In a hoarse rasp of a voice he growled, “My princess has made me immortal. Praise Allah!” His eyes had looked dazed and dull when he’d first come out of the room, but I could see them becoming more focused. I didn’t understand it. If he was a walker, then why was he able to talk? Or think?
He took a step toward me. The first step was wobbly, as if he was uncertain how to use his body. But the second step was firmer. The third step showed no instability at all.
Crap.
His face took on an expression that was half triumphant leer and half naked hunger, and a fanatical light burned like a solar flare in his eyes. “Allah is the only God and I am his wrath on Earth!”
“Whatever,” I said as I dodged to one side and kicked him on the meat of the thigh with the steel toe of my shoe, a blow that would cripple anyone. But again it did nothing to him.
“It’s funny,” he said in Farsi, “but it doesn’t even hurt. Oh, Amirah how I love you.”
I made a lunge for my fallen pistol but El Mujahid leaped at me. Any awkwardness he might have experienced upon returning to life was gone. For all his size he moved with cat quickness and he body-blocked me away from the piece and kicked the gun under a desk. I slewed around and came up into a fighting crouch. Okay, I thought, c’mon, Joe, you’ve done this before. Break the neck and you stop these buggers.
So I jumped in and tried to grab his chin and hair. Most people have only seen this move in movies. They won’t recognize it when someone tries it on them, and it’s such a fast move that by the time they figure it out they’re on the cold side of being dead.
Unfortunately for me El Mujahid wasn’t a novice. He parried my lunge and hit me in the ribs with a short chopping punch that lifted me completely off the ground; then he combined off that and planted an overhand right that nearly took my head off. I managed to get a shoulder up in time to save my head, but El Mujahid was a tank and his punch dropped me. I landed hard and immediately tucked into a sideways roll and barely managed to avoid a stamp that would have crushed my skull.
The First Lady was screaming over and over again and I wondered if her mind had snapped.
I came out of my roll on fingertips and toes and tried to reach for the.38 on my ankle, but he rushed me with a flying tackle that sent us both rolling over and over across the floor. At the end of the roll I managed to get a knee up between us and braced it against his chest as he tried to pull me into a bear hug. With his arms he’d have splintered my back. I drove my shoulders back and used the greater power of my legs to break his grab. He skidded back and I again went for my pistol, this time getting it out; but El Mujahid threw himself forward like a dolphin jumping out of the water onto the side of a pool. It was a sloppy move, all momentum, but it worked and he made a big reach and swatted the pistol out of my hand.
So I kicked him in the face and back-rolled to my feet.
I had my back to the wall and he was between me and any guns. He rose slowly, head down, shoulders hunched, hands forward and out. This was a son of a bitch who really knew how to fight. Without rules, just react and destroy. Like me.
Past him I could see parts of the tussle that was going on behind the desk. Legs and arms, and a lot of cursing. I had no idea who was winning that fight.
El Mujahid stalked me, cutting left and right to try and box me into the corner. Against most opponents a corner is a pretty good place to make a stand, it allows for a lot of options when flight is no longer in the mix; but with a fighter like this bruiser it would be a death trap.
He leered at me and bit the air with a clack of teeth. “I think I’ll take a bite out of you,” he said, pitching it to sound like a joke. I wasn’t laughing.
I could still hear gunfire and screams coming from the Bell Chamber. It must be one hell of a battle in there. Would Grace survive it, or had she already fallen? Would she rise as one of the mindless walkers or as a new and improved thinking monster like the one I faced?
What would Church and the President do? Let everyone in the Liberty Bell Center kill each other and then torch the whole place? Could the President risk any other response, even with his wife here?
Then I realized that the First Lady was no longer screaming. El Mujahid noticed, too, and we both turned to see that she had picked up my.45 and was pointing it at the big terrorist. She fired, but in her panic she jerked the trigger instead of squeezing it and the gun bucked upward and the shot punched a hole in the ceiling.
I rushed in her direction, wanting that damn gun, but El Mujahid lunged in to cut me off, pawing at me with a fast grab. I parried it, but it was a fake and he snaked the other hand in and caught me by the sleeve of my suit jacket.
The First Lady got off another shot but it just tore a chunk out of El Mujahid’s hip.
He jerked me forward with such force that I flew off the ground, and he hit me with an elbow shot that broke a black bomb in my head. I sagged in his grip and as he bent toward me I could feel his hot breath on my exposed throat.
Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Three
Gault and Amirah / The Bunker
GAULT SCRAMBLED FORWARD in a panic, feeling for the etched markings as Amirah’s eerie voice floated through the darkness toward him, louder each time she called his name.
“Sebastian!” She drew it out, making it a perverse song.
His fingers scrabbled across an uneven spot on the wall and he stopped, fumbling at it. Yes! He felt for the upper-right corner of the panel and then punched it with the side of his fist. The corner folded inward and he gripped the edges and tore the whole panel away. A small red light flicked on inside the compartment, illuminating the rubber-coated handles of six big levers.
“Sebastian!”
“Witch,” he breathed and grabbed the first handle and pulled. It was much harder than he thought it would be, and the angle was bad. He had to stand hunched over and throw his entire weight backward to move the handle. On the first pull it only moved five inches.
“Bastard!” he growled and tried again, screaming with effort. This time the handle tilted toward him and locked into place. There was an anticlimactic silence for a few seconds and then far away there was a heavy rumbling that he felt more than heard.
He grabbed the second handle and again it took him two pulls to lock it down.
“Sebastian!”
Her voice was close. God, he thought God!
Even as the rumbling started for the second collapsing vent pipe he threw himself back with the third, and this one locked down on the first try. The rumbling started at once.
“Sebastian!” Now there was a different tone in her voice. Perhaps a faint flicker of doubt. He grabbed the fourth lever and pulled. It was so hard, so stiff that it took him five tries to lock it down, but finally it clicked and the rumbling started.
“Sebastian!” He could hear the hurried scuff of her feet and her voice definitely had a note of alarm in it. It gave him strength to hear the fear and he tackled the fifth lever with a will and in two grunting pulls it locked down. Already the ambient temperature was rising as the superheated gasses began recoiling from blocked vents. A deep red glow was reflected through the steel passages and it bathed him in a bloody light.
“Sebastian!”
He turned and she was there, not twenty feet away. Her robes were torn and she was covered in blood. God knows whose blood it was. In the fiery glow of the lava she looked like a monster from hell itself. The blood on her lips and hands was black and her eyes were so shadowed that she looked more like a skull than a woman whose beauty had once made him gasp with but a single slanting glance.
“Listen to me, Sebastian,” she said, her voice thick and heavy. “Stop this I can share Generation Twelve with you. If you truly embrace the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet I can make you one of us; I can make you one of God’s immortals.”
“You’re insane, Amirah. You’ve turned yourself into a monster.” He put his hand on the sixth lever.
“I am Seif al Din,” she retorted, her dark eyes flashing. “Don’t you understand? I am the plague, I am the Sword of the Faithful. We don’t need laboratories or test subjects anymore. I am the breath of God that will blow
