Kane was a well-built man, with cropped, dark hair
and steely blue-gray eyes. Tall with a lean frame and muscular arms, Kane's physique was similar to that of a wolf, a machine built for hunting. His temperament was similar to that of a wolf, as well, both pack leader and loner as the situation demanded. Like Brigid, Kane was a member of Cerberus, an operation headquartered in Montana and dedicated to the uncovering of and resistance to a deep-rooted alien conspiracy that had threatened to overpower and subjugate humankind since the dawn of recorded time. That alien threat came from a race called the Annunaki, who had been mistaken for gods from the stars but were in fact a bored alien race who considered humans as nothing more than playthings, idle diversions along the bland, tiresome road of their millennia-long lifespans. Kane had accidentally uncovered inklings of that conspiracy when he had worked as a Magistrate in Cobaltville, learning to his disgust that the system he was tasked to uphold was in fact corrupt to its core. Kane had left Cobaltville, along with Grant, a fellow magistrate, and Brigid, an archivist with remarkable flair and the unusual ability of total memory recall. Together the three of them formed the energetic nucleus around which the sixty-strong facility of so-called Cerberus exiles based their operations.
Like Brigid, Kane had dressed in a shadow suit over which he had worn a tired-looking denim jacket, jeans and boots. Dressed as such, he could pass among Hope's locals with relative anonymity, although perhaps a perceptive individual might notice the proud way in which he carried himself, a vestige of his Magistrate training.
“Just wondering when it got so dark,” Kane finally said as he gazed out toward the beach, the sound of
crashing waves carrying over the hubbub of the crowd. He didn't really expect an answer.
Brigid scanned the dark sky, spying the pinpricks of light where the stars twinkled between the looming clouds. “It's never that dark,” she assured Kane. “Not if you know where to look.”
In silence, Kane nodded his agreement as the line of locals continued to snake slowly into the church to collect the handouts the Cerberus team had brought. They were military rations, many of them recovered from certain storage centers and redoubts that Kane had recalled from his time as a Magistrate. The rations had been acquired in a series of perfunctory raids.
“Guess we should be getting back inside,” Kane said, “before Grant thinks we've deserted him.”
Brigid's straight white teeth glinted in the moonlight as she smiled. “Grant knows you'd never do that, Kane. The pair of you are pretty near inseparable.”
“He says that about you and me, you know,” Kane said as he stood.
“No, he says we're
insufferable,
” Brigid corrected him, slapping her hand against Kane's rear to brush off the dust that clung to him from the step.
Kane laughed as he made his way past the milling crowd, through the shadow-filled porch and back into the church hall. Within, the hall was lit with flaming torches held in sconces, and a line of people stood waiting for their turn to receive their allocated rations from the crates that Kane, Grant, Brigid and what passed for the local authorities had off-loaded from the Mantas earlier that day. Other volunteers from the local area helped, ladling bowls of soup and distributing bottles of clean water that had been filtered clear of contaminants by a pump system operating in the back room of
the church. The pump continued to chug as volunteers added more water to its intake system.
The people of Hope seemed buoyant despite their current plight, and an all-pervading air of “getting on with it” appeared to be the order of the day.
With over five thousand starving people in the ville, the process of allocation based on need was slow but necessary. Many of the locals had arrived carrying bowls and buckets, sacks and carry-alls to obtain as much as they could for themselves and their struggling, starving families. But the two young men at the front of the line hadn't brought bowls or bags to transport the ration bars and purified water. Instead, as Kane watched from the far side of the room, a sixth sense triggering in the back of his mind, the two young men produced a pair of snub-nosed handguns and jabbed them in the face of his partner, the ex-Mag called Grant.
“Gun,” Kane snapped out in a harsh whisper, taking another step into the vast hall with Brigid just a pace behind him.
But before Kane and Brigid could venture farther into the busy church hall, several more people stepped from the ranks of the queuing locals and brought arms out from the hiding places within their dirty-looking clothes. People screamed and shouted, and everyone in the room dropped to the floor in unison as if struck by a massive weight. Kane stepped backward as he dropped, disguising himself within the shadows of the door. When he looked around he saw that Brigid Baptiste was just across from him, similarly lurking in the thick shadows cast by the porch of the antechamber, her body taut like a coiled spring.
“Hand over everything you've got left,” the leader shouted as he waved his snub-nosed .38 at Grant's face, “or you're going to be breathing out of a third nostril.”
“Oh, no, son,” Grant growled, “you don't want to be pulling this shit with me.”
Grant was a huge man, with broad shoulders and dark skin. Though heavy, his body was entirely muscle, with not an ounce of fat in evidence. His black hair was cropped very close to his scalp, but he wore a luxurious gunfighter's mustache. Right now, Grant wore a black
undershirt and loose combat pants, while his Kevlar trench coat remained hanging over the back of a chair behind him. For this rare occasion, curse the damn luck, he had left his wrist-mounted Sin Eater automatic pistol in the secure locker of the Manta vehicle parked around the back of the church grounds.
The lead stick-up artist thrust the barrel of his pistol closer to Grant's face, and he cocked the hammer with a sadistic sneer curling his lip. He was a young man, no older than seventeen by Grant's estimate, and already he wore a fierce scar down the left side of his face, cutting a white streak through the dark stubble and red acne that covered his jaw. Grant's dark eyes flicked across the room, noting the man's accomplices in an instant before turning his attention back to their leader. They were all dressed in muted, unwashed clothes, and none of them looked to be much older than twenty, maybe twenty-five.
“I done fucks like you for just looking at me, man,” the leader announced through gritted teeth. “I'll do everyone in this room if you fuck with me, you understand?”
Grant fixed his dark eyes on the bandit leader as, somewhere close to the door, a dog barked anxiously. “Oh, yeah,” he said softly, almost conspiratorially, “I understand.” Hands held loosely at his sides, Grant took a step back toward the open crate of rations. “You want me to hand them over one by one, or are you and your boyfriends going to come here and carry a crate out?”
The gunman glared at Grant, irritation on his frantic features as he considered his options. “You. You can carry it,” the man decided.
Grant snorted, his eyes still fixed on the nervous young gunman. “Can't help you,” he explained. “This
is a two-man job, buddy. You want to feel the weight of this bad boy if you don't believe me.”
Irritated, the gunman spit a curse and strode toward the line of tables, stepping onto the nearest desk and clambering over it, his hollow boot heels echoing loudly against the wood like the clip-clopping of a horse. As he did so, Grant seized his opportunity, his leg snapping out and his foot slamming into the front of the table as the gunman climbed onto its surface.
The table's legs screeched as they dragged across the floor with the impact of Grant's powerful kick, and the gunman found himself toppling forward, losing his balance as the table disappeared from under him. The young man snapped off a shot at Grant, a bullet blasting toward the huge ex-Mag with a resounding crack, several people screaming in its wake.
Grant felt the bullet cut the air just past his ear, missing him by a quarter of an inch, but he was already rushing forward to meet his assailant. All around the church hall, the gunman's allies were beginning to react, turning their own weapons on the man who had attacked their leader.
“Bunch of amateurs,” Kane muttered as he and Brigid readied themselves in their hiding place in the shadows of the porch. As the gunmen targeted Grant while he was safely protected behind the tumbling form of their leader, it gave Kane and Brigid ample opportunity to mount a surprise attack from the rear.
Over by the line of tables, Grant pumped his sledgehammer fist into the lead gunman's thorax, knocking the man back up into the air as he continued to fall, driving the breath painfully from his throat. The gunman toppled sideways, crying out in pain as he slammed against the wooden floor with bone-shaking finality.
A trained ex-Mag like Kane, Grant was working on instinct now, and his leg snapped out once more to kick the snub-nosed .38 out of the gunman's hand before he could bring it to bear. A stray bullet powered out from the pistol's barrel as it flew out of the gunman's hand and across the floor, embedding itself in the side of the water pump, water spraying everywhere.
As the gunman fell, his companions began blasting shots from their own weapons at Grant, peppering the wall behind the ex-Mag with shots as he leaped out of their path and rolled behind one of the tables. From his crouching position behind the scant protection of a desk, Grant extended the outstretched toe of his booted foot, hooking the nearby chair and scooting it across the floor toward him. His long Kevlar coat hung from the back, and Grant would need that if he was to make it through the next ten seconds alive.
Grant scanned the area to either side of him, seeing the other volunteers ducking behind the furniture as bullets drilled into the wall ahead. They looked frightened.
Abruptly the gunfire stopped. A moment later, Grant heard a voice from the other side of the desk as one of the gunmen spoke. “Richie?” the man shouted. “Richie, you okay, bro?”
Richieâthe gunman whom Grant had knocked to the floorâgroaned, his response something less than an actual word.
The speaker continued, issuing instructions to his people. “The guy went behind there. Ain't nowhere else for him to go. C'mon.”
The man was half right. Grant was trapped behind the desk, but he didn't plan on going far. With a thought, he activated the hidden Commtact communication device
that lay beneath his skin, subvocalizing his command. “Kane, back me up.”
Kane's reply was a single, whispered “Copy.” That one word was carried through the pintels of the subdermal communicator and straight through Grant's skull-casing as though the other man stood right beside him.
Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject's mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer's auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, if a wearer went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact.
His brief exchange with Kane concluded, Grant was moving, leaping from cover and raising the Kevlar-weave coat out before him like a shield. The gunmen began firing instantly as Grant ran toward a nearby serving table, and he snapped the coat out at them, so that the long tails of heavy material whipped across the nearest thug's face.
The gunman howled as the heavy coat struck him, leaving a red mark like a blush across his right cheek. He blasted another shot from the .357 Colt King Cobra in his hand. The gunman was distracted by the coat and the heavy bullet flew wide, allowing Grant to reach his objective.
Grant grabbed the handle of the pot of boiling soup, lifting it from the hot plate and tossing it out before him
at the lead thug. As the angry gunman took another step toward Grant, the bubbling soup splashed across his face, scalding him like raking fire across his exposed flesh. In an instant, the gunman forgot what he was doing and toppled backward, reaching for his burning face as he hollered in his pain. Grant ignored him, leaping over the desk and flipping the half-empty soup pot out before him like an extension of his arm, a bowler rolling a bowling ball.
The heavy pot clanged against the skull of the next stick-up man with a sound like the tolling of a bell. The man fell backward against the floor, his nose caved in and blood pouring down his face. Grant leaped atop his fallen foe, lashing out again with the heavy pot he held in his right hand as bullets slapped against the Kevlar shield he held in his left.
By then, Kane and Brigid had emerged from the shadows. Before the gunmen could react, they joined the fray, felling two of their number in a swift, coordinated attack. Running, Kane drove a ram's-head fist into the lower back of the nearest gunman before the man even realized he was under attack, forcing the man's legs to give way so that he fell to the floor in the grip of paralysisâwhether temporary or permanent Kane didn't much care at that instant.
Next to Kane, Brigid dropped low, sweeping her outstretched leg at another gunman, connecting with his knee so hard that it popped the man's kneecap with an audible
tock
that sounded like the clucking of a person's tongue. The man tumbled to the wooden floor, crying out in a mixture of pain and astonishment as he turned to face his beautiful attacker. Brigid didn't even give the man a second to retaliate. Her flat palm lashed out and bruised his windpipe in a sharp, savage jab. The
man's eyes rolled in his head as he sank into blissful unconsciousness.
As Kane disarmed a third gunman, Grant tossed aside the soup pot and slapped out at his own opponent's gun, knocking it aside as the bandit reeled off a burst of gunfire that echoed in the enclosed space of the church hall. Then Grant drove a massive fist into the man's gut, knocking the wind out of him and lifting him off his feet, such was the power of that incredible blow. As the man struggled to recover, coughing and spluttering from the savage punch to his gut, Grant drove his fist downward and into the man's head, breaking his cheekbone and knocking him across the room. The gunman staggered until he tumbled over a serving table before flopping to the floor behind it.
Grant looked up and saw that Kane had dispatched his own opponent, but the final gunman was lifting his pistol and aiming it at the back of Kane's head.
“Get down!” Grant shouted to his partner as his left arm whipped out with the Kevlar trench coat once again.
Kane ducked and a bullet blasted overhead. At the same instant, Grant's coat wrapped around the gunman's outstretched arm like a rope. As the bullet zipped harmlessly across the room, Grant yanked the coat back with such swiftness that the gunman found his arm dragged backward and his feet pulled from under him. He struggled to keep up with the sudden momentum.
Grant let go of the coat and the gunman staggered onward, hauled past the ex-Mag with the movement of the dragging coat. As he passed, Grant drove his knee into the gunman's side, knocking him to the floor. As the stick-up man crashed downward, Grant fell upon him, slapping away the hand holding the pistol and
driving his other hand down to hit the man's face with its heel. The gunman was knocked senseless, his head slamming against the wooden floors with a loud, hollow echo.
“Everyone okay?” Grant asked as he pulled himself away from the final stick-up artist.
Around the church hall, the timid locals began to rise once more, smiling tentatively as they saw that Grant, Kane and Brigid had disabled all of their would-be robbers. And, spontaneously, a ripple of applause broke out among the people in that church as they showed their gratitude to their saviors.
However, hidden among the shadows near the church doorway, one woman didn't applaud. Instead, her tanned face betrayed no emotion as she watched the scene with flashing dark eyes from beneath the hood of her jacket, her faithful dog waiting at her side.
Despite the disguising nature of the loose, ragged clothes she wore, it was clear that she was a tall woman, with a slender build and an economic lightness of movement. Her face was tanned with an olive complexion, with eyes the color of rich chocolate. The woman reached up with the long fingers of her slender hand, brushing a few rogue wisps of her dark hair back under the hood, pulling the front of the hood itself down lower, the better to mask her face.
As the crowd continued to congratulate the three Cerberus warriors, the woman turned and pushed her way past the milling crowd and out of the church hall, the dog obediently trotting along at her heels. The dog was some strange mongrel, with coarse, wiry fur and the look of a coyote about it. Its eyes were exceptionally pale, washed out to a blue so faint as to be almost white.
The woman stopped at the bottom of the stone steps that led to the church hall, gazing back over her shoulder for a moment to ensure that the Cerberus people weren't following her. But no, they hadn't spotted her among the crowds, had no reason to suspect she might be here. She had come seeking food, like the other residents of the shattered ville of Hope, but she hadn't expected to bump into familiar faces like theirs. Her name was Rosalia, and she had met with the Cerberus rebels once before.
Rosalia had been here six weeks ago, when the earthquake had rumbled through the ground and the towering tidal wave had pummeled the beachfront. She had been a bodyguard then, in the employ of a local brigand called Tom Carnack, whose operation stretched into the Californian desert. Her position had put her at odds with the objectives of the Cerberus personnel, and she had clashed with Kane, Brigid and Grant, along with another operative called Domi, whose skin was an eerie white the color of bone.
Carnack had been killed during the encounter with Cerberus, and his operation all but destroyed. Now a few splinter factions of Carnack's group remained, squabbling among themselves and with no clear leader emerging. And so Rosalia found herself once again out on her own, struggling to survive.