James Axler - Hell's Maw

HOPE’S BATTLEGROUND

Earth’s secret history of alien occupation is challenged by a powerful alliance of warriors driven to reclaim humanity’s birthright. But when a cruel, vicious ruler spreads a new wave of terror, the Cerberus rebels must fight for their lives.

DEATH BLOOMS

Beautiful, seductive and deadly, she is called Ereshkigal. Her flowerlike temple—eerie and alien—rises out of the desolate, sun-drenched desert of postapocalyptic Spain. The river of blood flowing to her temple doors is just the first sign of the horror to follow. With her army of Terror Priests eager to kill for their queen, Kane, Grant and Brigid must confront her dark power. But Ereshkigal’s power to control men’s lives may prove stronger than anything the Cerberus warriors have ever faced. And this evil interloper will not be satisfied until she has annihilated everything between her and total domination of Earth.

In the center of the room, Ereshkigal strode into the pool of blood

Kane watched her feet and ankles disappear beneath the surface as she entered by a hidden ramp. Her tail of feathers ruffled behind her, and several fluttered away. A trail of bloody feathers dotted across the floor already, like strange markers.

Kane stepped onto the first of the springy, leaf-like steps descending toward the pool, and something struck him from behind. Suddenly, Kane found himself falling, tumbling end over end down the staircase.

He rolled as he reached the bottom, bringing the Sin Eater up as one of Ereshkigal’s Terror Priests leapt from the topmost stair. His torso seemed freakishly long and his limbs stretched impossibly out at his sides like the wings of some bird of prey.

The man was throwing something. Kane saw it flash in the air even as he rolled.

Kane fired.

Across the room, Ereshkigal was still standing in the pool. Blood lapped at her slender hips. She smiled as she fixed Kane with her stare. Her lips moved and she began to speak the words of the chant designed to deliver the equation to the human body—the equation that could kill a man.

Hell’s Maw

James Axler

It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air—there’s the rub, the task.

—Virgil

The Road to Outlands—From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quotes

Road to Outlands

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Epilogue

Copyright

The room was too warm, too dark, and the dry smell of burning dust clung to it possessively.

The small space was made smaller by the drapes that had been hung from the walls and over the doors, patterned in the dark colors of blood and red wine intermingled with the purples and blacks and deepest blues of bruises on human flesh.

The room had no windows. It was located in an underground bunker, a single room in a facility that had once been called Redoubt Mike and had served the US military back in the twentieth century, two hundred years earlier. That name had been cast aside by history now, blown away on the nuclear wind that had reshaped the world and its people.

Where once there had been fluorescent lighting functioning on automated circuits, now there were candles, three dozen of them scattered across every cluttered surface and dotted across the floor like seeds broadcast from a farmer’s hand.

The room was cluttered by an odd selection of mismatched objects, feathers and bones, driftwood and skulls, jars of dried spices and plant roots vying for space along the walls, everything lit by the flicker of candle flames.

Everything here looks worn-out and tired, Nathalie thought as she pushed a hanging scarlet drape aside and strode through the doorway. She was a slim, dark-skinned woman in her twenties, six feet tall with long, bare legs that seemed to flow almost like liquid in the flickering light of the candles. She wore a calfskin jacket that jutted tightly across her breasts, leopard-print shorts and long, black boots that laced up at the back, the corset-like lacing running all the way up to the top of the boots where they sat just below her knees. The knife sheathed at her hip was as long as a man’s forearm and broadened along its length to become wider at its tip. Her hair was an afro of tight black ringlets, encircling her head like some shadowy halo. She wore dyed feathers hanging from her ears, and these seemed to twist and flutter as she entered the room, brushing against the tops of her shoulders. Her face was fixed in a solemn expression that gave nothing away, insouciant mouth unreadable.