Chapter 11
“Get down,” Grant shouted, grabbing Kane by the belt and pulling him to the floor.
Kane looked startled as another swarm of the howling bullets drilled into the wall above his head.
“What’s got into you?” Grant demanded. “You were just standing there.”
“There’s something in the bullets,” Kane said, shaking his head to clear it. “Faces.”
“Worry about that later,” Brigid said, sliding across the floor to join them. “We need to get out of here.”
Before Kane or Grant could reply, Brigid pulled her shotgun around, bringing herself up on one knee and firing. The loud cough of the shotgun pounded at their eardrums as the weapon discharged.
“She’s right,” Grant agreed, and Kane nodded.
“Sorry, I just...zoned out,” Kane explained, the confusion evident in his voice.
The shotgun’s discharge lit the room as Brigid fired again, blasting another shell at the oncoming Magistrates. They returned fire, their bullets screeching through the air as they hurtled toward the Cerberus teammates.
Then Kane was through the double doors, Grant’s hand between his shoulder blades as he shoved his disoriented partner through. Brigid followed a second later, reloading the shotgun as she crashed through the doors.
“What got into you, Kane?” she demanded.
“I...don’t know,” Kane said, bewildered. “I saw something...in their blasts.”
They were in a wide corridor that ran to a junction at one end and an abrupt stop at the other where the rubble of the wall had collapsed to block it. Light crept through the gaps in the rubble, illuminating the corridor. The whole atmosphere was heavy with that same burned stench. It had a tiled floor, but the tiles were blackened and stained with the rust color of long-dried blood in sweeping streaks, as if a painter had gone mad. Long light fixtures hung from chains, all of them dead, and there were gurneys shoved against the walls here and there. There were at least a dozen doors emerging from this corridor, along with a bank of three elevators, their thick metal doors cratered with impacts, one set wrenched entirely free and strewed across the floor.
“Don’t know about you, but I’m guessing it’s a hospital,” Brigid said, looking around. “Maybe a military one. The waiting room, the stretchers...”
Kane nodded, still struggling to organize his thoughts. The things he had seen in the expulsion of the bullets, the faces frozen in screaming agony, played again and again across his mind’s eye, hideous and terrifying all at once.
Grant peered through the ruined glass portal of the left-hand door. “They’re still coming,” he reported over the sounds of impacting bullets. “We’re gonna have to return fire.”
Kane shook his head. “Not yet. Let’s find cover and keep hidden.”
“Better find it fast,” Grant warned, turning away from the doors as a burst of fire rattled them on their hinges.
Taking the lead, Kane headed down the unlit corridor at a sprint, ignoring the doors leading from it in favor of the distant junction. “We’ll try to get to the far side of the building,” he instructed, his voice coming rapidly between breaths. “Keep moving away from the Magistrates.”
Together, the three Cerberus warriors sprinted toward the junction, heading to the right on Kane’s instructions. Behind them, the sickly looking Magistrates had just broken through the double doors of the wrecked waiting room, and their guns whipped up as they spotted their prey. The weapons fired, spouting eerie puffs of whiteness that hung in the air for a moment, shimmering in the shafts of light creeping through the rubble behind them, ghostly faces drawn in agony amid the smoke.
A moment later, screaming bullets peppered the far end of the corridor, but Kane and his two companions had disappeared, passing around the junction corner and sprinting through the ruined corridors of the hospital building.
At the rear of the group, Grant peered over his shoulder as the bullets lashed against the wall, their screams dying with each impact. “That was close,” he hissed, redoubling his pace.
The corridor here was narrow in parts, where a great hunk of ceiling had collapsed, and Kane had to weave past it, his pace seldom slowing. Above him, one half of the ceiling still held, but just barely, its lowest surface scraping above the hair on his head. Brigid followed, hefting the shotgun one-handed as she zipped through the narrow gap. In the rear, the wide-shouldered Grant was forced to go sideways past the collapse, but it gave him an idea.
“Brigid,” he called, and both she and Kane slowed their pace momentarily to see what Grant needed. Grant was standing on the near side of the ceiling collapse, pointing at it with his Sin Eater. “I don’t have any charges. Use your shotgun to blast this thing shut.”
Brigid needed no further encouragement. As Kane scouted ahead, she brought the 12-gauge around and targeted the partly collapsed ceiling. “Get back,” she warned.
As Grant stepped aside, Brigid squeezed the trigger, and the old Mossberg design unleashed a burst of deadly fire, striking the drooping ceiling with a crash of splintering wood and plaster. Grant ran as the rest of the ceiling collapsed behind him, his arms pumping as he hurried to join Brigid.
Up ahead, Kane had found a possible exit. His head appeared from a side room, calling his companions over as they raced along the corridor. They followed him inside, entering another waiting area of fixed seats and low tables. This one, however, had specially low seats in one section, and the scarred walls showed the remnants of a cheery mural, a cartoon version of a field with smiling flowers and cheerful bunny rabbits hopping across it. Like the rest of the rooms, this one was blackened with unidentified debris, rusty brown streaks smeared all over the floors and painted walls.
“Looks like a children’s ward,” Brigid observed as she followed Kane through the upturned tables and chairs.
“Which scratches your idea that it was a military hospital,” Kane pointed out.
“Not really,” Brigid reasoned as he led the way. “Military brats get sick, too. I think with the mat-trans upstairs—”
“Think later,” Grant growled from behind them both. “I don’t reckon that little trick back there is going to hold our playmates for long.”
* * *
B
ARELY
THIRTY
FEET
AWAY
,
the four Dark Magistrates hurried in pursuit of their quarry as the ceiling fell down before them. Lined up, the four dark figures halted before the collapsed ceiling, eyeing it through rotted and putrescent orbs. Magistrate North, whose flesh was black with infection, skin rotted away from muscle, held his Soul Eater pistol up and blasted a burst of rapid fire at the barricade before him, sending a dozen shots screaming at the fallen ceiling in the space of two seconds.
The rubble kicked and spit as the screaming bullets struck it, slugs vibrating across its surface in an angry tarantella, chunks of plaster and wood ripping from it in angry spits. But when he was done, the barricade remained intact, only the slightest damage showing across its rough surface, more dislodged pieces falling in place.
The Dark Magistrates did not say a word, as the capacity for speech had departed them long ago. Instead, they conversed in a series of abrupt shrieks and hums, identifying the problem and settling on a solution with rapidity.
A moment later, two of them turned back, returning the way they had come in search of another path through the ruined hospital. The others—North and West—remained at the collapsed ceiling, clawing at it with gloved hands as they searched for a way to lever the debris out of their path.
They would catch these living perpetrators—catch them for their crimes against Baron Trevelyan.
Chapter 12
In the darkened wing of the children’s ward, Kane led the way through two rooms and into a third. Open plan in style, the rooms opened one into the next like Russian dolls, a waiting area leading into a smaller waiting room and that into a cluster of joined consultation rooms. The whole wing was constructed in an oblong, but there was wreckage all over, with holed walls and collapsed chunks of ceiling to be navigated around.
As Kane led the way through the ruined area, Brigid realized why he had brought them in here. She could see tantalizing glimpses of a bank of windows off to the left, obscured by the piled debris. An inviting lake glistened beyond.
“There are no gaps large enough,” Kane growled, clawing at a handful of the rubble.
“Then we’ll make one,” Grant suggested, pulling a large hunk of masonry aside. But as he pulled the stonework free it began to crumble, turning to sifting flecks as he moved it away. It was like trying to move shifting sand.
“We don’t have time,” Brigid observed, voicing what they all realized. “Without tools, it’ll just keep dropping on us, filling in any progress we make.”
“Dammit,” Kane cursed, searching around for another way through. “Come on, Kane,” he admonished himself. “Think—think!”
Before Brigid or Grant could say a word, Kane was in motion again, hurrying back the way they had just come, launching himself toward a closed door that was partly hidden behind a fallen I beam. The door stood between two others, a narrow room lying beyond.
* * *
B
ACK
AT
THE
ENTRY
TO
THE
children’s wing, two dark figures were just entering, their shining Magistrate badges glinting like spilled blood in what little light infiltrated the waiting room. Magistrate North and Magistrate West had clawed through the fallen rubble in the corridor beyond, ripping piece after piece out of their way in a mess of dust and plaster. Their clothes were caked with dust, hunks of plaster falling from the creases as they moved and their helmets smeared with chalky residue.
The two Magistrates strode into the children’s wing, twitching with alertness, searching for their prey by sound and smell. They moved through the room like prowling sharks, following some inherent instinct that drove them to their prey while, elsewhere in the abandoned hospital complex, their companions did likewise, seeking another route.
* * *
K
ANE
TRIED
THE
DOOR
AND
found it locked. The handle turned but the door wouldn’t budge. Taking a step back, he kicked out, driving the cushioned sole of his foot into the door, heel first, just beneath the handle. There was a splintering of wood and then the door gave, the metal handle breaking off and falling away to the floor, the wooden frame splintering.
Kane gave the door a brutal shove as he barged inside while Grant and Brigid waited, weapons at the ready. Within, Kane found himself in a small pharmacy storeroom, ten-by-eight feet, the shelves stocked with bottles of pills and serums, all of it covered with plaster dust. Here, too, the ceiling bowed, causing several of the shelves to tip. Their contents had spilled to the floor long ago. Kane kicked his way through the mess, searching for the room’s window. It had to have one; he felt sure of it.
Outside the storeroom, Grant and Brigid waited in the semidarkness of the ward, watching for any sign of their wraithlike pursuers.
Suddenly Grant flinched and Brigid followed, both of them spying the shadow moving through the darkness at the same time. It was a Magistrate—no,
two
of them, moving stealthily into the waiting area at the far end of the room.
Grant began to say something but Brigid stopped him with a raise of her hand.
“I see them,” she said quietly. “Two.”
“Make that four,” Grant whispered, his eyes fixing on the other side of the room where an open doorway led into some kind of playroom.
Without saying a word, Brigid and Grant stepped back, merging into the shadows amid the upturned furniture.
* * *
I
NSIDE
THE
STORAGE
ROOM
,
Kane was staring at the farthest wall. He could make out a window there, or at least a sliver of one, light streaming in from outside, but it was obscured by a high shelving unit laden with bottles. Kane reached forward, pressing his hand to the window, feeling the coolness of the glass. It was an outside window, he was certain of it—the light could be artificial, but that feeling of a draft snaking around the window’s edge was something you couldn’t fake.
Kane worked his hand around, reaching behind the shelves as far as he was able until he found a catch. He manipulated it, feeling for how loose it was. He could work it—maybe not from this angle, but if he got the shelf out of the way, then maybe.
Kane drew his hand back and rested it against the side of the shelves. Then, using both hands, he shunted the shelving unit, gritting his teeth as he pushed it across the floor. The unit’s metal feet whined as they scraped against the floor tiles, tearing chunks out of them as it moved two inches. It was enough for Kane to reach behind. He pulled at the back of the shelving unit and clambered up it to add his full body weight. It began to rock unsteadily.
Kane leaped free as the shelving unit tumbled from the wall, its contents spilling across the floor, bottles shattering as they smashed against the blackened tiles. Midway through its tumble, the shelving unit slammed into the next closest unit and stopped with a crunch, poised at a thirty-degree angle. The jarred contents of the second unit went toppling from those shelves, too, further littering the floor in a carpet of pills and serums.
* * *
T
HE
D
ARK
M
AGISTRATES
all turned at the cacophony that emanated from the storeroom as Kane yanked the shelving unit free from the wall. They descended from opposite ends of the ward, their blasters raised as they sought their prey.
“What the hell is he doing in there?” Grant muttered from his hiding place just outside the storeroom’s door. He was watching both sets of Magistrates as they came closer, their eerie squawks and hums cutting through the air like a poorly tuned radio.
Across the door from him, Brigid held her shotgun ready, watching those dark silhouettes get closer. “Come on, Kane, get it together.”
* * *
I
NSIDE
THE
STOREROOM
,
Kane stood before the window, staring in frustration at the twin vertical bars that had been placed on the outside—presumably to stop anyone breaking in to steal drugs. “Trust the luck,” he muttered to himself. Even if he did get this window open, there was no way that any of them could squeeze through that gap between the bars, not even Brigid.
He was trapped; they all were. Trapped like rats.