by James Axler
She peered around, recalling the rotten husk of concrete and wood that she had taken to sleeping in over the past few days. It had been a storage garage for cars once, a long time ago, before the nukecaust had rewritten the lives of people and buildings and things. Now it was just a square with a roof, its floor moldy, its Swiss-cheese walls inefficient at keeping the wind at bay. Still, it was safe, secluded and offered a respectable view of the surroundings simply by merit of being high on a sloping road overgrown with weeds. Rosalia had jury-rigged a sheet of corrugated aluminium for the door. The sheet itself had been the roof of another dwelling before the tidal wave had leveled so much of the town.
Belly-on-legs was barking repeatedly, a strained sound as though he was shouting himself hoarse. The mutt rushed back and forth, tail swishing angrily as he circled around and around before returning to a position by the propped-up, corrugated-aluminium door. Something was out there, in the street, and the dog either wanted it or feared it; Rosalia couldn’t tell which.
Confident that no one else had crept into the shelter with her, Rosalia silently made her way to the door, the soles of her shoes touching the concrete floor with the softness of a lover’s gentle kisses, her eyes fixed on a gap in the top right side of the makeshift doorway. As she got closer, the olive-skinned woman leaned down and placed her hand—the one without the knife—on the mutt’s head to calm him, stroking firmly between his ears. The dog yipped once before going quiet, its incessant barking giving way to a low growl from somewhere deep in its throat. The dog sensed something out there, perhaps a storm coming from the distance.
Warily, Rosalia peered through the gap in the door, dazzled for a moment by the brightness of the clear sky. Outside, a dirt track road ambled up the slope, bushes and stunted trees growing along its edges, weeds painting the road’s surface a putrid shade of green. Three children were playing at the edge of the road, rolling pebbles across a flat area they had marked out with a stick in some derivation of jacks or marbles. Beyond them, about fifty yards to Rosalia’s left, two women were talking, the volume of their conversation slipping as they dropped in snippets of gossip among the facts. Rosalia ignored them, turning her attention back to the children and then looking beyond, over the slope of the road. The dog at her side let out a plaintive whine.
There was a drop out there, where the edge of the roadway met the scrubland, and it fell in a sharp incline until it met another road parallel to this track, that one lined with run-down buildings from the original town along with the hideous in-fill of shanty dwellings. A half-dozen men were striding along that road, swiftly dismissing anyone who stepped into their path with a single gesture of their hands. It looked to Rosalia as if the hooded strangers were passing the locals money, but the transactions were so quick that she was certain that that could not be the case. Food, perhaps?
Rosalia’s eyes narrowed as she examined the group. There were six of them, dressed in similar clothes with ragged hooded cloaks that left their faces in shadow, much like her own. People with something to hide.
The dog at her side growled again, and Rosalia mumbled soothing words as she stroked his head, not bothering to take her attention away from the gap in the door. As one, the walkers turned like flocking birds, their pace unchanging, and they began to stride up the sharp incline toward the dirt track.
Could it be? Were they coming for her? Impossible. No one knew that she was here. No one knew who she was.
Face pressed close to the gap in the door, Rosalia noticed something else then, something subtle and yet peculiar—a handful of other people followed from the roads below. Unlike the initial group, these followers didn’t walk in step, but seemed more shambolic, almost as if they weren’t sure that they should follow or not. There were just four of them, Rosalia saw, poking their heads out from here and there, turning to follow the group like children playing follow-the-leader. It was uncanny.
Rosalia felt the dog stiffen beneath her grip, his muscles becoming as taut as the half-dozen walkers continued to climb the slope. Unconsciously, her own muscles clenched, too, and she felt her grip on the handle of the knife tighten until her knuckles were icy-white lines in the tanned olive skin of her hand.
As the striders came over the lip of the slope, Rosalia saw how low their hoods sat, covering their faces almost entirely so that only their mouths were visible. Each mouth was a grim slit, turned down in determination. They carried themselves in a certain manner, not like Magistrates but with an authority, a presence, that Rosalia found herself contemplating. The heavy weight to their stride suggested they had rocks for boots, as though they were made of stone, statues come to life. Behind them, more casually, the others followed, clambering up the slope as if heeding the call to Mecca.
The lead group strode onward, its steps in unison, passing through the children’s game, a casual kick of the leader’s foot scattering the pebbles that they had been playing with. The kick was not deliberate, it seemed, just another stride, as though these people were ignorant of their surroundings, only truly conscious of their destination. But the leader dropped something from his hand as he passed, and Rosalia watched as one of the children picked it up and placed it in his mouth.
And then the group walked straight toward where she hid in the wrecked garage, and Rosalia’s breath tripped, a near-silent noise that seemed somehow loud in the darkness. She stepped back, ducking from the gap in the makeshift door, turning her attention to her dog and holding his head still with both hands as she looked in its freakishly pale eyes. The mongrel tilted his long head slightly and let out the beginning of a whimper, but Rosalia shushed it.
“Not now, Mutt,” Rosalia whispered. “Keep quiet now or you’ll get us both killed.”
Curiously, the dog seemed to understand, for he went silent, looking at her with wide, anxious eyes the color of milk.
From outside, Rosalia could hear the group of six marching past, their footsteps in time like old-fashioned soldiers. She watched their long shadows cross the partition in the aluminium door, six heads moving across the bright gap in the darkness. And then they were gone.
Rosalia turned back to the door, one hand still patting at her dog’s head lest he begin his yapping again. He had never been a noisy dog, but when he got scared he got scared. Pressing her head to the gap in the doorway, the dark-haired woman peered outside. Out there, out in the dirt track street, the six walkers were continuing on their way, heading toward a break between buildings through which they strode, finally disappearing from Rosalia’s view.
It was an instinctive decision then, what they used to call female intuition or plain old gut instinct. Rosalia grabbed the small pouch of her belongings that lay on the floor—a tiny sewing kit that she had been using to repair a hole in her ragged cloak, two ration bars that she had remaining after her tussle in the street on the preceding night—and scampered back to the aluminium door on lightest tread, quietly encouraging the dog to follow.
“Come on, Belly-on-legs,” Rosalia cooed. “This is something.”
What that something was, she didn’t know. But as she drew back the temporary doorway a little farther and let the dog run ahead of her down the dirt track road, Rosalita was certain that it was the sort of something she would want to know all about.
DOMI’S NOSE TWITCHED AS she peered around her, her scarlet eyes narrowing. She was still in the makeshift drop-in surgery that her Cerberus field team had established, and Henny Johnson stood beside her, cleaning the oozing arm wound of a middle-aged woman who had been bitten by one of the rats that roamed the shanty ville. Domi glanced once at the woman’s weeping wound, assuring herself that Henny had the situation in hand, before stepping through the doorway and scanning the street.
Alongside Henny, Domi had spent much of the past hour or so patching wounds, administering tetanus shots and handing out vitamin supplements to malnourished locals. By her own admission, the albino woman had somewhat lost track of time, but it had been at least an hour since she ha
d suggested Edwards get himself some fresh air and clear his head.
So where was he?
Engaging her subdermal Commtact, Domi patched a message through to Edwards. “Edwards? You out there, big man?” she asked.
After thirty seconds of silence from the Commtact, Domi felt certain there would be no response. Something was up; it wasn’t just her Outlands-refined instincts playing tricks on her.
“Don’t take hour to clear head,” Domi muttered, slipping into abbreviated outlander argot despite herself.
The street was busy, an endless stream of people wandering along its length as they sought food or work or whatever it was refugees sought in places like Hope when there was clearly no food and no work. It stank, that cloying stench of human movement, the smell of sweat and bodily functions. A young woman hovered outside one of the shacklike dwellings, wearing a short, tight skirt and a sweat-stained top that strained at her breasts, a dark cloud of hair bursting from a grimy head-band that struggled to keep it free from her eyes. She was watching people wandering down the street, speaking now and then to some of the men who passed.
The dark-haired woman was what they used to call a gaudy slut—a prostitute—likely operating out of her own dwelling here in the butt end of a shanty ville. And, like all street people, the prostitute was probably more aware of the comings and goings around here than most.
Domi approached the street girl, gazing at the taller woman for a moment in open admiration. The prostitute turned, and Domi smiled as the woman literally jumped.
“Whoa, shit!” the woman spit. “Don’t sneak up on me like that, freak.”
“I need some help,” Domi explained, ignoring the casual insult.
The taller woman appraised her for a long moment, looking the slender albino up and down as though eyeing the competition. “What’s with the white skin?” the woman asked.
Domi ignored the question, moving the conversation along. “I’m looking for a friend of mine,” she explained. “About six-two, thirties, Caucasian—”
The street girl interrupted, a confused moue shaping her lips. “What’s Caucasian?”
“Means he’s white-skinned,” Domi clarified.
“Like you?” the prostitute asked.
“No,” Domi said. “Normal white, like you.”
“Pink,” the girl said. “Why didn’t you just say that?”
Tamping down her irritation, Domi ignored the comment and continued with her description of Edwards. “My friend was wearing an olive undershirt and pants, has a shaved head and his ear’s all mangled like this.” Domi folded her right ear over so that the top was crumpled. “Have you seen him?”
The street walker nodded, a smile appearing on her face. Domi saw then that one of the woman’s upper canines was missing when she smiled, and her other teeth had been set crookedly, either a birth defect or after some especially poor dental work. “Tall guy, real big,” the woman said. “Quite a honey, I’m guessing. Yeah, I seen him. Remember his ear, piece of shittin’ work that was. What happened?”
“He took a bullet,” Domi explained swiftly. “Now, he went off about an hour ago, maybe a little longer. Did you see where he went?”
“Sure, he passed here and went off down that way,” the street girl said, pointing down the winding street in the rough direction of the sea. “Broad shoulders on that honey. I watched him go down there until he turned by the cart there—you see it?”
Domi saw an old wooden cart slumped to one side where one wheel was missing. “Thanks,” Domi said, and she left the woman to ply her trade.
The cart was about thirty yards along the street, and when she reached it Domi saw there was a rusting cage atop it where chickens were kept, clucking and blurting at random as they wandered about their cramped prison, in the way that chickens will. Her nose wrinkled as she stood by the cart, smelling the acrid stench of birds’ fecal matter that spattered the floor of the chicken cage.
As Domi looked around, a man appeared, a dirty red fez propped on his head at a jaunty angle, puffing at a cigarette in a long plastic holder. “You like chicken?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” Domi replied, dismissing the man as she looked all around.
Another lopsided alleyway crawled up a slope that led toward the beachfront ville of Hope itself, and Domi stood there, looking at it for ten seconds, wondering just what to do.
“You like egg?” the man in the fez asked, stepping before the shorter Domi’s field of vision, an ingratiating smile on his tobacco-stained teeth.
“No, thank you,” Domi said with rising irritation as she struggled to peer around the street trader.
The alleyway leading up was where the prostitute had indicated. Perhaps Edwards was up there. Domi could ask around, but the trail was an hour old and already going cold.
“You don’t like chicken, you don’t like egg?” the man in the fez asked, blowing out a plume of smoke from his lips. “What you eat?”
Domi looked at him, a feral smile appearing on her ghostlike face. “People,” she told him, her red eyes glaring.
The man in the fez hat suddenly found something more pressing that required his attention, and he couldn’t apologize fast enough as he disappeared back inside his falling-down shack.
Domi shook her head, muttering something nonsensical under her breath. She was being paranoid. Edwards had gone off to clear his head, bullet-bitten ear and all. Surely an ex-Magistrate like Edwards could take care of himself.
Chapter 12
“Huge” was an understatement, Clem realized a second later, as he saw an incredible form rush toward them through the tiny slit of window in the rear of Grant’s Manta craft. It looked like a swinging column of darkness, a vast line cleaving the water amid the dimness of the undersea crater.
Piloting the vehicle, Grant banked to port, turning the sleek craft over on itself as he avoided the thing he could see on the scopes. “Hang on back there, Clem,” he instructed as he maneuvered away from the colossal creature that was hurtling at them through the ocean.
Kane’s voice came to Grant over their linked Commtacts. “What’s going on down there?” Kane demanded. “Just saw you take a sudden dive.”
“We’ve got company,” Grant summarized. “Big company.”
As Clem was jostled about in the backseat of the Manta craft, he struggled to get a better look at the thing that had surged toward them out of the shadows. Even in the near-total darkness of the crater, he could see that it was colossal, comparable in size to buildings, not living creatures.
“Any idea what that thing is, Clem?” Grant shouted to his shipmate, raising his voice now over the straining sounds of the air pulse engine as it struggled to power them through the swift evasion maneuvers that he was running through. Up became down as they banked once more as the vast shadow swung toward them through the darkness, the waters churning in its wake.
“I can barely see it,” Clem admitted, peering fretfully as the huge shadow rushed at them through the ocean gloom. “I’m not sure, but the size of it…could be a whale or…” He stopped then, watching the huge thing get bigger still as it came at them once more.
“Or?” Grant prompted, flipping the Manta over to avoid the huge creature that plowed toward them on the scope.
In that moment, Clem and Grant both realized that the thing that came at them had been merely a limb. Behind it a hulking shadow maneuvered through the darkness of the crater, powering itself through the ocean currents. The limb itself was the size of a building, it was like trying to navigate around a swinging skyscraper tossed at them from the ocean bed. And as for the creature behind that limb—neither of them wanted to guess at its size.
“Or it could be prehistoric,” Clem finished finally, the words sounding uncertain even to his own ears.
The sensor readouts in Grant’s heads-up display were going insane. Lights flashed and information scrolled so fast that he could barely take it in before a new blip of information vied for his attention.
“Kane,” Grant barked, once again engaging the Commtact within his skull, “are you seeing this?”
STRAPPED IN THE PILOT seat of his Manta, Kane gripped the control stick, fighting for control as the backwash of the huge creature’s movements threatened to send his own craft into a deadly spin.
“I’m trying to get to higher ground,” Kane spit in reply to Grant’s question, “but we’re getting tangled up in the backwash.”
Even as he said it, the engines whined and Kane found his Manta circling in a spin, almost entirely beyond his control.
“Dammit,” Kane growled, “pull up, damn you.”
Despite the safety harness he wore, Kane was slammed against the side of the craft as it hurtled through the ocean, entirely out of his control for a dangerously prolonged instant as it was swept up in the vicious current generated by the movement of the monstrous creature ahead of him. From behind, Kane could hear Brigid shouting something, her words unintelligible over the sounds of the straining engines. The heads-up display was flashing contradictory information, too, a blur of shapes and identifier tags popping up in strobelight flashes before fizzing out again to be replaced by something new.
Kane wrestled with the control yoke, yanking it against the pull of the ocean current, urging the Manta out of its fearsome spin and back to a straight course. Ahead, he saw the outline of the sea creature, its shape drawn in glowing lines by the Manta’s powerful sensor equipment. With no reference point, it was hard for Kane to accurately assess the creature’s size, but he could guess it was well over two hundred yards from tip to tail, roughly the length of a Cobaltville block.