by James Axler
A set of naked figures turned at the noise. There were fifteen in all and they were pallid and drawn, four of them clearly in the early stages of decomposition. They looked at Kane with cruel expressions, though not one of them had his or her eyes open—instead, the eyelids were sealed over the eyes.
“Nobody move,” Kane instructed from the open doorway.
The corpses moved, trudging toward him—at first slow, then picking up speed with every subsequent step until they were rushing at him like a swarm of insects.
Kane fired, flicking the Sin Eater to triple burst as he squeezed the trigger.
Shots rang out. Struck across the chest, the first of the corpses—a man of indeterminate age with marker pen lines down his flank surrounding a line of black stitches—shuddered in place and dropped to his knees. Behind him, the next two corpses felt the fury of Kane’s blaster, a woman taking two bullets to her left shoulder, striking with such force that she was spun almost entirely around; her companion, a heavyset male showing the potbelly of some impressive middle-age spread, took a bullet to the chest and just halted, as if he had struck a wall.
But still they kept on coming.
Kane spotted targets, sending out a single burst of fire at each before moving on to the next. Two more figures dropped under his hail of fire, while another went caroming into his neighbor as a 9 mm slug ripped away the right-hand side of his face.
Then they were upon Kane, and he went down beneath a cavalcade of bone-dry arms and legs. As he struck the floor under the weight, all that Kane could see was dead skin and eyes that had sealed shut.
Chapter 24
Darkness.
A pain in the back of his head.
The smell of formaldehyde so strong he could taste it.
Something pressing against him. Many somethings, all pressing from different sides, pushing against his ribs, his arms, his legs, his face.
It came back to Kane in a disordered jumble: what had happened, where he was, how he had come to be here. He was in the hospital morgue, he remembered, shooting things that didn’t seem to realize that they were dead, and something had struck his head. He was lying on his back, and there was something writhing on top of him, moving around him. One thing or many things, he could not quite be certain.
The dead walkers had smothered him, overwhelmed him by sheer weight of numbers.
The Sin Eater was still in his hand, clutched there the way a drowning man clings to a life buoy. He squeezed its trigger, cursing even as he felt it press against something solid and doughy, a dead body that somehow still knew how to move. The blaster kicked in Kane’s hand, but he knew that it was like shooting hunks of meat—the very best he could hope for was to whittle his attackers down, chunk by chunk.
Meanwhile, they had him overwhelmed—numbers, relentlessness, everything was on their side. Things that couldn’t die, couldn’t stop. Now he could feel them clawing at him, their hands on his mouth, pressing at his face, his eyes.
Eyes.
It came to Kane unexpectedly, the eureka moment, barely formed. The realization that they all had their eyes almost closed. What it meant, he did not know. But it gave him the idea.
Kane shifted, constricted by his attackers, reaching desperately into his jacket pocket with his left hand. He could not reach, his fingertips just brushing against the edge of the items there. He shoved with his elbow, pushing at the weight of bodies on top of him, jabbing at them with the barrel of the Sin Eater in his other hand. But still he could not quite snare what he was after.
The second thought was perhaps even more inspired than the first. He needed space to work, just a few inches of room so that he could get his hand into that pocket and snag the device he needed. So he pushed up with his right hand, the one holding the Sin Eater blaster, and flinched his wrist tendons to send the weapon back to its hidden, spring-loaded holster. The gun disappeared in an instant, and that instantaneous shift left a momentary gap within which Kane could wriggle. His left arm pulled a little farther, fingers reaching for and priming one of the two-inch spheres that resided in his pocket before pulling it free.
Three…
Kane closed his eyes, even though his view was entirely obscured by his attackers.
Two…
He shoved out with both arms, using all his strength to generate more space under the scrimmage of writhing corpses.
One…
Kane released the device, letting it roll from his hand. He felt it butt against his side, between the third and fourth ribs on his left flank, and he screwed his eyes shut tighter.
Boom!
Powder keg!
The flash-bang went off. Its usual bellow of furious sound was muffled by all the bodies, sounding more like an explosive charge detonated underwater. But the light was revelatory—a great burst of pure whiteness amid the scrum of pale, dead flesh. Kane saw it even through his closed eyelids, and he hoped that the same would be true for his opponents.
There was a loosening of the pressure on Kane as a ripple of shock seemed to run through the bodies pressing against him. So they had seen it then, somehow.
The eyes of the corpses were like those of a baby bird. Behind the lids, retooled, their eyes were not properly formed. Their newly rewired ocular nerves could not handle the sudden burst of light that the flash-bang emitted.
What happened next happened fast. Kane blinked back the afterimage of the explosive, rolling his body to scramble free from the cluster of corpses who threatened to overwhelm him. His feet pressed against the floor, and his arms wavered and shifted beneath that press of bodies. If one could have applied an X-ray at that moment, it would have looked for all the world as if Kane was swimming, doing the back stroke amid a tide of bodies.
It was momentary. Those corpses closest to the flash-bang had reared back, but they had still been pressed down by the others around and above them. Kane took the brief ease in pressure to make enough space for himself that he could reach for more of the devices. His hand rummaged in his jacket pocket and gripped two more of the spherical pods. He primed one with his thumb, the second with the heel of his hand, gripping and turning with desperate urgency.
Kane dropped both flash-bangs, turning his head as they went off. This time the explosion was louder, the press of bodies against him was easing, and Kane’s hearing popped the way it did when traveling in a high-speed jet.
Around him, the pressure of bodies had eased almost entirely, and words were being growled in Spanish, words that Kane’s Commtact was picking up and translating even though he could not hear them directly.
“Pain!”
“Pain!”
“Why would she let us suffer so?”
Kane pushed free of the scrimmage, scrambling backward on his butt, legs working double-time to get him away from his attackers. The Sin Eater materialized in his hand even as he broke away from the mob, and as it struck his hand his finger was pressing against the trigger, sending out a rapid burst of fire at a woman’s corpse who still clutched on to Kane’s booted foot. The woman’s face was peppered with bullets in an instant, pallid flesh tearing away like cobwebs. She let go and Kane was finally free.
* * *
JUST ONE ROOM AWAY, Grant had been dodging attacks from the woman with the open chest wound while Pretor Cáscara kept out of reach of the dead man with the extending fingers.
The dead woman now had a perfect circle drawn on her forehead where Grant’s bullet had broken skin and entered her brain, but somehow she just kept coming.
“Need to change tactics,” Grant muttered as the woman hissed something at him in whispery Spanish. His gaze raced around the room, searching for something to use as a defense.
The woman paced toward Grant, her arms raised as if to strangle him. He kicked out as she came close, delivering a solid blow to her abdomen. Beside him, Cáscara was doing something similar to her own foe, just trying to hold him off.
Grant sidestepped as the female corpse struggled to regain her
balance, scrambling across to where one of the surgical tables stood. The table was fixed—which was a drag because Grant had hoped he might be able to use it as a battering ram to drive the woman back. No matter, the table still had instruments laid out on it that he might utilize.
Grant snatched up a one-pint bottle of ether as the dead woman came marching toward him, those ghost-pale eyelids sealed over her eyes. He threw it from just a few feet away, watched as the bottle shattered when it struck her forehead, spilling its contents across her face, broken glass in her hair. The woman did not even slow, but that did not matter—Grant was already bringing his Sin Eater up to her face and he squeezed off a shot as she reached for him, delivering a 9 mm slug into her left cheek as the gun rose in an arc.
The bullet struck the spilled ether, igniting it in an instant. It was like watching a fireworks display.
Suddenly, the woman was a ball of flame hurrying at him, while Grant skipped backward, his left arm up to shield him from the heat’s intensity.
The woman was still coming, striding forcefully across the tight space of the examination room, even as her body began to burn from the head downward, the flames spreading with her every step. Beneath his clothes, Grant’s shadow suit compensated for the sudden rise in temperature, but it couldn’t prevent him from feeling the radiance of the human inferno against his face. Grant shot again, sending another bullet into the flaming maelstrom, aiming for the woman’s heart. The bullet seemed to catch fire as it streaked at her, spreading the flames with an almighty “woof” of sound.
The corpse woman slowed then, as the flames caught one of her legs and began to burn more fiercely. Grant took the opportunity, turning on the spot before delivering a perfect roundhouse kick to her burning torso. The kick hit her with a crack of bones, and the animated corpse fell back from the force of the blow, crashing against the floor like so much discarded junk. Dark, acrid-smelling smoke billowed from the burning body, casting the ceiling in a smear of charcoal black. The fire had stopped her at least.
Grant had stepped back, watching his opponent burn, even as, across the room, Cáscara was using her handcuffs to affix her own attacker to the other table by his ankle.
Grant smiled—maybe they had managed to stop these impossible dead things after all? Then he felt a sudden strike across the back of the neck and he sank to his knees. As he did so, he felt something grip around his neck, tightening in a fraction of a second.
Cáscara was reaching for the room’s fire extinguisher to douse the burning corpse before its flames could spread. She heard Grant’s knees slam hard against the floor tiles, turned and saw that he was being attacked by the medical examiner who was still hanging from the ceiling by a rubber-tube noose.
“Grant, look—” Cáscara’s cry came too late. But she was drawing her pistol around to target the dead man hanging from the ceiling. Dead? Or maybe dying? Maybe he needed help. Oh, shit.
“Please let go of him,” Cáscara reasoned, the blaster never wavering in her grip, “so that I can help you down.”
“Corpse in waiting,” the hanged man sneered in response, his voice strained. “Corpses for my mistress.”
Cáscara pulled the trigger, sending a 9 mm slug into the depending man’s body, then another and another. The bullets embedded in the white-coated figure but he continued to cling to Grant, legs wrapped around the ex-Magistrate with incredible inhuman strength.
Grant pulled at the man’s legs, trying to speak, trying to call out, but he could not get them loose. It seemed that with each pull, the legs bent further, twisting into impossible knots around Grant’s neck.
And then the door to the theater crashed open and Kane came striding in, Sin Eater held out before him and reeling off a shot even as he assessed the situation. Kane’s bullet was aimed high, targeting not the hanged man but the strip of rubber tubing that had been used to hang him.
The tubing broke apart as the bullet cut through it, and the hanging man tumbled to the floor, abruptly loosening his hold on Grant. Grant ripped the entangling leg away—now more like a squid’s appendage than a human’s—rolling free from the freak’s grip. As he rolled, he saw Kane striding into the room, blaster trained on the fallen figure, left hand holding a familiar silver sphere.
“Close your eyes,” Kane said before triggering the flash-bang.
Grant turned his head away, screwing his eyes shut tight as the flash-bang exploded in a hail of sound and fury.
* * *
ON THE THIRD-FLOOR ward, Brigid Baptiste found herself the center of attention as a dozen patients in various states of distress turned to face her. Their eyes were pale—uncannily so—and they displayed the coordinated movement patterns of flocking birds, with each member of the group turning to face Brigid in unison.
Farther along the broad corridor, Brigid could see Shizuka helping a man whose white shirt was marked with blood.
The blood-streaked patients began to congregate toward Brigid, their expressions gripped with unutterable joy. In moments, Brigid found her way blocked, the gaunt faces of the sick pressing all around her. Then one reached for her, a woman with long blond hair and dressed in a hospital gown. She grasped for Brigid’s clothes, pawing at the lapels of her jacket.
“Get away from me,” Brigid instructed, speaking in Spanish and batting the woman’s hand away.
Another patient, this one a man with a balding pate, reached for Brigid’s hand as she brushed the woman away, while a third grabbed her hair from behind, yanking her back.
“Corpses for the mistress,” one of the women chanted as Brigid struggled against the onslaught. A moment later the chant was taken up by all twelve patients.
Shizuka saw what was happening from the far end of the corridor where she was helping Corcel from Zorrilla’s room. She glanced down at Corcel where he was slumped against her, saw how pale his face had become, how his eyes seemed to be drifting in and out of focus.
“Stay here,” Shizuka instructed, helping Corcel to a chair beside the nurse’s station.
Then she drew her katana sword from its hidden sheath beneath her jacket. The blade emerged from its scabbard with a whistled note, the sound of perfectly smoothed metal.
The sword swished through the air, flashing like a streak of lightning as it caught the overhead lights. “Back off!” Shizuka warned in English, striding toward Brigid, the sword held ready. “Everyone!”
The group of possessed patients seemed bemused by the samurai woman’s order—though there was no mistaking her intention. As one they turned to look at her, still voicing their wicked chant.
Amid the crowd, Brigid was being pulled left and right, hands pawing at her clothes and hair, dragging her in two directions at once. In a moment, the mob seemed to part and Brigid was suspended in their center, one group pulling at her left arm, the other pulling her right, both limbs stretched to full extension. Brigid strained as the pressure increased on her shoulders.
“Cadáveres para mi amante,” the crowd droned, pulling Brigid’s body painfully in two directions. “Corpses for my mistress.”
Chapter 25
The patients were trying to pull Brigid apart in a perverse tug-of-war. She strained against them, fighting with every muscle to hold herself together as her arms threatened to be pulled from their sockets.
“Cadáveres para mi amante,” the crowd droned. “Corpses for my mistress.”
Shizuka strode toward the group, swinging her sword in a brutal arc that ended in the head of the closest mob member. She didn’t intend to kill, but the time for diplomacy was most definitely over.
The mob member went down, crashing to the side as his head was struck with the flat of the sword.
The next met Shizuka’s blade head-on, his chest echoing as the flat of the sword struck against it once, twice, thrice, until he fell to the floor.
The pressure on Brigid had eased subtly, but she could not relax. These lunatics wanted to pull her apart, for reasons she could not begin to fathom. It wa
s all tied up with Ereshkigal; it had to be. But how? Why? Why did the reborn Annunaki goddess need corpses so badly?
Shizuka’s blade swished again, batting at the grasping arms of one of the patients and leaving an angry red mark across the skin. The next patient came at Shizuka, responding to her threat now, his jaw still chanting the words of their sick litany. “Corpses for my mistress.”
Shizuka met him with a twist of her body, bringing the katana blade up so that its pommel struck between the patient’s ribs. The man let out a pained blurt of breath and went dancing away, clutching at his bruised chest. Shizuka followed up immediately, reaching up for the man’s head with her left hand and twisting so that he turned away from her in a violent lurch. Then her blade came up again, reversed once more to use the pommel as a baton with which to strike his cranium with a loud crack. Broken bones did not matter in this battle, keeping everyone alive was all that Shizuka really cared about now.
Brigid Baptiste was not helpless. Despite her predicament, she remained well versed in combat and was a very capable fighter. Right now she was being held a few inches from the floor, but she could just touch it if she stretched her toes. She did so, right boot skimming against the floor tiles. She leaned, drawing her body that way, forcing the group of four who were tugging at her right arm to lurch just a little, enough to drop her another inch lower. The toe of her boot connected, giving her purchase enough to kick backward. The move threw the balance of both groups who were pulling at her, and they staggered momentarily to one side as they clung on. That tiny change was enough to relax the pressure on Brigid’s arms momentarily, and she lifted her feet up and out, kicking with both of them at the legs of the people to either side of her. The kicks were weak but they surprised the possessed patients, finding another chink in their armor and easing the pressure on Brigid’s arms a little bit more.