Scarlet Dream

by James Axler

  “You should probably get out of here,” Grant said.

  Hurbon looked at him sadly, the strange rag poppet still clutched in his hands. “You don’t need my help?” he asked.

  “Your help’s great,” Grant said, “but if we can’t contain this psycho bitch then you’re going to be the first to die. You’ve done a lot for us—I can’t have that on my conscience.” Grant’s hand reached around as he said this last and he pressed the ascend stud on the elevator control board.

  “You took away that beautiful dream world,” Hurbon lamented as Grant stepped from the large elevator and its jawlike doors began to close. “I could have lived there and been happy, you know?”

  Grant nodded once, respectfully. “Sorry, but it had to be done. You know that.”

  Hurbon nodded as the doors closed between them and the elevator began its shuddering ascent to the surface. “I know,” he replied, even though Grant could no longer hear him, “it’s all about sacrifice. Just have to know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.” And then Hurbon began to laugh.

  THE KU-BHA-SAH SWORD slashed through the air, cutting through the falling droplets of water as Kane forced his deathlike foe to retreat from the redoubt’s hangar area and into the corridor beyond. Ezili Coeur Noir held her forearms up to deflect the sword, and sparks kicked out with each strike. To her surprise, her colossal powers seemed diminished, and the striking sword almost seemed to hurt.

  “What can you possibly hope to achieve, thing of flesh?” Ezili Coeur Noir snarled contemptuously. “Do you think you have a chance to stop me now?”

  “See this water all around us?” Kane asked as he raised the sword to a ready position once more. The sprinklers were still raining down on them both. “This is your plan being washed away. The Red Weed you intended to unleash—the catalyst agent doesn’t work in water. We’ve diluted your whole evil plan out of existence.”

  Ezili Coeur Noir smiled tentatively, as if it was a joke. “Impossible,” she retorted.

  “Hey, you read the file,” Kane said. “You tell me.”

  The ex-Mag had backed the coal-skinned, skeletal figure to the end of the corridor by then, and she stood with her back to the elevator. Ezili Coeur Noir balled her hands into fists, a howl of utter frustration coming from her throat as she lunged for Kane. The ex-Mag leaped into the air, his clothes heavy with water, and plunged the tip of the ku-bha-sah into the grim figure of Ezili Coeur Noir even as she tried to bat him aside.

  Kane landed in a splash of water, watching as the fractured Annunaki goddess-turned-voodoo-loa collapsed against the sealed elevator doors, the sword poking from her chest. She wasn’t dead—Kane could tell that immediately—but she seemed almost asleep, as if struck by some incredible weariness. She was no longer struggling. Whatever Papa Hurbon had done to charge the sword had worked; its supernatural nature had stopped the queen of all things dead.

  Warily, Kane stepped up to the elevator and pressed the call button. From behind him there came footsteps splashing through the water that formed a layer across the floor.

  “Hurbon’s safe and all the dead are really dead,” Grant explained as he joined his old Magistrate partner. “You need a hand?”

  Kane glanced over his shoulder, acknowledging his partner with a lopsided grin. “I think I’ve got this one,” he said as the elevator doors opened and, leaning against them, the static form of Ezili Coeur Noir tumbled backward into the cage, the sword poking up from between her breasts.

  Grant looked mystified for a moment, stunned that his partner had succeeded in stopping the self-styled queen of all things dead.

  Seeing the bemused look in his partner’s eyes, Kane shrugged. “Hell of a sword,” he explained.

  Together Kane, Grant and the sagging body of Ezili Coeur Noir took the elevator to the lower level where the mat-trans and the cold-fusion reactor were located.

  BRIGID BAPTISTE DROVE the metal bar—end first—into the final remaining zombie, parting his ribs and leaving him struggling there on the floor like a crushed bug. She had smashed the other one to pulp, and while her remains still twitched, she no longer posed any threat to Brigid.

  Ignoring the struggling corpse, Brigid hurried on down the red-striped corridor and back into the room where they had initially arrived. In the corner of the low-lit room, beside the armaglass walls of the mat-trans chamber, Brigid saw the reactor waiting for her like a promise. Even as she approached it she saw the operation light blink from green to amber—Donald Bry’s security glitch had come into effect right on time. She had two minutes and eight seconds to remove the access panel and get the corpselike form of Ezili Coeur Noir inside.

  When Grant and Kane entered the room just forty seconds later, struggling with the lifeless body of Ezili Coeur Noir, they found Brigid kneeling on the floor by the reactor. A clutch of screws was arrayed around her where she had removed the physical lock from the security panel door, the magnetized lock having switched off with the false data spike.

  “Quickly,” Brigid said, her hands reaching for her pockets.

  Kane and Grant dragged the deadweight that was Ezili Coeur Noir to the reactor’s access hatch where a small, reinforced window could be used to peer within. At the same time, Brigid Baptiste produced the two plaits of hair that Papa Hurbon had ritualistically weaved.

  “How much time do we have?” Kane asked.

  “We just passed the fifty-second mark,” Brigid said, consulting her wrist chron. “So about seventy-five seconds.”

  “Open it,” Kane instructed, and Brigid pulled open the access panel. As she did so, the sound of the cold-fusion reactor filled the room. No longer muffled by the layers of metal that surrounded it, the reactor sounded like an aircraft taking off, and Kane and the others could feel static electricity playing in their hair. As if they hadn’t realized before now, the feeling confirmed just how dangerous this was—opening an operational reactor core as it continued to generate energy. Brigid leaned close, tossing the two plaits of hair inside where they skidded across the metal plating of the interior.

  But the burst of static in the air had another effect. Suddenly Ezili Coeur Noir was moving again, wrenching the sword from its resting place in her chest.

  “And now you will all take your places in my private choir.” She shrieked as she tossed Kane and Grant from her.

  Kane smashed against the side of the reactor, while Grant was slammed over one of the desks that had been used two centuries earlier to monitor the prototype mat-trans. Semiconscious, Kane’s head sunk down and suddenly his head was underwater.

  Brigid leaped back as Ezili Coeur Noir took a stride toward her, the movement of her insectile leg something hideous.

  “Once inaugurated you shall sing the songs of the dead,” Ezili Coeur Noir assured Brigid as she took another ominous step toward the red-haired former archivist, “until your vocal cords burn out like stars in the sky.”

  The queen of all things dead was so close that Brigid could smell the fetid stench of her foul breath. Kane was still lying facedown in the water beside the reactor, delirious, a trail of bubbles coming from his mouth.

  Brigid pulled her TP-9 from the holster and, as Ezili Coeur Noir took another menacing step toward her, snapped off a quick burst, ordering the sickening creature to keep back.

  Grant meanwhile found himself lying on the far side of the aisle of observation desks, his head fuzzy from the reeling blow he had just taken. He looked up, blinking to clear his vision, and saw the emaciated goddess standing in front of the reactor, looming over Brigid, who drilled another burst of fire into the monster’s dead chest. He didn’t need to think, just needed to act.

  Grant’s boots splashed in the shallow water as he launched himself, leaping over the desk in front of him and careening toward the black-skinned figure of Ezili Coeur Noir. He tucked in his head and shoulder-slammed the abominable creature, driving her like a battering ram through the open access panel of the reactor.

  Then Grant was insi
de the reactor, too, where the noise was so loud that he couldn’t even process it, just heard it like white noise. Ezili Coeur Noir crashed against the metal-plate floor of the reactor, her skeletal body sprawled in front of Grant as he struggled to his feet.

  “Grant!” Brigid called from outside. “Get out! Get out now!”

  Grant didn’t need telling twice. He was already running, leaping over the fallen body of Ezili Coeur Noir even as she made a grab for him.

  Grant barreled through the open access hatch, rolling over himself in his haste. Behind him, Brigid Baptiste slammed the door closed, sealing the reactor even as the amber warning light switched back to green. In that second, the automated electromagnetic lock came back to life, and the reactor was sealed for good.

  Grant turned back, clutching at his shoulder where he had struck the deathlike woman, feeling the ache of the blow. “Singing lessons will have to wait, bitch,” he snarled as the reactor hummed behind the metal walls.

  Atoms collided as the fusion reactor powered up, its core creating energy from hydrolysis. Lying beside the reactor, Ezili Coeur Noir, the unliving remnant of Lilitu, struggled to her feet. The reactor sounded unspeakably loud this close to her insect-bitten ear, and she hissed at it, swearing the way a cat swears.

  The reactor was charging up, its core spinning faster as the fusion process went into overdrive, the external security system intact once more.

  To Ezili Coeur Noir, however, it wasn’t a reactor but a cell. Just another place from which she must escape.

  Outside the reactor, Brigid hurried over to where Kane lay, pulling him from the water by his hair. Kane took a gasping breath, his eyes unfocused for a moment as he tried to work out what had happened.

  “You’re okay,” Brigid said to assure him.

  Kane made to reply, but instead blurted a mouthful of water over Brigid Baptiste.

  Through the window into the reactor Kane saw Ezili Coeur Noir push herself unsteadily to her feet, her putrid yellow eyes fixed on the door that Grant had leaped through just ten seconds earlier.

  In silence, Ezili Coeur Noir reached out for the door and shoved against it, trying to make it open. It was locked, she realized, but that did not matter to her. Outside, when she had found the redoubt, she had used a whole zombie army to dig out the door and break inside. Here, with just a single metal door barring her way, its surface painted a clean white, she would be out in a moment.

  Ezili Coeur Noir—the First Body of the crashed escape pod—placed her hand solidly on the door, laying her palm flat. Then she called upon the corrupted chalice of rebirth, felt its leakage as it sang its song of death in the air. The paint on the door blistered then flaked away, leaving the shining metal of the door itself revealed.

  Just outside the reactor, Kane watched as Ezili Coeur Noir pressed against the door, the paint on the outside peeling away under the power of her deathlike touch. “She’s coming through. We have to do something.”

  “Wait,” Brigid said. “That’s all we have left to do now.”

  Inside the reactor, Ezili Coeur Noir pressed her hand against the metal, and the outer surface began to oxidize, rusted chunks flaking away in a shower of copper-colored petals. Behind her, the reactor kicked into full fusion mode, and the queen of all things dead merely smiled, feeling its power shrugging against her back with all the irrelevance of a wave striking the shore. In a moment she would be free. In a moment she would recruit these terrible apes into her new choir of death.

  Another chunk of the door fell away in a shower of rust, revealing the thick, inner core of the double-layer door. Ezili Coeur Noir’s hand brushed it and a streak of rust showed there, twinkling like a seam of gold. She pushed her finger into the soft line of rust, her ragged nail poking through it and into the center of the reinforced door, the halfway point.

  And suddenly—nothing. Ezili Coeur Noir pressed against the door, but it stood there, immobile, sturdy as it had always been. She looked at her hands, looked back at the door, and she saw the call of the dead things fading from her vision. On the floor of the reactor, two tiny trinkets were being smashed together by the nuclear reaction: a plait of hair as white as snow and a ring through which was threaded a weave of hair as black as night. As the atom collider crashed the things around it together, fusing them to create new energy, Ezili Coeur Noir found herself buffeted by the trinkets and, at some spiritual level, the things that they represented.

  While she still looked like a dead thing, in that moment Ezili Coeur Noir changed, and Lilitu stood in the reactor, her psyche fused together once more. Through the window in the little safety hatch, Lilitu saw the face of Kane as he stood spluttering for breath and spitting out the water he had swallowed.

  “Nooooo!” Lilitu screamed as her body was pummeled by atomic forces, ripping itself apart in a tremendous implosion.

  Out in the swampland, in a dilapidated house that had acquired the name of Lilandera, two figures shook in place as they were called back to the core personality.

  Standing in place in the hallway, the voodoo doll just out of reach where Papa Hurbon had jammed it into the wall, Third Body Maitresse Ezili shuddered as her portly figure was reduced to a heap of dust. Her last thought had been of love.

  Just a few paces away, sitting at the kitchen table, Second Body Ezili Freda Dahomey rocked as if drifting off to sleep. Then she, too, was gone, the only evidence of her passing a single fleck of skin, a dark scar on it in the shape of a beetle.

  Deep beneath the ground, in the reactor room of Redoubt Mike, First Body became whole even as she ceased to be. The process took less than two seconds and it sounded like nothing, left nothing in its wake. It was as if Lilitu, or Ezili Coeur Noir, or whatever other aspect she had taken, had never even existed.

  In the mat-trans room outside the reactor, Brigid watched as the readout needles shuddered then stabilized, the water still raining down on them from the overhead sprinklers. As the needles finally returned to their base level, the beautiful redhead breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s over,” she announced.

  Kane looked around, as if seeing the room in a new light. “I expected it to be louder somehow,” he said, “when she finally went.”

  Brigid peered through the tiny security window of the reactor. “This is what it sounds like when gods die,” she said as the reactor powered down.

  Together, the three warriors made their way to the mat-trans unit that waited at the front of the room. The reactor charge would remain for ten minutes yet—more than enough time to send them on their way back home.

  OUTSIDE THE BURIED entrance to the redoubt, the light was turning to dusk, April turning to May and taking with it the Mange-les-Morts. Papa Hurbon wheeled himself along the dirt road that trailed through the bayou. He peered over his shoulder now and then, but there came no evidence that anything had changed, just the dead leaves and the sounds of distant insects and birds, as it had been when he had arrived.

  Still, he liked to think he knew that it was over. Because, if it wasn’t over, he was pretty sure he would know; something would be crawling or seeping or shambling from the entryway.

  Hurbon smiled then, as he took the little doll from his lap, the black material that made up her body still wringing wet from the traumas inside the redoubt. With pudgy fingers, he loosened the black ribbon that he had used to bind the doll, loosened it just a sliver, just enough to let the doll breathe, as it were.

  “Doll of wax, doll of dust,” Hurbon muttered as he brushed dirt from it. “You’re all fixed now. Soon you’ll come back, my precious little girl, and this time it is I—not you—who will be making the demands.”

  Papa Hurbon smiled as he wheeled himself down the dirt track toward the tarmac road beyond.

  Epilogue

  Once again there came the strange sensation of nonmovement, the stomach rolling of sea-sickness.

  Then the mist began to clear and Kane, Grant and Brigid found themselves standing within the mat-trans unit in the Cerberus ops
center, the familiar brown-tinted armaglass materializing behind the swirling mist.

  “Good to be home,” Kane said, brushing at his wet hair.

  Brigid nodded as she tapped in the door code that would release the lock and allow them to exit the mat-trans chamber. Her own damp hair clung to her face. “I need a shower,” she said. “A warm one this time, with soap.”

  “Sounds good,” Grant agreed as he rubbed at his aching shoulder, following Kane and Brigid from the mat-trans chamber and out into the familiar ops room.

  What confronted the three Cerberus warriors was a scene of carnage.

  Something had paid Cerberus a visit.

  Something bad.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-0231-3

  SCARLET DREAM

  Copyright © 2011 by Worldwide Library

  Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.

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