Planet Hate, page 19
Maria gave Kane an indulgent smile as she bent her knees and crouched in front of him. “Your eye looks bad,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Kane told her. “Hurts a little but—”
“No,” Maria interrupted, shaking her head. “It looks bad—evil. You feel it, too.”
Kane shook his head, trying to clear it. “My thoughts,” he began, “they’ve been getting confused. I’m seeing stuff that didn’t really happen to me. I can’t really explain.”
Maria reached for Kane, placing one of her hands gently on his. “An evil thing is inside you,” she told him.
Kane wondered then why he was talking to this stranger, how she could possibly know so much about him. “Just who are you anyhow?” he asked.
Before she answered, Maria pushed a stray lock of hair back under the hood she wore. “My name is Maria Halloween. Many years ago, I witnessed the bright lights in the sky that heralded the nukecaust, far away to the north. I lived through that, just a girl, saw the way it altered the world.”
Kane studied the woman, looked at her unlined face for a long moment. “That would make you over two hundred years old,” he said, ridicule in his tone. “It’s not possible, not for a human.” Of course, even as he spoke Kane thought of Lakesh, who had, with organ transplant and scientific trickery, lived more than 250 years.
Maria Halloween stood, taking a few paces away from Kane and the dog that knelt at his side. “You and your companion—this soul friend—you have lived numerous lives, worn numerous faces. Your soul lives on after each death, meeting and entwining with hers in the next life. It gives you strength and pulls you forward, Kane, and now you find yourself weakening devoid of her support.”
Kane glared at her. “What’s your point, you old witch?”
Halloween visibly started at the epithet. “Many are the ways to keep a person alive—many are the deaths we avoid,” she told him. “This pool is one way, but there have been others before it. Once I was old, now I am young, crone become maiden like the phases of the moon.”
Kane gestured to the pit. “This here is alien tech,” he said. “If you’re tinkering with it, that ain’t going to end real well, take it from me.”
The woman with the blood tears fixed Kane with her gaze. “You’re scared,” she said. “Lonely and scared.”
NEARBY, in the forest above the hidden cavern, Grant, Domi and Rosalia were making their way through the dense cover of the trees to where Grant had left their interphaser. To his annoyance, the unit was not there and he had to trust that Kane had taken it with him.
“So,” Grant asked, scanning the branches above, “where did those birds come from?”
Domi shrugged. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I got here before dawn, didn’t see anything too weird on my way to Luilekkerville.”
Rosalia perked up. “You mean, they’ve not reached the ville?”
“How do you mean?” Domi asked, wincing as she turned to the dark-haired woman.
“Those…things are big,” Rosalia explained. “A normal bird maybe has a hunting ground of a few miles, more for a bird of prey. Based on their size, those things should be traveling—I don’t know—sixty, eighty miles daily in search of food.”
“They didn’t come near the ville,” Domi assured her. “At least, I didn’t notice any of them in the skies, and they’re pretty hard to miss.”
Domi and Rosalia waited while Grant spoke to Lakesh in quiet tones, double-checking the coordinates with Lakesh via their Commtact link. Once he was done, Grant looked at them, concern etched on his brow. “You think it’s strange that the birds won’t leave the forest?” he asked Rosalia.
“Seems like an odd quirk,” she mused. “They’re not natural, and I think someone’s breeding them and keeping them here.”
“Someone?” Domi asked with surprise. “There are still a few muties out there, lady, throwbacks to the dark times. You live in the Outlands long enough and you’d see—”
Rosalia fixed Domi with a look. “Yes, I know. I didn’t come down in the last shower.”
“Well,” Grant said, stepping between the two women as they stared one another down, “if there is some kind of artificial force behind these creatures, then I guess we’re looking for a ‘monster maker,’ as well as Kane.”
“He didn’t answer your Commtact call earlier, did he?” Rosalia pointed out. “You thinking the two might be related?”
Grant sneered in annoyance. “I’m trying not to,” he growled as he moved off into the forest, following the directions Lakesh was giving over the Commtact.
Grant led the way from the stone-circled clearing that had served as a parallax point, with Domi and Rosalia following. Lakesh was still feeding Grant information over the Commtact, triangulating the location of Kane’s transponder.
As they made their way through the trees, Domi spit a curse. “Wish I still had my knife,” she grumbled.
Rosalia turned to the albino girl, and Domi saw something glinting in her hand. It was a dagger, its blade six inches in length, and the dark-haired woman was offering it to her.
Domi took it, muttering a brief word of thanks.
“De nada. I always carry a spare,” Rosalia told her, patting her wrist.
Just then, Grant noticed the ripped-up shear in the earth, zigzagging between the trees. “Look,” he said, keeping his own voice low.
“Any ideas how that got here?” Rosalia asked.
Grant nodded, briefly explaining about the subterrene and how it had all but destroyed Snakefishville the last time he had been here.
“So, what do you think?” Rosalia pressed.
“Crack like that probably leads somewhere,” Grant mused. “Lakesh is picking up Kane’s signal right about here, so since he ain’t above us, I’m guessing he’s underground.”
The three Cerberus warriors split up in a show of practicality, checking the area until they found a wider crack that led down into the caverns below the earth. Within a minute, they had regrouped at the steep entrance to the underworld.
“We don’t really know what’s down there,” Grant reminded them, pulling a pair of dark-tinted glasses from his inside pocket. The glasses featured electrochemical polymer lenses that gathered all available light to give Grant a limited form of night vision in the darkness below. “Either of you have night vision?” he asked.
Domi shook her head no, and Rosalia did likewise.
“Typical Magistrate,” Rosalia teased Grant, “always so prepared.”
He wasn’t entirely convinced that she admired him for that quality. “We’ll just have to wing it, then,” Grant told his companions. “Since he ain’t answering, I don’t want to use a flash beam and scare any locals who might be holding Kane.”
Grant led the way down the steep earth slope. It was almost vertical in places, with the curling roots of trees and bushes sticking out like the fingers of accusing jurors at an execution. They were not to know it, but Grant and his party had entered the network of caverns via a different crack to the one Kane had found, and that difference would cost them dearly.
THE DARK-EYED Maria Halloween reached her hand out to Kane, brushing her fingers along his cheek as they stood by the pit. “This soul friend—your anam-chara—gives you great strength,” she whispered. “It makes your soul powerful.”
“Yeah,” Kane said, feeling his skin prickle with the touch. Beside him, Rosalia’s unnamed dog slinked away from the witch woman, scampering off into the shadows with a fretful whine.
“Like all forms of energy, this power can be tapped, Kane,” the bloodstained witch reasoned. “Drawn from you and utilized in oh so many ways.”
Kane’s hand moved in a lightning-quick gesture, grabbing the woman’s wrist. “I don’t think you should start messing with that,” he warned her, holding her arm tightly as he pulled her hand away from his face.
“Well,” she said and shrugged laconically, “you really don’t get a say.”
And then Kane felt his knees buckling, and his grasp slipped from the woman’s wrist as he sank to the floor of the cave. Even as he succumbed to the blackness, Kane realized that there had been something on the woman’s touch, something that paralyzed him in just three beats of the heart. Whatever else she was, Maria Halloween was an herbalist par excellence.
GRANT LED THE WAY into the cavern, his boot slipping on a chunk of loose soil as he hurried to reach lower ground. Domi reached out, grabbing Grant’s wrist as he stumbled, steadying him with effort. The hulking ex-Mag was almost twice her weight, and it took Domi a moment to secure her grip.
Grant turned to her, his eyes obscured by the polymer lenses. “Thanks.”
Rosalia was finding it increasingly difficult to see as they got farther into the rent in the earth. The sunlight still stroked against the soil above her, but its rays were struggling to reach way down here, this far away from the earth’s surface. It’s remarkable, Rosalia thought, how much of the earth remains out of sunlight. Like another world hiding in plain sight.
While Rosalia struggled to see, beside her Domi seemed to be coping better. There was something strange about the albino woman, Rosalia knew, though she could not put her finger on quite what it was. Like her, the pale-skinned warrior seemed to be very conscious of her surroundings, but with her it was more instinctive, a kind of innate combat sense that kicked in whenever she was in danger. And, for Domi, it seemed that every occurrence was potential danger; she was like a wild animal, ever alert to predators.
The three-strong party continued onward, all three of them walking with appreciable stealth now as they dropped into the near absolute darkness of the caverns. Through the electrochemical filter of the lenses, Grant saw everything as if through a greenish light, the occasional edges of the deepest roots appearing white like flashes of lightning. The shelf had become a ceiling above them now, and Grant had to duck to make forward progress.
They turned a corner in the tight, tunnel-like gap beneath the earth, finding themselves in a space so narrow that two people would no longer be able to pass. Grant heard a noise coming from up ahead, and he held his arm up, blocking Domi’s path.
Unable to see, Rosalia stumbled into Domi’s back before she could stop. “Damn, I can’t see shit back here,” she said.
Grant waited, peering into the eerie green-lit world through the night vision of the polymer lenses. He could hear the thing, whatever it was, snuffling as it moved, its scrabbling feet brushing against loose soil.
Suddenly a set of pointed jaws appeared from out of the darkness, lit in Grant’s lenses like white sticks of lightning on green.
“Shit!” Grant thundered as he brought his Sin Eater up to blast the thing hurtling toward him.
Chapter 15
Though paralyzed, Kane could still sense the things around him. Whatever the Halloween woman had used on him, it had knocked him out almost immediately. He wasn’t sure, but he had a pretty good idea that the woman was a mutie. He hadn’t seen many of those in recent years, but back when he was a Magistrate in Cobaltville, a grim part of Kane’s duties had been to patrol the surrounding area close to the ville walls to ensure none of the Outland reprobates snuck into the city. Among those reprobates, now and again, he and Grant had come across a mutie. Usually they were some kind of human, uglified by radiation so that their calloused skin looked like scales or their eczema had become spiked like a porcupine’s back. But there were other muties, too, doomsayers who could predict the future, for instance, and even some who looked normal other than a little something extra—a sixth toe or prehensile hair that reacted to their emotional mood.
Kane was pretty sure that this woman with her blood tears and her ancient wisdom was a mutie. But as he reached that conclusion, any sense of conscious reasoning left Kane, and his paralyzed body turned itself to sleep.
DOWN IN THE caverns beneath the earth, Grant brought the dark muzzle of the Sin Eater up into play, targeting the feral-looking creature that bounded toward him. The thing’s wide jaws slobbered, sharp canine teeth shining like bright knife blades in the green lighting of the night lenses. Grant’s index finger was clenched, and as the Sin Eater slapped into his palm it depressed the trigger, snapping off a series of shots even as something struck him from behind. The shots blasted wide as whatever hit him knocked his arm, and the bullets burrowed into the earth wall beside him with dull thuds.
“You dumb ass,” Rosalia hissed right beside Grant’s ear. “It’s my dog.” It had been her arm that had thrown his aim.
Grant turned, staring at the mongrel as it nuzzled against Rosalia’s leg, conscious that his heart was pounding against his chest. “I thought you couldn’t see down here,” Grant said.
Rosalia looked up at Grant and smiled, a bright green line of teeth materializing in his night-vision lenses. “He’s not had a bath in a month,” she told Grant. “I recognized his smell.”
Shaking his head, Grant sent his pistol back into its hidden holster with a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons. “Three shots. Bet somebody would have heard that,” he said. “Let’s get moving. If we weren’t on the clock before, we sure as heck are now.”
THE WOMAN with the tears of blood looked up from her busywork at the edge of the resuscitation pit where her cloth bag lay. There had been a noise, a triple thudding as of a distant drum being banged.
Maria Halloween let her eyes lose focus as her mind reached out, and the flickering candle flames seemed to become a light show across her blurring vision.
Years ago, when she had begun her long trek from Sao Paulo, when she had been a young woman the first time over, she had been idealistic. The nukecaust was a part of her childhood, and the broken United States presented a land of opportunity like never before. A woman with her talents could truly shape this infant country as it clambered out of its cot. Bruja they called her—witch. And yes, she was a witch. She was a witch as her mother had been and her mother’s mother, and her grandmother’s mother and on through the maternal line.
Her ability to read people went deeper than that of her forebears, though, augmented by the radiation that had swept across the globe in the wake of the nuclear nightmare, igniting something deep inside her. And it was not just people that she could read, the bruja had the ability to look deep into nonliving things, too, discerning their purpose and seeing new applications for them in a flash of inspiration. She sought out these points of rebirth, utilizing them and their ilk to re-create herself, her old face made young once more. And, too, she saw how to use them, to add things and so change them, altering their purpose, renewing their worth.
Her vision lost focus now as she searched the immediate area, sensing and searching for the source of the drumbeats. In her mind, it felt like the ocean, where the ocean meets the shore. But already the drumbeats had halted, and without them it became harder to locate their source.
Maria reached her hand out toward the Chalice of Rebirth once more, producing a clutch of tiny eggs with a simple sleight of hand. The eggs were colored a creamy yellow-white, small and glistening as the candlelight flickered across their surfaces. There was red swirling in the amber mist of the chalice pit, life-giving blood that the bruja had had spilled there and nurtured for many weeks.
The woman with the blood tears hissed two words to the silent cavern then, old words but good words, a rhyme. “Hinx minx.”
Then she tipped her hand, dropping the first of the eggs and letting it fall into the pool where it disappeared amid the misting curlicues of amber and red. As the egg immersed itself in the life-giving concoction of the Chalice of Rebirth, Maria turned away, for she never liked to see the things that came forth once she cast her spells. The nanomachines in the pit were melding with the thing in the egg, the lifeblood tinkering with the mixture in a way that perhaps only the bruja herself could really understand.
A moment later something stepped forth, clambering out of the pool on four abbreviated legs, its long snout raised. It moved toward Maria for a moment, sniffing at her. She in turn stood perfectly still, her arms crossed over her breasts, hands touched to their opposing shoulders, her eyelids closed. The newborn thing twitched, sniffing at her for a couple of seconds before moving on. She was a null thing, dead or not really there; she smelled of nothing. The thing’s reptilian legs scampered across the metal ring surrounding the Chalice of Rebirth, waddling at a swift clip into the darkness, its long snout turning this way and that as it sought its prey.
As the monstrous thing disappeared into the shadows of one of the surrounding tunnel-like caverns, Maria Halloween dropped the second and third of the eggs into the pit.
“Hinx minx…”
“YOU HEAR THAT?” Grant asked, motioning down the gloomy dirt-walled tunnel that led beneath the earth.
It was distant, the sound of scrabbling claws against loose soil.
“What is it?” Domi whispered.
“I don’t know,” Grant admitted. “Rosie girl? You got a second dog I never noticed?”
“No,” Rosalia said, unimpressed with Grant’s attempt at levity.
“Then get down!” Grant snarled, even as the sound of the scrabbling claws became louder in the darkness.
Grant was a wide-shouldered man, and he swiftly took stock of his surroundings as the scrabbling sound became louder—closer. There was a hard-packed wall of earth and rock looming by his left shoulder, and he had taken to occasionally scraping against it where the path had narrowed more than before. That had become necessary as the right side of the path opened off into a vast drop, a tumbling cliff face that fell farther than Grant’s night-vision lenses could discern. Wherever it led, he figured it for a sheer drop.
As he mentally prepared himself, Grant saw it through the night lenses of his glasses, drawn in green and black like a photographic negative. He would maybe call it a crocodile, because that’s what it reminded him most of. But it was long, its tail stretching a good eight feet behind it, its flattened jaws three feet or more ahead of its eyes where twin vertical slits had opened wide to absorb whatever nominal light still ebbed into the cavern. It was reptilian; that much was clear. Leathery scales ran down its flanks, a glistering sheen to their surface as if they were still wet, and mist clouded from its back. It raced along toward Grant and his companions, two stubby forelegs pulling it forward at the speed a grown man might sprint, the tail swishing at the ground behind it. Given its fantastic size, Grant could be forgiven for calling it a dinosaur, something from a child’s book come to life.
