Ezili Coeur Noir smiled at the noise, enjoying the terrible, familiar song of death reversed. All of the corpses had done this when she had revived them; each had sung a beautiful note of pain. It was so pure, so absolute, she wished to one day make an orchestra of these corpses, killing and reviving them to create the music she heard echoing in her black heart.

Already she was walking down the road, instinctively searching for another dead body, feeling herself drawn to it as she repopulated the Earth with her army of the undead. But soon she would not need to search. Once the Red Weed batch was completed by her lackeys, Ezili Coeur Noir would have an endless supply of the dead to reanimate, a perfect orchestra to scream her beautiful songs of death. And prized among those singers would be the three humans she had found in the underground bunker of the redoubt, the three who had challenged her with the brightness of their living souls.

Scarlet Dream

Outlanders®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Call no man happy till he is dead.

—Aeschylus, 525–456 B.C.

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.

“Call no man happy till he is dead.”

—Aeschylus, 525-456 BC

Contents

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

Epilogue

Chapter 1

She had surrounded herself with dead things, for she found their company more agreeable now than that of the living.

Her name was Ezili Coeur Noir and she was the queen of all things dead, the flower of carnage. She stood over six feet tall and her limbs were bird-thin sticks, like the tools of some perverse surgeon. Her skin clung so tightly to those limbs that it seemed as if it would crush the stick-thin bones that were visible beneath. That skin was the rippled leather of a lizard, discolored and rotten with oozing wounds, as if in sympathy with the dead things she had elected to surround herself by. She stood upon two spindly, emaciated legs at an odd angle, as if no longer able to hold herself straight, which left her looking like some hideous mannequin discarded by its satanic puppeteer.

Along her torso, beneath her taut skin, her pronounced ribs showed like the keys of a piano, before finally disappearing beneath two misshapen breasts that hung like deflated balloons. Her elbows and knees were jagged points, like shards of broken glass, and her fingers curled arthritically in on themselves, their thick, jagged nails a sickly yellow.

Ezili Coeur Noir’s yellow eyes showed the intolerance of a lizard, twin black slits like the eyes of an alligator, watching inscrutably above a hideous smile that, like the eyes, was more reptile than human. The yellow of those eyes almost seemed to glow within the darkness of her skin, weathered and aged to a leathery mahogany brown.

Her clothes, like her body, had rotted, their dust-caked remnants clinging to her dark flesh in tattered rags. Death and entropy were all her body understood now, and thus nothing that came into contact with Ezili Coeur Noir could remain intact.

She stood knee-deep in the swampland of Louisiana, where the plant life was so thick that it almost blotted out the rays of the rising sun. The plants nearest to Ezili Coeur Noir were dying as she stood and breathed in their proximity, wilting their life away in supplication to the queen of all things dead, who now stood gloriously among them.

Ezili Coeur Noir had been there all night, watching as her people, her legion of the dead, went about their work. Her people had come from the ground, locked now in various states of decay as she had revived them. They shambled, lurching to their tasks as they dug at the marshy ground, clawing at it with withered hands that ended in broken yellow nails.

Ezili Coeur Noir closed her eyes as her legion of dead dug at the spongy soil, listening to their groans of complaint, their grunts of interest. Most of them had no real capacity for speech anymore; their tongues had shriveled away in death, no longer able to create the shapes needed to turn sound into form. Still, they made noise, the way humans will make noise, as if—even in death—they feared this dead place where the insects made their home. There were other things here, of course—amphibians, birds, some hardy types of fish that swam in the deeper pits of water among the marshes—all of whom seemed to fill the air with creaking and cawing, the hideous shrieks of a child’s nightmare.

Two centuries before, there had been other things living here, too—humankind. Out here in the depths of the bayou, Army men had cordoned off an area of this sweaty habitat to develop a research station located in the back of beyond, far from the nearest town, with just a single dirt road leading to it. The road endured in patchy remnants, a mud track lined with little sunken posts that stuck out of the earth like sharks’ teeth. The patches of road were uneven, and what remained survived from sheer tenacity and nothing more, for it had barely been used in two centuries and it led, categorically, to a patch of nothing amid a swamp full of the same. Or so it appeared.

In fact, the swamp had grown to cover the single-story entrance to the redoubt that had once stood at the end of the road. Nature had buried it, either through choice or when the nukecaust of 2001 had rewritten all the maps. Either way, the entrance to the redoubt was hidden beneath layers of marsh and concrete. But far below that, far below the entrance itself, lay the thing that Ezili Coeur Noir was searching for, the toy she wished to play with. She felt it calling to her.

Instinct had brought her here—instinct, arcane knowledge and an all-pervading sense for death in all its beautiful forms. For, to Ezili Coeur Noir, death was a thing of beauty, the perfect punctuation to conclude the statement called life.

All around the queen of death, the corpses worked at the soil, pulling and wrenching, tossing aside sodden chunks of earth that hit the ground with wet slaps. As the ground was sifted, black-shelled, multilimbed inhabitants crawled from the soil, disturbed by the outrage. The undead men ignored the beetles and the worms and the termites as they scrabbled from the upturned sod, letting them land and feast on their decaying flesh with hungry mouths. There were other things here, too, finding their way in the early morning gloom, flying insects that buzzed incessantly as they sought out the rotten flesh of the moving living-dead things, yearning to gnaw at it and to lay their eggs in rotten muscles, in ragged ears and between the gaps of the undead men’s smiles. The undead ignored them, or perhaps chewed on those insects that landed between their lips, an old instinct from the days when they had needed to eat, just muscle memory now playing its cruel tricks. The undead care not for the needs of the flesh, are undisturbed by such things as turn the stomachs of the living.

There came a noise then, a single, sharp thump that sounded of metal. Ezili Coeur Noir opened her eyes to slits, wide black vertical stripes crossing the yellow as she looked out at her people. They looked at her expectantly, twenty corpses that had once been men and women, and two of them just children, recently dead things now who barely stood tall enough to nose at the oyster entrance to her lifeless womb. She saw the expectation in their blank expressions where others would just see the rotting faces of the butcher’s blade. They had found it, she knew—the door to the redoubt.

Ezili Coeur Noir stepped forward, her spindly legs flicking out uncomfortably, like the long limbs of a house spider, trotting forward with a disquieting gait. Despite her skeletal form and the hideous way her decomposing legs ground against the sockets of her hips, the queen of death still strode with an indefinably regal air, her head held high. She dominated all that she saw; there could be no question that here was the ruler of all that her reptilian eyes surveyed. Even through their dead orbs, her corpselike minions saw this and several of them genuflected in appreciation as she tottered past them, the upper half of her body swaying as though a leaf on the mildest breeze.

The door was buried amid the sludge of the swamp, hunks of powdery concrete clinging to its surface. Reinforced steel, the door lay in front of the queen of death, nine feet by twelve, not flat but at a slight angle that made it a locked portal in the ground. A few brave rays of sunlight sneaked through the thick plant cover to glimmer on its metal surface, and pools of water began leaking over it even as Ezili Coeur Noir looked. Here was the entrance to the redoubt, the entrance that had been hidden for over two centuries.

Without taking her eyes from the gleaming surface of the steel door, Ezili Coeur Noir issued an instruction in a voice with all the vibrancy of ashes crushed in the palm of the hand. “Open it.”

The corpses hurried to obey, pushing past one another in their haste to serve their terrible mistress. Groaning and mumbling, Ezili Coeur Noir’s undead workers pulled at the door, struggling to make it move on its hinges. The door resisted. Not only had it been designed to withstand the impact of a nuclear blast, but also its hinges had been undisturbed for two hundred years; to move such a thing now was like trying to lift a mountain.

Ezili Coeur Noir observed with but the mildest of interest, barely watching as her favored subjects worked at the door, throwing themselves at it, ripping at the seals with the broken nails of their decaying hands, tugging away the concrete debris that had amassed there. The corpses felt no pain and could never tire, for they were at the peak of tiredness, the tiredness that comes only with the grave. And so they simply followed the instructions of their mistress without question, working at the door with all their effort until at last something moved. There had been a magnetic seal in place here, operated by an electronic lock, but even a magnet can be conquered, given enough force, facing an opponent with relentless and tireless ambition, limitless reserves of strength.

It took half an hour, but finally the corpses stepped aside as the door glided back on its tracks, grinding slowly to the side to reveal the shadow-filled interior of a long-forgotten military base. Two of the corpses had lost limbs in their struggles with the door, and one his head, but the others had used the broken bodies as props and levers until the door finally gave. Now the broken corpses simply waited with the others, blessedly unaware of how their incompletion might make them inferior. Ezili Coeur Noir strode forward, the sunlight playing in the jutting spikes of yellowing bone that poked upright atop her head in a crest.

This close to the door, she could smell the stale air, which had been trapped within the redoubt since it had been sealed all those years before. Her stub of nose wrinkled for a moment in her decaying face, and her lips pulled back from sharp teeth as she was dealt the full force of that putrid air. Ezili Coeur Noir chuckled then, reveling in the stench of the absence of life. Here was a part of the Earth that had been hidden so long that it had been effectively taken from the living. Now it stood as a shrine to death, proof positive of life’s inability to truly conquer her planet.

As the stale air dissipated, the queen of death stepped into the shadow-drenched interior of the redoubt, her long toenails clacking against the hard concrete floor. Obediently, her little army followed, their loyalty to their mistress beyond reproach. They were recently dead things, and yet they still moved, for she had granted them life, after a fashion.

Despite being unoccupied for over two hundred years, the redoubt reacted to the movement within. The motion-sensitive strip lights flickered on along the floor and high in the ceiling, illuminating the vast, slope-walled corridor that Ezili Coeur Noir and her people now found themselves in. The light mattered little to the queen of death; she needed nothing but her inherent sense of all that kills and rots and dies to guide her way. Corpses to the left of her, corpses to the right, Ezili Coeur Noir strode down the redoubt corridor, lights flickering on with her every step, the footsteps of her posse echoing into the darkness ahead as the distant lights winked on. In such close proximity to the corpses, Ezili Coeur Noir could smell their rotting flesh as it clung to their bodies, insects burrowing among its rotten folds. The corpses reeked of death and the smell pleased her, its perfume a scent she would bathe in given time.

Wide enough to fit two automobiles, the tunnel sloped downward at as light incline for a long time, with no visible breaks, no doorways or recesses. From far at its dark end there came a low rumbling, as ancient generators groaned back into life and machinery began to whir. Here and there black wiring led down from the overhead lights or up from the floor, ending in a junction box set at the midpoint of the otherwise blank walls, each one cased in black plastic with a little door that worked on a simple spring-loaded hinge. Every thirty paces there was a small red box covered by a glass panel, the fire alarm system that had been installed centuries earlier.

Here, Ezili Coeur Noir knew, buried deep in the sub-levels of the forgotten redoubt, was a thing that could do her bidding on a colossal scale. She could sense it, in the way that she could somehow sense all things that brought decay, a flaming beacon in her mind, calling to her with siren song.

The blank-walled tunnel sloped for almost three hundred paces, and by the time the group had reached its end, the motion-sensitive lights behind them had begun switching off, leaving the area by the entry door in darkness once more. The walls were a bland gray, smoothed concrete and plaster left unpainted. Here and there, notations had been scratched on the walls, tiny markings in pencil, the initials of a soldier or a workman scrawled lightly into the plaster in a spot close to the curved ceiling beside one of the recessed strip lights.

At the end of the tunnel the group stopped at a set of steel double doors that were set horizontally like the jaws of an immense trapped animal. The grinding, whirring noise came from behind these closed doors, and Ezili Coeur Noir halted in front of them. In silence, her undead entourage waited obediently behind her.

Then, the horizontal double doors split, one shunting upward while the other retreated into the base of the floor, and a steel-walled box was revealed. Small halogen lights flickered on in the ceiling as the doors disappeared from view. It was an elevator, reinforced and large enough to hold a supply truck. The tunnel leading here had one purpose only, which was to take people to this elevator, and so the redoubt was designed to automatically call the elevator once the entry doors were opened.

With all the grace that the dead can muster, Ezili Coeur Noir stepped through the doors, and her undead companions shambled behind her, walking into the large boxlike construction of the elevator cage. Behind them, the elevator doors rumbled closed on tracks that hadn’t been used in two hundred years, and then the elevator began to descend into the core of the buried redoubt.

Standing in the shaking elevator, the sound of long-unused pulleys whining in her ears, Ezili Coeur Noir glanced around her, taking in the dead figures who had come to form her entourage. Ezili Coeur Noir had granted the dead life, but truly she wanted the reverse—to give the living the glorious gift of death.

Ezili Coeur Noir was the queen of all things rotten, all things dead, and in that lay her power. For all things must rot, and all things must die. And so they would, and so they shall.

Chapter 2

In another military redoubt, high in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, a warning light was blinking urgently on the computer monitor screen of Brewster Philboyd. In his midforties, Philboyd was an astrophysicist by discipline. His blond hair was swept back from a receding hairline. A lanky six feet tall, he looked faintly uncomfortable as he sat in the swivel chair, hunched in front of his monitor in the central operations room of the redoubt with its twin aisles of computer terminals, its walls dedicated to the monitoring equipment that defined the hidden base’s function.

Behind Philboyd, a vast Mercator map dominated the wall above the doors into the operations room, showing every continent of the world, each one connected by dozens of different colored lines like the old flight plan maps that had existed before the nuclear holocaust had all but destroyed civilization. The map was just one part of a monitoring system that was dedicated to the upkeep of the mat-trans project, a transportation system developed in the late twentieth century by the U.S. military. The mat-trans units scattered around the globe could be used to move goods and personnel from location to location in the blink of an eye.

Like the map and the monitoring equipment in the control room, Brewster Philboyd was a relic from the twentieth century. He, along with a number of other military personnel, had been cryogenically frozen and placed in hiding on the Manitius Moon Base just prior to the outbreak of nuclear hostilities between the USA and the old USSR. Like many of other people who manned the redoubt now known as Cerberus, Brewster had been awoken two hundred years later into a new and dangerous world, where a once proud civilization had been replaced by the veiled manipulation of humanity by a poisonous alien race called the Annunaki. In recent years, Cerberus had set itself against this alien threat in a series of dangerous skirmishes, though the odds of actually defeating such a technologically superior enemy seemed astronomical.

Philboyd leaned forward slightly in his seat, adjusting the black-rimmed glasses he wore above his acne-scarred cheeks as he studied the warning pop-up that had appeared on his monitor. Philboyd’s fingers played briefly across his keyboard as he brought up the details of the alert, scrolling through the data swiftly as he scanned the information it imparted. It appeared that there was life—or movement at least—in a long-abandoned redoubt out in Louisiana. According to the scrolling information on his screen, the old military base was designated as Redoubt Mike, adhering to the ancient military protocol of naming redoubts after a phonetic letter of the alphabet.

Turning in his chair, Brewster attracted the attention of his superior, a man called Mohandas Lakesh Singh, who was busy at a terminal that sat at the back of the room, overlooking the operations center.

“Lakesh?” Brewster began. “Do you know anything about a redoubt out near White Lake, Louisiana?”

Lakesh’s blue eyes glazed over for a moment as he contemplated the question. He was a well-built man of medium height who appeared to be in his midfifties, with refined features and an aquiline nose. Known to his friends as Lakesh, Dr. Singh was in fact over 250 years old, and he had been with the Cerberus redoubt before the nuclear conflict that had ended the twenty-first century one cold January day. A cyberneticist and accomplished physicist, Lakesh had been involved with the mat-trans project from its earliest days, and it was with some sense of irony that he found himself in the same monitoring room several centuries later.

“Redoubt Mike,” Lakesh mused, his eyes coming back into focus. “I have visited it several times.” When Brewster looked at him curiously, Lakesh inclined his head with self-deprecation, and added noncommittally, “In my youth. Why do you ask about it, Brewster?”

Philboyd gestured to his flickering terminal screen. “According to this, Mike has a visitor. Maybe an intruder.”

“That’s quite impossible,” Lakesh protested, rising from his seat. “That redoubt was sealed in the 1990s. Sealed and buried.”

“Buried?” Brewster intoned.

“Redoubt Mike was a staging area for one of the earliest mat-trans units,” Lakesh explained, “a prototype via which some of our initial exploration was done. Mike’s mat-trans acted primarily as a sending unit, rather than a receiver, but this was in the early days of the project when the colossal amount of power required to operate a chamber was still being investigated. Mike’s mat-trans operated using a cold-fusion generator—a nuclear system that was ultimately considered too problematic for the strains placed upon it.”

“Problematic, how?” Philboyd queried.

“Mike’s was a working prototype in operation while the whole process was still at its teething stage,” Lakesh explained. “Ultimately, the idea of powering the units by cold fusion was judged too dangerous to continue to use, and so other avenues were pursued. Of course, several early systems were being tested at this stage. It was a prestige military project, and as is often the way in such cases, money was in place to ensure it would work.”

Philboyd nodded in understanding. “But you said it was buried?” he asked.

“Redoubt Mike was abandoned once the cold-fusion system was deemed unsuitable,” Lakesh explained. “The base itself was primarily belowground, with only the entry at ground level. They concreted over those doors and left it to the mercies of the swamps. Which means no one should be inside.”

Brewster glanced back at his monitor screen where the warning pop-up continue to blink. “Well-lll,” he began, stretching the single syllable, “either we have a glitch in our monitoring system or a caller has come a-knock-knocking for Mike.”

Casting aside the paperwork he had been looking at on his own desk, Lakesh strode across the room and joined Brewster at his monitor, running through the alert data that had appeared there. As he read the details, the old cyberneticist’s expression darkened.

LOCATED HIGH IN THE Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, the Cerberus redoubt was an ancient military facility that had remained largely forgotten or ignored since the nukecaust. The isolation was only reinforced by the curious mythology associated with the mountains, their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually un-populated; the nearest settlement was found in the flatlands some miles away and consisted of a small band of Native Americans, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

Hidden beneath camouflage netting, tucked away within the rocky clefts of the mountains, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for the Cerberus team within the redoubt. Gaining access to those satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists on hand at the base, but their efforts now gave Lakesh’s team a near limitless stream of feed data from around the planet, as well as providing global communications links.

Hidden away as it was, the redoubt required few active measures to discourage visitors. It was exceedingly rare for strangers to approach the main entry, a rollback door located on a plateau high on the mountain. Instead, most people accessed the redoubt via the mat-trans chamber housed within the redoubt itself.

Employing a quantum window, the mat-trans exploited the hyperdimensional quantum stream, transmitting digital information along hyperdimensional pathways. Though eminently adaptable, the system was limited by the number and location of the mat-trans units, much as a train is restricted by its tracks and the location of its stations.

More recently, the Cerberus personnel had refined an interphaser unit, which functioned along similar principles but relied on naturally occuring parallax points, intersecting lines of intense energy. Requiring no external power source, these parallax points existed across the Earth—and beyond—and could be exploited by use of a portable device called an interphaser, which could be carried by just one person using an attaché-style case. Although not limitless, the interphaser had the distinct advantage of portability and a wider array of receiver locations.

Having read the data on Brewster’s screen, Lakesh stumbled back into the empty chair behind him, almost falling as he sat. Several of the other personnel on shift in the command center turned at the noise, expressing concern for their operational leader.

“Is everything okay?” Brewster asked, although he feared that he already knew the answer.

“This is very bad,” Lakesh said, his voice little more than a whisper. “Once the decision had been taken to decommission Mike, the redoubt was used as a storage facility for other projects of dubious worth. Which is to say, it became a dumping ground, since the impending secure closure of the site meant that whatever was left there could not be accessed ever again.”

“What sorts of things?” Brewster asked.

Lakesh shook his head, feeling weary as the enormity of the breach in redoubt security struck him. “The sort of things the military always involves itself in—weapons, the means of destruction.

“Sooner or later, all our sins come back to haunt us, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh pronounced, standing once more. “I think we had better assemble a team and investigate this intrusion at our earliest opportunity.”

ON ANOTHER LEVEL of the hidden mountain base, Kane stood in front of a punching bag hanging on a rigid spring from the ceiling of the communal gymnasium. Kane gritted his teeth as he attacked the hanging bag with a series of swift, bare-knuckled blows: first right, then left, then right again.

Kane was a powerfully built man, with no-nonsense blue-gray eyes and dark hair cropped short to his collar. Dressed in a black T-shirt and loose slacks, Kane was an outstanding example of physical fitness. His wide shoulders and muscular arms powered his punches with incredible force, smashing the punching bag back on its spring so hard that it rattled in its metal housing. It had been observed that Kane was built like a wolf, sleek and muscular with exceptional power concentrated in his upper torso. He seemed to have the temperament of a wolf, too, for he was both pack leader and a natural loner, depending on the situation.

An ex-Magistrate, enforcer of the laws of the walled villes that dominated the U.S. landscape of the twenty-third century, Kane was a trained fighter, with a razor-keen mind and exceptional combat prowess. What distinguished Kane among his contemporaries, however, was something he referred to as his point man sense, an uncanny awareness of his surroundings that verged on the supernatural. In actuality, there was nothing unearthly about Kane’s ability—it was simply the disciplined application of the same five senses possessed by any other human being.

As Kane worked at the punching bag, each mighty uppercut, jab and cross forcing the leather teardrop to shake in its mountings, he became aware of another person entering the otherwise empty gymnasium. Kane’s blue-gray eyes flicked across the room as he looked over his shoulder, his fists still working at the high punching bag. The newcomer was a woman, her body sheathed in a skin-tight white jumpsuit that accentuated her trim curves and athlete’s body. A cascade of curling red locks flowed past her shoulders to the midpoint of her back.

Brigid Baptiste and Kane shared a long history. Where Kane was a man of action, Brigid’s background was as an archivist. Which wasn’t to say that Brigid could not hold her own in a fight—far from it, as she could handle herself with fists or guns, and she had proved to be a hellcat when riled. However, Brigid Baptiste had one trait that had proved immeasurably useful in the adventures she had shared with Kane: a mental talent known as an eidetic, or photographic, memory, which allowed her to visually remember in precise detail everything she had ever seen.

For almost half a minute Kane continued to beat at the punching bag, working rhythmically in a tarantella of swift punches as beads of sweat glistened on his skin. As he drilled his final right cross against the leather bag, Brigid Baptiste stopped in front of him, eyebrows raised in an inquisitive expression that betrayed her mocking humor.

“Feeling a little frustrated today?” she asked as Kane stepped back on the balls of his feet, leaving the punching bag swinging to and fro from its mounting between them.

Kane looked at her and smiled. “Aw, it had it coming,” he said, indicating the swaying bag as it slowly returned to a static position, waiting for its next opponent.

Brigid looked at the punching bag and laughed, creases of delight appearing momentarily around her emerald eyes as she did so. “What, did it outsmart you at chess?” she asked. “Again?”

Brushing a hand through his sweat-damp hair, Kane reached for the hand towel that he had left on a nearby bench. “What can I do for you, Baptiste?” he asked, ignoring her friendly taunt.

“Lakesh is asking us to meet in the ops room,” Brigid explained as she watched Kane wiping the sweat from his powerful arms. “I don’t know the details yet, but it seems there’s trouble out there in paradise and he wants us ready to ship out in the next hour.”

Kane tapped at the side of his head, indicating the subdermal Commtact unit that was hidden there beneath the skin. “Guess I didn’t hear the call,” he explained.

Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the military artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, a deaf person would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact. The Commtacts had other properties, too, including acting as intelligent, real-time translators on the condition that a sufficient sample of a language had been programmed into them to decipher a dialect.

“You didn’t miss anything,” Brigid assured Kane. “I told him I’d come find you.”

Kane fixed Brigid with his most mischievous look as he slung the towel over one shoulder. “You just can’t keep away, can you?”

In reply, Brigid leaped from a standing start, high into the air, and kicked the punching bag that hung between them, making it rebound so hard that it almost clipped Kane in his smugly smiling face.

“You wish,” she told him as she landed in a graceful crouch.

Despite their outward antagonism, Kane and Brigid had the utmost respect for one another and they shared a very special bond. That bond was known as anam-charas, or soul friends, and it referred to a connection that transcended history itself. No matter what form the two found themselves in, no matter the nature of their reincarnations throughout eternity, the pair would remain unequivocally linked, tied together by some invisible umbilical cord that meant they would always be there for each other. Some had interpreted this link to mean that they were lovers, but the anam-chara bond was something more than that—the friendship and love of siblings or respectful contemporaries, with Brigid the yin to Kane’s yang.

While Kane and Brigid had been partners for a long time, there was a third integral member of their group, as well. Grant was also an ex-magistrate and had been Kane’s original partner in his Magistrate days. Grant was as much Kane’s brother as any blood relative. Together, the three of them formed an exceptional exploration group who seemed able to handle themselves in any given situation. Which was fortunate, as the situations they encountered while working for Cerberus had ranged from the improbable to the outright impossible.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Kane strolled into the operations room dressed in a clean shadow suit, his hair still damp from the shower he had taken on leaving the gym.

As Kane walked through the doors beneath the Mercator map with its multicolored lines of light, Lakesh stepped forward to greet him. “I am glad you could make it so quickly, Kane,” he said briefly.

As with Brigid Baptiste, Kane had known Lakesh for a long time and he recognized when the formidable scientist sounded worried. Behind Lakesh, Brigid and Grant waited along with several other personnel who were prepping the mat-trans for use. The mat-trans chamber was located in an antechamber at the far corner of the large room, well away from the entry doors. The unit itself was situated within a small, eight-foot-high cubicle surrounded by armaglass walls tinted a brown hue. The door to the unit operated using a numeric key code, and the use of the unit was monitored by a computer terminal located just to the side of its entry door. Right now, Lakesh’s deputy, the copper-haired Donald Bry, sat at the mat-trans terminal, a look of deep concern on his features. Normally, Kane would not take Bry’s expression as a reliable indicator of the situation. The man was a compulsive worrier and Kane struggled to recall an instance when his brow wasn’t furrowed beneath his untamed mop of copper curls. However, the atmosphere in the room was such that Kane knew immediately that he had entered a serious situation.

“Well, I aim to please,” Kane replied as Cerberus weaponsmith Henny Johnson rushed over to arm the ex-Mag for the field. “What’s going on?”

Briefly, Lakesh outlined the situation regarding the intrusion alert at Redoubt Mike and how the Louisiana redoubt potentially contained any number of decommissioned weapons along with its outdated mat-trans unit.

“This may be a simple glitch in our system, or in Mike’s,” Lakesh concluded, “but there’s an adage that I think applies here—it is better to be safe than sorry.”

“I quite agree,” Kane said as he strapped a familiar wrist holster to his right arm and checked that the Sin Eater pistol that Henny handed him was fully loaded.

Henny glared at Kane as he checked the pistol, as if offended that he would, for even a moment, believe she might send him out into the field with equipment that wasn’t fully prepared. She was a small woman, five foot five with blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended just below her ears.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as Kane placed the compact pistol snugly in its wrist holster and shrugged the sleeve of his black denim jacket over it to conceal it. “Don’t trust me anymore, cowpoke?”

Kane glanced up at the armorer. “I trust you, Johnson,” he said, “but I’d also expect you to double-check my work if your life was about to depend on it.”

“Thanks… I think,” Henny said as she passed Kane a handful of spare ammo cartridges and flash-bang globes for use in the field.

“Well, then.” Grant’s voice rumbled from where he sat, perched on the edge of one of the computer desks. “Let’s get this show on the road.” Grant was a huge man, well over six feet in height and broad like an oak door. A little older than Kane, he was a solid wall of muscle, with skin like polished ebony and a gunslinger’s mustache curling down from his top lip. Grant wore his hair cropped so close to his skull that he seemed almost bald, and he had placed a dark woollen cap over his head now, pulled low so that it met with his thick eyebrows, enhancing his permanent scowl.

Like Kane, Grant had dressed in one of the remarkable shadow suits beneath his long, Kevlar-weave black coat. Though they appeared to be made of the thinnest of material, the tight-fitting one-piece shadow suits acted as artificially controlled environments that regulated a wearer’s body temperature and offered protection from a variety of environmental contaminants. Additionally, their weave was superstrong, creating an armored shell that could deflect knife attacks and even small-arms fire within reason. While not impregnable, the shadow suits gave a Cerberus agent a distinct advantage when out in the field.

Standing across from Grant, Brigid Baptiste had donned her own shadow suit, its sleek black lines clinging to her trim body beneath a suede jacket with a tasselled back. Where Grant’s choice of weaponry was hidden amid the folds of his heavy coat, Brigid wore her own blaster—a TP-9 automatic—prominently in a low-slung hip holster, its grip pointing upward and ready for quick access.

Kane peered around the room for a moment, his eyes searching before he turned back to his partners where they waited at the desks. “Was I meant to bring the interphaser?” he asked.

“No interphaser this time, buddy,” Grant advised in his deep voice.

Lakesh gestured to the doorway in the far corner of the room. “Ah, yes, you weren’t here when I explained this, old friend,” he told Kane. “We’ve used our remote access to power the receiver unit at Redoubt Mike,” he stated briefly.

Kane felt a familiar sinking feeling in his stomach. “Oh, no,” he groaned.

Brigid smiled brightly as she looked over her shoulder, encouraging Kane to follow her toward the armaglass cubicle that dominated a corner of the operations room. “Oh, yes. We’re going via mat-trans for this one,” she told him. “Old school.”

“Oh, great,” Kane muttered sarcastically as he followed his two companions through the doorway into the ancient mat-trans unit. “If there’s one thing I miss, it’s doing things the really shitty way.”

“We’ll briefly activate the outdated system by remote,” Lakesh told Kane as he peered through the open doorway. “It’s risky, but every second counts, so the closer we can get you to the site of infraction, the better.”

“Right blindly into the thick of it, huh?” Kane said, shaking his head. “Yeah, that plan can’t go wrong.”

“For our security, the mat-trans will power down immediately after you’ve materialized at Redoubt Mike,” Lakesh said to assure him. “Which means you’ll need to comm us when you’re ready to return.”

Kane nodded irritably. “Got it.”

Kane closed the door, locking the three companions in the ancient mat-trans chamber and enabling the jump sequence. Donald Bry’s fingers worked the computer keyboard and the trio were reduced to their component atoms, digitized and sent across the quantum ether to the receiver unit in far-off Louisiana.

At least it’s quick, Kane reasoned as his substance ceased to exist.

Chapter 3

Traveling via mat-trans was a little like waking in the middle of the night to the awful realization that you had contracted food poisoning. A moment earlier, one’s life was a restful dream, then suddenly it had turned into a bewildering nightmare, colored only by one’s need to vomit.

Almost doubled over, Kane took deep breaths as he stood in the mat-trans chamber that he and his companions had materialized in an instant before. His heart was pounding, his stomach was doing some crazy kind of acrobatics and he could taste bile at the back of his throat. For a moment he stood hunched over, staring at the white-tiled floor as he tried to bring himself back to a state of calm.

The tiled floor at Kane’s feet was familiar, exactly the same as the one that the companions had left in Montana just an instant earlier, dusty white tiles glinting beneath harsh overhead lighting. White mist floated in the air like fog, slowly dissipating as extractor fans began their designated task of clearing the glass-walled chamber.

While mat-trans travel was possible for humans, it had not initially been designed with people in mind. Rather, it was intended for the movement of matériel, and its application to transporting the human form could be traumatic. Despite the churning of his stomach, Kane was fairly used to this ghastly system of travel, and had made his peace with it years before. Grant, by contrast, had never liked traveling via mat-trans, and he endured it with a determined mixture of bitterness and hostility, even after all these years with Cerberus.

“Everyone arrive in one piece?” Kane asked, straightening to check on his two companions.

They stood behind him, one over each shoulder in the manner of a fighter pilot’s wingmen. Brigid Baptiste had her hand to her mouth and was biting down on her knuckle, her skin visibly paler than even its usual near-alabaster hue.

Realizing that Kane was looking at her for an answer, Brigid nodded, still biting down on her knuckle.

Across from the red-haired former archivist, Grant had his teeth gritted and his eyes screwed up tight, and his breathing was coming in ragged bursts.

“Grant?” Kane urged, reaching for his other companion.

“Present,” Grant muttered, his eyes still closed.

Kane felt his own stomach lurch then, and he gagged for a moment, holding down its contents with considerable effort. “You okay?” he asked once he had got himself back under control.

Grant opened his eyes, the dark orbs looking bloodshot, focused on some far distant point. “That was…that was really something,” he said through gasping breaths.

“Lakesh said this was a prototype unit,” Brigid reminded them both. She had removed her hand from her mouth now, but she still seemed unsteady on her feet as she staggered forward, the chunky heels of her cowboy boots clacking loudly against the white tiles. “I guess they didn’t iron out all the kinks on this one.”

“Guess not,” Kane agreed as he recovered himself.

The pale transportation gas had almost disappeared now, the extractor fans whirring loudly above the companions’ heads, and Kane turned to face the door. The door was offset from center in a bank of tinted armaglass, its panes colored a golden yellow. When traveling via mat-trans, the differently colored armaglass was one rudimentary way to recognize that a person had actually been shunted to a new location. In the direct manner of the military mind, each location had differently colored glass, a coded sequence that identified each mat-trans and its location. Presumably, when the system was still in its earliest days and the number of units was small, one might say, “I’m going to gold,” which meant the individual was traveling to Redoubt Mike in Louisiana. As a general rule, what a military force seemed to lack in subtlety it more than made up for in effectiveness. The speed and ease of identification could often be crucial in such situations, where goods and personnel were effectively being shoved through the unknown.

Still a little woozy, Kane stilled his mind and went into the near trancelike state that put him on high alert, powering his Sin Eater pistol into his hand with a flinch of his wrist tendons as he stepped over to the sealed door. The Sin Eater was the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, and both Kane and Grant had kept them when they had fled from the barony of Cobaltville that they had been tasked to protect years before. The Sin Eater was an automatic handblaster, less than fourteen inches in length at full extension, firing 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist, in Kane’s case one tucked beneath the unbuttoned sleeve of his darkly colored denim jacket. The holsters reacted to a specific flinch movement of the wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into the user’s hand where, if the index finger was crooked at the time, the pistol would begin firing automatically. The trigger had no guard; the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety feature for the weapon would ever be required, for a Magistrate’s judgment was considered infallible.

Kane and Grant were schooled in the use of numerous different weapon types, from combat blades to Dragon missile launchers, but both of them still felt especially comfortable with the Sin Eater in hand. It was an old and trusted companion, a natural weight to their movements, like wearing a wristwatch.

Kane worked the electronic lock, ordering the others to stay alert as the door slid open. Grant still looked decidedly uncomfortable, but Kane knew that they didn’t have the luxury to wait around if there were intruders on site. “You ready?” Kane asked his old Magistrate partner.

Slowly, Grant nodded, ordering his own Sin Eater blaster into his hand with a well-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons. “Yeah, let’s go crash this party.”

Beside Grant, Brigid Baptiste unfastened her own pistol from its position at her hip, the bulky block of the TP-9 looking large in her delicate, feminine hands. Unlike the two ex-Magistrates, Brigid had not grown up being schooled in the application of weaponry. However, she had learned swiftly as an adult, her eidetic memory allowing her to perfect the techniques of combat far quicker than an average person. Her TP-9 was a compact semiautomatic, a large hand pistol with the grip set just off center beneath the barrel and a covered targeting scope across the top, all finished in molded matte black. With its grip so close to the center, it looked a little like a square block, the bottom edge of that square completed by the holder’s forearm. Weapon now in hand, Brigid nodded her own silent agreement.

Kane stepped into a large, ill-lit room that lay beyond the mat-trans chamber, his companions close behind. As Kane entered the main area of the room, a handful of fluorescent tubes flickered on from hidden recesses in the high ceiling. The lights were widely spaced, lighting the room while still leaving it in a gloomy sort of half light.

Leading the way in a semicrouch, Kane took two swift paces to the right and dropped to the floor, scanning the room with his eyes, his gun held out in front of him in a steadying, two-handed grip. Behind Kane, Brigid had peeled off to the left, her head ducked down as she swept the room with her own weapon, searching for any targets. At the back of the group, Grant paused just inside the open doorway to the mat-trans chamber, his own Sin Eater held at shoulder height, ready to back up Kane or Brigid and blast any hostile intruders they might flush out.

The room appeared empty, and after a moment Kane eased himself up from his crouch, never loosening his two-handed grip on the Sin Eater. The room was roughly square in shape, and Kane estimated it to be perhaps forty feet from wall to wall. Beneath the insubstantial illumination, Kane saw a long aisle of monitoring equipment facing the mat-trans cubicle. The aisle was split into two, a gap wide enough for a person to walk through at its center. Still alert, Kane stepped through the gap and peered at the dead equipment there. The aisle was made up of various computers and sensor arrays, including several rather old-fashioned banks of needles and dials alongside the digital monitors. Although the equipment had been shut down long ago, the low lighting would have been ideal for its users, Kane realized, as the majority of these monitors and sensor displays would have been backlit. In fact, other than a visible layer of dust, it looked as if they had been turned off just minutes before. It was kind of eerie, Kane thought, like walking through a graveyard at night.

The rest of the room contained one single desk set back from the others. Six old dial telephones sat to one side, their wires trailing down into a circular port at the edge of the desk, along with what appeared to be twin computer terminals. Kane peered closely at them for a moment, and he realized that one was in fact some kind of television monitor, most likely used for security purposes back when the base was live. Now, both screens were blank, powered down two centuries earlier.

To the rear of the large room were six tall banks of monitoring and recording equipment. Each of them towered above Kane to perhaps eight feet, their size and shape reminiscent of the cold-drinks machines common in hotel lobbies and schoolyards in the final years of the twentieth century. Kane glanced over them briefly, acknowledging the rows of long-unused lights and the ancient, rotten magnetic spools of tape that had presumably been used to store recordings of the mat-trans unit in operation. The banks of recording equipment ended off to the far right, where Kane spotted an open doorway that led from the room into darkness beyond.

Over to the far left corner of the vast, windowless room, Brigid found the majestic unit that powered the mat-trans. The unit ran floor to ceiling, with rounded sides stretching wider than her arm span; it reminded Brigid a little of an old-fashioned pillbox sentry post. Thick pipes emerged from the sides and top of the unit, and a dust-caked monitoring display glowed at roughly head height. Presumably, this display was a failsafe backup as the main monitoring would be conducted via the powerful computers in this underground control room. A sealed steel door stood in the center of the cylinder, with rounded corners and a raised lip that reminded Brigid of the doors one would see inside a submarine.

Tentatively, the titian-haired woman placed her hand against the metal sides of the unit, but even though it had just been activated, no vibration could be detected. Within that towering steel cylinder, the cold-fusion process for creating nuclear energy was in operation, Brigid knew, a product of the Manhattan Project research of the 1940s.

After a moment Brigid stepped back, eyeing the manner in which the piping connected to the mat-trans chamber. Since the nukecaust, anything involving nuclear energy set off alarm bells as being dangerous or risky, and yet here was an artifact that predated that paranoia, from when nuclear power was still being explored as a viable source of energy. In many ways, this generator was as much a relic from another society as anything the Cerberus team had encountered in ancient civilizations like the Mayan and the Sumerian.

With his gun held high, Kane used the weapon to gesture toward the open doorway. “We’re all clear here,” he said. “Let’s move out.”

Following Kane from her position at the far wall, Brigid slowed for just a moment to examine the neat, unmarred desks that ran across the axis of the room. It was both curious and intriguing, seeing all this monitoring equipment for the mat-trans, reminding her that there was a point not so very long ago where the whole concept had been nothing more than a theory to be explored by brave physicists.

“Come on, Brigid,” Grant urged as he sidled up beside her. “No point keeping the man waiting.”

Brigid nodded and trotted off to where Kane waited at the open doorway leading into shadow. Grant followed, seemingly more himself now, the wave of nausea from the hard trip having mercifully passed.

Kane crept out into the corridor beyond the open doorway, noticing that a heavy rollback door there had jammed halfway out of its wall recess. Presumably, the door should lock while the prototype mat-trans unit was fired, but Kane could see that the door was now caught where the cracked walls had moved just enough to lock it in place. Time, he realized, eventually wore down everything, not just animals and plants. Kane continued, entering the corridor with Brigid a few paces behind him and Grant warily bringing up the rear.

As they entered the corridor, lights began to flicker on in recessed alcoves above, motion sensors detecting their movement. The corridor was typically bland, its walls finished in a two-tone design, primarily an off-white that had turned gray over time, while the bottom third was shaded with a thick red stripe. The stripe was some kind of section identifier, Kane theorized, perhaps relating to the mat-trans-testing facility. The corridor was empty, stretching off toward the doors of an elevator, their metal gleaming as the motion-sensitive lights at the end of the corridor flickered on in bursts of brilliance.

The corridor smelled faintly of burning, where ancient, long-settled dust was being heated by overhead lights that had presumably not been switched on in over two centuries. Kane glanced up, wondering if something might actually catch alight up there, but he could see nothing smoldering and so dismissed the thought. He walked slowly forward, the Sin Eater raised in his steady grip, checking for signs of movement or for any other indication of life. The corridor was silent, the only noise coming in the brief tinkling sounds of the fluorescent tube lights winking on as Kane approached them.

There were several doors leading off from the corridor, each one pulled closed. Kane tried a few of them, as did Brigid along the opposite wall of the corridor, and they found the majority of them unlocked and leading into what appeared to be storage rooms. The rooms stank of vinegar and were stacked full of boxes, their ancient cardboard tattered and torn. A few of the stacked boxes had toppled, spilling their contents of paper files and tape recordings over the floor. Ignoring them, Kane moved on, Brigid and Grant following.

Certain that no one was hiding in the straight corridor or the storerooms that branched from it, Kane stopped in front of the elevator doors and eyed the call button thoughtfully. The silver button glowed invitingly with a circle of faint orange around its rim. Kane knew that if anyone was in the redoubt—something that was by no means certain—using the elevator was a sure way to alert them to his team’s presence.

Brigid and Grant caught up to Kane as he waited, and Grant voiced what his ex-Mag partner was thinking. “Stairs?”

Kane nodded. “I think so,” he said, leading the team toward a recess at the side of the corridor wall that ended with a heavy fire door.

“Looked like we were the first to use the mat-trans in a long time,” Brigid said quietly, “but Brewster said they couldn’t be sure where the intrusion had come from.”

“Could be topside, then,” Grant muttered.

Sin Eater ready, Kane pushed his free hand against the fire door, hoping he wasn’t about to trip some unseen alarm.

With Brigid right behind him, Kane pushed open the door and waited for a moment until he was reasonably certain no one was standing in the stairwell in front of him. Dim lights placed at every third popped on. It was enough to make them clear, but hardly dazzling. In the day-to-day running of this redoubt, the staircase would have been for emergency use only, so there had been no need to keep it permanently or brightly lit. The moving of the door must have tripped the switch for the floor lights, but no noise accompanied this. Could be a silent alarm, of course, Kane realized distrustfully before tamping down the paranoia he felt.

At the rear of the group, Grant had adopted a ready crouch, scanning the corridor they had just traipsed down, just in case any sudden surprises materialized. Grant had never been comfortable leaving an operational mat-trans at his back; it meant that potentially anyone could sneak right up behind you, even from a previously empty room.

“Stairs are clear,” Kane stated shortly before he stepped through the doorway and disappeared into the empty stairwell. They appeared to be at the bottom level of the redoubt, the hard concrete steps echoing Kane’s every movement. Swiftly, Kane climbed the stairs, taking them two at a time, his Sin Eater pistol nosing ahead of him.

Brigid followed, entering the stairwell immediately in Kane’s wake, but holding back at the lowest step so as to keep Kane covered while he hurried up to the first landing, the midpoint between floors where the staircase abruptly turned on itself. Brigid watched as Kane whipped the Sin Eater around and surveyed the next set of stairs before making his way up to the next floor. After three seconds Brigid followed Kane up the stairs, the hollow heels of her cowboy boots clip-clopping loudly in the stillness of the vertical shaft.

Grant waited patiently at the bottom of the stairs, standing so that his back wedged the door open and he could peer out to the corridor that led to the mat-trans. The echoes of his companions’ footsteps came back to him, and once he judged that they had both reached the next floor he slipped back from the door, letting it slowly close before he hurried up the stairs.

One flight above, Kane stood in front of another fire door, peering through a vertical rectangle of reinforced glass, approximately twelve inches by two. There was nothing but darkness beyond, and he realized with irritation that, without something out there, the motion-sensitive lights of the ancient redoubt would remain off. He held his empty hand up in a halting gesture so that Brigid could see. “Stay here, keep me covered,” he said in a low voice.

Then Kane pulled the heavy door toward him and dashed out into the corridor beyond, the solid black muzzle of his Sin Eater poised and leading the way. Brigid stepped forward, wedging the door open with her foot as she watched Kane jog down the corridor, the overhead lights sparking into life. Like the one below, this corridor was painted a dull off-white. A horizontal bar of green ran in a continuous line along the bottom third of each wall.

With the overhead lights sputtering to life ahead of him, Kane swiftly and meticulously checked each door leading off from the gray-green corridor, trying the handles, peering inside those that were unlocked, and then moving on. Brigid held her TP-9 semiautomatic out and ready, tracking Kane’s movements, her steadying left hand gripped just beneath the wrist of her outstretched right.

Kane felt instinctively that this whole level was empty, and he made short work of checking as much of the area as he could. It appeared to be primarily a storage level, with several offices and a quartet of bunk rooms at the far end close to the restrooms. Other than dust and a half-full box of now-perished canned food, the level was inoffensive in its emptiness. Had anyone been here, Kane concluded, the lights would have been on already—the only real risk was when he came to the bunk rooms, whose lights worked on a manual switch. As such, they may just contain someone lurking in the darkness.

Warily, Kane entered the first of the bunk rooms, ducking low as he stepped inside, conscious of the lit doorway at his back that would illuminate him as an ideal target for anyone hiding in the shadows. Crouching in the darkness, Kane stilled his breathing, listening for any sounds of movement, any indication of another presence within the room. There was nothing, he felt sure, and he edged his left hand along the wall behind him until he found the light switch, flicking it on.

Illuminated, the room was empty. It contained three Army cots, one each to his left and right and a third over against the wall farthest from the door. There was a footlocker at the end of each bed; two of them were closed, their lids scarred and chipped. The third lay open, and Kane peered briefly at its contents—several garishly colored comic books, a dark pair of socks with a toe missing and a well-thumbed paperback with a man’s booted feet on its bright red cover. The open lid to the footlocker had attracted a layer of dust, through which a two-inch yellow circle peeked like the sun. Kane leaned down, wiping his finger through the dust until he could see the circle in full; it was a sticker bearing the legend “I heart Atlanta”. Kane wondered idly if the owner would still “heart” Atlanta half as much if they saw what the nuclear devastation had wrought there shortly after this redoubt had been sealed.

Kane turned, leaving the room as he had found it and made his way farther along the corridor to check the other rooms. There were three other bunk rooms, and each contained two or three Army cots along with occasional belongings that had been left behind when the redoubt had been closed, nothing but forgotten antiques now.

Head down, Kane took long, swift strides back to the stairwell where Brigid and Grant waited. Brigid had her gun trained on the corridor as Kane approached. Behind her, Grant appeared tense as he surveyed the stairwell, up and down.

“Level’s clear,” Kane explained, keeping his voice low. “Guessing no one’s interfered with this junk in two centuries. Whatever Cerberus was reading, it may just be a wild mutie chase.”

“Might be,” Grant agreed, sounding less than convinced. “Want me to take the next one?”

“I’ve got it,” Kane assured him, taking the lead once more as he trotted up the concrete stairs.

As he turned the right-angle in the stairwell heading up, Kane saw a sliver of light eking through the rectangular glass of the fire door that faced him. Kane slowed as he climbed the stairs, checking the higher levels with a swift glance before focusing on the illuminated rectangle of light. “Could be company,” he stated, his voice little more than a whisper.

At the tail of the group, Grant peered back over his shoulder, making sure no one was following them from below, while Brigid pushed herself close to the outside wall as she slowly followed Kane.

At the penultimate stair, Kane ducked, keeping his head lower than the bottom of the glass panel, pressing his knee against the step in front of him. Kane stared, trying to make out what was going on on the other side of the tiny window as its light played against the wall. He could see the familiar off-white paint of another corridor and the edge of one of the overhead strip lights showed, glowing firmly in its ceiling mounting. Kane waited, doing a slow count to ten in his head—now was not the time to rush in where angels feared to tread. As he waited, a shadow crossed the rectangle of glass, and Kane instinctively crouched lower, the barrel of the Sin Eater held at eye level, pointing upward to where the door would open. Nothing happened.

Warily, his breathing coming slow and steady despite the tension he felt, Kane inched forward, his eyes still on the clear glass panel. Behind him, Brigid hugged the wall, the TP-9 semiautomatic poised on the closed door.

Still in a crouch, Kane sidled up to the door until his head was just below the edge of its small windowpane. For a moment he watched the square of light that was projected on the wall to his side, waiting to see if anything else crossed the gap, all the while listening intently for the sounds of movement. There was nothing; it was quiet as the grave.

Almost a minute passed with Kane just waiting there, searching for any further indications of movement. Then he peered back, his eyes glancing past Brigid and fixing on Grant’s. Grant recognized the question in the ex-Mag’s face, and he nodded, indicating he was ready.

Kane turned back to the fire door, standing to his full height and reaching for its cool metal handle. As he did so, the face of a man appeared at the window. Or, at least, the remains of a face—for the man appeared to be decomposing even as the empty sockets of his eyes fixed on Kane.

Chapter 4

With a sudden crash, the reinforced glass pane shattered inward as the eyeless thing’s decomposing hand smashed through it, reaching for Kane through the window in the fire door. Kane leaped backward, staggering down two steps in his haste and yet still just barely avoiding the lancelike fingertips as they clawed the air, grasping for his face.

“The hell is that?” Grant swore from his position on the lower level.

Kane raised his Sin Eater, targeting the door. “Whatever it is, it’s about to be a whole lot of dead,” he snarled.

The heavy fire door swung open as far as the safety hinge would let it, and the creature staggered into the stairwell. His tread was unsteady, more a series of lurches than a regular stride. As he approached, Kane barked an order at it, employing the authoritative voice he had used back in his Magistrate days.

“Restricted area, perpetrator—down on your knees.”

The eyeless corpse gave no indication of adhering to Kane’s instruction but merely took another shaky step forward, negotiating the first stair with a rumbling groan from deep in his throat.

It was clearly a man—tall, thin and wearing a dark suit of some sort. It was hard to tell more than that, however. The suit was moth-eaten and parts of it looked burned. As for the man’s flesh, that also looked moth-eaten, rotted meat clinging to jagged bones in some perverse mockery of life.

The walking corpse took a step closer to the Cerberus team. Smelling him for the first time, Brigid Baptiste began to gag. He stank of rotting, infected meat, and as she watched she saw something dark appear between the wasting muscles of his neck; a hairy caterpillar, its black body thick as a man’s thumb and longer than Brigid’s hand. Poised against the wall, the former archivist reared away, watching as the ghastly thing took another staggering step past her, reaching out toward Kane.

“On your knees,” Kane repeated, gesturing with the muzzle of the Sin Eater pistol in his hand. “You take one more step and I will shoot.” He didn’t have any authority here, that was true, but Kane was pretty damn sure that the dead thing that stumbled in front of him didn’t, either.

Behind the creature, the fire door had eased itself closed on its slow hinges, effectively shutting off the noise of movement here from the rest of the redoubt. The rotting thing took another lurching step toward the ex-Mag.

Kane gritted his teeth. “You’re about to end up a whole lot deader if you don’t back off,” he snarled.

Then, with a surge of incredible speed in the dim lighting of the tight stairwell, the corpse-thing lunged for Kane. More literally he fell at Kane, arms outstretched, using weight and gravity to propel himself at the ex-Mag.

Kane depressed the trigger stud of his Sin Eater and a stream of 9 mm slugs rammed into that cadaverous body even as he fell forward. The sounds of gunfire echoed throughout the stairwell as Kane was slammed backward by the falling corpse, and he felt his feet slip off the step, throwing his balance. Then Kane found himself crashing against the metal-barlike banister that ran around the inside turn of the stairwell, striking it with his lower back in a spasm of sharp pain.

Kane’s feet kicked out as he finally lost his balance, and suddenly he was toppling backward, the corpse still flailing at him as they both began to drop over the side of the stairs.

Moving on instinct alone, Brigid reached out and grabbed for the undead thing that was pushing Kane, seizing the creature’s legs as she watched Kane descend over the banister. Held in Brigid’s grip, the corpse-thing found himself dragged off his victim, and he turned to face her even as his head slammed into the metal banister with a resounding clang. In that instant, Brigid produced her TP-9 and drilled a cacophony of bullets into the thing’s decomposing face, reducing it to pulp. Chunks of rotted flesh sprayed the walls around her as bullets mashed into the remains of the thing’s hideous features.

At the same time, one floor below, Kane dropped head-first toward the next flight of stairs. Twisting frantically in midair, he stretched his arms out in front of him in an effort to break his fall. He landed badly—it was hard to do otherwise, landing as he did on the uneven incline of the stairs—taking the impact in his strong arms and rolling over onto his back with a grunt of pain.

“You okay?” Grant asked, peeking down the stairwell at his partner as Brigid continued struggling with the corpse on the floor above.

“Help Brigid,” Kane replied without hesitation.

Grant didn’t question the order—he knew that Kane only used Brigid Baptiste’s first name when he was really concerned for her. He figured that being knocked over a balcony by an animated corpse will do that to you.

Brigid, however, had matters well in hand. The corpselike figure staggered in place as she peppered his decomposing body with bullets, until he finally slouched against the banister and sunk to the floor in a heap, emaciated limbs flailing in all directions.

“I think it’s dead,” Grant said as he hurried up the stairs to join Brigid.

Brigid looked at him, one ginger eyebrow cocked in amusement. “I think it was dead before it met me,” she said.

Grant leaned down, getting a closer look at the messy, foul-smelling remains of the creature. Clearly human but visibly decomposing, he reeked of death. Using the barrel of his gun, Grant prodded the corpse a few times, but the dead thing didn’t react.

As Grant pushed at the unmoving corpse in the dim lighting of the stairwell, Kane trudged back up the stairs, a spatter of blood marring his forehead. “Did we get it?” he asked.

Grant nodded while Brigid checked Kane’s wound. It was just a graze; the thin line of blood made it look worse than it really was. Once she wiped that away, Brigid could see the scratch, and it had already dried.

“If Stinky here has buddies,” Kane noted, “that shattered window is going to draw their attention. But if we move quick, maybe we can get the jump on them.”

With that, the Cerberus trio headed for the fire door, leaving the remains of the dead man sprawled across the stairs. They didn’t notice him flinch, struggling to pull himself up from the floor after the heavy fire door had inched closed, his ruined face dripping away in gobs of muscle and dried-up skin.

AN ALIEN RACE called the Annunaki had first visited the Earth aeons ago and had been surreptitiously involved in human affairs ever since the emergence of humankind. To man, these beings from the stars, wielding technology far in advance of anything he could comprehend, had seemed divine, and so man had served and worshipped them without question.

But the Annunaki, alarmed at the proliferation of humans, initiated a wave of destruction to purge the Earth of humankind and start afresh. Recorded by various historical documents, that purging is perhaps best known as the Great Flood of Judeo-Christian tradition, and although it decimated the local population it failed to totally destroy it.

The Annunaki had spent the subsequent millennia observing from the shadows as man had grown bold, had proliferated at an alarming rate and learned how to tame his environment for his own ends. While the Annunaki had weaponry that had seemed magical in its capability, they had been fascinated to see how man developed his own terrible weaponry, things that could hurt and maim and kill.

Ultimately, the Annunaki had played their hand once more to begin the second great purging, utilizing fire this time where water had failed before. The brief nuclear war of 2001 had utterly changed the landscape of the planet Earth, creating vast tracts of irradiated land known as the Deathlands, and all but destroying the population. This was the world’s legacy that the Cerberus rebels inhabited.

But while the nuclear bombs had marked the end of civilization, they had not been the only means of destruction developed by man. In fact, in the centuries since the Annunaki had first tried to extinguish him, man had excelled in developing the means with which to kill his fellow man, and many and varied ways had been created that might be used to that terrible end.

Deep in the subterranean complex of Redoubt Mike, Ezili Coeur Noir had just uncovered one such terrible weapon. The queen of all things dead, Ezili Coeur Noir had an inherent ability, something like a homing instinct, that drew her to the things that would destroy life. She had sensed this thing down here, deep beneath the Louisiana bayou, and she found herself drawn to it. In her mind, it was like some almighty magnet drawing her down into the earth, down where the dead men lay.

MOVING STEALTHILY, Kane led the way into the corridor with Grant and Brigid just behind him. The undead thing that they had encountered had shaken them all up, and Kane felt unsettled as he trekked down the corridor.

The overhead lights flickered here, and though the motion sensors responded to the presence of the Cerberus rebels, several of the fluorescent tubes had blown. In places the lights flickered in staccato bursts, leaving the corridor in a sort of half-light of lightning flashes. Like the ones they had encountered on the lower levels of the redoubt, the corridor itself was painted off-white, with a boldly colored stripe lining the bottom third of the walls. This stripe was finished in a bright sky blue, and with the flickering illumination it gave Kane the eerie illusion of being below water.

There were no other corpse-things, but the corridor was littered with broken crates and boxes, with ancient paperwork strewed across the carpet tiles of the floor.

“Looks like they used this level as a dumping ground,” Grant muttered.

“Guess they wanted to get rid of this stuff,” Brigid pointed out, kicking at one of the stacks of paperwork with her toe. The topmost papers of the stack slid to the floor, and Brigid saw a bold red stamp marked Top Secret across several fluttering pages. “It’s just so much landfill now.”

Kane moved on, passing two open doorways to his left, both of them opening out into storerooms stacked with old furniture, chairs with broken backrests and wheels missing from their runners, computer desks stained with centuries’ old coffee.

This corridor proved much shorter than the ones he had explored on the preceding levels, and it ended in a solid wall on which hung a lone fire extinguisher painted a bright bloodred. Beneath the flickering light, the extinguisher seemed to flash like some fleshy cut in the wall, vying for Kane’s attention.

Off to the right, Kane saw a wide corridor set at a right angle to the one they were in. The corridor stood in darkness, and Kane peered into it trying to make out details. He could discern faint noises coming from its far end, distant shuffling sounds. With a swift hand gesture, Kane led the way silently down the corridor, his companions following at a wary distance, their guns ready.

The white-blue corridor ended in a sharp turn that opened directly into a large room the size of an aircraft hangar. The exit came so abruptly in the intermittent tube lighting that Kane very nearly stepped straight out into the open before he realized what he was doing. The sole of his boot scraped against the floor as he came up short and pulled back to the edge of the wall. He had managed just the briefest of glances ahead, but in that half second he had seen plenty, his regimented brain automatically taking in details from years of discipline.

It was a vast room, perhaps eighty feet square with scratched metal decking that glinted beneath harsh spotlights hanging on high catwalks. There were figures moving around the vast room—fleshy, shambling figures like the corpse-thing that his team had tangled with in the stairwell.

Grant and Brigid caught up with Kane and he gave them a look, indicating that someone was on the other side of the wall. Brigid lowered herself behind Kane until she knelt in a crouch by the near wall. Grant, meanwhile, silently eased himself across the wide corridor until his back was flush against the far wall, just out of sight of the opening but with the gap firmly in the sights of his poised Sin Eater.

Kane inched forward, bringing himself in low to peer once more around the edge of the whitewashed wall. He saw now that the room beyond was lit in patches, but it was enough that he could make out even the far corners, where stacks of crates towered haphazardly against gray-licked walls. Three aging Army vehicles were parked off to the left of the room. Two were jeeps, their tires long since perished or removed, one with its engine on blocks in front of its open hood, and the third was a heavy artillery truck, its olive paintwork caked with mud that had dried there two centuries ago, its tires flat.

At the rear of the room, Kane spotted the twin metal doors of a goods elevator. They opened like jaws, and the elevator looked wide enough to hold a truck. This was doubtless how the vehicles had been brought here, Kane realized, and presumably they had been left when the redoubt had been closed down.

The central strip of the room was empty. Painted lines marked out a “road” and designated safe walkways. Corpselike figures wandered around this vast arena, some of them carrying bulky crates in what seemed to be an effortless manner despite their wasted musculature. Kane counted more than a dozen zombies, for want of a better term, before his attention was drawn to the far side of the room. There, off to the right, a large glass-walled area took up almost one-third of the floor space, and Kane could see movement within. A towering figure strode among the other corpses, rotting like them and yet somehow demanding Kane’s attention. As he watched, Kane realized it was a woman, her flesh almost entirely rotted away, what remained a dark shade of brown like licorice beneath scraps of clothing.

There was an incessant buzzing coming from the hangar, low but present all the same, from the insects that flew close to the dead things, drawn to their rotting stench. It was incessant, like the sound made by someone running a finger around the rim of a wineglass. But for the woman it was different. Nothing flew around her.

Kane stepped back from the opening, swiftly attracting the attention of his companions. “There’s something going on out there,” he told them in a sharp whisper, “but I need to get closer if we’re going to find out what it is.”

Grant nodded sternly once and, after a moment’s hesitation, Brigid did the same. Briefly, Kane outlined the layout of the room and explained where everyone was to go before he led the way on swift, silent tread, into the vast, hangarlike chamber.

All the while, Kane couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something very familiar about the corpselike woman he had spied in the glass-walled office. Emaciated and almost fleshless, she had a certain presence he recognized, a certain bearing he felt that he somehow knew.

Quickly, his head ducked low between his shoulders, Kane sprinted to the nearest wall of the glass-lined area, crouching where a bank of filing cabinets had been placed against the wall on the far side.

Across the hangar, Brigid and Grant made their way through the shadows at the edge of the room, posting themselves among a pile a dismantled crates atop which a crowbar had been discarded. From here, they could see the doorway to the glass-walled area, as well as most of the vast, hangarlike room without exposing themselves.

Now poised beside the glass wall, Kane edged himself up from his crouch and peeked through the glass. This close up he could see that it was smeared with dust and grime, but he could still see through it clearly enough to observe what was going on within. The room itself seemed to be some kind of office with a laboratory attached, and files of paper had been left haphazardly over several surfaces while the lab was now in an obvious state of disrepair. The spindly corpse woman who had drawn Kane’s attention continued flicking through the pages of the file she held in her clawlike hands as other undead figures wandered throughout the room.

Kane watched incredulously as a fly, its bloated black body like a blob of ink, left the gaping eye socket of its host, a dead child no taller than Kane’s navel. It flew around in that strange, hard-angled-turn manner that flies will until they find somewhere to go. Then, the inkblot fly seemed to spot the woman, darting in the air to buzz toward her. But as it neared her, attracted by her reeking decrepitude, the fly’s wings ceased moving and it simply dropped, plummeting to the ground where it landed with a sharp whisper, now just a dried-up husk. Kane saw another fly do the same thing a moment later, this one a fat bluebottle with body like shimmering glass. This, too, dropped in the presence of the corpse woman, falling to the floor as though in supplication.

Machinery whirred behind her within the glass-walled room, ancient lab technology that was being operated—perversely, it seemed to Kane—by another of the shambling undead figures, this one a short, stocky woman whose skin had wrinkled into a black smear that clung like tar to her dead flesh. She was operating some kind of mixing device, Kane realized, and he moved a little to his right so that he could see what the device was doing. He watched as test tubes spun, their luminous contents bubbling and frothing with each rotation of a spinner arm. There were four test tubes at each end of the arm, eight in total, each clamped there by holding pincers, a stopper cap preventing their contents from spilling free as the arm rotated.

“What the hell are they mixing up in there?” Kane mouthed, his voice something less than a whisper.

Kane watched as the eight glass tubes were whirled around once again within the centrifuge unit, like a tiny funfair ride. The spinner arm itself was located behind reinforced armaglass, like a little glass display cabinet at the side of the room. Presumably, the cabinet was designed to both dampen the noise of the machinery and to protect the user from dangerous chemicals, for the door could be sealed to prevent any leakage. However, Kane spotted a crack in the glass and the lock appeared to have been wrenched off, a brown smear across the front panel—the woman’s flesh, he acknowledged with a growing sense of nausea.

A digital timer at the top of the mixing unit glowed, proudly counting down from a little over twelve hours, its green numbers marching slowly toward an inevitable zero. Whatever it was that was being mixed there, it would be ready at sundown, Kane calculated.

His interest piqued, Kane shifted his position, turning his attention back to the taller, corpselike figure who seemed to dominate the room. The corpse woman was working through a file of papers, and Kane swallowed hard as he saw the pages begin to crumble in her hands, tiny flecks of paper sailing away on the air, now nothing more than dust. Wrapped in its brown cardboard sleeve, the file was marked U.S. Army and several notations appeared on its foremost page.

Kane edged closer to the glass, trying to make out the designation on the front cover where the corpse woman held it with vomit-yellow talons. RWI077-093-d.

Kane committed the number to memory as he watched the woman flick through the file, a rictus grin fixed on her hideous features. With each turn of the page, flakes of paper drifted from the file like ashes from a fire; it was literally rotting at her touch.

Kane turned at a nearby noise, ducking out of sight. Across the hangar, the animated corpse of a male was pacing toward the glass-walled room, rolling gait uncomfortable as he balanced a heavy metal cylinder in his outstretched arms. The man was wide-shouldered and must have been over six feet tall when he was alive. He still seemed formidable even with so much of his body rotted away beneath the ragged remains of his dark clothes. Despite himself, Kane smiled when he noticed that the corpse wore a leather patch over his left eye, even though the evidence of the right eye was just an empty socket now. Whatever it had worn in life, the man now wore in death, Kane realized.

Eye Patch stomped through the open doorway and into the glass-walled area, and he stopped in front of the woman, showing the cylinder for her approval like some mockery of an old-fashioned door-to-door salesman.

Kane hunkered down, watching the transaction from behind the concealing cabinets. The woman leader stared at the cylinder for a long moment, reading the coded markings there with lizardlike eyes yellow as egg yolks. There were several brightly colored haz-chem labels on its side, Kane saw, including one showing a cross through the black silhouette of a slope-sided beaker on a burned orange background—poison.

The woman ran her hand along the metal canister, her ragged nails playing across its surface like nails on a chalkboard. Kane gasped as he saw the paint begin to peel and flake away as if it had been prematurely aged by the elements.

Then the ex-Mag heard the corpse woman speak for the first time, in a voice like dried leaves. “Yes,” she told the figure with the eye patch. “Find more. Do this for your mistress. Do this for Ezili Coeur Noir.”

The partially decomposed male figure placed the canister on the floor, leaving it at Ezili Coeur Noir’s feet. Then he turned and made his way from the glass room before halting in the doorway. Kane got the impression that the broad-shouldered corpse was sniffing the air, as if he had sensed something. Kane crouched, pressing his back against the glass as the broad figure stood there, searching the room with his eyeless socket.

From his position, Kane could see only the figure’s boots—holed and wasting away. He felt his stomach turn as the dead thing made some hideous sound from the back of his throat, the noise of a man choking on his own blood.

Across the room, crouching among the stacked crates, Grant and Brigid watched furtively as Kane huddled closer to the wall, trying to keep out of the eye line of the dead thing standing in the doorway. They heard him make that terrible sound deep in his throat, and they watched with concern as three figures seemed to answer, moving toward him from their work at a stack of matériel near the glass office. Ungainly but purposeful, the figures made their way over to the area where Kane was crouching, one of them using an ebony walking cane to help balance the stride of his wasted legs.

Grant tapped on his Commtact. “Kane, you’ve been spotted,” he whispered. “Abort.”

Even as Kane heard Grant’s words amplified through his mastoid bone over the subdermal Commtact, the eye-patched figure at the doorway turned to face him, showing the fearsome remains of its broken teeth as it snarled at him. Kane’s eyes widened as three more rotting forms joined Eye Patch, standing in a semicircle at his back. As Kane began to push himself up from the wall, the figure with the eye patch raised his sickening, rotted hand and his bony index finger extended to point at the ex-Mag, like the accusing finger of judgment.

“Guess you’ve got me dead to rights,” Kane muttered as he stood in front of the four accusing, wasted figures.

Chapter 5

Kane took in the figures who faced him in an instant.

The one with the eye patch pointed at Kane with a skeletal index finger as if in accusation of the living.

Behind Eye Patch, three other forms loomed, rocking on their heels as they watched him with dead eyes. The one farthest to the left was tall and scarecrow thin, wearing tattered clothing. He was so unsteady that he used a crooked walking stick.

Beside Walking Stick, Kane saw an emaciated figure with the straggly remains of long dreadlocks. The wide hips of her pelvis confirmed that she had been a woman, and a powerfully built one at that. When the woman bunched her fists, a gob of discolored and rotting flesh hung down between her ragged fingers like a teardrop. Mentally, Kane tagged the woman Dreadlocks before turning his attention to the last of the undead creatures.

This one was shorter than the others, a little over five feet tall, and had adopted a fighting stance, pitching his legs wide to lower his center of gravity. He had wispy hair, and his skull peeked through the rotted flesh of his long-dead face. Kane tagged this one Shorty, and figured him to be the least trouble if it came to a fight.

Pointing at Kane, Eye Patch curled an index finger, folding it inward, like the beckoning finger of fate. A twisting knot in his stomach, Kane recognized the movement; the corpse wasn’t pointing but was pulling the trigger of a gun, an old flinch reaction from whatever brutal life he had lived.

As the realization dawned, Kane took a quick step to his left, away from the glass wall. The tall corpse with the walking stick took a step to his right, holding the stick out to block the ex-Mag’s way. Behind the clutch of corpses, the twisted form of Ezili Coeur Noir had appeared, moving like a specter from the glass-fronted office into the main hangar. Her mouth opened, black tongue writhing amid rotting gums, as she spoke.

“Life.”

Kane heard the word, and felt the nagging at the back of his mind that somehow he knew this woman. The eye-patch-wearing corpse took another step toward Kane, so close now that Kane had to step back to avoid him. The corpse’s dead companions stepped forward, too, boxing Kane in. Behind them, more of the undead figures had begun amassing, acknowledging the perverted condemnation of the queen of death.

Taking another lurching step forward, the figure with the eye patch reached for Kane once more, and Kane found himself backed up against the wall.

“Back off, Eye Patch,” Kane snarled.

The corpse ignored him, reaching up with his rotting left hand and grabbing a fistful of Kane’s jacket. The instant the corpse grabbed him, Kane rammed his Sin Eater into the corpse’s belly and squeezed the trigger. Gobs of desiccated flesh spurted from the figure’s back as 9 mm bullets blasted through rotted flesh. The corpse staggered backward several steps, wrenching a square from Kane’s jacket, two brass buttons flying off into the glass wall to Kane’s right.

Freed of the corpse-thing’s grip, Kane kicked out with his left leg, striking the tall man in the midsection. Eye Patch bent over himself with the impact of Kane’s kick, and the ex-Magistrate pushed off, flipping over the toppling body and bringing his gun up to deal with the next of the clutch of zombies.

A short way across the hangar, Grant spoke to Brigid where they hid, watching the frantic showdown from the cover of the stacked crates. It had been less than ten seconds since Grant’s Commtact warning, and it was clear Kane was in trouble.

“Come on,” Grant snapped.

Brigid trotted out from cover in Grant’s wake, blasting bursts of bullets from her TP-9 at the looming pack of undead creatures that traipsed across the room toward their partner.

A fleshless woman standing close to the crates staggered over as Grant drilled her with bullets from his Sin Eater, flipping the weapon around to smash her in the face with its grip. Brigid leaped over the woman’s corpse as it flopped to the floor.

And then, the one thing Brigid had most feared happened. As she leaped the fallen figure of the corpse, a skeletal hand whipped out and grabbed her ankle, pulling her to the ground.

Brigid spun, unleashing another burst of bullets right into the undead thing’s withered face at near point-blank range. The corpse woman shook in place as Brigid’s bullets drilled into her, ripping away the gory stump of her nose and rattling against the empty sockets of her eyes. Yet still the undead thing clung on, ignoring the effects the bullets were having on her face, and Brigid reached a sudden, awful realization—bullets weren’t stopping these things.

A little way across the hangar, Kane had just come to the same conclusion. Still in motion, he had blasted a volley of 9 mm steeljackets at the scarecrowlike figure holding the walking stick, only to see him stumble a pace back before regaining his footing, glowering at Kane with those lifeless eye sockets. Kane spun, dropping low as his leg swept the scarecrow, knocking him from his feet. The corpse’s walking stick whipped out as he fell with a ghastly hiss from peeled-back lips as black as night.

Kane continued the leg sweep, catching the woman with dreadlocks just behind her ankle. She stumbled a pace forward, but despite her apparent unsteadiness, she refused to fall. She turned on Kane then, reaching down at him with long arms as he scooted across the metal plating of the floor. Kane grunted as the woman’s hands snagged the torn front of his jacket, and she demonstrated incredible strength as she pulled him from the decking in one swift jerk.

The hideous figure of Ezili Coeur Noir let loose a deep, throaty laugh as Kane was yanked from the floor, nodding her approval as he was thrust up in the air by her dead servant. With clawlike, fleshless hands, Dreadlocks lifted Kane high over her head as her mistress laughed, and Kane tried desperately to bring his pistol up to shoot her.

Just then a stream of bullets slammed into the woman holding Kane and she stumbled back, her dreadlocks whipping around her face. Kane felt her grip loosen, and suddenly he was hurtling through the air before crashing an instant later into—and through—the glass wall of the office. Kane rolled across the office as glass shards shattered all around him. Then, bringing his gun up, he blasted a stream of fire across the remaining windows behind him, sending a burst of shattering glass at the five corpselike figures who were just turning to follow him. He watched in grim satisfaction as three of the figures dropped back to protect Ezili Coeur Noir, with only the shorter individual leaping over the barrier of the filing cabinets amid the smashing glass.

Kane engaged his Commtact, instructing his companions in a hurried explanation. “They ain’t living and they ain’t dying. Anyone have any ideas?”

The zombie he’d named Shorty was in the office now, hurrying past a doorway through which Kane could see the closed doors of an elevator, and Kane saw that he had grabbed two long shards of broken glass, wielding them like knives as he hurried at Kane. Still on the floor, Kane pushed himself back on his shoulders before springing up into a crouch and unleashing another stream of bullets at his onrushing attacker. The short zombie was knocked backward by the impact of the bullets, and he held one hand up as if to protect his ruined face.

STRUGGLING in the mantrap-like grip of the dead woman holding her ankle, Brigid Baptiste was a little too preoccupied to answer Kane’s question. The undead thing wrestled with Brigid’s foot as they lay sprawled on the floor, even as Brigid’s TP-9 blasted another burst of gunfire in her face. Kane was right; bullets were having almost no effect, and they needed some other way to deal with these deathless things.

With a determined shriek, Brigid kicked the zombie girl’s arm with her free leg, snapping the brittle bones with a determined boot. From somewhere deep in her rotting chest, the undead thing growled. Brigid ignored her, kicking out again.

GRANT WAS PEPPERING the area with bullets, turning this way and that as additional corpses descended on him from all around the hangarlike room. One, a child with a wilted stump for an arm, ran straight into Grant’s line of fire, his decomposing body shaking in place as he staggered closer to the ex-Mag.

They aren’t stopping, Grant realized, but maybe we can drive them away somehow.

THE GLASS SHARD in the zombie’s raised hand shattered under the impact of Kane’s bullets, spraying glass over the undead man’s ruinous face. Instantly, Shorty lunged out with his other hand, and Kane saw the lethal shard of glass leave the creature’s other hand and cut toward him through the air. In flinch reaction, Kane’s right hand whipped up, bullets lashing the ceiling from the muzzle of the Sin Eater as he tracked the hurtling glass knife.

His shots missed, but Kane managed to bat the lethally sharp blade out of the air with the barrel of his pistol, turning his head as the blade shattered into a dozen smaller, onrushing blades. Then Shorty was upon him, and Kane saw the other corpses clambering over the filing cabinets as they followed the most direct route to assist their companion.

THE CORPSE CHILD grabbed the end of Grant’s Sin Eater, shuddering in place, ignoring the stream of bullets that drilled through his tiny hand. His other arm, withered to something like a twig-thin branch, jabbed at Grant, stabbing him in his side so hard he felt it through the protective weave of his shadow suit.

With a single mental command, Grant sent his pistol back to its housing in his sleeve, and the corpse child stumbled as he lost his grip. Grant was ready, however, and he drove the hard end of his bent knee straight into the undead child’s face, knocking him to the floor.

An instant later Grant was turning, shoving another walking corpse aside as he sprinted toward the far side of the room, away from the glass-walled office.

“Kane, Brigid—hang tight,” Grant ordered over the Commtact. “I just had an idea.”

“Make it quick,” Kane responded as he threw the attacking zombie over a desk, knocking a bulbless lamp and an empty filing tray flying.

Behind Kane, three more undead figures were making their way toward him in their unwieldy but determined manner, the one with the black walking stick thrusting it in front of him like some kind of sword.

BRIGID LEAPED from the floor, the undead woman’s hand still clutching at her ankle. It didn’t matter as Brigid’s second kick had wrenched the rotten limb free of its socket, and now she dragged the hand and arm along with her as she ran back to the crates where she and Grant had hidden. Behind Brigid, the fleshless woman flapped her remaining arm as she struggled to pull herself up from the floor, moving with all the grace of a drowning man.

Brigid shoved her TP-9 back into her low-slung hip holster, reached for the crowbar resting atop the crates.

As the corpse woman staggered toward her, maggots visibly writhing in the stump now hanging in place of her arm, Brigid lashed backward with the crowbar, smashing it against the corpse’s face with all her strength. The undead creature rocked on her heels, and Brigid kicked out hard into the corpse’s pelvis, forcing her backward. Then Brigid swung the crowbar once more, this time from low to the floor, bringing the metal tool up in a vicious arc that rammed the claw end straight into the woman’s ruined face.

The corpse-thing whined in some approximation of pain or surprise—Brigid didn’t know which—and stumbled backward, pulling at the metal bar now lodged in her face.

Bunching her fists, Brigid took a pace toward the stumbling undead woman, preparing to knock her down once more, only to hear a growling noise from far off across the hangar bay. But this time the growling wasn’t coming from a recently dead thing’s long-dry throat. Instead it was coming from an engine as Grant started up the artillery truck that had waited in the redoubt for over two hundred years.

Sitting in the cab, Grant pumped the accelerator and the truck rumbled to life around him. The vehicle was rusted and worn, and all four tires were flat as road kill, but at least it operated along the same basic principles as the Sandcats he had driven back in his days with the Cobaltville Magistrate Division.

The corpse figure of a man was slammed against the hood and disappeared from view beneath the body of the truck as the vehicle picked up speed.

As he urged the artillery truck across the metal decking toward the distant glass walls of the office-lab, Grant glanced out to his right and his eyes met with Brigid’s. The corpse-thing with the crowbar in her face sinking to her knees in front of her.

“Want me to get the door for you?” Brigid asked, her words amplified over the medium of their linked Commtacts.

“Say again?” Grant asked.

But Brigid was already sprinting across the room, rushing behind the truck as it picked up speed. Grant glanced to his left and saw Brigid running onward deftly avoiding the shambling undead figures as she hurried toward the closed doors of the goods elevator.

“I figure we have only one exit,” Brigid explained over the Commtact, but before she could continue Grant cut her off.

“I gotcha,” Grant assured her. “Be there in a tick. Kane,” he added, alerting his other colleague. “You might want to duck down.”

“Roger that.” Kane’s voice snapped back instantly, not bothering to question his best friend’s left-field advice.

Grant was at the wall to the office then and he slammed on the brakes as the truck smashed through the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass. He saw Kane leap back just in time as the glass shattered all around him, twinkling shards surging across the office like some beautiful, man-made tidal wave.

The truck slapped into the corpse wielding the walking stick like a weapon, knocking him flying in an instant, and its front tire bumped over another before it came to a halt, chairs, desks and office debris toppling in front of its hood.

Commanding his Sin Eater back into his palm, Grant snapped off a quick burst of covering fire from the truck’s window as Kane vaulted over a dust-caked desk and scrambled toward the waiting vehicle. A moment later Kane had clambered up into the high rig, the figure with the dreadlocks lunging after him.

“What kept you?” Kane asked breathlessly, delivering a swift back-kick into the grasping corpse woman’s chin.

“Traffic,” Grant replied, working the gearshift into reverse and pumping the gas.

A moment later the Army truck was hurtling backward across the hangar bay, rotten rubber tires screeching on the metal decking as Grant wrestled with the wheel. They hit something behind them, and Kane leaned out of the window, peering to see what it was. A stack of crates toppled over, and two undead corpses were knocked from their feet. Ezili Coeur Noir watched, well away from the path of the rushing vehicle.

Over by the elevator, Kane spotted Brigid jabbing at the control panel with her free hand as she sprayed staggered bursts of bullets at a half-dozen undead men who threatened to overwhelm her. With a cheerful chime that seemed utterly out of place in the nightmarish surroundings, the elevator arrived, its jawlike metal doors sighing open while Brigid’s sweeping bullets knocked another zombie off his feet.

Grant’s foot pumped the brake, and he gripped the steering wheel as the truck threatened to go into a skid on its bald flat tires. As the vehicle screamed across the metal it knocked three corpse figures from its path, but there was no time for celebration. Brigid Baptiste leaped aside as ten tons of truck hurtled past her and crashed hard into the edge of the open elevator, metal-on-metal kicking up a lightninglike burst of sparks. As the truck drew to a stop, its left side flush with the wall of the goods elevator, Brigid rushed into the elevator cage and jabbed at the control panel with the heel of her hand. In front of her, the doors began to close on their pneumatic motors as several undead figures struggled from the floor toward the fleeing Cerberus team.

Behind Brigid, Kane had jumped down from the cab and was adding bursts of gunfire from his own weapon to hers as she fended off the approaching figures until the shining metal doors finally closed. As they did so, Brigid let out a long breath. “What on earth…?” she asked.

“RWI077-093-d,” Kane replied, flexing the tension from his shoulders as the elevator shuddered and began to rise.

“What does that mean?” Brigid asked him, baffled.

“It was the code on the file that crazy-looking woman was studying,” Kane told her. “She called herself Ezili Coeur Noir.”

“Ezili of the Black Heart,” Brigid said in translation. “Voodoo loa, the spirit of death.”

“No.” Kane shook his head. “That’s no voodoo spirit.”

Brigid looked up at Kane querulously as she discharged the near-empty clip from her TP-9 and loaded a fresh one. “No?”

“Don’t ask me how,” Kane told her, “but that there—that’s Lilitu, Annunaki dark goddess and royal pain in the ass.”

Brigid’s eyes widened as she stared at Kane, utterly dumbfounded.

Chapter 6

In her guise as dark goddess of the Annunaki pantheon, Lilitu had been manipulating humankind almost from the day that she had first emerged from the water and begun to walk on two legs.

Her story had been told in a hundred different ways across the different religions of mankind, where she had been Lilith, Lilu and even the Queen of Sheba who seduced wise King Solomon. The ancient Sumerian records cast Lilitu as a terrible harlot-goddess who reveled in the extremes of carnality. As Lilith, Lilitu was reputed to sexually take men by force as they slept, and in Talmudic lore she was believed to be the first wife of Adam.

While mythology was often mired in interpretation, it was clear that Lilitu was a shrewd and ruthless manipulator with a sadistic streak. Thousands of years ago, when the Annunaki had first walked the Earth, Lilitu’s family holdings had become a sprawling empire near the Red Sea. Wishing to acquire the territory, Overlord Enlil had wed Lilitu in a pact that had resulted in betrayal and usurpation. Thus, Lilitu had embarked on a millennia-long war with the Annunaki Supreme Council, a sprawling game of chess with humanity as pawns. And so Lilitu was rightly renowned for her utter ruthlessness, the possessor of a callous streak that recognized no limitations.

Several years ago, Lilitu had emerged from her chrysalis state where she had hidden for ninety years in the guise of Baroness Beausoleil, ruler of her own self-named ville in the Outlands. She had caused trouble for the Cerberus rebels—both as Baroness Beausoleil and in her true form—since almost the day of their inception.

However, although she had assumed many forms in her near-immortal lifespan, the last time the Cerberus rebels had dealt with Lilitu she had been in her true body, a graceful humanoid goddess with a snakelike aspect to her crimson-scaled skin and black-vertical-slit yellow eyes, a magnificent crest atop her skull.

Less than a year ago, the Cerberus team had dealt what had appeared to be a final, decisive blow against the Annunaki’s mothership, Tiamat. During the scuffle, Lilitu had been shot—and apparently killed—by her brood sister Rhea, and her corpse had still been aboard Tiamat when the magnificent organic spacecraft had been destroyed in an almighty fireball. Kane, Brigid and Grant had seen that with their own eyes, and yet they knew that the Annunaki had a nasty habit of surviving even the most dire and absolute of circumstances.

Kane climbed back into the cab of the artillery truck as the elevator doors opened in front of them, and he shot Brigid an inquisitive look. “You going to say anything, Baptiste?” he asked. “Or are you just going to let your jaw hang like that until the wind changes?”

Brigid Baptiste brushed a lock of her red-gold hair behind her ear as she finally spoke, now seated between Kane and Grant. “Lilitu,” she said, as if quite unable to comprehend what Kane had said. “That…thing…was Lilitu?”

Kane nodded. “I think so,” he said. “She’s been through a few changes.”

“A few changes?” Grant repeated, amused. “She looked awfully dead, my friend.”

Placing his hands on the steering wheel, Grant pushed down gently on the accelerator and the truck idled out of the elevator as the doors opened to their full extent, a long, ill-lit shaft yawning in front of before them. As the truck rumbled along a few feet, motion-sensitive lights popped on overhead, lighting a little more along the wide tunnel. In the flickering lighting, the three Cerberus teammates saw they were in a gray-walled corridor that angled upward toward the surface. The corridor was wide enough to accommodate the truck twice over, and as they watched the lights pop on ahead of them, the team became aware of dark figures lurking in the shadows. These figures, like the ones they had left below, stood at strange angles like once-proud trees struck by lightning, their bodies rotten, creamy bone visible amid the perished skin of their emaciated faces. The undead.

“How much gas do we have?” Kane snapped as he wound down the passenger side window and recalled his Sin Eater back into his right palm with a slap.

Grant looked at the fuel gauge that was set beneath the speedometer on the dashboard display as the cab shuddered in time with the idling engine. The needle stood at empty. “Not much,” Grant said.

Kane cursed as he began blasting a stream of 9 mm slugs at the nearest shadowy form. The zombie thing to their right fell in a hail of bullets, but Kane watched with revulsion as it began to struggle back to its feet. Up ahead bright sunlight was just visible through a huge rollback door that stood open at the end of the tunnel.

“Think we have enough to get outside?” Kane asked, peering at Grant and seeing the twisted wires beneath the ignition where his colleague had hot-wired the ancient truth.

“We’re running on fumes,” Grant admitted, “but what the hell.” With that he slammed his foot down hard on the accelerator and the truck lurched forward, bumping over the struggling corpse and knocking another rotting figure from his feet like a bowling pin.

The truck rocked so much that it felt as if it might shake itself apart as they picked up speed. Leaning from the passenger window, Kane snapped off swift burst of gunfire as another rotting figure loomed into view.

The truck now snugly within the tunnel, trundling along at a steady clip as Grant wrestled to keep it on course. The vehicle’s bald tires struggled for traction, pulling the heavy machine toward the walls as Grant held the accelerator down. The cab stank of diesel, and Grant eyed the fuel gauge on the dashboard once again—the needle seemed to be stuck at empty, and Grant tapped the plastic several times to see if it was a genuine reading or whether it had simply become jammed over time. The needle didn’t move.

“Kane,” Brigid urged, pointing up ahead.

Kane saw what was worrying Brigid—a zombie stood close to the rollback door, his skin peeled away from his face, skull held at an odd angle atop his broad shoulders. The undead thing grasped a thick tree branch—wider than a man’s leg—and as Kane watched he hefted the branch forward like a jousting pole, swinging its sharp point at the windshield of the cab.

Grant stomped on the accelerator, knocking another corpse flying in the air until the undead thing slapped against the low ceiling. Grant peered in the mud-caked side mirror, watching as the corpse fell from the ceiling and dropped into the back of the truck. He could not tell if it was still moving, and he turned his attention back to the doors ahead.

Up ahead, the broad figure lunged with its jousting pole branch, driving the sharp end into the grille of the truck with a rending of metal. Beyond the windshield, the engine began to pour a cloud of steam, obscuring Grant’s view as he struggled with the wheel. Behind them, the undead corpse in the back grabbed onto the flatbed of the truck with clawlike hands, the ancient paint there flaking away with each scratch of his ragged nails.

As they hurtled over the lip of the redoubt doors, Kane swung open his passenger side door, using it like a battering ram to knock the broad-shouldered zombie off his feet. Bald tires spun on the dirt track beyond the redoubt, and suddenly the truck was out in the open. Outside the external door they found themselves bumping along a dirt road that carved a path through the dense swamp. Although dense, the plant life in the immediate vicinity of the doorway looked brown and ragged, as if it had been touched by poison.

As soon as they left the shadows of the underground redoubt, the heat of the Louisiana swamp struck them like a wall, the thick, heavy atmosphere of late morning like some physical blanket weighing down upon them. The breeze through the open passenger side window didn’t feel refreshing at all; it felt oppressive, hitting Kane in the face like hot liquid. Sweat beaded on his brow immediately, and his companions shifted in their seats, sweat running down their backs. Kane pushed the collar of his jacket back off his neck, wiping away the perspiration that was already forming there with an irritated hand. Threads hung from the shredded front of the jacket where the undead creature with the eye patch had grasped him.

As they continued along the overgrown dirt track away from the redoubt entrance, they became aware of other shambling figures moving through the undergrowth, and Kane peered in his side mirror to see more corpselike forms massing at the rollback doorway of the redoubt.

Warm air sullied the cabin, and the smell of the bayou came to them through the open window. Sitting between Grant and Kane, Brigid held her hand against the dusty vent in the center of the dash, feeling the stream of warm air there like breath against her skin.

Suddenly the remains of Grant’s side window shattered entirely as a charcoal-black skeletal hand reached through, grabbing for the wheel. It was the undead thing who had landed on the bed of the truck as they sped out of the redoubt, Grant realized. As the wheel was pulled out of the ex-Mag’s grip, the truck lurched to the left, screeching off the dirt road and crashing through a clump of saplings, thin branches snapping as they struck the grille and windshield.

“There’s one on the roof!” Grant shouted as the truck bumped through dense leaf cover that hung like a green curtain ahead of them, obscuring their way.

Grasping the steering wheel with both hands, Grant fought with the wheel, struggling to right the old artillery truck’s path as the bald tires spun for traction in the marshy ground underfoot. Grant eased up on the accelerator as he felt the truck threaten to roll, pulling the vehicle back toward the dirt road, even as the undead figure batted at his face with his clawed hand.

On the other side of the cab, Kane thrust open the passenger door and clambered out, the road rushing by just a few feet below the soles of his boots. “Come on, you ugly son of a bitch,” he snarled as he pulled himself up onto the roof.

The undead figure on the cab hissed as he saw Kane, dark-colored spittle spraying from his black mouth. Dressed in tattered rags, the figure had stick-thin limbs and dark rubbery skin so taut that it looked as if it had been stretched over a drum. He lay on the cab roof, legs splayed out behind him for balance, reaching into the driver’s window with one bony, emaciated arm.

With his left hand reaching back to cling solidly to the edge of the truck, Kane clambered toward the undead thing in a crouch, powering the Sin Eater back into his free hand as he did so. “Ride’s over,” he snarled. “Don’t forget to tip your driver.”

The undead creature grabbed for the muzzle of the Sin Eater as Kane’s finger tightened on the guardless trigger, and his rotten hand was blown away in a burst of bullets. The walking corpse seemed surprised for a moment, the dead pit eyes gazing in astonishment at his ruined hand. Kane brought the pistol around and blasted off another stream of bullets as the truck bumped over the uneven road, and his shots went wild.

Then the undead thing flipped his legs out in a such a way that they almost seemed to be dislocated, and Kane found himself tumbling off the roof and over the front of the truck. Everything seemed to whirl around him, and Kane reached out blindly until his left hand found purchase. As swiftly as it had begun, Kane’s fall stopped, and he found himself lying prone on the front of the truck above the engine housing, his hand grasping one of the wide side mirrors that stuck out like an elephant’s ears from the truck’s hood.

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