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Beside Walking Stick, Kane saw an emaciated figure with the straggly remains of long dreadlocks. The wide hips of her pelvis confirmed that she had been a woman, and a powerfully built one at that. When the woman bunched her fists, a gob of discolored and rotting flesh hung down between her ragged fingers like a teardrop. Mentally, Kane tagged the woman Dreadlocks before turning his attention to the last of the undead creatures.
This one was shorter than the others, a little over five feet tall, and had adopted a fighting stance, pitching his legs wide to lower his center of gravity. He had wispy hair, and his skull peeked through the rotted flesh of his long-dead face. Kane tagged this one Shorty, and figured him to be the least trouble if it came to a fight.
Pointing at Kane, Eye Patch curled an index finger, folding it inward, like the beckoning finger of fate. A twisting knot in his stomach, Kane recognized the movement; the corpse wasn’t pointing but was pulling the trigger of a gun, an old flinch reaction from whatever brutal life he had lived.
As the realization dawned, Kane took a quick step to his left, away from the glass wall. The tall corpse with the walking stick took a step to his right, holding the stick out to block the ex-Mag’s way. Behind the clutch of corpses, the twisted form of Ezili Coeur Noir had appeared, moving like a specter from the glass-fronted office into the main hangar. Her mouth opened, black tongue writhing amid rotting gums, as she spoke.
“Life.”
Kane heard the word, and felt the nagging at the back of his mind that somehow he knew this woman. The eye-patch-wearing corpse took another step toward Kane, so close now that Kane had to step back to avoid him. The corpse’s dead companions stepped forward, too, boxing Kane in. Behind them, more of the undead figures had begun amassing, acknowledging the perverted condemnation of the queen of death.
Taking another lurching step forward, the figure with the eye patch reached for Kane once more, and Kane found himself backed up against the wall.
“Back off, Eye Patch,” Kane snarled.
The corpse ignored him, reaching up with his rotting left hand and grabbing a fistful of Kane’s jacket. The instant the corpse grabbed him, Kane rammed his Sin Eater into the corpse’s belly and squeezed the trigger. Gobs of desiccated flesh spurted from the figure’s back as 9 mm bullets blasted through rotted flesh. The corpse staggered backward several steps, wrenching a square from Kane’s jacket, two brass buttons flying off into the glass wall to Kane’s right.
Freed of the corpse-thing’s grip, Kane kicked out with his left leg, striking the tall man in the midsection. Eye Patch bent over himself with the impact of Kane’s kick, and the ex-Magistrate pushed off, flipping over the toppling body and bringing his gun up to deal with the next of the clutch of zombies.
A short way across the hangar, Grant spoke to Brigid where they hid, watching the frantic showdown from the cover of the stacked crates. It had been less than ten seconds since Grant’s Commtact warning, and it was clear Kane was in trouble.
“Come on,” Grant snapped.
Brigid trotted out from cover in Grant’s wake, blasting bursts of bullets from her TP-9 at the looming pack of undead creatures that traipsed across the room toward their partner.
A fleshless woman standing close to the crates staggered over as Grant drilled her with bullets from his Sin Eater, flipping the weapon around to smash her in the face with its grip. Brigid leaped over the woman’s corpse as it flopped to the floor.
And then, the one thing Brigid had most feared happened. As she leaped the fallen figure of the corpse, a skeletal hand whipped out and grabbed her ankle, pulling her to the ground.
Brigid spun, unleashing another burst of bullets right into the undead thing’s withered face at near point-blank range. The corpse woman shook in place as Brigid’s bullets drilled into her, ripping away the gory stump of her nose and rattling against the empty sockets of her eyes. Yet still the undead thing clung on, ignoring the effects the bullets were having on her face, and Brigid reached a sudden, awful realization—bullets weren’t stopping these things.
A little way across the hangar, Kane had just come to the same conclusion. Still in motion, he had blasted a volley of 9 mm steeljackets at the scarecrowlike figure holding the walking stick, only to see him stumble a pace back before regaining his footing, glowering at Kane with those lifeless eye sockets. Kane spun, dropping low as his leg swept the scarecrow, knocking him from his feet. The corpse’s walking stick whipped out as he fell with a ghastly hiss from peeled-back lips as black as night.
Kane continued the leg sweep, catching the woman with dreadlocks just behind her ankle. She stumbled a pace forward, but despite her apparent unsteadiness, she refused to fall. She turned on Kane then, reaching down at him with long arms as he scooted across the metal plating of the floor. Kane grunted as the woman’s hands snagged the torn front of his jacket, and she demonstrated incredible strength as she pulled him from the decking in one swift jerk.
The hideous figure of Ezili Coeur Noir let loose a deep, throaty laugh as Kane was yanked from the floor, nodding her approval as he was thrust up in the air by her dead servant. With clawlike, fleshless hands, Dreadlocks lifted Kane high over her head as her mistress laughed, and Kane tried desperately to bring his pistol up to shoot her.
Just then a stream of bullets slammed into the woman holding Kane and she stumbled back, her dreadlocks whipping around her face. Kane felt her grip loosen, and suddenly he was hurtling through the air before crashing an instant later into—and through—the glass wall of the office. Kane rolled across the office as glass shards shattered all around him. Then, bringing his gun up, he blasted a stream of fire across the remaining windows behind him, sending a burst of shattering glass at the five corpselike figures who were just turning to follow him. He watched in grim satisfaction as three of the figures dropped back to protect Ezili Coeur Noir, with only the shorter individual leaping over the barrier of the filing cabinets amid the smashing glass.
Kane engaged his Commtact, instructing his companions in a hurried explanation. “They ain’t living and they ain’t dying. Anyone have any ideas?”
The zombie he’d named Shorty was in the office now, hurrying past a doorway through which Kane could see the closed doors of an elevator, and Kane saw that he had grabbed two long shards of broken glass, wielding them like knives as he hurried at Kane. Still on the floor, Kane pushed himself back on his shoulders before springing up into a crouch and unleashing another stream of bullets at his onrushing attacker. The short zombie was knocked backward by the impact of the bullets, and he held one hand up as if to protect his ruined face.
STRUGGLING in the mantrap-like grip of the dead woman holding her ankle, Brigid Baptiste was a little too preoccupied to answer Kane’s question. The undead thing wrestled with Brigid’s foot as they lay sprawled on the floor, even as Brigid’s TP-9 blasted another burst of gunfire in her face. Kane was right; bullets were having almost no effect, and they needed some other way to deal with these deathless things.
With a determined shriek, Brigid kicked the zombie girl’s arm with her free leg, snapping the brittle bones with a determined boot. From somewhere deep in her rotting chest, the undead thing growled. Brigid ignored her, kicking out again.
GRANT WAS PEPPERING the area with bullets, turning this way and that as additional corpses descended on him from all around the hangarlike room. One, a child with a wilted stump for an arm, ran straight into Grant’s line of fire, his decomposing body shaking in place as he staggered closer to the ex-Mag.
They aren’t stopping, Grant realized, but maybe we can drive them away somehow.
THE GLASS SHARD in the zombie’s raised hand shattered under the impact of Kane’s bullets, spraying glass over the undead man’s ruinous face. Instantly, Shorty lunged out with his other hand, and Kane saw the lethal shard of glass leave the creature’s other hand and cut toward him through the air. In flinch reaction, Kane’s right hand whipped up, bullets lashing the ceiling from the muzzle of the Sin Eater as he tracked the hurtling glass knife.
His shots missed, but Kane managed to bat the lethally sharp blade out of the air with the barrel of his pistol, turning his head as the blade shattered into a dozen smaller, onrushing blades. Then Shorty was upon him, and Kane saw the other corpses clambering over the filing cabinets as they followed the most direct route to assist their companion.
THE CORPSE CHILD grabbed the end of Grant’s Sin Eater, shuddering in place, ignoring the stream of bullets that drilled through his tiny hand. His other arm, withered to something like a twig-thin branch, jabbed at Grant, stabbing him in his side so hard he felt it through the protective weave of his shadow suit.
With a single mental command, Grant sent his pistol back to its housing in his sleeve, and the corpse child stumbled as he lost his grip. Grant was ready, however, and he drove the hard end of his bent knee straight into the undead child’s face, knocking him to the floor.
An instant later Grant was turning, shoving another walking corpse aside as he sprinted toward the far side of the room, away from the glass-walled office.
“Kane, Brigid—hang tight,” Grant ordered over the Commtact. “I just had an idea.”
“Make it quick,” Kane responded as he threw the attacking zombie over a desk, knocking a bulbless lamp and an empty filing tray flying.
Behind Kane, three more undead figures were making their way toward him in their unwieldy but determined manner, the one with the black walking stick thrusting it in front of him like some kind of sword.
BRIGID LEAPED from the floor, the undead woman’s hand still clutching at her ankle. It didn’t matter as Brigid’s second kick had wrenched the rotten limb free of its socket, and now she dragged the hand and arm along with her as she ran back to the crates where she and Grant had hidden. Behind Brigid, the fleshless woman flapped her remaining arm as she struggled to pull herself up from the floor, moving with all the grace of a drowning man.
Brigid shoved her TP-9 back into her low-slung hip holster, reached for the crowbar resting atop the crates.
As the corpse woman staggered toward her, maggots visibly writhing in the stump now hanging in place of her arm, Brigid lashed backward with the crowbar, smashing it against the corpse’s face with all her strength. The undead creature rocked on her heels, and Brigid kicked out hard into the corpse’s pelvis, forcing her backward. Then Brigid swung the crowbar once more, this time from low to the floor, bringing the metal tool up in a vicious arc that rammed the claw end straight into the woman’s ruined face.
The corpse-thing whined in some approximation of pain or surprise—Brigid didn’t know which—and stumbled backward, pulling at the metal bar now lodged in her face.
Bunching her fists, Brigid took a pace toward the stumbling undead woman, preparing to knock her down once more, only to hear a growling noise from far off across the hangar bay. But this time the growling wasn’t coming from a recently dead thing’s long-dry throat. Instead it was coming from an engine as Grant started up the artillery truck that had waited in the redoubt for over two hundred years.
Sitting in the cab, Grant pumped the accelerator and the truck rumbled to life around him. The vehicle was rusted and worn, and all four tires were flat as road kill, but at least it operated along the same basic principles as the Sandcats he had driven back in his days with the Cobaltville Magistrate Division.
The corpse figure of a man was slammed against the hood and disappeared from view beneath the body of the truck as the vehicle picked up speed.
As he urged the artillery truck across the metal decking toward the distant glass walls of the office-lab, Grant glanced out to his right and his eyes met with Brigid’s. The corpse-thing with the crowbar in her face sinking to her knees in front of her.
“Want me to get the door for you?” Brigid asked, her words amplified over the medium of their linked Commtacts.
“Say again?” Grant asked.
But Brigid was already sprinting across the room, rushing behind the truck as it picked up speed. Grant glanced to his left and saw Brigid running onward deftly avoiding the shambling undead figures as she hurried toward the closed doors of the goods elevator.
“I figure we have only one exit,” Brigid explained over the Commtact, but before she could continue Grant cut her off.
“I gotcha,” Grant assured her. “Be there in a tick. Kane,” he added, alerting his other colleague. “You might want to duck down.”
“Roger that.” Kane’s voice snapped back instantly, not bothering to question his best friend’s left-field advice.
Grant was at the wall to the office then and he slammed on the brakes as the truck smashed through the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass. He saw Kane leap back just in time as the glass shattered all around him, twinkling shards surging across the office like some beautiful, man-made tidal wave.
The truck slapped into the corpse wielding the walking stick like a weapon, knocking him flying in an instant, and its front tire bumped over another before it came to a halt, chairs, desks and office debris toppling in front of its hood.
Commanding his Sin Eater back into his palm, Grant snapped off a quick burst of covering fire from the truck’s window as Kane vaulted over a dust-caked desk and scrambled toward the waiting vehicle. A moment later Kane had clambered up into the high rig, the figure with the dreadlocks lunging after him.
“What kept you?” Kane asked breathlessly, delivering a swift back-kick into the grasping corpse woman’s chin.
“Traffic,” Grant replied, working the gearshift into reverse and pumping the gas.
A moment later the Army truck was hurtling backward across the hangar bay, rotten rubber tires screeching on the metal decking as Grant wrestled with the wheel. They hit something behind them, and Kane leaned out of the window, peering to see what it was. A stack of crates toppled over, and two undead corpses were knocked from their feet. Ezili Coeur Noir watched, well away from the path of the rushing vehicle.
Over by the elevator, Kane spotted Brigid jabbing at the control panel with her free hand as she sprayed staggered bursts of bullets at a half-dozen undead men who threatened to overwhelm her. With a cheerful chime that seemed utterly out of place in the nightmarish surroundings, the elevator arrived, its jawlike metal doors sighing open while Brigid’s sweeping bullets knocked another zombie off his feet.
Grant’s foot pumped the brake, and he gripped the steering wheel as the truck threatened to go into a skid on its bald flat tires. As the vehicle screamed across the metal it knocked three corpse figures from its path, but there was no time for celebration. Brigid Baptiste leaped aside as ten tons of truck hurtled past her and crashed hard into the edge of the open elevator, metal-on-metal kicking up a lightninglike burst of sparks. As the truck drew to a stop, its left side flush with the wall of the goods elevator, Brigid rushed into the elevator cage and jabbed at the control panel with the heel of her hand. In front of her, the doors began to close on their pneumatic motors as several undead figures struggled from the floor toward the fleeing Cerberus team.
Behind Brigid, Kane had jumped down from the cab and was adding bursts of gunfire from his own weapon to hers as she fended off the approaching figures until the shining metal doors finally closed. As they did so, Brigid let out a long breath. “What on earth…?” she asked.
“RWI077-093-d,” Kane replied, flexing the tension from his shoulders as the elevator shuddered and began to rise.
“What does that mean?” Brigid asked him, baffled.
“It was the code on the file that crazy-looking woman was studying,” Kane told her. “She called herself Ezili Coeur Noir.”
“Ezili of the Black Heart,” Brigid said in translation. “Voodoo loa, the spirit of death.”
“No.” Kane shook his head. “That’s no voodoo spirit.”
Brigid looked up at Kane querulously as she discharged the near-empty clip from her TP-9 and loaded a fresh one. “No?”
“Don’t ask me how,” Kane told her, “but that there—that’s Lilitu, Annunaki dark goddess and royal pain in the ass.”
Brigid’s eyes widened as she stared at Kane, utterly dumbfounded.
Chapter 6
In her guise as dark goddess of the Annunaki pantheon, Lilitu had been manipulating humankind almost from the day that she had first emerged from the water and begun to walk on two legs.
Her story had been told in a hundred different ways across the different religions of mankind, where she had been Lilith, Lilu and even the Queen of Sheba who seduced wise King Solomon. The ancient Sumerian records cast Lilitu as a terrible harlot-goddess who reveled in the extremes of carnality. As Lilith, Lilitu was reputed to sexually take men by force as they slept, and in Talmudic lore she was believed to be the first wife of Adam.
While mythology was often mired in interpretation, it was clear that Lilitu was a shrewd and ruthless manipulator with a sadistic streak. Thousands of years ago, when the Annunaki had first walked the Earth, Lilitu’s family holdings had become a sprawling empire near the Red Sea. Wishing to acquire the territory, Overlord Enlil had wed Lilitu in a pact that had resulted in betrayal and usurpation. Thus, Lilitu had embarked on a millennia-long war with the Annunaki Supreme Council, a sprawling game of chess with humanity as pawns. And so Lilitu was rightly renowned for her utter ruthlessness, the possessor of a callous streak that recognized no limitations.
Several years ago, Lilitu had emerged from her chrysalis state where she had hidden for ninety years in the guise of Baroness Beausoleil, ruler of her own self-named ville in the Outlands. She had caused trouble for the Cerberus rebels—both as Baroness Beausoleil and in her true form—since almost the day of their inception.
However, although she had assumed many forms in her near-immortal lifespan, the last time the Cerberus rebels had dealt with Lilitu she had been in her true body, a graceful humanoid goddess with a snakelike aspect to her crimson-scaled skin and black-vertical-slit yellow eyes, a magnificent crest atop her skull.
Less than a year ago, the Cerberus team had dealt what had appeared to be a final, decisive blow against the Annunaki’s mothership, Tiamat. During the scuffle, Lilitu had been shot—and apparently killed—by her brood sister Rhea, and her corpse had still been aboard Tiamat when the magnificent organic spacecraft had been destroyed in an almighty fireball. Kane, Brigid and Grant had seen that with their own eyes, and yet they knew that the Annunaki had a nasty habit of surviving even the most dire and absolute of circumstances.
Kane climbed back into the cab of the artillery truck as the elevator doors opened in front of them, and he shot Brigid an inquisitive look. “You going to say anything, Baptiste?” he asked. “Or are you just going to let your jaw hang like that until the wind changes?”
Brigid Baptiste brushed a lock of her red-gold hair behind her ear as she finally spoke, now seated between Kane and Grant. “Lilitu,” she said, as if quite unable to comprehend what Kane had said. “That…thing…was Lilitu?”
Kane nodded. “I think so,” he said. “She’s been through a few changes.”
“A few changes?” Grant repeated, amused. “She looked awfully dead, my friend.”
Placing his hands on the steering wheel, Grant pushed down gently on the accelerator and the truck idled out of the elevator as the doors opened to their full extent, a long, ill-lit shaft yawning in front of before them. As the truck rumbled along a few feet, motion-sensitive lights popped on overhead, lighting a little more along the wide tunnel. In the flickering lighting, the three Cerberus teammates saw they were in a gray-walled corridor that angled upward toward the surface. The corridor was wide enough to accommodate the truck twice over, and as they watched the lights pop on ahead of them, the team became aware of dark figures lurking in the shadows. These figures, like the ones they had left below, stood at strange angles like once-proud trees struck by lightning, their bodies rotten, creamy bone visible amid the perished skin of their emaciated faces. The undead.
“How much gas do we have?” Kane snapped as he wound down the passenger side window and recalled his Sin Eater back into his right palm with a slap.
Grant looked at the fuel gauge that was set beneath the speedometer on the dashboard display as the cab shuddered in time with the idling engine. The needle stood at empty. “Not much,” Grant said.
Kane cursed as he began blasting a stream of 9 mm slugs at the nearest shadowy form. The zombie thing to their right fell in a hail of bullets, but Kane watched with revulsion as it began to struggle back to its feet. Up ahead bright sunlight was just visible through a huge rollback door that stood open at the end of the tunnel.
“Think we have enough to get outside?” Kane asked, peering at Grant and seeing the twisted wires beneath the ignition where his colleague had hot-wired the ancient truth.
“We’re running on fumes,” Grant admitted, “but what the hell.” With that he slammed his foot down hard on the accelerator and the truck lurched forward, bumping over the struggling corpse and knocking another rotting figure from his feet like a bowling pin.
The truck rocked so much that it felt as if it might shake itself apart as they picked up speed. Leaning from the passenger window, Kane snapped off swift burst of gunfire as another rotting figure loomed into view.
The truck now snugly within the tunnel, trundling along at a steady clip as Grant wrestled to keep it on course. The vehicle’s bald tires struggled for traction, pulling the heavy machine toward the walls as Grant held the accelerator down. The cab stank of diesel, and Grant eyed the fuel gauge on the dashboard once again—the needle seemed to be stuck at empty, and Grant tapped the plastic several times to see if it was a genuine reading or whether it had simply become jammed over time. The needle didn’t move.
“Kane,” Brigid urged, pointing up ahead.
Kane saw what was worrying Brigid—a zombie stood close to the rollback door, his skin peeled away from his face, skull held at an odd angle atop his broad shoulders. The undead thing grasped a thick tree branch—wider than a man’s leg—and as Kane watched he hefted the branch forward like a jousting pole, swinging its sharp point at the windshield of the cab.
Grant stomped on the accelerator, knocking another corpse flying in the air until the undead thing slapped against the low ceiling. Grant peered in the mud-caked side mirror, watching as the corpse fell from the ceiling and dropped into the back of the truck. He could not tell if it was still moving, and he turned his attention back to the doors ahead.
Up ahead, the broad figure lunged with its jousting pole branch, driving the sharp end into the grille of the truck with a rending of metal. Beyond the windshield, the engine began to pour a cloud of steam, obscuring Grant’s view as he struggled with the wheel. Behind them, the undead corpse in the back grabbed onto the flatbed of the truck with clawlike hands, the ancient paint there flaking away with each scratch of his ragged nails.
As they hurtled over the lip of the redoubt doors, Kane swung open his passenger side door, using it like a battering ram to knock the broad-shouldered zombie off his feet. Bald tires spun on the dirt track beyond the redoubt, and suddenly the truck was out in the open. Outside the external door they found themselves bumping along a dirt road that carved a path through the dense swamp. Although dense, the plant life in the immediate vicinity of the doorway looked brown and ragged, as if it had been touched by poison.
As soon as they left the shadows of the underground redoubt, the heat of the Louisiana swamp struck them like a wall, the thick, heavy atmosphere of late morning like some physical blanket weighing down upon them. The breeze through the open passenger side window didn’t feel refreshing at all; it felt oppressive, hitting Kane in the face like hot liquid. Sweat beaded on his brow immediately, and his companions shifted in their seats, sweat running down their backs. Kane pushed the collar of his jacket back off his neck, wiping away the perspiration that was already forming there with an irritated hand. Threads hung from the shredded front of the jacket where the undead creature with the eye patch had grasped him.
As they continued along the overgrown dirt track away from the redoubt entrance, they became aware of other shambling figures moving through the undergrowth, and Kane peered in his side mirror to see more corpselike forms massing at the rollback doorway of the redoubt.
Warm air sullied the cabin, and the smell of the bayou came to them through the open window. Sitting between Grant and Kane, Brigid held her hand against the dusty vent in the center of the dash, feeling the stream of warm air there like breath against her skin.
Suddenly the remains of Grant’s side window shattered entirely as a charcoal-black skeletal hand reached through, grabbing for the wheel. It was the undead thing who had landed on the bed of the truck as they sped out of the redoubt, Grant realized. As the wheel was pulled out of the ex-Mag’s grip, the truck lurched to the left, screeching off the dirt road and crashing through a clump of saplings, thin branches snapping as they struck the grille and windshield.
“There’s one on the roof!” Grant shouted as the truck bumped through dense leaf cover that hung like a green curtain ahead of them, obscuring their way.
Grasping the steering wheel with both hands, Grant fought with the wheel, struggling to right the old artillery truck’s path as the bald tires spun for traction in the marshy ground underfoot. Grant eased up on the accelerator as he felt the truck threaten to roll, pulling the vehicle back toward the dirt road, even as the undead figure batted at his face with his clawed hand.
On the other side of the cab, Kane thrust open the passenger door and clambered out, the road rushing by just a few feet below the soles of his boots. “Come on, you ugly son of a bitch,” he snarled as he pulled himself up onto the roof.
The undead figure on the cab hissed as he saw Kane, dark-colored spittle spraying from his black mouth. Dressed in tattered rags, the figure had stick-thin limbs and dark rubbery skin so taut that it looked as if it had been stretched over a drum. He lay on the cab roof, legs splayed out behind him for balance, reaching into the driver’s window with one bony, emaciated arm.
With his left hand reaching back to cling solidly to the edge of the truck, Kane clambered toward the undead thing in a crouch, powering the Sin Eater back into his free hand as he did so. “Ride’s over,” he snarled. “Don’t forget to tip your driver.”
The undead creature grabbed for the muzzle of the Sin Eater as Kane’s finger tightened on the guardless trigger, and his rotten hand was blown away in a burst of bullets. The walking corpse seemed surprised for a moment, the dead pit eyes gazing in astonishment at his ruined hand. Kane brought the pistol around and blasted off another stream of bullets as the truck bumped over the uneven road, and his shots went wild.
Then the undead thing flipped his legs out in a such a way that they almost seemed to be dislocated, and Kane found himself tumbling off the roof and over the front of the truck. Everything seemed to whirl around him, and Kane reached out blindly until his left hand found purchase. As swiftly as it had begun, Kane’s fall stopped, and he found himself lying prone on the front of the truck above the engine housing, his hand grasping one of the wide side mirrors that stuck out like an elephant’s ears from the truck’s hood.
