Which meant he had to leave now.
Gabriel turned to make his way out—and saw Velda storm through the doorway, Millie’s two spears clutched in her hands.
Chapter 27
“Step away from that machine, Gabriel,” Velda said, coming toward him. Her gown was in shreds, leaving her naked to the waist and barely covered below.
He didn’t move. “What did you do to Millie?”
“Made him put me down,” she replied flatly as she crossed the room, raising the spears to point at Gabriel’s chest. “Remarkable what a kick to a broken ankle will do.”
“You shouldn’t have done it, Velda,” Gabriel said. “He was taking you to safety. This place is going to be destroyed in minutes.”
“This place? What are you talking about?” Her voice suddenly wasn’t affectless anymore.
“I reset the device,” Gabriel said. “To target itself.”
“You did what?” Velda came to a stop.
“I can’t let you kill millions of innocent people. No matter what the women here did to your father. Or what the Germans did to him sixty years ago.”
“You had no right,” she snarled. She jabbed one of the spears at him. He knocked its point aside with his forearm.
Velda lunged for him with the other spear, its sharpened stone blade whistling through the air directly toward his face. He ducked at the last second and it clanged against the metal sphere behind him. She pulled it back while stabbing out with the first spear again. It caught him high on one thigh, drawing blood.
He reached out, seized the shaft right behind the blade, and yanked it out of her grip. Spinning it in a circle like a staff, Gabriel brought the point around toward Velda. They faced off, weapons aimed at one another.
“Vierzehn minuten zur aktivierung…”
“If we don’t get out of here, we’re going to die,” Gabriel said. “This thing’s going off in fourteen minutes.”
“So let me change the goddamn settings back, Hunt!” She swung her spear at his head. He tried to duck it, but the rapid motion of his head brought on a powerful wave of dizziness. He tried to stay upright, but couldn’t. He put out one hand and caught himself as he tumbled to the floor. The spear fell from his grasp.
Velda was still standing. She was wincing, but she hadn’t been in the room with the machine as long as he had, so she hadn’t been affected as strongly yet. She strode forward, raising her spear high above her head with both hands, preparing to plunge it down into his neck.
“Don’t, Velda,” he said. He could barely hear his own voice over the thrumming of the machine and the rush of blood in his ears. “Please. Your father wouldn’t want this sort of vengeance. His own daughter killing millions in his name? How could anyone who survived what he did want that?”
“Don’t you dare presume to tell me what my father would have wanted,” Velda shouted, her eyes blazing with fury. “Don’t you dare!” The silver pocket watch hung by its chain between her sweat-streaked breasts, its cover having snapped open as she ran. Inside, he saw the tiny photo, the older man and the loving daughter. She still saw herself as a loving daughter, he knew—but the savage hatred on her face now had nothing in common with the girl in the photo. Nothing in common with a sane human being.
If there had been more time, maybe he could have helped her, or someone could have; she could have recovered; this madness could have passed.
But there was no more time.
“Okay,” Gabriel said, his voice soft. “Change it back. Do what you have to.”
She lowered her spear and stepped forward. She was just a foot shy of the machine, and he was in the way. “Move,” she said.
He tried to look her in the eye, but from where he lay she seemed miles away. “I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. “I really am.” And he rolled backward, hard, ramming with all his strength into the narrow metal legs of the frame that held the Untergang machine in place.
For an instant, the machine stayed where it was, just rotating as the structure beneath it tipped; the body of the sphere turned, the side with the heavy lens attached sliding down toward Gabriel and Velda, the side with the red-hot nozzle swinging up and out of reach. Then Gabriel rammed the frame again and the metal ball toppled from its perch.
Velda had time enough to raise one arm, as though to ward off a blow. The device plunged toward her. The thick, riveted metal skin narrowly missed her—and so did the heavy glass surface of the lens. They passed just inches away, the metal in front of her and the glass behind her. But any feeling of relief or triumph on her part must have been infinitely brief. Gabriel ducked his head and rolled out of the path of the sphere, so he didn’t see what happened—but he heard the gruesome sizzle, saw the blinding flash of magnesium-white light, and smelled the strong, nauseating scent of ozone. When he looked back, she was gone.
The device itself rolled till it fetched up against the wall. The nozzle, miraculously, was still attached, still protruding from the sphere like a stem from an orange. The lens had snapped off and lay in pieces on the floor. Painted in soot across the surface of the largest piece he saw the silhouette of a woman, head thrown back, one arm raised above her head.
“Good-bye, Velda,” he whispered as he staggered to his feet.
Was there any chance the thing was irreparably damaged, that it wouldn’t go off…? Any hope he might have harbored was dashed when he heard the crackly recorded voice, still counting down.
“Zwölf minuten zur aktivierung…”
Twelve minutes. He grabbed the spear he’d dropped and raced out of the room.
His head began clearing as soon as he got out into the open air. It was sticky, it was hot, it was humid—but it wasn’t filled with deadly radiation or that intense, unnatural, unbearable pressure the machine had somehow created. He oriented himself quickly and headed off in the direction of the plane. He couldn’t hear the voice any longer, but he knew what it would be saying: zehn minuten…neun minuten…acht minuten…
“Millie!” he called as he ran, pushing branches and enormous fronds out of the way. “Millie!”
“I’m here,” came a pained reply a hundred yards later, and as Gabriel rounded a bend he saw the big man crawling toward him on his hands and knees, his face a mask of pure agony. The splint was still on his ankle, but the foot was bent crookedly inside it. Gabriel threw the spear to him and Millie reached up to snatch it out of the air. Gabriel rushed over to his side and helped him up. Millie leaned heavily on the spear and slung his other arm around Gabriel’s shoulders. He stood on one leg, kept the other bent at the knee. He couldn’t put any weight at all on it.
“Where’s Velda?” Millie whispered through his grimace.
“She’s dead,” Gabriel said.
“Feel better already,” Millie muttered.
“Bad news is, we’ll be joining her if we don’t get to that plane in ten minutes or less.” He thought for a second. “Less.”
“Seriously?” Millie said.
“Seriously,” Gabriel said.
“Fuck.” Millie took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s do it.”
They ran—or anyway Gabriel ran, as best he could with Millie’s weight bearing down on his shoulders. The big man hopped along on one leg, planting the foot of the spear in the dirt each time and using it to pull himself forward with enormous heaves. The foliage grew thicker around them, slapping them in the face and chest as they lunged through it. But they kept pushing forward. Gabriel’s heart was hammering and his breath was painful and ragged when they finally glimpsed the H-shaped tail fin between two trees up ahead.