brigid pocketed her rebreather. “Everyone be careful. That water smells stagnant,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“Don’t drink it,” Kane said. “Gotcha.”

Brigid shook her head in despair at his flippant attitude. Typical Kane.

Brigid was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, with pale skin, emerald eyes and long red hair the color of sunset, tied back for the mission today. Her high forehead suggested intelligence, while her full lips spoke of a more passionate side. In reality she exhibited both these facets and many more besides. Like Kane, Brigid wore a shadow suit. In her case, she had augmented it with a short dark jacket that did nothing to disguise the swell of her breasts, and she wore a low-slung holster at her hip holding her trusted TP-9 semiautomatic pistol.

Where Kane had been a magistrate, Brigid was once an archivist, and while she could hold her own in a fight, she was equally at home poring over books and data. She had one particular quality that made this a weapon in its own right—an eidetic memory that meant she could retain information in the manner of a photograph in her mind’s eye. Her incredible bank of knowledge had helped herself and her companions out of more than one tight corner.

The final member of the team was Grant, an ominous, hulking figure with skin dark as mahogany. Like Kane, he was an ex-magistrate who had been caught up in the same conspiracy and forced to flee from Cobaltville to roam the Outlands. In his mid-thirties, Grant had recently taken to shaving his head, and sported a gunslinger’s mustache. Like his companions, he wore a shadow suit, over which he had added his favored duster coat. The garment appeared to be made of black leather, though in truth the fabric was a fireproof Kevlar-Nomex weave capable of deflecting bullets. Neither he nor Kane appeared armed, but they were; their blasters were hidden in quick-release holsters strapped to their wrists, the same sin eater weapons they had worn as magistrates years before.

Grant sniffed the air but could not really detect the stagnant, musty smell the others spoke of. His nose had been broken multiple times, which had affected its sensitivity. “Shouldn’t be wet like this,” he grumbled in a voice like rumbling thunder. “Something must’ve sprung a leak.”

“Great deduction, Detective,” Kane deadpanned as he led the way through the room and out to the twin aisles of monitoring desks that faced the mat-trans chamber.

Together, the trio scouted the control room, assuring themselves that they were alone and not being observed. The room was large, roughly thirty feet square, with rows of computers that dominated the space and had once been used, two hundred years ago, to monitor and program the comings and goings via the mat-trans unit. There were other desks here, too, one housing a half dozen telephone receivers, each one a different color. A couch and two easy chairs were set around a low coffee table in the farthest corner. Ancient magazines rested atop the table, while the water lapped just inches below.

There were also several large computer banks lining one of the walls, a massive CPU held in a metal cabinet with armaglass front, and a whole row of printers with paper still spooling from them as if the site had been abandoned two minutes ago and not two centuries. The paper in the bottom-most printer had come free, however, and its slowly disintegrating remains floated on the dirty water that had filled the room. Beside the farthest bank of printers was a reinforced steel door rolled back on its tracks. Water sloshed in the corridor beyond, level with that in the control room.

Everything here had been dedicated to one thing: the operation of the mat-trans, a system of transport dating back to the late twentieth century, where it had been the sole province of the United States military. Similar projects existed worldwide, but the U.S. system had been retained solely for the military in a series of hidden redoubts, protected bases that could withstand a nuclear assault. The redoubts had been devised as backup should the worst happen, and when it had, on that fateful January day in 2001, and nuclear missiles had rained down on the United States and across the world, the redoubts had stood firm as safe havens for anyone who could gain access to them. However, hidden and secret as they were, plus being locked, and heavily protected with military codes, they had by and large proved to be impregnable and often impossible to find. Which was why so many of them survived two centuries on, like the buried tombs of ancient Pharaohs.

This redoubt, however, had highlighted a problem less than twenty-four hours ago, which had been picked up by the powerful monitoring equipment of the Cerberus facility.

Grant made his way through the doors and into the corridor beyond. “I’ll check out the local amenities,” he joked, though his face was deadly serious. The team had done these kinds of missions before, and knew it didn’t pay to be anything less than careful when entering unknown territory.

Wading back through the murky water that swished almost to her knees, Brigid engaged her commtact and reported in. “Cerberus, we’re in. Mat-trans is clear. Automatic lights have failed, and the control room is waterlogged.”

The commtacts were small implanted communications devices worn by all Cerberus field personnel. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintles made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound, which had the effect that they could pick up and enhance any subvocalisation. In theory, even if a user went deaf, he or she would still be able to hear, after a fashion, courtesy of the commtact device.

A voice came back over Brigid’s commtact a moment later, broadcast from the Cerberus redoubt many miles away in Montana. It was Brewster Philboyd, one of the operators who helped run the base, including its communications desk. “Any signs of damage?” he asked.

“Negative,” Brigid confirmed. She was already eyeing the mat-trans using the powerful illumination of her xenon beam. The octagonal chamber took up fully one-third of the control room, featuring a sealed door like an airlock, and armaglass walls that could repel a bullet. The glass was tinted a muddy shade of brown, much like the water that had seeped into the redoubt. There were some scuff marks here and there, and the base was hidden beneath the murky water, but nothing looked broken, and the monitoring desks that served the mat-trans were undamaged.

“Remote reports flagged a reengaging of the power cores,” Philboyd reminded Brigid, as if she of all people would ever need reminding.

“Well, I can’t see any signs of...” She paused as Kane indicated something with the toe of his boot. It was hard to see with the swirl of dirty water masking it, but several panels at the base of the mat-trans chamber’s exterior had been pulled away, bent back with considerable force. The affected panels were located in line with the lone door. “What is that?” Brigid muttered.

“Please repeat,” Philboyd responded.

She ignored him, ducking down to get a closer look.

“Seems like someone took a crowbar to it,” Kane said, tapping one of the bent grilles with his toe. “Went at it pretty hard, too—these things are built sturdy.”

Brigid examined the submerged, damaged plate, reaching in and wiggling it a little this way and that. The water was ice-cold, smarting like a bite. The panel was a covering for the circuitry that controlled the functionality of the mat-trans, with a slatted section to allow for excess heat to be expelled in times of high traffic. The plate was made of burnished steel and was still connected—in a fashion—to the mat-trans chamber itself, albeit by just one rivet that was barely clinging to its drill hole. “Looks like someone’s tried to gain access,” Brigid summarized over the commtact link.

“’Nother one here.” Kane indicated another panel around the side of the chamber’s base. This one had been removed entirely. “Got some marks here, too,” he added, shining the fierce beam of his flashlight on the armaglass beside the door.

When Brigid looked she saw triple scrapes marking the surface, running quite low down—hip and knee level—both left and right of the door. The gashes looked like...

“Claws,” she said, relaying the observation to Philboyd back at home base. “Someone’s definitely been trying to get inside.”

“Or something,” Kane remarked poignantly.

Cerberus was at the center of the mat-trans network, and its personnel monitored the system for any potential problems or threats. With the instantaneous nature of travel via its system, the mat-trans was, potentially, a very powerful resource to any group. However, it was largely unknown to the general public—and Cerberus intended to keep it that way. When a standard monitoring query had resulted in an error code response from this particular mat-trans unit, the CAT Alpha exploration team, made up of Kane, Grant and Brigid, had been sent to investigate. This unit was located about eighty miles east of Cobaltville, the old stomping ground of Kane and his partners. A mile underground and taking water from who knew where, it felt a long way from home.

A new voice spoke over the linked commtacts as Brigid examined the indentations in the mat-trans wall. “Can you elaborate on that, dear Brigid?” It was Mohandas Lakesh Singh, popularly known as Lakesh, the leader of the Cerberus operation and a man with an incredible history with the mat-trans project. A theoretical physicist and cyberneticist, Lakesh had been born in the twentieth century, where his expertise had been applied to the original development of the mat-trans process. A combination of cryogenic hibernation and organ replacement had seen him emerge in the twenty-third century as the leader of what had begun as a covert rebellion against Baron Cobalt, but had ultimately developed into something even more noble—the Cerberus organization.

Brigid ran her fingers along the indentations in the armaglass. “Regular relative placement, three score marks each time,” she said, thoughtfully. “These are claw marks.”

Kane looked at her and nodded grimly. “Same thing I was thinking, Baptiste.”

Lakesh sounded thoughtful as he spoke over their commtacts. “A wild animal would not have the intelligence to break into a redoubt, nor the motivation to try to access the mat-trans.”

“Maybe no one broke in,” Kane said. “The place is waterlogged—could be a wall breach somewhere.”

“But look, Kane,” Brigid interrupted. “The claw marks around the door, the removed panels—this is a deliberate attempt to gain entry into the mat-trans. And Lakesh is right—no wild animal would do that.”

“Then it’s one that’s not so wild,” Kane retorted defiantly. “I swear, you brain-boxes and your logic—”

Before he could finish the insult, Grant came stomping in from the corridor where he had been scouting, a worried look on his face. “Wake up, guys—there’s something alive out there.”

“Something—?” Kane began, jogging across the room to the open door.

Brigid activated her commtact and signed off. “Lakesh, Brewster, we’ll have to get back to you shortly. Looks like we may have a situation here.” She cut the communication before either man could reply.

Kane and she followed Grant through the open door.

* * *

OUTSIDE, THE CORRIDOR was knee deep in water and its walls were streaked with mold. Its proportions were large, wide enough to drive a SandCat through without touching.

“Down there,” Grant said, pointing to his left.

Kane followed him, both men sloshing through the dark water, while Brigid followed more slowly.

“What did you see?” Kane asked, keeping his voice low.

“Can’t be sure,” Grant replied. “Looked big, though—either a leg or a tail moving just beneath the water. When it crossed into the circle of light it turned real fast and scooted back the way it came.”

“So it’s not blind, then,” Kane reasoned. “Just shy.”

“It could be whatever’s been tampering with the mat-trans,” Brigid proposed in a whisper.

“Could be,” Kane agreed as the group continued making slow progress along the corridor.

There was nothing there, just that knee-deep water and the mold, the sense of cold palpable all around them despite the environmental stability granted by their shadow suits.

The Cerberus crew trudged onward, sloshing slowly through the murky waters. The light of their xenon beams lit the dark walls and cloudy depths.

“I don’t like this,” Kane muttered, his nose twitching as he took the lead. Back in his days as a hard-contact magistrate, he had been known for his point-man sense, an indefinable ability to detect danger in what seemed to be the most harmless of situations. The gift seemed uncanny, but was in fact a combination of the same five senses anyone else had, but so acute it seemed incredible.

“What do you sense?” Brigid asked.

“Not sure,” Kane said, running the beam of his flashlight over the tunnel-like walls before them. He cocked his head, listening. “There’s something moving out that way,” he murmured, taking another step.

Without warning, he disappeared, sinking beneath the waters in a rush of movement.

Chapter 3

“What th—!” Grant spit as he waded through the water after Kane’s disappearing form.

“Grant, wait!” Brigid called, reaching for the big man’s arm.

Although her strength was nothing compared to his own, he stopped when he felt her hand touch him. “Kane’s in there....” he began.

“I saw,” Brigid confirmed, “but we have to be logical about this or we’ll all get dragged under.”

Grant knew she was right.

“Kane, do you copy?” she called, activating the subdermal commtact. “Kane, I repeat—do you copy?”

Grant frowned as he looked at her.

“Nothing,” she admitted. She looked at the dark water in the harsh beam of her xenon flashlight. “I’d estimate this is less than two feet deep,” she reasoned.

“Maybe eighteen inches,” Grant agreed.

“Where we stand,” Brigid continued. “But Kane dropped, which means it’s deeper ahead.”

Grant nodded, passing her his flashlight. “Here, hold this,” he said. Then, following her logic, he sank down on his knees and crawled forward, hands sluicing through the water as he felt his way. “Hard floor,” he reported, “with a little give, like carpet maybe.” He reached forward, moving slowly. “Still floor, still floor...there!” He turned back to Brigid, smiling. “There’s a drop here, stairs maybe.”

She watched as he dipped lower, still reaching forward, testing the terrain. “Careful,” she said, when his face came close to the water.

“It’s all right,” Grant assured her. “I think I feel somethi—”

At that moment, Grant felt something wrap around his arm, and in an instant he, too, was dragged under.

Brigid splashed forward, playing the beam of the flashlight over the dark surface. “Didn’t I just say to be careful?” she muttered, gazing into the murk.

* * *

GRANT WAS SINKING. There was something dragging on his right arm, using its weight to pull him down in the water, deep down into the gloom. He had at least had foresight enough to take a breath as he’d felt the thing grab him, wrap around him, pull him down. Now he circulated that breath in his lungs as he was dragged ever onward.

He couldn’t see a thing, it was so dark. The only light was back up at the surface: Brigid using the xenon flashlight.

He would drown. That’s what was going to happen.

Forget about finding Kane for a moment, just save yourself, Grant told himself. You ain’t no good to Kane dead.

The thing held tightly to his right wrist like a manacle, a dark shape dragging him down and down and down. For a moment Grant saw something flash in the darkness, a row of teeth wide as his forearm.

As the creature opened its mouth for a better grip, Grant pulled his arm away, then kicked as hard as he could, simultaneously stunning whatever it was and propelling himself away, back toward the surface.

* * *

TOPSIDE, BRIGID BAPTISTE was standing at the edge of the deep well beneath the redoubt floor. It should not be there, she knew—redoubts were designed to be impregnable, and the mat-trans located at the base.

She wondered how big the gap was. Could she step over it, if she managed to locate the far rim? And how deep was it? A few feet, or a quarter mile or more? Most importantly, where did it lead?

She tried her commtact again, desperately hoping for an answer from Kane or from Grant, wishing that one of them could hear her and respond.

“Come on, Kane, come on, Grant—one of you say something already,” she hissed into the hidden mic.

Then she spotted a dark shape materializing beneath her in the depths, and a moment later the waters surged and Grant came lunging to the surface, gasping for air.

“Grant, you’re okay,” she called, wading over to him.

He winced as she shone the light over his face, one thousand candles of wattage blasting into his eyes like a nuclear explosion.

“Sorry...sorry,” Brigid began, turning the beam away. As she did so, she saw the figure looming behind her, also emerging from the water, twin rows of teeth gleaming as they caught the flashlight’s ray. The creature’s skin looked dark and rippled in the harsh glare of the xenon light, almost like armor, and for a moment Brigid’s mind whirled, fearing that this was another Annunaki overlord, reemerged on Earth to enslave mankind. But it wasn’t Annunaki; it seemed more animal than human, a wild thing.

The creature pulled itself out of the water into a position that Brigid guessed was a close approximation of standing upright. It was unclothed and taller than a man, about seven feet at full extension, with a long snout like a dog and lips pulled back from vicious pointed teeth. The teeth followed the jaw around from sides to front, each one the length of Brigid’s pinkie finger. The being had a thick, muscular tail, as long again as its height, curling across the floor, just visible in the water. Brigid figured it had been a crocodile once, a few iterations of DNA ago. It was a mutie now.

“Brigid,” Grant gasped from behind her, “get down.”

She responded automatically, ducking low as Grant began firing on the emerging creature. Two bullets flew, racing to the target, drilling against the chest of the croc-like mutie. The sin eater sounded loud in the confines of the corridor, echoes reverberating with the swish of the water. In the aftermath, the croc staggered back a step, then plunged back down, disappearing with a splash of its enormous tail.

Brigid spoke angrily, still watching the location where the creature had disappeared. “What are you thinking? We don’t know if that thing’s a friend or foe.”

“Yeah, we do. One of them just pulled me down under the surface,” Grant declared. “I’m calling it.”

Brigid flashed him a look before scanning the vicinity. “Any sign of Kane?” she asked.

“I couldn’t see shit down there,” Grant told her. “But I can tell you this much—it’s a bastard long drop.”

“What is it?” Brigid asked. “A well? Sinkhole?”

He glared at her. “I was too busy fighting for my life to check.”

“Humph. It happens,” she retorted, playing the xenon beam about once more.

Suddenly there was movement all around the two Cerberus warriors. They sensed it as much as saw it, and then five more of the croc-like creatures emerged from the water—two from the corridor leading back to the mat-trans, three more from the deeper space behind Grant.

“We could be in trouble,” he muttered, raising his blaster again.

* * *

AIR. THAT CAME FIRST. Everything else came in a rush afterward, filling in with memory and logic and guesswork, but the air came first. Kane breathed it, grateful, feeling that slosh of liquid inside him where he had sampled a mouthful of the filthy water when he had been dragged beneath the surface.

How long had he been held under? A minute? More? He had blacked out, the cold ache of the water pressing against him even through the protection of his shadow suit. His face still felt like ice.

Kane heard something: a voice. It sounded awfully close, and for a moment he wondered if he was awake or asleep, because he couldn’t recall where the heck he was.

His eyes snapped open, only to find pitch darkness, a black so absolute the thought that he could be inside a box or a sack crossed his mind. But no, there was no material pressed against his face, and he couldn’t feel that telltale bounce of air as he breathed out, so he wasn’t close to a wall or box lid.

He was soaking wet, his clothes heavy, as if they would drag him down where he lay. He was stretched out on his back. Wet, lying on his back. On cold stone. He could feel the cool hardness scrape against the back of his head when he tried to move.

He felt dizzy, off balance, and realized that the floor beneath him tilted at an angle, leaving his feet lower than his head.

Automatically he felt for the weight at his wrist, the familiar bulk of the sin eater in its hidden sheath under his sleeve. It was still there. Good. Someone was going to get it, pretty soon, too, unless he got some answers.

What had happened? Thinking back, he could see the water, clouded black with pollutant. He had been checking the redoubt corridor and then the floor had dropped away and he had found himself sinking into the liquid. No, not sinking—he had been dragged, weights on his legs, something guiding his passage. No air to breathe, of course—the descent had been too sudden for that—so he had held his breath, mouth tasting of the dark water that had carpeted the deck, and then he was here. Somewhere between “there” and “here,” Kane figured, he had blacked out.

The voice in his head had been Brigid’s, calling him and Grant. The commtact.

“Baptiste?” Kane subvocalised, not saying the word but just breathing it. The commtact’s pickup would enhance the word into speech, relay it to Brigid, wherever she was.

He waited a moment. No reply.

All the while, Kane was listening. Listening intensely to the space around him, the way the echoes resounded, the ambient sounds of the room. There was water here; he could hear its telltale blup as something dripped into a larger body of water, like a melting stalactite over a pool.

There was also the rhythmic sound of ripples, of water being brushed lightly by a breeze.

There was something else, too—breathing. Soft, hardly discernible over the dripping and the rippling, but there just the same when Kane filtered out all the other sounds and put them into categories. The breathing seemed close in the darkness; not loud, but close.

Kane stirred slightly, testing to see what reaction he would get. The thing beside him stirred, too. It was maybe ten feet away, moving around his three o’clock.

Okay, Kane thought. Shoot or make friends? Decisions, decisions. What would Baptiste do?

It was a tough one. Kane knew that Brigid would make friends, or at least she would try to, but whatever had happened to get him here—and he was still struggling to recall all of it—seemed to involve drowning or kidnapping or a little bit of both. At least he had air to breathe now, even if it smelled like the back end of a burned-out SandCat.

The thing shuffled, rough skin running over the stones of the floor. Kane heard it sniff twice, scenting the air. Then he heard another noise, a quiet rumble, not from the thing’s throat but from its belly. It was hungry.

* * *

“WHAT THE HECK are they?” Grant asked as he trained his sin eater on the first of the emerging croc creatures.

“Beats me,” Brigid admitted. “They look like muties—maybe an offshoot of the scalies that were prevalent in this area a hundred years ago.” As she spoke, she was checking the ammunition in her TP-9 semiautomatic pistol. The TP-9 was a bulky hand pistol with a covered targeting scope across the top finished in molded matte black. The grip was set just off center beneath the barrel, creating a lopsided square in the user’s hand, hand and wrist making the final side and corner.

And then the crocs moved, lips pulling back to show their impressive teeth, hissing deep in their throats as they began to attack. There was no time for negotiation now—it was do or die.

The crocs swished their tails to propel themselves from the water, hurtling toward the intruders like rockets.

Grant sent a triple burst of fire from his sin eater, three bullets whipping across the space between himself and his attackers in quick succession. As he did so, he was dropping back toward the nearest wall, using it for cover as the closest of the croc-like creatures came at him with snapping jaws. Grant brought his left arm up in defense, groaned as he felt those vicious jaws chomp down on the Kevlar armor of his coat.

Beside him, Brigid’s pistol flashed in the darkness, sending a score of 9 mm bullets at the first of her attackers as it leaped at her, stagnant water pouring from its ridged, naked frame. The bullets scored a direct hit, cutting a line across the creature’s thick skin in pockmarks—one, two, three, four—from its waist to its meaty pectoral. Their impact did not seem to even slow the creature; it moved like lightning toward Brigid, and its hands—eerily human despite their coating of thick scales—grabbed for her blaster.

In a moment, the mutant had a hold on the muzzle of her TP-9, sweeping it aside as it came toward her with widening jaws.

* * *

THE SIN EATER appeared in Kane’s hand instantly, commanded there by a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons as he lay on his back on the cold stone. He could hear the creature’s feet thumping over the rock floor as his finger met the pistol’s trigger, and suddenly the quiet, regular sounds of water dripping and wind across water were broken by the noise of gunfire.

Kane located his foe by sound alone, holding the trigger down for an extended burst of fire. He heard the other stagger, its movements interrupted, and then a cry like a hiss of steam, followed by the thump of the body dropping to the floor.

Kane eased his finger from the trigger, still holding the blaster poised in the direction of his unseen foe. Hope I’m right about this, he thought as he reached into a utility pocket in his jacket with his free hand. An instant later, Kane had pulled free what appeared to be a pair of sunglasses, which he slipped over the bridge of his nose. They had specially coated polymer lenses and were designed to draw every available iota of light to create an image of whatever was around the viewer, acting as a kind of proxy night vision. Kane pushed himself into a crouch and examined the scene.

He was in an artificial cavern with an arched ceiling and strip of floor, all constructed of regular, carved stone. The floor beneath was tilted, leaving half the room submerged beneath a stretch of dark water. It all smelled rank, bitter, like rainwater on manure.

The creature lay before him, sprawled half in and half out of the water. It looked kind of like a crocodile, only larger and with powerful legs like a man’s, and a tail that disappeared into the water as it curled. The tail twitched, sending ripples across the water.

Kane eyed the creature, making sure it was down. The tail twitched once more, then stopped. He figured it was dead.

Kane paced across to the croc-thing, looking around the cavern. They were in a sewer, maybe; it was hard to tell for sure, but it looked a lot like one. He figured it had served the redoubt two hundred years before, when it had been built. The redoubts were self-sufficient and could be closed off entirely from the outside world, but some had been served by networks of sewers and service tunnels when they were being constructed. Most of those service tunnels had been shut off, blocked up, concreted over. This one, it seemed, had survived.

The creature on the floor was naked and must have stood nine feet tall, with the muscular tail to propel it through the water. It looked like a croc, with a long muzzle featuring rows of teeth as long as Kane’s index finger. But it also had a human quality, despite its coarse, armorlike skin. A chill went down Kane’s spine as he wondered if it was an offshoot of the Annunaki or the Naga, two lizardlike races that had reached for power in the post-nukecaust Earth—the former a race of alien would-be world conquerors, the latter a genetic offshoot of the Annunaki seeded on Earth. But Kane checked himself, recalling stories of the mutie races that used to walk the so-called Deathlands that grew up in the wake of the nukecaust. Some of those creatures had been lizardlike in appearance, the radiation turning them into twisted genetic dumping grounds for weird combinations of mismatched DNA. It was a chill-or-be-chilled world in those days, or that’s what the old-timers used to say.

Kane stepped past the dead lizard, scanned his surroundings through the polymer lenses.

Behind the creature were sacs of organic matter, attached to the walls with what appeared to be a kind of gluelike webbing. There were eight in all, each one oval and almost as long as a man’s torso. Eggs. Kane studied them for a few seconds, peering closely at their translucent shells. There were things waiting inside, half-formed creatures no longer than his forearm. “Baby crocs,” he muttered.

Beyond that, a large bore hole lay in the far wall. The hole was circular and wide enough to grant access to a man or even a small vehicle, and certainly large enough to let these croc things come and go as they pleased. “Now then, where do you lead to?” Kane wondered aloud.

Whatever he and his companions had stumbled on here, it looked like a mutie breeding ground, the kind of place those put-upon mutie races had gone to hide when man had reasserted himself as the dominant life-form in the post-apocalypse world. Kane almost felt sorry for the muties, but he knew that their nesting this close to an operating mat-trans unit spelled trouble. Muties weren’t dumb, even the ones more animal than man. If they could figure a way to get the mat-trans working, they might spread like an infection, settling new colonies right across the North American continent. And if they should meet with humans, as was inevitable, it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that unrest would follow—the kind of unrest that brings a body count in its wake.

Kane looked at the lizard corpse again, sneering. “Poor bastard,” he muttered, shaking his head, “you’ve got no idea what they’d do to you up there. If you knew, you’d think what I did here was a show of mercy.”

* * *

GRANT YOWLED IN PAIN, his scream echoing in the waterlogged corridor. The croc mutie had clamped its jaws around his left arm and was endeavouring to close them. The Kevlar weave of Grant’s coat was strong, acting like plate armor, and beneath it he wore the shadow suit, with its own armorlike quality. But he could still feel those two-inch-long teeth driving into his flesh.

“Get the hell offa me,” he snarled, twisting his body around and swinging the beast with him despite its bulk. Grant was strong—it had occasionally been commented that his strength verged on the superhuman, in fact. With all his strength, he shoved the croc, still clamped to his arm, against the closest mold-dark wall, fixing it in place. Then, with his other hand, he rammed the muzzle of the sin eater point-blank against the thing’s round eye and blasted.

The first bullet destroyed the creature’s eye and Grant felt the pressure on his arm ease for an instant. He kept firing, delivering bullets into the creature’s skull and brain. The sin eater bucked in his hand and he felt the impact of the bullets reverberate through his arm where the mutie gripped him.

* * *

JUST A FEW steps away, Brigid was struggling with her own foe. It lunged at her, the seven-foot-long tail swishing behind as it darted across the watery floor of the corridor. The bullets from the TP-9 were having next to no effect. They just rebounded from the monstrous thing’s thick hide.

Brigid skipped back, the heels of her boots splashing in the dark water that carpeted the redoubt floor. She thought fast, struggling to find a way to keep this creature—and its brethren—from devouring her and Grant. There had to be a way—and there was, if she could just create enough space to make it work!

Brigid turned her back to the monsters. “Come and get me!” she shouted, scrambling down the corridor, back toward the control room and its mat-trans chamber.

Three of the mutie crocs followed, issuing a discordant hiss from their throats as they chased after their prey. Is that how they speak? Brigid wondered. Despite their appearance they were clearly intelligent, and those marks around the mat-trans showed where some of them had tried to work the device to jump to a different location.

She was in the control room now, the mat-trans chamber waiting before her, the muddy brown armaglass looking like a coffee spill as it caught the beam of her xenon flashlight. She reached for the chamber door, rapidly typing in the code to unlock it.

The crocs slowed as they reached the doorway to the control room, stalking warily inside.

“Just a little closer,” Brigid murmured to herself, stepping back through the open door of the mat-trans. As she did, she pulled the rebreather mask from her pocket. It was small, not much larger than a marker pen, and rested neatly in her left palm.

Brigid watched the humanlike crocs approach on hind legs, using their tails to balance. They were intrigued to see the mat-trans finally open, a door they had perhaps spent days trying to unlock, without success. “That’s right, boys,” she taunted. “Store’s open. Come on in.”

Whether they could understand her words or not—and Brigid was inclined to guess that they couldn’t—the crocs moved in response, charging the last few feet between the control desks and the open door, one of them leaping over a desk in his haste. For a moment, all Brigid seemed to see in the dancing flicker of her xenon beam were three mouths the size of mantraps, opening wider to reveal thick, muscular tongues as long as her forearm, surrounded by twin rows of dagger-sharp teeth.

Brigid threw the thing in her hand then, flipping it into the open mouth of the middle croc, just three feet from her extended arm. As the rebreather sailed into the creature’s mouth, she blasted a single bullet from her TP-9 and fell back, all in one gesture.

Brigid was still sailing toward the floor as the bullet struck the rebreather, and in an instant the device’s pressurised supply of oxygen caught light in a cruel explosion, obliterating the head of the lead croc and catching the other two in its wake.

Brigid hit the floor with a slap, the armaglass walls of the mat-trans chamber protecting her from the worst of the explosion.

* * *

MEANWHILE, AS THE first croc slipped back from Grant, its long face splattered with chunks of its own flesh and ruined eyeball, a second one was moving more warily toward the powerfully built ex-magistrate. With a flinch of his wrist tendons, Grant sent his sin eater pistol back into its hidden holster and reached into a sheathlike pocket in his duster. A moment later his hand reappeared wielding a Copperhead assault subgun. The Copperhead was a favorite field weapon of Grant’s, and it 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-handed. 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. Grant preferred the Copperhead thanks to its ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create.

As the muscular mutie leaped at him, he depressed the trigger, unleashing a storm of 4.85 mm death at his foe. The Copperhead’s reports sounded deafening in the enclosed space of the corridor, and the bullets cut through the charging beast like a hot knife through butter. The croc slowed, stumbled, then finally sank to the waterlogged deck two feet from Grant, landing with a great splash of dirty water.

Grant stared down, saw green-tinted blood mixing with the filthy water, lost instants later amid the swill.

“Dumb animal didn’t know what it was up against,” he muttered as he stalked down the corridor to where Brigid had disappeared.

Grant was halfway there when he heard the explosion of her destroyed rebreather. He didn’t just hear it, he felt it, too, the concussive force thudding against his chest like a physical blow.

“Brigid?” he called, running as best he could through the waterlogged tunnel.

He stopped at the open door to the control room, the Copperhead held ready as he glanced inside the door. The place was a scene of devastation. Several consoles at the center had been reduced to slag, and the headless body of one of the croc-men lay sprawled amid their debris. Besides that, over to the sides of the room, two more croc muties were lying in pools of their own blood, spasms running through their sprawled bodies. One was on fire, flames licking up toward the ceiling in a vibrant plume.

“Brigid?” Grant called again, stepping carefully into the room.

“I’m here,” she called back, working the latch of the mat-trans chamber. Grant looked at her.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “Armaglass saved me,” she explained, glancing around the room to see the result of her action for the first time.

“What did you do? Explosive?”

“Rebreather,” Brigid told him. “Just took a spark from a bullet. Oxygen and fire don’t play nice together.”

Grant nodded. “Yeah, I can see that. The mat-trans okay?”

“Should be,” Brigid assured him. “Where’s Kane?”

Grant made a face, then turned and hurried back down the corridor, with Brigid following, toward where they had last seen their partner.

* * *

KANE WORKED THROUGH the egg sacs, delivering a single bullet from his sin eater into each forming creature inside, aborting them before they could be born.

Then he slipped the rebreather over his mouth and paced to where the floor sank beneath the water. He needed to find Grant and Brigid and show them the entrance he had discovered. Could be a lot more trouble yet before they had this pest-hole cleaned up.

Chapter 4

They regrouped, then followed Kane back into the water, using the waterproof xenon flashlights to light their way. Grant and Kane still had their rebreathers, but Brigid had sacrificed hers in the struggle with the crocs, so she shared with Grant, taking a breath every fifty seconds while they explored the submerged structure of the redoubt. Brigid was a superb swimmer, and she was adept at holding her breath, using circular breathing techniques to keep from drowning.

They came across no further living muties, although there was a rotting corpse deep below, on the bottom, weighted down with some kind of air-conditioning unit that had been pulled out or broken away from a wall. Brigid speculated that the unit may have fallen on the croc, killing it.

There was something else under there, too: ancient boring machinery, powerful caterpillar tracks and a pointed drill extended before them like a nose. Brigid pointed it out as they swam past. She guessed it dated back to the early days of the Deathlands, when uncontaminated water had been scarce, but technology was still functioning. In that period, people had done anything they could to obtain clean water.

Before long they were back at the place where Kane had awoken after the first attack, the area he had identified as an old sewer pipe.

“Looks like this isn’t the end of it,” he reiterated, pointing to the hole in the wall.

Brigid eyed the ruined egg sacs for a heartfelt moment, wondering at what Kane had done. “They were children,” she said. “You shouldn’t have—”

“They tried to kill me, Baptiste,” Kane snapped back. “Me and you and Grant. No discussion, no explanation. They just dragged me under—”

“Me, too,” Grant added, “or they tried to.”

Brigid shook her head regretfully. “They were probably hungry, living down here like this.”

“Then I sympathize,” Kane said hotly, “but that won’t stop me putting up a fight when something starts chomping down on my leg.”

They left it at that, the atmosphere between the trio strained. Brigid knew Kane was right in one sense. They had come here without any intention to hurt anything, but had been forced to defend themselves. She herself had been cornered and forced to kill three of the strange mutated creatures. Even so, it wouldn’t sit easy with her, especially killing unborn things like the ones Kane had dispatched.

“I wonder what they are,” she said, crouching down to examine the body of the adult that Kane had shot.

“Some kind of mutie,” he replied dismissively.

“This one’s a female,” she told him, and then she indicated the eggs. “Their mother, probably, trying to feed her brood.

“But they’re not a strain of mutie I recognize,” Brigid continued. “They share superficial similarities to scalies, but they’re more animal than that.”

“A new strain?” Grant proposed.

“Could be,” she mused, “but they shouldn’t be appearing like this.”

Kane stepped over to the wide hole and peeked inside. “You think maybe we should go check out the source?” It was obvious he wanted to. That was the reason he had brought them back here.

“Yes, we should,” Brigid agreed, checking and reloading her pistol before she slipped it back into its holster.

With his head still in the hole, Kane called a hearty “Hello-o-o!” and listened for a response. The only thing to come back was the distant echo of his own voice.

“Smart,” Brigid muttered to herself with a shake of her head.

“So,” Kane asked, “you want me to go first?”

“You’re point man,” Grant said.

“Why not,” Brigid added. “Look how much it helped us last time.”

* * *

THE THREE CERBERUS warriors clambered through the rough gap in the wall. They were in a long, roughly carved tunnel that stretched through a thick layer of poured concrete. The space was unlit, and way longer than their xenon beams could reach, leaving a whole swathe of the hole in darkness.

The concrete walls felt rough where they had been drilled into and broken up, and were scuffed and dark with mold. There was a little water on the floor here, not a stream but just a shallow trickle a couple inches across at its widest point.

“Water’s coming in from somewhere,” Brigid observed, running her beam on the glistening flow.

“Clean water,” Grant pointed out, noting its clearness.

The water was flowing steadily toward them, coming from the direction they were headed.

Kane marched on. The tunnel was on a gradual slope, and a few stretches had rugged, uneven steps carved in the floor. “Someone certainly wanted to get down here,” he said grimly.

“Or they wanted to get away from whatever is up there,” Grant suggested solemnly.

“You saw the borer,” Brigid pointed out. “Could be this tunnel’s been here for a long time.”

There was a sense of foreboding as they climbed the gentle slope to whatever waited above. Nothing came to block their path and there was no sign of life, not even insects feasting on the mold. The trickling of water was the only movement they could detect.

* * *

IT TOOK SIX MINUTES until the powerful xenon beams reached the end of the rough-hewn tunnel, seven until the Cerberus teammates had finished their ascent to its egress. The exit, like the rest of the tunnel, was roughly carved, an almost circular hole leading to whatever lay beyond.

Kane dowsed his flashlight and the others did the same, replacing the polymer-coated lenses over their eyes to see in the darkness rather than warn anyone of their approach. Looking back, he estimated that they had climbed at least a quarter mile up from the underground redoubt, and he guessed that they must be close to ground level.

Kane went ahead, crouch-walking toward the gap in the wall, anxiously manipulating his fingers as he itched to draw his sin eater once again. Behind him, Grant had drawn the Copperhead assault subgun and held it close to his body, pointed at the floor. If they met any more of those croc muties he would be ready. Brigid brought up the rear, her eyes fixed on the space behind them, making sure they didn’t get snared in a classic ambush with no way back.

Kane let his point-man sense attune to the new environment, stilling his mind and listening, smelling, feeling the way the wind currents moved. Whatever lay beyond the hole smelled old and dusty, but otherwise didn’t smell much at all. He was pretty sure there was no one around, and certainly no more of the croc things, unless they’d taken to using mouthwash.

Through the gap and into the next space. It was huge, momentarily dwarfing Kane with its proportions after the claustrophobic tunnel. He was in a room a little larger than a tennis court, containing a sunken space in the floor. The sunken area was rectangular and filled most of the room, with broad steps leading down into it and a metal ladder running up one side. It took a moment for Kane to recognize what it was—a swimming pool.

Grant followed a moment later, with Brigid just behind him, both of them glancing around warily.

“So,” Grant whispered, “where are we?”

“Pool,” Kane said, indicating the sunken space. He paced around the rim, scanning the room.

The pool was empty of water, but contained several boxes or crates, stacked one on top of the other. There were similar crates dotted around the sides, as well as a pile of material—probably clothes or towels, Kane guessed—near one wall. Up close, the material smelled musty. The room had no windows, but it featured two sets of double doors, set off center on the shorter walls.

Kane paced swiftly to the nearest doors, indicating Grant should do likewise for the far set. Moments later the two ex-mags were standing at the doors, listening for signs of life beyond them.

“On three?” Kane called across the room.

Grant nodded, running his index finger down the side of his nose as he caught his teammate’s eye. They called the gesture the one percent salute, a ritual between them that averred that no matter how much you plan for, there’s always that rogue element—that one percent—that can throw a wrench in the works. The salute was meant to be ironic, but the two men saw it almost as a lucky charm when they found themselves entering an unknown situation.

Kane did a silent count on his fingers and then the two ex-magistrates pushed at the doors they stood before. None of them opened.

“Locked.”

“Locked,” Grant agreed.

The top halves of each door featured a glass panel, but all of them seemed to have been obscured on the far side. Certain now that they were alone, Kane flipped his xenon flashlight back on and ran it over the windows and down the sliver of space between the doors to see if he could find a lock.

“Looks like someone’s put something against the other side of this one,” he stated, trotting back and keeping his voice at conversational level. “Looks like wood—maybe a dresser or cabinet.”

Grant tried his own doors again, pushing at them with his prodigious strength. “There’s some give here,” he told the others. “Might be able to force it.”

Kane looked from the empty pool to the doors, and finally settled his gaze on Brigid. “What do you figure this place is? Some kind of public baths?”

“Could be, but could just as easily be one person’s private pool,” she said.

“Looks kind of old,” Kane said to her.

“Reclaimed from prenukecaust stock maybe,” Brigid suggested. “Rebuilt or built to old specs. A lot of the materials we’ve come to use every day date back to those predark designs, remember.” She didn’t need to add that even her own blaster was of prenukecaust design, first fashioned in the late twentieth century.

* * *

CONCLUDING THAT THE only alternative exits in the room were narrow ventilation ducts, which had been sealed for years, the Cerberus crew agreed to try the doors that Grant had felt give. Kane and Brigid waited behind him while he put all his weight into moving them. The twin doors bulged outward, and the team could hear the rattle of chains. For a moment nothing happened, then came a splintering of wood as Grant applied more force, pushing his shoulder against the narrow gap between the panels.

There was a loud cracking and then the doors shuddered backward as they split from their frames, crashing to the floor with a metallic clatter of chain links, followed by an eerie silence.

Grant stepped back, pulling his Copperhead from its hidden sheath.

“Well, I guess that’s one way of opening a door,” Brigid said quietly.

Grant waited by the doorway, scanning the space beyond. It was dark out there, just as it had been inside. He saw a corridor lined with windows on one side and a rash of peeling paint on the other. The panes were so grimy they let in almost no light, a wash of mud caking their exterior. Apart from furniture, which included a pewlike bench and a trophy cabinet, the corridor was empty.

“What happened here?” Brigid whispered as she stepped forward to examine the scene.

“Maybe the crocs ate everyone,” Kane suggested. Though his tone was light, he was only half joking.

She shook her head, her usually vibrant hair almost purple in the semidarkness. “No, they locked the crocs in here, with the pool,” she reasoned. “Then they probably drained it in hopes of killing them.”

“How do you figure that?” Kane asked.

Brigid pointed to the fallen doors, the length of chain still wrapped tightly around their handles. “It’s been locked from outside,” she said. “The crocs couldn’t get out even if they wanted to.”

“Unless they had a bruiser like Grant on their team,” Kane added, but he accepted Brigid’s point.

* * *

THEY PACED AHEAD, more confident now, using the xenon beams to light their way.

There were rooms bleeding off the corridor, some with closed doors, others with just open doorways. The Cerberus trio were used to that. They had grown up in Cobaltville under the Program of Unification, which stated that no individual should have a lock to bar the entry of another.

There were several communal dressing rooms, showers and a large space that Brigid speculated had been used for social events. There were also several smaller rooms, including an office and a number of toilet stalls. All the rooms were unoccupied and in a run-down state, although they were mostly clean. It was as if the whole building had been deserted and forgotten, left as a frozen moment in time.

There were a few pictures here and there, posters on the walls, photographs on desks and in drawers. The Cerberus team examined these, looking for signs of something going wrong. But they found nothing untoward; the people in the pictures looked normal.

Behind one door was a staircase, with more crates of belongings on the steps, along with several heaps of towels. The others waited in the doorway while Kane trotted up the steps, checking where they led. He found himself in an upper room with a low ceiling and naked support beams, an attic filled with cold and damp.

As in much of the building, a large chunk of the space was given over to storage, but sunlight painted a square on one small section of the floor. Kane paced across to it, glancing around until he located its source. There was a small gap between two support beams of the sloping roof, a ventilation hole where the wall met the eaves. Kane squeezed past the struts and peered through it.

Beyond lay a ville, a small community of a couple dozen buildings, most of them single story, lit by the midmorning sun. There was a paved street running from this building into the ville, with a few benches dotted along its length and a statue at a corner. The place seemed lifeless and empty. Empty except for one thing: a SandCat waiting at the far end, its markings familiar to Kane even after all this time. Cobaltville magistrates.

Chapter 5

“Mags,” Kane muttered, looking at the SandCat through the gap.

Kane had been a Cobaltville magistrate once, as had Grant, his partner on the beat until they fell afoul of a conspiracy orchestrated by Cobaltville’s leader. Baron Cobalt had turned out to be something other than human, a hybrid of alien DNA, holding the genetic key to a race far older than humankind. That race, the Annunaki, had caused Kane and his Cerberus teammates no end of trouble over the past few years, but it had all started with Baron Cobalt and his cruel desire to manipulate humanity for his own ends.

Kane watched through the gap below the eaves for over a minute, waiting to see if anything moved out there by the SandCat. The squat vehicle was parked, he realized, and nothing entered or exited its sealed doors. The gun turret atop its roof was silent, the guns bowed as if in defeat.

Maybe the SandCat had been left here during a routine patrol; maybe it had broken down. Or maybe the magistrates were here right now, searching the seemingly deserted ville, maybe even rounding up and chilling the locals for some imagined infraction to the baronial world order. Kane listened at the gap a moment longer, but could hear nothing, just the wind whistling through the streets.

Eventually, he backed away from the spy hole and made his way back through the attic and down the stairs to where his partners were waiting.

“You find something up there?” Grant asked. He and Brigid had been waiting five minutes, but it didn’t matter to them. They knew some things took time and that Kane would have called them via commtact had he got into any difficulty.

He nodded. “Spy hole up there. Can see the whole ville,” he said.

“What’s it look like?” Brigid asked.

“Dead,” Kane said, “but there are mags here, I think, or maybe just one. Can see a SandCat, anyway.”

“Marked?” Grant asked.

“With the familiar red shield,” Kane replied, nodding grimly. “One of us, or what we used to be.”

Brigid had tensed as the discussion progressed, and she looked now from Kane to Grant. “Either of you guys want to tackle a magistrate? Because I sure don’t.”

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Kane said, though he sounded less certain than his words suggested. “If there’s mags skulking around a little out-of-the-way community like this, I want to know why, and I want to know where the heck everyone’s gone to.”

Together, the Cerberus exiles made their way through the building’s corridors, which followed a large, rectangular pattern roughly outlining the pool in the center. The three were searching for an exit, but the doors they tried were locked, just like the ones to the pool. These were external doors, however, heavier than the ones Grant had broken through, and would take tools or explosives to breach.

“We’ll break a window on the far side and sneak out that way,” Kane finally suggested.

“The noise could bring someone,” Brigid warned.

“Then we’d best stay on our toes,” he replied, eyeing the windows and mentally weighing their proportions. He needed one that would be large enough to allow him and Grant to slip through safely. Brigid, too, though there was a lot less of her to slip. Several of the windows had large, square frames with no cross struts holding them in place, which made them ideal for what Kane had in mind. “There we are,” he muttered.

Having selected a window, Kane searched around for something to smash it with.

“Need me to do this?” Grant asked, brandishing his Copperhead subgun.

Kane raised his eyebrows, figuring that his teammate was planning to blast the window clean out of its frame. But Grant reversed the subgun, turning the butt toward the glass.

“Wait here,” Brigid instructed, before Grant could smash the window. “And don’t do anything till I get back.”

She was gone less than a minute, and when she returned she was carrying one of the towels that littered several rooms and the stairwell. “Use this,” she instructed, waving the terry cloth toward the window that Grant was about to break. “It’ll muffle the noise.”

So doing, Grant smashed through the window, and a few moments later the three Cerberus teammates were stepping outside the abandoned swimming pool complex for the first time.

It was warm out there, the sun trundling slowly toward its midday zenith. Brigid gasped as she trod on something just beyond the window. It was a bone, and when she looked she saw many more partly buried in the ground they walked on, scattered there as if on display.

“Bones,” Kane said, emotionless. His old magistrate training had kicked in once more, that ability to divorce himself from the potential horrors of a situation and simply deal with it like a machine.

Crouching down, Brigid examined a few of the bones without touching them. They were white, but dirty where the soil had marked them. “Human,” she said after just a few seconds’ consideration.

Kane looked around, taking in the area around them with its smattering of loose bones. “How many? People, I mean,” he asked.

Brigid looked in turn, narrowing her eyes for a moment in thought. “Fifteen, maybe twenty. Hard to say.”

Grant shook his head grimly. “What happened to them?” he asked, though he knew he couldn’t expect an answer.

“Fed to the crocs maybe,” Kane proposed, “before they locked them in the pool and forgot all about them.”

Brigid nodded, pulling herself erect. “Could be.”

Together, the band of Cerberus warriors made their way across the patch of bones to what would be the front of the building, the direction where Kane had spotted the SandCat. There were more bones all about, some broken, some just shards now, glinting sharply in the overturned soil. Whatever had happened here had killed a lot of people in a very short time.

The side of the building was decorated with stone chips, making the wall rough to the touch. Kane went ahead, pressing himself lightly against it as he moved warily toward the front. He peered around the corner, darted back, then scanned more carefully once he was confident no one was in the immediate vicinity.

“How’s it look?” Grant asked. He kept his voice to a whisper.

“Quiet,” Kane said, “and empty.”

In front of the pool building was a little courtyard with a line of apple trees in blossom, tufts of white flowers like cotton wool on their branches. The courtyard featured two benches and a path leading to the main street that Kane had watched from the hole in the roof space.

Out there, the street was wide enough for two SandCats to pass, and the stone paving looked to be in good working order, albeit a little weatherworn. The buildings fit that description, too—well-built, a little weatherworn, but all of them well-kept. It looked for all the world like a nice place to live. The only thing that broke that illusion was the absolute lifelessness of the whole ville. Nothing moved, no sound carried from workshops or distant conversations. It was like a museum piece.

Kane watched for a moment longer, his eyes fixed on the SandCat that waited at the end of the street. The bulky vehicle sat low to the ground, like a jungle cat waiting to pounce.

Kane turned back to the others, his expression pensive. “The coast is clear—in fact, it’s all too clear. Let’s be careful.”

With that, he stalked ahead into the courtyard, keeping to the shadows and using the trees as cover. He moved swiftly and his companions followed, spreading out a little to ensure that if they were spotted they would not make an easy, single target.

Kane hurried ahead in a crouching run, leaving the others in the courtyard amid the apple trees. He crossed the street, ducking close to the side of a two-story building that would cover the SandCat driver’s view of him. The tinted windshield of the vehicle gave nothing away; all Kane could do was move quickly and hope he wasn’t spotted. He pressed his back against the wall, glanced around the corner to ensure no one had materialized from the SandCat, then encouraged Grant and Brigid to join him with a swift hand gesture.

Like Kane, the two ran swiftly across the street, keeping their movements as quiet as they could. They met up at the building’s edge.

“You think mags did this?” Grant asked.

“Did what?” Kane challenged. “We don’t know what happened here or why.”

As he finished speaking, there came a groaning sound from behind them. It was coming from inside the building the Cerberus teammates were pressed against, and it sounded like a human voice. All three of them turned, to try to locate and identify the sound.

“Sounded human.” Brigid confirmed what the others were thinking.

The wall to the building was solid brick, with just one slit window very high up, and it ended in a wooden fence that surrounded a yard or storage area of some kind. The fence was a little over six feet tall.

“No door,” Kane stated. He didn’t want to walk around and risk being seen. “We’ll use the fence.” With that, he trotted along to where the fence began and reached up to the top.

“You just plan to go in there?” Brigid asked, a note of warning in her voice.

“Some people would say that was reckless,” Kane said, “but those are the same people who get shot in the back ’cause they never checked what the noise was.”

Brigid nodded once, accepting his point. Then she watched as Kane lifted himself up and scrambled swiftly over the wall, all taut muscles and smooth movements. When he’d dropped down, disappearing behind the high fence, she turned back to Grant. “One of these days he’s going to be wrong,” she said. “Then he’ll get killed.”

“Not Kane,” Grant said. “He’s lucky, the kind of luck you hone into an instinct. That instinct has saved my ass on more than one occasion.”

“Yeah,” Brigid sighed resignedly. “Mine, too.”

* * *

A YARD LAY behind the building, a gate in the fence to Kane’s right, which he saw led to some kind of service alley. The two-story building was made of gray stone, discolored here and there where the elements had worked at it. There was a single window, and a wooden door that had been painted blue some time ago, long enough that the paint was scratched and flaking around the edges.

Above this were two more windows, looking into rooms on the second story.

Kane checked above him, but spotted no one at the windows. He glanced into the lower window—kitchen—then tried the handle of the door. Unlocked, the door opened with a creak of hinges that hadn’t been oiled in a long time.

Kane stepped into the kitchen and stopped. There was a dog bowl on the floor, licked clean. Beside it lay the rotting corpse of a dog, flies buzzing around it. It was a large breed, a German shepherd maybe, but it was hard to be sure because so much had decomposed.

Kane moved past the corpse, doing his best to ignore the stench, and continued through the kitchen doorway. It led directly into a living room, which contained two chairs big enough to hold two or three people each, and a sideboard housing trinkets of indeterminate value. Besides the peeling wallpaper, there was something else, too—a figure sitting in one of the chairs with its back to Kane.

“Hello?” he began as he stepped into the room. “I mean you no harm—”

Kane stopped as he saw the figure’s face. Its eyes were hollow and there were trails of thick black liquid running down its cheeks from those empty eyes. More liquid oozed from its nostrils and mouth.

Chapter 6

Kane blanched, stepping back from the man in the chair. He looked to be in his forties, though it was hard to tell. He was dead—that much was certain—and the liquid trails that ran over his face had dried there, congealing into something that looked sticky.

Kane flicked his gaze to the ceiling, searching for the source of the liquid—thinking it had maybe dripped from above. But no, there was nothing up there, just the paint, yellowed from tobacco.

The smell of the room struck him, an odor of meat turned bad.

Kane looked back at the dead man in the chair. He wore a dressing gown, beneath which were bedclothes, and thick socks on his feet. It was as though the man had got out of bed and sat down, and then died right then and there. Which meant he had probably felt sick, maybe even for a while. The drapes were closed, but they weren’t thick and so the sunlight still came in, turned a warm ochre color as it struck the material.

Belatedly, Kane pulled the rebreather mask from his jacket and slipped it over his mouth and nostrils. He had been breathing the air here for maybe a minute, long enough, possibly, to catch whatever it was that had killed the man. There was a lot of disease out there, and baseline radioactivity was still high in places, high enough that magistrates had been regularly dosed with immunity shots to combat its possible side effects if they had to leave the security of the ville.

Kane’s commtact snapped to life then, surprising him in the silence of the old house. “Kane? You okay? Found a way in yet?” Grant asked.

“I’m in,” he confirmed. “Found a dead body. Still searching.”

He trekked through the living room toward the far door, moving to the front of the house. He stopped momentarily at the window, inching back the edge of the drapes until he could see down the street. The SandCat was still there, silent, waiting.

Kane moved on to the entry, and a staircase lined with wooden banisters.

* * *

OUTSIDE, GRANT RELAYED Kane’s response to Brigid while she crouched at the edge of the wall, watching the street.

“Seems like we walked into deadville,” Grant finished, shaking his head grimly.

Brigid looked up at him for a moment, and her emerald eyes seemed to bore into his. “The trouble with deadville is that it used to be aliveville, which means we need to find out what happened here before it kills us, too.”

“Agreed.”

They returned to silence, watching the empty streets and the unmoving SandCat, waiting for Kane’s next report.

* * *

AS HE REACHED the top of the stairs, Kane heard the groan again, louder now that he was inside the building. There were three doors up here, plus a loft ladder hanging down from above.

Kane moved toward the closed door of the nearest room, resisting the urge to call his sin eater back into his hand. The weapon could be called instantaneously—he had to trust that, or he could end up spooking whoever was here if he went in with a blaster already in his hand.

The door gave after a gentle push. It was a bedroom, Kane saw, with a figure lying in the bed, propped up in a sitting position, pillows against the wall. It was a woman and, like the man downstairs, she was dead. Her face appeared to have caved in, and the eyes were just dark shadows now, that same dark liquid congealed in thick lines.

Kane closed the door, stepped out into the corridor. He couldn’t help the dead.

He moved to the next room, another closed door, tried it. The door opened a few inches, then stopped as it struck something. The groan came again, loud now, from just inside.

Kane pressed against the door and wedged his head into the gap, trying to look in. “Hey, is someone there?” he asked.

The room was in pitch darkness, the response another groan. Kane stood there, narrowing his eyes, waiting for them to adjust to the lack of light. It was a bathroom, he saw after a moment: shower cubicle, sink, toilet stall. Someone was sitting crouched in the shower, arms wrapped around knees, head down so that their long hair fell in front of their face. Like the lights, the shower was off.

Kane reached for the xenon flashlight and switched on its beam, angling it away, at the floor behind him. “I’m turning on a light,” he explained. “It’s going to be bright. Close your eyes.”

He raised the flashlight, playing the beam through the gap in the door. It gleamed off the shiny surfaces of the glass and tiles and faucets, flashes of chrome as metal caught the light. The figure in the shower flinched just a little, snuffling like an animal but not moving.

“Hey,” Kane called. “You all right? You need help?”

The figure didn’t speak, just issued a pained howl from deep in its chest. It was dressed in soiled clothes, matted hair over its face.

Something was behind the door, stopping it from opening. Kane stepped back, pressed against the panel and shoved harder, forcing whatever was there to move back. The door moved a foot and a half, accompanied by a scraping noise, then there was a thud and it wouldn’t swing any wider. It was enough for him to pass through, and he went shoulder first.

Kane stepped into the bathroom, checked immediately behind the door. A figure was sprawled there, flat on its back, dead eyes open and turned black, the already-familiar trace of black liquid smeared across its face. The figure was naked, but it had wasted away so much that it was hard to tell if it was male or female; it looked like a skeleton protruding from a bag of skin. Kane glanced at the corpse’s groin: male, black smeared genitals and the floor beneath where something had leaked out. The assessment had taken two seconds.

Kane moved across the room, angling the xenon beam at the ceiling so as not to dazzle the groaning figure. It was still bright enough to light the space.

“You okay?” he asked again. “You hurt?”

The figure still did not respond, but just sat there, barely moving.

Kane padded forward, suddenly on high alert, his senses scanning for any danger, any attack. His eyes flicked to the toilet stall, couldn’t help but notice the mess that festered there. Black slime was spread up the sides of the basin, over the seat and across the back and the wall behind it. More black splattered the floor, as if someone had spilled paint there.

Kane turned back to the figure crouched in the shower, saw now that it was a woman, long dark hair obscuring her face, her frame wasting away like the corpses he had found in the house. He guessed she was young, a teenager maybe, but it was hard to tell—she was little more than skin and bones. “It’s okay,” he said gently. “I can help you.”

Kane crouched down before her. She didn’t move, didn’t respond, just issued another of those painful, agonized groans from somewhere behind her curtain of hair.

Kane reached forward, warning the woman what he was about to do, then pushed her hair back until he could see her face. Her head was tilted down, with black streaks running from her eyes and nose and mouth like a river that had burst its banks.

Kane resisted the urge to jump away.

* * *

“SOMEONE’S OUT THERE,” Brigid hissed. She was still at the building’s edge, watching the street, her back to Grant.

“What?” he asked, glancing behind him, back to where Kane had slipped over the fence.

“Dressed in black,” Brigid explained in a low voice. “It’s a mag...I think.”

She could see the figure in the distance, but only from behind. He was dressed in a long black coat that almost touched the ground, like the coats magistrates wore in storm conditions, along with a helmet covering his head. Brigid watched as he stopped at the driver’s side of the waiting SandCat. The gull-wing door whirred open and the figure ducked inside. A moment later, the engine roared to life.

“He’s moving,” Brigid whispered to Grant as he joined her at the corner of the building. “SandCat’s turning.”

Standing over Brigid, Grant poked his head around the corner, eyes focusing on the SandCat at the far end of the street. As she had stated, it had pulled away from the curb and was performing a three-point turn, reversing its direction. He was barely able to hear the engine from this far away; even in the silent ville the purr of the engine was lost to the wind.

“Lone mag,” he mused, “or maybe there’s a partner inside, operating the guns. What were they doing here, I wonder?”

Brigid glanced up at him. “Maybe gathering data by remote,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Grant stated. “We need to investigate while the coast is clear. Who knows how soon they’ll return.”

“Grant, no—that’s inviting trouble,” Brigid told him.

“Then what?” he asked. “It’s the only sign of life we’ve seen so far, which makes it our only lead.”

Brigid’s mind raced. “Satellite,” she said, thinking aloud. “Cerberus can track it.”

Grant watched the SandCat slowly pull away. Its rear fender was toward them now, which meant the driver wouldn’t spot them easily. “I don’t like it,” Grant said. “I’m going to go check where they’re going.” He stepped away from the wall. “You and Kane follow when you’re ready.” With that, he turned and began sprinting up the street, sticking close to the buildings, using their shadows and his own dark clothing to mask his movements.

Brigid muttered a curse about impulsive partners and their knack for getting into trouble, then activated her commtact.

“Cerberus, this is Brigid,” she said to the empty air.

Brewster Philboyd’s cheerful voice responded immediately. “Brigid, do you have an update for us?”

“Major update,” she replied, “but we’re still putting the pieces together. Can you get a spy-eye trained on a magistrate SandCat that’s just left our location?”

“A what?” Lakesh cut in over the shared comm frequency.

“Just put the eye on it,” Brigid said. “You can triangulate from my transponder, right?”

“On it,” Brewster confirmed.

The transponder device was surgically fitted for all Cerberus field personnel, designed to broadcast their location, as well as details on their health, such as heart rate and brain activity, to the home base in real time. Back in the Cerberus operations room, Lakesh and his team could access such details about Grant, Kane and Brigid even as they went about their mission, relayed over the satellite links and interpreted via a sophisticated computer program.

As Grant sprinted away down the street, Brigid followed at a more leisurely pace, checking the side doors and watching for snipers or other would-be threats. “Kane?” she said into her hidden commtact. “We’re splitting up. SandCat has departed. Grant’s checking out where it’s heading.”

* * *

KANE HEARD BRIGID’S words softly over his commtact, but he sensed it wasn’t the time to respond. He didn’t want to spook the girl in the shower.

“Tell me your name,” Kane said, holding his other hand out as he brushed the woman’s dark hair away from her face. The black tears glistened on her cheeks, pooling in the hollows beneath her sunken eyes.

The woman shook, clearly agitated as he met her gaze.

“I’m Kane,” he said, trying to reassure her. “I only want to help.”

The woman unleashed an agonized shriek, then suddenly moved, head tilting rapidly toward Kane’s face as if to butt him. He pulled back, but she grabbed him, both hands reaching for his face.

“Wh—?” he began, as the woman was dragged back with him, her face rushing at his.

Then she struck him, her nose against his, mouth pressed on his, lips parted.

Chapter 7

The woman crashed down on Kane, her face pressed against his. She was trying to kiss him.

With a little effort, he pushed her away. Though she was skeletal, she still had strength in her limbs, strength enough to cling to him as he tried to lift her.

“Get off me,” Kane snarled, shoving the woman aside.

He had seen this before, the sudden wave of adoration for a rescuer; in magistrate training they had called it shining knight syndrome. At least, that’s what he thought this was.

The corpselike woman lay there on the floor at the base of the open shower cubicle, not moving. Kane could see the floor of the shower now; it was smeared with black, congealed liquid, thick as oil. The blackness circled the drain in a spiral, like a child’s drawing of a firework.

Kane stood up, watching the woman as she lay there, perfectly still. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. You just...it’s just that you took me by surprise, is all.” As he spoke, he wiped at his face where she had struck him, her mouth on his in that desperate kiss. The rebreather was still in place, but it was smeared with liquid, and when he pulled his hand away, Kane saw the tacky black ooze glistening on his fingers.

“What is this stuff?” he muttered, studying it closely.

On the bathroom floor, the woman watched through the strands of her hair, realized her mistake. A moment later she leaped away, moving with unbelievable speed, issuing a groaning scream from deep in her throat.

* * *

GRANT RAN, HUGGING the shadows, his eyes tracking the retreating SandCat, then flicking left and right to check for any sign of threat from the buildings to either side of him. They were almost silent, but he could hear low voices as he ran past them, mumbled pleas and agonized groans like the one Kane had gone to investigate.

Grant was two-thirds of the way down the street when something stepped from a shadowy alleyway between houses and stood in his path. The figure was tall and thin, head bowed so that its chin touched its throat. It was dressed in street clothes—not a magistrate. Grant’s eyes flicked ahead, watching the SandCat continue to roar away as he slowed his pace. Should he ignore the stranger, run past him? Or should he stop and interrogate him, see if he knew anything about the bones and the strained voices?

The figure opened its mouth as Grant approached, issuing a terrible groan, followed by something else: vomit, black as midnight, running from its mouth like tar.

Grant stopped, bringing himself up short before the vomiting man. “You okay, man?” he asked. “You need...something?”

The man doubled over, vomiting more forcefully, and a gush of black ooze spattered across the street between his feet. There was more ooze coming from his eyes, Grant saw now, and a dark trickle ran down from his left ear and both nostrils.

“What happened to you?” Grant asked, keeping a wary distance. “Did...did someone do this to you?”

* * *

BRIGID, MEANWHILE, PROCEEDED more slowly down the empty street, peering in the windows of buildings for signs of life. Three doors down she found what looked to be a meeting room or a saloon, shades drawn halfway down. She had to crouch to peer inside, and when she did she saw chairs arranged in a circle, with a dozen pairs of legs sitting in them. There were people in there, a ville meeting, maybe. Could that explain the sense of the place being abandoned?

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