by James Axler
The ocean crashed once more against the shore and, as she chewed, Pam perceived something within those waves, the way the atoms clung together and broke apart like partners at a formal dance. And she saw, just for a moment, the way the whole dancing ocean was dragged to and fro by the pull of its bullying best friend, the moon, watching from above with its crescent sliver of cat’s eye.
Smiling, Pam turned away from the crashing waves and saw Tony jab at the flames with his length of driftwood. Sparks spit from the fire as Tony hooked at the food that he had been cooking there, submerged deep in the popping flames. She and Tony had come across a clutch of little mollusks that had been washed up by the tide as they walked along the beach earlier that evening, and Pam had suggested cooking them here while they watched the sun disappear beneath the swell of the Pacific.
“Go on,” she had said. “It’ll be dead romantic and that.”
Tony pulled a face. He didn’t go much for romance, unless it involved having a fumble under her shirt while no one was looking. “Won’t your mom be worried?” he asked.
“Nah,” Pamela assured him. “There’s never any food at home. She’s probably out partying with someone even now.”
Tony nodded. He liked Pam’s mom; she was all right. But after the tidal wave had hit Hope, the whole ville had been turned upside down and everyone was scrabbling to find enough to feed themselves, even more than they had before. So when Pam said “partying,” Tony knew that she really meant her mom was trading sex for food.
The weird mollusks they found washed ashore had hard shells the color of oil on water, and ranged in size from the very small to ones almost as big as Tony’s clenched fist—the same fist that had knocked out Tim Brin’s front tooth—but they tasted all right once you cooked them for a bit. The flesh was kind of salty, tasting like the ocean, and they could be a bit chewy, but Tony and Pam didn’t mind. It was good to smell them cooking, a brackish, sharp kind of tang drifting within the charcoal smoke of the fire. After they had eaten the first few, they had just become used to the texture and the taste, and it hadn’t really mattered after that.
Using his stick, Tony pulled the last of the dead creatures from the fire, licking his lips as he caught the aroma of the cooking flesh where it lay on the shale before his resting knees. Then he cast the stick aside and, wrapping his hands in the tails of his shirt to protect them, picked up the flame-hot creature and cracked open its now-brittle shell. A hunk of jellylike meat flopped about inside, its color a pink so dull that it looked almost gray, the flesh still bubbling as a smoky white trail plumed from it.
Tony offered the mollusk to his girl. “Last one,” he said. “You want some?”
Pam looked at Tony and smiled. To her eyes, his face seemed so beautiful, his fourteen-year-old skin smooth and taut, the fluffy dusting of his first beard cluttering his jaw. And she saw that the multicolored stars were reflected in his eyes, all those wonderful colors that she had never noticed before. “Half each,” she told him, holding her hand out for the cooked flesh as it was cooled by the sea breeze.
Tony tore the pink-gray meat apart and handed Pam half. As he leaned close, he kissed Pam next to her lips, a slobbering touch that included his tongue licking at the side of her face like a dog. Then, gazing into each other’s eyes, they brought the flesh to their mouths and, giggling, sucked the juices before chewing and swallowing.
The meat left a salty taste on their tongues, as though they were eating the ocean itself. Tony looked at Pam as he felt that delicious flesh slide down his throat, and he saw how she seemed to glow beneath the multifaceted light of the moon. Above, up in the sky, he, too, saw the multicolored display that seemed to emanate from the stars. Like gods, he thought. Gods in the sky.
KANE RUBBED THE BACK of his neck, feeling the tension there subside as he gazed out across the streets of Hope from the summit of the church steps. It was still busy out here despite day having given way to night, and a line of locals shuffled past on the steps as Kane tried to clear his whirring mind.
“Everything okay?” asked a familiar woman’s voice from behind him.
Kane turned to see Brigid Baptiste pushing out of the rotting wooden doors of the old church to join him where he sat on the topmost stone step. Brigid was a beautiful woman, svelte of form with an athlete’s musculature and a ballet dancer’s grace. Her hair was a vibrant red-gold, the color of sunset, and she had painted her full lips to match. Her bright green eyes stared back at Kane from her pale face, like twin emeralds glinting from the snow. Where her full lips spoke of sensuality, Brigid’s high forehead suggested intellect, and in reality she was both of those aspects and many more besides. Brigid had been Kane’s colleague in the Cerberus operation for several years, and though their relationship was strictly platonic, their closeness was often akin to that of siblings. They shared the mystical bond of anam-charas, soul-friends destined to meet over and over through eternal reincarnation stretching along the flowing stream of time itself.
Brigid had dressed in scuffed but durable leathers over her shadow suit. The shadow suit itself was a waferthin bodysuit that was able to deflect knife attacks, offer protection from contaminated environments and also had other remarkable properties including the ability to regulate its wearer’s body temperature.
Kane nodded at Brigid’s question as she took a place beside him on the cool stone step, crouching so that her face was close to his while the refugees shuffled past them in a slow-moving line. The pair had been cooped up in the church for over fourteen hours, working nonstop as they distributed reconstituted rations to the local population. Elsewhere in the sprawling shantytown that surrounded the ville, another field team was distributing medicines where they were most needed. Theirs was a mission of mercy, and something that the Cerberus people seemed to have had very little time for over the recent months thanks to a litany of problems, both within their home base and across the globe.
Kane was a well-built man, with cropped, dark hair and steely blue-gray eyes. Tall with a lean frame and muscular arms, Kane’s physique was similar to that of a wolf, a machine built for hunting. His temperament was similar to that of a wolf, as well, both pack leader and loner as the situation demanded. Like Brigid, Kane was a member of Cerberus, an operation headquartered in Montana and dedicated to the uncovering of and resistance to a deep-rooted alien conspiracy that had threatened to overpower and subjugate humankind since the dawn of recorded time. That alien threat came from a race called the Annunaki, who had been mistaken for gods from the stars but were in fact a bored alien race who considered humans as nothing more than playthings, idle diversions along the bland, tiresome road of their millennia-long lifespans. Kane had accidentally uncovered inklings of that conspiracy when he had worked as a Magistrate in Cobaltville, learning to his disgust that the system he was tasked to uphold was in fact corrupt to its core. Kane had left Cobaltville, along with Grant, a fellow magistrate, and Brigid, an archivist with remarkable flair and the unusual ability of total memory recall. Together the three of them formed the energetic nucleus around which the sixty-strong facility of so-called Cerberus exiles based their operations.
Like Brigid, Kane had dressed in a shadow suit over which he had worn a tired-looking denim jacket, jeans and boots. Dressed as such, he could pass among Hope’s locals with relative anonymity, although perhaps a perceptive individual might notice the proud way in which he carried himself, a vestige of his Magistrate training.
“Just wondering when it got so dark,” Kane finally said as he gazed out toward the beach, the sound of crashing waves carrying over the hubbub of the crowd. He didn’t really expect an answer.
Brigid scanned the dark sky, spying the pinpricks of light where the stars twinkled between the looming clouds. “It’s never that dark,” she assured Kane. “Not if you know where to look.”
In silence, Kane nodded his agreement as the line of locals continued to snake slowly into the church to collect the handouts the Cerberus team had brought.
They were military rations, many of them recovered from certain storage centers and redoubts that Kane had recalled from his time as a Magistrate. The rations had been acquired in a series of perfunctory raids.
“Guess we should be getting back inside,” Kane said, “before Grant thinks we’ve deserted him.”
Brigid’s straight white teeth glinted in the moonlight as she smiled. “Grant knows you’d never do that, Kane. The pair of you are pretty near inseparable.”
“He says that about you and me, you know,” Kane said as he stood.
“No, he says we’re insufferable,” Brigid corrected him, slapping her hand against Kane’s rear to brush off the dust that clung to him from the step.
Kane laughed as he made his way past the milling crowd, through the shadow-filled porch and back into the church hall. Within, the hall was lit with flaming torches held in sconces, and a line of people stood waiting for their turn to receive their allocated rations from the crates that Kane, Grant, Brigid and what passed for the local authorities had off-loaded from the Mantas earlier that day. Other volunteers from the local area helped, ladling bowls of soup and distributing bottles of clean water that had been filtered clear of contaminants by a pump system operating in the back room of the church. The pump continued to chug as volunteers added more water to its intake system.
The people of Hope seemed buoyant despite their current plight, and an all-pervading air of “getting on with it” appeared to be the order of the day.
With over five thousand starving people in the ville, the process of allocation based on need was slow but necessary. Many of the locals had arrived carrying bowls and buckets, sacks and carry-alls to obtain as much as they could for themselves and their struggling, starving families. But the two young men at the front of the line hadn’t brought bowls or bags to transport the ration bars and purified water. Instead, as Kane watched from the far side of the room, a sixth sense triggering in the back of his mind, the two young men produced a pair of snub-nosed handguns and jabbed them in the face of his partner, the ex-Mag called Grant.
Chapter 2
“Gun,” Kane snapped out in a harsh whisper, taking another step into the vast hall with Brigid just a pace behind him.
But before Kane and Brigid could venture farther into the busy church hall, several more people stepped from the ranks of the queuing locals and brought arms out from the hiding places within their dirty-looking clothes. People screamed and shouted, and everyone in the room dropped to the floor in unison as if struck by a massive weight. Kane stepped backward as he dropped, disguising himself within the shadows of the door. When he looked around he saw that Brigid Baptiste was just across from him, similarly lurking in the thick shadows cast by the porch of the antechamber, her body taut like a coiled spring.
“Hand over everything you’ve got left,” the leader shouted as he waved his snub-nosed .38 at Grant’s face, “or you’re going to be breathing out of a third nostril.”
“Oh, no, son,” Grant growled, “you don’t want to be pulling this shit with me.”
Grant was a huge man, with broad shoulders and dark skin. Though heavy, his body was entirely muscle, with not an ounce of fat in evidence. His black hair was cropped very close to his scalp, but he wore a luxurious gunfighter’s mustache. Right now, Grant wore a black undershirt and loose combat pants, while his Kevlar trench coat remained hanging over the back of a chair behind him. For this rare occasion, curse the damn luck, he had left his wrist-mounted Sin Eater automatic pistol in the secure locker of the Manta vehicle parked around the back of the church grounds.
The lead stick-up artist thrust the barrel of his pistol closer to Grant’s face, and he cocked the hammer with a sadistic sneer curling his lip. He was a young man, no older than seventeen by Grant’s estimate, and already he wore a fierce scar down the left side of his face, cutting a white streak through the dark stubble and red acne that covered his jaw. Grant’s dark eyes flicked across the room, noting the man’s accomplices in an instant before turning his attention back to their leader. They were all dressed in muted, unwashed clothes, and none of them looked to be much older than twenty, maybe twenty-five.
“I done fucks like you for just looking at me, man,” the leader announced through gritted teeth. “I’ll do everyone in this room if you fuck with me, you understand?”
Grant fixed his dark eyes on the bandit leader as, somewhere close to the door, a dog barked anxiously. “Oh, yeah,” he said softly, almost conspiratorially, “I understand.” Hands held loosely at his sides, Grant took a step back toward the open crate of rations. “You want me to hand them over one by one, or are you and your boyfriends going to come here and carry a crate out?”
The gunman glared at Grant, irritation on his frantic features as he considered his options. “You. You can carry it,” the man decided.
Grant snorted, his eyes still fixed on the nervous young gunman. “Can’t help you,” he explained. “This is a two-man job, buddy. You want to feel the weight of this bad boy if you don’t believe me.”
Irritated, the gunman spit a curse and strode toward the line of tables, stepping onto the nearest desk and clambering over it, his hollow boot heels echoing loudly against the wood like the clip-clopping of a horse. As he did so, Grant seized his opportunity, his leg snapping out and his foot slamming into the front of the table as the gunman climbed onto its surface.
The table’s legs screeched as they dragged across the floor with the impact of Grant’s powerful kick, and the gunman found himself toppling forward, losing his balance as the table disappeared from under him. The young man snapped off a shot at Grant, a bullet blasting toward the huge ex-Mag with a resounding crack, several people screaming in its wake.
Grant felt the bullet cut the air just past his ear, missing him by a quarter of an inch, but he was already rushing forward to meet his assailant. All around the church hall, the gunman’s allies were beginning to react, turning their own weapons on the man who had attacked their leader.
“Bunch of amateurs,” Kane muttered as he and Brigid readied themselves in their hiding place in the shadows of the porch. As the gunmen targeted Grant while he was safely protected behind the tumbling form of their leader, it gave Kane and Brigid ample opportunity to mount a surprise attack from the rear.
Over by the line of tables, Grant pumped his sledgehammer fist into the lead gunman’s thorax, knocking the man back up into the air as he continued to fall, driving the breath painfully from his throat. The gunman toppled sideways, crying out in pain as he slammed against the wooden floor with bone-shaking finality.
A trained ex-Mag like Kane, Grant was working on instinct now, and his leg snapped out once more to kick the snub-nosed .38 out of the gunman’s hand before he could bring it to bear. A stray bullet powered out from the pistol’s barrel as it flew out of the gunman’s hand and across the floor, embedding itself in the side of the water pump, water spraying everywhere.
As the gunman fell, his companions began blasting shots from their own weapons at Grant, peppering the wall behind the ex-Mag with shots as he leaped out of their path and rolled behind one of the tables. From his crouching position behind the scant protection of a desk, Grant extended the outstretched toe of his booted foot, hooking the nearby chair and scooting it across the floor toward him. His long Kevlar coat hung from the back, and Grant would need that if he was to make it through the next ten seconds alive.
Grant scanned the area to either side of him, seeing the other volunteers ducking behind the furniture as bullets drilled into the wall ahead. They looked frightened.
Abruptly the gunfire stopped. A moment later, Grant heard a voice from the other side of the desk as one of the gunmen spoke. “Richie?” the man shouted. “Richie, you okay, bro?”
Richie—the gunman whom Grant had knocked to the floor—groaned, his response something less than an actual word.
The speaker continued, issuing instructions to his people. “The guy went behind there. Ain
’t nowhere else for him to go. C’mon.”
The man was half right. Grant was trapped behind the desk, but he didn’t plan on going far. With a thought, he activated the hidden Commtact communication device that lay beneath his skin, subvocalizing his command. “Kane, back me up.”
Kane’s reply was a single, whispered “Copy.” That one word was carried through the pintels of the subdermal communicator and straight through Grant’s skull-casing as though the other man stood right beside him.
Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was 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, if a wearer went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact.
His brief exchange with Kane concluded, Grant was moving, leaping from cover and raising the Kevlar-weave coat out before him like a shield. The gunmen began firing instantly as Grant ran toward a nearby serving table, and he snapped the coat out at them, so that the long tails of heavy material whipped across the nearest thug’s face.
The gunman howled as the heavy coat struck him, leaving a red mark like a blush across his right cheek. He blasted another shot from the .357 Colt King Cobra in his hand. The gunman was distracted by the coat and the heavy bullet flew wide, allowing Grant to reach his objective.
Grant grabbed the handle of the pot of boiling soup, lifting it from the hot plate and tossing it out before him at the lead thug. As the angry gunman took another step toward Grant, the bubbling soup splashed across his face, scalding him like raking fire across his exposed flesh. In an instant, the gunman forgot what he was doing and toppled backward, reaching for his burning face as he hollered in his pain. Grant ignored him, leaping over the desk and flipping the half-empty soup pot out before him like an extension of his arm, a bowler rolling a bowling ball.