Death Cry

Kane sighed. “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning beforehand?”

Brigid pierced him with a frosty stare, anger bristling in her tone. “I thought we’d have maybe an afternoon here, do a recce, come back at a later date once we had decided what it was we were looking at. You’re the one who got all gung ho and decided to threaten armed people with a bomb unless you got your own damn way.”

Kane looked annoyed, his voice defensive. “Hey, it’s called improvisation, Baptiste.”

O UTSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Grant made his way back along the corridor to the place where he had seen the map. A large color-coded illustration, the map sat behind hard, transparent plastic to one side of a T-junction corridor that disappeared farther into the disused military base.

Leaning close as the overhead light flickered and hummed, Grant swept grime from the plastic covering with the edge of his free hand before wiping the hand on his pant leg. The map showed five different-colored sections that formed a bulging rectangular shape. The key to the right-hand side of the map gave a broad term for what each section represented, green for research, orange for personnel and so on.

Grant looked swiftly over the map and located the computer room he had just come from. Then he carefully ran his finger along the key to the side, reading the names of all the different divisions and subdivisions. He was halfway down the list when he heard footsteps off to his right, coming from the same direction as the entry from the mine shaft. He turned to his right, automatically lifting the Sin Eater and pointing it into the darkness of the dusty, ill-lit corridor.

If I can’t see them then they’re probably having just as much trouble seeing me, Grant realized, holding the pistol steady as he took a step away from the wall and crouched to make a smaller target. At two hundred fifty pounds of solid muscle, it wasn’t easy for the big man to make an appreciably smaller target.

Grant thought back to the discussion with the millennialist guards outside. They’d said there were eight people down there, and with the two they’d found in the shaft plus the five in the computer room, Grant realized that they were still one man short. “Guy chose the wrong time to take a leak,” Grant murmured as he darted lightly forward along the corridor, his movements quiet and economical.

As he moved forward, holding the Sin Eater before him with his left hand steadying his grip, Grant spotted movement in the dark. Someone was approaching, walking along the corridor toward him. Grant was suddenly very conscious that, despite the poor lighting, he was still dressed in white jacket and hat for the snow. He sank into a crouch, holding the pistol steady as he dropped out of the stranger’s potential eye line.

Silhouetted against the flickering light for an instant was a tall, bulky figure reaching for a rifle that was slung from a shoulder strap across his chest. “Who’s there?” the newcomer asked, his voice deep but cracking with fear. “I can see you’re there.”

A tiny glint of light reflected from the muzzle of the rifle as it swung toward him, and Grant leaped forward, powering himself at the man in a driving rush of coiled muscles. In two steps, Grant was upon the gunman, his arms wide as he gripped the man’s shoulders, toppling the gunman backward onto the hard floor. The long barrel of the gunman’s rifle spit a half-dozen shots as the man’s finger twitched on the trigger, their report loud in the enclosed area of the corridor, but Grant was already inside the firing arc, his heavy body crushing the man beneath it. With a loud crack, the gunman’s head smacked into the floor tiles, splitting one across its center.

Grant pulled back his right hand, ready to shoot the guard with his pistol, but the man was already unconscious. Breathing heavily through his clenched teeth, Grant watched as a trickle of blood seeped across the cracked tile from the back of the gunman’s head. Grant got up and stepped away from the unconscious gunman, holstering his Sin Eater and kicking aside the man’s rifle.

“Mouse, meet cat,” Grant muttered as he turned from the fallen guard and headed back down the corridor to look at the map.

I NSIDE THE COMPUTER ROOM , Brigid’s fingers were frantically racing across the keyboard as a stream of digits raced across the screen.

“I’m into the basic coding,” she told Kane without looking up, “but the whole thing is encrypted. Whatever’s in here is either very important or it’s the diary of a very paranoid teenager.”

Kane looked at her, brushing concrete dust from his short, dark hair. “Thinking of anyone in particular, Baptiste?”

“What?” she asked as her fingers sped across the keys. Then she looked up, seeing the sly grin on her colleague’s face. “Well, don’t look at me. Do you think I ever had time to keep a diary when we were in Cobaltville?”

Kane shrugged, laughing to himself as she went back to work on the computer code. As he did so, they both heard shots coming from a little way down the corridor, and Kane took two swift steps across the room to the closed double doors, the Sin Eater appearing in his hand.

There had been six shots, fired rapidly as if from an automatic. No further noise followed, and Kane risked opening one of the double doors, pushing his back against it as he raised the pistol in his hands.

“Grant?” he called tentatively. “Grant? You okay?”

Grant’s deep, rumbling voice echoed back along the corridor. “Just fine. Rodent problem, but I dealt with it.”

Kane stepped back into the room, his pistol returning to his sleeve as he walked across to stand behind Brigid.

She didn’t look up as she spoke. “I don’t feel safe here, Kane.”

“We’ll be out of here in a few minutes,” he told her.

Just then, Grant came running through the double doors, clutching his Sin Eater. “We have got a problem,” he announced, a scowl across his dark brow.

“What now?” Brigid asked in exasperation.

“Unless I am very much mistaken,” Grant told them, “there is no mat-trans in this facility.”

Kane and Brigid looked at Grant, their eyes wide as they took in his statement.

“No back door, people,” Grant reiterated, shaking his head.

Brigid shook her head, as well, as she continued working the keys of the computer terminal. “Worst plan ever,” she growled without looking up at Kane.

Chapter 2

Kane was pacing the computer room like a caged tiger, head low as he tried to think through the situation. He had assumed that this installation would have a mat-trans, but there had been no guarantee of that. “There’s got to be a way out,” he assured the others. “A back door. Something.”

Brigid watched him over the rims of her glasses as she sat at the computer terminal. “This place has been buried for two hundred years, remember?” she told him. “Any back doors that might have existed are long since sealed. Essentially, we’re sitting in an archaeological dig.”

“Then we go out the same way we got here,” Kane decided. “We use the shaft.”

“We get the shaft, you mean,” Grant rumbled. “You heard what Brigid said when we came in. That route is a bottleneck with fifteen, maybe twenty armed millennialists just waiting to take a pop at us.”

Kane reached for the gunmetal flask that hung from his belt. “So we’ll use the same trick, the dead man’s switch.” He smiled. “They won’t shoot me while I’m holding the dead man’s switch.”

Grant shook his head. “Oh, yes, they will.” Kane shot a questioning look at the huge ex-Magistrate, and Grant began counting off points on the fingers of his free hand. “One, they know exactly where we’re coming from this time. Two, they’ve had time to think about it. Three, they’ve had time to set up sharpshooters.”

“Four,” Brigid chipped in, a sour smile on her face, “they’ll most likely shoot your arm off at the elbow.”

“What makes you so sure?” Kane asked, his tone abrupt as angry frustration bubbled to the surface.

“’Cause that’s what you’d do,” Grant told him, locking his gaze with Kane’s fierce stare.

After a moment, Kane looked away, shaking his head heavily. “Yeah, you’re right,” he admitted.

Stepping over to the double doors, Grant pushed his way through and glanced warily down the corridor, waving the Sin Eater in a slow arc before him. As the lights flickered, he made out the slumped form of the gunman he had disarmed, still lying unconscious close to the rabbit-hole exit. “I don’t think we have a whole lot of time, either,” Grant told the others as he came back through the doors. “I met a hostile outside. He’s out for the count, right now, but…” He shrugged, leaving the sentence hanging.

Turning from Grant, Kane addressed Brigid. “How’s the computer hack going, Baptiste?”

“Slowly,” she admitted. “Even with a ville full of luck, it could take all day to stumble on a lead that takes me anywhere. Plus, Lakesh didn’t really know what we were looking for. It’s like secret Santa—you hope it’s something good but you have no idea what it’s going to be till the wrapping’s off.”

Kane tilted his head as he assessed the black metallic base of the computer terminal. “Then we’ll take the whole unit with us,” he decided. “Can’t weigh more than twenty, thirty pounds. Shut it down, and let’s get the thing unhooked.”

Brigid flashed him a withering look. “Do you know anything about how computers work, Kane? This is a delicate piece of equipment and it’s attached to—”

Kane held up a warning finger. “Stow it,” he said firmly. “It’s survived the nukecaust and two hundred years of dust. We’ll take what we can and get out of here alive.”

Brigid looked plaintively to Grant, and the huge ex-Mag returned her look.

“Wrap it up, people,” Kane said, raising his voice as he walked across the room to the double doors. “We’re moving out in two minutes. Grant, you carry the computer.” With that, Kane disappeared through the doors, Sin Eater in hand, to scout the corridor for opposition.

Once Kane had left, Brigid muttered to herself as she powered down the computer terminal. “He’s actually gone insane,” she stated.