Judgment Plague

“Brigid,” Grant gasped from behind her, “get down.”

She responded automatically, ducking low as Grant began firing on the emerging creature. Two bullets flew, racing to the target, drilling against the chest of the croc-like mutie. The sin eater sounded loud in the confines of the corridor, echoes reverberating with the swish of the water. In the aftermath, the croc staggered back a step, then plunged back down, disappearing with a splash of its enormous tail.

Brigid spoke angrily, still watching the location where the creature had disappeared. “What are you thinking? We don’t know if that thing’s a friend or foe.”

“Yeah, we do. One of them just pulled me down under the surface,” Grant declared. “I’m calling it.”

Brigid flashed him a look before scanning the vicinity. “Any sign of Kane?” she asked.

“I couldn’t see shit down there,” Grant told her. “But I can tell you this much—it’s a bastard long drop.”

“What is it?” Brigid asked. “A well? Sinkhole?”

He glared at her. “I was too busy fighting for my life to check.”

“Humph. It happens,” she retorted, playing the xenon beam about once more.

Suddenly there was movement all around the two Cerberus warriors. They sensed it as much as saw it, and then five more of the croc-like creatures emerged from the water—two from the corridor leading back to the mat-trans, three more from the deeper space behind Grant.

“We could be in trouble,” he muttered, raising his blaster again.

* * *

AIR. THAT CAME FIRST. Everything else came in a rush afterward, filling in with memory and logic and guesswork, but the air came first. Kane breathed it, grateful, feeling that slosh of liquid inside him where he had sampled a mouthful of the filthy water when he had been dragged beneath the surface.

How long had he been held under? A minute? More? He had blacked out, the cold ache of the water pressing against him even through the protection of his shadow suit. His face still felt like ice.

Kane heard something: a voice. It sounded awfully close, and for a moment he wondered if he was awake or asleep, because he couldn’t recall where the heck he was.

His eyes snapped open, only to find pitch darkness, a black so absolute the thought that he could be inside a box or a sack crossed his mind. But no, there was no material pressed against his face, and he couldn’t feel that telltale bounce of air as he breathed out, so he wasn’t close to a wall or box lid.

He was soaking wet, his clothes heavy, as if they would drag him down where he lay. He was stretched out on his back. Wet, lying on his back. On cold stone. He could feel the cool hardness scrape against the back of his head when he tried to move.

He felt dizzy, off balance, and realized that the floor beneath him tilted at an angle, leaving his feet lower than his head.

Automatically he felt for the weight at his wrist, the familiar bulk of the sin eater in its hidden sheath under his sleeve. It was still there. Good. Someone was going to get it, pretty soon, too, unless he got some answers.

What had happened? Thinking back, he could see the water, clouded black with pollutant. He had been checking the redoubt corridor and then the floor had dropped away and he had found himself sinking into the liquid. No, not sinking—he had been dragged, weights on his legs, something guiding his passage. No air to breathe, of course—the descent had been too sudden for that—so he had held his breath, mouth tasting of the dark water that had carpeted the deck, and then he was here. Somewhere between “there” and “here,” Kane figured, he had blacked out.

The voice in his head had been Brigid’s, calling him and Grant. The commtact.

“Baptiste?” Kane subvocalised, not saying the word but just breathing it. The commtact’s pickup would enhance the word into speech, relay it to Brigid, wherever she was.

He waited a moment. No reply.

All the while, Kane was listening. Listening intensely to the space around him, the way the echoes resounded, the ambient sounds of the room. There was water here; he could hear its telltale blup as something dripped into a larger body of water, like a melting stalactite over a pool.

There was also the rhythmic sound of ripples, of water being brushed lightly by a breeze.

There was something else, too—breathing. Soft, hardly discernible over the dripping and the rippling, but there just the same when Kane filtered out all the other sounds and put them into categories. The breathing seemed close in the darkness; not loud, but close.

Kane stirred slightly, testing to see what reaction he would get. The thing beside him stirred, too. It was maybe ten feet away, moving around his three o’clock.

Okay, Kane thought. Shoot or make friends? Decisions, decisions. What would Baptiste do?

It was a tough one. Kane knew that Brigid would make friends, or at least she would try to, but whatever had happened to get him here—and he was still struggling to recall all of it—seemed to involve drowning or kidnapping or a little bit of both. At least he had air to breathe now, even if it smelled like the back end of a burned-out SandCat.

The thing shuffled, rough skin running over the stones of the floor. Kane heard it sniff twice, scenting the air. Then he heard another noise, a quiet rumble, not from the thing’s throat but from its belly. It was hungry.

* * *

“WHAT THE HECK are they?” Grant asked as he trained his sin eater on the first of the emerging croc creatures.

“Beats me,” Brigid admitted. “They look like muties—maybe an offshoot of the scalies that were prevalent in this area a hundred years ago.” As she spoke, she was checking the ammunition in her TP-9 semiautomatic pistol. The TP-9 was a bulky hand pistol with a covered targeting scope across the top finished in molded matte black. The grip was set just off center beneath the barrel, creating a lopsided square in the user’s hand, hand and wrist making the final side and corner.

And then the crocs moved, lips pulling back to show their impressive teeth, hissing deep in their throats as they began to attack. There was no time for negotiation now—it was do or die.

The crocs swished their tails to propel themselves from the water, hurtling toward the intruders like rockets.

Grant sent a triple burst of fire from his sin eater, three bullets whipping across the space between himself and his attackers in quick succession. As he did so, he was dropping back toward the nearest wall, using it for cover as the closest of the croc-like creatures came at him with snapping jaws. Grant brought his left arm up in defense, groaned as he felt those vicious jaws chomp down on the Kevlar armor of his coat.

Beside him, Brigid’s pistol flashed in the darkness, sending a score of 9 mm bullets at the first of her attackers as it leaped at her, stagnant water pouring from its ridged, naked frame. The bullets scored a direct hit, cutting a line across the creature’s thick skin in pockmarks—one, two, three, four—from its waist to its meaty pectoral. Their impact did not seem to even slow the creature; it moved like lightning toward Brigid, and its hands—eerily human despite their coating of thick scales—grabbed for her blaster.

In a moment, the mutant had a hold on the muzzle of her TP-9, sweeping it aside as it came toward her with widening jaws.

* * *

THE SIN EATER appeared in Kane’s hand instantly, commanded there by a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons as he lay on his back on the cold stone. He could hear the creature’s feet thumping over the rock floor as his finger met the pistol’s trigger, and suddenly the quiet, regular sounds of water dripping and wind across water were broken by the noise of gunfire.

Kane located his foe by sound alone, holding the trigger down for an extended burst of fire. He heard the other stagger, its movements interrupted, and then a cry like a hiss of steam, followed by the thump of the body dropping to the floor.

Kane eased his finger from the trigger, still holding the blaster poised in the direction of his unseen foe. Hope I’m right about this, he thought as he reached into a utility pocket in his jacket with his free hand. An instant later, Kane had pulled free what appeared to be a pair of sunglasses, which he slipped over the bridge of his nose. They had specially coated polymer lenses and were designed to draw every available iota of light to create an image of whatever was around the viewer, acting as a kind of proxy night vision. Kane pushed himself into a crouch and examined the scene.

He was in an artificial cavern with an arched ceiling and strip of floor, all constructed of regular, carved stone. The floor beneath was tilted, leaving half the room submerged beneath a stretch of dark water. It all smelled rank, bitter, like rainwater on manure.

The creature lay before him, sprawled half in and half out of the water. It looked kind of like a crocodile, only larger and with powerful legs like a man’s, and a tail that disappeared into the water as it curled. The tail twitched, sending ripples across the water.

Kane eyed the creature, making sure it was down. The tail twitched once more, then stopped. He figured it was dead.

Kane paced across to the croc-thing, looking around the cavern. They were in a sewer, maybe; it was hard to tell for sure, but it looked a lot like one. He figured it had served the redoubt two hundred years before, when it had been built. The redoubts were self-sufficient and could be closed off entirely from the outside world, but some had been served by networks of sewers and service tunnels when they were being constructed. Most of those service tunnels had been shut off, blocked up, concreted over. This one, it seemed, had survived.

The creature on the floor was naked and must have stood nine feet tall, with the muscular tail to propel it through the water. It looked like a croc, with a long muzzle featuring rows of teeth as long as Kane’s index finger. But it also had a human quality, despite its coarse, armorlike skin. A chill went down Kane’s spine as he wondered if it was an offshoot of the Annunaki or the Naga, two lizardlike races that had reached for power in the post-nukecaust Earth—the former a race of alien would-be world conquerors, the latter a genetic offshoot of the Annunaki seeded on Earth. But Kane checked himself, recalling stories of the mutie races that used to walk the so-called Deathlands that grew up in the wake of the nukecaust. Some of those creatures had been lizardlike in appearance, the radiation turning them into twisted genetic dumping grounds for weird combinations of mismatched DNA. It was a chill-or-be-chilled world in those days, or that’s what the old-timers used to say.

Kane stepped past the dead lizard, scanned his surroundings through the polymer lenses.

Behind the creature were sacs of organic matter, attached to the walls with what appeared to be a kind of gluelike webbing. There were eight in all, each one oval and almost as long as a man’s torso. Eggs. Kane studied them for a few seconds, peering closely at their translucent shells. There were things waiting inside, half-formed creatures no longer than his forearm. “Baby crocs,” he muttered.

Beyond that, a large bore hole lay in the far wall. The hole was circular and wide enough to grant access to a man or even a small vehicle, and certainly large enough to let these croc things come and go as they pleased. “Now then, where do you lead to?” Kane wondered aloud.