Judgment Plague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On three?” Kane called across the room.

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

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

“Locked.”

“Locked,” Grant agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you figure that?” Kane asked.

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s it look like?” Brigid asked.

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

“Marked?” Grant asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“The noise could bring someone,” Brigid warned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Quiet,” Kane said, “and empty.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You think mags did this?” Grant asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

“Agreed.”

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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