'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.
