by James Axler
“What are you thinking?” Brigid asked in an urgent whisper. “That they’re still receiving transmissions?”
Kane nodded. “And that we could send them,” he told her, raising his eyebrows.
Before Brigid could query that, Kane gestured her to cross the road, and the two of them scurried across the cracked surface and into the forecourt with its glass carpet. Brigid picked her way through the shards until she reached the shadow cast by the awning, while Kane was more direct, keeping pace with her and crushing the glass underfoot, the popping tinkles, barely audible over the incessant howl of the winds.
When they stopped, Brigid looked at Kane quizzically as he stared back down the street, watching for the figures he had spotted there.
“You want to send a broadcast?” she asked. “What, to Cerberus?”
“Yeah,” Kane said. “Unless you’re up for rebooting our Commtacts. I know you’re a dab hand at most stuff, but microwiring, coupled with the respective surgical procedure... Well, under normal circumstances, I’m sure you’d manage, but out in the field...?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Brigid said, hefting the shotgun so that it rested on her shoulders. “Are we going inside, then?”
“You go,” Kane instructed. “I’m going to wait here, see what John Ghost there is up to.”
Brigid nodded and made her way into the tall building. She knew better than to argue with Kane when he was in a mood like this. He was in hunter mode now; something had piqued his curiosity.
The doors to the tower block were warped and buckled where something powerful had struck them. It looked like the result of a hurricane. Inside, Brigid found a typical office lobby, one long reception desk coupled with a small waiting area that featured a low table for magazines. Everything was blackened with smoke damage and the fabric coverings of the chairs had burned entirely away, leaving the stuffing, melted and congealed, hanging within their skeletal metal frameworks.
After a quick scan of what remained of the office directory behind a sheet of melted plastic, Brigid found what she was after; a monitoring station attached to a media group, likely the owner of the equipment on the roof. The group would have disseminated official information, a mouthpiece for the ville’s baron.
Brigid pushed open a couple of doors—one for a store cupboard, the next for a cloakroom with a long metal rail—before she located the stairwell behind the dead elevators. Like the lobby, the stairwell smelled of fire damage and damp, and Brigid winced as its pungency struck her, making tears stream from her eyes. The stairway door had been closed a long time, so the stench had had nowhere to escape to. Drawing a breath, Brigid began the long trek up eight flights of stairs to the office in question.
* * *
OUTSIDE, KANE HAD MOVED away from the forecourt and was making his way down the street toward a lone figure he could see moving there. The others had disappeared, but Kane had been watching this one for two minutes now. The winds continued to howl through the streets, wailing like a creature in pain and making it hard to distinguish if the figure was making any noise.
Kane continued toward the figure, sticking close to the shadows as he made his way to the end of the block. He could see clearly now that it was another Magistrate, dressed in dark leathers with the bloodred badge of office pinned to the left breast of his tunic. He wore the outer coat of the Magistrate Division over his uniform, and this, too, featured the red symbol of the Magistrates along with scarlet piping. The Mag seemed to be picking through the wreckage that was strewed on the street, discarding great chunks of melted metal as he searched.
Ducked down in the shadows, Kane watched for almost five minutes, conscious of the weight of the Sin Eater pistol pressing against his wrist. The Magistrate moved normally, but each time he looked up Kane could see the bulging flesh beneath the helmet, distended and colored an angry red, the veins running like dark fingers through it, the skin split here and there. Kane had seen enough corpses to recognize the look. He appeared to be in the second stage after death, the stage known as bloat, when a body’s gases accumulate. And yet the man still walked, going about his business as if nothing was wrong. Kane felt a shiver down his spine as he watched, hoping he was mistaken. There was only one way to find out for sure.
“Hey, Magistrate!” Kane shouted as he stepped out of the shadows. “I heard there was a happening at the big house—you think you could maybe point me the way?”
The Magistrate flinched, his blaster emerging from his sleeve as he looked up to see who dared taunt him. Kane started to run.
* * *
THE STAIRWELL WAS DANK, dark and it had a smell like burned toast. Brigid climbed the stairs, passing floor after floor as she made her way to the ninth floor. Water was pooled everywhere, its dampness clinging to the walls opposite a line of shattered windows. Kane had the right idea about radio communications, she knew. They just needed the right equipment and she could tap the Cerberus network and alert them to their dilemma.
There was a presence on the staircase. Brigid could feel it, sense it, but when she looked it wasn’t there. It was just out of sight, waiting around the next turn or following behind her. Her mind playing tricks.
From the staircase the floors seemed characterless, just smooth gray concrete with a floor number plated to the wall beside each dull-painted door. The paint of the doors had blistered with heat, a sign that something had struck the building. This was designed as a fire staircase, and it featured heavy doors to every floor. Any fire would not have penetrated that barricade easily, yet the well still stank of burning and the doors showed the evidence of suffering a dose of extreme heat. Maybe it wasn’t fire, Brigid wondered—maybe it was just heat of such intensity it had melted everything in a flash.
Brigid stopped at floor nine. She waited a moment at the closed door that led onto the floor itself, gathering her thoughts and calming her breath. She was in the peak of physical fitness, but hurrying up this stinking staircase still took effort. And there was the thing behind her, the lurking presence with the familiar face. It wouldn’t do to get caught unprepared now, after she had come this far.
Raising the shotgun one-handed, Brigid pulled at the heavy fire door and peered into the floor beyond.
The door opened up straight into an office, open-plan design with low screens that boxed in each section, standing a little over four feet in height. The desks were mostly arranged in blocks of four, with one or two lone desks at the end of each row. They reminded Brigid of cages in a zoo. Two entire walls of windows cast light into the room, painting it in a charmless gloom that would force its occupants to rely on the fluorescent strip lights overhead. The window glass had broken in places, and Brigid could feel and hear the breeze blowing through those holes, fluttering coasters and address cards across the floor like tumbleweed.
Taking a step from the fire door, the shotgun ready in her grip, Brigid called out, “Hello? Anyone here?”
No one answered, which didn’t surprise Brigid in the slightest. She had hoped that perhaps she was wrong, but sadly, like every other building they had checked here in Quocruft, the office was emphatically empty.
Brigid stepped to her left, gazing out of the nearest bank of windows, the breeze tousling her hair. She was at the side of the building, as far from the forecourt as one could get. Her own reflection played across the glass. The reflection was translucent, and it took just a slight adjustment of Brigid’s focus to see through herself and down to the access road beyond, where garbage and delivery wags might have come to service the building. No one down there.
As Brigid turned away, she saw something standing beside her, reflected in the smooth surface of the glass. It was a man, seen only in shadow, his proportions familiar. She turned, looking behind her at where the man—Daryl Morganstern—should have been, but he wasn’t there.
Shaking her head, Brigid turned
back to the window for just a moment, searching its reflective edge. He was still there. She couldn’t quite see him, only his absence, but she could feel him, watching her. A resentful guardian angel.
Warily Brigid paced the long aisle that ran between desks, seeing more signs of the great heat that seemed to have incinerated so much. Devoid of life, the room had been left to rot, computer units and comm devices spread untidily on the desks, some tipped on the floor. Besides the computers, there was a monitor screen on almost every desk, enough to make Brigid conclude that they had all featured such a device once. She took a few moments to test one of these, trying its switches. They were television sets, a built-in playback device attached to their bases. Nothing worked.
She moved on, spying the seared artifacts on the walls, two dust-drenched coats that had been left on a coat stand between desks. There was a smoke-streaked comm array, designed for taking satellite feeds. Brigid eyed it for a moment, recognizing the setup. Hypothetically, she could use this to contact the Cerberus base, tuning into the Commtacts’ frequency and bouncing a signal off the Keyhole satellite. But of course, that would require power, which was something that this building did not have.
Over to the right, away from the bank of windows, was a long wall that had been used to store recordings. They ran almost the whole length of the wall, double-stacked in places, with occasional gaps where items had been removed. At first Brigid took them to be books, but on closer inspection she saw they were reel-to-reel magnetic tapes: video recordings. The tapes nearest the windows had been melted, their plastic covers liquefied and solidified in new and interesting shapes, like hot toffee sticking to a cooking ladle, but most had survived intact. She pulled one from the shelf at random, reading the identifying label that had been slapped on the box. The label was handwritten over a formatted printout, and it gave the date of the recording, along with the story and the reporter’s name. It was a news recording of some sort, Brigid realized, this one celebrating the opening of a new school.
Brigid checked a few of the tapes, finding stories concerning food deliveries, recycling and one about the declining radiation levels. It was the kind of information she had regularly processed as a junior archivist in Cobaltville, before she had been given more important responsibilities in the Historical Division.
Archived news reports. Of course, without power she had no way to play them.
Brigid pushed the tapes back onto their shelves, returning them to their correct places with the ingrained meticulousness of an archivist. The shelving units were split in the center to reveal a door that Brigid guessed led into an editing suite or similar. She strolled over, tested the handle and let herself in.
There, Brigid found herself staring straight down the barrel of a gun pointed right between her eyes.
Chapter 17
Automatically, Brigid skipped back, dodging out of the firing line with a movement born of honed reflex. The shining revolver did not fire but simply remained there, pointed at the door.
It was dark in the room, the only light spilling in from the office outside, where Brigid had left the door open. The blaster was held in a bone hand that was attached to a skeleton draped in stained clothes. The skeleton was balanced in a swivel chair that had been placed between two tight shelving units filled with videotapes. There was barely enough room for the chair, though its long-dead occupant scarcely cared now. The room itself was windowless.
The first thing Brigid did was disarm the skeleton and check over the revolver in the office outside, where the light was better. It was a .38 with five bullets still in the chamber and the safety off. She flipped the safety on and shoved the weapon in her waistband at the small of her back.
“Don’t think you’ll be needing it anymore, friend,” she told her grisly discovery.
After that, Brigid returned to the room, reached for the light switch on the wall and flipped it once, twice, only proving what she had already suspected—that it didn’t work. There was no power; nothing worked here any longer. When night fell, she and Kane would likely see the whole city plunged into darkness.
Swiftly she pushed the swivel chair and its gruesome occupant out of the storeroom before returning. Then, leaving the door open behind her, Brigid checked the room. If there was a communications device, she might be able to use an emergency backup generator to get it running. But she needed to find both, and here seemed as good a place to start looking as any. Things like that ended up forgotten in dusty storerooms like this.
There was no comm array. Little more than a storeroom, the tiny office featured a reinforced metal door—the one Brigid had entered by—twelve shelves containing video tapes, two further shelves that contained a dismantled editing box designed for editing in the field and a one-man desk at the far end on which there was a lamp that no longer worked, a television and a bulky, handheld video camera. Brigid looked at the camera for a moment, turning it over in her hands as she thought. The camera ran on battery power and could take a full-size videocassette. She flipped open the side-mounted screen and watched as, to her surprise, it illuminated with life.
“Batteries still working,” she said. Standing behind her, the shadowy figure of Daryl Morganstern smiled at Brigid’s discovery, his silhouette visible in the reflection of the dark television screen. Brigid ignored him, knowing he couldn’t be real.
With the camera’s video player and power, she could watch the tapes, at least until the battery ran down. Brigid took a minute to familiarize herself with the camera’s operation, bringing up a user’s menu on-screen. The camera had two hours and eighteen minutes of battery power left.
Brigid scanned the shelves. “So, what are we going to watch?” she muttered.
* * *
KANE RAN THROUGH the ghost streets of Quocruft, his arms pumping at his sides, feet splashing into the puddles that littered the broken tarmac. Behind him, the imposing figure of the Magistrate sidestepped as he followed, weapon raised, trying to get a bead on his zigzagging prey.
Kane flinched as a clutch of bullets came howling toward him, cutting the air with their ghastly shrieks. Kane’s pursuer shrieked, too, his strained voice echoing through the empty buildings like a whale song. All around Kane, the Magistrate’s screaming bullets clipped into the ground and the charred street furniture, whipping into it with an abrupt curtailment of their screams.
Kane needed to finish this, and quickly. The noise of gunfire, the screaming call of the Dark Magistrate, even his own running footsteps on the hard ground—all of this would attract others, he felt certain. Kane leaped as more bullets clipped the road at his feet, spitting up chunks of broken tarmac.
There was a car up ahead, a burned-out wreck, its tires flattened husks that clung to the road like the tendrils of a creeping plant. As more of the Mag’s screaming bullets blistered the air all around him, Kane leaped onto the hood of the parked car with a loud thump, rolling across it in a second before dropping below, out of sight of those vicious bullets.
Crouched down in the puddles behind the automobile, Kane checked his right hand. He could bring his own Sin Eater into play, either execute this Magistrate or wound him. But he needed to find a way to catch the man so that he could question him, perhaps even reason with him.
Kane scanned the area, searching the immediate vicinity with his eyes as his opponent stalked closer. There was water here, pooled on the cracking road surface, shimmering silver as it reflected the cloud cover from overhead. Kane’s eyes were drawn to that water as ripples ran across its surface where the breeze brushed against it. Vaughn.
Her face was there, the face of the schoolgirl who had died on his watch. Her blond hair swirled about her face, cutting across her eyes for a moment, tangling around her narrow stem of a neck. Helena Vaughn.
Kane looked at the face in the water, the clouds overhead drifting past her. She looked beautiful in her innocenc
e, a beauty that he knew had been stolen away by Pellerito and his drugs. He should have saved her. But how could he? He had only been called to the scene once the girl had died; he could not possibly have—
Something exploded close to Kane, a shriek of terror as the bullet cut the air and struck the side of the burned-out automobile. Kane jumped, instinct driving his body, pumping him with adrenaline. He was away from the car even before he quite realized, charging across the street toward an open concrete quadrangle framed by the jutting struts of an office block. The concrete had been pounded by some great force, dark, cracked lines running across it as if an earthquake had struck. In the center, a statue stood atop a plinth, mother and child captured in embrace, the woman’s head crumbled away with damage.
Kane ran at the statue, still seeing the innocent face of Helena Vaughn in his mind’s eye, still smelling her girl perfume, pencil shavings, hairspray. Behind him, the Dark Magistrate tracked his prey, screaming bullets blasting from his hand cannon, his fixed expression stern behind the cracked mask of his visor.
His mind whirling, Kane tripped, the toe of his boot catching on one of the ruined paving slabs. Suddenly he was falling headfirst at the ground as another burst of bullets lunged through the air toward him.
* * *
THERE WAS NO CHOICE, not for an archivist like Brigid. Most of the tapes in the store cupboard were labelled with dates and identifier numbers, but Brigid didn’t pay that much attention. She simply looked around the room until she found the lowest number, took that tape from the shelf and pushed it into the open tray of the camera. Then, sitting on the floor of the storeroom with the video camera between her knees and its flip screen open, she pressed Play.
The screen lit up immediately, coming in midway through a news report. A dour-faced man in a raincoat stared into the lens as a parade marched past behind him, the familiar lines of the ville buildings to his rear. He was speaking to the viewer in that mock-urgent tone reserved for television news reports.