by James Axler
“Logic has no complication,” she replied without looking up. “It is merely a case of fitting the parts together.”
Enlil wondered about fitting their parts together, but chose not to voice that. Although he could not know it, before the decade was over, Ereshkigal would be carrying his child, Namtar, who would be considered by the apekin to be the god of death. Instead he said, “What does your logic reveal?”
Ereshkigal looked up then, fixing Enlil with her luminous eyes. “That there is an equation written into all living things on this planet,” she said with some excitement. “It informs them of how and when to grow, and also when to stop. Otherwise, the apekin might keep growing to heights of twenty or thirty feet or more. Can you imagine that?”
Enlil flashed her his smile, perceiving the humor in her example. “All living things must have their limits, and all must be careful not to exceed them,” he observed.
“But, you see, the equations can be bent,” Ereshkigal whispered confidentially, though there was no one else in the courtyard. “I believe that they may be altered to generate new results.”
Enlil was intrigued. “What kind of results?” he asked. He had been at war with his relatives, on and off, since birth, vying for power, fighting over one spit of land or another. He had considered breeding a creature that might tip the balance in his favor, an assassin, his hand-in-darkness. Perhaps this equation, if it could really be used to alter the genetic makeup of a living creature, might hold the answer to his desires.
“I am uncertain as yet, my lord,” Ereshkigal admitted with the honesty of a child. “Death, perhaps.”
“Death?” Enlil questioned.
“A formula for life is a formula also for death,” Ereshkigal explained. “It needs only to be reversed.”
“And you believe that this is possible?”
Ereshkigal nodded slowly, flipping to one of her reams of notes. “There should be a way, a formula, with which one could instruct a body to die,” she said. “It’s mathematics, pure mathematics. You simply need to know what the input is, numerator to denominator, you see?”
Enlil thought that he did. “So you might kill the apekin with—what? An instruction?”
Ereshkigal looked at him thoughtfully. “They are our playthings, are they not?” she said. “I shall take some to my lab and experiment awhile. Perhaps I will be able to introduce new deaths to them.”
“New deaths,” Enlil repeated, rolling the words around thoughtfully in his head. “Could this be applied to us, the Annunaki, do you think?”
A smile materialized on Ereshkigal’s face as if this thought had not occurred to her before. “It depends on how robust the equation is, I suppose,” she said.
Enlil eyed the girl more warily. She was still a child really, barely out of her teens, and all she seemed to enjoy were her formulae. She would bear watching this one, in case she should turn on him or make a bid for his throne. “I would contend that such experiments necessitate prime facilities,” he proposed. “Not the tiny suite of rooms you have here but something more suited to your purpose.
“Come, dear Ereshkigal. Let us draw up a map for your new laboratories,” Enlil said solicitously. “Somewhere out of the sunlight where you might better concentrate.” He knew just the spot—below the ground, well away from the terrain of Lords Marduk, Zu or Lilitu, who had been sniffing out his weaknesses over recent months. Let the girl work out of sight for a while and create her death formula for him.
Chapter 17
Traffic on roads. Hustle. Bustle.
The Zaragoza streets were busy with land vehicles. Spain, it seemed, had progressed further than the bombed-out United States of America in its climb back to a livable society after the nukecaust. There were small one-man mopeds, larger two-man wags with plastic coverings that left the sides open and full-on automobiles carrying whole families to and fro on the road network of the walled ville.
Grant was glad he wasn’t driving. Sitting in the back of the Pretor patrol Wheelfox—a kind of abbreviated Sandcat with a single, centrally mounted, gyroscopic rear wheel that was four feet high, providing admirable maneuverability and stability—he watched as the driver weaved through the traffic, avoiding snarl-ups and ignoring the constant bleat of honking horns.
The patrol Pretors were amiable on the journey through town. Both had removed their helmets, housing them in the well between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s. Both men were in their thirties, the one to the right wearing a pencil-thin mustache and perfumed hair oil that gave off a lavender scent, the one to the left sporting a shaved head that had begun to regrow with a five-o’clock shadow to match.
“You’re not from around here, then?” the man in the passenger seat asked in passable English, the Spanish accent loaning his words a cheerful quality. “American, right?”
“I’m American,” Grant confirmed, “but she’s from New Edo.”
“An island in the Pacific,” Shizuka elaborated when she saw the uniformed Pretor frown.
“You vacation here, get mixed up in some mess,” the driver said, glancing behind him even as he steered around a stalled moped on the four-lane roadway.
“Yeah,” Grant said. “A whole lot of mess. Your colleagues asked if we could help out.”
“Real honor,” the Pretor in the passenger seat remarked. “Juan C doesn’t partner up easily.”
“We’ll remember that,” Grant said with a nod and a forced smile.
The Wheelfox drew to a halt outside the hospital complex, dropping Grant and Shizuka at the main doors, a triumph of glass and metal. The hospital was a large, white-stoned monstrosity that took up a city block and was surrounded by a desert of tarmac populated by shrubs in bricked-in pots and abutted by a multistory parking garage. Corcel and Cáscara were waiting for them in their own patrol vehicle and came striding across the tarmac toward the jutting porch when they saw the Pretors pull up.
“Feel better?” Corcel asked, eyeing Grant and Shizuka and handing them both a clip-on badge—a Magistrate-style shield finished in metallic blue. He and Cáscara wore similar shields attached to their belts, although theirs were gold.
“Cleaner anyway,” Grant said, taking his shield. “What’s this?”
“Your jurisdiction. These are temporary,” Corcel told them both as they clipped them to their clothes—Grant’s to his belt, Shizuka’s to a lapel on her jacket. “Don’t start throwing weight around that you don’t have, and don’t go arresting anyone without my say so, you understand?”
“What about shooting a suspect?” Grant asked with mock seriousness.
“I’d advise against that also,” Corcel told him in a voice that suggested he hadn’t gotten the joke.
“I managed to get a few insights into who this Ereshkigal is,” Grant said.
“The name of some old goddess,” Cáscara said, “so most probably a gang leader with a sick sense of humor.”
“I’d go for the former,” Grant told her solemnly. “Goddess. Drawing from experience.”
Cáscara’s perfectly shaped eyebrows rose in surprise. “Do you meet a lot of old goddesses, Grant?”
“More than I’d like,” Grant told her. “Long story. Series of them, in fact. Let’s say that most of those old myths have some basis in reality, and over time a lot of them are refusing to stay dead.”
“It appears that you live a very interesting life with these Cerberus people you mentioned,” Cáscara said archly.
“Interesting’s one word for it,” Grant said as they passed through the revolving glass door and into the hospital’s lobby.
* * *
INSIDE, THE HOSPITAL had the universal smell of all hospitals, a mixture of vinegar and citrus fruit and recycled air masking an underlying stink of sweat and sickness.
The hospital lobby was meticulously clean to the point of sterility and was lit by overheads, bright but not overpowering. The gold finish of Corcel’s and Cáscara’s shields caught the light of the overhead fluorescents i
n firework flashes. People were waiting on side benches that had been placed in two semicircle patterns around some potted plants, while trolleys were wheeled through containing files and vials.
A young woman dressed in white, with olive skin and hair a midnight black so dark it was almost blue, glanced up at the Pretors’ approach from where she had been filing a printed chart behind the long, bar-like desk. “Can I help you, Pretors?” she inquired, speaking Spanish.
Corcel flashed the woman a dazzling smile. “A group of people were brought in from an incident at the Hotel Retiro last night,” he explained, adding a case number. “Would you be able to guide us to them?”
“Certainly,” the administrator told him before consulting a computer. Swiftly, she gave Corcel a floor and two room numbers that associated with the survivors of the weird attack. “Three survivors, the others are in the morgue.”
“We’ll find our own way,” Corcel told the white-clad woman as she began to look around the lobby for someone to help.
“As you wish, Pretor,” she said.
Corcel led the way to an elevator bank located roughly behind the lobby desk.
“I’ll handle the interviews,” Corcel stated. “Right now you two are the most reliable witnesses we have. Hopefully, this will change that.”
Grant nodded. “I’d like to check in on the bodies that were brought in,” he said.
“Here, I’ll show you,” Cáscara said.
“You guys come here a lot?” Grant asked as they waited for the elevators to arrive.
“It can be an unfortunate necessity in our line of work,” Cáscara answered, her expression solemn.
“Yeah, I remember,” Grant said, recalling his days as a Magistrate in Cobaltville. He thought, too, of his more recent experiences with Cerberus and tried to count the number of times he had ended up waiting in the medical area of the Cerberus redoubt while one or other of his colleagues recovered from injuries sustained in the line of service. He had waited on Shizuka in that situation more than once and knew that she had waited on him at least as often as he had her. Risks of the business, he lamented.
“Oftentimes, it seems that we are shuffling the cards at the fringes of life and death,” Corcel said, his thoughts mirroring Grant’s. “And yet we never seem to know who’ll be dealing our next hand.”
While they waited for the elevators, Grant outlined what he had gleaned about Ereshkigal from his discussion with Cerberus. “In essence, the Annunaki are bad business, and Ereshkigal sounds like the baddest business they got,” he concluded.
“Sounds delightful,” Cáscara deadpanned as the first elevator arrived and its doors inched open. “Morgue’s downstairs. Shall we?”
Grant nodded, following the female Pretor into the elevator just as the second one arrived. Shizuka joined Pretor Corcel in the second elevator, riding up to the third floor while Grant and Cáscara descended to the basement.
* * *
THE THIRD FLOOR featured pale walls and the same antiseptic smell that permeated the whole building. Shizuka wondered if anyone had ever opened a window here—it felt as though they hadn’t, not once since the construction of the building over a decade ago.
A nurse on call waited at the near end of the corridor, just to the right of the elevator bank. She was young, with long blond hair that she had clipped back so that it fell away from her face. Shizuka guessed she was beautiful when she had had enough sleep and her white uniform wasn’t showing the creases of a two-day-long shift. Right now, however, she looked something beyond tired.
When the young nurse saw Corcel she stood to attention, a furtive expression on her face. “P-Pretor,” she said, her hands twitching nervously at her desk—a small wooden unit housing a flat computer screen with just enough room beneath it for one person to put their legs. “May I—may I help you?”
Used to this reaction—and knowing it was to his badge of office, not him—Corcel offered the nervous carer a winning smile, a row of white teeth materializing in his tanned face. “Three people were brought in yesterday,” he said before giving their names.
“Th-through here,” the nurse stuttered, leading the way down the clinically clean corridor. The corridor, like much of the hospital, was lit by fluorescents located behind grille-like tiles.
Inside the patients’ room, the atmosphere was still. The blinds had been drawn, painting the room in a semidark gloom. Two people shared the room, both of them men, lying in two beds that had been set five feet apart. Both men appeared to be asleep.
“Zorrilla is next door,” the nurse explained in Spanish before leaving Corcel and Shizuka alone in the room. Shizuka regretted not being able to speak the language.
Keeping his voice low, Corcel had the good manners to translate for Shizuka. His English was flawless but accented in such a way that the hard edges of syllables seemed to have been planed down. “These two look to be asleep,” he said quietly, stepping between the beds.
Shizuka paced across to the head of one of the beds. The man there had a lined face and looked to be in his fifties or perhaps his early sixties. His eyes were closed, his expression serene, but there was bruising around his throat where the noose had been wrapped before he had been cut down. She turned her attention to the occupant of the other bed. This one was younger and appeared well built from the span of his shoulders that was visible under the covers. He had dark hair, sleep-ruffled now, but obviously trimmed neatly. Like his fellow patient, his eyes were closed and there were dark bruises across his neck.
“I wonder what they are thinking of,” Shizuka said quietly.
“We’ll only know that when they wake up,” Corcel said, glancing at the monitors that were wired to the two patients.
One of the men stirred, but when Corcel tried to speak to him he only grunted and turned his head away.
“We’ll try the other patient,” Corcel told Shizuka, leading the way quietly to the door.
* * *
IT WAS NOT clear that they had entered the basement level, Grant thought, as the elevator doors drew back to reveal a starkly lit corridor painted in a pastel shade. The floor, too, was pastel, a barely there green color that had so little confidence it looked like a shirt that had been washed a thousand times until the color was almost gone. It was just like every other corridor of the hospital, and similar to every corridor of every medical facility that Grant had ever attended.
“No bold colors,” Grant said, addressing Cáscara. “You ever wonder about that?”
Pretor Cáscara’s brow was furrowed when she looked at Grant. “Huh?”
“They never paint hospitals in bright colors,” he told her as they trudged along the airless corridor. “It’s always soft shades that look like they spent too long in the sun.”
Cáscara shrugged. “Maybe they’re afraid that anything too bright will scare the patients,” she suggested. “No fear of that happening here, though,” she added, directing Grant toward a set of double doors that led into the morgue. The doors featured glass roundels at head height, just enough that one could see who was approaching but not look into the room itself.
Within, the room felt cold. Despite his shadow suit, Grant felt the temperature drop against his bare hands and face.
The room was large and featured three walls of drawers running floor to ceiling, each door big as that of a filing cabinet. The fourth wall—the side from which Grant and his companion had entered—was blank with a long mirror running its length, before which stood a small desk with an anglepoise lamp, a computer and a mobile tablet. A man sat at this, his expression haggard, his hair prematurely thinning, staring into the computer screen as the Pretor and the Cerberus man entered his domain. He looked up and smiled when he saw Cáscara, self-consciously brushing at the hair on his head. “Pretor Cáscara, h-how are you?” he said in Spanish. “I—I mean, what are you doing here? Which is to say, can I help you with why you are here?”
“Julio,” Cáscara replied, “are you busy?”
; The man called Julio shrugged. “So-so,” he admitted. “The dead keep on dying.”
“Would you have five minutes to show us the bodies that came in last night from the hotel incident?”
“For you,” Julio said with a blush as he stood up, “I can make time. Who’s your friend?”
“This is Grant,” Cáscara explained.
Grant saluted casually.
“He’s American. Helping us on a case.”
“Lucky stiff,” Julio said as he led the way to one of the banks of drawers. He counted them in his head, despite the fact that each was labeled, then pulled at one of the handles that was just below hip level, one up from the bottom. A drawer slid out on runners, long as a bed and containing the figure of a man in his midforties, naked and with a deathly pallor, his eyes closed.
“Looks dead, sure enough,” Grant said, peering at the body. He thought he maybe recognized the corpse from the night before as one of the hanging suicides. As he looked closer, he saw the darker skin around the neck and throat along with a little chafing.
“You see the wound around the neck,” Julio observed. “Consistent with death by hanging.”
“I know,” Grant replied.
“Are you a doctor?” Julio asked, surprised.
“No,” Cáscara told him. “He was there.”
The morgue technician did a double take. “Seriously? That must have been some nasty, nasty business.”
Grant didn’t answer the man, just gave him a grim smile that said he had seen it all before.
“There are more?” Cáscara checked.
“Twelve in here,” Julio confirmed, “with two in the theater waiting for final report.
“Let me close up Frankie here,” he continued, reaching for the handle to the drawer, “and then I can—”
The technician stopped as Grant’s hand gripped his wrist.
“Wait,” Grant said. He had seen something. A movement in the body, just a minute twitch of the fingers. “You see that?” he asked. “He moved.”