Judgment Plague. James Axler

applied more force, pushing his shoulder against the narrow gap between the panels.

      There was a loud cracking and then the doors shuddered backward as they split from their frames, crashing to the floor with a metallic clatter of chain links, followed by an eerie silence.

      Grant stepped back, pulling his Copperhead from its hidden sheath.

      “Well, I guess that’s one way of opening a door,” Brigid said quietly.

      Grant waited by the doorway, scanning the space beyond. It was dark out there, just as it had been inside. He saw a corridor lined with windows on one side and a rash of peeling paint on the other. The panes were so grimy they let in almost no light, a wash of mud caking their exterior. Apart from furniture, which included a pewlike bench and a trophy cabinet, the corridor was empty.

      “What happened here?” Brigid whispered as she stepped forward to examine the scene.

      “Maybe the crocs ate everyone,” Kane suggested. Though his tone was light, he was only half joking.

      She shook her head, her usually vibrant hair almost purple in the semidarkness. “No, they locked the crocs in here, with the pool,” she reasoned. “Then they probably drained it in hopes of killing them.”

      “How do you figure that?” Kane asked.

      Brigid pointed to the fallen doors, the length of chain still wrapped tightly around their handles. “It’s been locked from outside,” she said. “The crocs couldn’t get out even if they wanted to.”

      “Unless they had a bruiser like Grant on their team,” Kane added, but he accepted Brigid’s point.

      * * *

      THEY PACED AHEAD, more confident now, using the xenon beams to light their way.

      There were rooms bleeding off the corridor, some with closed doors, others with just open doorways. The Cerberus trio were used to that. They had grown up in Cobaltville under the Program of Unification, which stated that no individual should have a lock to bar the entry of another.

      There were several communal dressing rooms, showers and a large space that Brigid speculated had been used for social events. There were also several smaller rooms, including an office and a number of toilet stalls. All the rooms were unoccupied and in a run-down state, although they were mostly clean. It was as if the whole building had been deserted and forgotten, left as a frozen moment in time.

      There were a few pictures here and there, posters on the walls, photographs on desks and in drawers. The Cerberus team examined these, looking for signs of something going wrong. But they found nothing untoward; the people in the pictures looked normal.

      Behind one door was a staircase, with more crates of belongings on the steps, along with several heaps of towels. The others waited in the doorway while Kane trotted up the steps, checking where they led. He found himself in an upper room with a low ceiling and naked support beams, an attic filled with cold and damp.

      As in much of the building, a large chunk of the space was given over to storage, but sunlight painted a square on one small section of the floor. Kane paced across to it, glancing around until he located its source. There was a small gap between two support beams of the sloping roof, a ventilation hole where the wall met the eaves. Kane squeezed past the struts and peered through it.

      Beyond lay a ville, a small community of a couple dozen buildings, most of them single story, lit by the midmorning sun. There was a paved street running from this building into the ville, with a few benches dotted along its length and a statue at a corner. The place seemed lifeless and empty. Empty except for one thing: a SandCat waiting at the far end, its markings familiar to Kane even after all this time. Cobaltville magistrates.

Chapter 5

      “Mags,” Kane muttered, looking at the SandCat through the gap.

      Kane had been a Cobaltville magistrate once, as had Grant, his partner on the beat until they fell afoul of a conspiracy orchestrated by Cobaltville’s leader. Baron Cobalt had turned out to be something other than human, a hybrid of alien DNA, holding the genetic key to a race far older than humankind. That race, the Annunaki, had caused Kane and his Cerberus teammates no end of trouble over the past few years, but it had all started with Baron Cobalt and his cruel desire to manipulate humanity for his own ends.

      Kane watched through the gap below the eaves for over a minute, waiting to see if anything moved out there by the SandCat. The squat vehicle was parked, he realized, and nothing entered or exited its sealed doors. The gun turret atop its roof was silent, the guns bowed as if in defeat.

      Maybe the SandCat had been left here during a routine patrol; maybe it had broken down. Or maybe the magistrates were here right now, searching the seemingly deserted ville, maybe even rounding up and chilling the locals for some imagined infraction to the baronial world order. Kane listened at the gap a moment longer, but could hear nothing, just the wind whistling through the streets.

      Eventually, he backed away from the spy hole and made his way back through the attic and down the stairs to where his partners were waiting.

      “You find something up there?” Grant asked. He and Brigid had been waiting five minutes, but it didn’t matter to them. They knew some things took time and that Kane would have called them via commtact had he got into any difficulty.

      He nodded. “Spy hole up there. Can see the whole ville,” he said.

      “What’s it look like?” Brigid asked.

      “Dead,” Kane said, “but there are mags here, I think, or maybe just one. Can see a SandCat, anyway.”

      “Marked?” Grant asked.

      “With the familiar red shield,” Kane replied, nodding grimly. “One of us, or what we used to be.”

      Brigid had tensed as the discussion progressed, and she looked now from Kane to Grant. “Either of you guys want to tackle a magistrate? Because I sure don’t.”

      “Nothing we can’t handle,” Kane said, though he sounded less certain than his words suggested. “If there’s mags skulking around a little out-of-the-way community like this, I want to know why, and I want to know where the heck everyone’s gone to.”

      Together, the Cerberus exiles made their way through the building’s corridors, which followed a large, rectangular pattern roughly outlining the pool in the center. The three were searching for an exit, but the doors they tried were locked, just like the ones to the pool. These were external doors, however, heavier than the ones Grant had broken through, and would take tools or explosives to breach.

      “We’ll break a window on the far side and sneak out that way,” Kane finally suggested.

      “The noise could bring someone,” Brigid warned.

      “Then we’d best stay on our toes,” he replied, eyeing the windows and mentally weighing their proportions. He needed one that would be large enough to allow him and Grant to slip through safely. Brigid, too, though there was a lot less of her to slip. Several of the windows had large, square frames with no cross struts holding them in place, which made them ideal for what Kane had in mind. “There we are,” he muttered.

      Having selected a window, Kane searched around for something to smash it with.

      “Need me to do this?” Grant asked, brandishing his Copperhead subgun.

      Kane raised his eyebrows, figuring that his teammate was planning to blast the window clean out of its frame. But Grant reversed the subgun, turning the butt toward the glass.

      “Wait here,” Brigid instructed, before Grant could smash the window. “And don’t do anything till I get back.”

      She was gone less than a minute, and when she returned she was carrying one of the towels that littered several rooms and the stairwell. “Use this,” she instructed, waving the terry cloth toward the window