Authors: Nick Kelly
Pivoting his hips, Cat swung his left arm upward, shattering the ceiling of pain. There was an audible ‘pop’ as his shoulder returned to place in its ball joint. The immediate agony was blinding, and he stumbled backward, nearly vomiting from the dizziness. He landed flat on his back on the ground, exhaling a stream of profanity. The rain beat down on him, and he took solace in the feeling.
Deciding against testing his left arm further, he used his right arm to help him reach his feet. The angel, thankfully, hadn’t moved. Reaching onto his hip, he grabbed the baton again, snapping it to full extension. He limped toward the fallen form of his assailant.
Angelyka stared mutely forward, her eyes darkening from red to an almost human brown. As Catwalk stood over her, she turned up to him, softening her face. Again, the creature at his mercy identified itself as Delambre’s daughter. This time, a tear even creased her cheek as she looked upward at him.
“Please, Leon…I beg you. Spare my life.”
Cat felt every moment he’d shared with Eva. The way she’d opened up to him, pleaded for her father’s life, and revealed her abilities when she didn’t need to. She was brilliant but vulnerable. She was defiant, but unable to protect herself in this brutally violent realm.
And she’s never, not once, called you ‘Leon’.
The hitman turned his gaze away, moving it to his feet. In an instant, he struck, driving the baton straight into the eye of the creation called Angelyka. The construct screamed loudly, and Cat twisted his wrist, activating the Electro-Magnetic Pulse tip of the baton. With a crackle, the scream of the angel descended to a human range, and then became nothing more than an electronic hum.
Finally, in the continued driving of the rain, the peel of lighting and the percussive thunder, the angel was silenced.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Cat slid down the length of the cliff. Momentum was easy. Control wasn’t. For several moments, he was in a free-fall. He knew the feeling well. It was the brief sensation of weightlessness, pushed out of yet another Hovertank to combat some brutal unknown maniac back in the Nation’s capital. He landed with a chuckle in the beach sand. He wasn’t a cop anymore, but the scenario wasn’t all that different. There was an out-of-control MetaHuman threat loose in the city. Only this time, the brain running it wasn’t in the same body performing the attacks.
He concentrated on his breathing for several seconds. A direct frontal attack on the Cathedral ensured suicide. A simple heat scan revealed several mines and laser-wires along the road. Either he was meant to die trying, or more likely, he was being directed to another path.
The cleaner closed his eyes, focusing, concentrating, layering and defining the sounds surrounding him. The waves crashed along the shoreline in their rhythmic pattern. The flames crackled far above, a pyre for the fallen angel. The lapping of the tattered banners provided intermittent percussion. Still, there was something else, something stagnant, yet unpronounced. The slightest voice reached his ears. He identified it as a faint but steady trickle of water.
He exhaled and opened his eyes, sprinting in the direction of the waterfall. Cautiously slowing as he neared it, his gaze soon fell upon the source of the sound. A large, jagged drainpipe protruded from the mountainside providing sewage and flood relief from the Cathedral above. The rusted and bent rebar jutted out from the side of the hill. Cat thought of the vampires he’d faced defending Delilah. Hadn’t he left their fangs looking about the same?
Cat watched the rats crawl around the liquid flow from the drainpipe. He lowered the thresholds on his nasal sensors. The drainpipe provided a way into the underbelly of the Cathedral, but it was going to be an unclean and gut-wrenching path.
He stopped again to gather the faces of those who depended upon him. He inhaled, cursed under his breath and leapt forward, landing in the muck of the Cathedral’s sewers. He made a silent wish that nothing was alive in there. If it could survive in this buffet of defecation, he’d probably be defeated by the stench alone. Shifting the sensors of his cybernetic eyes, Cat again steeled his nerves and set forth into the bowels of the ancient church.
Any sign of light from outside disappeared a few steps into the drainpipe. The rain battered the weathered opening, echoing the metallic ringing until it was impossible to determine the source. The thought of a potential flash flood, natural or triggered, made Cat double-check his environment. A few more steps inside confirmed the feeling he was entering a tomb.
The scent of decay struck him full-force through his dampners and made him halt his progress. The air was heavy and wet, nearly thick enough to chew. It was Will’s morgue without the sterility and chemical compounds that burned his throat. This was pure decay and rot. Gripping the baton harder, Cat forced himself to step forward, one cybernetic boot at a time. Vermin and unidentified debris slithered past, occasionally wrapping around his feet and legs as the water deepened.
The faint glow of his eyes reflected off of items in the muck, a scrap of metal, broken glass, cracked spectacles, discarded syringes, and a dismembered cyber limb. Either a few too many homeless had lost their way and sought refuge here, or the nomads had wandered inside only to die. Nitro City had enough lost souls to populate its own off-world colony.
Other things floated by. Some were easily identified; others were the proverbial mystery meat. Cat leveled his gaze on a spot ahead, preferring not to know what it was he was wading through. Soon, with the flooding, water or something like it, began trickling down on him. Despite the armor and insulation, grime bored into his skin.
Something solid and heavy struck Cat’s legs. At first, it felt like wood, simple flotsam in the stomach-turning sewage. He turned his gaze downward, looking for a handhold to push the junk aside. It proved to be a mistake. Vacant holes returned his gaze from where the rats had devoured the dead man’s eyes. His skin was bloated and chewed, while most of his clothes had rotted into scraps. The dead man’s bearded and decaying mouth opened, and Cat heard him moan.
Cat kicked the putrid form aside. As he did, the arm snapped from the corpse’s torso, held near the form by the remains of its coat. With an audible grunt, Cat shoved the eroded body aside, backing against the wall of the drainpipe. The dead man’s head craned at an inhuman angle, his severed arm reaching back towards the hitman. The groan grew louder, a cry of desperation.
As it floated away, the vacant eyes seemed to plead to him. Even before the body disappeared, it began sinking into the muck of the sewers.
Seconds later, it was gone.
Cat pressed against the wall harder than he intended. His skin bristled in a cold sweat. His hands felt unnatural. He shook his head at the sensation and the hallucinations that circled inside his head. What was he doing here, chasing some madman and his constructs to the farthest reaches of the city? He was nearly up to his waist in rotting bodies and debris and who knew what else. This job didn’t even pay. He could walk away any time. He could leave the scientist to his heretic insanity. He wouldn’t lose anything.
Except Delambre.
And Eva.
Even if he didn’t truly care about Delambre and his daughter, there was more to it. Losing the two of them meant starting over. It was a chance he couldn’t afford to take. His cybernetics were wreaking so much havoc with his physiology that he might not have the ability to think his way through problems much longer. Losing them meant losing his best chance at survival.
It also meant losing Delilah.
The dead man’s groan still haunted him. He slammed the baton against the drainpipe, creating a loud metal-on-metal clang. Not enough. He lashed out again. Sparks showered down from the metal framework. Again. He bellowed something guttural, screaming upward. The ringing of the impact became a note, a chord, a chorus. He struck the pipe. Again. And again. And again. Until the endless ringing in his ears drowned out the wailing of the dead man. His ears began to ring, carrying pain into the sides of his skull. The pain allowed him to focus, to forget his fear. He stopped, shaking his head and clearing his mind. He lifted his head to strike again, and everything grew silent.
He turned his gaze once more back to the world he had known up until now. He could retreat and spend his days waiting for the next construct to come for him. He turned his back on that path, squaring up and looking ahead. The faintest glow of light graced his field of vision ahead. Something appeared far away. It was either the light at the end of the tunnel, or an oncoming train sent to crush him. Either way, it meant freedom from this horrid swamp.
Cat stepped back into the current of the sewage and walked, step by resistant step, steadily forward toward the faint beacon.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Cat stopped after an eternity in the sewage. The light wasn’t coming from in front of him. It was coming from above. He briefly made out the ring of light trickling down. Rusted rungs of a steel ladder beckoned him upward. With a wish for a hot shower and a warm body next to him, Cat reached up and grabbed the nearest rung. The steel held his weight. Thank the maker for small miracles. Cat started to reach upward with his left arm. Pain vetoed that idea. He gritted his teeth and formulated a new plan. Slowly, he balanced his boots on the rungs, and reached up once again with his right hand.
He found a stone hallway leading into darkness halfway up the climb. Using lowlight, his Cyberoptics showed him a room roughly ten meters away. He stepped off the ladder and headed down the hallway. The room he entered was almost perfectly round. The flickering light of torches provided the inconsistent illumination he had seen from the drainpipe.
Rising to his feet, Cat glanced around the room, recognizing it as a burial chamber. Arranged in a semi-circle, seven sarcophagi faced him, moss and algae finding their way atop a few of the carved faces. Behind him, the wall bore the tattered remains of a mosaic depicting some sort of family history. He shrugged it off. The cathedral couldn’t hold generations of history. It was hardly a decade old. It could only be more theatrics from the nut job scientist behind the MetaHuman Horsemen.
He focused on the scene before him. Each sarcophagus was precisely sculpted. Its concrete visage more human than the gyrating masses at Liquid Chrome or the Cell Block. As if beckoned, he stepped to the nearest concrete tomb, pulling the brush away. The dead eyes that reflected his gaze were those of the MH he’d battled in the convenience store.
“Pestylynce,” he whispered aloud.
The concrete figure seemed to move upon hearing its name. Cat fell back a few steps. The cold stone of the wall stopped his retreat. The odd pokes and prods of the carved mosaic pushed against his back. They each provided more comfort than another go-round with the inhuman he’d fought in the liquor store. He closed his eyes and steeled his will. When he opened them again, the sarcophagus provided no threat, only long shadows. He stared at the concrete face for several breaths.
“Rest in Peace, cop killer.”
Gripping the baton as an anchor, he neared the second tomb. Brushing aside the overgrowth revealed the face of Eva, of Angelyka. Wings crossed her form along with her arms, proving that this was the intended tomb of the construct, not the human. Cat drew in a breath. Fear didn’t enter him this time. Instead, anger found its place within his MetaHuman blood stream. Had the madmen assumed her defeat as well? Did he put that much stock in Catwalk or did he have another plan for his winged assassin? Angelyka was the most highly developed Metas he’d ever faced. Cat took offense that the madman behind it all would be willing to write off such an adversary.
He tore aside the brush covering the next concrete resting place. The cement reflection was similar to the original MH he’d seen. The face was nearly identical to the one who drew him to this case in Will’s Morgue, but the features differed slightly. Wahrr.
Cat stepped back and shifted gears. If the madman had gone through all this trouble, he would have had adapted as time pressed on. Instead of continuing along the semi-circle, Cat leapt to the end. He brushed the muck off of the final cement form. Triangular eyes and elongated fangs defined the corpse’s features.
“Son of a bitch,” Cat laughed, staring at his own image.
He took a moment to stop and recount the sarcophagi. Seven. That made sense. Sevens were huge in Christianity, he remembered that. Sevens and threes. Four horsemen. The other three? He grumbled beneath his mask. The scientist undoubtedly had his own take on his trinity of enemies…the Father, the Child, and the Unholy Ghost. Delambre, Eva, and…
Cat felt his blood boiling before he even raised his arm. He struck without aim. His first strike cracked the face between its eyes. The second splintered the face into a dozen pieces. The third shattered the concrete and the wooden coffin it housed. Cat looked down. His forearm was embedded in the velvet interior of his intended final resting place.
Shockit, I ain’t dead. An’ if you got a reservation for me, madman, I’m about ta cancel it.
Cat reached the next sarcophagus, reacting with no surprise at its design. The permanent gaze of Delambre’s daughter stared up at him. No wings wrapped around her vulnerable human form. This was meant to be Eva’s crypt. On a whim, Cat ripped the cover aside, sending it clamoring against the crypt floor loudly. He tore open the lid of the coffin inside and found relief when he discovered it vacant.
His heart crawled into his throat. The thought of Eva in the tomb forced him to rediscover fear, for just a moment. He looked at his hands and saw them shaking. Had she suddenly become that important? “My father has never been your caretaker.” Those were her words. She was responsible for his survival, his humanity. Christ, keeping her safe was his anchor to staying human. He patted a glove against the velvet lining of her would-be grave. He exhaled hard and tried to get his hands to stop shaking.