Hell's Maw (29 page)

That afternoon, the children were at their grandmother's—a regular date they shared after nursery one day a week, giving Beatriz a little alone time to pamper herself. She was in the bath, mirror fogged over and windows steamed up, when she heard the bells of the nearby Catholic church. She smiled at the sound—one she associated with weddings and christenings and the joy they brought.

Oddly the bell had chimed just once. She didn't think about that until she noticed its subsequent absence, like waiting for a clap of thunder that never came to follow the flash of lightning. Maybe someone had hit something by accident, she thought, smiling at the slapstick image that the thought conjured in her mind's eye.

And then the bell had chimed again, accompanied this
time by another close by. The bells chimed in unison but their pitches were different, creating a kind of doubling effect like voices in a poorly tuned radio signal.

Lying in the bath hearing those bells repeat, Beatriz suddenly felt cold. Where before the bath water had been warm against her body, now it felt chilly. She glanced around the compact bathroom with its pale yellow walls in need of new paint, its mirror and window misted over. There was so much steam in here, looking into it suddenly seemed like peering into the fog. She lay there in the tub, listening for the chimes again. Waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Chime.

It was eerie. Uncanny. The chimes were too spread apart, too regular, playing an oh-so-slow rhythm she had never heard before yet knew in her heart, knew from before thought, before body, before time.

The cooling water rotated slowly around her, a gradual current formed by the eddies of the wind through a tiny gap in the window's frame. And then Beatriz heard the noise, an urgent, insistent, angry banging at her front door.

She gasped, pulling her hands up to her chest to cover her nakedness, turning to the bathroom door. Her landlord? Surely not, the rent wasn't due for another two weeks.

She strained for a moment, listening for what was going on outside. The hammering stopped, and then there was nothing, just the vacant silence left in its wake, heartless as the grave. She strained, listening harder. Was that movement at the door? Was something scrabbling around out there, just outside her bathroom door? Was it…?

Chime.

The church bells bonged again, loud now, making Beatriz jump.

“That's it,” she muttered. “Gotta get out of this bath.”
She was up even as she spoke, water draining off her as she vaulted the side of the tub and stood on the bath mat.

There was a chill deep inside her now, a chill that was no chill at all, the cold between planets, the cold of the abyss.

She reached for the towel, drying herself quickly and perfunctorily, with none of the tenderness she would have shown her children at bath time. She just wanted to be dry now, get outside and see what was going on, whether it was just her imagination or—

Chime.

The church bells again, all over the city, chiming the death knell of everyone who dwelled within its once-protective walls.

Beatriz's body was dry. She slung the towel aside, not looking as it wrapped itself around the broken wicker chair that she perched on when she was watching the children clean their teeth.

She was reaching for her underwear when the door to the bathroom crashed open and a figure stepped inside.

Beatriz screamed.

The door was hanging from its hinges, a great hunk of wooden panel poking into the wall like a salacious tongue. A man was standing there, so tall he had to duck to enter the room, shirttails hanging loose, tie wrenched to one side. He was not only tall, but freakish, Beatriz saw—his neck was long like one of those African tribesmen who used rings around their necks to elongate them, only there were no rings. And his torso, too, or at least the upper part, where his ribs started, was also long, reminding her more of an alligator's body than a human's. His face was human enough, dusky skin and dark hair, eyes wide and a toothy smile so joyous it disturbed her to look at it. The eyes were big, blotches of irises that seemed to fracture around their edges, clouding into the whites.

“Exquisita edad,”
the man said. “Age exquisite.”

Then he reached for her with arms that seemed to extend well beyond their natural length, growing even as Beatriz stood there, naked and transfixed. The thought went through her mind then, as those hands reached for her throat and began to squeeze the life out of her—why had this man broken the door when she hadn't even locked it.

The bathroom lock had not worked in the six years she had rented the apartment.

* * *

T
HE ROAR OF
the Wheelfox's engine was loud in the interior compartment. The alleyway down which Corcel had taken them seemed to be getting narrower, its turns tighter and leaving less margin for error. Suddenly, the front fender clipped a café table and chairs, knocking them up and over the hood until they careened off to one side. Corcel eased down on the accelerator, powering through the obstruction.

There were a few people here, though it seemed that most had congregated with Ereshkigal on the streets. Washing lines hung high overhead, cinched between the upstairs apartments located above the crowded eateries and cafés. Two bodies hung from one of the lines, dangling in the wind, dead.

Corcel looked pale as he gripped the wheel, eyes staring straight ahead, turning out of the alleyway and stabbing out onto a wide street with a complaining screech of tires.

Then the sturdy patrol vehicle was racing up the main thoroughfare, with the identifying red eye light of the Hall of Justice visible at the end of the street.

The road here was filled with debris, dead bodies, here a dog that had been run over by some heavy vehicle. A circle of people were standing outside a storefront that was billowing smoke, four of them in total, hands locked and staring into one another's faces. They looked delighted as
the smoke wafted around them before spiraling up into the sky.

“It's citywide,” Cáscara said, blinking in surprise.

“Yeah,” Kane agreed. “Looks like it's been spreading ever since we got here.”

“The streets were almost abandoned when we arrived,” Brigid added by way of explanation. “It was like the bells were warning them to hide.”

“Do you think it's affecting everyone?” Shizuka asked. “It can't be, can it?”

Brigid turned to her, seeing the fear on her pretty face. “It's not affected us,” she said.

“But there's a reason for that,” Shizuka said. “We're not local, we're visitors. That's what we all have in common.”

“Except me and my partner here,” Cáscara pointed out, “and we haven't been affected. Right?”

Corcel didn't answer. His attention was fixed on the street as he aimed the hurtling Wheelfox toward the entry to the Hall of Justice compound.

“Where were you when the bells started?” Brigid asked, a theory percolating in her prodigious mind.

Cáscara swiveled in her seat so that she could address Brigid. “In the morgue with Grant.”

“No Commtact reception down there,” Grant told Brigid helpfully.

“Did you hear the bells?” Brigid queried.

Cáscara looked thoughtful, her lips tightening into a pretty moue. “Not until we came out into the lobby,” she recalled. “And even then, they were faint.”

“Ultrasonics don't need to be consciously heard for them to affect the subject,” Brigid mused. “If it was something like that, then the volume wouldn't matter, only the proximity.”

“What do ultrasonics do?” Cáscara asked.

“High-power sound waves,” Brigid said. “They can be
used as weapons. For example, brown notes, sounds below twenty hertz, can theoretically affect an individual's body, making them involuntarily lose control of their bowels.”

Cáscara pulled a face. “Ick, nasty. And you think that this—”

“I think we need a theory,” Brigid replied, “and ultrasonic weaponry fits as well as any. It's a starting point at least.”

“One we sorely need,” Kane averred.

The engine roared louder as Corcel pressed his foot against the accelerator. The Wheelfox zipped off the street and through the barrier that restricted entry to the multilevel garage abutting the Justice building. Designed to respond to a hidden trigger located in all Pretor vehicles, the barrier rose as the Wheelfox approached, just barely fast enough to let the vehicle through.

With its low ceilings and hard surfaces, the garage seemed to be filled with the strange echoes of screeching tires and roaring engine as Corcel's Wheelfox tore along the marked roadway between parked vehicles. Inside, it was lit by dull fluorescents, casting it in a dusky light. Then they took a ramp at speed, bringing the wheel around as Corcel ascended to the second level.

Still talking with the Cerberus team, Cáscara found herself suddenly thrown in her seat, the safety belt digging into her shoulder as she lurched. She turned to look through the windshield and then at her partner. “Juan? You want to slow down…?”

Corcel ignored her, his expression fixed as he stared through the windshield. The chimes of the bells were running through his head now, over and over, bringing with them the rhythm that Ereshkigal had discovered all those millennia ago—the rhythm of life and death. He yanked the wheel around, driving the Wheelfox through the closed-in space at an increasing rate. Parked
Wheelfoxes and Sandcats whipped past them to either side in a blur of ceramic shell and armaglass.

In the back compartment, Kane, Brigid, Grant and Shizuka found themselves thrown side to side.

“What are you doing up there, man?” Grant yelped as he was tossed against the door.

Corcel turned the wheel again, and the tires screeched as the Wheelfox took the ramp up to the next level. A moment later the compact patrol vehicle emerged on the top level, above which were the landing pads for the Pretors' Deathbirds and other air support vehicles.

Cáscara was staring at Corcel strangely, trying to make sense of what was happening. In back, the Cerberus allies were unable to do anything but complain. They were not able to reach through the grille, which was designed to stop felons from interfering with Pretors after they had been arrested.

“Slow down!” Cáscara called.

But Corcel ignored any voiced instruction. All he could hear now was the piercing instruction in his mind—the one that demanded corpses for his mistress.

Cáscara glanced through the windshield and saw that they were heading directly to the edge of the garage. There was a low wall there, just a little higher than the front fender, with an open horizontal space above it to bring daylight into the building. Corcel was heading at the wall and he was not slowing down.

Cáscara reached across to grab the wheel, pulling at Corcel's left hand. But it was already too late. The man's foot was rammed against the accelerator and the only course correction that Cáscara could hope to enable was too little, too late.

“Corpses for my mistress,” Corcel said in a low voice as they struck the wall.

Hurtling at high speed, the Pretor Wheelfox slammed into the wall of the split-level parking garage. The crash of impact could be heard four streets away; it sounded like an aircraft had dropped from the sky.

The shock wave reverberated through the body of the vehicle like an earthquake, throwing the driver and passengers in all directions with shouts of surprise and pain.

The wall had crumpled beneath the onslaught but the Wheelfox kept on going as great hunks of concrete and metal broke away and began their brief descent through the thirty-foot distance to the street below. Engines roaring, the Wheelfox followed, smashing through the gap in the wall and careening out into empty air.

The engine's whine assumed a higher pitch as the wheels left the surface, and then the Wheelfox began to fall, tracing a shallow arc that threw it out beyond the edge of the parking garage and halfway across the street beyond, following those huge chunks of falling debris.

For a moment, Cáscara could see the familiar roofs of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar and the Aljafería Palace hurtling past in the distance, viewed from new angles.

Then the Wheelfox slammed into the ground with a second thunderous crash, which could be heard two blocks away, nose-first and accompanied by hunks of wall and
metal and a great billow of dust. The engines whined for a moment and the vehicle lurched a few feet forward, threatening to overbalance and flip, before coming down again at an angle where it rested, its rear wheel bent and its back port side touching the road.

* * *

T
HE GODS DEMANDED SACRIFICE.
It showed devotion, it showed belief, it showed the insect's awe in the face of a being so much grander than anything that insect could ever fully comprehend.

Ereshkigal stalked the city in beauty like the night. Her body was becoming more lizard-like now, more absolute and rigid, the skin assuming its hard, armor-like coating that she remembered from her first life, lo those millennia ago.

Each step was a step of an age-old dance, her tail of feathers shimmying in time to the secret equation she had happened upon when she was still a youth in Enlil's courtyard. To an observer's eyes, if such there had been, the dance appeared to be a flamenco, a Spanish dance of death.

Around her, the city of Zaragoza was dying. Few who heard the chimes in the secret rhythm could resist, their promise of joy eternal too strong a draw to ignore. People came from their apartments to die, pushing a dagger deep into their heart, diving from their open windows or merely throwing themselves prostrate in the streets before the marching mob to be crushed in its wake. The deaths were glorious. Every one fed her within, strengthening Ereshkigal and supplying the rudimentary genetic material for her to finish her birth that had begun with the dragon's tooth in the hand of that vodun madman, Papa Hurbon.