Beside Kane, Brigid was sprawled on the floor, her head spinning where it had struck the hard slate there, trying to shake the muzziness that occluded her thoughts. Wake up, she told herself. Wake up and act. If her body understood the words, then it didn’t seem inclined to play along.
All around Kane, people were dropping as the life force was sucked out of them by the stone abomination. Pregnant woman; bald man; teen with acne and dyed hair; overweight farmhand with a beard that touched his belly—all of them fell as the stone monster touched them with its distended fingers, exchanging their lives and strength for its own. The stone thing was buoyed with every touch, rising taller, each step more determined, and all the while its gaping wound of a mouth shrieked its hideous ululation.
“Time to put this stone wannabe out to pasture,” Kane grumbled as he stroked the trigger of the Sin Eater and sent a stream of bullets at the rough-hewn abomination.
Designated Task #009: Food Harvesting
Food is grown in massive hydroponics labs located in the west and north corners of Delta Level. Vast artificial fields have been sown with seeds which grow various crops—tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, carrots, etc.—in uniform lines. The crop is tested thoroughly throughout its lifespan to ensure it is growing in the correct manner: size, shape, color. Any imperfect crop is removed and recycled as feed for the animals in one of the other areas of Delta Level.
Picking the crops is partially automated, but the amount of moisture coupled with the gentle touch required means that humans are considered superior and more efficient with much of the menial work. As such, I have been assigned to work here two days a week as a rest from the construction of war machines on Epsilon Level. My first assignment is to tend to the pears which grow with resilience from a line of trees in room D41977. The crop is hard-skinned and tasteless, but it holds nutrients enough to sustain life. Most of it will be turned to pulp which is then added to the daily meal ration each citizen is allocated, wherein its lack of a distinctive taste will be rendered irrelevant.
My crop picking is slow because I am still new to the task and have yet to get used to the automated ladders used by the pickers. These ladders stand at a thirty-degree angle with a wheeled base, and they follow the instructions of a computer brain. The brain analyzes the optimum speed for fruit picking based on a scan of each tree and its crop, then follows that calculation to provide a window within which the tree must be stripped of its bounty. The speed seems fast to me, and it becomes inevitable that many of the crop which I pick are bruised. The supervisors show no concern for the bruised fruit, and merely chastise me for my inadequacy in stripping every pear tree in my designated batch.
“Your deficiency will be taken out of your food allowance next week,” a supervisor informs me without looking up from her tally sheets. I stare at the gray peaked cap she wears for a long moment, wondering if she might meet my eyes and perhaps explain how I am to increase productivity, but she never looks up.
The conclusion of my shift is accompanied by a very real sense of disappointment, the knowledge that I have failed to live up to the expectations that the barons have in me as a citizen of Ioville. My back aches from stretching, my arms, too, from constantly reaching above me. I vow to try harder tomorrow.
—From the journal of Citizen 619F.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_42e162e1-50fb-5d57-af43-b78b522ec33c)
A stream of 9 mm bullets zipped across the temple at the wretched stone monster that had emerged from the fire. Kane watched as the bullets trailed from his Sin Eater, while around him two dozen of the faithful who had joined him on this pilgrimage looked horrified at the sudden turn of events. They believed they were there to give of themselves whatever their god required, even if it was their lives. But Kane didn’t believe—he knew better. He knew that this stone monstrosity was nothing more than a trick. The iron content in the blood it was being fed combined with the trigger inside those stone seeds, bringing it to nothing more than a cruel imitation of life. At least that’s what Kane guessed was happening as he squeezed the Sin Eater’s trigger.
Bullets hurtled toward the stone menace. The first bullets struck its rocky, mismatched hide and the creature let loose a surprised shriek, its distended fingers pulling free from two more sacrifices—a dark-skinned woman with a mop of braided hair and one of the robed acolytes who was ministering the proceedings. The stone monster’s fingers rattled back into the hands, the wrists pulling back and the overlong limbs retracting to a more normal length, returning to the stone figure’s shoulders. In their wake, its two victims sagged to the floor, visibly shaking, neither fully awake nor truly asleep.
Kane’s bullets sparked as they struck the creature’s rough hide, sounding like cymbals being clashed together with every rebound. But the monster only turned, fixing Kane with its dark, shadowy glare.
“You recognize me?” Kane challenged the creature as around him pilgrims ducked out of the way of the fight.
The stone creature tilted its head in the semblance of a nod.
“Yeah, I think you do,” Kane snarled. “I’m the guy who killed your daddy.”
The bastard child of a thousand deluded devotees hurtled toward Kane then, charging across the flame-lit temple floor, screaming an unearthly howl from its gaping wound of a mouth.
Kane’s Sin Eater pistol blasted again, a stream of 9 mm titanium-shelled bullets catching in the light of the flames like fireflies in the dusk.
The monster’s composite arms reached out and batted Kane’s bullets aside, like twin landslides waving impossibly through the air, lines of warm blood rippling between each loose stone.
Kane leaped back but he was too late. The creature grabbed him, shooting one of its extending arms toward him and snagging his Sin Eater out of his hand.
How do I get myself into these jams? Kane wondered as that inhuman arm flicked the Sin Eater aside.
But there was no time to think—only to act. As the stone monster hurtled closer, charging for all the world like a runaway steam train, Kane began running at it. The two figures met in a crash of breaking shale amid the firelit chamber, and suddenly Kane was running up the monster’s body, using its rocky crags as steps before driving his booted foot into the abomination’s face.
The monster wavered in place, great chunks of its still-forming body spilling to the floor like so much thrown sand.
All around the temple, the pilgrims were reacting with horror, calling for it to stop, asking who this man was who would dare violate their god. Kane ignored them as he leaped from the stone edifice that walked like a man, ducking and rolling to the slate floor even as the nightmare figure reached for him with one of its extending, pendulous arms. He recognized it—kind of. It was a pale imitation of Ullikummis, a memory only half-remembered, the details blurry, forgotten.
How do you break a thing that’s already broken? Kane wondered as a lashing arm came sailing toward his head in a flurry of stones and blood.
Kane dropped out of the way of that swinging extendable arm, slid on his buttocks across the slate floor to where his blaster had dropped, snatched it up as he rolled.
A half-dozen pilgrims surrounded Kane as he recovered, their outraged faces glaring at him. Two men took the lead and kicked Kane while he lay on the ground, booting him in the sides. Kane groaned as he felt the first foot strike him on the ribs, followed an instant later by a second kick in the gut, forcing him to double over and expel the breath he held.
Kane could not shoot them. They were victims. Stupid, yes, but victims all the same.
Another foot sailed at Kane’s face and he reacted instinctively, left arm snapping up to block it, then grabbing his attacker’s ankle and twisting. The pilgrim shrieked as a sudden stab of pain tore through his ligaments, and then he crashed to the floor beside Kane, grasping in agony at his twisted ankle.
From across the chamber, the hulking form of the stone monstrosity stalked through the flame-lit darkness, seeking out its next victim and the blood it desperately craved.
“Stop!” It was a woman’s voice, loud enough to penetrate the rabble of panic and confusion, and it was accompanied by a brilliant flash of light and clap of thunder.
Everyone in the chamber turned, all except for an elderly man who walked with a stick who was even now having his blood drained from him by the stone thing that had come to life.
Across the chamber, Brigid Baptiste was standing before the statue of her other self, of Brigid Haight. She had stripped off her jacket and the loose shirt she had worn, revealing the tight black bodysuit she wore beneath—the shadow suit. The shadow suits had been discovered in Redoubt Yankee and were so named because they absorbed light, reducing the profile and visibility of the wearer. However, in the flickering light of the temple, the shadow suit’s similarity to the sleek black leathers, which Brigid had worn while possessed by Haight, “wrapping her body in the dead” as she had termed it then, was impossible to miss. With her grim expression and wild halo of red-gold hair, she looked for all the world like the hateful thing she had been before—Ullikummis’s hand in darkness.
“Stop this, all of you,” Brigid shouted, her narrowed eyes scanning across every face in the room.
For a moment there was silence—shocked silence at this vision of the woman whose statue dominated one wall of the temple chamber. Then, the leader of the robed acolytes cried, “The demigoddess has returned!” He dropped to his knees, arms outthrust in praise.
Beside him, two more acolytes fell immediately to their knees, bending low until they touched the floor with their foreheads, muttering confused praises for the glorious return they were blessed to witness. In a few moments, it seemed that everyone in the temple had fallen to their knees to worship Brigid—all except for Kane, who lay sprawled and bloodied on the floor, and the stone monster that loomed over its latest victim.
Still surrounded, Kane peered between the kneeling bodies of his attackers, and his brow furrowed. “Baptiste?” he muttered incredulously. “Don’t tell me this has all got to you.”
“Hear me now and hear me well,” Brigid announced, pitching her voice in a low timbre of command. “This monster—” she pointed to the stone creature that had been brought to life in the flaming pit “—is a false god. He is not the great one. He is nothing but simple puppetry, brought to life to test your faith.”
A stunned buzz burbled through the worshippers, and one pilgrim loudly cried, “We’ve been tricked!”
“Yes, you have been tricked,” Brigid assured the crowd, striding toward them on her booted heels. “I walk among you now because such heresy cannot be allowed to flourish.”
As she passed Kane, Brigid caught his eye and he detected just the slightest wink of one narrowed eye. Relief sang through him, bolstering his tired limbs and aching body.
“B-but what should we...?” an elderly woman asked, confused by the direction her pilgrimage had turned.
“Leave this place,” Brigid told her, addressing everyone in the room. “Feed not this false idol. Let it wither and die, struck from your very minds in disgust.”
“Oh, brother,” Kane muttered. “Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t we?” But no one heard him.
The pilgrims and the acolytes were stunned, and for a moment they all just knelt there, watching the demigoddess Brigid Haight walk among them, a vision from legend come back to life.
“Go now!” Brigid commanded. “Swiftly. While I deal with this pretender!” And she stomped with a determined swagger toward the stone monster that loomed by the fire pit.
There came a mass exodus from the temple then, pilgrims and acolytes hurrying out into the rain. Kane joined the crowd, slipping behind a pillar as sixty-something people hurried from the temple, which was alive with more flashes and bright bangs, as if a thunderstorm were occurring within its hallowed walls. Kane knew it wasn’t a thunderstorm, of course, or any other kind of godly, supernatural show. No, he had recognized the thing Brigid had used when she had made her first dramatic reappearance as “Brigid Haight.” She had employed a man-made device called a flashbang, similar in shape and size to a palm-sized ball bearing and designed as a nonlethal part of the standard Cerberus field mission arsenal. Once triggered, the flashbang brought an almighty flash of light and noise. It was similar to an explosive being set off, only the flashbang did no damage, as such. Instead, it was used by the Cerberus personnel to confuse and disorient opponents—and, just once, to pose as demigods, it seemed.
Once the temple was clear, Kane made his way across to Brigid, who was standing a good distance away from the other standing figure in the room—the stone monster—watching it warily as they slowly circled one another. Around them, the fallen bodies of almost a dozen pilgrims and one robed acolyte lay, their skin pale where the blood had been drained.
“So, what do we do now,” Kane asked, “your goddess-ness?”
