Hell's Maw

by James Axler

  Shizuka, meanwhile, was working her way through the angry patients with swift professionalism. A cut leg here, a slap of steel there, and the crowd started to thin.

  As she reached Brigid—the redhead still held by seven patients who were trying hard to rip her to shreds—Brigid got her feet on the ground at last and kicked, springing with as much power as she could muster so that she went high in the air. Five of the people clinging to her let go, two of them crashing into the others at the sudden, unexpected movement, knocking them away. They tumbled like dominoes, and Shizuka was on them in an instant, bringing the razor-keen blade of her katana around in a sweeping arc that dared them to cross it.

  There were still two of the chanting patients holding Brigid, clinging to her arms as she ascended. Brigid’s body was still in motion, twisting in her opponents’ grip to bring her legs upward so that she was upside down. In an instant, her feet slapped against the high ceiling and she pushed, extending both legs to drive herself—and her attackers—back down to the floor. All three crashed to the floor in a jumbled heap.

  Brigid leaped away, bounding out of the muddled group and creating a few steps’ distance between them before spinning around. Shizuka was at her side in an instant, fending off the remaining crowd members with the flat of her blade.

  “What brings you here?” Shizuka asked.

  “I was hoping to catch up with an old friend,” Brigid replied with a grim smile. “Do you know what time visiting hours are?”

  Shizuka slapped her blade against one of the approaching patients, ducked and brought her kicking leg up and out to strike another in the gut, knocking him to the floor. “Any idea what’s going on?” she asked, her breath coming fast.

  “Not yet, but it’s everywhere,” Brigid replied, “all over the city. A kind of mass hysteria.”

  “Then why aren’t we affected?”

  “Good question,” Brigid said. “No answer just yet, I’m afraid. So what’s happening with you?”

  “Caught up in insanity,” Shizuka summarized. “Guy there is Corcel, local law, got stabbed. I was trying to help him.”

  “Then let’s help him,” Brigid agreed, kicking a looming patient in the face. The patient struck the floor with a slap.

  * * *

  “THEY DON’T LIKE LIGHT,” Kane explained as he helped Grant off the floor of the morgue’s examination room.

  The hanged man was just lying there, twitching as if hit with an electric current, his legs curling and flopping like an angry cat’s tail.

  Cáscara, meanwhile, was using the fire extinguisher to put out the woman’s burning corpse before it took the whole hospital with it, her own opponent struggling against the cuffs she had managed to snag on his ankle.

  “I figure it’s something to do with their eyes,” Kane continued with his usual sense of understatement. He was shouting a little, having been almost deafened by the first flash-bangs, but his hearing was returning now. As Grant stood up, Kane nodded toward Cáscara. “Care to introduce us?”

  “Kane, this is Cáscara, a local Magistrate,” Grant said.

  “Pretor,” Cáscara corrected, acknowledging Kane with a nod, “and call me Emiliana.”

  “Sure.”

  “And Pretor—this is Kane,” Grant explained. “We’ve worked together for a long time.”

  “I save his butt, usually,” Kane said, flashing the dark-haired Pretor a smile.

  “So I see,” she responded, switching off the fire extinguisher.

  “We ran into big problems here,” Grant summarized. “Corpses coming back to life, their physical properties not as rigid as you’d expect. I tried hailing Cerberus—”

  Kane held up a hand to halt his partner’s continued explanation. “There’s bigger problems than that, buddy,” he said. “Outside, the streets are like a graveyard. There’s people trying to kill themselves, a lot of people. There’s a whole herd of people throwing themselves from the roof here while, out in the street, Baptiste and I were almost run down by a biker who was determined to connect with a brick wall.”

  “Madness,” Cáscara muttered.

  “Yeah,” Kane agreed, “the worst kind. No explanation, no discernible trigger. Just people going nuts all over. Lakesh suggests it’s some form of mass hysteria, says there’s historical precedent.”

  Grant nodded, briefly explaining to Cáscara that Lakesh was their ally back home.

  “Any idea what started it?” Grant asked.

  Kane shook his head. “Not yet. You’re the man on the ground—we were hoping you’d have some intel we could use.”

  Grant shook his head slowly. “You already know about Ereshkigal,” he said. “I’d guess she’s involved—if she exists.”

  “You said you saw a woman—” Kane prompted.

  “Yesterday,” Grant confirmed. “But there’s no way of knowing if that’s who’s causing all this.

  “You said Brigid is with you?”

  “Yeah, checking the other floors,” Kane told him. “We had you triangulated but Farrell couldn’t say what floor you were on.”

  “Shit,” Grant cursed with an angry sigh. “Shizuka’s out there, too. I thought it was just the morgue, but if she’s got caught up in this—”

  Kane held his hand up to calm his friend. “We’ll locate her,” he said, reassuringly. “Let’s get moving, and maybe we can get to the bottom of this.”

  Emiliana Cáscara shot Grant a sideways look as Kane stalked back to the door leading into the morgue. “Your friend? He’s a take-charge kind of guy, isn’t he?” she said.

  Grant smirked despite himself. “He gets restless,” he said. Then he moved over to where he had placed Julio the lab tech, swiftly checking the man’s vitals. His pulse was weak but he was still breathing at least. “You have any idea where we can take this guy?” Grant said after patching up his wound with a strip of gauze.

  “Leave him here and lock the room,” Kane suggested, standing in the doorway, surveying the carnage in the morgue. “There’s no help for anyone outside—trust me.”

  Grant swallowed hard and nodded. “Kane,” he said.

  Kane met his partner’s eyes. “Yeah, I know. Annunaki. It never ends.”

  “Never does,” Grant agreed.

  Together, the trio left the theater, hurried through the morgue and, from there, made their way to the bank of elevators. Around them, the dead bodies of the reawakened corpses were holding their hands to their eyes, hissing in confusion and—perhaps—pain.

  * * *

  ON THE THIRD FLOOR, Brigid and Shizuka had fought their way to Pretor Corcel and managed to drag him to an examination room in the abandoned floor below. Temporarily safe, they closed the door and Brigid got to work tending to the Pretor’s cut. The wound was deep and he had lost some blood, but he was hanging on to consciousness.

  “You took quite a beating here,” Brigid told him gently in Spanish as she cleaned the wound, having removed the glass.

  “Just one beating,” Corcel replied with a weak smile. “Lucky shot.”

  Shizuka stood at the door, watching through a gap in the blinds that were intended to grant the occupants privacy.

  “Anyone coming?” Brigid asked.

  “No,” Shizuka confirmed. “I think we lost them when we jumped in the elevator. Lucky you knew this floor was empty.”

  “We’re all barely surviving on ‘lucky,’” Brigid groused, using a cotton swab to clean the edge of Corcel’s wound. “We need to get on top of this, ASAP.”

  Corcel nodded, his head moving slowly and heavily. “A whole plague of madness, you said,” he muttered to Brigid. “It’s baffling. We’ve seen some group suicides over the past few weeks, but nothing on the scale you’ve described.”

  “How many?” Brigid asked.

  “A dozen,” Corcel recalled, “in two unrelated incidents. Seemingly unrelated,” he corrected.

  “We suspect it’s the work of an alien agent,” Brigid told him.

  “Ereshkigal,” Corcel
said. “Yes, your friend Grant told us about how he and his people had met with alien gods. I thought he was exaggerating.”

  Brigid pressed an absorbent pad against the Pretor’s skin, tearing off a strip of gauze tape she had taken from one of the cupboards and adhering it in place. “How do you feel now?” she asked as she strapped up the wound.

  Corcel winced. “Stupid,” he admitted. “I should never have let that woman ambush me like that.”

  “We were both surprised,” Shizuka placated. “She slit her own throat and then attacked Corcel.”

  Brigid frowned. “Did you say that right?” she checked. “She attacked after wounding herself?”

  “It doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?” Shizuka agreed.

  Brigid sighed heavily. “It makes sense to somebody,” she reasoned. “We just have to figure out how.”

  “We’ll return to the Hall of Justice,” Corcel proposed, his eyes closed against the pain. “They should be coordinating efforts to stem this. Hopefully they’ll be able to give us some insights.”

  At that moment, Brigid’s hidden Commtact trilled to life, and Kane’s voice began speaking directly into her ear canal. “Baptiste, I’ve found Grant. Where are you?”

  Turning her head, Brigid answered. “Second floor. I’m with Shizuka and a local law enforcer called Corcel,” she explained. “I understand Grant knows him.”

  “We’ve run into some serious trouble in the morgue,” Kane summarized. “Dead people coming back to life, their physical properties no longer absolute. We got out. We’re in the lobby now.”

  “It’s chaos on the third floor, too,” Brigid told him. “A group of patients tried to rip me apart like they were in a trance.”

  At the other end of the Commtact link, Kane cursed. “We need to regroup,” he decided. “You able to get here?”

  “Oh, Kane,” Brigid cried. “What about the people on the roof?”

  “Too many darn victims,” Kane growled in reply. “We need to find the source.”

  “Agreed,” Brigid said reluctantly. “The Pretor here suggests going to the Hall of Justice.”

  “Local Mags?”

  “Exactly. Pretor thinks they will be surveying the situation and trying to regain order.”

  “Stands to reason. That’s standard protocol for Magistrates,” Kane agreed.

  “We’ll be with you in a few minutes,” Brigid assured him, cutting the connection.

  Shizuka and Corcel looked at Brigid quizzically. They had, of course, only heard her side of the discussion.

  “You have a plan?” Corcel asked.

  “Yes,” Brigid told him, helping the man to his feet. “Yours. Think you’re okay to walk?”

  Corcel winced, screwing up his eyes. “I’ll be fine,” he assured her, taking a tremulous breath. When he opened his eyes once more, the irises were a little bigger and a little paler. Neither Brigid nor Shizuka noticed.

  Chapter 26

  Outside the hospital was madness.

  The sounds of vehicle engines roared in the distance now, echoing through the city like a race track in backing to the slow, gradual chimes of the church bells. There were bodies hanging from the streetlamps of the parking garage, with more people queuing up to do the same. Others were finding even more inventive ways to kill themselves, bashing their brains out on blood-smeared concrete pillars, leaping out of the moving vehicles they drove to high speeds or throwing themselves in front of them, holding themselves under the water of the decorative fountain outside the hospital until they drowned.

  All around the hospital, the dead or dying were sprawled on the hard pavement like sandbags from where they had jumped from the roof. Groans emanated from the clumped bodies, and the scene was mirrored up and down the street beyond where the roofs of other tall buildings had been used to similar effect.

  Smoke billowed from distant buildings where fires had been set, clouding the sky in towering plumes like dark fingers clawing for heaven.

  “This is impossible,” Brigid stated as she observed the scene of carnage. “Humans—we have survival instincts. They—we—shouldn’t be doing this. It’s impossible.” She was standing with Kane, Grant, Shizuka and the two Pretors just beyond the grand glass doors that led from the hospital reception area. The doors showed cracks in the glass and there were several bloody smears where people had tried to use those cracks to cut the arteries in their wrists, their necks. One man lay dying on the ground below a bloody smudge, eyes wide and a look of ecstasy on his face.

  “It’s happening, Baptiste,” Kane said pragmatically.

  “People have the capacity to kill themselves for many reasons,” Shizuka reminded them. “Not just through depression. It can be a gesture of devotion or a mark of honor, for example.” She was thinking of her own legacy as a samurai.

  Brigid looked at Shizuka as realization dawned. “Devotion,” she repeated. “Honor. Dammit, why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Think of what?” Kane asked.

  “These people are killing themselves as a self-sacrifice,” Brigid guessed. “To do so in such numbers, that would have to be the most likely explanation. They want to die to achieve something. Something more than death.”

  “What does Ereshkigal promise?” Grant asked.

  Brigid thought for a moment. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Only fragments of her story survived. She ruled the underworld and was not above killing other Annunaki for revenge. But beyond that, how she interacted with humans…we don’t know.”

  Corcel scanned the parking garage, searching for his Wheelfox. It remained where he had left it but was now abutted by two crashed motorbikes, one of the riders lying dead on the hood. “Come on, let’s get to the Hall,” Corcel said, leading the way across the body-strewed tarmac. He was bent over a little as he walked, wincing where the pain of the chest wound pulled against him.

  “I’ll drive,” Cáscara told him as the group approached the Wheelfox.

  Corcel shook his head. “No, Liana. I may not be good for much just now, but I can still drive.”

  Cáscara shot Corcel a quizzical look but Corcel ignored her and tapped in the key code to unlock the patrol vehicle. Corcel swung himself painfully into the driver’s seat once the gull-wing door opened. As he did so, Cáscara reached for the man lying across the vehicle’s hood. The man wore a leather jacket and a bandanna across his head, once blue but now stained with blood in what looked like a slick, black patch. As Cáscara touched his arm, the man flinched and turned his face toward her. His expression was jocular, wide smile amid blood-streaked stubble.

  “The joy, the joy!” he trilled in Spanish, twisting to reach for the female Pretor. “Feel the joy!”

  Then he had Cáscara by the wrists, pulling her down onto the hood of the Wheelfox with such vigor that she struck the windshield with a loud bang.

  Kane interceded in a flash, placing one strong hand on the biker’s chest and forcing him back with a shove so that he rolled over the slanted front of the Wheelfox while Cáscara stumbled free.

  Shizuka was with Cáscara straightaway, helping her back while Grant and Brigid stormed forward.

  The biker was up again in a second, a mad stare in his too-pale eyes, his lips curled in a sneering smile. “Cadáveres para mi amante,” he cheered. “Corpses for my mistress.”

  Then the man leaped, springing from where he had fallen, bounding through the air toward Kane with his hands poised in tight claws.

  Kane met him with an outstretched arm, delivering the heel of his hand to the man’s face in a brutal blow. The man seemed to sag in the air, his body concertinaing as it crumpled against the force of Kane’s blow. He dropped to the ground, and Kane spun away.

  The moment that Kane was out of the line of fire, Grant unleashed a burst of fire from his Sin Eater—commanded into his hand in the seconds between the man’s ambush attack on Cáscara and Kane’s devastating rebuttal. Several 9 mm bullets drilled into the man’s left kneecap, hobbling him in an instan
t.

  The biker hissed like a cat as the bullets struck him, writhing against their impacts.

  Beside Grant, Brigid was ready with her own blaster, the sleek TP-9 unleathered from the holster at her hip, but it was unnecessary.

  “Stay down,” Grant ordered, his dark eyes fixed on the deranged attacker. Whether the man understood English or not did not matter—Grant figured that his expression and the blaster in his hand should be enough to convey his message.

  “I would have cuffed him,” Cáscara bemoaned in irritated Spanish.

  “I think we’re beyond the stage of cuffing people,” Kane told her.

  While Cáscara took the shotgun seat, the Cerberus warriors and Shizuka bundled into the back via a wide gull-wing door set before the single back wheel. It was cramped, but there was space enough.

  Corcel triggered the Wheelfox’s ignition and the engine roared to life like an animal unleashed. “Everyone comfortable?” he asked jocularly. He looked drained of color and his eyes were beginning to fracture as the irises merged with the whites. His heart had stopped earlier, when the glass had hit it, but he had bounced back…somehow.

  Corcel pressed his foot down on the accelerator and steered the Wheelfox out of the parking lot, leaving behind the body of the biker who had attacked them.

  * * *

  THE STREETS WERE HELL. Sheer bloody hell.

  There were dead bodies and dying bodies and people trying to kill themselves and each other. But what made it worse, as if worse could even be contemplated, was that there was barely any noise—no screams, no shouts, no weeping or groans or shrieks. Instead, the streets were silent but for the ever-present thrum of distant engines accompanied by the slow, metronomic beat of the church bells.

  “We’ve walked into a nightmare,” Grant muttered, looking through the window port of the Wheelfox land wag.

  Corcel guided the Wheelfox through broken vehicles, burned-out heaps, bodies—so many bodies—that were just scattered across the road. He kept at a steady twenty miles per hour, not racing, just trying to keep moving while people fell from buildings above them, autos crossed intersections in mad games of chicken where the aim was not to survive but to crash and to die.