Hell's Maw. James Axler

were similar without matching. They were tired things, old designs patched together and brought back into service, a caking of mud and dirt and poor repaints loaning them the appearance of patchwork quilts as they bumped over the rough road. All three had flatbed rears, though the rearmost included a rail around the bed for added security. A two-man cab sat up front, where driver and shotgun traveled, scanning the long road for danger. Behind the cab of the front and rear vehicles, a makeshift gun turret had been installed, running a .50 gauge machine gun with belt ammo, while the middle wag had two smaller guns installed on tripods on the rear. The vehicles ran on alcofuel—“homebrew engines,” the drivers called them, which gave some insight into where that fuel was coming from.

      Crouched between sacks, Kane kept alert. Back in his Magistrate days he had been fabled for his point-man sense, a seemingly uncanny ability to sense danger before it happened. It was no supernatural ability, however—just the combination of his five senses making intuitive leaps at an almost Zen-like level.

      The road seemed empty, abandoned even, like a lot of the back roads across the territory that had once been called the United States of America. So much had suffered in the nukecaust, and the population had been reduced to one-tenth of what it had been before the war. That left back roads like this abandoned and forgotten, and even now, two hundred years after the last bomb had been dropped, they remained overgrown and despoiled. There was an irony in that, Kane saw—that it was almost impossible to grow crops on the irradiated land and yet the old roads had become beds for wild grasses.

      They were approaching a rise, the splutter of the wag engine loud as it tackled the incline. Kane thought back to how Ohio Blue had described the previous attacks on her freight convoys. “The wags were crippled and left to rot,” she had said, “and my men had been singed by fire, their flesh burned away. Those who had survived had been incomprehensible, babbling about red and amber lights as though they had been attacked by a predark traffic signal.”

      He was armed, of course, even though that was not obvious from looking at him. Kane wore a Sin Eater, an automatic pistol, in a retractable holster hidden beneath his right sleeve. The Sin Eater’s holster was activated by a specific flinch movement of Kane’s wrist tendons, powering the weapon into his hand. The weapon itself was a compact hand blaster, roughly fourteen inches in length but able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden holster. The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and his carrying it dated back to when Kane had still been a hard-contact Mag. The blaster was armed with 9 mm rounds and its trigger had no guard—the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features for the weapon would ever be required, for a Mag was judge, jury and executioner all in one man, and his judgment was considered to be infallible. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Kane had retained his weapon from his days in service at Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand—its weight was a comfort to him, the way the weight of a wristwatch felt natural on a habitual wearer.

      When it happened, it wasn’t obvious. Kane’s attention was drawn to a group of black-feathered birds who had been grazing on the scarred soil some way behind them when they suddenly took flight. The birds had moved when the wags approached, but they had returned to their meager feast almost as soon as the wags had passed. But now, a hundred yards down the road where nothing seemed to be passing, the birds took flight once more, circling in the air and issuing angry caws that could be heard even over the sound of the wag’s engine. There was another sound, too, Kane realized. Low and deep, a bass note that vibrated the air and the ground beneath them as its pitch rose. The sound could barely be heard over the spluttering roar of wag engines, but it was there—a tuneless hum, the deep thrumming noise of something mechanical.

      “Domi,” Kane said, automatically activating the hidden Commtact that was located beneath his skin along the side of his head. “Pay attention to your six. I think there’s something—”

      His words trailed off as he spotted the wispy trail of gray smoke rising against the silver clouds where the birds had taken flight. Not from the road but to the side.

      “You don’t need to tell me how to do my job,” Domi was complaining over their shared Commtact frequency. “I’ve stood guard over more than a sack of corn before now.”

      Kane tuned her out, watching the plume of smoke as it twisted in the breeze. It was not solid, it was little puffs of smoke being emitted at regular intervals—which probably meant it was an engine of some kind, Kane realized.

      “Baptiste,” Kane said, calling on the other member of his field team, “do you see smoke back there, on the road behind us?”

      Brigid’s familiar voice piped into Kane’s ear a moment later. “Puff-puff-puff, pause…puff-puff-puff, pause,” she began, copying the beat of the smoke. “Yes, I can see it all right.”

      Around him, the wag’s engine growled as it struggled to ascend the hill, speed dropping with every foot it gained. The damn thing was overloaded, leaving them vulnerable on the incline—ripe for ambush. For a moment, Kane could see the whole of the road that they had traveled along stretched out behind him, a strip of grass and dirt and broken tarmac that ran in a perfectly straight line through the sparse fields. From this height, he could see the thing that was following them, too—not along the road but to one side of it, scrambling through the fields to his left where the crows had taken flight. It looked like a boxcar, the kind you would find on an old-style train, its dull metal finish almost perfectly camouflaged by the sky behind it. But this was no railroad train. The metal box swung high off the ground, depending from two pivoting legs that clambered over the uneven ground like a gigantic, grounded bird. Thirty feet high, it was moving at some speed, faster in fact than the three wags that Kane’s crew were protecting.

      Kane watched as the strange-looking machine continued forward, getting steadily closer to the back of the convoy.

      “I see it,” Domi said, her words echoing over their shared Commtacts.

      “Me, too,” Brigid chimed in.

      It was at that moment that the strange vehicle unleashed the first of its heat bolts, searing red-amber energy cutting through the sky accompanied by a shriek of parting air.

      “Traffic signal,” Kane muttered. “Right.”

      The red-hot blast carved a path toward them like a slash of blood spraying through the air.

       Chapter 4

      “¡Congelar!” Pretor Corcel demanded, his pistol aimed unwaveringly at Grant where the Cerberus warrior was framed in the doorway to the ballroom.

      Grant knew better than to argue with a man who had a gun. He raised his hands slowly, making sure not to make any sudden movements. “I’m freezing,” he stated in English. “I’m freezing.”

      The doctor who had attended the nightmarish scene had been startled by Corcel’s shout, and he looked up to see the strange man just entering the doorway.

      The sharp-suited Pretor held in place, watching Grant carefully. “American?” he asked.

      “Yeah,” Grant replied. He saw that the bodies had been removed from the room. More worrying was the fact that Shizuka was nowhere to be seen. The man with the blaster was twelve feet away—probably too far to rush in an open space like this, Grant calculated, too risky anyway. For now at least, Grant would have to play along and hope he could find out just what the heck was happening.

      Still holding the Devorador de Pecados pistol on Grant, Pretor Corcel’s dark eyes flicked to the razor-sharp disc that his target held in his hand. “Drop the weapon,” he instructed.

      “Okay.” Grant nodded. Then he lowered his left hand, moving it away from his body just slightly before dropping the razor disc. The disc struck the wooden floor with a hollow clang. “That ain’t mine,” Grant said, though he could hear how lame that must sound right now. As he dropped