He came toward her, his Mace-swollen eyelids heavy over his raw eyes. He was hurt now. He was weak.
“Melanie,” he gasped.
She set herself between him and the entrance to the vault. As repelled as she was by the oily blood basting his wounded neck, that had to be her target. The blue light of the UV chamber flared again behind her, and its energy somehow steadied Melanie. She made fists of her small, trembling hands.
A figure had moved out of the dim hallway behind Zero. Melanie thought at first that it was Maryk, but the blazing blue light distorted her view. Not until the figure was right behind Zero did Melanie see that it was Stephen Pearse. He was racked with disease, suffering incredibly, his face drawn of all being — and yet somehow he was staggering forward with his cane through the roaring blueness. Somewhere he had found the strength to stand and move toward them.
Zero stopped in front of her. He saw the recognition dawning in her eyes and watched dumbly, twitching, as she took one step back from him and out of the way. Stephen raised the cane behind Zero’s shoulder as the drone of the lamps became deafening. Zero began to turn just as Stephen brought the cane around. He caught Zero over the ear with the flat of the handle.
The crack was awful. Zero coughed a spray of blood and stumbled foot over foot to the side, then at once collapsed to the floor. Stephen, reeling from his own momentum and the force of the impact, swayed the other way, but did not fall.
Melanie circled blindly around them, screaming through her hands. “Stephen!”
His red eyes lolled in their orbits as he steadied himself. He gripped the cane by its long end and started back toward Zero. Zero had risen to one knee, threads of gore falling from his rotted mouth. Stephen sagged toward him and he brought the cane around and up again, but with less force this time, striking Zero on the shoulder. He tried a third time, and Zero raised a forearm and batted the cane away. It spun out of Stephen’s hands and went clattering away along the floor.
Stephen reached out as though to grasp him, but Zero got to his feet and lashed out first, striking Stephen in the center of the chest, and Stephen crumpled. Melanie heard his frail ribs snap like stalks of celery. Zero staggered over him, reaching down, and Melanie could see the outline, through shirt and skin, of Stephen’s protruding ribs. Zero pressed against the exposed bones. Stephen’s head flopped in soundless agony.
“Stop!” screamed Melanie, but no command could touch Zero’s savagery. Stephen’s head flailed and struck the floor, and she heard a soft crunch as his fragile cheekbone gave. Zero straightened, pulling back his foot to kick Stephen, and Stephen watched this with no expression on his smashed face. Zero kicked him in the stomach and Stephen expelled a bubble of blood, and sagged, and Melanie thought that breath was his last.
The ultraviolet vault entrance was surging to full intensity again, the lamps droning, the radiation sensors going off, and Zero turned as though called by it, reminded of his purpose. He staggered across to the console. He ran his bloody hands over the controls.
She watched him try to captain the steel limb, to command the diseased computer to find the smallpox virus and withdraw it for him. But the screens ran mad with information, fraught with his own virus. The steel arm flailed wildly against the vault inside the plastic shield like a thing in the throes of death. It would not obey, and Zero pounded the console in vain.
Melanie searched the entrance for a weapon, anything. The blue lights brightened the entire room, and she saw the shadow of Stephen’s wheelchair in the hall. She grabbed it at once and pushed it out, screaming, running the chair from the entrance to the console, straight at Zero. She struck him from the side, pitching him off the console and hard into the flat of the high plastic wall. The wheelchair struck the foot of the console chair and keeled over, clattering, but Zero remained on his feet. He wavered, then turned toward her, starting her way.
She reeled back. There was blood on the floor before the vault entrance, and she slipped on it, falling hard. She tried to scramble away but could not get any traction, and Zero was coming for her.
Something stopped him at her feet. Maryk had come into the room behind her. Zero seemed to smile — a momentary, bloody, lipless smile. Then all at once, Stephen came at Zero from his blind side and they fell together back against the wall.
Broken and bleeding, somehow Stephen had gotten to his feet. He wrapped his arms around Zero now, as though in an embrace, leaning against the plastic wall at the vault entrance.
They grappled there, madly, weakly. Zero reacted to Stephen’s weird, sudden affection for him and tried to get his arms free as Stephen slumped against him, tying them both up like two exhausted boxers.
Maryk remained next to her, incredulous, watching the spectacle of Stephen and Zero entangled. Stephen’s face was sagged and expressionless, and seeing him that way, feebly struggling with Zero, Melanie believed she was losing her mind.
Bashed and spent, Stephen somehow held on, hugging Zero and turning them both slowly around the corner of the shield wall into the open doorway. The blue lamps began whirring again, brightening just behind them, the hum growing louder and louder.
Melanie pulled herself up off the bloody floor. At once, she understood what Stephen was trying to do. Zero seemed to realize then where they were, and she quivered with tension as Zero too comprehended Stephen’s intent.
Ultraviolet light chambers killed exposed viruses. Zero was a living virus. His skin, tissues, organs, blood, muscles — every cell of his being had been converted. And the light source was raging at ten or twenty times its normal intensity.
Radiation sensors went off all around them. The lamps gained force and the drone of the humming light intensified as Zero began to bellow, but could not pull himself free. They remained there just inside the doorway, struggling against the side wall, before the scalding blue lamps. Stephen could not haul Zero over the necessary final few feet to his death. Neither man possessed the strength necessary to move the other.
Maryk went forward then. He went to the open chamber door, but was forced back by the intense heat.
The cobalt glare radiated behind Stephen as he saw Maryk. Stephen appeared to shake his head, as though to say that he had no more strength. Maryk tried to reach inside, but the heat was too much. The drone was rising to a roar. The alarms screamed and the blue light flared, and Melanie shaded her eyes.
She could barely see Stephen now. The ultraviolet light was peaking behind him, blurring him. He clutched Zero and stared out of the ethereal blueness, his dead eyes locked with Maryk’s, imploring him. Something unspoken was exchanged.
Maryk grasped the frame of the open door with both hands. He raised his right foot and, with a swift, powerful thrust, caught Zero sharply in the small of the back. Maryk reeled backward as Zero fell with Stephen into the roaring oven of burning blue light.
Zero wailed like an animal. The light raged to its fullest around their collapsed forms as Stephen rolled away from Zero, finally releasing his grip.
Zero’s dark body writhed and shriveled inside the pure blue holocaust. The light and the clamor peaked and held, bluing the entire room, then began to decline again. As it did, Melanie could see Zero more clearly, rippling and settling around his scorched clothes into a sinking, black heap. The fading rays consumed the last echoes of his groan, until all that remained was a foul, black lump, shrunken and wasted into the shape of a thing reaching for the vault inside.
Stephen lay on his back. The light subsided and Maryk slid him out by his ankle, leaving Stephen’s dark silhouette behind, etched into the floor of the chamber.