Hell's Maw (28 page)

“Stands to reason. That's standard protocol for Magistrates,” Kane agreed.

“We'll be with you in a few minutes,” Brigid assured him, cutting the connection.

Shizuka and Corcel looked at Brigid quizzically. They had, of course, only heard her side of the discussion.

“You have a plan?” Corcel asked.

“Yes,” Brigid told him, helping the man to his feet. “Yours. Think you're okay to walk?”

Corcel winced, screwing up his eyes. “I'll be fine,” he assured her, taking a tremulous breath. When he opened his eyes once more, the irises were a little bigger and a little paler. Neither Brigid nor Shizuka noticed.

Outside the hospital was madness.

The sounds of vehicle engines roared in the distance now, echoing through the city like a race track in backing to the slow, gradual chimes of the church bells. There were bodies hanging from the streetlamps of the parking garage, with more people queuing up to do the same. Others were finding even more inventive ways to kill themselves, bashing their brains out on blood-smeared concrete pillars, leaping out of the moving vehicles they drove to high speeds or throwing themselves in front of them, holding themselves under the water of the decorative fountain outside the hospital until they drowned.

All around the hospital, the dead or dying were sprawled on the hard pavement like sandbags from where they had jumped from the roof. Groans emanated from the clumped bodies, and the scene was mirrored up and down the street beyond where the roofs of other tall buildings had been used to similar effect.

Smoke billowed from distant buildings where fires had been set, clouding the sky in towering plumes like dark fingers clawing for heaven.

“This is impossible,” Brigid stated as she observed the scene of carnage. “Humans—we have survival instincts. They—we—shouldn't be doing this. It's impossible.” She was standing with Kane, Grant, Shizuka and the two Pretors just beyond the grand glass doors that led from the
hospital reception area. The doors showed cracks in the glass and there were several bloody smears where people had tried to use those cracks to cut the arteries in their wrists, their necks. One man lay dying on the ground below a bloody smudge, eyes wide and a look of ecstasy on his face.

“It's happening, Baptiste,” Kane said pragmatically.

“People have the capacity to kill themselves for many reasons,” Shizuka reminded them. “Not just through depression. It can be a gesture of devotion or a mark of honor, for example.” She was thinking of her own legacy as a samurai.

Brigid looked at Shizuka as realization dawned. “Devotion,” she repeated. “Honor. Dammit, why didn't I think of that?”

“Think of what?” Kane asked.

“These people are killing themselves as a self-sacrifice,” Brigid guessed. “To do so in such numbers, that would have to be the most likely explanation. They want to die to achieve something. Something more than death.”

“What does Ereshkigal promise?” Grant asked.

Brigid thought for a moment. “I'm not sure,” she admitted. “Only fragments of her story survived. She ruled the underworld and was not above killing other Annunaki for revenge. But beyond that, how she interacted with humans…we don't know.”

Corcel scanned the parking garage, searching for his Wheelfox. It remained where he had left it but was now abutted by two crashed motorbikes, one of the riders lying dead on the hood. “Come on, let's get to the Hall,” Corcel said, leading the way across the body-strewed tarmac. He was bent over a little as he walked, wincing where the pain of the chest wound pulled against him.

“I'll drive,” Cáscara told him as the group approached the Wheelfox.

Corcel shook his head. “No, Liana. I may not be good for much just now, but I can still drive.”

Cáscara shot Corcel a quizzical look but Corcel ignored her and tapped in the key code to unlock the patrol vehicle. Corcel swung himself painfully into the driver's seat once the gull-wing door opened. As he did so, Cáscara reached for the man lying across the vehicle's hood. The man wore a leather jacket and a bandanna across his head, once blue but now stained with blood in what looked like a slick, black patch. As Cáscara touched his arm, the man flinched and turned his face toward her. His expression was jocular, wide smile amid blood-streaked stubble.

“The joy, the joy!” he trilled in Spanish, twisting to reach for the female Pretor. “Feel the joy!”

Then he had Cáscara by the wrists, pulling her down onto the hood of the Wheelfox with such vigor that she struck the windshield with a loud bang.

Kane interceded in a flash, placing one strong hand on the biker's chest and forcing him back with a shove so that he rolled over the slanted front of the Wheelfox while Cáscara stumbled free.

Shizuka was with Cáscara straightaway, helping her back while Grant and Brigid stormed forward.

The biker was up again in a second, a mad stare in his too-pale eyes, his lips curled in a sneering smile.
“Cadáveres para mi amante,”
he cheered. “Corpses for my mistress.”

Then the man leaped, springing from where he had fallen, bounding through the air toward Kane with his hands poised in tight claws.

Kane met him with an outstretched arm, delivering the heel of his hand to the man's face in a brutal blow. The man seemed to sag in the air, his body concertinaing as
it crumpled against the force of Kane's blow. He dropped to the ground, and Kane spun away.

The moment that Kane was out of the line of fire, Grant unleashed a burst of fire from his Sin Eater—commanded into his hand in the seconds between the man's ambush attack on Cáscara and Kane's devastating rebuttal. Several 9 mm bullets drilled into the man's left kneecap, hobbling him in an instant.

The biker hissed like a cat as the bullets struck him, writhing against their impacts.

Beside Grant, Brigid was ready with her own blaster, the sleek TP-9 unleathered from the holster at her hip, but it was unnecessary.

“Stay down,” Grant ordered, his dark eyes fixed on the deranged attacker. Whether the man understood English or not did not matter—Grant figured that his expression and the blaster in his hand should be enough to convey his message.

“I would have cuffed him,” Cáscara bemoaned in irritated Spanish.

“I think we're beyond the stage of cuffing people,” Kane told her.

While Cáscara took the shotgun seat, the Cerberus warriors and Shizuka bundled into the back via a wide gull-wing door set before the single back wheel. It was cramped, but there was space enough.

Corcel triggered the Wheelfox's ignition and the engine roared to life like an animal unleashed. “Everyone comfortable?” he asked jocularly. He looked drained of color and his eyes were beginning to fracture as the irises merged with the whites. His heart had stopped earlier, when the glass had hit it, but he had bounced back…somehow.

Corcel pressed his foot down on the accelerator and
steered the Wheelfox out of the parking lot, leaving behind the body of the biker who had attacked them.

* * *

T
HE STREETS WERE HELL
. Sheer bloody hell.

There were dead bodies and dying bodies and people trying to kill themselves and each other. But what made it worse, as if worse could even be contemplated, was that there was barely any noise—no screams, no shouts, no weeping or groans or shrieks. Instead, the streets were silent but for the ever-present thrum of distant engines accompanied by the slow, metronomic beat of the church bells.

“We've walked into a nightmare,” Grant muttered, looking through the window port of the Wheelfox land wag.

Corcel guided the Wheelfox through broken vehicles, burned-out heaps, bodies—so many bodies—that were just scattered across the road. He kept at a steady twenty miles per hour, not racing, just trying to keep moving while people fell from buildings above them, autos crossed intersections in mad games of chicken where the aim was not to survive but to crash and to die.

“How far to the Hall of Justice?” Kane asked.

“Little over a mile,” Cáscara told him from the front seat.

“Street's blocked,” Corcel chimed in, applying the brake.

Up ahead, a vast group of moving figures could be seen through the windshield, marching in a kind of ragged unison, bobbing like waves on the ocean. They were tired-looking, their clothes torn and stained with blood. Some displayed sickening wounds on their exposed bodies, self-inflicted or encouraged by others. There were men, women, children; young and old; infirm and healthy. Every member of that eerie, unreal mob was smiling
with an unnerving, fixed grin of teeth like a shark scenting prey.

The people were chanting something, the sound of all those voices beating against the sealed windows of the Wheelfox.
“Saca a tu vida!”

“Bring out your living!” Brigid translated automatically.

“What the hell?” Grant muttered.

“Trouble,” Kane replied, squeezing himself close to the grille that separated the front seats from the rear compartment, trying to get a closer look.

The wave of people was moving toward them, spreading out and blocking the full width of the street from store to store, striding determinedly. There must have been two hundred or more, each one displaying that unnerving, ecstatic smile, each one joining the chanted words in Spanish. “Bring out your living! Bring out your living!”

As Kane watched, he saw the way the bodies of some of the crowd members seemed stretched or of uncertain proportions, like something made from plasticine. Here a man strode on long, bandy legs that he seemed to fling forward like yo-yo strings, reminding Kane of the legs of a spider. There a woman walked with a torso elongated like an elephant's trunk, her head peering up above the crowd members who surrounded her. Another figure had arms so long they touched the ground before his feet did, and he propelled himself forward on his hands like a child's circus toy.

“Bring out your living!”

Somewhere in back, amid the great torrent of grinning people, the figure of a beautiful woman seemed to be directing them, semi-naked like a carnival showgirl, running bloody hands through her long dark hair, within which was clipped a crown of twisted bones.

“That's her,” Grant said, spying the woman
momentarily through a brief parting of the crowd. He scrambled forward and pointed. “See there? Flanked by two men?”

Kane nodded, spotting the striking woman amid the swelling crowd.

“That's the woman I saw back at the hotel,” Grant confirmed.

“Ereshkigal,” Kane said, barely breathing the name.

The crowd was getting closer. “Bring out your living.”

“What do we do? We can't run these people down,” Corcel stated.

“He has a point,” Grant agreed. “An' I don't think we can just waltz into that crowd to get to her—do you?”

“No,” Cáscara agreed. She did not sound happy.

“Is there another route?” Brigid asked. “Some other way to get to the Hall of Justice? Coordinate from there?”

“Of course, yes,” Corcel said, shaking his head as if to gather his senses. “I was…distracted. I'm sorry.”

Flanked on all sides by her faithful, the carnival woman gestured for the mob to proceed toward the stalled Wheelfox patrol vehicle. For a moment, her eyes seemed to fix on the vehicle, jet-black orbs piercing the tinted windshield to peer directly into the driver's eyes, into his soul.

Corcel shifted into Reverse, and the engine whined as the Wheelfox shot back. Up ahead, the crowd had begun moving faster, jogging toward the vehicle as it hurried away from them.

Still reversing, Corcel spun the wheel, slipping the nimble Wheelfox into a tight 180-degree turn. Now facing in the opposite direction, Corcel shifted into Drive and nudged the accelerator, charging up the body-clogged street before taking a hard right and slipping into an alleyway between buildings. Behind them, they left the sound of the trudging crowd, their slowly marching feet hitting the pavement in step, their voices chanting the same refrain: “Bring out your living!”

The alley was a tight fit, curving around back of one of the ancient buildings and past a church where the bells were gonging their eerie, incessant call.

* * *

T
HE ENTHRALLED COULD
sense the burden of the living, sense the sadness life generated like a beacon in the night. It seemed to burn before them with the brilliance of a thousand supernovas, calling them to points in the city where Ereshkigal's release had somehow failed to touch. The dead—her army, her faithful—joined together to hunt these poor souls down, to bring to them the gift in all its glory and wonder and joy.

Beatriz Valle was one such victim. She was
twenty-seven, a mother and nursery group helper, whose husband had left her three years before following the birth of their second child. He had left her for an older woman, older and plain-looking, in fact, which had somehow hurt more than if he had left her for someone pretty.

Beatriz lived in a small apartment to the west of the Ebro, the two bedrooms divvied up between herself and her two children. She could not see the river from her window but she could hear it, that reassuring shushing as it burbled its way toward the distant ocean, passing the sights of Zaragoza with all the indifference of water. She would listen to it sometimes when she had finished washing up, craning her head to the open kitchen window and imagining that maybe the river water was the same water that she had used to clean her dishes.

Her children were no trouble. Juanita was a fussy eater but Carlos was self-sufficient at five, happy to play his own games and make his own entertainment that incorporated his little sister in a way that only sibling love could, finding new players for his stories, new princesses and heroes and noble steeds for his sister to portray, emulate or ride.