Judgment Plague. James Axler

as they began to attack. There was no time for negotiation now—it was do or die.

      The crocs swished their tails to propel themselves from the water, hurtling toward the intruders like rockets.

      Grant sent a triple burst of fire from his sin eater, three bullets whipping across the space between himself and his attackers in quick succession. As he did so, he was dropping back toward the nearest wall, using it for cover as the closest of the croc-like creatures came at him with snapping jaws. Grant brought his left arm up in defense, groaned as he felt those vicious jaws chomp down on the Kevlar armor of his coat.

      Beside him, Brigid’s pistol flashed in the darkness, sending a score of 9 mm bullets at the first of her attackers as it leaped at her, stagnant water pouring from its ridged, naked frame. The bullets scored a direct hit, cutting a line across the creature’s thick skin in pockmarks—one, two, three, four—from its waist to its meaty pectoral. Their impact did not seem to even slow the creature; it moved like lightning toward Brigid, and its hands—eerily human despite their coating of thick scales—grabbed for her blaster.

      In a moment, the mutant had a hold on the muzzle of her TP-9, sweeping it aside as it came toward her with widening jaws.

      * * *

      THE SIN EATER appeared in Kane’s hand instantly, commanded there by a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons as he lay on his back on the cold stone. He could hear the creature’s feet thumping over the rock floor as his finger met the pistol’s trigger, and suddenly the quiet, regular sounds of water dripping and wind across water were broken by the noise of gunfire.

      Kane located his foe by sound alone, holding the trigger down for an extended burst of fire. He heard the other stagger, its movements interrupted, and then a cry like a hiss of steam, followed by the thump of the body dropping to the floor.

      Kane eased his finger from the trigger, still holding the blaster poised in the direction of his unseen foe. Hope I’m right about this, he thought as he reached into a utility pocket in his jacket with his free hand. An instant later, Kane had pulled free what appeared to be a pair of sunglasses, which he slipped over the bridge of his nose. They had specially coated polymer lenses and were designed to draw every available iota of light to create an image of whatever was around the viewer, acting as a kind of proxy night vision. Kane pushed himself into a crouch and examined the scene.

      He was in an artificial cavern with an arched ceiling and strip of floor, all constructed of regular, carved stone. The floor beneath was tilted, leaving half the room submerged beneath a stretch of dark water. It all smelled rank, bitter, like rainwater on manure.

      The creature lay before him, sprawled half in and half out of the water. It looked kind of like a crocodile, only larger and with powerful legs like a man’s, and a tail that disappeared into the water as it curled. The tail twitched, sending ripples across the water.

      Kane eyed the creature, making sure it was down. The tail twitched once more, then stopped. He figured it was dead.

      Kane paced across to the croc-thing, looking around the cavern. They were in a sewer, maybe; it was hard to tell for sure, but it looked a lot like one. He figured it had served the redoubt two hundred years before, when it had been built. The redoubts were self-sufficient and could be closed off entirely from the outside world, but some had been served by networks of sewers and service tunnels when they were being constructed. Most of those service tunnels had been shut off, blocked up, concreted over. This one, it seemed, had survived.

      The creature on the floor was naked and must have stood nine feet tall, with the muscular tail to propel it through the water. It looked like a croc, with a long muzzle featuring rows of teeth as long as Kane’s index finger. But it also had a human quality, despite its coarse, armorlike skin. A chill went down Kane’s spine as he wondered if it was an offshoot of the Annunaki or the Naga, two lizardlike races that had reached for power in the post-nukecaust Earth—the former a race of alien would-be world conquerors, the latter a genetic offshoot of the Annunaki seeded on Earth. But Kane checked himself, recalling stories of the mutie races that used to walk the so-called Deathlands that grew up in the wake of the nukecaust. Some of those creatures had been lizardlike in appearance, the radiation turning them into twisted genetic dumping grounds for weird combinations of mismatched DNA. It was a chill-or-be-chilled world in those days, or that’s what the old-timers used to say.

      Kane stepped past the dead lizard, scanned his surroundings through the polymer lenses.

      Behind the creature were sacs of organic matter, attached to the walls with what appeared to be a kind of gluelike webbing. There were eight in all, each one oval and almost as long as a man’s torso. Eggs. Kane studied them for a few seconds, peering closely at their translucent shells. There were things waiting inside, half-formed creatures no longer than his forearm. “Baby crocs,” he muttered.

      Beyond that, a large bore hole lay in the far wall. The hole was circular and wide enough to grant access to a man or even a small vehicle, and certainly large enough to let these croc things come and go as they pleased. “Now then, where do you lead to?” Kane wondered aloud.

      Whatever he and his companions had stumbled on here, it looked like a mutie breeding ground, the kind of place those put-upon mutie races had gone to hide when man had reasserted himself as the dominant life-form in the post-apocalypse world. Kane almost felt sorry for the muties, but he knew that their nesting this close to an operating mat-trans unit spelled trouble. Muties weren’t dumb, even the ones more animal than man. If they could figure a way to get the mat-trans working, they might spread like an infection, settling new colonies right across the North American continent. And if they should meet with humans, as was inevitable, it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that unrest would follow—the kind of unrest that brings a body count in its wake.

      Kane looked at the lizard corpse again, sneering. “Poor bastard,” he muttered, shaking his head, “you’ve got no idea what they’d do to you up there. If you knew, you’d think what I did here was a show of mercy.”

      * * *

      GRANT YOWLED IN PAIN, his scream echoing in the waterlogged corridor. The croc mutie had clamped its jaws around his left arm and was endeavouring to close them. The Kevlar weave of Grant’s coat was strong, acting like plate armor, and beneath it he wore the shadow suit, with its own armorlike quality. But he could still feel those two-inch-long teeth driving into his flesh.

      “Get the hell offa me,” he snarled, twisting his body around and swinging the beast with him despite its bulk. Grant was strong—it had occasionally been commented that his strength verged on the superhuman, in fact. With all his strength, he shoved the croc, still clamped to his arm, against the closest mold-dark wall, fixing it in place. Then, with his other hand, he rammed the muzzle of the sin eater point-blank against the thing’s round eye and blasted.

      The first bullet destroyed the creature’s eye and Grant felt the pressure on his arm ease for an instant. He kept firing, delivering bullets into the creature’s skull and brain. The sin eater bucked in his hand and he felt the impact of the bullets reverberate through his arm where the mutie gripped him.

      * * *

      JUST A FEW steps away, Brigid was struggling with her own foe. It lunged at her, the seven-foot-long tail swishing behind as it darted across the watery floor of the corridor. The bullets from the TP-9 were having next to no effect. They just rebounded from the monstrous thing’s thick hide.

      Brigid skipped back, the heels of her boots splashing in the dark water that carpeted the redoubt floor. She thought fast, struggling to find a way to keep this creature—and its brethren—from devouring her and Grant. There had to be a way—and there was, if she could just create enough space to make it work!

      Brigid turned her back to the monsters. “Come and get me!” she shouted, scrambling down the corridor, back toward the control room and its mat-trans chamber.

      Three of the mutie crocs followed, issuing a discordant hiss from their throats as they chased after their prey. Is that how they speak? Brigid wondered. Despite their appearance they were clearly intelligent, and those marks