Judgment Plague

HUMAN OFFENSIVE

Though the Cerberus Rebels have battled unfathomable odds to defend mankind, victory and sovereignty remain far from assured. As enemies of otherworldly origin push the warriors’ power to the limit, a very human menace emerges, eager to grind them all to dust.

DOOMSDAY CONTAGION

Brothers-in-arms Kane and Grant upheld the inflexible laws of Cobaltville until they finally turned their backs on its wicked regime. Now a fresh threat brings them back to the barony—a mysterious plague that kills with impunity. It soon becomes clear that this murderous pestilence isn’t the result of some random mutation, but the product of a dark and twisted mind. With the disease spreading rapidly, the Cerberus warriors can only hope they’re not too late—or too vulnerable—to save humanity from being snuffed out by one of its own.

“Grant, wake up,” Brigid said, shaking the man by his shoulder

Please be alive, she thought. Please be alive.

Grant shifted a little with the force of Brigid’s shaking, then his eyes flickered open and he smiled. “What? Did I miss something?” he asked. His voice sounded weak and quiet, like he had just woken up, and his eyes were bloodshot.

“I thought you were zoning out on me,” Brigid said, smiling briefly. “Don’t do that again.”

Grant began to reply, but the words were lost as he began coughing. He rolled on his side and covered his mouth with his hand. When he drew his hand away it was spattered in black spittle. “Wh-what is this?” he asked, bewildered. He didn’t sound like an ex-Magistrate to Brigid anymore—he sounded like a lost child, frightened by something he didn’t understand.

“I think you may have become infected,” Brigid said, hating the words as they left her mouth, as if saying them had somehow made it happen, made it real. “That one who jumped you, he…spat at you.”

Judgment Plague

Outlanders

James Axler

It is better to murder during time of plague.

—English Proverb

What, will these hands ne’er be clean?

—William Shakespeare, Macbeth

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, D.C. 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.