Pandemic Page 71

She saw Conroy Austin’s severed head, a sleepy look on his young face. Something had torn it from his shoulders. It had come to rest on the b.l.o.o.d.y, ragged neck, temple pressed against a broken chunk of cell. A rain of bleach wet his hair to his scalp. Bits of brown material clung to his cheeks.

The two cells closest to her had avoided the worst of the damage, but thick cracks lined their walls. The cell on the left held Clark’s hatchling-ridden corpse, still strapped to the metal bed. But the cell on the right, Cantrell’s cell … it was empty. The cracked door hung open, its flat-panel monitor black and still.

Where was he? He’d tested negative all the way through. Could he come with them?

Clarence released her shoulder. He stepped out of the airlock door, pistol in both hands, barrel in front of him. He moved to his right along the bulkhead wall that separated the containment room from the lab area, keeping the metal to his back. Bleach rain drizzled on his suit, ran down it in rivulets.

He looked back at her, reached out his left hand and curled his fingers inward: follow me.

Tim gently pushed Margaret’s back, urging her forward. She stepped out and followed Clarence. Bleach beaded up on her visor. She quickly reached her right hand up and held her left shoulder, covering the hole in her suit as best she could.

Clarence kept moving to his right, eyes on the shattered cells in front of him. He reached the empty prep area just inside the wide exterior airlock. The endless rain splattered off the stainless steel equipment. He looked back at her, urgently waved her forward.

She stumbled toward the garage-door-sized airlock. Tim ran past her, head still tilted down as much as he could manage, his blue suit wet and gleaming.

The bleach smell grew stronger — some of it had leaked into her suit. It wouldn’t be long until the fumes made her lungs burn. Clarence had to get them out fast or she’d be as good as dead.

Tim reached a keypad to the right of the airlock. He punched in a code. The heavy door let out a hiss of compressed air, then slid open.

Margaret stared out into a nighttime blizzard. Through the whipping snow she saw shimmering lights — the Pinckney looked like a mystical fortress rising from the depths. Snaps of orange and yellow dotted the sky, muzzle flashes lighting up like the sparkle of cameras in a dark arena.

Fresh air blew in hard, making the bleach spray in any direction but down.

“Oh s.h.i.t,” Clarence said. He grabbed her, held her tight. “Tim, hold on!”

From the rear of the shimmering, gray leviathan that was the Pinckney, Margaret saw a billowing cone of fire and heard a simultaneous blast that hammered her ears. The deck bounced beneath her. She fell, landing on top of Clarence’s thick chest.

A roar overhead; Margaret looked out and up, saw a bulky helicopter moving through the whipping snow, away from the Brashear and toward the Pinckney. Something flashed from under the helicopter’s stubby wing. A missile shot forward trailing a rope of glowing smoke. The missile closed the distance in two seconds: a fireball erupted from where the Pinckney had just fired.

“Margaret, hold still.”

Clarence, shouting to be heard over the alarm and the explosions. She turned to see something moving toward her face. She closed her eyes, trusted him, felt that something tug down around her neck and shoulders, pushing her suit against her skin.

A life jacket.

“Look at me,” Clarence said.

She opened her eyes. Bits of snow and ice clung to her visor, sliding down the gla.s.s along with the spraying bleach. Through it, and through his visor as well, she locked onto his intense eyes, his commanding eyes.

He shouted. She listened.

“The jacket will keep you afloat,” he said. “We have to jump. You’ll hit and go under, but you’ll pop right up.”

She heard a ripping sound, looked to the source — Tim Feely, wrapping sticky tape around his back and belly, over and over again, fastening the yeast container to his stomach.

Clarence ran to the wall and grabbed another life jacket. He pulled it around Tim’s head even as the smaller man kept taping. Clarence fastened the life jacket as Tim cut the tape and tossed the roll away.

Through the wind and the spray and the sound of gunfire, Margaret heard something to her right — the labored breathing of a man in pain.

She turned and saw Cantrell coming for her, not even ten feet away, black skin wet from the bleach rain, his squinting eyes red and swollen.

In his hands, a fire axe.

She took a step backward, away from the man. “Clarence!”

He was there, instantly, stepping between her and Cantrell, pistol raised and firing.

Margaret kept backing up as the first round made Cantrell twitch to the right. The second bullet blew out the side of his head. He fell like he had no bones at all, face slapping on the metal deck.

She took one more step back to stop her momentum, but the foot hit empty air.

The fall lasted forever and less than a second, a moment of nothingness before she slammed into the water.

All noise ceased instantly; someone had turned off the volume. In front of her, blackness.

Cold hit her hard and from all sides. Her body went rigid. Her breath locked in her chest. Then, sudden heat across her skin as her suit automatically tried to compensate for the drop in temperature; she felt it everywhere but her shoulder — there, a creeping, icy death as water poured in.

She had a sensation of rushing upward, saw tiny, wavering lights, then her helmet-covered head popped back into the noise of war. Gunfire and screaming, the roar of flames, the concussive pulse of explosions so powerful that air slapped against the water. The surface reflected the firework flashes from above.