Hell's Maw (20 page)

An Igigu harpist began to play from one corner of the lab as Ereshkigal entered, for she preferred to work to music—she found it drowned out the pleas and moans and screams of the apekin upon whom she experimented. The Igigu was a reptilian humanoid and moved with abundant grace, plucking at the taut strings of the harp with the subtle care of a mother cleaning its young. The Igigi were servants to the Annunaki, described by the humans as “those who watch and see.” Physically, they lacked the musculature of their masters, and mentally they lacked the Annunaki's cunning. They served the Annunaki not from fear, however, but out of love, believing the Annunaki to be enlightened, and hoping that close proximity might confer enlightenment upon them.

Ereshkigal watched the Igigu harpist for a moment as she stood at the bottom of the steps. Then her attention shifted, caramel-brown eyes switching to the three figures affixed to the tables that stood in a line across from the single doorway. They were apekin—“humans” in their own parlance—two males and a female, all held naked with their arms stretched tautly above their heads, their ankles strapped down with intelligent nano-fiber cord that responded to their movements to ensure they would not pull themselves free. One of the males grunted something as Ereshkigal entered, and the other two looked up and began mewing in the irritating way of their race.

Ereshkigal strode across the laboratory to the strains of the harp, the tune reminding her of the cascading
artificial waterfalls that flowed from Enlil's Royal Palace in Nippur.

“Please let us free, goddess,” the human male to the left cried, his voice coarse to Ereshkigal's ears.

“Our devotion is absolute, goddess,” the other male added.

“No, don't listen to them,” the woman shouted, her voice already raw from crying out for so long. “I am the most devoted. The adoration of these two is nothing compared to my adoration of you. Please let me free that I may spread your love—”

“No, me! Let me free!” the man who had spoken first cried.

“It should be me,” the other male cried out. “I have a family. They need me.”

Ereshkigal affixed her three prisoners with a look that could turn milk. The apekin continued to whine, their voices sounding like cats being slaughtered to Ereshkigal's ears; which was ironic in so much that cats she had time for, for they were their own masters and required no one to look up to to give them a sense of worth.

Ereshkigal looked down at the female. The female's body was red and clammy with sweat, long, dark hair clinging to her forehead and the sides of her face. “You say that your adoration is richest, Kalumtum?” Ereshkigal asked, her voice soft and rich as warmed honey.

“Yes, my goddess,” the woman replied. “Oh yes.”

“And you beg of my favor?” Ereshkigal asked.

“Yes,” the woman replied, her body arching as she strained frantically against the bonds that held her on the examination table. “I would do anything if you would only let me free. Please, I beseech you. Show mercy on me.”

“I propose an experiment,” Ereshkigal said, her eyes locked with the female's. “I shall speak, then I shall ask
you to remember my words and hold them tightly in your head until I ask that you repeat them. Do you understand?”

Still straining at her bonds, the woman nodded, though she was obviously confused by what Ereshkigal had said. Beside her, the other humans were straining to see, pulling against their bonds as they tried to look past the standing figure of the underworld goddess.

With a gesture, Ereshkigal silenced the harpist, who sat waiting patiently, staring into the middle distance until his services were needed again. Then she leaned close to the woman and spoke the words of the formula into her left ear, so close and so quiet that only the woman could hear. Ereshkigal had spent long hours stripping the sum down into grunts that the ape-descendant could easily remember. She had used rhythm and rhyme to make them more memorable.

“Now, you are to hold these in your head, repeating them over and over without saying a word aloud,” the Annunaki instructed.

The woman lay there, eyes wide, running through the words in her head. Her brow was furrowed in concentration as she tried to ensure each word was correct.

Ereshkigal took a step back and waited, watching the expression on the woman's round face. The woman was staring intently, her lips tight, running through the rhyme—the secret equation—in her head. Her eyes seemed to grow wider as she continued to run the words of the equation over and over in her mind, and Ereshkigal's lips rose slightly into a smile as she noticed that the woman had stopped breathing because she was concentrating so hard.

“Recite the words I told you,” Ereshkigal urged. “Loudly, so that I may hear you.”

The apekin woman opened her mouth and spoke, the first words coming slowly.

“Circle…around…my body…”

Ereshkigal's thin-lipped smile grew wider as she saw the woman's expression break into something that encompassed both pleasure and fear. Her eyes had become so wide that it seemed as if they might burst free of their sockets. Her mouth pulled open at each successive word she spoke and it seemed to be a struggle to bring her lips back together to form the next word in the recital.

“Be still—” the woman continued “—to…to move…”

“Go on,” Ereshkigal encouraged.

“To move…” the woman said, her face strained in rapture, “no…more.”

Ereshkigal watched in fascination as the woman's face seemed to draw in on itself, her cheeks sunk, her lips cracking as if suddenly dry. Her eyes had become bloodshot in a matter of seconds, and dark circles materialized below them. Her ruddy skin, rosy from the warmth of the room, became pale and drawn, the flesh on her body suddenly losing its luster so that it seemed to be taut like the skin on a drum, showing every muscle and bone. The woman's belly, where it had been rounded just moments before, sunk down as though it had collapsed, its curve switching from convex to concave before Ereshkigal's eyes.

The other test subjects in the room were howling fearfully, unable to comprehend what it was that they were seeing.

And all the while, the woman's smile grew more desperate, more forced. Was it because she wanted to please Ereshkigal, or was it something else, something in the equation that had made the act of self-immolation pleasurable?

Ereshkigal watched as the woman struggled for another breath, the smile still on her face, tears welling in her eyes. The woman strained and a strangled squeak emerged from
somewhere deep inside her throat. Then she stopped, the look of bliss fixed on her face, her body losing all tension, sinking down against the surface of the table on which she was resting. She was dead.

Ereshkigal gestured to the Igigu harpist, and immediately the music began to play once more, a cascade of plucked notes running up and down the musical scale like raindrops on armor plate. The music helped mask the startled cries of the other apekin in the room, who were asking what had happened, whether the woman had died, whether either knew what was going on. Listening to the music, Ereshkigal tuned the shrill voices of the apekin out of her mind.

The recital was incomplete, Ereshkigal knew. The apekin woman had spoken as much of it as she could force through her throat before the throat had closed up, cartilage rings tautening to the point where no further sound could be expelled.

Death was possible then, Ereshkigal ruminated. By committing a mathematical equation to the subject, it was possible to reverse the life in them. Could that process be reversed a second time? she wondered. Could the newly dead be made to live again by imparting the same equation—albeit reversed—to the body? That was worth exploring, certainly.

But that was for later, she realized, bringing her thoughts back to the here and now. Anu had taken an interest in her over recent months, and his patronage was as valuable as that of Enlil himself. She would give him her body for a while, that she might access his resources on the mother ship,
Tiamat
, the better to continue her research into the mathematics of life and death.

The drawers in the hospital morgue were rattling. They sounded like cowbells or drumbeats as the metal doors shook against the hinges, the drawers within shuddering on their runners.

The corpse called Frankie held Julio, the lab technician, across his lap. He was hefting Julio bodily up to get him into place for—
something
, Grant couldn't guess what. Julio was screaming himself hoarse, unable to mentally process what was happening.

“Sir, you have to let him go, please,” Pretor Emiliana Cáscara was shouting in Spanish. “There's been some mistake. I'm a Pretor. I can help you.”

Grant had his Sin Eater primed and ready, and he was reaching for Julio's struggling form.

“Take my hand!” Grant urged, reaching forward with his free hand and grasping Julio beneath one arm.

“What's happening?” Julio screamed and shook Grant away in his panic. The strained note of his anxious voice was as penetrating as a knife, and it seemed to cut straight into Grant's gut. The other man—the corpse—wasn't answering Cáscara's pleas, he didn't even seem to hear them. He just shifted Julio's body where he balanced it across his lap, sitting up and looming over it, legs still stretched out on the metal slab.

Corpses that moved.
Grant had seen this before. Maybe this time it was an error—maybe the guy had been put in
the morgue by mistake, one of those believe-it-or-not medical stories that you heard from time to time. Or maybe it was something much nastier. Maybe some dead chump had just come back to life and was now thinking whatever the dead thought when they'd spent twenty-four hours waiting to get in the grave, just like Bella Arran.

Grant reached for Julio's quivering hand again, even as the corpse known as Frankie drew the morgue technician closer. But suddenly the corpse had pulled Julio up and he sunk his teeth into the living man's throat.

There was a spurt of blood. Grant watched it from just two feet away, saw it in all its hideous glory. Blood pumped from the severed carotid artery in Julio's throat and sprayed against Frankie's corpse-pale face, washing him with its deep, dark redness even as he placed his mouth against the hole he had made as if to seal it. His mouth over the wound, Frankie started to drink or eat, Grant could not tell which. He saw the corpse's throat move as it swallowed.

The whole thing had taken seven seconds, from Julio being snatched to his throat being bitten. Even if Frankie was alive, one of those medical quirks Grant had heard about, there was no reasoning with a man who bit into a helpless victim's throat.

There was a time to reason and a time to act—and Grant knew just which this was. In an instant, Grant shot the corpse, delivering a 9 mm bullet from his Sin Eater's barrel into the side of the dead thing's head. The corpse's head took the bullet below the left temple, just above the eye, and his skull caved in a sudden entry wound a split second before the bullet emerged from the back of his head. The dead man shuddered, then dropped back onto the cold metal surface of the morgue drawer, accompanied by a sound like a trash can lid being dropped.

“Dead boy's…dead,” Grant stated, glancing back to where Cáscara was scanning the drawers.

“Was he dead before?” she asked uncertainly.

Grant looked at the beautiful Pretor, reading her body language. The tension in her pose was pronounced—she was spooked. “What's that noise?” Grant asked, noticing the rattling for the first time.

“The drawers,” Cáscara said, indicating with a twitch of her blaster's barrel.

There were drawers on three sides of the room, floor to ceiling, each one designed to hold a body like Frankie's. Grant scanned them in an instant, estimating that there were somewhere between forty and fifty drawers in this room alone—potentially holding forty to fifty corpses. He could see some of the metal doors shaking, the overhead light bouncing from their surfaces as it caught them. It wasn't happening to all of them, maybe two or three on one wall, another four here, more on the far wall.

“Julio, you still with us?” Grant asked.

No answer.

Grant glanced back at the open drawer where the morgue tech lay across the dead body of his attacker. There was blood down one side of his neck and he was not moving. “Julio? Damn. How many victims of the hotel incident did he say he had here?” Grant asked. “Twelve, wasn't it?”

“
Sí
, twelve,” Cáscara agreed.

Grant began to say something else when one of the drawers came crashing open, bursting from the wall to their left like a champagne cork. Already at floor level, it slid across the floor tiles, crossing the room with such speed that it almost knocked Grant off his feet—he only just leaped aside in time to avoid being struck. Inside the drawer lay a man—or more accurately, a corpse—naked with a blue tint to his sickly pale skin, eyes closed, a head of thick white hair that reached down past his shoulders.
The back end of the drawer looked as if it had been sheared from the wall, and part of the runners on which the drawer slid had come with it as it had burst from its housing.

Cáscara had her blaster trained on the dead man in an instant. “Don't—” she began.

But already the figure was up out of the drawer, moving with a swiftness that seemed superhuman. He stalked across the floor in a low crouch, charging towards Cáscara.

“Shoot it!” Grant urged.

But Cáscara did something else. With perfect timing, she stepped just out of the corpse's path, turning backward on her right heel so that she continued to face the dead thing even as he charged past the spot where she had been. He missed her by inches, and as he passed, Cáscara whipped her left foot in to trip his trailing foot, hooking it up and back so that White-Hair lost his balance. Still charging forward, the man suddenly fell over himself, his head and torso tumbling forward as his legs were whipped out from under him, until he smashed jaw-first against the solid floor beneath him with a loud smack. The rest of his body followed, toppling to the floor like an avalanche.