Hell's Maw

by James Axler

  Pretor Emiliana Cáscara was standing at the top of the staircase leading down to the chamber, her Devorador de Pecados pistol held steady in her hand from where she had shot Grant in the back. “Wait!” Cáscara called, her voice echoing across the vast chamber.

  Ereshkigal looked up at the sudden intrusion, bemused by what was occurring.

  “You are Ereshkigal, are you not?” Cáscara asked.

  Ereshkigal nodded once.

  “It is said that you control death and the hereafter,” Cáscara said, bowing her head and staring at her feet in humble servitude. “If that is true, then please, I beg you, bring my partner back to life. Let Juan Corcel live again.” As she spoke these last words, Cáscara reached behind her and pulled Corcel’s dead body from where she had dragged it into the temple and propped it against the tunnel wall. “Please. I will readily give my life in return.” Wincing, Cáscara bowed down to her knees before the Annunaki goddess, holding her head down until it almost touched the floor that looked like leaves.

  An alligator’s smile crossed Ereshkigal’s lips, predatory and inhuman. “You would give your life regardless,” she said in whispered Spanish. “The bargain is worth nothing. Unless…”

  Cáscara peered up through her drooping bangs, hope fluttering in her heart. “Unless, Your Eminence?”

  “Do you know where there are more apekin?” Ereshkigal asked. “More…people?”

  “I do,” Cáscara replied.

  “Can you bring them to me?”

  “It…is possible.” As a Pretor, Cáscara could enter the other walled cities of Spain and use her authority.

  Ereshkigal’s smile grew wider. Her formulas, her perfect mathematics needed testing, there was still so much she might learn, so many equations still waiting to be balanced. She could control death, yes, and the human body, too, commanding growth spurts that made limbs longer, stretched torsos beyond their natural limit with sufficient genetic input—sucking another’s blood, for instance. But to have control of a world of apekin, to manipulate them with mathematics would take the one thing that Ereshkigal did not yet have—stability of body. When Papa Hurbon’s agents had planted the seed that had formed her, Ereshkigal had emerged imperfect. Her body required a genetic infusion—blood plasma—to remain mobile, otherwise it would deteriorate and die. The other, the dead Pretor, could be revived to serve as one of Ereshkigal’s Terror Priests, spreading the joy of the beyond-death. As for the woman…

  “This shell is incomplete,” Ereshkigal mused aloud as she stared into Cáscara’s eyes with her hypnotic orbs. “It decomposes where it should hold intact, the formula is out of balance. I seek completion, balance.

  “If you will offer yourself, give me the keys to that, then I shall grant what you ask.”

  “You’ll make Juan live?” Cáscara asked, not comprehending—or thinking about—the other words that Ereshkigal had said.

  Ereshkigal just stared at the Pretor, waiting for her reply.

  Cáscara nodded. “I accept.”

  And so are deals with devils made.

  Chapter 34

  Ereshkigal waved her hand toward where Cáscara was bowed, encouraging the woman to stand with a gesture. There was a patch of decaying blackness above her breasts where Kane’s bullet had buried itself, the armored skin turning rotten like metal rusting away. Cáscara stood, then began to limp her way uncomfortably down the staircase to meet with Ereshkigal on the shores of the lake of blood. All around, the voices of the wailing choir rose and sank.

  “What do you need from me?” Cáscara asked, gazing up at the taller woman whose dusky skin was ridged with the trace of lizard scales.

  “All that you were,” Ereshkigal said. Then she reached forward and pressed her hands against Cáscara’s temples, gripping her so tightly that Cáscara grunted with pain. Ereshkigal’s next words were in the ancient tongue of the Annunaki, pan-dimensional words only whose sibilance touched our plane of being, just as with her impossible formulas for death. The Annunaki were multidimensional, existing on many planes at once, beautiful when seen entire, like Julia Sets.

  The next thing that Cáscara felt was a kind of warmth deep inside her, welling up from her core. The warmth turned to hot, to scalding. Her eye sockets hurt, her head began to pound and suddenly she cried out in pain.

  “You may not fight it, apekin,” Ereshkigal told her. “You must give willingly for the transfer to bond.”

  Ereshkigal continued speaking the words of hyper-math, the high-end mathematics that bonded the universe and all its living things together. To Cáscara they sounded like a song, one barely remembered from childhood, the earliest memory of all. The song’s words were lost on Cáscara but she knew the rhythm—it was the beat of her mother’s heart when she was sleeping inside her womb.

  Cáscara’s body glowed with heat, shining like a star within the cavernous flower.

  A single moment. A second; a day; a lifetime. The thing that had once been Emiliana Cáscara withered away and what was left was an empty shell, a body with no content, no mind to power it. Position vacant.

  And then Ereshkigal took control of the empty shell, shunting her life into the woman’s body, becoming Cáscara where Cáscara was departing, absorbing all she was. She would be doubled momentarily, a human suit to wear and to puppet.

  * * *

  WHEN GRANT HAD been shot in the back he had fallen into the pool of blood. He was still conscious, however. The shadow suit beneath his clothes had deflected four-fifths of the impact of that 9 mm slug, turning what should have been a devastating blow into just a glancing one. He would be left with an impressive bruise, but better that than a grave marker.

  He was in the blood pool, lying on the shallow edge where the steps disappeared down beneath the surface. His head was tilted to one side and there was blood washing in his mouth. His body wanted to give up, to just take five minutes to relax, to shake off the effects of the battle—but he knew there was no time.

  Just a few feet away, he could see the radiance emanating from Cáscara’s body where Ereshkigal stood before her, channeling her life essence through the other’s body to absorb its genetic content, to reinforce her own body and make her whole, to bind the human to her. Ereshkigal was saying something. It sounded like a kind of chant. In the back of his mind, Grant knew that Brigid would have an explanation for all this—one that involved ancient myths and highfalutin physics—but just now he figured what he needed to do was stop Ereshkigal any way he could.

  The radiance from Cáscara felt hot against Grant’s side, even from feet away.

  He reached out with his left hand, grabbed Ereshkigal by the ankle, and yanked her off her feet. She shrieked with surprise as she sank to the deck, landing at the pool’s edge with a thud. As she crashed to the floor, her grip on Cáscara loosened and the glowing Pretor came tumbling past Grant and into the pool.

  Grant pulled Ereshkigal closer, using his grip on her to drag himself out of the pool before drawing his right arm back. He still held his Sin Eater in his hand, thrust it against Ereshkigal’s forehead and depressed the trigger.

  Nothing happened. The gun sputtered weakly, blood running down its sides.

  The blood in the pool, Grant realized. It must have gummed up the works. It would be a matter of minutes to dry it off, clean the gun, but they were minutes he did not have.

  Beneath him, Ereshkigal shrieked again, leaning forward and beginning her wicked chant. It was the chant that could drive a man to suicide, that could shut down the human body in a matter of moments.

  “Círculo alrededor del cuerpo,

  Guarda silencio a moverse más—”

  Grant grabbed one spoke of Ereshkigal’s crown with his left hand, using it like a lever to push her face away from his, even as she grabbed for his wrist. Grant shoved as hard as he could, drawing on depths of strength he did not know he had.

  “—Gire vida lejos,

  Gire aliento—”

  Grant shoved, driving Ereshkigal’
s head into the blood pool that lay beside them. The pool was getting hotter, had started bubbling where Cáscara’s star-bright body had toppled into it. All around, blood was steaming in wisping vapor trails, casting a ferrous tang to the air.

  “Abra—” Ereshkigal’s words were cut off as her mouth went under the surface.

  Ereshkigal struggled to get out, but Grant fought back, throwing a powerful haymaker that struck her jaw, even as he used the spike of her crown to force her under the pool again.

  The pool was getting hotter. Grant could feel it against his knees where he knelt in the liquid, even through the protective weave of the shadow suit. The shadow suits were designed as environment suits and were able to regulate a wearer’s body temperature, but even they had limits. Where his legs touched the pool, it seemed as if they were being lashed with a hot poker, burning right down to the marrow.

  Ereshkigal emerged once again from the pool, her eyes black orbs. Her hands reached for Grant, grabbing at his collar. But Ereshkigal was no fighter—she was an academician, a student of mathematics and logic.

  Grant grabbed her spiny crown with both hands and used it to force her under the surface again, holding her there as the red liquid boiled all around them and the choir wailed on. He held her for a long time as she struggled against him, ignoring the burn against his legs.

  Grant kept Ereshkigal’s face beneath the pool’s surface while Cáscara’s body decomposed in a burning pyre of whiteness. The pool of blood boiled, its surface bubbling like soup on the stove, and as it did so Ereshkigal’s body was flayed alive. Grant’s shadow suit gave him some protection—enough he hoped—while he held the Annunaki under the surface until she stopped fighting him. It took minutes, but they felt like hours.

  Grant’s muscles ached by the time he was done, he had been straining for so long. But when he finally stepped away, the thing that was Ereshkigal reborn was as dead as her own sick creations.

  Chapter 35

  When Grant finally looked up, Brigid was waiting at the top of the staircase leading into the chamber, standing beside the dead body of Juan Corcel. “What happened?” she asked, her eyes scanning the vast alien landscape and its occupants.

  “It’s over,” Grant told her, trudging away from the pool of boiling blood.

  He made his way across to Shizuka, whose unconscious body was sprawled against one of the walls, crouched down and spoke softly to her until she awoke.

  “Grant-san? What…?” she began, confusion reigning on her pretty face.

  “Kane took a nasty blow to the head,” Grant told her. “I’m going to have to carry him.”

  * * *

  BRIGID REMAINED AT the top of the steps, where Corcel’s dead body had been left by Cáscara. Grant picked up Kane and, with Shizuka covering him, made his way up the staircase while the choir of the dead droned on. Brigid had her TP-9 ready to cover him, but it was unnecessary—nothing moved in the chamber apart from the ripples on the pool; everything else was dead. Even the choir was not a threat—presumably they would sing until they decomposed.

  Outside, night was falling. The sky was beginning to darken and a crescent moon was already visible low to the horizon. The air felt markedly colder than it had just an hour before.

  The Wheelfox waited twenty feet from the entrance to Ereshkigal’s temple, its headlights on, enough to dazzle the newly dead. Its driver’s door was wide-open. Brigid explained how Cáscara had knocked her out, using the butt of her gun to coldcock her. “I tried to warn Kane,” Brigid said, glancing at his sleeping body where Grant carried him over one shoulder. “I figured that Cáscara planned to do something stupid from the way she was talking. I guess we didn’t realize how attached she was to her partner.”

  “She’s gone now,” Grant said grimly. “Burned down to nothing.”

  Brigid shook her head in bewilderment. “I can’t begin to imagine,” she lamented.

  “Ereshkigal was trying to say something when I held her under the…water? Blood? I don’t know what it was,” Grant explained.

  “The music, the words,” Shizuka mused. “It all meant something, didn’t it? Like an instruction for everyone within earshot. An instruction to literally curl up and die.”

  Grant rested Kane’s dozing form gently in the rear seats of the Wheelfox before turning back to Shizuka and Brigid. “Is such a thing possible, Brigid?” he asked.

  “Hypnotic suggestion,” Brigid said uncertainly, “is one way to make people behave in a manner wildly at odds with their personality, and it’s the only thing I can think of.”

  “And if Ereshkigal was an Annunaki,” Shizuka pointed out, “then what might such a hypnotic suggestion entail?”

  “Good point,” Brigid mused. “They fooled the whole world into believing that they were gods once—a kind of mass hypnosis by consensus. So I guess anything is within the realms of possibility.”

  “Anything,” Grant repeated dourly.

  Shizuka rubbed him gently across the shoulders. “And we’ll be ready for it,” she assured him. “Ready for anything.”

  * * *

  ZARAGOZA HAD SURVIVED. There were pockets of resistance, people who were not susceptible to the mathematical spell that commanded men’s bodies to destroy themselves. Some had been rounded up and killed by the followers of Ereshkigal, but many had hidden, barricading themselves inside the great monuments of the city—the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar cathedral and the Aljafería Palace—old structures that had survived world wars.

  The revived dead lost purpose when the church bells stopped ringing, and after a few hours without sustenance they simply ceased to function, unable to draw any more energy from their rotting bodies to power tired limbs. In total, the city lost an estimated fifteen hundred people in a single hour, but given the circumstances it remained a triumph.

  The Pretors had been decimated, however, and the strictures of law and order took a backseat to common sense and man’s infinite capacity to share and to help his fellow man, to survive. The dark days of the Deathlands were long behind them, but people still remembered the lessons that dark period of history had taught them—that survival at any cost was not really survival at all.

  Ereshkigal’s temple was left untouched, for there was little that the Cerberus warriors could do without ground explosives or an air strike other than to warn people away. Cáscara’s body burned itself out within the pool of collected blood, fizzling there like potassium in water for a very long time until it had simply disintegrated to nothing.

  Ereshkigal’s two retainers—or Terror Priests as they were known—Namtar and Tsanti—were rounded up by a Cerberus pickup squad led by Domi three hours after Kane’s team had exited the temple. She found them still inside the temple, walking in aimless circles as they waited for instructions from their dead mistress. Domi’s squad—CAT Beta—carefully captured them and brought them back to the Cerberus redoubt for incarceration, where they could be questioned and studied.

  * * *

  BACK AT CERBERUS, once everyone had had a chance to recover, the field team sat down to consider what had happened in Spain. Kane’s head was bandaged where he had been struck with the staff, and Brigid’s wounded ankle had been properly dressed, but everyone was getting back to normal. Shizuka joined the group known as CAT Alpha on the plain outside the redoubt’s massive, rollback doors, accompanying Grant at this impromptu meeting spot as the sun rose over the valleys of the Bitterroots.

  “Some vacation, huh?” Grant said as Kane, Brigid and Domi filed out from the dark recesses of the redoubt and onto the sandy plateau.

  “One to remember,” Shizuka replied pragmatically.

  “Think it’s one I’d prefer to forget,” Grant said. He looked up as Brigid approached, catching the woman’s emerald eyes. She was limping from her twisted ankle, but she looked less drawn. Painkillers working miracles, Grant guessed. “You figure out anything yet?” he asked.

  Brigid shook her head. “Nothing much, just assumptions and gues
swork really,” she admitted. “That chant she was reciting—I translated it. It translates as something like this.

  Circle around the body,

  Be still to move no more.

  Turn life away,

  Turn breath away.

  Embrace Hell’s gaping maw.”

  “Embrace Hell’s gaping maw,” Kane repeated with disgust. “Cheery kind of poetry, huh?”

  “I think it’s a kind of instruction,” Brigid said. “I spoke with Reba, while she was bandaging my foot—” Reba DeFore was the staff physician for the Cerberus redoubt “—and she agrees it’s possible to use some kind of hypnotic suggestion to make people take their own lives.”

  “But why didn’t it affect us when we heard it?” Shizuka wondered.

  Brigid shook her head. “I…don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Spanish,” Kane said as he found a jutting rock on which to sit. “I don’t speak it, nor does Grant. Shizuka?”

  “No,” Shizuka confirmed.

  “See, we rely on our Commtacts to translate in these situations,” Kane reminded everyone, “but—I never really thought about it until now—they wouldn’t properly translate those words that Ereshkigal chanted. Like they were, I dunno, unable to affect to the translation software.”

  Brigid shook her head with uncertainty. “That’s all well and good, but I can speak Spanish, Kane,” she said. “So I could understand the words. I’ve just proven that.”

  Kane looked up at her thoughtfully. “Is translation the same as native tongue?” he asked.

  A smile slowly crept across Brigid’s face. “No, I guess there are differences,” she admitted. “The act of translation involves an additional step in the brain, albeit a very swift one for someone fluent in a second language.”

  “But there is a step,” Kane said, holding his hands out before him and widening the gap between them as if to demonstrate, “a jump that needs to be crossed mentally.”