Judgment Plague - James Axler

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the three Cerberus teammates were stepping outside the abandoned swimming pool complex for the first time.

      It was warm out there, the sun trundling slowly toward its midday zenith. Brigid gasped as she trod on something just beyond the window. It was a bone, and when she looked she saw many more partly buried in the ground they walked on, scattered there as if on display.

      “Bones,” Kane said, emotionless. His old magistrate training had kicked in once more, that ability to divorce himself from the potential horrors of a situation and simply deal with it like a machine.

      Crouching down, Brigid examined a few of the bones without touching them. They were white, but dirty where the soil had marked them. “Human,” she said after just a few seconds’ consideration.

      Kane looked around, taking in the area around them with its smattering of loose bones. “How many? People, I mean,” he asked.

      Brigid looked in turn, narrowing her eyes for a moment in thought. “Fifteen, maybe twenty. Hard to say.”

      Grant shook his head grimly. “What happened to them?” he asked, though he knew he couldn’t expect an answer.

      “Fed to the crocs maybe,” Kane proposed, “before they locked them in the pool and forgot all about them.”

      Brigid nodded, pulling herself erect. “Could be.”

      Together, the band of Cerberus warriors made their way across the patch of bones to what would be the front of the building, the direction where Kane had spotted the SandCat. There were more bones all about, some broken, some just shards now, glinting sharply in the overturned soil. Whatever had happened here had killed a lot of people in a very short time.

      The side of the building was decorated with stone chips, making the wall rough to the touch. Kane went ahead, pressing himself lightly against it as he moved warily toward the front. He peered around the corner, darted back, then scanned more carefully once he was confident no one was in the immediate vicinity.

      “How’s it look?” Grant asked. He kept his voice to a whisper.

      “Quiet,” Kane said, “and empty.”

      In front of the pool building was a little courtyard with a line of apple trees in blossom, tufts of white flowers like cotton wool on their branches. The courtyard featured two benches and a path leading to the main street that Kane had watched from the hole in the roof space.

      Out there, the street was wide enough for two SandCats to pass, and the stone paving looked to be in good working order, albeit a little weatherworn. The buildings fit that description, too—well-built, a little weatherworn, but all of them well-kept. It looked for all the world like a nice place to live. The only thing that broke that illusion was the absolute lifelessness of the whole ville. Nothing moved, no sound carried from workshops or distant conversations. It was like a museum piece.

      Kane watched for a moment longer, his eyes fixed on the SandCat that waited at the end of the street. The bulky vehicle sat low to the ground, like a jungle cat waiting to pounce.

      Kane turned back to the others, his expression pensive. “The coast is clear—in fact, it’s all too clear. Let’s be careful.”

      With that, he stalked ahead into the courtyard, keeping to the shadows and using the trees as cover. He moved swiftly and his companions followed, spreading out a little to ensure that if they were spotted they would not make an easy, single target.

      Kane hurried ahead in a crouching run, leaving the others in the courtyard amid the apple trees. He crossed the street, ducking close to the side of a two-story building that would cover the SandCat driver’s view of him. The tinted windshield of the vehicle gave nothing away; all Kane could do was move quickly and hope he wasn’t spotted. He pressed his back against the wall, glanced around the corner to ensure no one had materialized from the SandCat, then encouraged Grant and Brigid to join him with a swift hand gesture.

      Like Kane, the two ran swiftly across the street, keeping their movements as quiet as they could. They met up at the building’s edge.

      “You think mags did this?” Grant asked.

      “Did what?” Kane challenged. “We don’t know what happened here or why.”

      As he finished speaking, there came a groaning sound from behind them. It was coming from inside the building the Cerberus teammates were pressed against, and it sounded like a human voice. All three of them turned, to try to locate and identify the sound.

      “Sounded human.” Brigid confirmed what the others were thinking.

      The wall to the building was solid brick, with just one slit window very high up, and it ended in a wooden fence that surrounded a yard or storage area of some kind. The fence was a little over six feet tall.

      “No door,” Kane stated. He didn’t want to walk around and risk being seen. “We’ll use the fence.” With that, he trotted along to where the fence began and reached up to the top.

      “You just plan to go in there?” Brigid asked, a note of warning in her voice.

      “Some people would say that was reckless,” Kane said, “but those are the same people who get shot in the back ’cause they never checked what the noise was.”

      Brigid nodded once, accepting his point. Then she watched as Kane lifted himself up and scrambled swiftly over the wall, all taut muscles and smooth movements. When he’d dropped down, disappearing behind the high fence, she turned back to Grant. “One of these days he’s going to be wrong,” she said. “Then he’ll get killed.”

      “Not Kane,” Grant said. “He’s lucky, the kind of luck you hone into an instinct. That instinct has saved my ass on more than one occasion.”

      “Yeah,” Brigid sighed resignedly. “Mine, too.”

      * * *

      A YARD LAY behind the building, a gate in the fence to Kane’s right, which he saw led to some kind of service alley. The two-story building was made of gray stone, discolored here and there where the elements had worked at it. There was a single window, and a wooden door that had been painted blue some time ago, long enough that the paint was scratched and flaking around the edges.

      Above this were two more windows, looking into rooms on the second story.

      Kane checked above him, but spotted no one at the windows. He glanced into the lower window—kitchen—then tried the handle of the door. Unlocked, the door opened with a creak of hinges that hadn’t been oiled in a long time.

      Kane stepped into the kitchen and stopped. There was a dog bowl on the floor, licked clean. Beside it lay the rotting corpse of a dog, flies buzzing around it. It was a large breed, a German shepherd maybe, but it was hard to be sure because so much had decomposed.

      Kane moved past the corpse, doing his best to ignore the stench, and continued through the kitchen doorway. It led directly into a living room, which contained two chairs big enough to hold two or three people each, and a sideboard housing trinkets of indeterminate value. Besides the peeling wallpaper, there was something else, too—a figure sitting in one of the chairs with its back to Kane.

      “Hello?” he began as he stepped into the room. “I mean you no harm—”

      Kane stopped as he saw the figure’s face. Its eyes were hollow and there were trails of thick black liquid running down its cheeks from those empty eyes. More liquid oozed from its nostrils and mouth.

      Kane blanched, stepping back from the man in the chair. He looked to be in his forties, though it was hard to tell. He was dead—that much was certain—and the liquid trails that ran over his face had dried there, congealing into something that looked sticky.

      Kane flicked his gaze to the ceiling, searching for the source of the liquid—thinking it had maybe dripped from above. But no, there

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