Germ Page 43

  The silenced weapons spat and popped.

  Litt screamed. His blood splashed over her. The knife spiraled out of his hand and clanged against the metal hangar wall—a cymbal clash over the dull tones of bullets plunking into the same wall. As soon as his body hit the ground, she flipped around to face the Atroposes.

  They stood in a tight group, their arms straight out in front, clutching pistols that smoked and projected arrows of red light over her head. They shared an expression of vague shock. Then all six eyes flicked to her and the laser beams lowered. The high-pitched whine of motors caught their attention. In unison, they rotated their heads toward the sound.

  For the only time since seeing them together, Julia witnessed a disunity in their actions. Two began swinging their pistols toward the nearest Deadeye; the other reeled back, trying to shift his feet into hyperdrive.

  The Deadeyes roared and vanished in billows of smoke. The Atroposes disappeared too. In a chunky mist of black and red. Sparks flashed as round after round pinged off their pistols. There were so many sparks, she thought later the gauntlets must have been made of metal as well. The men seemed to blur backward, like inked figures smeared by the artist’s hand.

  She closed her eyes.

  The Deadeyes stopped firing. Their barrels continued to spin; they sounded like dentist’s drills. Something wet smacked against the ground.

  She turned away and cautiously ventured into the world of vision. Allen was sitting against the wall, one leg completely off the ground in a posture of defense. His hands gripped his head because they had nothing else to do. His mouth gaped in a silent scream. Moving in miniscule increments, his eyes—too big for his face—settled on her. His mouth closed on a frown, then a bruised tongue poked out and slid over his lips. He swallowed. His hands remained in the air. He started to speak, stopped. Another swallow.

  “Did you actually say,” he asked, wheezing out a thin chuckle, “cure this?”

  ninety-nine

  She had been gone no more than three minutes, and

  when she returned Allen was still propped against the wall. He bore a numb, dull expression and was staring at the spot where the Atroposes had finally met their match. She had tried to avoid glimpsing any of that particular carnage, but the Deadeyes had done their job so thoroughly, everywhere she looked she saw

  something

  of the former assassins.

  “They’re just gone,” he said. “They were here and now they’re not. What kind of person creates a thing that can do that?” He looked up at her. “You lost your jacket. You covered him up?”

  She nodded. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks still wet. “I had to be sure. What if he was … somehow … ?”

  “I can’t imagine those monsters walking away from any adversary who still drew breath.”

  She picked up Litt’s case and sat down beside Allen. The bombs were raining down now, pouring into craters where the Quonsets had been. They had to leave quickly, but an equally pressing needed demanded her attention. She squared Litt’s case on her lap. There was a single drop of blood near the handle.

  She said, “Was he telling the truth, do you think?”

  473

  “One way to find out.”

  She could tell he was in great pain. His breathing sounded sloppy and wet. Still, he displayed more vigor than he had ten minutes before. Eyeing Litt’s body, sprawled flat on its back an arm’s reach away, she understood how he felt. She hoped he could hold on to the energy awhile longer. She worried about her ability to carry him to safety if he couldn’t walk.

  She took a deep breath, popped the latches, and opened the case. Mounted to the inside of the lid were two rows of stainless steel vials. Small labels identified their contents: “Ebola Kugel 4212A”; “Ebola Kugel 521 IF”; “Ebola Kugel 3294B” … The last one on the right was twice the size of the others. “EK Antiserum.”

  “That’s it,” Allen said.

  “Do you think it’s an actual antidote, not just his blood? Doesn’t it take years to develop?”

  “He told me he had an antidote. Antiserum’s the same thing.”

  The bottom portion of the case contained a square metal box, what appeared to be bankbooks, passports, identification, and other documents. She opened the box. Inside were roughly two dozen memory chips in plastic cases.

  “The formula for Ebola Kugel?” she wondered.

  “Or digitized DNA records. Blackmail material. Financial transactions. Could be anything.”

  A jet streaked overhead, low. A thunderous blast shook the hangar. They realized it had emanated from the front of the hangar, much closer than the others.

  She slammed the lid closed. “Come on.”

  “Wait.” With some difficulty, he reopened the case, plucked three vials of Ebola from the metal tongs that held them, and tossed them toward Litt’s body.

  “Don’t—” She stopped herself. Of course he was right. Nothing good could ever come from those vials. She reached in, removed the remaining vials—all but the antiserum—and tossed them onto Litt’s chest.

  “You think they’ll be destroyed?” Allen asked.

  A missile shrieked into the jungle and exploded. Noises of a million varying pitches and tones collided with each other, forming one bellowing scream.

  “Witness the wrath of Kendrick,” she said. “If he wanted to take down Litt and get his research, he’d have sent in a platoon of commandos.” She thought a moment. “Actually, that’s what I expected. No, he wants Litt and his germ destroyed. He won’t stop until this entire place is a wasteland. Bet on it.”

  She removed the memory chips from the case and tossed those too. She pulled out the documents. He stopped her. From the sheaf in her hand, he extracted a stack of hundred-dollar bills. It must have been three inches thick.

  “For Stephen’s church,” he said. He dropped the money back into the case and pushed against the wall to stand.

  She closed the case and stood. As she reached for Allen, an explosion rocked the ground and she toppled into him. They hit the dirt hard. Then the neighboring hangar blew apart. Roiling clouds of fire and smoke flung jagged panels of sheet metal and twisted beams into the air. The hangar they leaned against lost a wall and started collapsing.

  “Hurry!” She pulled Allen’s arm around her shoulder and heaved him forward in a stumbling run.

  On the other side of the chain-link fence, a huge tree instantly ignited and crashed down, crushing one of the Deadeyes and a section of fence. Heated air shoved them against the wall. Allen yelled out in pain and dropped to one knee, but he pressed on. She could feel him drawing determination from his physical distress, turning the agony into fuel that powered his fight for survival.

  Together, they scrambled behind the hangars, awkward as shackled prisoners not yet attuned to each other’s rhythm and gait. They tottered into a wall, pushed off, and stumbled forward another dozen paces before falling into the wall again. Instead of turning into the alley through which she had pursued Litt, she led Allen farther south: he did not need to see the body whose head and upper torso she had covered.

  The explosions were no longer demarcated in an easily avoided region but seemed to be everywhere, ripping apart the compound’s central area, its hangars and Quonsets. She thought the pounding was less severe on the south side of the base near the mineshaft. Or was that just wishful thinking?

  She considered escaping through the main gate and along the dirt road where the compound’s workers had gone. But she didn’t know how far Kendrick would go to eliminate Litt’s threat. After pulverizing the compound, might he then start on the road, with the intention of catching up to the fleeing masses? She wouldn’t put it past him.

  No, she and Allen would leave the way she and Stephen had arrived. If God thought they’d had enough adversity for one day, Tate would be waiting for them with his truck.

  At the dilapidated motor pool, they turned west. Across the field, several of the Quonset huts lay smashed
and burning. Dense black smoke rose from a crater in the field. Julia had the feeling this opening was intended as a gateway into the underground complex for the kind of building-crushing, concrete-melting, de-atomizing ordnance civilians couldn’t even imagine. She stepped up their pace, now pulling him along as well as supporting him. The sight of the Dumpsters spurred her on.

  As they passed the guard shacks and entrance gate, a horrendous explosion behind them slammed them to the ground. An army truck sailed over their heads and landed upside down twenty feet away. Its tires were on fire. She rolled over and saw that the motor pool building they had passed—and fallen against—was now a blazing ruin. She rubbed a sudden pain in her shoulder and found her fingers sticky with blood.

  Helping Allen to his feet, she steered him around the truck and limped and pulled and hopped the short distance to the trash area. The huge container near the shaft had been knocked over by a blast and partially covered the hole. If Stephen had replaced the lid when they crawled out, she and Allen could never have pried it up again. But he hadn’t.

  “This is it. Watch your step.”

  Allen raised his head and peered into the heart of the dying base. “I wish we didn’t have to leave Stephen,” he said.

  “He’s not really here, Allen.” Through breaks in the smoke, she could make out the growing flyspecks of approaching planes.

  “I know,” he said.

  Putrid slime had oozed from the toppled Dumpster and pooled around the shaft. He lowered his body into this muck, doing so without complaint, and squeezed into the hole. She warned him about the rung that had snapped under Stephen’s weight, then lowered herself into the slime and over the rim.

  Somewhere she had lost her flashlight, and the other one had fallen to its death. She supposed they could follow the walls to the opening. What was slime, what was darkness next to the things they had gone through?

  An explosion shook the shaft. Julia imagined they were in the gullet of a growling beast. Rung after rung they descended, Julia stopping every few moments to let Allen pull ahead. Finally she heard him drop the last few feet to the floor. He groaned.

  “You all right?”

  “Depends on what you mean.” His voice was weak.

  “Are you clear—”

  The top of the shaft erupted. Concrete chucks punched into Julia’s shoulders and head, and she fell. She landed on her back over a boulder, knocking the wind out of her lungs. She gasped, getting a mouthful of dirt. The shaft roared above her. It was breaking up and coming down. She was paralyzed—with fear … with pain … with the prospect of death. She felt a harsh tug on her arm. She came painfully off the boulder and bounded over smaller rocks. Allen was pulling her, rising up and falling backward, using the momentum of each plunge to drag her away from the cave-in.

  “Aaahhg!” he yelled with every tug. “Aaahhg!”

  The collapsing earth slowed, then stopped. Silt rained down, hissing against the huge mound of rubble, like the sizzle of molten lava. A gaping chimney as wide as a silo bore up through the earth where the shaft had been. Sunlight pushed through the dust-choked air, casting a weak, murky glow over the place Julia and Allen sprawled.

  The opening rumbled once more, the light disappeared, and something big crashed down, bringing with it grave-sized slabs of earth as it slammed against the sides of the hole. Then the Dumpster struck the rubble and tumbled into the mine. It landed so close to Julia, she could have reached out and touched it. Trash erupted from the container, covering them in the foulest stench ever to lay hold of Julia’s nose.

  Gagging and coughing, they pulled each other up and stumbled away. Just before daylight completely succumbed to the blackness of the mine, Allen leaned down and picked up a dinged and dust-coated flashlight. He shook it, coaxing a weak light from it.

  They shuffled into the mine’s inky coolness.

  Behind them, someone coughed.

  Out of the cloudy air emerged a figure, hazy, blurred. The first thing Julia distinguished was a pistol. Pointed at them. Then the arm that held it. A foot, a leg, stepping forward. The face revealed itself last.

  “Gregor,” Allen said, nearly choking on the word.

  The older man’s hair was matted with blood. It flowed past his eye and down the side of his face. But his eyes were clear, his gait strong. He strode directly to them, raised his pistol, and backhanded it into Allen’s forehead. Allen crashed against the wall and fell to the ground, motionless.

  Julia lashed out, but too fast the gun was in her face, pressed into her temple. Gregor brought his free arm around to the back of her neck, holding her in place. He pressed himself against her. Chest to chest, cheek to cheek, he spoke into her ear.

  “In the end, I win.”

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “What I do not want”—the malice in his voice was as plain as the stink of vomit on his breath—“is to chat.”

  She had recognized his weapon—the popular 1911 Colt .45. Though it was a semiautomatic, it sported a hammer that required cocking. His thumb pulled back on that hammer now.

  “We know where Litt’s money is … and his serum, the Ebola antidote.” It was all she could think to say.

  Just buy time, she thought.

  She didn’t know if the words that would save their lives would come to mind. She didn’t know if he’d move an inch or look away and grant her a chance to plant an elbow in his throat. What she did know was that once he pulled the trigger, it was over. No more chances. No more hope.

  Gregor pushed the barrel harder into her temple. “They’re in the briefcase,” he said. “I am not a fool.”

  But he sounded unsure.

  Over Gregor’s shoulder, she could see Allen. He stirred, then raised his head. He touched his hand to the tunnel wall behind him and pulled it away quickly. He was in front of an oddly flat section of wall, lighter in color from the surrounding rock surfaces. She saw a flicker of light at the floor, smoke streaming out, as if from a volcanic vent.

  It was the fire door Tate had described, the abandoned emergency exit. Apparently a blast had taken out the second door Tate had said was at the end of a long corridor beyond this one. If she read Allen’s reaction correctly, the door was scalding hot. She thought of the maelstrom of flame and heat that must be on the other side.

  “Drop the case,” Gregor said.

  “The vials might break.”

  “Just drop it.”

  She did. It struck her foot and tipped over.

  Allen caught her eye. He jerked his head to the side: Move! He raised his hand toward the door handle.

  She shook her head gently.

  He nodded, disagreeing. Of course.

  “I already removed the vial,” she told Gregor.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Look for yourself. Then I’ll take you to it.”

  He glanced down at the case. His arm came away from her neck.

  “Back up slowly,” he said. The barrel of his gun never wavered from her face.

  She took a step back, then another.

  He bent at the knees, keeping his aim and his eyes on her, reaching for the case.

  She turned and dived, hit the floor and rolled.

  Allen opened the door. Angry flames roared into the tunnel, growling like a beast as they sucked up oxygen and expanded at lightning speed.

  Squinting, squatting, backpedaling away, Julia watched the fire engulf Gregor. It slammed him against the opposite wall and fanned out in both directions. As it lost momentum, flames fell to the floor, burning in a wide swath from the door across the width of the mine and ending at Gregor’s burning corpse.

  Julia’s sneakers and the bottoms of her pant legs were ablaze. She kicked and rolled and finally sat on them to extinguish the flames. She quickly stood, feeling the pain of scorched flesh, and looked around.

  “Allen!”

  He was thirty feet farther into the mine. His hair was smoking, his shirt was on fire, and he wasn’t moving
. She threw herself on top of him and ran her hands through his hair.

  “Is this your idea of romance?” he whispered.

  She gripped his head between her hands, leaned close. “I can’t believe you did that.”

  “I didn’t know the door was going to just slam open like that. It batted me like a pinball flipper.”

  “If it hadn’t, you’d have ended up like … what’s-his-name.”

  “Gregor. Is he … ?”

  “Oh yeah.” She paused. “Thank you.” A tear dropped from her eye and landed on his cheek. It left a white streak on his sooty skin.

  “None of that, now,” he said. “You’ll ruin my image of you.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “Oh, someone who could take my lunch money anytime she wanted to.”

  “I can.”

  They laughed, more relieved than humored. It didn’t last long. There were too many hurts on too many levels.

  She lifted him, and he pretended to help. They made their way to the mouth of the mine leaning against each other, finally in perfect sync. The opening was bright and covered with green leaves. They stumbled to it and did not pause when they reached its lip.

  Together, they fell into the cool arms of the jungle.

  epilogue

  His eyes fluttered against the stark sunlight breaching the blinds in his hospital room. As he came awake and his vision adjusted, he saw the blinds were wide Venetians, dated and dusty. The walls were drab brown and unadorned, except for wall-mounted medical instruments. Somewhere, an EKG machine beeped.

  Allen took a deep breath. For the first time in as long as he could remember, nothing inside hurt.

  He turned his head to examine the room, which looked different outside the veil of pain-and medication-induced grogginess that had enveloped him for … for … a long time. Perhaps the room seemed changed only because he wasn’t only seeing it now but was finally lucid enough to pass judgment on it. He didn’t like it much: an empty metal tray on wheels, stained acoustic ceiling tiles, the ugly walls.

  He brought his vision around to the other side of the bed and lit on a startlingly beautiful sight among the stale blandness: Julia Matheson’s beaming face.