by James Axler
“...with this, Baron Trevelyan promises a new era of prosperity, tapping the sun’s resources to provide a near-infinite stream of power into our residences.”
The image cut to the marching figures as the report continued in voice-over. A marching band of uniformed schoolchildren passed the camera, alternately grinning and concentrating hard, followed by the grim figures of Magistrates walking five abreast, their expressions hidden beneath their helmets.
“The process has been over a decade in development, we are told, with last summer’s prototype launch conducted in secret. Now the baron feels ready to share his triumph with his grateful people.”
The scene changed once more, cutting to a pale-faced figure flanked by two Magistrates standing on a balcony, a vivid red banner draped beneath it in a long vertical that continued past the bottom of the screen. Brigid gasped as she saw the figure, recognized what it was: a hybrid, one of the quasi-human monsters who had ruled the nine villes until they finally revealed themselves to be the major players in a millennia-long alien conspiracy to subjugate and conquer humankind.
The hybrid baron spoke in an effeminate, weaselly voice, an echo coming from the speakers set up around him. “My people, today is a proud day. With the launch of our first sun shield, we are now able to tap the energy of the sun itself, utilising solar power to achieve our dreams. With this near-infinite power source, we are able to dream bigger than we ever have before. The world is ours.”
Brigid swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry, as the reporter wrapped up the news story. A sun shield that could provide infinite power? Into what world had the mat-trans unit thrown them?
* * *
KANE WAS SPRAWLED BY the statue, his jaw throbbing, head spinning. He pulled himself back from semiconsciousness, rolling his body back to a sitting position.
Across the street, the Magistrate moved like a wraith, the dark lines of his uniform weaving between the burned-out automobiles and ruined benches like a beetle’s glistening shell as he strode toward Kane in the quadrangle.
I’m trapped, Kane realized.
There were walls on all sides, holding him in a pincer between the office blocks. Tucked behind the mother-and-child statue, Kane raised his right arm—his gun arm—and thought about the Sin Eater, about what it would cost him to shoot this Magistrate. No, he decided. There had to be some other way. Killing the patrolman would achieve nothing. He needed a witness, someone to interrogate, so he could figure out what was going on and where they had materialized.
Kane’s eyes flashed around the area where he found himself trapped, searching the pooling water and the broken office furniture that had found its way to this enclosed concrete square. The furniture gave Kane an idea.
Behind him, the Dark Magistrate loomed closer, seeking his prey amid the ruins of the sprawling avenue. He called, mouth wide, a shriek like nails down a chalkboard bursting forth, becoming louder with each ululation. Abruptly the sound stopped, cut off in midstream when the Magistrate closed his lips. His prey had gone, was no longer hidden behind the statue.
The Magistrate turned, searching the area with his hidden eyes. And as he turned, Kane ran at him from his hiding place under a pockmarked desk, wielding the broken leg of a chair like a baseball bat.
* * *
“MY NAME IS BRYAN BAUBIER, and I’m a journalist,” the man on the videotape said without preamble.
This recording looked washed-out, the colors muted, and there was a fuzzy white blur at the top of the screen where the playback head needed cleaning, but Brigid watched without complaint. The man was sitting in what looked like this very storeroom, the wall visible right behind him with a shelf full of videotapes. The room was so small there was barely enough room to set up the camera, lending almost a fish-eye effect to his face. He looked young, still in his twenties, a mop of curly blond hair hanging partway over his eyes. In a different set of circumstances, Brigid might have described him as cute. He spoke in a whisper, his eyes furtive throughout the brief recording.
“This isn’t going on the record,” Baubier said. “They won’t let it.
“There was a protest in the town square today,” he continued, his eyes darting back and forth, “and it turned ugly. The people are rioting over food because so much has been reassigned for the baron’s grand project. Without any freight vehicles available, food’s no longer reaching the ville, and even the black market is struggling now where once it flourished.
“They sent Magistrates to quell the rioters. They were the new breed of Magistrates, ones I had heard about but not seen before. They walk like men but there is something wrong with them. They smell like they don’t wash, and they never speak. They simply lash out, attacking anyone who comes within arm’s reach. I saw a woman shot in cold blood as she tried to get free. She had been there to protest about the lack of food—she hadn’t been a part of the riot. She had been trying to calm everyone down when the Magistrates shot her in the head.”
Despite the low quality of the recording, Brigid could hear the fear in the man’s trembling tone, see it in his eyes.
“People are starving, but all the baron does is command his Magistrates to shoot them,” the man concluded. “One less mouth to feed. Or to complain.”
Brigid watched as Bryan Baubier leaned forward and switched off the camera, at which point the recording cut to static.
Brigid’s eyes returned to the shelf of video recordings, scanning their spines. The tapes to the left had dates on them, but as she got farther across the shelf she saw the dates turn to day numbers, and then tapes with simple blank labels where no one had taken the time to fill them in. She picked one of the undated ones, identified as Day 461, and slapped it in the video player.
* * *
KANE SWUNG THE HUNK of wood like a bat, driving it into the back of the Magistrate’s helmet with a loud crack. The wood struck so hard that it snapped, breaking along its central line, one half flipping over before crashing into the street.
The Magistrate fell, too, tumbling forward as the wood struck his helmet. The Magistrate’s helmet toppled from his head, rolling three feet across the sidewalk as he sagged to the ground. Kane stood behind him, the hunk of wood still clutched in his hand, watching for any sign of consciousness. He hadn’t killed him; he was sure of that. He just wanted the Magistrate unconscious so he could drag him somewhere secure to interrogate him.
The Magistrate lay before Kane, utterly still, sprawled across the tarmac, his arms stretched out before him. But as Kane watched, a weapon materialized in the Magistrate’s right hand, some curious adaptation of the Sin Eater pistol. Kane stepped away even as the dark-clad figure began rolling, bringing the blaster up and snapping the trigger. A trio of those shrieking bullets burst from the muzzle in quick succession, piercing the air with their haunting sound.
Kane was already in motion, diving for cover as the bullets clipped by overhead. In that moment, the Magistrate caught Kane’s eye, skewering Kane with his sinister stare. Beneath the helmet, his eyes were bulging, like two fried eggs sizzling in the pan, and his skin was an angry red, shredded and splitting, dark wounds oozing all across his bloated face.
Kane tossed the useless hunk of wood aside, scrabbling in the street debris for a better weapon. He did not want to use his Sin Eater, that was a last resort against a fellow Magistrate, even one in such a state of physical decay. The Magistrate, however, had no such compulsions, and he snapped off another burst of fire from his retractable blaster as Kane rolled away.
* * *
THE FACE ON THE VIDEO screen was talking again. Same face, same room, but the voice sounded flatter somehow, as if the man called Bryan Baubier had been stripped of his emotions.
“...see my mother,” Baubier said, beginning in the middle of his sentence. “When I go to shave, I see her there, looking out of the water.”
His t
one reminded Brigid of the way people sound after a loved one has died, that week-later sound, when they have cried as much as any person can and simply don’t have anything left to give to the world.
“Hadn’t seen her in three years, since she...the home.” His head dipped, and Brigid found herself looking into the crown of his hair for a few seconds as he muttered something that the microphone did not properly pick up. “I thought I’d stopped missing her. My sister always took it worse. But here it is, I’m mourning her all over again. When I do the dishes, even though there’s barely anything to eat. Why I’m coming into work still I don’t know, it’s...people need to know what happened, how it all went down.”
Brigid watched the face on the screen as the man sat there, staring into the lens—or through it. He seemed to be gathering his thoughts, less scripted than the earlier entry she had seen. Ninety seconds passed before Bryan Baubier reached forward and the screen finally went blank.
Brigid ejected the tape, took another from the shelf. This one had no date on it, no indicators at all, other than a number that had been peeled from a sticker sheet and placed in the center of the spine. It was tape number 9.
“Hell-o, operator,” Brigid muttered as she pushed the tape into the player. Behind her, the other figure watched, too.
* * *
KANE SNATCHED UP A LENGTH of metal piping as he rolled, the Dark Magistrate’s pistol bucking in his hand. The pistol fired, rattling off another burst of those howling slugs as the Cerberus man plucked up the metal pipe and doubled back. The screaming bullets were lost somewhere in the street, while Kane regained his footing and began to lunge toward the Mag.
His arms pumping, Kane ran at the Magistrate, swinging the metal piping like a baseball bat. The Magistrate’s blaster rushed up at him even as Kane swung, and the two weapons met in a clang of metal on metal. The pistol spat another shrieking bullet from its muzzle as Kane knocked it aside, and the bullet raced past Kane’s ear so close that he felt it brush his hair.
The Magistrate glared at Kane with huge yellow-white eyes, bloody streaks coloring them at the outer edges. He tried to bring his weapon around again, but Kane kept the length of piping against the blaster, holding it firmly away from his body. Kane’s other hand shot forward in a cross, punching the Magistrate with a powerful blow across the jaw. The Mag stumbled a half step, his finger still pressed against the trigger of his screeching weapon.
Kane pressed his advantage, driving his right knee up into the Magistrate’s gut, forcing him backward with weight alone. Kane suspected that the longer they spent out here, the more noise they made, the more chance there was that someone else would come to investigate. That would most likely be another Magistrate, and Kane didn’t want that. So he needed to finish this quickly and decisively, whether or not his foe was actually alive.
The Dark Magistrate scooted backward, letting out an abbreviated screamlike noise close to Kane’s ear before dropping to the ground. Kane drew his hand back and swept it, arrowlike, at the Magistrate’s exposed throat to silence him.
“Zip it,” Kane snarled.
* * *
ON SCREEN, BRYAN BAUBIER had grown a beard, though it did little to disguise how gaunt he had become. It took Brigid a moment to realize why he had grown the beard—it was most probably to avoid looking at the reflection in the water basin, the one that looked like his mother.
“Mags are all over now,” he explained in a hoarse voice, “more of them than us. They use those blasters on anyone who moves—Soul Eaters, they’re called. The Mags don’t speak, they just arrest people who break curfew, and those people never appear again.
“It’s three in the morning, and I’m still at work because I’m scared of going out there. If the Magistrates see me...
“A bomb went off, near the center of the ville. They’re saying it was an experiment, that’s the official line. I don’t know what kind of experiment would do that. People died, burned up in the blowback.
“Teresa’s gone.”
Brigid watched the haunted face of the man on the screen as he sat in this same claustrophobic, metal-walled room, talking into the camera.
“Baron Trevelyan put out a statement promising us that everything was okay,” the man on the screen continued. “But it’s not. People are disappearing day by day, and there’s little enough food for those who remain. I’ve hardly eaten in ten days.”
For a moment the mop-haired journalist reached forward, and the picture jumped as it cut to a new recording—the same face, some indeterminate time later. He looked tired, had dark circles under his eyes.
“My mother’s here,” Baubier said. “She was in the men’s restroom—I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I couldn’t go. I wanted to piss myself when I caught sight of her, but the irony is I couldn’t go. She looks sick, like how I remembered the last time, only worse.”
There was a noise from somewhere off camera, and the journalist turned away from the lens, peering off toward where Brigid realized the door would be. Then he turned back, reaching for the switch on the camera once more.
“Security’s here,” Bryan Baubier explained in a hushed voice. “Maybe they can figure out what my dead mother’s doing here.”
The image winked out.
* * *
LYING ON THE SIDEWALK, the Magistrate rocked, his Soul Eater firing again as Kane held it back from his face. The bullet screeched as it left the chamber, screaming like a child in pain as it shot away from the two figures wrestling on the ground.
The Magistrate was well-trained—Kane expected no less—and he shifted his muscles to gain leverage, flipping Kane back. Kane let his body go limp as he was thrown, knowing better than to struggle. He was tossed away by the Magistrate, tumbling over and over on the sidewalk before regaining his balance.
Glass tinkled under his hands and knees as Kane drew himself up on all fours, a bloody red line drawing a path down from his left nostril to his mouth. As he looked up, the Magistrate was pulling himself to a standing position, bringing his blaster around to execute this human irritation.
“This can’t be good,” Kane muttered as the Magistrate targeted him once more.
Kane winced as the Magistrate’s trigger finger tensed.
* * *
BRIGID TOOK THE last tape from the shelf and she inserted it into the player with a sense of foreboding.
Static ran on the screen for a few seconds, then was replaced by the face of Bryan Baubier. He looked tired, haunted, with an unkempt beard and uncombed hair.
“I just wanted to let you know that I didn’t kill my mother,” he began. “Even if that’s what she’s saying. Yes, I should have visited her more in the home, but I...” He stopped, drew a heavy breath before he went on. “A part of me knows that something is happening, this rational part of me, the journalist part. Everyone is so heartsick but they can’t express it. Like we’re all being followed by the people in our lives who have died. As if there isn’t enough death out there already.”
Brigid turned away from the screen for a few seconds, her eyes on the closed door. Daryl Morganstern was there, watching her from the shadows. She saw him, shook her head, willed him to go away.
On screen, Bryan Baubier was still talking. “They did something, the baron, the Magistrates. They did something to us. I don’t know what it is, can’t get a grip on it, but I know it’s something. Like we’re all out of true.”
Brigid was watching the screen again, trying to ignore the figure poised in the darkness behind Bryan’s head, a refection of the figure whom she knew was waiting behind her. Daryl.
“We were people with lives,” Baubier muttered, shaking his head. “Now...” He stopped again, brushing at the tears that had formed in his eyes, tears that the camera’s resolution could not even pick up in the dimly lit store cupboard. Then, sniffing loudly, Baubier star
ed into the camera, his face close to the lens, and spoke in a defiant tone. “We’re not living anymore—we’re just spaces filled with sorrow. Sorrow spaces.”
Brigid watched as the man reached forward and switched off the recording again. The screen reverted to static. There were no further tapes on the shelf; the only possibility now was to go backward and watch what had come before.
Brigid let the tape turn in the player, watching the snowstorm patterns that the static made on the screen, looking past it at the reflection of the figure who was standing over her shoulder, so close she could reach out and touch him. Daryl Morganstern was not there, she told herself. But his reflection continued to wait, a statue in the darkness, infinitely patient.
“Are you just going to ignore me?” Daryl Morganstern wanted to know. His voice sounded colder than Brigid remembered, harsher.
* * *
STRUGGLING ON THE SIDEWALK, Kane winced as the Magistrate pulled the trigger on his blaster. But nothing happened. No bullet, screaming or otherwise. The weapon simply clicked on empty.
The Magistrate stared at the blaster in disbelief, his finger curling again and again on the trigger as if that would somehow resolve the problem of running out of ammo.
Kane meanwhile drew himself up and charged toward the Magistrate, head low, driving himself with a growl of determination. The Mag looked up at the last moment, just as Kane slammed against his chest using the crown of his head as a battering ram.
The rotted Magistrate went down, crashing into another office forecourt, where everything was strewed with glass. Both figures slid, Kane’s momentum driving them back. Then they were at the edge of the building, where a revolving door stood, its glass panels missing, just steel bars poised in a dance of vertical lines. The Magistrate struck one of those steel lines headfirst, with a sickeningly hollow sound.
Kane pulled away, staring at the Magistrate as he lay on the paving slabs, head lolling at an angle. Without hesitation, he kicked away the Magistrate’s weapon—that strangely altered Sin Eater that shot screaming bullets in curling facelike smoke—and shook his head. “What the hell have we stumbled onto here?” Kane asked himself.