Apocalypse Unseen

by James Axler

  Grant glanced back at the cafeteria, detecting the familiar roar of Kane’s Sin Eater amid the cacophony of crashes and booms. He could stay, help Kane and Brigid, or he could go after Hurbon and finish this.

  With a determined jut of his jaw, Grant turned and strode to the heavy fire door that opened onto the stairwell, pushing it aside and hurrying within. A moment later he was scampering down the stairs, his footsteps echoing down the chasm of the stairwell shaft.

  * * *

  DEEP INSIDE THE REFRIGERATOR, Kane’s Sin Eater had clicked on empty. Ki was on top of him, clawed hand reaching for his face, larger than any Annunaki that Kane had ever seen. He had fought bare-knuckle with Lilitu and with Enlil, but Ki was larger, more powerfully built. What was it Brigid had said? Ki was the first, the archetype, the mother of the whole line.

  Ki’s smile broadened as she saw fear cross Kane’s expression, even though his eyes were still hidden behind the darkened lenses of the night-vision specs. Her breath smelt of rot, of the dryness of sleeping too long, of birth or rebirth.

  “Your weapon is empty,” Ki said, the duotonal words coming with a wash of rancid breath on Kane’s face. “Poor, helpless apekin, too proud to bow to your master.”

  “Maybe I’m just too stupid,” Kane replied. “Did you think of that?” As he spoke, Kane squirmed beneath her, pushing Ki away with the clenched fist of his free hand. Ki just laughed at the feeble attempt.

  “I’ll start with one of your eyes, apekin,” she promised in her weird, duotonal voice, “but you’ll still see and feel everything that follows. I’ll leave you the other right up until you finally die.” A droplet of saliva dripped from her salivating tongue onto the left lens of Kane’s shades.

  “I’m sure I’ll appreciate that,” Kane said sarcastically, pushing at Ki’s forehead with his left fist to try to hold her back. Behind the dark lenses, he had closed his eyes, screwing them tightly shut. Then Kane activated the thing he had clenched in his left fist, opening his fingers to release it as it went off in his hand. It was a flashbang.

  Suddenly, the refrigerator was filled with a brightness like the sun and its accompanying boom as the flashbang went off, right in front of Ki’s face. She shrieked, the duotonal scream of a creature whose existence crossed the boundaries of dimensions, a scream heard in places far beyond the confines of the underground redoubt.

  Ki reared back, blinded by the cruel proximity of the explosive charge. Her ears were ringing, too, the reverberation of the explosion like a tolling bell inside her head.

  As Ki’s weight shifted momentarily from him, Kane pulled himself aside, rolling over and scrambling free on hands and knees. Like a sprinter at the starting blocks, he got to his feet from that swiftly moving crawl, kept pushing himself forward as Ki flailed just a few feet behind him.

  “Now, Baptiste!” Kane shouted. “Now!”

  * * *

  AT THE DOOR to the refrigerator, Brigid watched as Kane came sprinting toward her, the temporarily blinded form of Ki regathering herself to give chase. Brigid shoved the door, its cold metal heavy against her straining muscles, for it had never been designed to be shut quickly like this.

  Legs pumping, Kane came running toward the gap in the door even as Brigid swung the heavy door, driving it with all her strength, both hands pressed against it, handle and front.

  Kane leaped through the closing gap, still running as the door slammed shut and Brigid drew the handle up to lock it.

  The kitchen area was plunged into sudden darkness once more, only the green activation light on the refrigerator glowed eerily in the gloom. Kane was still running, Sin Eater clutched in his right hand, dodging to avoid the central island worktop as he shed the burst of speed that had driven his body to freedom. Behind him, he heard something heavy slam against the far side of the refrigerator door, crashing against the metal.

  Standing at the door, Brigid took a step back, alarmed by the sound as Ki came slamming against the door. It held, the chromium not showing so much as a dent, as the muscular Annunaki crashed powerfully against it from the inside. The refrigerator was designed to seal as tight as an airlock, trapping all of the cold inside.

  There came another crash against the far side of the door, and another, but the door remained unmoved, holding in place without so much as a scuff showing on exterior surface.

  Kane came over to join Brigid a moment later, his breathing racing from the adrenaline that had driven a shock through his system in the ultimate fight-or-flight response against one of humanity’s very first monsters.

  “You okay, anam-chara?” Brigid asked.

  Kane smiled at the nickname, one he could not recall Brigid ever using out loud for him. It was a much-needed reminder of their relationship, of how they were soul friends throughout all of time, locked together in a clinch that existed somewhere much deeper than the physical plane. “Yeah,” he said between hurried breaths.

  Then Kane reached forward for the control panel beside the green indicator light, seeing it clearly through the electrochemical polymer lenses of his night-vision spectacles. He worked the controls for a moment, adjusting the temperature in the refrigerator with a twist of a dial and a double tap of a button. Deep freeze.

  “There,” Kane said. “That ought to do it.”

  The refrigerator would freeze Ki in place, holding the lizard in the room until such time as Cerberus could return and deal with her more fully. Lizards were cold-blooded, they did not function well in freezing temperatures.

  When Kane turned back, he saw that Brigid was staring at his chest. “What?” Kane asked, looking down to see what she was looking at.

  His shadow suit had a two-inch rip across his left pectoral, the material puckered against his chest. The tiny window it left exposed Kane’s bare chest beneath. There was something dark and metallic there, pressed against the flesh, round like a coin. Kane reached for it, but Brigid stopped him, grabbing him by the hand.

  “Kane, you’ve been shot,” she said.

  Chapter 26

  “What?” Kane repeated, trying to process what Brigid meant even as the hammering against the refrigerator’s metal door continued just a foot away.

  “It’s a bullet,” Brigid said. “Your shadow suit must have reduced its velocity, but not enough to stop it going in.”

  Brigid could see better than he could, Kane acknowledged with emotional detachment, had a better angle on what had happened. He thought back, remembering something striking against his chest, forcing him to let go of the hook-and-chain where he had originally intended to use one of the same to hook Ki.

  “I’ve been hit,” Kane said, echoing Brigid’s words from just a few moments before. He stared at the bullet, his chin pressed against his chest.

  “How do you feel?” Brigid asked, the concern obvious in her voice.

  “Bruised, kind of,” Kane said after a moment’s thought. “The adrenaline’s wearing off now, I think that and the shadow suit helped blunt the pain.”

  “We need to get it out, get you proper medical assistance,” Brigid told him.

  But Kane was shaking his head. “Grant will need our help,” he said. “This whole thing isn’t over till it’s over.”

  “It looks like it’s missed your heart, but we don’t know what the bullet’s pressing against,” Brigid said doubtfully.

  “It’ll wait,” Kane assured her.

  “What if it can’t?” Brigid told him. “I’m not a doctor, Kane—”

  “It’ll wait because it has to, Baptiste,” Kane told her, his voice firm. “Now, let’s go find Hurbon and see what other monsters he’s been hiding down here.”

  Without waiting, Kane strode toward the entryway that led into the cafeteria. He halted in the doorway, turning his head back to Brigid. “Baptiste? You coming?”

  She nodded and
began to trot after him. “You know, Kane, we always fought the Annunaki because we believe they restricted humanity’s free will, forcing us into a submissive position.”

  “Yeah,” Kane acknowledged, leading the way through the bullet-marked cafeteria, reloading his Sin Eater as he walked.

  “Well, I just realized that they don’t have anything on you,” Brigid teased, “you hard-assed bastard.”

  Kane turned to her and smiled, offering a snort of laughter as his reply.

  Brigid frowned at him. “Doesn’t mean you should go catching any more bullets, though,” she admonished as they furtively made their way toward the entrance of the cafeteria to try to locate Grant.

  * * *

  GRANT SCURRIED DOWN the stairwell, listening to the muffled groan of the elevator mechanism as it lowered the car carrying Hurbon through the redoubt.

  He knew the redoubt—kind of. He had been here roughly two years before, when an incursion had occurred that had been flagged by the Cerberus mainframe. That time, he and his colleagues, Kane and Brigid, had checked every floor, searching for the source of the incursion before locating it in a laboratory that branched off from the motor pool.

  He thought back, trying to picture what they had found on each level. Storage, living quarters, sleeping quarters, some computer rooms that had fallen into disrepair, some ancient food stores. Not much worth hanging around for.

  The lowest level had been the only point of interest. Here they had emerged from the facility’s mat-trans chamber, and had discovered it was powered by an experimental cold-fusion generator located on the same level. If anyone was setting up anything here, Grant guessed it would be in that lowest subbasement level.

  He took the stairs two at a time, still listening for the whine of the elevator as it finally came to a halt. Even if he had not been listening out for it, Grant could not have missed the halt—it was accompanied by the loud ch-chunk noise of the brakes activating and bringing the car to a stop in the shaft next to the stairwell.

  Grant was one floor above the lowest level by then, and he vaulted the banister and leaped down to the next flight of stairs, moving swiftly toward the door there. A sign had been painted on the wall identifying the floor and area. It read “BO55 Level.”

  There was a small window in the door made from reinforced glass with a familiar crisscross pattern of wire running through it. Grant checked the window, wary of attack.

  Outside, the corridor was cast in a soft, red glow. Papa Hurbon was just exiting the elevator to Grant’s left, the back of his wheelchair retreating from Grant as he wheeled down the corridor, away from the yellow rectangle of illumination spilling from the open elevator doors.

  There were other things illuminating the corridor, candles in jars and on stands, one flickering inside the blackened face of a human skull like some ghastly jack-o’-lantern. And the whole thing was cast in a soft redness that emanated from somewhere beyond the window’s frame.

  Grant cursed as Hurbon disappeared from sight, moving beyond the reach of the window. The Cerberus warrior waited a moment, listening. Then, quietly, he pulled open the door and stepped out into the red corridor.

  Hurbon had already disappeared, but there were two figures standing at the far end of the corridor, lit by the flickering candles and a square of redness that seemed almost organic in nature, as if they were all inside a body. The men were dark skinned and bare chested, and they stood perfectly still. They momentarily reminded Grant of the men who had functioned as Ereshkigal’s Terror Priests in Spain.

  Grant raised his Copperhead, training it on them so that they could see it. “Hands where I can see them, and no sudden moves,” he instructed.

  The two figures ignored him, standing perfectly still like statues. To their side, Grant saw the redness seemed to be emanating from a doorway, though from this distance and this angle it was hard to make out quite what was causing it. It cast the scene in a red wash like blood on teeth.

  Grant jogged the blaster a little, raising it to draw attention to it. “I ain’t kidding, guys,” he said. “Hands up high, right now.”

  “They won’t obey you,” Hurbon’s voice called, emanating from somewhere nearby.

  “Papa Hurbon,” Grant called in response, “whatever is going on down here it needs to stop.”

  “Is that so, Mr. Grant of Cerberus?” Hurbon replied from wherever he had hidden. The voice was emanating from somewhere close to the two figures who stood sentry in the bloodred corridor.

  With his blaster still trained on the two men, Grant paced forward. “We’ve been following the trail of chaos you left right across the globe,” he said, raising his voice. “Spain, Italy, the Congo. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Experiments,” came the response. “I’m a medicine man, Grant, you know that. Medicines need to be tested, refined. That was all it was. Surely you don’t resent me for that.”

  “People died,” Grant said, pacing slowly along the corridor, still watching the two bare-chested figures who stood statue still. “A lot of people. Hundreds.

  “And worse,” Grant added, “some were killed just so they would walk again, dead soldiers brought back to life.”

  “The difference between life and death is far less than most people outside of the path acknowledge,” Hurbon said, a throaty chuckle to his words.

  Grant was close to the motionless men, still watching them cautiously.

  “But then, you never walked the path, did you, Mr. Grant?” Hurbon added.

  The two static figures suddenly moved, lunging for Grant and grabbing the end of his weapon in a flash. Grant pulled the trigger as the blaster was yanked from his grasp and, for a moment, propellant lit the red corridor as Grant went dancing backward. In that momentary flash, Grant saw the men’s eyes clearly for the first time—they were pure white, like the eyes of a marble statue.

  Chapter 27

  Zombies! Grant realized as the two men piled on top of him in the tight confines of the candlelit corridor.

  Not the shambling undead, risen-from-the-grave types, but the other kind, living men whose wills had been drained through the use of drugs and herbs. It was an old voodoo trick, sapping the will of the living, leaving them in an impressionable haze where they would follow a houngan’s orders like the hypnotized volunteers at a magician’s show.

  One of the figures shoved Grant hard—harder in fact than he would have expected even given the impressive muscular on show across the man’s naked torso—as if he had no sense of self-preservation, just the desire to knock his enemy back.

  Grant staggered backward, only remaining upright by striking against the wall at his rear. He watched as the other man, the one who had grabbed his blaster, threw the Copperhead dismissively aside. The weapon clattered to the floor, kicking up water from a puddle that had accumulated there.

  Grant was a highly trained combatant; even a momentary advantage for an enemy was short-lived unless they knew how to press that advantage. Grant rolled his shoulders as his enemy came for him again, swung a punch at White Eyes’s jaw that crossed the space between them like a rocket. The man’s head whipped back under the impact as Grant’s fist connected, a crunch of crushed gristle or bone accompanying the strike. But the man did not so much as grunt, just flopped back with a stagger, falling against the wall.

  Grant moved forward, closing in on his second attacker. They had caught Grant unawares, as he had let his guard down for just that fraction of a second as he spoke with Hurbon. But he was a trained hard-contact Magistrate and they were just civilians. Putting them out of commission, even if they had no sense of pain or self-preservation, would be a matter of a few seconds, not minutes.

  The second man strode toward Grant, arms outstretched, teeth catching the flickering candlelight as a wicked grin appeared on his face. He swung a punch, but Grant blocked it,
overturned it and threw the man off balance so that he staggered wildly in a three-step spin.

  Grant kicked out with his right leg, delivering a hard blow to the tottering figure’s belly as he circled past. The man crumpled at the impact, doubling over himself like balsa wood struck by a sledgehammer.

  Grant turned as his foe dropped to the deck, ready for the first man whom he sensed was rising. He was right—the man was just pulling himself up off the floor where he had gone slamming against the wall.

  Grant leaped, delivering a double kick to the man’s jaw, knocking his head so hard it spun. Grant landed with a splash of displaced water as his foe went down, the other man dropping to the floor, all the fight gone out of him.

  Grant turned back to the end of the corridor, eyeing the doorway that loomed there. He saw now that the doorway had no door; instead the entrance was masked by a scarlet blanket draped across it, and through this Grant could see the flicker of a candle, turning the material into a bloodred rectangle and casting the whole corridor in its scarlet hue. Hurbon had to be behind it, Grant knew. His hand twitched as he felt for the Sin Eater strapped against his wrist, drawing it into his palm. It was time to finish this.

  * * *

  THREE FLOORS ABOVE, Brigid and Kane had left the waterlogged cafeteria and were carefully making their way along the corridor beyond.

  “Grant?” Kane growled. “You out here?”

  “The elevator’s gone,” Brigid pointed out. “You notice?”

  Kane glanced at her and nodded. “Yeah. Someone’s used it.”

  “Probably Papa Hurbon,” Brigid proposed.

  “Then either Grant went with him or he followed,” Kane reasoned.

  The two Cerberus warriors halted before the closed elevator doors. The muck had been brushed from the indicator panel, leaving a dirty smear. It showed the elevator was now at the lowest level of the redoubt.