Area 7 ss-2
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"something to--"
The flying piece of metal nearly took his head clean off.
Schofield saw it at the very last second and on a reflex,
he ducked, just as the jagged piece of steel slammed like an
axe into the concrete wall behind him.
He spun, searching for the source of the projectile--
and he saw it in the shapes of the two commandos from
Bravo Unit, bursting out of the darkness, hurdling the
pieces of broken plane, each man holding a length of jagged
metal like a sword, and charging at Schofield's group at
speed!
"Scatter!" Schofield yelled as the first commando came
storming toward him, swinging down hard with his "sword."
Schofield blocked the blow by grabbing the man's
downward-moving wrist, while Gant engaged the other
commando.
"Go!" Schofield yelled to Juliet, Mother and the President.
"Get out of here!"
Juliet and the President dashed off into the darkness.
But Mother hesitated.
Schofield saw her. "Go! Stay with the President!"
THE PRISONERS CHEERED WITH DELIGHT AS OVER BY THE eastern
wall of the pit, Schofield fought with the first 7th
Squadron commando, while behind him, Gant grappled with
the second Bravo Unit man.
The President and Juliet--with Mother a short distance
behind them--dashed north through the darkened maze,
heading for the mini-elevator at the northeastern corner.
From above them, however, the chanting prisoners saw
what Juliet and the President and Mother could not: three figures
closing in on them from their left, moving quickly along
the northern wall of the pit--Jerome Harper, Carl Webster,
and coordinating the assault, Captain Boa McConnell.
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SCHOFIELD AND GANT STOOD BACK TO BACK, FIGHTING THEIR
own separate battles.
Gant had taken up a length of piping from the floor, and
was now wielding it like a quarterstaff against the blows of
her Bravo Unit commando.
The Bravo man swung his piece of steel viciously, two
fisted, but Gant parried well, holding her length of pipe sideways,
blocking the blow.
"How you doing back there?" Schofield asked, between
blows with his own enemy.
"Just ... frigging ... dandy," Gant said, gritting her
teeth.
"We have to get to the President."
"I know," Gant said, "but first ... I have to ... save your ass."
She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled, and in
a fleeting instant, she saw his opponent move in for another
blow and she shouted, "Scarecrow! Duck!"
Schofield dropped like a stone.
His opponent's sword swooshed over his head, and the
man overbalanced, and stumbled right toward Gant.
Gant was waiting.
Turning her attention from her own assailant for the
briefest of moments, she swung her length of pipe hard,
baseball-style.
Shwack!
The sound of her pipe hitting the Bravo Unit man's head
was absolutely sickening. The commando collapsed in a
heap just as Gant spun again--pirouetting like a ballet
dancer--returning just in time to block the next blow from
her own attacker.
"Scarecrow! Go!" she yelled. "Get to the President!"
And with a final look at her, Schofield dashed off into
the darkened wreckage.
ABOUT TWENTY YARDS TO THE NORTH OF SCHOFIELD AND
Gant, Juliet Janson and the President were running hard,
weaving their way through the debris-cluttered maze, heading
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for the northeastern corner, but unaware of the three men
closing in on them from the left.
They went for Juliet first.
Two figures came bursting out of the darkness, from behind the destroyed rear end of the AWACS plane--Boa McConnell and Warrant Officer Carl Webster. They crash-tackled Juliet hard, hurling her to the floor.
The President spun to see her hit the floor, held down by Boa and Webster. Then he turned again, and saw Colonel
Jerome Harper, standing amid the AWACS wreckage, watching from a distance.
The President was hurrying to help Juliet when- whoosh--a large blurring shape came exploding out of the
nearby wreckage, missing him by inches.
Mother.
Flying through the air, out of the darkness, linebacker
style.
Crunchhhh!
She shoulder-charged Boa McConnell so hard that she
almost snapped his neck. The 7th Squadron commander was
thrown off Juliet's body, visibly dazed.
Carl Webster was momentarily startled by the sudden
loss of his fellow attacker, and he turned to see what had
happened--
--just in time to receive a powerful punch from Mother
Even though he was a bulky man, Webster was thrown
right off Juliet by the blow and went crashing into a collection
of plane pieces. Without a pause, he snatched up a wicked-looking four-foot strip of metal and brandished it at
Mother.
Mother growled.
Webster charged.
The fight was as brutal as they come.
They couldn't have been more evenly matched--both
were experienced in hand-to-hand combat, both were over
six feet tall, and they both weighed in at over two hundred
pounds.
Webster roared as he swung his makeshift metal sword.
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Mother ducked, then quickly grabbed a busted piece of the
AWACS's wing flap to use as a shield. Webster's blows
clanged down against her shield as he forced her back toward
the battered wing of the plane.
As she danced backwards, staving off Webster's slashes, Mother bent down and scooped up a jagged sword of her own.
She tried to strike back, but Webster had all the momentum.
He swung again, cutting deep into her shoulder, tearing
open the sleeve of her dress coat, drawing blood.
"Arrgh!" Mother shouted, dropping her shield, fending
off the next three blows with only her sword.
Damn it, all she needed was one opening, one
chance ...
"Why did you betray the President!" she yelled as she
stumbled backwards, trying to distract him.
"There comes a time when a man has to make a decision,
Mother!" the Army warrant officer barked back,
yelling between blows. "When he has to choose a side! I
have fought for this country! I have had friends who died for
it, only to be fucked over later by politicians like him! So
when the opportunity arose, I decided that I was no longer
going to stand by and watch yet another two-bit, whore-banging, draft-dodging fuck drive this country into the ground!"
Webster swung--a lusty, sideways swipe.
Mother jumped backwards, avoiding the blow, leaping
up onto the wing of the plane, so that she was now three feet
off the ground.
But the wing wobbled slightly under her weight, and
she lost her balance for a split second and Webster slashed
viciously with his sword--once again slicing sideways--aiming for her now-exposed ankles, way too fast for her to
block in time.
Clang!!!
Webster's weapon hand vibrated monstrously as his
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jagged metal sword slammed into Mother's dress-uniformed
pants leg, just below the knee.
Webster blanched.
"What--?"
Mother smiled.
He'd hit her prosthetic lower leg--her titanium-alloy prosthetic lower leg!
Seeing her opponent's confusion, Mother took her one and only opportunity, and swung her own makeshift sword
with all her might.
Slash!
A fountain of blood sprayed out from Webster's throat
as Mother's blade sliced across his neck, severing his carotid
artery.
Webster's blade fell from his hand, and he dropped to
his knees, clutching his bleeding throat. He held his hands
out in front of him, gazing at the blood on them in disbelief.
Then he took one final horrified look up at Mother, after
which he fell face-first into a pool of his own blood.
The crowd of inmates roared with delight.
By now, the assembled mob--Seth Grimshaw included --had moved around to the northern side of the pit in an effort to find better spectating positions.
Some of them had started cheering for the President, a
happily deranged chant in the tradition of American
Olympic supporters: "U-S-A! USA!"
ON THE EASTERN SIDE OF THE PIT, GANT WAS STILL ENGAGED in the fight of her life.
Her 7th Squadron opponent's swordlike length of steel
clanged against her own quarterstaff pipe.
They fought amid the wreckage, trading blows, the
Bravo Unit commando driving her backwards. As he did so,
he began to smile with every raging swing. Clearly, he felt
he had the edge.
And so he swung harder, but as Gant saw, this only
served to wear him out more with every blow.
So she feigned fatigue, staggered backwards, "desperately"
fended off his swings.
And then her assailant swung--a lunging sloppy effort,
the swipe of a tiring man--and quick as a flash, belying her
apparent fatigue, Gant ducked beneath the blow and
launched herself upward, thrusting her pipe forward--end first--ramming its solid tip right into the throat of her
stunned opponent, crushing his Adam's apple, ramming it
two inches back into his windpipe, stopping him dead in his
tracks.
The man's eyes went instantly wide with disbelief. He
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wobbled unsteadily, wheezing, choking. He may have been
standing up, but he was already dead. Staring stupidly at
Gant, he crumpled to the ground.
The crowd of prisoners was oddly silent--stunned, it
seemed, by Gant's lightning-fast death blow.
Then they cheered their approval. Wolf whistles rained
down on Gant. Claps and cheers.
"Whoa, baby!"
"Now that is what I call a woman!"
AT THE NORTHERN END OF THE PIT, THE PRESIDENT SLID TO THE
ground beside Juliet Janson, hauled her up, but when they
both got to their feet, they froze.
Before them, standing next to one of the upturned engines
of the AWACS plane--alone but closer now--stood
Colonel Jerome T. Harper.
On the ground to his left, lying on the floor, was Boa
McConnell. He was groaning painfully, still reeling from
Mother's crunching shoulder-tackle earlier.
The hoots and hollers from the prisoners enveloped
them.
"Come on, Mr. Prez! Get some blood on your hands! Kill the fucker!"
"Eat shit, Harper!"
"U-S-A! USA!"
Harper knew the score. All his men were either dead or
useless.
And yet still he seemed strangely confident ...
It was then that he pulled something out of his pocket.
It looked like a high-tech grenade of some sort--a small
pressurized cylindrical canister with a nozzle on its top and a
vertical clear-glass window on its side.
Through the narrow glass window, the President could
see the contents of the grenade very clearly.
It was filled with a mustard-yellow liquid.
"Oh, Jesus ..." he breathed.
It was a biological grenade.
A Chinese biological grenade.
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A pressure-sealed explosive charge filled with the
Sinovirus.
AN EVIL GRIN CRACKED HARPER'S FACE.
"I was hoping it wouldn't come to this," he said. "But
fortunately for me, like every Air Force man at this complex,
I have already been immunized against the Sinovirus. The
same, however, cannot be said for you or your brave Marine
guardians."
Then, without so much as a blink, Harper pulled the pin
on the Sinovirus grenade.
harper didn't see him until it was too late.
As he pulled the pin on the grenade, all he saw was a
flashing blur of movement from the wreckage to his immediate
left.
The next thing he knew, Shane Schofield was standing
beside him, emerging from the darkness, swinging a length
of piping upward like a baseball bat.
The pipe struck Harper on the underside of his wrist,
causing the Sinovirus grenade to fly out of his hand and go
soaring upwards.
THE LIVE BIOLOGICAL GRENADE FLEW UP INTO THE AIR.
It flew in a kind of bizarre slow motion, tumbling end
over end, high above the northern half of the pit.
Schofield watched it, eyes wide.
The prisoners watched it, mouths agape.
The President watched it, awestruck.
Harper watched it, an evil grin forming on his face.
One, one-thousand ...
Two, one-thousand ...
Three ...
At that moment, at the height of its arc, about thirty
feet above the floor of the pit--directly above its northernmost
section--the Sinovirus grenade went off.
IN THE FIRELIGHT OF THE PRISONERS' TORCHES, THE AEROSOL
explosion of the grenade inside the hangar was almost beautiful.
It looked like the blast of a water-filled firecracker--a
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giant star-shaped burst of mist--with multiple fingers of watery
yellow particles shooting outwards from a central point,
showering laterally, fanning out like a giant umbrella over
the sunken aircraft elevator platform, orange firelight glinting
off every single particle.
And then in wondrous slow motion, the whole misty
cloud began to fall, first at its extremities, then in its center,
down over the pit.
LIKE SLOW-FALLING SNOW, THE Sinovirus PARTICLES descended.
Since it had detonated above the floor line of the hangar,
the yellow mist hit the prisoners standing on the rim first.
Their reaction was as sudden as it was violent.
Most of them doubled over where they stood, started
hacking, vomiting. Some fell to their knees, dropping their
flaming torches, others lapsed instantly into involuntary fits.
Within a minute, all but two were on the floor, writhing
in agony, screaming as their insides began to liquefy.
Seth Grimshaw was one of the two.
Along with Goliath,
he stood unaffected by the falling
yellow mist, while everyone around him lay dying.
Although only they and the now-dead Gunther Botha
knew it, Grimshaw and Goliath had been the original test
subjects for the vaccine against the Sinovirus the previous
afternoon.
Unlike the others, they had Kevin's vaccine coursing
through their veins.
They were immune.
THE YELLOW MIST FELL THROUGH THE DARKNESS.
It was now about fifteen feet above the lowered elevator
platform--five feet above the rim--and still falling steadily.
Alone on the eastern side of the pit, Libby Gant had
seen the grenade detonate, had seen the spectacular aerosol
explosion high above the pit. She didn't have to be a rocket
scientist to guess what it was.
A biological agent.
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The Sinovirus.
Move!
Gant spun. She was standing right next to the eastern
wall of the pit, ten feet below the rim. The rim itself was now
empty, all the inmates having moved around to the northern
side earlier.
Gant didn't waste a second.
She was still wearing her full dress uniform, which
meant she had no gas-mask--so she definitely didn't want to
be here when the Sinovirus descended into the pit.
The particles were fourteen feet off the floor.
And falling ...
Gant pushed one of the AWACS plane's big black tires
up against the concrete wall, jumped up onto it, hauled herself
out of the ten-foot-deep pit.
She rolled up onto the hangar's floor, careful to stay
low, beneath the layer of descending Sinovirus particles.
She saw the hangar's internal building about twenty
yards away from her, saw the slanted observation windows
of its upper level.
The control room, she thought. Caesar's command
center.
Staying low but moving fast, Gant hurried for the doorway
at the base of the internal building.
THE YELLOW HAZE CONTINUED TO FALL.
Having consumed the prisoners on the northern edge of
the pit, its particles now dipped below the rim, drifting down
into the pit itself.
Schofield looked anxiously about himself.
In the pandemonium of the grenade blast and the ensuing