Judgment Plague. James Axler

was in the control room now, the mat-trans chamber waiting before her, the muddy brown armaglass looking like a coffee spill as it caught the beam of her xenon flashlight. She reached for the chamber door, rapidly typing in the code to unlock it.

      The crocs slowed as they reached the doorway to the control room, stalking warily inside.

      “Just a little closer,” Brigid murmured to herself, stepping back through the open door of the mat-trans. As she did, she pulled the rebreather mask from her pocket. It was small, not much larger than a marker pen, and rested neatly in her left palm.

      Brigid watched the humanlike crocs approach on hind legs, using their tails to balance. They were intrigued to see the mat-trans finally open, a door they had perhaps spent days trying to unlock, without success. “That’s right, boys,” she taunted. “Store’s open. Come on in.”

      Whether they could understand her words or not—and Brigid was inclined to guess that they couldn’t—the crocs moved in response, charging the last few feet between the control desks and the open door, one of them leaping over a desk in his haste. For a moment, all Brigid seemed to see in the dancing flicker of her xenon beam were three mouths the size of mantraps, opening wider to reveal thick, muscular tongues as long as her forearm, surrounded by twin rows of dagger-sharp teeth.

      Brigid threw the thing in her hand then, flipping it into the open mouth of the middle croc, just three feet from her extended arm. As the rebreather sailed into the creature’s mouth, she blasted a single bullet from her TP-9 and fell back, all in one gesture.

      Brigid was still sailing toward the floor as the bullet struck the rebreather, and in an instant the device’s pressurised supply of oxygen caught light in a cruel explosion, obliterating the head of the lead croc and catching the other two in its wake.

      Brigid hit the floor with a slap, the armaglass walls of the mat-trans chamber protecting her from the worst of the explosion.

      * * *

      MEANWHILE, AS THE first croc slipped back from Grant, its long face splattered with chunks of its own flesh and ruined eyeball, a second one was moving more warily toward the powerfully built ex-magistrate. With a flinch of his wrist tendons, Grant sent his sin eater pistol back into its hidden holster and reached into a sheathlike pocket in his duster. A moment later his hand reappeared wielding a Copperhead assault subgun. The Copperhead was a favorite field weapon of Grant’s, and it featured a two-foot-long barrel, with grip and trigger in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handed. It also featured an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Grant preferred the Copperhead thanks to its ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create.

      As the muscular mutie leaped at him, he depressed the trigger, unleashing a storm of 4.85 mm death at his foe. The Copperhead’s reports sounded deafening in the enclosed space of the corridor, and the bullets cut through the charging beast like a hot knife through butter. The croc slowed, stumbled, then finally sank to the waterlogged deck two feet from Grant, landing with a great splash of dirty water.

      Grant stared down, saw green-tinted blood mixing with the filthy water, lost instants later amid the swill.

      “Dumb animal didn’t know what it was up against,” he muttered as he stalked down the corridor to where Brigid had disappeared.

      Grant was halfway there when he heard the explosion of her destroyed rebreather. He didn’t just hear it, he felt it, too, the concussive force thudding against his chest like a physical blow.

      “Brigid?” he called, running as best he could through the waterlogged tunnel.

      He stopped at the open door to the control room, the Copperhead held ready as he glanced inside the door. The place was a scene of devastation. Several consoles at the center had been reduced to slag, and the headless body of one of the croc-men lay sprawled amid their debris. Besides that, over to the sides of the room, two more croc muties were lying in pools of their own blood, spasms running through their sprawled bodies. One was on fire, flames licking up toward the ceiling in a vibrant plume.

      “Brigid?” Grant called again, stepping carefully into the room.

      “I’m here,” she called back, working the latch of the mat-trans chamber. Grant looked at her.

      “You okay?” he asked.

      She nodded. “Armaglass saved me,” she explained, glancing around the room to see the result of her action for the first time.

      “What did you do? Explosive?”

      “Rebreather,” Brigid told him. “Just took a spark from a bullet. Oxygen and fire don’t play nice together.”

      Grant nodded. “Yeah, I can see that. The mat-trans okay?”

      “Should be,” Brigid assured him. “Where’s Kane?”

      Grant made a face, then turned and hurried back down the corridor, with Brigid following, toward where they had last seen their partner.

      * * *

      KANE WORKED THROUGH the egg sacs, delivering a single bullet from his sin eater into each forming creature inside, aborting them before they could be born.

      Then he slipped the rebreather over his mouth and paced to where the floor sank beneath the water. He needed to find Grant and Brigid and show them the entrance he had discovered. Could be a lot more trouble yet before they had this pest-hole cleaned up.

Chapter 4

      They regrouped, then followed Kane back into the water, using the waterproof xenon flashlights to light their way. Grant and Kane still had their rebreathers, but Brigid had sacrificed hers in the struggle with the crocs, so she shared with Grant, taking a breath every fifty seconds while they explored the submerged structure of the redoubt. Brigid was a superb swimmer, and she was adept at holding her breath, using circular breathing techniques to keep from drowning.

      They came across no further living muties, although there was a rotting corpse deep below, on the bottom, weighted down with some kind of air-conditioning unit that had been pulled out or broken away from a wall. Brigid speculated that the unit may have fallen on the croc, killing it.

      There was something else under there, too: ancient boring machinery, powerful caterpillar tracks and a pointed drill extended before them like a nose. Brigid pointed it out as they swam past. She guessed it dated back to the early days of the Deathlands, when uncontaminated water had been scarce, but technology was still functioning. In that period, people had done anything they could to obtain clean water.

      Before long they were back at the place where Kane had awoken after the first attack, the area he had identified as an old sewer pipe.

      “Looks like this isn’t the end of it,” he reiterated, pointing to the hole in the wall.

      Brigid eyed the ruined egg sacs for a heartfelt moment, wondering at what Kane had done. “They were children,” she said. “You shouldn’t have—”

      “They tried to kill me, Baptiste,” Kane snapped back. “Me and you and Grant. No discussion, no explanation. They just dragged me under—”

      “Me, too,” Grant added, “or they tried to.”

      Brigid shook her head regretfully. “They were probably hungry, living down here like this.”

      “Then I sympathize,” Kane said hotly, “but that won’t stop me putting up a fight when something starts chomping down on my leg.”

      They left it at that, the atmosphere between the trio strained. Brigid knew Kane was right in one sense. They had come here without any intention to hurt anything, but had been forced to defend themselves. She herself had been cornered and forced to kill three of the strange