Hell's Maw (27 page)

The sword swished through the air, flashing like a streak of lightning as it caught the overhead lights. “Back off!” Shizuka warned in English, striding toward Brigid, the sword held ready. “Everyone!”

The group of possessed patients seemed bemused by the samurai woman's order—though there was no mistaking her intention. As one they turned to look at her, still voicing their wicked chant.

Amid the crowd, Brigid was being pulled left and right, hands pawing at her clothes and hair, dragging her in two directions at once. In a moment, the mob seemed to part
and Brigid was suspended in their center, one group pulling at her left arm, the other pulling her right, both limbs stretched to full extension. Brigid strained as the pressure increased on her shoulders.

“Cadáveres para mi amante,”
the crowd droned, pulling Brigid's body painfully in two directions. “Corpses for my mistress.”

The patients were trying to pull Brigid apart in a perverse tug-of-war. She strained against them, fighting with every muscle to hold herself together as her arms threatened to be pulled from their sockets.

“Cadáveres para mi amante,”
the crowd droned. “Corpses for my mistress.”

Shizuka strode toward the group, swinging her sword in a brutal arc that ended in the head of the closest mob member. She didn't intend to kill, but the time for diplomacy was most definitely over.

The mob member went down, crashing to the side as his head was struck with the flat of the sword.

The next met Shizuka's blade head-on, his chest echoing as the flat of the sword struck against it once, twice, thrice, until he fell to the floor.

The pressure on Brigid had eased subtly, but she could not relax. These lunatics wanted to pull her apart, for reasons she could not begin to fathom. It was all tied up with Ereshkigal; it had to be. But how? Why? Why did the reborn Annunaki goddess need corpses so badly?

Shizuka's blade swished again, batting at the grasping arms of one of the patients and leaving an angry red mark across the skin. The next patient came at Shizuka, responding to her threat now, his jaw still chanting the words of their sick litany. “Corpses for my mistress.”

Shizuka met him with a twist of her body, bringing the
katana blade up so that its pommel struck between the patient's ribs. The man let out a pained blurt of breath and went dancing away, clutching at his bruised chest. Shizuka followed up immediately, reaching up for the man's head with her left hand and twisting so that he turned away from her in a violent lurch. Then her blade came up again, reversed once more to use the pommel as a baton with which to strike his cranium with a loud crack. Broken bones did not matter in this battle, keeping everyone alive was all that Shizuka really cared about now.

Brigid Baptiste was not helpless. Despite her predicament, she remained well versed in combat and was a very capable fighter. Right now she was being held a few inches from the floor, but she could just touch it if she stretched her toes. She did so, right boot skimming against the floor tiles. She leaned, drawing her body that way, forcing the group of four who were tugging at her right arm to lurch just a little, enough to drop her another inch lower. The toe of her boot connected, giving her purchase enough to kick backward. The move threw the balance of both groups who were pulling at her, and they staggered momentarily to one side as they clung on. That tiny change was enough to relax the pressure on Brigid's arms momentarily, and she lifted her feet up and out, kicking with both of them at the legs of the people to either side of her. The kicks were weak but they surprised the possessed patients, finding another chink in their armor and easing the pressure on Brigid's arms a little bit more.

Shizuka, meanwhile, was working her way through the angry patients with swift professionalism. A cut leg here, a slap of steel there, and the crowd started to thin.

As she reached Brigid—the redhead still held by seven patients who were trying hard to rip her to shreds—Brigid got her feet on the ground at last and kicked, springing
with as much power as she could muster so that she went high in the air. Five of the people clinging to her let go, two of them crashing into the others at the sudden, unexpected movement, knocking them away. They tumbled like dominoes, and Shizuka was on them in an instant, bringing the razor-keen blade of her katana around in a sweeping arc that dared them to cross it.

There were still two of the chanting patients holding Brigid, clinging to her arms as she ascended. Brigid's body was still in motion, twisting in her opponents' grip to bring her legs upward so that she was upside down. In an instant, her feet slapped against the high ceiling and she pushed, extending both legs to drive herself—and her attackers—back down to the floor. All three crashed to the floor in a jumbled heap.

Brigid leaped away, bounding out of the muddled group and creating a few steps' distance between them before spinning around. Shizuka was at her side in an instant, fending off the remaining crowd members with the flat of her blade.

“What brings you here?” Shizuka asked.

“I was hoping to catch up with an old friend,” Brigid replied with a grim smile. “Do you know what time visiting hours are?”

Shizuka slapped her blade against one of the approaching patients, ducked and brought her kicking leg up and out to strike another in the gut, knocking him to the floor. “Any idea what's going on?” she asked, her breath coming fast.

“Not yet, but it's everywhere,” Brigid replied, “all over the city. A kind of mass hysteria.”

“Then why aren't we affected?”

“Good question,” Brigid said. “No answer just yet, I'm afraid. So what's happening with you?”

“Caught up in insanity,” Shizuka summarized. “Guy there is Corcel, local law, got stabbed. I was trying to help him.”

“Then let's help him,” Brigid agreed, kicking a looming patient in the face. The patient struck the floor with a slap.

* * *

“T
HEY DON'T LIKE LIGHT
,” Kane explained as he helped Grant off the floor of the morgue's examination room.

The hanged man was just lying there, twitching as if hit with an electric current, his legs curling and flopping like an angry cat's tail.

Cáscara, meanwhile, was using the fire extinguisher to put out the woman's burning corpse before it took the whole hospital with it, her own opponent struggling against the cuffs she had managed to snag on his ankle.

“I figure it's something to do with their eyes,” Kane continued with his usual sense of understatement. He was shouting a little, having been almost deafened by the first flash-bangs, but his hearing was returning now. As Grant stood up, Kane nodded toward Cáscara. “Care to introduce us?”

“Kane, this is Cáscara, a local Magistrate,” Grant said.

“Pretor,” Cáscara corrected, acknowledging Kane with a nod, “and call me Emiliana.”

“Sure.”

“And Pretor—this is Kane,” Grant explained. “We've worked together for a long time.”

“I save his butt, usually,” Kane said, flashing the dark-haired Pretor a smile.

“So I see,” she responded, switching off the fire extinguisher.

“We ran into big problems here,” Grant summarized. “Corpses coming back to life, their physical properties not as rigid as you'd expect. I tried hailing Cerberus—”

Kane held up a hand to halt his partner's continued
explanation. “There's bigger problems than that, buddy,” he said. “Outside, the streets are like a graveyard. There's people trying to kill themselves, a lot of people. There's a whole herd of people throwing themselves from the roof here while, out in the street, Baptiste and I were almost run down by a biker who was determined to connect with a brick wall.”

“Madness,” Cáscara muttered.

“Yeah,” Kane agreed, “the worst kind. No explanation, no discernible trigger. Just people going nuts all over. Lakesh suggests it's some form of mass hysteria, says there's historical precedent.”

Grant nodded, briefly explaining to Cáscara that Lakesh was their ally back home.

“Any idea what started it?” Grant asked.

Kane shook his head. “Not yet. You're the man on the ground—we were hoping you'd have some intel we could use.”

Grant shook his head slowly. “You already know about Ereshkigal,” he said. “I'd guess she's involved—if she exists.”

“You said you saw a woman—” Kane prompted.

“Yesterday,” Grant confirmed. “But there's no way of knowing if that's who's causing all this.

“You said Brigid is with you?”

“Yeah, checking the other floors,” Kane told him. “We had you triangulated but Farrell couldn't say what floor you were on.”

“Shit,” Grant cursed with an angry sigh. “Shizuka's out there, too. I thought it was just the morgue, but if she's got caught up in this—”

Kane held his hand up to calm his friend. “We'll locate her,” he said, reassuringly. “Let's get moving, and maybe we can get to the bottom of this.”

Emiliana Cáscara shot Grant a sideways look as Kane
stalked back to the door leading into the morgue. “Your friend? He's a take-charge kind of guy, isn't he?” she said.

Grant smirked despite himself. “He gets restless,” he said. Then he moved over to where he had placed Julio the lab tech, swiftly checking the man's vitals. His pulse was weak but he was still breathing at least. “You have any idea where we can take this guy?” Grant said after patching up his wound with a strip of gauze.

“Leave him here and lock the room,” Kane suggested, standing in the doorway, surveying the carnage in the morgue. “There's no help for anyone outside—trust me.”

Grant swallowed hard and nodded. “Kane,” he said.

Kane met his partner's eyes. “Yeah, I know. Annunaki. It never ends.”

“Never does,” Grant agreed.

Together, the trio left the theater, hurried through the morgue and, from there, made their way to the bank of elevators. Around them, the dead bodies of the reawakened corpses were holding their hands to their eyes, hissing in confusion and—perhaps—pain.

* * *

O
N THE THIRD FLOOR,
Brigid and Shizuka had fought their way to Pretor Corcel and managed to drag him to an examination room in the abandoned floor below. Temporarily safe, they closed the door and Brigid got to work tending to the Pretor's cut. The wound was deep and he had lost some blood, but he was hanging on to consciousness.

“You took quite a beating here,” Brigid told him gently in Spanish as she cleaned the wound, having removed the glass.

“Just one beating,” Corcel replied with a weak smile. “Lucky shot.”

Shizuka stood at the door, watching through a gap in the blinds that were intended to grant the occupants privacy.

“Anyone coming?” Brigid asked.

“No,” Shizuka confirmed. “I think we lost them when we jumped in the elevator. Lucky you knew this floor was empty.”

“We're all barely surviving on ‘lucky,'” Brigid groused, using a cotton swab to clean the edge of Corcel's wound. “We need to get on top of this, ASAP.”

Corcel nodded, his head moving slowly and heavily. “A whole plague of madness, you said,” he muttered to Brigid. “It's baffling. We've seen some group suicides over the past few weeks, but nothing on the scale you've described.”

“How many?” Brigid asked.

“A dozen,” Corcel recalled, “in two unrelated incidents.
Seemingly
unrelated,” he corrected.

“We suspect it's the work of an alien agent,” Brigid told him.

“Ereshkigal,” Corcel said. “Yes, your friend Grant told us about how he and his people had met with alien gods. I thought he was exaggerating.”

Brigid pressed an absorbent pad against the Pretor's skin, tearing off a strip of gauze tape she had taken from one of the cupboards and adhering it in place. “How do you feel now?” she asked as she strapped up the wound.

Corcel winced. “Stupid,” he admitted. “I should never have let that woman ambush me like that.”

“We were both surprised,” Shizuka placated. “She slit her own throat and then attacked Corcel.”

Brigid frowned. “Did you say that right?” she checked. “She attacked
after
wounding herself?”

“It doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?” Shizuka agreed.

Brigid sighed heavily. “It makes sense to somebody,” she reasoned. “We just have to figure out how.”

“We'll return to the Hall of Justice,” Corcel proposed, his eyes closed against the pain. “They should be
coordinating efforts to stem this. Hopefully they'll be able to give us some insights.”

At that moment, Brigid's hidden Commtact trilled to life, and Kane's voice began speaking directly into her ear canal. “Baptiste, I've found Grant. Where are you?”

Turning her head, Brigid answered. “Second floor. I'm with Shizuka and a local law enforcer called Corcel,” she explained. “I understand Grant knows him.”

“We've run into some serious trouble in the morgue,” Kane summarized. “Dead people coming back to life, their physical properties no longer absolute. We got out. We're in the lobby now.”

“It's chaos on the third floor, too,” Brigid told him. “A group of patients tried to rip me apart like they were in a trance.”

At the other end of the Commtact link, Kane cursed. “We need to regroup,” he decided. “You able to get here?”

“Oh, Kane,” Brigid cried. “What about the people on the roof?”

“Too many darn victims,” Kane growled in reply. “We need to find the source.”

“Agreed,” Brigid said reluctantly. “The Pretor here suggests going to the Hall of Justice.”

“Local Mags?”

“Exactly. Pretor thinks they will be surveying the situation and trying to regain order.”