Hell's Maw (5 page)

“No. Nothing,” the girl replied, wide-eyed in astonishment. “I can't believe…” She stopped and crossed herself, unable to finish her sentence.

Shizuka looked back at the ballroom, eyeing the ceiling where the nooses had been attached to the open beams that ran crossways through the room. It was a curious affair, to
say the least. As she pondered, Shizuka's eyes settled on the band, who were still waiting at one side of the room. They were talking among themselves and seemed distraught, faces ashen with the shock of what had occurred here. And yet, Shizuka recalled, they had been playing normally when she and Grant had happened upon the horrific scene, as if they were a part of it somehow.

Shizuka placed a hand on the receptionist's side and guided her across the room. “Come, I may need you to help me speak with them,” she explained.

Bewildered by the almost-surreal scene around her, the receptionist plodded alongside Shizuka on her flat-soled pumps.

“Do any of you speak English?” Shizuka asked, addressing the band.

One of the guitarists nodded, as did the singer, while two of the others made “so-so” gestures with a shrug.

“You must have been here when all this was occurring,” Shizuka said. “What did you see?”

“See?” the singer repeated. “It's…confused. We play as people arrive. They laugh, some dance. Then…”

“Then?” Shizuka urged.

“It's…
atropelladamente
,” the singer said.

Shizuka looked from the singer to the other band members, some of whom were nodding. “I don't understand,” she said.

The singer began rattling off something in fast-paced Spanish, her garbled words exhibiting the rat-a-tat rhythm of an old machine gun's fire.
“Un tobogán en espiral de altura sinuoso alrededor de una torre en una feria,”
she said. “
Una feria…
fairground.”

Shizuka looked to the receptionist for help. “Fairground?” she prompted.

“Mónica says it was like seeing a twisting slide,” the
receptionist translated thoughtfully. “Like the slide at the funfair.”

“The helter-skelter.” Shizuka realized after a moment.

“Si!”
the singer agreed with a snap of her fingers. “But here, in my head. Inside.”

The woman's bandmates seemed to agree, one of them translating for the drummer, whose grasp of English was very limited. Several of the men tapped their foreheads as if to show her. It was the point where many religions placed the third eye, Shizuka noticed.

At that moment, the authorities arrived, and the atmosphere in the room changed subtly. Shizuka felt it straightaway, the way that everyone suddenly became a suspect.

Two officers strode through the room, eyeing the sprawl of corpses and wounded scattered across the lavish surroundings. They were a man and a woman, both dressed smart-casual in charcoal-gray suits. The man was in his thirties, six feet tall with striking features and wavy dark hair slicked back from his forehead, a trace of stubble darkening his chin. He wore his jacket open, the pressed white collar of his shirt tightly clasped to his neck, a striped tie swaying before his broad chest. The woman was of a similar age, several inches shorter than the man, and her suit was looser, its baggy lines masking her taut, athletic figure. She wore a white T-shirt beneath the blazer, the bulge of a blaster almost hidden where it was holstered beneath her left arm. She had dark hair cascading past her shoulders in gentle waves and she wore a concerned expression that sat well on the sharp planes of her face, enhancing her flawless olive complexion.

The woman asked something in Spanish, addressing the room in general. The blonde receptionist answered, indicating Shizuka, and the two officers strode across the room toward her, while everyone else seemed to subtly rear back to give them room.

Shizuka looked mystified as the dark-haired woman babbled something in Spanish, then the hotel receptionist said something and the woman repeated her question in flawless, slightly accented English, “You found the people here? Like this?”

Shizuka nodded. “I did.”

“I'm Pretor Cáscara,” the woman explained, flashing her a badge, “and, my partner, Pretor Corcel. Are you able to answer some questions for me?”

Shizuka nodded again. “Of course.” Then Shizuka explained who she was and that she had been visiting the hotel with her partner when they had, by chance, made their grisly discovery.

“And when was this, Senora Shizuka?” the man asked, speaking for the first time. He had a refined accent, as if he had learned English from the upper-class British of a bygone age.

“Ten minutes,” Shizuka guessed. “Less maybe. I don't… It was very unexpected.”

The woman touched Shizuka's bare arm gently. “We understand, you must have had quite the shock.”

Shizuka took a slow, deliberate breath, gazing past the two officers to focus on the fallen bodies strewn about the room. She had seen worse than this, many times in fact—such was the cost of a life of adventure. But there was something poignant and hopeless about finding these people hanging here like this without warning or explanation. It sickened her, and for the first time since she and Grant had arrived, Shizuka had the chance to stop and realize that.

Pretor Cáscara raised her dark eyebrows, peering at Shizuka as she saw her tremor slightly. “Do you need to sit down?”

“Yes,” Shizuka blurted, so sudden that the word caught her unawares. Even as she said it, Shizuka wavered in
place as if she might fall. Shock, she realized at a disconnect, as if she was thinking about someone other than herself.

The woman called Cáscara took Shizuka by the arm and led her from the room, asking one of the hotel staff in Spanish to bring a glass of water as she escorted Shizuka into the hotel lobby.

* * *

P
RETOR
J
UAN
C
ORCEL
was left alone with the doctor as the relevant authorities arrived to remove the bodies and take the survivors away to a nearby hospital. The hotel staff had departed the crime scene, waiting nearby. As he surveyed the room, pacing in a small circle on his Italian-made loafers, the doctor asked him a question.

“I bet you have never seen anything like this, eh, Pretor?” the doctor said in Spanish while several of the living where taken away on stretchers.

Corcel shook his head. “Sadly, that is not the case.”

The doctor looked surprised. “You mean this has happened before?”

Pretor Corcel looked back at him with haunted eyes, saying nothing. “How many are alive?” he asked finally, gazing at the stretchers. Some of the sheets had been pulled over the heads to hide the faces.

“Seven,” the doctor said.

“Yes,” Pretor Corcel agreed distractedly, pacing across the room. He had seen this before; in fact this was only the latest in a spate of something that one might have called serial killings. But the details were vague, uncertain. He and his partner, Cáscara, urgently needed a break on this, before things became any worse. There had been sightings, two black men appearing close to the scenes sometimes, vague recollections of a woman, but that was all circumstantial, hearsay, like trying to grab ahold of something from a child's drawing. There had been tiny slivers of
evidence—another Pretor had been killed using a razor-sharp disc that had been pushed into his belly somehow, shredding his gut apart; bloodred feathers scattered at two of the scenes. But it all felt disconnected, with no clear picture emerging.

Corcel huffed, shaking his head.
Who would do this, and why?

It was then that Juan Corcel, Pretor of the Zaragoza Justice Department with a twelve-year unblemished record of service, had what he considered at that moment to be the greatest lucky break of his career. The twin doors leading out of the ballroom crashed open and one of the black men from the eyewitness reports came hurrying through, breathless from killing. He held one of the throwing disc-like weapons in one hand, a bloody feather protruding from his jacket pocket.

In a flash, Corcel pulled his blaster—a compact Devorador de Pecados—from its hidden underarm holster and targeted the man in its sights, even as he stepped into the room.
“¡Congelar!”
he shouted.

* * *

G
RANT HAD DASHED
back to the hotel as quickly as he was able, concerned at leaving Shizuka alone amid the nightmare scene. He wished he had some way to remain in touch with her in those moments as he sprinted through the back alleys of this strange city, wished she had a Commtact like the Cerberus personnel. But she wasn't Cerberus, despite working with them on occasion.

It took a minute or two of backtracking before Grant reached the service door to the hotel, the same one he had rushed through in pursuit of the strange trio he had spotted close to the scene. His breathing was coming heavier now, the night air cold on his skin as the initial surge of adrenaline passed.

Grant trotted down the corridor, reciting a mantra in his head, praying that Shizuka was still alive.

The twin doors to the ballroom were closed, so Grant switched the sharpened disc to his left hand before reaching for the handle with his right. By now, the feather protruding from his pocket had become bloodred; not wet, but its whole color had changed.

Grant pulled at the door and stepped through, coming face-to-face with a handsome, dark-haired man in a loose-fitting suit. Before Grant could say a word, the man produced a compact blaster and jabbed it toward Grant's surprised face.

“¡Congelar!”
the man hollered.

Grant's Commtact translated the bellowed word automatically: “Freeze!”

One side effect of the fall of the baronies was that obtaining food had become a source of dispute once more, Kane reflected. Kane was a powerfully built man with broad shoulders and rangy limbs that lent something of the wolf to his appearance. His hair was dark and his steely blue-gray eyes seemed to emotionlessly observe everything with meticulous precision. There was something of the wolf to Kane's demeanor, too—he was a loner at heart, and a natural pack leader when the situation called for it.

Like Grant, Kane had once been a Magistrate for the Cobaltville barony in the west, where he had enforced the law of the ville. But he had stumbled upon the conspiracy behind the ville—that is, the intended subjugation of mankind—and had turned against the regime and found himself exiled along with his partner and fellow rebels. From that day on, Kane had become an active member of the Cerberus organization, dedicated to the protection of humankind, freeing humans from the shadowy shackles that had been used to oppress them and stunt their potential for hundreds of years.

Right now, Kane was sitting in the rear of a six-wheeler beside three dozen sacks of grain as it trundled along a dirt road in the province of Samariumville. The road was narrow and straight, flanked by the scarred earth of fields that had been abandoned and left fallow as legacy of the radioactive fallout from the nukecaust. Radiation levels
fell year on year, but it remained an unwanted gift from the past that just kept on giving, spawning mutant crops and poisonous fruit that was of no use for consumption. Therein lay part of the problem that Kane and his team were tackling with their guarding of these transports—so much of the land was still too damaged to sustain life, even two centuries on, from the nuclear exchange that had slowed down Western civilization.

One of three, Kane's vehicle featured an open bed, the sacks secured with rope, leaving it easy-pickings for the scavengers and cutthroats who roamed the barony. The cloudy sky was dark and ominous, and only the occasional bird caw could be heard over the growl of wag engines.

It hadn't always been like this, Kane lamented as he eyed the overcast sky and its sheets of silver-gray ripples. Barely three years earlier, the baronies had been intact, their high walls and firm laws ensuring safety for their occupants and loaning a degree of safety to the provinces beyond. Local Magistrates had patrolled problem areas outside the ville walls, stemming the threat of outlanders and muties who might destabilize the local area or foster an uprising against the ruling baron. All of that had changed when the barons had received something Kane understood as a “genetic download,” a kind of evolutionary trigger that drew their hidden DNA to the fore, revealing the ethereal hybrid barons to be merely chrysalis states for their true forms—the reptilian Annunaki. The Annunaki were an alien race from the distant planet Nibiru, who had once been worshipped on Earth as gods during the Mesopotamian era, over six thousand years ago. Hungry for power, the Annunaki had ultimately squabbled themselves into mutual self-destruction.

However, the power vacuum left by the disappearance of the barons had resulted in the villes having to find new ways to survive and remain stable. Some had installed new
barons, imitating the old system as closely as they could. Others, such as Cobaltville, had covered up their baron's disappearance, relying instead on Magistrate rule to ensure their populace remained under strict control. Kane had even found a new experimental barony where the population had been reprogrammed to adhere to subliminal commands, losing all independent thought.

Kane didn't know how Samariumville was running its show, nor did he much care, just as long as its people were safe. What did matter, however, was that the local territory had become more treacherous as rival gangs vied to carve up the land beyond the ville walls for their own usage. Those gangs included slave traders, gunrunners and other lowlifes who were only too happy to exploit and abuse anyone, human or mutie, who fell into their clutches. And all those crooks and ne'er-do-wells needed feeding, which was how Kane and his partners found themselves guarding this three-wag convoy as it crossed the unpopulated terrain to the west of Boontown, close to what had once been the Louisiana/Mississippi border.