Fuming, breathing through his open mouth, his eyes watering from the new wave of pain and nausea that was creeping up his body through knee caps that have turned to cartilages, the major screamed, “You said you were bringing an antidote!”
“There is no antidote, Santiago.”
“You lied! You lied to me! I trusted you!”
“Let us say that is your own little contribution to the course of peace. Even if I had the antidote, I couldn’t risk my own life to bring it to you. But I want you to know this was the best I could do in the circumstances. You have done your part, Major. You are a hero, your name is going to be remembered for good. I’m going to make sure of that.”
Santiago was not listening anymore. He was looking at his men on the floor, the ones conscious enough to feel pain. Two were lolling on their backs, vomit coming out of their noses. The others were sprawled out, bummed out. The rancid smell of death and degradation filled his nose, fueled his terror and rage. He flung the talkie across the room.
It careened through the air and crashed into the side of the ICBM. The admiral’s voice quenched.
Santiago staggered over to the wall where his rifle was propped. He checked the rounds; it would be enough for them all.
Head shots. So they’ll not know what hit them. It was the best he could offer too. Freedom in death was better than pain in existence.
He went to the vomiting duo. He popped them first before moving forward.
Dry-eyed and grim-looking, Santiago became his own angel of death.
The shots ceased, followed by a deathly silence. In it, there was only the thump of her heart. Olivia steeled herself from the urge to scream or collapse in a faint. Even though she wasn’t new to gunfights, she had never imagined being holed up in a German secret facility thousands of miles from civilization, on a continent of ice and rocks, surrounded by ancient death and the smell of fear.
The others sat without talking too. Together she supposed they must mirror what it was like for holocaust sufferers of Hitler’s Germany. Huddled together on cold nights, hungry and out of anger, waiting for their turn to be filled out on the edge of a pit dug by their relatives, to be shot, and subsequently buried by the ones who they would have died for. Their relatives.
They were humble thoughts and Olivia resigned herself to take this last piece of knowledge to her grave without documenting it for the world to read.
The door opened slowly.
The major was standing there, his hands over his head. One of his legs bent to the side as if he had had a bad fall. His eyes were red and his lips had bloody splits in them. He wavered on his feet. Olivia thought he might collapse at any time.
“I have been tricked,” he said clearly enough, “just as you have been. There is nothing here but death.”
The crew looked at each other. Olivia saw color return to Peter and Miller’s faces. She saw color leaving Anabia Nassif’s own. The biologist was shrinking against the back of his bunk, not from the soldier himself, but from what he carried in him. Anabia was mumbling something, and pointing at the major.
Olivia reached for her Dictaphone. She had just been granted another day to breathe. She was going to take it.
“All my men are dead,” the major continued. “I killed them. There was no other way, no cure, no antidote—”
Anabia Nassif jumped from his bunk and dove under the bed where Miller sat. The biologist pulled the rack with the antidotes he had created.
“We made one! We can cure you!” he shouted.
“No, it killed him!”
“Killed who?”
The major turned to Ted Cooper. The professor’s face turned paper-white. His jaw tightened. He stared at the major from half-closed lids. His lips were a thin line on his murderous face.
“He injected one of my soldiers with it. It killed him.” Santiago pointed at Cooper.
Anabia Nassif said, “What is he talking about, Professor?”
Cooper sneered. “I was trying to help, since you guys were trying to sell the shit you made. I gave it to someone who needs it. How was I supposed to know that your little shitty experiment wasn’t going to work? Ain’t like you put a label on it that says, 'caution, deadly antidote, may not work on the sick.’”
Miller rose up. “Ted, you are one hell of a stupid guy, you know. We know what you’ve been doing, selling us out—”
“And we know you destroyed the satellite dish back at the camp,” Peter Williams added.
“And you have been talking with someone outside the facility, trying to make a deal,” Olivia said.
“He told me he’d steal it,” the major said.
All eyes turned to Ted Cooper. He threw his hands up. “I give up, okay. Satisfied? Now can we get out of here already? I have students to teach and women to bang back in Miami.”
Ted looked at the major.
“Amigos, you know Miami? You wanna come along, infect the whole city?”
“No, I just want to get home to my family.”
“Fair enough.”
10
They were endangered in many ways. One, the major was infected. If he joined the crew, they might as well stay back in the underground facility. Two, the team was not sure if the major had acted by killing his men under the influence of the virus, for he was infected too. He deserved the same death as his men.
He seemed lucid enough to understand the implications.
"But I could save him," Nassif insisted, shortly after the major had been sedated.
"But he is a travel risk for us all," Peter Williams said. "You heard him, there's an admiral out there who wants us to perish down here. He'll be waiting."
"Not if we could get the U-boat to work." Miller pointed.
"What's an old U-boat got on a destroyer?" said Ted Cooper. "We could never outrun him."
"But we can try," Miller responded.
The team split in two. Olivia Newton, Peter Williams, and doctor Anabia Nassif would get more files and documents from the laboratory. And the rest of the crew would get down to the U-boat pen to join Victor Borodin and Nicolai.
They passed by the rocket room, and Olivia wanted to take pictures. She went in against Peter Williams's disapproval. Grudgingly, the two men let her inside the place.
Rigor Mortis had set in; the bodies were stiffening. They found out that the major had piled them together in a corner, where a pool of caked blood had gathered at the base.
Nassif dashed out of the room and got sick in the hallway.
Olivia felt her stomach roil as she took some pictures. Steeling herself, she climbed up the platform. The ICBM lay on metal stilts like a huge, black ballpoint pen. She took photos of the uncompleted rocket, and as she was stepping off, she saw the remains of the major's talkie where it had hit the wall and shattered into pieces.
"Come on." Peter took Olivia's hands. "We've got to get out of here."
At the door, Olivia pulled free and went back to the heap of bodies. She pulled a talkie from the pocket of a dead soldier.
"We may need this."
She put it in her backpack.
Borodin stuck his head out of the hatch and said, "This boat can move, but I don't think we have enough diesel to take us out to high sea."
Frank Miller, Liam Murphy, and Ted Cooper all went down the hatch. It was warm inside the boat. It was hollow and quite cramped. They bowed their heads as they went from one compartment to the other.
"We have searched the boat, everywhere, no diesel," said Victor Borodin. His hands were grimy with black oil. Nicolai poked his head from the small hole in the floor. Below him was the engine room.