by James Axler
The midday heat of the Spanish sun was enough to knock both of them out, however, so instead of exploring the city Grant and Shizuka had spent a restful few hours just catching up with each other, tracing the familiar curves of one another’s bodies before indulging in a late-afternoon swim in the hotel’s pool. Now, at a little before 8:00 p.m., the pair made their way toward their destination, a small café that became a restaurant when the sun set.
As the chill of the approaching night began to make itself felt, Grant and Shizuka strolled past a Roman theater, a series of stepped levels organized around a semicircle where ancient actors had once performed. Now it was a little tribute to those long-forgotten days, where only the occasional play might still be performed for a specific celebration or anniversary.
The sky had turned a pleasing shade of indigo when they found the restaurant, Shizuka still aggrieved that they were late. The owner—a large-bellied, red-faced man with a graying mustache and ragged, curly hair—did not mind their tardiness. It seemed that that was very much the culture of this city. “Time,” he told them in ebullient Spanish, “is whatever you make it, and you may make of that what you will.”
Inside, the restaurant was softly lit with candlelit tables and floor-length windows that were open along a side that faced into an alleyway to allow a through breeze to keep the place cool. As they were shown to their table, Grant squeezed Shizuka’s hand, and she looked up at him. He said nothing, but his look seemed to say, Look at this place. Look at all the wonderful things out here for us to enjoy. It was a world away from the one they knew.
And so they ate, unaware of what was occurring barely a block away.
* * *
AFTER FOOD CAME DANCING. Grant jokingly tried to swear off, claiming he was too full of paella to move, but Shizuka shot him a look that could leave no doubt as to why she was the ultimate authority in New Edo.
“You will dance and you will enjoy it,” she said.
“I will dance and you will enjoy it,” Grant corrected with a mischievous, boyish grin.
They made their way down the alleyway that ran beside the restaurant, passing parked vehicles and other couples enjoying the city’s nightlife. Spain was a country of night people, the heat of the day too fierce to enjoy. Now the burning heat had turned to a refreshing night breeze, and Shizuka rubbed her bare arms as they crossed a junction and made their way toward the grand hotel that was their destination.
From outside, the grand, four-story building was awash with lights, its windows burning brightly in the darkness.
“There’s a dance hall inside,” Grant explained. “I hear it can be quite an experience.”
Shizuka smiled as she looked up at her taller companion, her face alive with delight.
Even from here, a dozen yards from the steps that led to the open front doors, they could hear the strains of a band, acoustic guitars rushing through some local number at furious speed, maracas click-clacking to keep time as the tune hurtled toward its finale, a blur of tumbling notes and riffs.
Grant and Shizuka hurried up the steps, a spring in Shizuka’s step as she led her lover through the lobby toward the grand ballroom, which dominated the hotel’s ground floor. Grant stopped momentarily to tip the doorman before dashing after Shizuka as she reached for the double doors into the ballroom itself, the strains of a flamenco emanating loudly from within.
Grant reached for Shizuka, wrapping one muscular arm around her and pulling her close as she pulled one door open. “I love you,” he said as he brought Shizuka’s face close to his own.
“I love you, too, my bravest one,” Shizuka told him before kissing him on the lips.
Then the pair turned back to the doors that were swinging open where Shizuka had pulled their handles. The hurtling notes of the furious flamenco became suddenly louder, twin guitars racing through notes as if trying to outpace one another, the maracas chattering like an insect swarm, a woman’s voice melodically reciting in a foreign tongue. But what lay beyond was enough to stop the two warriors in their tracks.
The ballroom was vast with an ornate ceiling and richly decorated walls, each carving lit by a flickering candle or the low, shaded light of a bulb. To one corner, the band was playing, four men in dinner jackets and a female singer with luxurious, dark hair tied up tight to her head with a flower clipped there and wearing a wispy dress the rich red of rose petals.
But no one was dancing. Instead, perhaps a dozen couples, dressed in their most beautiful clothes—the women’s dresses cut to accentuate their curves, the men’s suits cut to hide their own—were hanging from the ceiling in rows, each couple lined up together, two dozen nooses wrapped around two dozen necks, their feet swaying a few feet above the perfectly sprung wooden floor.
Grant and Shizuka stared at the scene in absolute horror. And suddenly a city of half a million people felt very, very empty.
Chapter 2
Grant could tell the twenty-four bodies hanging from the rafters of the ballroom were freshly deceased. He had experienced death from close up many times in his action-filled life and felt no need to shy away from it.
Beside him, Grant heard Shizuka gasp. She, too, had seen death, had dealt it at the tip of her katana sword. But this—this was something unexpected, something exceptional.
A forest of taut necks and sagging bodies hung before them, feet still twitching, tongues lolling out from faces that were strained red with pain, eyes open in accusation.
Grant took a step forward, then turned to the quintet who continued to play their whirling, racing music. “Can you all stop playing?” he shouted to them, striding across the room through the swaying human stalactites.
The band continued for several bars before its players finally brought the music to an abrupt stop. The woman singer in her rose-red dress seemed poised to say something, or perhaps to sing, and looked aggrieved as she watched Grant stalk across the room toward her.
“What happened here?” Grant demanded. “Why did they do this? When did they do this? Did you see?”
The singer stared at Grant, a flash of challenge in her dark eyes. Challenge and confusion, as if he had intruded on her dreams.
“You understand me?” Grant asked. “¿Lo entiendes?” he repeated the question in Spanish as his Commtact helpfully translated in his ear.
“Grant—look!” Shizuka called from where she remained at the front of the room close to the open doors.
Grant turned to her, then spun, following where she was pointing. A pair of double doors stood at the far end of the room, identical to the ones through which Grant and Shizuka had entered. There, through the open doors, three figures were moving swiftly down a hotel corridor, away from the scene. It could be nothing, Grant knew, but he wasn’t one to pass up a lead. Years of Magistrate training had taught him to investigate everything.
Grant ran, sprinting through the room toward the far set of doors. As he ran he called back to Shizuka, “Wait here and get the hotel people on this,” he said. “See if you can help any of these people—if they can still be helped.”
With that, Grant was gone, leaving Shizuka standing in a room full of swaying bodies, the band watching her with what seemed to be almost feral looks.
* * *
GRANT SPRINTED THROUGH the open doors and out into the corridor. The corridor was underlit, and it was decorated in luscious, dark colors with a small side table and two chairs resting against a wall. Grant glanced behind him as he chased after the rapidly disappearing figures and realized that the corridor turned in a right angle back there to wrap around the ballroom, and presumably back to the hotel reception. It probably functioned primarily as a service corridor, which staff used by way of shortcut between the kitchens and the public parts of the hotel.
A bellhop in a white jacket was just rounding the corner holding a tray of empty glasses, and his face became alarmed as he spotted Grant appear through the doors to the ballroom.
“¡Hey!” the bellhop shouted in Spanish as he
spotted Grant.
Grant ignored him, scrambling along the corridor toward the retreating figures. There were three of them—two men led by a woman. The men had coffee-colored skin and were muscular and bare chested. They wore dark pants and boots. One of them seemed to have tattoos across his back, painted there in dark patches like beetles running across his skin. Two steps ahead of them, a curvaceous woman was stepping toward another door on six-inch heels. Grant saw the dazzle of the streetlight that was situated just outside when she pushed against it—and realized that it led out into the street. Glanced in the half-light of the service corridor, the woman appeared to be dressed for carnival, with a towering headdress swaying high over her head, and a plume of white feathers attached to her butt, swinging back and forth like a pendulum with every movement of her legs.
“Hey—wait up!” Grant called, scrambling along the corridor after the figures. He did not know if they had had anything to do with the scene in the ballroom, but he could only rule that out if he spoke to them.
The bare-chested men halted to let the woman slip out through the door before them. As they did so, they both turned back at Grant’s call, and he saw them more clearly in the artificial light streaming in from the street. They had shaved heads and grimly fixed expressions. And, strangely, from this distance it appeared that their eyes were blank, white orbs, like hard-boiled eggs without their shells.
“Stop!” Grant ordered, using the same tone of voice he had employed in his days giving orders as a Magistrate.
The two men ignored Grant and stepped out through the doorway. Why shouldn’t they—he had no authority here.
But Grant was determined. He dashed down the corridor and through the door before it could slam closed behind the disappearing party, shoving it open again as he stepped through.
He was in a back alley, six feet in width—just wide enough for a land wag. There were garbage cans out here and the alleyway stretched off around the edge of the hotel building, a streetlight blazing right into Grant’s face. Grant turned left and right and spotted the three figures as they trotted off down the alleyway and slipped into another side passage, the woman’s tail of white feathers bouncing up and down with every step.
Grant followed, chasing the strangely dressed trio as they disappeared from view. As he turned the corner into a narrower alleyway, he had a flash of premonition—the old instincts from his Magistrate days kicking in. He dipped his head, tucking it into his shoulders. As he did so, something came hurtling at him from the narrow alley between the tall buildings, whizzing just over his ducked head before impacting against the far wall in a shower of sparks as metal met brick.
Grant lurched aside, his right arm darting ahead to slap against the opposite wall as he sped after his quarry. It was at times like this that Grant regretted not coming armed. Behind him, he heard something metallic drop against the paving slabs with a low tinker like a falling paint tin lid—it was whatever had been tossed at him.
Up ahead, the trio turned again, and this time Grant saw as one of the men—the one with those eerie tattoos—plucked something small, circular and shiny from his waistband before drawing his arm back, ready to throw it. The object was roughly the size of a compact disc, and it hurtled toward Grant at incredible speed.
Grant stepped to the side, pressing himself against the wall as the silvery disc zipped by. In that moment he had a clear view of the woman where a streetlamp illuminated her, but only for an instant. She was stunning—olive-skinned with an oval face framed by long dark hair that cascaded to midway down her spine. Her skintight dress, the colour of a purple bruise, hugged every line of her lithe body like liquid before fraying at the hips into torn strips that fluttered all the way down to her ankles. Behind this, a cascade of white feathers fluttered at her rear like a peacock’s fan. But it was her headgear that was most impressive—rising almost eighteen inches above her head. The piece was designed like twin horns, entwining one another in a complex web of twists and turns. Grant had the sudden feeling that the stag-like horns were somehow made from bone.
In the microsecond it took Grant to register all of this, the second dark-skinned man worked the door to a building on the alleyway, and suddenly the three figures disappeared inside.
Grant gave chase again, reaching the door a fraction of a second after it had closed. It was a fire door, he realized then, completely smooth with no provision given to opening it from this side. Which raised the question of just how the hell these people had managed to open it.
But that was only one of the many questions racing through Grant’s mind at that instant. Grant hammered against the door for a few seconds, but no one responded. He looked around him, taking in the narrow alleyway as if for the first time. Three- and four-story buildings stood to either side of him, dark windows peering out onto the narrow passage, a sliver of indigo sky visible between them like an upturned river. Grant wondered where the doorway led, but there was no obvious entrance farther along the wall.
As he peered up and down the alleyway, Grant spotted something lying at the edge of the door. It was a feather, presumably from the woman’s train. Leaning down, Grant picked it from the sill of the door, lifting it closer to study it. As he did so he felt its sharp edge cut him across his thumb, just like a paper cut, and he winced. The feather was eight inches long and almost two inches wide, goose white with a pale stem. But there was red at the edges of the feather, and as Grant held it, the red spread before his eyes. In a matter of seconds, the feather had turned from purest white to a dark, bloodred.
Grant studied the feather a moment longer before slipping it into the pocket of his jacket. He had lost the strange group by now, and he was woefully aware that he had left Shizuka alone in the hotel ballroom with the hanging bodies and the eerily playing band.
“Dammit,” he cursed, turning back the way he had come. As he retraced his steps, Grant plucked up both of the metal discs that had been launched at him by the men. They were four inches across with sharp, jagged edges, a little like buzz saws. Studying them as he retraced his steps, Grant couldn’t help but wonder what on Earth he and Shizuka had managed to walk into.
* * *
WHILE GRANT WAS chasing after the mysterious figures, back at the hotel, Shizuka rapidly enlisted several members of staff to assist in untying or cutting down the dancers who were hanging from the ceiling.
“Alert the authorities,” Shizuka told a porter as he dragged a chair over from the wall to help her untie the first victim.
The porter looked mystified, and Shizuka repeated her request. “Authorities. Police.”
“Policía,” the porter repeated, nodding in understanding. He hurried off, and a few seconds later Shizuka could hear him having a hurried discussion with the hotel receptionist before he returned with more help.
It took four of them almost two minutes to get everyone down from the ceiling, and Shizuka spent the whole of that time asking aloud for anyone to speak up if they could hear her while the receptionist translated the question in Spanish. Three of the hanging figures gurgled strained responses through the pressure of the nooses, and Shizuka ensured that they were the first she assisted down from their grisly positions.
The five-piece band remained dazed by what they saw here, Shizuka noticed, as if they had only just awoken—except in this case, the nightmare was all too real.
Despite her lack of Spanish skills, Shizuka managed to take charge and organize everyone, and it was not long before all of the previously hanging figures had been brought back down to the floor. A doctor who was staying at the hotel was found and called upon to check over the grisly scene. He was a portly man in his late forties who had been enjoying an after-dinner drink in the hotel bar, and he was efficient and calm as he looked over the ballroom’s occupants. Over two-thirds of the figures were already dead; just seven had survived, and of those only two could speak.
The receptionist, a bottle blonde with dark roots showing, pretty and scarcely out of her t
eens by Shizuka’s reckoning, spoke flawless English with only a trace of an accent, so while the doctor worked, Shizuka cornered her and asked her what had happened.
“I didn’t know anything was wrong until Paolo called me,” she admitted, referring to the young porter who had been the first to answer Shizuka’s call.
“Didn’t you hear anything?” Shizuka probed.
“No. Nothing,” the girl replied, wide-eyed in astonishment. “I can’t believe…” She stopped and crossed herself, unable to finish her sentence.
Shizuka looked back at the ballroom, eyeing the ceiling where the nooses had been attached to the open beams that ran crossways through the room. It was a curious affair, to say the least. As she pondered, Shizuka’s eyes settled on the band, who were still waiting at one side of the room. They were talking among themselves and seemed distraught, faces ashen with the shock of what had occurred here. And yet, Shizuka recalled, they had been playing normally when she and Grant had happened upon the horrific scene, as if they were a part of it somehow.
Shizuka placed a hand on the receptionist’s side and guided her across the room. “Come, I may need you to help me speak with them,” she explained.
Bewildered by the almost-surreal scene around her, the receptionist plodded alongside Shizuka on her flat-soled pumps.
“Do any of you speak English?” Shizuka asked, addressing the band.
One of the guitarists nodded, as did the singer, while two of the others made “so-so” gestures with a shrug.
“You must have been here when all this was occurring,” Shizuka said. “What did you see?”
“See?” the singer repeated. “It’s…confused. We play as people arrive. They laugh, some dance. Then…”
“Then?” Shizuka urged.
“It’s…atropelladamente,” the singer said.
Shizuka looked from the singer to the other band members, some of whom were nodding. “I don’t understand,” she said.