slashed viciously with his sword — once again slicing sideways — aiming for her now-exposed ankles, way too fast for her to block in time.
And the vicious blow hit home — Clang!!!
Webster's weapon hand vibrated monstrously as his jagged metal sword slammed into Mother's dress- uniformed pants leg, just below the knee.
Webster blanched.
'What…?'
Mother smiled.
He'd hit her prosthetic lower leg — her titanium-alloy prosthetic lower leg!
Seeing her opponent's confusion, Mother took her one and only opportunity, and swung her own makeshift sword with all her might.
Slash!
A fountain of blood sprayed out from Webster's throat as Mother's blade sliced across his neck, severing his carotid artery.
Webster's blade fell from his hand, and he dropped to his knees, clutching his bleeding throat. He held his hands out in front of him, gazing at the blood on them in disbelief. Then he took one final horrified look up at Mother, after which he fell face-first into a pool of his own blood.
The crowd of inmates roared with delight.
By now, the assembled mob — Seth Grimshaw included — had moved around to the northern side of the pit in an effort to find better spectating positions.
Some of them had started cheering for the President, a happily deranged chant in the tradition of American Olympic supporters: 'U-S-A! USA!'
On the eastern side of the pit, Gant was still engaged in the fight of her life.
Her 7th Squadron opponent's swordlike length of steel clanged against her own quarterstaff pipe.
They fought amid the wreckage, trading blows, the Bravo Unit commando driving her backwards. As he did so, he began to smile with every raging swing. Clearly, he felt he had the edge.
And so he swung harder, but as Gant saw, this only served to wear him out more with every blow.
So she feigned fatigue, staggered backwards, 'desperately' fended off his swings.
And then her assailant swung — a lunging sloppy effort, the swipe of a tiring man — and quick as a flash, belying her apparent fatigue, Gant ducked beneath the blow and launched herself upward, thrusting her pipe forward — end first — ramming its solid tip right into the throat of her stunned opponent, crushing his Adam's apple, ramming it two inches back into his windpipe, stopping him dead in his tracks.
The man's eyes went instantly wide with disbelief. He wobbled unsteadily, wheezing, choking. He may have been standing up, but he was already dead. Staring stupidly at Gant, he crumpled to the ground.
The crowd of prisoners was oddly silent — stunned, it seemed, by Gant's lightning-fast death blow.
Then they cheered their approval. Wolf whistles rained down on Gant. Claps and cheers.
'Whoa, baby!'
'Now that is what I call a woman!'
At the northern end of the pit, the President slid to the ground beside Juliet Janson, hauled her up, but when they both got to their feet, they froze.
Before them, standing next to one of the upturned engines of the AWACS plane — alone but closer now — stood Colonel Jerome T. Harper.
On the ground to his left, lying on the floor, was Boa McConnell. He was groaning painfully, still reeling from Mother's crunching shoulder-tackle earlier.
The hoots and hollers from the prisoners enveloped them.
'Come on, Mr. Prez! Get some blood on your hands! Kill the fucker!'
'Eat shit, Harper!'
'U-S-A! USA!'
Harper knew the score. All his men were either dead or useless.
And yet still he seemed strangely confident…
It was then that he pulled something out of his pocket.
It looked like a high-tech grenade of some sort — a small pressurized cylindrical canister with a nozzle on its top and a vertical clear-glass window on its side.
Through the narrow glass window, the President could see the contents of the grenade very clearly.
It was filled with a mustard-yellow liquid.
'Oh, Jesus…' he breathed.
It was a biological grenade.
A Chinese biological grenade.
A pressure-sealed explosive charge filled with the Sinovirus.
An evil grin cracked Harper'ss face.
'I was hoping it wouldn't come to this,' he said. 'But fortunately for me, like every Air Force man at this complex, I have already been immunized against the Sinovirus. The same, however, cannot be said for you or your brave Marine guardians.'
Then, without so much as a blink, Harper pulled the pin on the Sinovirus grenade.
Harper didn't see him until it was too late.
As he pulled the pin on the grenade, all he saw was a flashing blur of movement from the wreckage to his immediate left.
The next thing he knew, Shane Schofield was standing beside him, emerging from the darkness, swinging a length of piping upward like a baseball bat.
The pipe struck Harper on the underside of his wrist, causing the Sinovirus grenade to fly out of his hand and go soaring upwards.
The live biological grenade flew up into the air.
It flew in a kind of bizarre slow motion, tumbling end over end, high above the northern half of the pit.
Schofield watched it, eyes wide.
The prisoners watched it, mouths agape.
The President watched it, awestruck.
Harper watched it, an evil grin forming on his face.
One, one-thousand…
Two, one-thousand…
Three…
At that moment, at the height of its arc, about thirty feet above the floor of the pit — directly above its northernmost section — the Sinovirus grenade went off.
In the firelight of the prisoners' torches, the aerosol explosion of the grenade inside the hangar was almost beautiful.
It looked like the blast of a water-filled firecracker — a giant star-shaped burst of mist — with multiple fingers of watery yellow particles shooting outwards from a central point, showering laterally, fanning out like a giant umbrella over the sunken aircraft elevator platform, orange firelight glinting off every single particle.
And then in wondrous slow motion, the whole misty cloud began to fall, first at its extremities, then in its center, down over the pit.
Like slow-falling snow, the Sinovirus particles descended.
Since it had detonated above the floor line of the hangar, the yellow mist hit the prisoners standing on the rim first.
Their reaction was as sudden as it was violent.
Most of them doubled over where they stood, started hacking, vomiting. Some fell to their knees, dropping their flaming torches, others lapsed instantly into involuntary fits.
Within a minute, all but two were on the floor, writhing in agony, screaming as their insides began to liquefy.
Seth Grimshaw was one of the two.
Along with Goliath, he stood unaffected by the falling yellow mist, while everyone around him lay dying.
