Judgment Plague

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He waited a moment. No reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

MEANWHILE, AS THE first croc slipped back from Grant, its long face splattered with chunks of its own flesh and ruined eyeball, a second one was moving more warily toward the powerfully built ex-magistrate. With a flinch of his wrist tendons, Grant sent his sin eater pistol back into its hidden holster and reached into a sheathlike pocket in his duster. A moment later his hand reappeared wielding a Copperhead assault subgun. The Copperhead was a favorite field weapon of Grant’s, and it featured a two-foot-long barrel, with grip and trigger in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handed. It also featured an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Grant preferred the Copperhead thanks to its ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You okay?” he asked.

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

“What did you do? Explosive?”

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Some kind of mutie,” he replied dismissively.

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

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

“A new strain?” Grant proposed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re point man,” Grant said.

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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