Germ Read online

  “Go,” Stephen pleaded again, his voice weak and raspy, and her heart ached at the realization that she must obey. It would be crueler not to.

  Her fingers, bent grotesquely backward, throbbed and spewed blood. Her forearm felt as though a truck had parked on it, but she pushed the pain down into a black well, where its screams for attention echoed flatly and carried no weight.

  She could not get another clear shot. She recognized determination in Stephen’s eyes. He wanted everything they’d gone through to matter. Allen’s trauma; her efforts and grief; Donnelley’s death; the deaths of so many others, ones they knew about and more they didn’t; Stephen’s own … offering now—he wanted it all to make a difference, if not to bring good, then to stop evil. She understood. And she knew hesitating would ruin it all, would make futile the blood and tears. She lowered the pistol and gave him a soft nod. She was biting her lip, reopening the wound, tasting the blood. She felt like a small child trying to be brave.

  He attempted a smile, but his quivering lips could not hold it. So he held her eyes a moment longer and nodded back, firm, sure.

  Again she pulled at Allen. He stood on shaky legs and let her take some of his weight. Then she started backing away.

  “No, wait,” Allen pleaded.

  “We have to stop Litt,” she whispered without taking her eyes off Stephen and his captors. The Atroposes stared, knowing they had won.

  “I can’t leave him,” Allen said. “Not like this.”

  “It’s what he wants, Allen. If we don’t go now, we won’t stop Litt and Stephen will have—” She restructured the thought. “All of this will be in vain.”

  “Stephen! I love you!” he cried.

  And Stephen did smile, a big ain’t-everything-just-dandy grin. It was ecstasy to witness, a cool shower on sweat-soaked skin. Julia thanked him silently for that. Then she tugged again at Allen. He yielded and took a few steps backward with her. He turned away then, apparently wanting to remember the smile, not the aftermath.

  One of the Atroposes aimed his pistol at them. Stephen noticed and knocked his forehead into the weapon. He head-slammed the Atropos directly behind him, managed to pull an arm free, then a leg. He grabbed, punched, kicked, and berated the three Atroposes into leaving the other two alone for now. She had the idea. This, after all, was not for pay; this was personal. No one cared whether this “hit” was clean and quick. They cared that it was messy and drawn out. And their arrogance, borne of a skill that could do nothing but breed arrogance, would convince them they could take their prey at their leisure. Never mind the air strike; they were here for revenge.

  “He’s getting away,” Allen said, his voice flat.

  She turned and saw Litt crossing in front of a hangar. She squeezed off three rapid shots. Small explosions erupted in the dirt around him. He jerked to a stop, turned, and fell. He scooped the case up and disappeared into the space between two hangars.

  “Slowed him down,” Allen rasped.

  “We have to move faster.”

  “Go on ahead of me. I’ll catch up.”

  But before she could stop herself, she glanced back. Her blood congealed. Stephen was on his knees. An Atropos was holding each of his arms straight out from his body, crosslike. Another Atropos stood behind him, raising a gauntleted fist, focused on the back of Stephen’s head. Her heart kicked against her breastbone. She swung the pistol around, but too late. The gauntlet came down, firm and straight as a piston.

  Stephen crumbled. The two holding him let go, and he fell: no resistance, no spasms, no life.

  Julia let loose an animal roar that rubbed her throat raw and rose to the pitch of the siren so that it seemed to go on and on long after she closed her mouth. The Atroposes, standing around their downed foe, rotated their heads to peer at her. It was one thing to accept death, quite another to see it. She tried to steady the heavy weapon it held and pulled the trigger. Again. And again. After five wild shots, she forced her finger to stop. Her shots had not stirred the Atroposes at all; they stood like wax figures, staring.

  She spun away from them. She caught up with Allen, who was stumbling and falling, loping across the field. She was nearly panting, afraid she’d never draw enough air again.

  “Is he—?” he asked.

  “Don’t look back.” She hitched in a breath. Ten rounds, she thought, her mind flailing for something sturdy. No, eleven. The first took out the light above Atropos’s head. Then two as she ran from Atropos, three at Litt, and five more at Stephen’s killers. Eleven. The Sig held thirteen rounds, plus one in the chamber. She had three left. Enough to turn Litt inside out.

  She bolted for the gap between the hangars.

  ninety-seven

  Karl Litt loped behind the hangars. Off in the jungle, not far from the last hangar, was a shed that housed his Hummer. He could feel the heat of the burning hangars and smell the smoke. Flecks of ash fluttered in his eyes, and he brushed them away. The perimeter fence was a mere thirty yards to his right, and just beyond he could see trees ablaze like pillars of fire. If he had gauged the air strikes correctly, Kendrick’s screaming war machine had completed phase two, the tomography bombs. Somewhere overhead, a plane’s radar was reading the results and constructing a map of the underground complex. It wouldn’t be long before the last and most destructive attack would begin.

  He felt the sting before he heard the shot. Then the fire—his ear was on fire! He dropped his briefcase and grabbed his ear. Felt blood and the ragged, tingling edge where the top of his ear was gone.

  I shot his ear off, she thought.

  Julia stood watching Litt over the sights of her pistol. Delicate tendrils of smoke seeped from the barrel and the notch of the ejection port. He was touching the wound and probably had no idea what had just happened. She had aimed for the center of his back, and he was only forty yards away; she’d won an Academy tournament on a range ten yards longer. But she was using her injured hand. Extending out the broken middle and ring fingers instead of wrapping them around the grip made for shaky shooting. She bent her elbows and drew the pistol closer to her face. With her left hand supporting her shooting hand, she centered her sights between his shoulder blades.

  He turned and raised his hands in surrender.

  Her finger tightened on the trigger. She imagined the bullet striking the lapel over his heart. She had the shot.

  She let her grip relax, and the barrel dipped. She couldn’t do it. She could not shoot an unarmed man in the act of surrendering. Even soldiers took prisoners on the battlefield, didn’t they? Wasn’t it part of the Geneva Convention? But what would she do with him? If she tied him up or knocked him out or disabled him somehow, he’d die in the air strike. That would be no better than shooting him now. If she took his case and let him escape, would he find a way to continue killing, to perhaps even duplicate the work he’d done here? How would she live with herself then? And if she actually took him in custody, how far would they get—she and the gravely ill Allen—before he got the upper hand and murdered them both?

  “You have no choice. Do it.”

  At first she thought the words were her own, so persuasive as to sound like whispers in her ear. Then she realized they’d come from Allen, who was slowly, painfully moving up behind her. He came into her peripheral vision on her left, scraping along the wall of the hangar, sucking in wet breaths.

  “Julia,” he groaned. “Think of … the deaths … he’s responsible for. Think of … your partner. Think of Ste … Ste …”

  He sobbed then—or coughed; she couldn’t tell. But it didn’t matter, because she was thinking of Donnelley, she was thinking of Stephen. She braced herself, feeling the muscles in her face, especially around her mouth and brow, pinch tight. She brought the barrel back in line with Litt’s chest.

  “You’d only be killing yourselves!” Litt called.

  She held her position. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning—”

  His left hand moved—he was holding something.
How could she not have noticed? In the moment between seeing the movement and deciding to shoot, she heard a machine kick into gear: clack-clack-clack-clack-clack … Fast, like an anchor chain reeling out to the ocean floor. She shifted her vision to see a contraption on the jungle side of the chain-link fence spin around. A Gatling-style cluster of barrels jutting from its body now pointed not out toward the jungle but inward toward them. When it stopped, she continued hearing the sound for a second longer. She turned to see another of these weapons— Tate had called them Deadeyes—pointing its barrels almost directly at her. She remembered Tate saying soldiers controlled them with remotes, and they could be programmed to monitor certain regions around them. She had just witnessed the redirecting of these two, from outward, where a sniper would fire into the compound, to the compound itself, where she and Allen stood. She had no doubt that either Deadeye was capable of blowing them away, regardless of where along this strip between the hangars and the jungle they were.

  “Meaning, if you fire your weapon, my mechanical friends will annihilate you both.” He smiled and lowered his arms.

  Had Tate not warned them of these anti-sniper weapons, she probably would have called his bluff.

  He continued: “Their response is instantaneous—”

  Three seconds, she remembered.

  “—and their field of fire is quite broad. You can’t elude them. I’ve seen people try.” As he spoke, he squatted and picked up the silver briefcase. Then he took a tentative step back.

  “Just … stop!” she screamed through gritted teeth. He did. She took a step forward. He stepped back. Another step for each of them. Her mind had told her she could not shoot him, and she held to that mandate. But she nearly forgot why he was off-limits, and she came within a half pound of trigger pressure of squeezing off a warning round. She pushed the back of her finger against the trigger guard to keep it ready but safe.

  “Litt! I said stop! I mean it. Don’t think I won’t end it all right here, right now.”

  She walked forward, and this time he held his ground. Behind her, Allen pushed himself along the wall of the hangar.

  “Allen, stay there. Don’t move.”

  “If you go, I go,” he said weakly. She knew he was referring to a longer journey than the distance to Litt. “Besides, he … probably killed me anyway.” He spat a red glob into the dirt. “Julia, you can get out of this. I know you can.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “No. But I know you. You’ll figure something out.”

  “You’re giving me too much credit. I’m stumped.”

  They reached a gap between hangars. Allen hesitated and Julia moved close to him, not taking her eyes or her aim off Litt. “You’re not up for this,” she said.

  “I’m feeling better. Really.” He groaned, but she thought he did look stronger. Something inside was fighting hard. “Stephen shot me full of adrenaline. I’m feeling it.”

  “Take my shoulder, but don’t jar me too much. If this is it for us, I want to take him along.”

  “I believe he’s going the other direction.” He grabbed hold of her and gently shifted a measure of weight to her.

  They crossed the gap and he let go to continue his sad slide along the wall. They had halved the distance to Litt. This near, she could make out the blood that coated the remainder of his ear and where he had smeared it on his jaw and neck. It was stark against the whiteness of his face. Closer, she noticed that a scarlet trickle had followed his jawbone and formed a bead on his chin like a tiny goatee. An explosion hurled debris against the hangar hard enough to shake the entire wall, but she resisted the temptation to look. Hot air billowed her hair. The air strike had taken a giant step toward them.

  A body length from Litt, she stopped. She pointed her gun at the left lens of his black sunglasses.

  “You’re not going to use that thing,” he said, smiling thinly.

  “In a heartbeat.”

  In her peripheral vision, she saw Allen slide down the wall, grunting when he hit the ground. He held one shoulder out at an uncomfortable angle, as if trying not to completely collapse. His head drooped; he appeared to have spotted something fascinating in the dirt. Litt appraised him.

  “Well, Dr. Parker. Did you enjoy your stay with us?”

  “You’re a sick man, Litt,” Julia said, not sure what to do next.

  “So I’ve been told. Something about the pointless death of his family will do that to a man.”

  “That’s what this is about? Revenge?”

  “When you put it that way, it does sound petty, doesn’t it?”

  They were both stalling, trying to figure a way out.

  “Other people have lost loved ones. They don’t kill thousands in retaliation.”

  “I’m not other people.”

  Keeping his lenses pointed at her, he placed the remote control device into the breast pocket of his lab coat.

  “Don’t move. Not even a finger.” Julia said, poking the gun at him. Her upper torso leaned into the movement.

  “Or what, you’ll shoot? Of course, you could pistol-whip me. Would you like that? Maybe this will dissuade you.” His hand came out of the pocket with something that looked like a harmonica—

  My mind’s not working right, she thought. And if that’s true, we’re not going to survive.

  Then a fat blade snapped out of the end. He held a stiletto.

  ninety-eight

  Litt began casually stirring the air with the knife.

  It looked utterly ridiculous in his bony fingers, but she wasn’t going to bet the farm he didn’t know how to use it. That he kept it in motion told her something; a moving weapon was the hardest to take away.

  “Don’t worry, I have no intention of attacking you. I merely desire the same courtesy.”

  She raced through her options: Shoot and die … Jump him and risk the blade … Follow him and hope they moved out of the Deadeyes’ sensors. The hangars all had people-sized rear doors. Litt could easily back to a door, then duck in and lock it before she could reach him. By the time she raced around, he’d be gone again. Maybe he had a plane waiting. Or a car. Something with bulletproof windows and bulletproof everything. If she attacked, he might cut her down and get away. The only certain way to stop him was to shoot.

  But he didn’t move; he watched her.

  “You’re the one, aren’t you?” he said. “The information on the chip. You modified it. Hacked it, as they say.”

  She felt herself smile.

  “Oh, you are cunning. The president’s family was never targeted. You added them.”

  “As you said, best not mess with a man’s family.”

  A plane flew over, followed by a tremendous explosion. It had hit well away from them, where the Quonsets were or even farther. Still, the ground shook hard enough to make Julia’s feet unsteady for a few moments. Silt and ash drifted down on them. A hot wind blew past.

  “Kendrick’s final wave,” Litt announced. “Annihilation of the base. We’d better resolve this, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not letting you leave.”

  “I can help him, you know.” He cocked his head at Allen. “All of them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ebola. I have the cure.”

  She didn’t know whether to believe him. She wanted to see his eyes, but his glasses were too dark.

  “It’s reversible,” he said, “at least in the early stages. Many people have recovered, even after experiencing severe hemorrhagic symptoms. Once the virus is gone, the body repairs itself rather quickly. The cure restores and accelerates intravascular coagulation, which give the endothelial cells time to reform.”

  She could not risk a glance at Allen, but she knew he looked as if a truck had hit him. That was repairable?

  Her doubt must have shown on her face. Litt said, “Even Dr. Parker has a chance. On the scale of heart failure due to the Ebola virus, he is on the early side. His organs have not failed, but his heart is respo
nding to the blood loss and hypotension. He has a chance,” he repeated, “with this.” He tapped the metal case with his toe.

  Then she saw it: movement reflected in his glasses. Silhouettes of legs moving, heads bobbing, a swinging arm. The Atroposes were behind her, approaching slowly.

  Litt was stalling, saying, “You can save his life. I’ll give you the cure; you let me walk away. Simple as that.”

  A red light, as small as a paper cut, appeared among the reflected cluster of Atroposes. As it bounced and jiggled, another appeared … then another. The laser sites. They were turning on their pistols’ lasers, and the smoke was making them visible. She counted three bodies, three lasers.

  They won’t risk my hearing them. They’re going to shoot sooner, not later.

  “In fact,” Litt said, “I’ll get you two out of here, drop you off at the hospital in …”

  They don’t know about the Deadeyes, and Litt isn’t going to tell them. Their lives for his … what does he have to think about? And they don’t care that Litt will go down with me, perhaps killed by the same bullets that kill me. No honor among thieves. Or murderers.

  The silhouettes were now indistinguishable from the other shadow-and-light patterns on the lens, but the tiny red beams dancing at their sides were clear as neon. She remembered the shooting styles of the Atroposes she’d seen in action: they didn’t pause, they didn’t take time to aim. They didn’t have to—they were marksmen. When they raised their weapons, they shot. One-second warning. No more.

  “… after that, I started producing antibodies.”

  “What?”

  “It comes from my blood. The cure.”

  His glasses reflected what she had been waiting for: the lines of lasers rose and shortened as the Atroposes raised their pistols. The short lines of the beams became pinpricks.

  “Cure this,” she said and dropped to the ground.