INFERNO (New Perdition's Gate Omnibus Edition)

by James Somers

  Sparks leaped away in a spasm of electrical current arcing between the H9’s neck joint and a fractured armor plate hanging open on the left side of its skull. Still, the mechanical beast rose from the ground and started after them again—slower, but gaining speed. Jason grabbed a magnetic grenade, throwing it straight up at the ceiling of the tunnel. He ran, pulling Chloe after him. Out of twelve people, the H9 had killed them all except himself, Chloe and Solomon. Only Heaven knew where Alfred was at this point.

  The H9 stalked after him, but hadn’t quite reached the grenade when it went off. The roof exploded downward into the tunnel, filling it with earth and structural debris in less than a second. The robot remained on the other side of the blockage, a trick Jason had employed against his own Counterpart, Alfred, when Wraith’s implanted subroutine had taken control of him. However, the three of them were now entombed with no way out.

  DISCOVERED

  “Back here!” Solomon called from the darkness.

  Jason and Chloe picked themselves up from the ground where the grenade blast had left them. “Come on,” Jason said as he helped her up. They both walked back through the darkness toward Solomon standing next to a closed metal door—the only one in the dead end corridor they had come to.

  “Where does it go?” Chloe asked her father.

  Solomon tried to budge it, but found it jammed. “I’m not sure,” he said. “We never had any reason to explore beyond the wreckage that had closed this area off.”

  Jason and Solomon both tried to budge the door. It moved only slightly and stopped. “Stand back,” Solomon said. He switched his ammunition selector back to armor piercing rounds and fired into the door, sweeping an oval pattern into the metal from top to bottom. One swift kick of his boot smashed the metal in. Solomon passed through with his gun leading the way. Jason and Chloe waited for his “all clear.” Behind them, Jason heard the sounds of the H9 trying to get through the debris barrier.

  Jason followed Chloe through the doorway. “What have you got?”

  Solomon stood on the opposite side of the small room before an arch leading down another corridor. “Maybe our ticket out of this mess,” he said.

  The room appeared to be a makeshift barracks. Several torn cots lay in pieces against one wall. A urinal, dirt stained with half of its elongated porcelain bowl lying in pieces on the floor, stood as sentry near the door they had come in by.

  “The H9 is trying to get through,” Jason said. “We’d better get moving fast.”

  Solomon nodded and passed into the corridor beyond. Chloe followed her father with Jason bringing up the rear. He tried again to reach Alfred, but received only static for his efforts. If they were lucky only one robot had come down into the tunnels. More likely, however, this wasn’t the only one they would be forced to deal with…and H9s were extraordinarily difficult to deal with.

  The corridor lights returned as they rounded another turn. Hope filled Jason as they emerged from near total darkness. Solomon kept going, leading them onward around more twists, turns and intersections. Jason tapped his visor in order to deactivate his night vision and turned in every direction, as he followed the others, to be sure no one was pursuing them or waiting in the many shadows to ambush them.

  The tunnel lights flickered. Solomon stopped and held up his hand for the others to hold. The LED lighting failed altogether, plunging them into darkness again. But this time when they tried to activate their night vision, they found that it was no longer functioning. “Some sort of dampening field,” Solomon said.

  “Electromagnetic pulse maybe?” Chloe added.

  “But that would also knock out the H9,” Jason said.

  A fire ignited in Solomon’s hand. “Nothing like a good old flare, eh?”

  Jason smiled. No wonder this guy had always been considered the best. He never went unprepared for any contingency.

  Solomon began moving down the tunnel again—this time more cautiously. They came upon a long portion of intersecting tunnel. All directions led away into darkness. “What do you think?” he asked Jason.

  “We’ve taken so many twists and turns, it’s hard to know which direction we’d be going,” he said. “You don’t happen to have a manual compass somewhere?”

  “No,” Solomon said.

  “But I do,” Chloe chimed in. She removed a small plastic disc encasing a red needle, ever trying to orient itself to magnetic north.

  Jason pointed to their left. “That’s west, which should put us heading toward Jerusalem.”

  Solomon agreed. They began to jog down the tunnel in that direction with Solomon and his flare leading the way. Fifty feet down the tunnel they intersected another branch. Solomon swung the flare to either direction to be sure nothing was there. Nothing. They moved on.

  Jason kept his rifle at the ready, doing his best to guard their rear despite the darkness and their equipment failure. Another one hundred feet brought them to another four way intersection. Solomon swung the flare to his left with his gun aiming in the same direction. At first, he saw nothing. Then a dim shape appeared on the ground. He took a step towards it in order to make out what it was.

  A bloody arm, severed nearly at the shoulder, lay there on the ground. Another step closer revealed Ramirez’s body slumped halfway against the wall—his lifeless, half-lidded eyes mocking their decision to come down this end of the tunnel. Solomon swung around to face Chloe and Jason, his face now showing his worst fears realized.

  The halo of light passed over Chloe and Jason, revealing a mechanized terror standing right behind them. Solomon’s eyes revealed the danger to them. Jason spun with his gun ready, but the H9 was too fast for him. The robot battered the assault rifle away and lunged forward, grabbing Jason up by the neck so that his feet dangled above the ground.

  Solomon tried to attack, but the H9 knocked him into the wall. Chloe aimed her rifle, but stopped, realizing acid rain capsules would kill Jason.

  A pale blue laser swept over Jason face as the robot raised him up to eye level. Jason gasped for breath, trying to keep a grip on the mechanical arm in order to stop his own weight from snapping his neck. There was no breaking the iron grip he was held in. No way to even cry out for help had there been anyone who could actually stop the automaton. In seconds, the H9 would terminate him. It would all be over. He only regretted that he hadn’t told Chloe how he had come to feel about her.

  Wraith tried to extract himself from under a cabinet which had fallen across his torso during the earthquake. He could hear others in the room apparently recovering from unconsciousness as well. In the half light left by the power outage it was hard to tell where people were in the conference room.

  Kolski, one of his personal bodyguards, appeared and helped to lift the heavy steel cabinet away so Wraith could get up. He didn’t bother to thank the man who likely wasn’t expecting him to anyway. Across the confined space, he saw his other bodyguard holding the side of his head where something had crashed into his skull and left a nasty gash. Jacob Stein was pulling himself out from under the table. But Oliver Theed stood in the middle of the room as though nothing could possibly happen to him unless he willed it to.

  Wraith’s auricular receiver chimed, alerting him to an incoming message. “Receive,” he said.

  “H9 Counterpart, number three-two-seven, reporting, sir,” the robot said. “I have apprehended the fugitive, Jason Night, in a tunnel near the Jerusalem perimeter.”

  Wraith could hardly contain his excitement. “Is he still alive?”

  “Yes, sir,” the H9 said passively. “The fugitive Solomon Gauge is also here, sir.”

  Wraith ground his teeth. His day had finally come. “Kill Gauge immediately, but bring Jason Night to me.”

  “As you command, sir.”

  The H9 stood in the tunnel with Jason still held in its unrelenting grip. For whatever reason, the robot had yet to kill him after nearly fifteen seconds. Solomon and Chloe stood with their rifles trained unsure how to prevent Jason’s de
ath.

  The robot moved. Twin gun barrels rose from the beast’s right forearm. Jason remained lodged in its left hand, still suspended in the air. The H9 took aim at Solomon, a red laser site zeroing in on his chest. Chloe, only half realizing what was about to happen, pushed herself in front of her father to protect him.

  With a blur, flash and bang, the H9 stumbled into the wall. Alfred leaped on top of the shiny monster, still wearing his holographic human disguise, smashing his heel down onto the other robot’s wrist. The servos in the H9’s forearm reacted, opening its hand. Jason rolled onto the ground as the H9 drove a fist into Alfred’s armored chest.

  He toppled backward into the tunnel wall. The light of the flare, now lying on the tunnel floor, was the only thing allowing any of the humans to see what was happening. As the H9 got back to its feet, Alfred leaped knees first into its chest, bringing down both elbows onto the sides of its head. Sparks leaped away as he held fast, knees clamped down around its neck, driving elbow after elbow across its metal skull almost faster than Jason or the others could see.

  Still, with the fight raging into the intersection of the tunnel, they couldn’t run the way they needed in order to reach their exit in Jerusalem. All they could do was hope that Alfred came out the victor in the titanic struggle. The H9 tried in vain to pull Alfred off of his perch. Instead, the robot toppled over, as Alfred’s added weight and his monstrous pummeling forced it off balance. The H9 landed on its back with Alfred still hammering its skull. A dented piece of armor plating finally fell away and Alfred drove his hand down into the H9’s mechanical brain, tearing apart anything his fingers could find. The H9 became still as the light died in its optics.

  Jason was still massaging his throat and trying to get his breath when Alfred stood over his kill. “I’m sorry I was delayed. Are you all right, sir?”

  Jason coughed and walked over to pat the automaton on the shoulder. “Alfred, this is one of the many times that I’ve never been so glad to see you in all my life.”

  Alfred gave him a quirky confused look. “I’ll take that as a compliment then, sir.”

  “Amazing moves, Alfred,” Chloe said as she gave him a peck on his holographic cheek.

  “Muay Thai, actually,” he said.

  “I guess if you build a humanoid robot, it will have similar weaknesses,” Solomon said as he ignited another flare from a pack tucked into his thigh pocket. “We’d better get moving. That H9 could have been transmitting.”

  “Was transmitting, I’m afraid,” Alfred interrupted.

  “Did you catch it?” Jason asked.

  “The transmission was heavily encrypted, sir. However, the fact that the H9 saw you leads me to believe Babylon knows you and Solomon are alive and on your way into Jerusalem.”

  “Then we should turn back?” Chloe said.

  Solomon shook his head. “Max is still in the city and there’s no telling what kind of shape our base is in after that quake. I’m not going to leave him when there’s a chance he made it through alive. Jason, you take Chloe back with you—”

  “Oh no,” Chloe said, cutting him off. “Max is like family to me too. If you’re going, I’m going.”

  Jason smiled. “And Nightstalker makes three.” He turned to Alfred. “You’re back on point. Just don’t leave us, in case we come upon any more of those things.”

  Alfred nodded and began jogging down the dark tunnel toward their exit point nearly a mile away. Jason, Chloe and Solomon each took a flare and followed after him, moving as quickly as they dared, each of them hoping Babylon didn’t know they were coming.

  AFTERSHOCK

  Wraith waited, but the H9 did not respond. “H9 three-two-seven, report! Have you killed Solomon Gauge? Do you have Jason Night?”

  Static.

  “Bungled again, Agent Wraith?” Oliver Theed asked with a knowing laugh. “The real Theed must have been a proud parent indeed.”

  Wraith shot him a dangerous look. “He was no more a father than you,” he said. Wraith had allied himself with this imposter because the man was powerful. Others might believe him to be the Devil himself, but he wasn’t falling for religious nonsense. Though he may have feared his father, for reasons he still couldn’t sort out, Wraith did not fear this clone of the man.

  Oliver’s attention had already focused on Jacob Stein standing next to him in the dark with a flashlight. “How long before we get some blasted power in here?” he bellowed.

  “We had better see about getting back to the Temple, Master,” Jacob said. “Your people will want to hear your voice and be reassured that you are well and there for them.”

  Oliver smiled wryly. “Yes, my children need guidance.” He and Jacob walked out of the room, but not before leaving Wraith with a final instruction. “I want more Christians found and executed. Step up your progress, Agent Wraith. The people need to see my government taking action. Night and Gauge are nothing. Your private vendettas can wait.”

  Wraith stood there looking at his men, Kolski and Bennett. “Get Rogue on the horn. Night and Gauge are here in Jerusalem and I want them.”

  “But sir,” Kolski began before thinking better of it. “Yes, sir.”

  Night had fully come, by the time Jason, Chloe and Solomon surfaced inside Jerusalem’s heavily guarded perimeter. Alfred stood next to the metal carcass of another robot. This one had been an H3. Although it had clearly been modified, the robot remained an obsolete model. Alfred had had little difficulty destroying it. “I’m surprised Theed is using these old bots,” Chloe said as she investigated Alfred’s handiwork.

  “An H3 is still more than capable of stopping a human,” Alfred reminded her. “And the perimeter these robots are guarding is quite large.”

  “He’s been forced to use what he has available,” Solomon added.

  “Which way to Max and the others?” Jason asked.

  Solomon scanned the immediate area. “This way. Follow me.”

  The quake had done a great deal of damage to Jerusalem, but more so as they approached the Old City. Here the destruction had been severe. Buildings had spilled across the roads and into one another like tumbled dominos. More than once, their quartet had been forced to negotiate around a jagged open rift in the earth.

  A curfew was currently in effect. Alfred had alerted them to the presence of more robots patrolling the area. They had sought refuge in quake damaged structures several times. Solomon eventually managed to get them to the place where Max should have been.

  The Christian Underground had converted a condemned sewage plant building into one of their network hubs. The plant had given them access to many tunnels beneath the city which had fallen into disuse.

  “We’ve gotten a lot of people out of Jerusalem through this place,” Solomon said as he stood scanning what was left of the building. “The persecution has only gotten worse over the past months. How will we get them out now?”

  The roof had collapsed in on the interior of the structure with more than one wall tumbling after it. Smoke rose from the broken shell of the two-story building. No fires were apparent. Jason sighed and looked at Chloe. No one would have survived.

  “Maybe they were able to get to the tunnels?” she proposed.

  “Worse, they could be trapped inside them,” Jason added.

  Solomon, gaining some hope, rushed toward the building through the darkened street, leaping over piles of debris in order to get inside. Chloe followed. Jason waited.

  Alfred had been patrolling the surrounding streets for them and was just returning. His perceptor tech had been set so that the robot appeared nearly invisible. The hologram warped his surroundings to appear as though light were passing through him. This image changed as he approached Jason, morphing back to a younger version of his usual middle-aged British man.

  Jason thought how strange he looked like that. Alfred stopped and lowered his rifle.

  “Must be nice, never getting tired,” Jason said.

  “Only one of many advantages, sir.�
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  “What did you find?” Jason asked.

  “Two streets over,” Alfred said. “There is an armed party moving in this direction.”

  “Theed’s soldiers?”

  “They are wearing IDF uniforms,” Alfred explained, “but since the IDF has been officially disbanded in favor of Theed’s personal security force, I would say it’s likely.”

  “They’re probably just searching for survivors, or maintaining the curfew,” Jason proposed.

  “Or they might be searching for us,” Alfred countered. “That H9 was definitely in contact with someone. Unfortunately, I was unable to decode its encryption. However, we can be sure that it had enough time to identify you and possibly Solomon. As former Babylon agents and highly wanted men, your identities and location would have been immediately transmitted back to its superior.”

  “And then to Theed,” Jason added.

  “We must hurry, if we intend to avoid a firefight.”

  Jason pointed toward the sewage plant. “This is where Chloe and Solomon think Max should be, if he survived the quake. We’d better see if we can help. We might need your strength if anyone has been trapped beneath the wreckage.”

  Alfred and Jason ran across the street into the darkened building. Jason activated his night-vision which seemed to be working again now that they were away from the H9. They passed beneath an arch of rubble, barely held up by two support columns that had fallen toward one another.

  Inside, they quickly found Chloe and her father kneeling next to a collapsed wall. Solomon was holding the hand of someone pinned beneath the wreckage. As Jason and Alfred walked up to them, he noticed Solomon finishing a prayer. He looked up at Jason with a tear rolling down his cheek. He wiped it away quickly.