Distortion Offensive

Grant let go of the coat and the gunman staggered onward, hauled past the ex-Mag with the movement of the dragging coat. As he passed, Grant drove his knee into the gunman’s side, knocking him to the floor. As the stick-up man crashed downward, Grant fell upon him, slapping away the hand holding the pistol and driving his other hand down to hit the man’s face with its heel. The gunman was knocked senseless, his head slamming against the wooden floors with a loud, hollow echo.

“Everyone okay?” Grant asked as he pulled himself away from the final stick-up artist.

Around the church hall, the timid locals began to rise once more, smiling tentatively as they saw that Grant, Kane and Brigid had disabled all of their would-be robbers. And, spontaneously, a ripple of applause broke out among the people in that church as they showed their gratitude to their saviors.

However, hidden among the shadows near the church doorway, one woman didn’t applaud. Instead, her tanned face betrayed no emotion as she watched the scene with flashing dark eyes from beneath the hood of her jacket, her faithful dog waiting at her side.

Despite the disguising nature of the loose, ragged clothes she wore, it was clear that she was a tall woman, with a slender build and an economic lightness of movement. Her face was tanned with an olive complexion, with eyes the color of rich chocolate. The woman reached up with the long fingers of her slender hand, brushing a few rogue wisps of her dark hair back under the hood, pulling the front of the hood itself down lower, the better to mask her face.

As the crowd continued to congratulate the three Cerberus warriors, the woman turned and pushed her way past the milling crowd and out of the church hall, the dog obediently trotting along at her heels. The dog was some strange mongrel, with coarse, wiry fur and the look of a coyote about it. Its eyes were exceptionally pale, washed out to a blue so faint as to be almost white.

The woman stopped at the bottom of the stone steps that led to the church hall, gazing back over her shoulder for a moment to ensure that the Cerberus people weren’t following her. But no, they hadn’t spotted her among the crowds, had no reason to suspect she might be here. She had come seeking food, like the other residents of the shattered ville of Hope, but she hadn’t expected to bump into familiar faces like theirs. Her name was Rosalia, and she had met with the Cerberus rebels once before.

Rosalia had been here six weeks ago, when the earthquake had rumbled through the ground and the towering tidal wave had pummeled the beachfront. She had been a bodyguard then, in the employ of a local brigand called Tom Carnack, whose operation stretched into the Californian desert. Her position had put her at odds with the objectives of the Cerberus personnel, and she had clashed with Kane, Brigid and Grant, along with another operative called Domi, whose skin was an eerie white the color of bone.

Carnack had been killed during the encounter with Cerberus, and his operation all but destroyed. Now a few splinter factions of Carnack’s group remained, squabbling among themselves and with no clear leader emerging. And so Rosalia found herself once again out on her own, struggling to survive.

With no employer and no place to call home, Rosalia had found herself back in Hope, accompanied by the strange mongrel dog. What remained of the shanty dwellings had been reduced to a claustrophobic rabbit’s warren, which suited Rosalia fine. She could hide here, another refugee among the population of strangers until she was ready to move on. There was the nunnery, of course, just over the border, where she had been trained. Rosalia knew that she would always be welcome there if nowhere else.

Right now, however, she required rations and clean water, but she felt instinctively that revealing herself to Kane and his team would be foolhardy. Their business had not ended well. Better, then, that they thought her dead and dismissed her from their overly moralistic minds.

Rosalia hurried on, making her way from the church doors before ducking into a side street, the faithful mutt keeping pace with her. Rosalia had found the dog six weeks ago, while she had been wandering the Californian desert following the destruction of Carnack’s base, and the two had become companions on the road. Not given to sentimentality, Rosalia had elected not to give the hound a name, merely calling it “Dog” or “Mutt” or “Belly-on-legs.” The dog didn’t seem to care, happy to have human company, sharing its warmth with Rosalia wherever she slept. The dog itself was a strange, nervous animal, inquisitive but slightly wary around strangers, often hiding behind Rosalia as they walked the streets. That nervousness served her well, for it meant the hound would wake at the slightest noise or movement and would bark at any shadow it didn’t recognize. On more than one occasion, the dog’s sudden barking had woken Rosalia and saved her from being robbed or attacked while she slept in one of the empty, ramshackle buildings that remained dotted around the fishing ville.

Dog whined, and Rosalia peered down at it. Like herself, Dog could feel the gnawing in its belly as hunger threatened to consume it. It wouldn’t do to go hungry simply because of the Cerberus Magistrates and their interruption of her daily routine. If she didn’t eat, she would become weak, and once that happened Rosalia would become a slave to circumstance, or she would never eat again and simply lie down in the street to die as she had seen others do.

There, she said in her mind as she looked back up the street, her predatory instincts rising. Exiting the church, a young couple made their way down the stone steps, going slowly so that their child could keep pace with them. The child was a toddler, and the mother held its hand as it slowly navigated the hard steps to the street. Rosalia’s eyes were on the male’s bag, small but full of rations and two bottles of purified water. The young woman cheered as the child clambered down the final step, and it looked up at her and laughed. They were simple folks, Rosalia recognized, naive and lacking street smarts. Ville folk turned refugee with the destruction of Beausoleil or Snakefishville, most probably. Educated to be idiots.

And if the child starved because of her actions?

Better the child than me, Rosalia reasoned.

Beneath the waxing moon, the couple turned into the side street where Rosalia waited by the wall, hidden in the shadows of the brickwork. She was about to step forward, planning merely to brush past them and take the bag before bolting in the manner of a common street thief, when she saw movement at the far end of the narrow street. Two tough-looking youths had followed the couple and their child, clearly harboring the same idea as Rosalia. She saw the glint of metal catch the moonlight as one of the young men unsheathed a switchblade, and the whisper of a smile crossed her perfect lips. It was a bored smile, the kind that came when one could finally sense a break in the tedium. This would be Rosalia’s break from tedium.

One of the young punks began laughing, a sinister, braying sound that echoed off the walls of the enclosed street. It was meant to terrify, and the young couple walked faster, glancing over their shoulders as they rushed down the street. Then the two punks began to sprint, rushing along the street and surrounding the young couple in an instant, like a pack of wild dogs, howling and laughing as they did so, the animalistic noises echoing off the walls. Two more young thugs had appeared from the far end of the alleyway, and another stepped out of a doorway on the far side from Rosalia’s own hiding place, where he had been waiting just out of sight, a bend in the alley hiding her from him.

“Got something we want, Mr. Man,” one of the punks announced, pointing to the modest bag of rations he had acquired from the church.

“Keep away,” the man spit, reaching for his woman’s elbow and urging her onward.

The five-strong gang paced around the young couple, hemming them in and laughing among themselves. Another knife appeared in one punk’s hand, and Rosalia noted how weedy he looked, the arm that held the knife little more than skin pulled over bone.

“We went to eat, but they didn’t feed us enough,” the leering leader of the punks explained, his tone mocking. “We want more.”

Ironically, Rosalia could well believe that. These punks looked emaciated, wasting away like the fishing town around them.

The man stopped, standing protectively before his partner and child even as the group continued to circle them. “Get away,” he instructed. “We need to eat, too.”

“No, Mr. Man,” the lead punk said. “Not you.”

Rosalia stepped forward then, while the eyes of the teenage gang members were fixed on the man and his wife, intimidating them with the threat of casual violence. With two long-legged strides, she was next to the nearest punk, and without warning her hand jabbed out and drove into the soft, fleshy part beneath his rib cage. He yelped and fell to the ground, his eyes wide and his tongue lolling in his open mouth. Though he didn’t know it yet, his kidney had ruptured under the impact, and internal bleeding would fill and devour him in the next two hours.

As one, the group of would-be robbers turned to see the hooded woman in their presence.

“Who th—!”

Rosalia didn’t give the little punk enough time to even finish his sentence. Already her right leg was swinging high off the ground to kick the gang member in the face, and his nose exploded in a hideous burst of scarlet.

As the punk fell backward, Rosalia dropped and lashed out behind her as another of the gang slashed at her with his knife. The blade whizzed over her head, and Rosalia continued backward, driving the sharp corner of her crooked elbow into the young hoodlum’s groin. The punk screamed out as white-hot pain speared through his genitals, and Rosalia heard something soft squelch beneath the impact of her savage blow. The knife-wielder toppled forward, his cry of pain echoing in the enclosed space of the narrow street, and Rosalia snatched the blade from his hand as she flipped him over her back and into the next gang member, who was running toward her.

The running gang member collided with his flailing comrade, and both of them crashed to the street with finality.

Still low on the ground, Rosalia turned to see the final would-be robber grab the woman’s hair and drag the knife he held across her exposed throat, just short of cutting her but still close enough to make her cry out. Behind her, Rosalia’s dog barked once, but she dismissed him from her mind, her hands a practiced blur of movement. An instant later, the stolen knife left her hand and sailed through the air, connecting in less than a second with the final gang member’s right eye, plunging deep into the eye socket. The punk screamed as he staggered backward, the hostage he had been holding forgotten.

“You fucking bitch, you blinded me,” the punk cried as he staggered back against the wall behind him. The knife was embedded in his eye, viscous liquid oozing down his cheek.

“No, I haven’t,” Rosalia told him calmly as she stood up and approached her struggling foe. “Not yet.” With that, she pulled her own eight-inch blade from its hiding place in her voluminous sleeve, and thrust it into the worthless punk’s remaining eye socket, ramming it so hard that she heard the bone crack.

As the frightened young couple ran down the street away from the scene of carnage, their child wailing in terror, Rosalia checked the pockets of her fallen foes. Riffling through their possessions, she snagged a half-dozen ration bars and two bottles of water. Not much, but enough for her and the mutt. The dog whined hopefully as it saw its mistress break the foil of a ration bar, snapping the end off. Rosalia handed the mongrel the broken end of the ration bar, telling it to make the food last, even though she knew it wouldn’t understand or heed her advice.

As the gang lay there, groaning and struggling to recover from the woman’s deadly attack, Rosalia and the dog exited the street and disappeared into the night.

Life in Hope could be hard. Only the strongest would survive.

Chapter 3

The Cerberus trio had spent the night in the spare rooms of the church warden, an aging man whose name was Vernor, but they awoke early and made their way out to the beach at Brigid’s insistence.

“We spend half our lives cooped up inside a mountain,” Brigid had insisted, referring to the hidden Cerberus redoubt in Montana where the team was based, “and the other half fighting for our lives. Let’s go take a look at the ocean and remind ourselves what it is we’re fighting for.”

Grant agreed and, albeit with a reluctant grunt, Kane ultimately agreed, too. He’d much sooner spend another hour in bed, catching up on some much-needed rest, but he knew there was no reasoning with the red-haired archivist when she got like this.

When the three of them reached the beachfront, Brigid rushed off toward the rolling waves while Grant hung back to talk with Kane.

“Everything okay?” Grant asked, his voice a low rumble like distant thunder.

“What, with me?” Kane replied. “Sure. Why do you ask?”

“You just seem—” Grant shrugged “—I dunno, like you’d sooner be somewhere else.”

Kane looked at Grant, fixing his trusty partner in his steely stare. “No, this is… Well, it’s nice,” Kane said, sweeping his hands before him to take in the vista of the sandy beach and the churning turquoise waves of the Pacific as a quintet of seagulls swooped across its surface, squawking to one another. “Just makes a weird change from the usual.”

“Beating the crap out of Annunaki stone gods and their screwed-up minions, you mean?” Grant asked lightly, the humor clear from his tone.

Kane laughed. “Yeah, something like that.” With that, he and Grant joined Brigid at the ocean’s edge, where she had removed her boots to wade in the spume-dappled water.

Though meant in jest, Kane knew that Grant’s statement had an air of truth to it. Just ten days before, Kane and Grant had found themselves battling with a stone-like being called Ullikummis, who had returned from the stars after almost five thousand years in exile from his Annunaki brethren. The Annunaki had been a constant thorn in the side of the Cerberus warriors since their earliest days as a team. Once mistaken for space gods, the Annunaki were lizardlike, alien visitors who assumed different aspects in their ultimate quest to subjugate and subvert humankind, denying it from reaching its full potential. Primary among those so-called gods was the ruthless Enlil, whose subtle planning and mastery of deception made him a formidable foe.

Ullikummis was, in fact, Enlil’s son, his lizardlike body genetically altered to serve a specific purpose—to be his father’s personal assassin. But approximately five thousand years ago, something had gone wrong in Ullikummis’s assassination attempt on a god called Teshub, and Enlil had disowned his scion, exiling him to space, imprisoned within an asteroid.