a second one was moving more warily toward the powerfully built ex-magistrate. With a flinch of his wrist tendons, Grant sent his sin eater pistol back into its hidden holster and reached into a sheathlike pocket in his duster. A moment later his hand reappeared wielding a Copperhead assault subgun. The Copperhead was a favorite field weapon of Grant’s, and it featured a two-foot-long barrel, with grip and trigger in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handed. It also featured an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Grant preferred the Copperhead thanks to its ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create.
As the muscular mutie leaped at him, he depressed the trigger, unleashing a storm of 4.85 mm death at his foe. The Copperhead’s reports sounded deafening in the enclosed space of the corridor, and the bullets cut through the charging beast like a hot knife through butter. The croc slowed, stumbled, then finally sank to the waterlogged deck two feet from Grant, landing with a great splash of dirty water.
Grant stared down, saw green-tinted blood mixing with the filthy water, lost instants later amid the swill.
“Dumb animal didn’t know what it was up against,” he muttered as he stalked down the corridor to where Brigid had disappeared.
Grant was halfway there when he heard the explosion of her destroyed rebreather. He didn’t just hear it, he felt it, too, the concussive force thudding against his chest like a physical blow.
“Brigid?” he called, running as best he could through the waterlogged tunnel.
He stopped at the open door to the control room, the Copperhead held ready as he glanced inside the door. The place was a scene of devastation. Several consoles at the center had been reduced to slag, and the headless body of one of the croc-men lay sprawled amid their debris. Besides that, over to the sides of the room, two more croc muties were lying in pools of their own blood, spasms running through their sprawled bodies. One was on fire, flames licking up toward the ceiling in a vibrant plume.
“Brigid?” Grant called again, stepping carefully into the room.
“I’m here,” she called back, working the latch of the mat-trans chamber. Grant looked at her.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “Armaglass saved me,” she explained, glancing around the room to see the result of her action for the first time.
“What did you do? Explosive?”
“Rebreather,” Brigid told him. “Just took a spark from a bullet. Oxygen and fire don’t play nice together.”
Grant nodded. “Yeah, I can see that. The mat-trans okay?”
“Should be,” Brigid assured him. “Where’s Kane?”
Grant made a face, then turned and hurried back down the corridor, with Brigid following, toward where they had last seen their partner.
* * *
KANE WORKED THROUGH the egg sacs, delivering a single bullet from his sin eater into each forming creature inside, aborting them before they could be born.
Then he slipped the rebreather over his mouth and paced to where the floor sank beneath the water. He needed to find Grant and Brigid and show them the entrance he had discovered. Could be a lot more trouble yet before they had this pest-hole cleaned up.
They regrouped, then followed Kane back into the water, using the waterproof xenon flashlights to light their way. Grant and Kane still had their rebreathers, but Brigid had sacrificed hers in the struggle with the crocs, so she shared with Grant, taking a breath every fifty seconds while they explored the submerged structure of the redoubt. Brigid was a superb swimmer, and she was adept at holding her breath, using circular breathing techniques to keep from drowning.
They came across no further living muties, although there was a rotting corpse deep below, on the bottom, weighted down with some kind of air-conditioning unit that had been pulled out or broken away from a wall. Brigid speculated that the unit may have fallen on the croc, killing it.
There was something else under there, too: ancient boring machinery, powerful caterpillar tracks and a pointed drill extended before them like a nose. Brigid pointed it out as they swam past. She guessed it dated back to the early days of the Deathlands, when uncontaminated water had been scarce, but technology was still functioning. In that period, people had done anything they could to obtain clean water.
Before long they were back at the place where Kane had awoken after the first attack, the area he had identified as an old sewer pipe.
“Looks like this isn’t the end of it,” he reiterated, pointing to the hole in the wall.
Brigid eyed the ruined egg sacs for a heartfelt moment, wondering at what Kane had done. “They were children,” she said. “You shouldn’t have—”
“They tried to kill me, Baptiste,” Kane snapped back. “Me and you and Grant. No discussion, no explanation. They just dragged me under—”
“Me, too,” Grant added, “or they tried to.”
Brigid shook her head regretfully. “They were probably hungry, living down here like this.”
“Then I sympathize,” Kane said hotly, “but that won’t stop me putting up a fight when something starts chomping down on my leg.”
They left it at that, the atmosphere between the trio strained. Brigid knew Kane was right in one sense. They had come here without any intention to hurt anything, but had been forced to defend themselves. She herself had been cornered and forced to kill three of the strange mutated creatures. Even so, it wouldn’t sit easy with her, especially killing unborn things like the ones Kane had dispatched.
“I wonder what they are,” she said, crouching down to examine the body of the adult that Kane had shot.
“Some kind of mutie,” he replied dismissively.
“This one’s a female,” she told him, and then she indicated the eggs. “Their mother, probably, trying to feed her brood.
“But they’re not a strain of mutie I recognize,” Brigid continued. “They share superficial similarities to scalies, but they’re more animal than that.”
“A new strain?” Grant proposed.
“Could be,” she mused, “but they shouldn’t be appearing like this.”
Kane stepped over to the wide hole and peeked inside. “You think maybe we should go check out the source?” It was obvious he wanted to. That was the reason he had brought them back here.
“Yes, we should,” Brigid agreed, checking and reloading her pistol before she slipped it back into its holster.
With his head still in the hole, Kane called a hearty “Hello-o-o!” and listened for a response. The only thing to come back was the distant echo of his own voice.
“Smart,”
