Scarlet Dream (21 page)

In the corridor, Hurbon stared at the impressive figure of Maitresse Ezili as she squirmed against the invisible bonds that held her. Realizing the
houngan
was too short in his chair to reach for the woman's hair, Kane offered to cut a lock from her head. “You want me to do it?” he asked.

Hurbon handed Kane the
athame
blade and Kane took a lock of black hair from the back of the woman's head, two inches in all.

Then Kane gave the blade back to Hurbon along with the pinch of hair. “We about done?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Hurbon said, still studying the woman. “Take her ring, there, from her finger. That one—” He pointed to the ring finger of her left hand. It was a gold ring holding a shining ruby, the gem a fierce red even in the ill-lit corridor.

Kane reached for the woman's hand and stopped, peering back at Hurbon. The man had produced the other doll,
the one that represented Maitresse Ezili and had been entwined in black ribbon.

“Is this safe?” Kane asked.

“Why do you think I asked you to do it?” Hurbon replied with a knowing smile, clutching the doll tightly in his hands.

Nine months earlier.

S
ECOND
B
ODY LAY
shivering beside the wreckage of the escape pod as night mercifully fell in the Louisiana bayou. Naked, her skin still felt as if it was on fire from the punishing effects of the sun, red welters bubbling across her arm and forehead where they had been touched just briefly by the sun's fearsome rays.

The spacecraft itself had sunk lower into the mire, and Second Body could see now that it would be gone by the morning. She should be gone then, too, for being in the sun like this was dangerous for her. It had aged her terribly already, and her arms were covered in the beetlelike blotches of the sickness. She would hide those scars over time, clothe herself so that they could not be seen. The thought of clothes made her realize that she required a hiding place.

Behind Second Body, something within the sinking wreck moved, and a stream of garbled noises came from a still-forming throat. Afraid, Second Body shuffled away, putting more distance between herself and the figure who emerged from the wreckage, enough that it could not touch her. In appearance this one was larger, wider, and it looked to Ezili Freda Dahomey—to Second Body—more like a waddling sphere than an actual person. This was Third Body.

Third Body's skin was dark, far darker than Second
Body's but lighter than the desiccated flesh of her first-born sister. A balance had been struck by the malfunctioning sequencers of the chalice of rebirth, it seemed. Third Body was, in a sense, a halfway house between her two sisters, an amalgamation of them and a buffer between their traits. An ego, then, to sit between base instinct and overarching morality.

As Second Body watched, Third Body called her over. “Come now, sister,” Third Body said. “I won't hurt you.”

“The sun hurt me,” Second Body stated, as if this explained her fear.

“I need your help,” Third Body said, “before the ship sinks and we lose the others. I love them but I cannot free them on my own.”

Love would be the guiding principle for Third Body, and all because the first thing she had been tasked to do after her birth was to decide whether to help the other newborns or to ignore them. The original Lilitu template would have left them to die, concerned only with her own survival. Once again, the personality growth had fractured, corrupted, made of Third Body something she should not have been.

Second Body, the one who would be Ezili Freda Dahomey, helped her larger sister, dragging other bodies from the escape pod. Each body had been generated there, made in the production line of the malfunctioning chalice of rebirth. They were half-formed things with fetus faces and pulpy limbs like dough. These were the failed attempts that the broken logic of the escape pod had tried to create as a body for Lilitu. Had they grown they might have looked like the old hybrid barons, but they had been aborted as soon as they had been birthed, the mush of the swamp finally leaking into the circuitry and ruining the birthing procedure. Instead, these half-born things had
just the barest of personality traits: to want. Third Body would care for them, though, and for her older sister, too.

“We shall find a place where we can all be safe,” Third Body announced. Beside her, the rag-tag group watched the escape pod sink without a trace beneath the marsh, in much the same way as the sun had set a few hours before, when Second Body had finally been able to stop cowering from it.

“We shall find a dark place for you,” Third Body said to assure her Second Body sibling. “A place beneath the earth.”

Second Body smiled, the old woman's wrinkles creasing her pale face. Third Body was love, and Second Body approved. Already, Second Body had an inkling of who her sister would be, of which face of the voodoo Ezili she would adopt. It would be the most loving aspect, the one known as Maitresse Ezili. She would take care of Second Body and she would take care of her sister-abortions. And she would care, too, for strangers and wayfarers; Maitresse Ezili would care for any outlanders who came into her reach. It would be nothing like her time as Lilitu or Lilu or any of the others. And it would be a beautiful life.

 

I
N THE HALLWAY
of the House Lilandera, Kane warily reached for the woman's hand. As he touched it, he felt a jolt go through him like electricity, powering through his hand and up his arm, sending shooting pain across his chest. As the jolt hit, the servo motors of his wrist holster began to whir automatically, and the Sin Eater tried to launch itself into his hand, finding its path blocked by Kane's bent wrist. “What the hell, Hurbon?” Kane shouted.

“You'll be fine, man,” Papa Hurbon said. “Just remove the ring.”

Kane shook as the strange power racked his body, feeling it running all over him, head to toe, as he clung to the hand of the housemistress.

“It's the binding,” Hurbon said simply. “Didn't think she'd fight this much.”

As he said that, Maitresse Ezili began to inch forward, her feet still in place but her body keeling slightly toward Kane. Still clinging to her hand, tremors running through his own body, Kane snagged the ring Hurbon had indicated and yanked it free, stumbling back three steps with the effort before striking the nearest wall with his back.

As Kane looked up, the woman he still thought of as Madam Ellie reached forward, her left hand clawing for his face. Automatically, Kane drove his own hands forward like a wedge, pushing Ellie's grasping hand away from him. She was terrifically quick, however, far more so than he had expected, and already her hand was reaching out, grabbing him by the throat. Before she could secure her grip, Kane grabbed Ellie's wrist, forcing her hand away from his neck.

Kane was backed up against the wall, nowhere to move to get clear of the woman's grasping hand. She was still stuck in place, too, he realized, unable to get her legs to move. But that didn't seem to diminish her determination to hurt him. Whatever his touch had done, it seemed to have fractured the invisible binding that held Maitresse Ezili in place, allowing her the freedom of movement in her hand and arm. With a sinking feeling, Kane recalled how strong the Annunaki overlords were in their original forms. If Ellie has half that strength…

Kane grunted with the effort of driving that reaching hand away. It seemed that somehow this Annunaki
abortion had become stronger as she was held in place, and now all of that fearsome power had been centered into her single mobile hand. Fingers outstretched, the housemistress Ezili drove her hand at Kane's eyes, endeavoring to blind him in her desperation.

Three feet from Kane, sitting in his wheelchair, Papa Hurbon wheeled himself backward even as Grant and Brigid appeared in the kitchen doorway after being alerted by the sounds of the skirmish.

“What's going on?” Grant snapped, the Sin Eater materializing in his hand.

Hurbon ignored him. Concentrating, the voodoo priest turned the
athame
blade over in his hand as he watched the now-moving form of Maitresse Ezili grab Kane's throat with her lone, mobile hand, driving the ex-Magistrate back against the wall with such force that the plaster crumbled, dust spewing across Kane's bloodied face.

“She's loose,” Brigid screamed, her hand moving automatically to her hip holster.

“I can't make the shot,” Grant snarled, trying to get closer. Papa Hurbon's wheelchair blocked his path and Kane's struggling form made it too dangerous from even this brief a distance.

As Grant tried to slink past the voodoo priest, Hurbon slapped the voodoo doll of Maitresse Ezili against the wall and drove the
athame
knife into its heart with a clunk, pinning it there. As the blade struck, Maitresse Ezili herself ceased moving, her eyes rolling up in her head, and her grip slackened on Kane's throat.

Kane stood against the wall for a moment, struggling to catch his breath and holding back the urge to cough. In front of him, Maitresse Ezili stood stock still once more,
her body locked in place, the once-grasping hand fixed in a clawlike shape.

“That supposed to happen?” Kane asked, his voice sounding raw as he cleared his throat.

Papa Hurbon held his hands up in innocence. “She's got a mad one for you,
non?
”

Irritated, Kane strode down the corridor and handed Hurbon the ring he had removed from the woman's hand. Hurbon took the ring and weaved the lock of hair around it, threading the black hair carefully through the claws that held the gemstone in place. Once he had done so, he handed the strange totem to Brigid.

“You take care of this one, too,” Hurbon instructed, fixing her with a no-nonsense stare. “And if anything goes wrong, you get rid of it and you get far, far away. You won't want to be anywhere near if Maitresse Ezili comes back for it, you understand me?”

Brigid took the ring and pocketed it. “I understand.”

Grant, meanwhile, had made his way up to the far end of the corridor, past where the trapped form of Maitresse Ezili stood. He stared at her warily as he passed, wondering that she might make a grab for him as she had Kane.

Then Grant was at the front door to the House Lilandera, the Sin Eater still clutched in his grip. He pulled open the door.

“What is he doing?” Hurbon asked as Kane and the others shuffled along the corridor.

“Checking for hostiles,” Kane explained simply.

“Who are we expecting?” Hurbon asked cheerily.

Kane gave the man a stern look, and Hurbon fell to silence.

“There's three of them out there,” Grant confirmed, leaning against the rotten wood of the old door.

Like so much of the house, once the illusion cast by the
vision chair had been dropped, the front door had been left revealed as a tatty, ancient thing, hanging wonkily on rusted hinges, evidence of woodworm all over its blistered paintwork. Seeing this, Kane recalled how Brewster Philboyd had described the house when he had first located it on his satellite surveillance feed. He had said the place was in a state of disrepair, and Kane had been surprised to find it appeared to be in such spectacular condition when they had seen it with their own eyes. With hindsight, Kane realized that should have tipped them off from the get-go. With a sigh, Kane reminded himself of Womack's Law: hindsight is 20/20.

At the doorway, Grant watched as several half-alive figures strutted along the shingle drive. They had been aimless before, unable to see the house that stood right in front of their dead eyes. Now, they walked with purpose, not really striding but at least walking in a definite direction. There were three of them; the others had presumably returned to the redoubt or found other things to occupy their time, whatever the undead did with their time.

Three, we can handle, Grant assured himself. Then he turned to his companions, holding his Sin Eater aloft and using it to gesture outside. “Okay, ramblers, it's on.”

Grant led the way onto the grounds of the House Lilandera, now just a dilapidated old building hidden by the overgrown vegetation that surrounded it.

Behind Grant, Brigid Baptiste and Kane fanned out, readying themselves for another batch of the undead. The red-haired former archivist used a two-handed grip to hold the metal pole she had acquired, her semiautomatic securely back in its hip holster. Kane meanwhile appeared to be unarmed, and he watched the undergrowth warily.

Behind the Cerberus trio, Papa Hurbon wheeled himself from the house in his wheelchair, bumping down the rotted wooden stairs there and freewheeling across the shingle pathway where plants and weeds had untidily sprouted.

Up ahead, Grant strode boldly toward the road, his eyes never leaving the three shambling figures who lurched along the path toward him and his companions. As he reached the first, a man with his rib cage on show through his unbuttoned shirt, the zombie moaned and made a grab for him. Grant wanted to be sure before he engaged more of these abominations in combat, and that grab was all he needed to confirm that he and his companions could be seen, that Hurbon's spell had worn off.

The zombie's jagged brown nails slashed through the air, and Grant sidestepped in a swift, two-step dance. Then Grant's right fist lashed out, using the barrel of his
Sin Eater to smack the undead man in the face. As his blow hit, Grant squeezed down on the firing stud, and the Sin Eater came to life, unleashing a volley of bullets into the undead man's head at point-blank range. Head smoldering, the zombie staggered backward, while his undead companions turned on Grant.

Grant focused his attention on the one he had shot first. He had had time while in the House Lilandera to consider the most efficient way to deal with this seemingly infinite army of undead. He and Kane had concluded that his best option was to put each one down in succession, rather than allow their energies to be split between two or more. So Grant punched the first zombie with his left fist, smashing it across its still-smoldering face with a blow like a hammer. The undead man staggered backward under the force of the punch, and Grant raised the Sin Eater again, snapping off another burst of fire at the thing's torso. Grant turned then, as the first animated corpse fell over, his feet snagged by the roots of a weed that had spread over the pathway.

As his first foe fell, Grant turned on the next undead man, saw that this one was carrying a thick branch it had snagged from one of the nearby trees. Grant leaped over the path of the swinging branch, landing agilely on both feet and delivering a rocket-fast jab to the zombie's jaw. Even as his fist struck, Grant popped off another burst of fire from the Sin Eater, peppering the undead thing's face with bullets.

Though bullets had little effect on these revived corpses—other than perhaps whittling down their bodies by miniscule degrees—Grant had concluded that the shock to their bodies, plus the burst of light involved, served as enough of a distraction to give him some small advantage. As such, he used his Sin Eater like an
extension of his fist, landing blows and lacing them with quick bursts of gunfire as he struck.

As the undead man with the branch sagged backward, Grant rammed down with his left fist, bringing it hard against the back of his adversary's head. The moving corpse-thing toppled forward, getting a face full of shingle as he struck the path.

Grant used his strike to springboard from the moving zombie, leaping through the air and catching the third one with a scissor kick that threw them both to the ground. As the third corpse-thing struggled to fight back, Grant drove a knee into his windpipe, slamming his head against the solid ground. Then his right fist struck out again and again, smashing the zombie's moldering face, with a burst of gunfire punctuating every blow.

“Stay…the hell…down!” Grant ordered his gruesome opponent as each punch struck.

In a few seconds the undead thing's rotten face looked barely like a face at all, and thick black liquid leaked from its empty eye sockets like an oil spill.

Kane and Brigid had joined Grant by then, mopping up the struggling corpses that Grant had put out of action. Together, the three of them worked as one unit to finish off the undead figures.

“This is going to take forever,” Kane complained as he put the last of their relentless foes down for good, decapitating him with a solid kick. “We need to be back in the redoubt inside an hour to make this plan work. After that, the Red Weed catalyst will make whatever we do irrelevant—everyone will be dead anyway.”

Grant gave his partner a stern look. “We can only keep going,” he said. “If it happens, I'll deal with these dead things while you and Brigid make a run for it to the redoubt.”

As Grant made his statement, Brigid's Commtact came to life and she listened as Lakesh outlined his discoveries.

“Regarding the reactor, I think we've found a way to make it work,” Lakesh explained. “It's a back door to the security system, but by using a false power surge to the electrics we can fool the system into believing it's been shut down. Once we do that, it will automatically engage a systems check and reboot sequence, giving you about two minutes during which the access hatch can—theoretically—be opened.”

“You say about two minutes…?” Brigid said.

Donald Bry's strained voice came over the Commtact link. “The reboot takes two minutes and eight seconds,” he explained. “The system will believe it's been powered down during that period and will allow the access hatch to be opened. That's your window.”

The trio of Cerberus warriors and Papa Hurbon had reached the scarred blacktop now, and warily began to trudge along it, back to where the overgrown dirt track led deeper into the swamps.

“That's not long,” Brigid mused over the Commtact, “but I think it's doable. How much notice do you need at your end to start this security glitch?”

“We've set the sequence in place,” Lakesh told her. “We're monitoring your progress via our satellite surveillance and we can go live as soon as you're ready.”

“But you can't see once we enter the redoubt and our Commtacts are unreliable inside,” Brigid observed, speaking her thoughts out loud. “Kane?” she asked, knowing her partner was listening in on the conversation.

“We'll be there in an hour,” Kane decided. “Have to guess it after that.”

“But what if you're not there?” Lakesh asked.

“Then you'll finally get to throw that end-of-the-world party you've been planning for,” Kane stated.

Over the com link, the Cerberus warriors heard Lakesh discuss the plan with his personnel. Then he came back to Brigid and Kane. “We'll monitor your progress via the satellite and start our sequence ten minutes after you reach the door.”

“What about the catalyst?” Brigid asked.

“By Kane's timing that would be ready in ninety minutes,” Lakesh said. “Donald and I have a team working on possible counteragents, but no answers yet, I'm afraid.”

“Great,” Kane said sourly. “Anything else?”

“Good luck,” Lakesh offered.

Kane, Brigid and Grant checked their wrist chrons as they continued down the scarred tarmac roadway.

“Roughly ninety minutes before the world ends, huh?” Kane pointed out with grim humor.

Wheeling himself along the blacktop behind the Cerberus teammates, Papa Hurbon spoke up. “We have, on occasion, been on opposing sides of the fence during our brief meetings,” he told Kane and the others. “But I believe today that fortune is waiting to be kind.”

Brigid looked at the strange voodoo priest and smiled, clearly touched. “I hope you're right, Mr. Hurbon.”

Hurbon shrugged. “In a situation of this magnitude, my natural instinct is to call upon the
loa
—to pray to my gods,” he clarified. “Somehow, that seems inappropriate. We are going to kill one, are we not?”

“We're going to stop a god gone mad,” Brigid lamented. “Things like that—they just have to be done.”

“You make it sound like you do this regularly,” Hurbon observed with a chuckle.

“Yeah, sure,” Kane huffed. “Every three months. Set your watch by it.”

Thus, the foursome made its way onto the dirt road that led to the underground entrance of the redoubt. Kane took up a position behind Hurbon's wheelchair, grasping the handles and pushing the corpulent man along since he found the uneven track heavy going under his own power.

“How far away is this place?” Hurbon asked, reaching into the bag at his side.

“Fifty minutes on foot,” Kane said. “Maybe a little less if we don't meet anything too hostile. Or if you lost weight.”

Hurbon produced the spindle of black ribbon from his saddlebag and began unraveling a length of it, speaking under his breath. He was blessing it, Kane guessed, preparing the ribbon—and himself—for this final showdown.

Within forty minutes the group had reached the entrance to the redoubt. Other than the clutch of undead wandering around near Lilandera, there had been few signs of life—or unlife—during their trip. There had been just two encounters with wandering corpse-things, both of them mercifully brief. It seemed that Ezili Coeur Noir had called most of her troops to her side, and Brigid proposed that the undead things may have trouble living—as it were—beyond a certain proximity to her.

As if to confirm Brigid's theory, Grant spotted several shambling figures waiting by the large rollback door to the redoubt. “Company,” he stated, his voice low.

“I see them,” Kane acknowledged. “We're ahead of schedule. Let's keep it that way.”

With a single curt nod, Grant hurried forward, his body crouched low, the Sin Eater present once more in his hand. His companions followed but held back a little,
both Brigid and Kane remaining alert if Grant needed their help.

In his wheelchair on the dirt track, Papa Hurbon brought out the doll that represented Ezili Coeur Noir, its black rag body sagging with the loose sawdust stuffing inside. “Get me to some cover, eh?” he instructed Kane. “Give me a chance to finish this.”

With a silent nod, Kane pushed Hurbon's chair to the edge of the dirt road while Brigid kept watch, hiding the voodoo priest among the greenery there. The greenery was actually turning brown, much like the dead plants in the immediate vicinity of the redoubt itself. It seemed that the longer Ezili Coeur Noir remained here, the more death spread out around her. Her powers were growing, Kane realized.

“You think I'll be safe here?” Hurbon asked as Kane parked the wheelchair.

“I'm fresh out of guarantees,” Kane replied grimly as he turned back to the dirt road leading to the redoubt entrance.

Open, the door to the redoubt was wide enough to fit a vehicle through. There were three zombies trudging around, not really guarding the entrance so much as wandering aimlessly. They turned as Grant approached in his half crouch.

The lead undead thing was a woman, with tangled locks that fell down her back like lines of blood. This was the same one whom Kane had battled with earlier, the one he had dubbed Dreadlocks who had thrown him through the glass wall of the laboratory. She hissed like a rattlesnake when she saw Grant, and he could not help but smile, repulsed but faintly amused by the terrible thing.

Behind her, two other undead figures waited, and then Grant spotted a third hanging back in the shadows of the
tunnel. The closest of the undead figures was skeletal with a walking stick. Next was a small figure whose skin had shredded, leaving only his white skull for a face. The third figure remained in the shadows of the entryway, looming there with unspoken menace, at home with this swath of death that now surrounded the redoubt.

As Grant took another step, Dreadlocks stopped hissing and lunged at him. Grant was ready, mentally prepared for this move. He had stepped forward only on the toe of his foot, and he kicked backward so that he reared away as the undead woman swept a clawlike hand at his face. Her hand cut through the air, and then Grant was upon her, his right fist driving a blow low to her torso, the Sin Eater's trigger depressed as he struck.

The female zombie's body shook and chunks of her desiccated guts spewed from out of her back as Grant's bullets cleaved a path through her rotten flesh.

This close up, Grant could smell her, and his nose wrinkled in disgust. Her breath reeked of disease, while her body carried the musty smell of old books, mildew and dust. As the undead woman doubled over with Grant's punch and tumbled to the ground, the undead figure with the walking stick turned on Grant.

Grant's eyes opened wider as the animated cadaver took his stick in both hands and wielded it like a bat. Behind the scarecrowlike skeleton, the white-faced one bared his teeth and hissed, his hands poised like knives.

“Crap,” Grant muttered. They were fighters, dead or alive.

Grant ducked low as the stick came slashing through the air, swishing just inches over his head. He jabbed out with his right fist, blasting off a volley of bullets at his skeletal adversary.

Behind Grant, Kane and Brigid had just joined the
fight, even as the undead thing with dreadlocks struggled up off the ground, her rotten guts hanging from her torso.

“I'll take her,” Brigid instructed. In a second she had flipped around the metal pole she held, striking the female zombie across the side of her face and knocking her back to the ground.

Kane didn't stop to argue. He was already rushing at the shorter figure, leaping into the air as he reeled off a stream of bullets from his own Sin Eater pistol. The short, skull-faced zombie stood there as the bullets rattled against his bony hide. Then Kane was on him, his foot kicking out into the undead thing's jaw. The zombie fell back, but had recovered in a fraction of a second. Despite being dead, these things still seemed able to move pretty damn fast when they needed to, Kane lamented, and it seemed they had more life in them when they were close to their terrible mistress, Ezili Coeur Noir. She had to be inside the redoubt, then.