Beside him, a body floated past, a tanned man with a gaping wound across his belly, guts spewing forth like the writhing tentacles of an octopus.
“Better you than me,” Black John muttered as the body floated away, even as the deck disappeared beneath his feet, covered by a carpet of ocean.
Beneath his feet, La Segunda Montaña finally sank from view, leaving Black John floating alongside six dead bodies on the ocean waves.
Black John was a pirate and sadist, but most of all he was a survivor. He would survive this. Somehow he would survive and bring bloody revenge on the crew that had betrayed him.
Chapter 3
The God War was over.
The mop-up, however—now, that would take a little longer.
Kane, Grant and Edwards stepped out of the rain and made their way past the open double doors of the old aircraft hangar and into the grumbling crowd that waited beyond. Within, close to forty or fifty people were waiting, the muttering sounds of their voices echoing from the high ceiling.
“Just like old times, isn’t it?” Kane said under his breath as the three men entered the huge room.
Edwards nodded. “Yeah, it’s a regular triple-P, all right.”
“Triple-P” was slang for a Pedestrian Pit Patrol, a task all three men had had to perform in their past lives as Magistrates for ville authorities, lives all three had put behind them.
At some point in time, the building they entered had been used to store aircraft and automobiles, playthings of the very rich. That was before the nukecaust had changed the rules of the world, and civilization had been dealt such a blow that it had seemed for a while as if it might never recover. Even now, two hundred years later, these places still existed, abandoned and almost forgotten, relics of a bygone age just waiting to be put to use once more.
The ceiling dripped rainwater through gaping holes, and what glass remained in the windows was white with birds’ droppings. Right now, even as the orderly crowd gathered, the sound of pigeons cooing trilled through the building, a sonic bed that was almost subliminal in its constancy.
Kane glanced up at the ceiling, watching for a moment as two pigeons took flight one after the other, a third joining them a moment later, weaving through the high girders that held the roof in place in a fluttering of gray feathers. The crowd ignored them.
In his early thirties, Kane was a tall man with a strong build that even his loose denim jacket could not disguise. With wide shoulders and rangy limbs, his physique resembled that of a wolf. He had the nature of a wolf, too, both a loner and pack leader depending on what the fates threw at him. His dark hair was cropped short and he was clean shaved for the first time in more than a month. As an ex-Magistrate, Kane was one of the enforcers of the now-fallen baronies that had dominated the former United States. He had been exiled from the barony of Cobaltville after stumbling upon a conspiracy that had threatened the very integrity of the system he was pledged to protect. Exiled along with his Magistrate partner Grant and archivist Brigid Baptiste, Kane had been recruited into the Cerberus operation in its infancy. Ever since, he had been battling against the Annunaki threat to Earth in all its myriad forms, and most recently he had taken down Ullikummis in a battle that raged not simply across Earth but through multiple planes of reality. Standing in a decrepit aircraft hangar amid a gaggle of other humans, Kane was glad to get back to something approaching normality once more.
The two men walking at Kane’s side were similarly intimidating men. The first of these was Grant, Kane’s longtime brother-in-arms whose relationship with Kane dated from way back to his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate. Tall and broad-shouldered, Grant was an imposing figure with ebony skin and not so much as an ounce of fat on his body. His hair was shaved close to his skull, and he had sported his trademark gunslinger’s mustache. In his mid-thirties, Grant wore a long black duster made from Kevlar weave. The coat skimmed the tops of his boots, giving him a funereal look.
The other man was called Edwards, who was similarly well built. He had chosen to forgo a jacket, leaving his rippling arm muscles cinched beneath the tight sleeves of his dark cotton shirt. He was closer in age to Kane. Like Grant, his hair was shaved close to his skull, drawing attention to his bullet-bitten right ear. During the war with Ullikummis, Edwards had been duped into acting in the interests of the enemy through a hidden implant in his skull. That implant had been removed via ultrasonic surgery just four days earlier, but Edwards was in the field already—determined, as he put it, to make up for lost time. Kane and Grant kept an eye on him, neither of them sure that he could be fully trusted yet.
There was a fourth Cerberus agent in the room, an albino woman called Domi who had been tracking down information about this meeting for several days. She had patched through to Cerberus just a few hours before, confirming the time and location and giving the go-ahead for the others to move in.
The meeting itself was in the West Coast territory of the old United States of America, just forty miles from the majestic settlement of Luikkerville. Built on the ruins of Snakefishville, Luikkerville was a city constructed from faith, its populace enthralled by the preachings of Ullikummis and his followers. News of Ullikummis’s passing had done little to temper that burgeoning faith in the region, and Domi was there to ensure it remained at a manageable level. Where the Annunaki were involved, that was often easier said than done.
The crowd numbered close to fifty, and they came from all walks of life, all ages and ethnicities. But there was a definite atmosphere in the room. Kane could sense an atmosphere of dissatisfaction and mistrust, the belief that some great betrayal had occurred. Their god was dead.
Kane and his team continued moving through the crowd, splitting up with assured casualness as they lost themselves amid the ragtag congregation.
“...brother died,” Kane heard one of the crowd complain as he walked past. “Disappeared in a warp and never came back.”
“Yeah,” his companion agreed. “Same thing happened to my cousin. Ain’t seen him since Sunday.”
Kane moved on, gently pushing the occasional crowd member aside as he found a good vantage point to view the raised stage that dominated one end of the room.
Elsewhere within the crowd, Grant and Edwards made similar progress, making their way through the throng without drawing attention to themselves. All three men were trained Magistrates and they knew how to work through a crowd, walking with that inherent authority and challenge to their step that made others move aside.
A simple podium had been erected at one end of the hangar, just boards raised on piled blocks, and Kane, Grant and Edwards took their places as a woman stepped up onto it with the help of a man in a hooded robe. The robe was made of rough hessian material, and it featured a red shield insignia over the left breast. Kane winced as he recognized the design. Just a few years before, he and his colleagues had worn something similar in their roles as Magistrates; this new religion had appropriated much of the iconography of the dying villes in its manipulation of the populace. The woman looked to be in her late twenties, with mouse-brown hair to which she had added streaks of purple like an anarchic road map. She walked with a shuffle to her step, and Kane saw she carried a little extra weight around her middle beneath the loose, floaty dress she wore. The dress was white, and it billowed around her as it caught the drafts from the broken windows, clinging to her legs as she took each step.
To the side of the podium, two more of the robed Magistrate stand-ins waited, their hoods down revealing their emotionless expressions. They were
