55
City hall was now an inferno. Sparks blew in through gaping holes in the shattered windows and fell on papers strewn everywhere. Flames shot up from those papers almost instantly. Parts of the building were already ablaze. What had briefly been my office was a cauldron of fire.
I ran toward the passageway that led to the old bank building where the labs were. The smoke was getting thicker and I couldn’t stop coughing. My throat was as dry as sandpaper, and it was getting harder and harder to breathe. But the flames hadn’t reached the passageway, so fresh air still streamed in through broken windows there.
I reached the guard post where Green Guards had stood watch what seemed like a lifetime ago. Their girly magazine still lay on the floor. I trampled it as I eased inside the lab.
In the first room, I came upon the body of a middle-aged woman in a lab coat; she’d had the misfortune to be on the night shift. She’d been shot once in the heart and once in the forehead, mafia-style. Whoever did that knew what he was doing.
The next body was Dr. Ballarini’s. The Italian wore a trench coat over his pajamas. When he heard the shooting and the explosion, he must’ve jumped out of bed and run in to protect his precious lab. Someone had stopped him along the way. The scientist’s execution was messier, less professional. He had a huge hole in his stomach. His face was twisted in surprise, as if he couldn’t believe he was dead. One of his slippers lay three feet away. There were drops of blood on the toe.
I heard metallic clangs coming from the floor below. I cocked the AK-47 and descended the stairs to the old bank vault. The overhead light blinked a few times, then dimmed. The backup generator automatically kicked in. I crept the last few feet in silence and looked around the door of the chamber.
There was Greene. With him was a beefy Aryan, his arms the size of hams. He was whacking away at the steel vats where they fermented the Cladoxpan.
He’d already broken all the vats except two; a small lake of medicine covered the floor and trickled down a drain. Greene watched with a fevered look on his face. His gun was in one hand and in the other was a metal bucket that held that white, knobby brain-sized thing that was the planet’s salvation. The reverend planned to destroy all but that one fungal cultivar.
The guard finally managed to overturn the vat; it fell over with a big clang. The Cladoxpan spilled out in a huge wave that splashed almost to the men’s waists, before rushing down the drain and out the door. I formed a bowl with my hands, plunged them in the little river as it passed by me, and took some greedy sips.
The liquid burned my throat. It was more concentrated than I’d ever tasted. The adrenaline rush was brutal and I felt dizzy. The cuts, bruises, and burns dotting my body stopped hurting as if by magic. When the effect passed, the pain would come back a hundredfold, but right then I felt great.
I planted myself in the doorway. At first, they were so busy attacking the last vat they didn’t see me. Then Greene grabbed his right knee as if he’d been hammered by a horrible pain and turned, wide-eyed.
“You!” he shouted.
“Yeah, it’s me…”
I shot the guard before he could grab the Beretta he’d set on a shelf. The first bullet hit him in the leg and he fell to the ground. The second tore through his heart.
I turned to Greene. The reverend was trembling in fear and anger as he relived his terrifying nightmare, unable to tear his gaze from me. He thought he was seeing a ghost. He aimed his huge Colt at me, his hands shaking.
“You’re the spawn of Beelzebub,” he said in a guttural whisper. His Stetson hat had fallen off and his hair was a tangled mess. “You’re the Devil, the Antichrist, an abomination in the eyes of the Lord! It’s time for you to join Satan forever!” Then he pulled the trigger.
At that moment, the generator flickered for the last time and the lights went out. I threw myself to the ground as a ghostly flash from Greene’s gun lit up the room, and the bullet whizzed by like an angry wasp, just inches from my head. From the ground, I fired blindly, hitting the reverend in the arm. He screamed in pain and dropped the Colt. He bent to pick it up, but I was already on my feet.
In a homicidal rage, I jumped on Greene so hard he fell backward. The preacher’s hands clawed at my face, his jaws snapping furiously as he tried to bite my neck.
“You can’t kill me! I’m the Prophet! I AM THE PROPHET!”
The last vat of Cladoxpan was right next to us. I grabbed Greene by the lapels and lifted him up the way a cat shakes its kitten.
“You’re not the Prophet,” I hissed in his ear. “You never were, you crazy son of a bitch.”
Greene looked at me with terror in his eyes. His right leg had not stopped shaking throughout the fight. Then suddenly it was still. “It stopped hurting,” he murmured in disbelief. “That can’t be…”
“Well, this’ll really hurt, you bastard.” And I plunged his head into the vat.
The reverend struggled wildly, trying to surface so he could breathe. I held him tight as the Cladoxpan spilled over the edge. After a while, his body stopped writhing.
I collapsed on the floor, panting. I should’ve felt good. I’d killed the man who infected me, who took Pritchenko’s life, and who convinced thousands of people to follow him in that orgy of pain and destruction against their fellow human beings. But all I wanted to do was close my eyes and rest.
A loud boom sounded overhead. Something on the floor above had collapsed. The air was very hot and I smelled smoke. I struggled to my feet and picked up the ax the guard had used to destroy the vats. I went back to Greene, raised the ax over my head, and, with one blow, decapitated the old man.
“Let’s see you come back from the dead now, asshole.”
I slung my rifle across my back and darted out of the vault with the bucket in one hand and the reverend’s head in the other. The corridor was pocked with small fires.
I climbed the stairs through the stifling heat and rushed from the burning lab back over the passageway and through the lobby of city hall. Blinded by the smoke, I felt my way down the front steps. When I finally got outside, I collapsed to my knees and threw up.
Flames were slowly engulfing Gulfport. Only the Bluefont ghetto was spared from the fire’s fury, thanks to the channel that formed a natural barrier.
I raised the reverend’s head to eye level. His face was frozen in anger and his mouth hung open, baring his old, worn teeth. I spat in his eyes, swung his head over my head, and cast it into the inferno that city hall had become. Moments later, Greene’s head disappeared into that enormous pyre, black smoke rose above the flames, and I heard an inhuman howl. The smoke twisted and turned with a life of its own.
The roof came crashing down as a sea of fire washed over everything.
56
I drove the Jeep SUV slowly through the bushes and weeds that had grown up through cracks in the pavement. Most of the houses were weather-beaten, and some were on their last legs. Aside from that, not much had changed. As we drove, crushing piles of rotting, bleached bones under our tires, I pointed out landmarks to Lucia, as excited as a child to be back.
We finally came to an intersection and turned left. I could barely make out the paint a long-dead soldier had sprayed there years before, during the evacuation.
I stopped the car and turned off the engine, but I couldn’t get out. There were too many memories.