Shadow Box

Chapter 19

Chapter 1

A dog’s carcass lay in the middle of the street in the town called Hope. Rats surged around the corpse like a flowing river, yanking off strips of flesh with their needle-sharp teeth.

Brigid Baptiste suppressed a shudder and turned away from the revolting spectacle as she and Kane and Grant followed their diminutive guide through the narrow, twisting streets of the shantytown.

Hope was located somewhere along the southern coast of California, close to what had been the border with Arizona. With the recent fall of several baronies, the small Outland villes had been swamped with refugees seeking food and shelter. Eighteen months ago, Hope had been a quaint fishing ville with a population of less than two hundred. Now its populace had swelled to over five thousand and a vast, makeshift settlement had formed at its outskirts.

Theft and murder were daily occurrences; what people wanted they simply took. That wasn’t the whole story, of course. Many of the refugees had come to Hope genuinely looking to create a better life for themselves and their families. But crime had escalated over recent months, and Hope had become a destination for scoundrels of every stripe to hide out and carve a niche for themselves, free from reprisals.

Kane, Grant and Brigid had come to Hope chasing a rumor. Word had it that a black marketer called Tom Carnack possessed some very valuable salvage and was offering it to the highest bidder. Carnack presided over a whole tribe of loyal brigands, and he rarely left the safety of his base in the Hope shantytown.

The Cerberus crew had heard that Carnack was currently in possession of the genetic material from the baron reproduction program. The rulers of the baronies had been hybrids of human and alien DNA, and they had governed with an iron fist. More recently it had come to light that these strange hybrids were in fact the chrysalis state of a higher form of life, a warlike alien race called the Annunaki whose goal was the absolute subjugation of humankind. The ever present threat of the return of the Annunaki hung heavily over every human being on the planet. The objective of the Cerberus team had always been to safeguard humankind. Carnack’s promise of reborn barons did not bode well.

“They should have called this pesthole Hopeless,” Grant muttered as he stepped over the dog’s carcass, punting a rat out of the way with his toe. Dressed in a long leather duster, Grant was a wide-shouldered man with a towering frame, every inch of which was muscle. With skin like polished ebony, Grant wore a drooping, gunslinger’s mustache. His coarse black hair was shaved close to the scalp. Beneath the matte-black duster, Grant wore a shadow suit, a black, tightly fitting one-piece garment that served as an artificially controlled environment and offered protection against both radiation and blunt trauma.

As a Magistrate in the barony of Cobaltville, Colorado, Grant had been schooled in many forms of combat and tasked with keeping the strictly tiered human population in its place. Several years ago, the huge man had been convinced that his job was predicated upon a lie, and he had resigned with explosive finality.

Kane looked at his partner and nodded. “It was probably a nice place once,” he said quietly. Like Grant, Kane was an ex-Mag from Cobaltville. Wearing a washed-out denim jacket over his shadow suit, Kane was built like a wolf, all muscle piled at the upper half of his body, his arms and legs long and rangy. His partnership with Grant dated back to their days in Cobaltville, and many considered them an inseparable—and unstoppable—team.

The third member of the group, Brigid Baptiste, was another exile from Cobaltville. She had been an archivist, a faceless cog in the bureaucratic machine that kept each barony running smoothly. However, her friendship with Kane, coupled with her insatiable hunger for knowledge, had placed her on the wrong side of the conspiracy to subjugate humankind, and she had been forced to leave Cobaltville along with the ex-Mags when they were enlisted in the Cerberus operation by Mohandas Lakesh Singh.

Brigid was a stunning woman, tall and athletic. She tied her long, red-gold hair back in a ponytail, swept away from a high forehead that suggested strong intellect, while her full lips spoke of a passionate aspect. Her skin was pale and flawless, and her piercing emerald eyes shone as she took in the details of their nightmarish surroundings. Brigid’s real weapon was her eidetic, or photographic, memory—an ability to instantly remember the finest details of anything she had observed.

Like Grant and Kane, Brigid wore a black one-piece shadow suit over her curvaceous body, with tan boots and a brown suede jacket contrasting its stern appearance. A strip of frayed tassels ran across the back of the jacket, midway through her spine, while the boots’ Cuban heels added a further two inches to her already statuesque height.

The three of them had been following the boy through the streets for more than ten minutes now. He led them from the outskirts of the shanty community through its warrens to its stinking, rat-infested center. The boy had no shirt and no shoes, and his ribs could be seen clearly drawn along the taut skin of his pigeon chest. He wore a knife at his waistband, the naked blade shoved through a belt loop of his trousers, now and then catching the light as he jogged ahead of them. Brigid had been unable to tell if he could speak English; he had greeted them enthusiastically at the outskirts of the wreckage they called a town, nodded and gestured for them to follow him, but his only words had been, “Carnack, yes-yes, Carnack.”

The implication was he had been sent by Tom Carnack to find them, or at least he knew where Carnack was hidden—a fact that they had next to no chance of uncovering on their own. Grant had offered the boy a ration bar from the meager supply he had stashed away in his coat pockets, and the boy had eagerly accepted it, tearing at the foil wrapping and gorging on it with sharp teeth as he ran into the stinking, claustrophobic alleyways of the shantytown.

Finally, the boy led them down a tight alley so narrow that they had to walk single file. Grant was forced to walk sideways to squeeze his wide shoulders through the tightest parts. Three-quarters of the way along the alleyway, the boy pushed back a curtain that covered a doorway and glanced back at his charges before ducking inside, indicating that they should follow. Kane led the way inside, and the three teammates found themselves within a low-ceilinged reception area where two burly, scarred individuals held some heavy-duty automatic weapons on them with studied disinterest.

“You wait here,” the boy told them before disappearing through another curtain into the room beyond.

The sweet, cloying stench of marijuana filled Kane’s nostrils as he glanced at the weapons the guards held. Big-barreled automatics ending in wide muzzles like a shortened version of the ancient blunderbuss, they were a type he didn’t recognize, most likely cobbled together by a local gunsmith.

His eyes flicked to Brigid, standing to his left, and he saw her watching the door through which their guide had disappeared. Her body was relaxed, giving the careful impression that all of this was just another day, nothing out of the ordinary. Behind him, Kane could hear Grant’s steady breathing as he stood before the entry door to this ramshackle shelter, ready for a hasty exit if need be.

The curtain before them swished back and the boy returned, accompanied by a short thin man wearing a purple velvet frock coat, a loud Hawaiian shirt and a pencil-thin mustache. Kane mentally tagged the man as “Velvet Coat,” and watched as he produced an eight-inch white baton and approached the Cerberus field team.

“You have weapons?” Velvet Coat asked in English dripping with a thick, Mexican accent. He had used some sort of oil to slick back his black hair, and the scent of it assaulted Kane’s nostrils as he stepped closer.

“Sure do.” Kane nodded. They were all well aware that meeting with this crime boss would necessitate their disarming, but bringing weapons to the scene at least allowed for the possibility of using them. Besides which, everyone knew that entering the ville of Hope unarmed was foolhardy, and Tom Carnack’s people wouldn’t have expected otherwise. “You want them?”

“Slowly, if you please, and one at a time,” Velvet Coat told Kane, sweeping his gaze to address them all as the boy came forward with his empty arms outstretched to take the weapons from them.

Kane pulled a .44 Magnum pistol from the shoulder rig hidden under his jacket, and Grant did the same, producing two pistols—a Heckler & Koch and a dented .38 Police Special with a corroded finish that looked as if it had spent a hundred years in a swamp. As the sentries’ guns turned on her, Brigid slowly reached into the leather holster slung low on her hip and pulled out her TP-9 pistol. The TP-9 looked factory new, its matte-black finish unmarred, and both Velvet Coat and one of the sentries nodded their approval.

Once they were finished, Velvet Coat held the white baton before him. “You mind?” he asked Kane. “Just a precaution, nothing personal.”

“Go ahead.” Kane nodded. “It’s a shitty world, and if I were you I’d do the same.”

Kane held out his arms as the man ran the baton up and down his sides and between his legs. The baton made a low electronic ticking noise, like a Geiger counter, until Velvet Coat nodded and smiled at Kane. “Okay, you’re clean,” he confirmed, and Kane brought his arms back down and stepped aside.

Velvet Coat moved across to Brigid, who adopted the same position as Kane with her arms stretched out from her shoulders, tugging her jacket open. She stood almost eight inches taller than the mustached man, and Velvet Coat’s eyes narrowed for a moment as he admired the way the shadow suit clung to her breasts, before running the weapons sensor over her limbs and torso.

Then he moved onto Grant, who tried to look disinterested as the man ran the baton down to his feet. As the baton reached about to the level of Grant’s knee, the clicking was replaced by a shrill whine. Velvet Coat leaped backward, and the sentries raised their guns and targeted Grant’s head, stern expressions on their faces.

“Your boot, señor?” Velvet Coat said. “You will remove this for me.”

Grant lowered his arms very slowly, his eyes never leaving those of the man, very aware that he stood in the sights of two guns. “Whoa, okay,” he said, “everyone just calm down.”

“Your boot, señor,” the man stated again, his irritation barely suppressed. “Or you can forget the deal and we kill you and your friends right now.”

“Now, let’s not be hasty,” Kane began, but the man in the velvet coat held up a hand to quieten him.

“Your colleague has something in the boot there, a weapon,” Velvet Coat explained as he backed toward the curtained doorway, far away from Grant.

Grant lowered his arms slowly, trying to keep his tone calm. “It’s just a knife,” he said. “Clipped to my boot. For camping.”

“We came a long way to see you,” Brigid added. “Camped out for three nights in the Outlands.”

“Man’s gotta cut firewood somehow,” Grant explained reasonably.

“Vamonos.” Velvet Coat nodded very slowly, the slight trace of a smile on his lips. “You remove and hand over the knife,” he said, “and if I find you hiding anything else…” He left the sentence unfinished, but the implication was clear.

Grant knelt and pulled his pant leg up to reveal a scuffed leather boot that ended a little way up his calf. There was a six-inch-long, brown leather sheath there from which the handle of a knife protruded at an angle. Grant unclipped the sheath, not bothering to remove the knife. As he did so he smiled inwardly—it had been a ploy to keep up their appearances. The last thing they had wanted to do was advertise themselves as representatives of Cerberus, here to gather intelligence and shut down Carnack’s little DNA trading post, so they had come here posing as traders themselves. And any trading party worth its salt would try to sneak just one weapon into a meeting, no matter what the rules were.

Grant stood and handed the sheathed knife to the shirtless young guide, who placed it atop the little stack of guns he had amassed.

Velvet Coat stepped forward once more, watching Grant warily as he raised the baton. “Arms outstretched, please, señor,” he said, and Grant obeyed, waiting as the man ran the baton carefully over his form three full times before he was satisfied.

As a rule, Kane and Grant would each be carrying a Sin Eater pistol each in its distinctive wrist rig. The Sin Eater was the weapon of the Magistrate, a symbol of office as much as a devastating hand cannon. But its very recognizability would have caused problems in this environment, and any rationalization about acquiring the Sin Eaters from storage or from killing Magistrates was too risky to chance. They had opted instead to arm themselves lightly with fairly common pistols that wouldn’t draw any undue attention to a supposed group of traders.

Once the trio had been disarmed, Velvet Coat pushed through the curtain into the next room and held it to one side to usher the three Cerberus warriors through.

Kane turned back and shot a look at their young guide as he knelt to stash their weapons in a chest in the corner of the anteroom. “Careful with those,” he told the boy. “Family heirlooms.”

The boy smiled and nodded, but there was no recognition in his eyes. Kane suspected that he hadn’t understood the words.

“Come,” Velvet Coat said, “no tricks.”

Kane pushed past the dirty curtain and found himself inside a far bigger room. The area was ill-lit, its walls draped with sheets of orange and tan, billowing in the draft and leaving Kane with a confused and uncertain idea of the true size of the room.

The floor space seemed to cover about eighteen square feet. To the back of the room, facing the curtained entry, a young man sat low upon a smattering of cushions, slumped into their enveloping folds and cramming his mouth with berries dipped in syrup. There were two other men in the room, both well-armed and wearing fierce expressions. An attractive woman dressed in shimmering fabrics was dancing in one corner to a light jazz recording piped into the room at low volume, close enough that the man on the cushions could reach out and touch her.

“You would be the interested party,” the lounging man announced, still watching the dancing girl.