Spiral

She had killed Vlad at close range, without a thought. She had tortured Liam Connor in an unimaginably gruesome fashion. She would set off a pandemic as easily as another might kill a fly.

She could not be allowed to have the cylinder.

Jake glanced at Dylan. He was watching everything closely, intently. He was terrified but still very aware of his surroundings. He knew something was coming. He was ready.

“Give it to me,” Orchid said to Jake. “Or he will pay.”

“All right,” Jake said, swinging his arm back. “Here. Catch.”

Jake tossed the cylinder.

For Jake, the world slowed to quarter speed. Orchid reached out with her free hand. She couldn’t help it, the desire to catch from the air what she most desired. But the cylinder was outside of her grasp. Jake had not tossed it to Orchid. He tossed it toward Dylan.

Orchid lost her focus for just a split second. Her gun hand drifted slightly. Jake was already moving toward her. She was off balance now, trying to recover, and she overcompensated. She tried to do two things at once. She tried to bring the gun back to Jake and fire. And she simultaneously went to tap out the sequence on her leg to shock him.

Twice meant neither. Both were slowed by a split second. The split second that Jake gained was enough. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake saw Dylan catch the cylinder. At the same instant, Orchid fired, but the bullet missed, screaming past Jake’s right ear.

Jake caught her square and they both went down, the gun skittering away across the concrete. Jake landed a blow on her cheek. He felt the crunch of bone, and she seemed to go limp, her hands at her sides.

Zap! The electricity hit him like a hammer, every nerve in his body firing at once. He fought it, forcing himself to focus through the fireworks going off in his head. He felt as though his entire body were on fire.

He grabbed her right hand and pulled her fingers back, breaking at least one of them. He gritted his teeth, growling through them to keep focused, and tapped her broken hand against her leg, trying to reproduce the sequence that would stop the electric shocks. He smashed her hand again and again against her leg, losing his ability to think. He held on to her tightly, but she was like an eel in his grasp, twisting and turning.

“Dylannn, ruhhh! Ruhhhh,” he dribbled out, the words barely understandable, his teeth chattering, his stomach convulsing. He threw up.

Jake held on and Orchid fought, Jake’s thoughts reduced to a single command: Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. In the strange contours of his electrified mind, he had become a python, choking his prey to death.

They were like this, Jake holding her, the shocks hitting him in waves. He had no idea how long this went on. Seconds? Minutes? All he was aware of was the continuous chatter of the impulses running up and down every nerve in his body.

Then suddenly Orchid was free of his grasp. He reached for her, but his arms curled up like a dying spider, every muscle contracting, every nerve firing at once. He could no longer see Orchid. He could no longer see anything but burst after burst of searing white light.

He could form only one thought: Run.

34

DYLAN RAN.

He bolted out of the bunker, brass cylinder in his hand. He ran as fast as he could down the middle of the road, back the way they’d come, heading instinctively to his mother.

After a few hundred yards he realized that is exactly what Orchid would expect him to do. He turned right, running as fast as he could between two of the bunkers. The weeds sliced and grabbed at him, his side already starting to ache. He knew he was making all kinds of noise, but he had to get away. He would reach the next road, then turn back in the direction of the FedEx van. Was it better to run down the road? Or stick to the grass?

He heard a slam in the distance, what he took to be the closing of the bunker door. He stopped and listened. Who was closing it? Jake? Orchid?

Please let it be Jake. He wanted to run back, to Jake.

But it might not be Jake.

He started forward again, running fast. He’d heard footsteps. In the weeds.

It had to be Orchid. Jake would call out.

He looked down at the brass cylinder in his hand. Dylan understood. This was the most important task that he’d ever faced. Maybe that he would ever face.

She couldn’t get it. No matter what.

He had to hide.

The big metal door on the bunker to his right was open a few inches. He was drawn to it, a primordial instinct, seek shelter in a cave. He ducked inside, just able to slip through.

It was dark inside, pitch-black. Not like the other one with the glowing Fusarium.

He wanted to pull the door closed behind him, but that would make a noise. Go all the way in. He’d be safe. There was no way she could check them all.

He stepped deeper into the bunker.

The darkness swallowed him.

The bunker was in bad shape, damp and leaky. The smell of mold was strong. He walked with his hands in front until he found the back wall. He moved as far as he could from the strip of moonlight that leaked in through the partially open door.

He crouched down, cold and scared. He listened carefully for any sound, trying not to breathe. All he heard was a steady drip of water. He wanted to go inside himself, to hide far away.

The blackness was absolute. Darker than anyplace he’d ever been.

Otherwise, he would have never noticed them.

On his shirt sleeves were tiny pinpricks of glowing light, slowly pulsing on and off. Bits of glowing fungus were still clinging to his clothes.

ORCHID SCANNED LEFT AND RIGHT, LOOKING FOR ANY SIGN of the boy with her night-vision goggles. She cradled her gloved right hand in her left. The son of a bitch Sterling had broken two of her fingers. She’d kicked him senseless, then had grabbed her backpack and filled it with Connor’s fluorescent fungus, scraping it off the metal trays as fast as she could.

She’d tripped the electronic controller near the main door that activated the self-destruct mechanism, a series of incendiary devices she had placed in strategic positions inside the bunker. She had always planned to destroy Connor’s hideaway. In two minutes, there would be no traces left of anything inside, all of Connor’s work turned to ash. And now Jake Sterling would be ash, too.

She just had to deal with the boy.

He had a head start, and the Seneca Army Depot was a huge damned place. If he decided to hide, she would never find him in time. It would take days to search all the bunkers. And she didn’t have days. She had only minutes. Soon the explosion would go off and this place would be crawling with people. She had to get the cylinder, get back to the FedEx van, and head to the border.

Stick to basics. Keep looking.

Orchid checked up and down the empty road between the bunkers. Which way?

Then she saw something odd. She almost missed it, thought it was a flicker in the noise in her infrared CCDs.

But there it was again. A tiny blinking light. She took off her glasses, and it vanished. It was so faint, she could see it only with the goggles.

She jogged over to investigate. It was a tiny piece of fungus, stuck to a blade of grass. The blinking fungus.