Destroying Angel

by Michael Wallace

  The being reached inside his robe. He pulled out a sword. It sucked the darkness from the air, forming a shadow so deep that everything around it seemed lighter in comparison. Caught in the moonlight, it grew darker still and sent shadows crawling like snakes along the stone wall behind it.

  “Jacob Christianson,” the angel said, “this is the night of your destruction.”

  He lifted the sword above his head and brought it down at Jacob’s head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Don’t shoot!” Lillian screamed.

  Eliza thought at first that she was yelling at the figure in the yellow hazmat suit who held the assault rifle. But Lillian was screaming at Miriam, who had moved into a crouch to Eliza’s right, her gun already in hand. The assault rifle swung toward Eliza.

  Their opponent was too short to be a man, and the hazmat suit disguised but did not entirely hide her form. She was heavy at the hips, built like a woman who had given birth, probably several times. Some of the children lying on the floor, their chests barely moving as they smothered in carbon dioxide, were probably her own. What was she doing? Why wasn’t she helping?

  But what did the woman see? Three figures, their faces obscured behind the black, insect-like tubes coming out of the rebreather masks, had just dropped into their midst. And armed.

  These thoughts flickered through Eliza’s mind even as she saw the inevitable. Miriam had become a machine, its on switch flipped, its motor spinning autonomously, its gears in motion. Her training had kicked in, and nothing would stop it. Lillian threw herself at the woman in the hazmat suit, reaching for the gun as if recognizing she had to get it down before Miriam could—

  Miriam’s gun barked twice.

  The woman fell backward. Her finger squeezed on the trigger and the assault rifle jerked upward. Bullets chattered from the muzzle, spraying the wall and ceiling.

  Lillian was at the woman’s side even before she stopped twitching. A pair of red blossoms formed on the front of the yellow suit, no more than an inch apart. They bloomed until they became a single large splotch. Lillian unzipped the front of the suit and got the mask up and off. It was a young woman, her face still flushed.

  “Why would you do that?” Lillian said to the dead woman. “It was all a lie—I told you. He’s not a prophet. Mary Ellen!”

  Eliza’s mind raced. Mary Ellen Paxson? Mary Ellen Johnson? Blood trickled from the woman’s mouth, the flush on her face turning gray as blood drained into and out of her chest cavity, and then her expression turned glassy. It was as if Eliza were watching the transformation of a woman into one of the rubber resuscitation dolls Jacob hauled around town to teach people CPR.

  Eliza dragged herself from her stupor. She turned from Lillian, who was sobbing behind her mask, and found Miriam frozen, gun still raised. Miriam pulled her gas mask up to her forehead with the other hand. It left a red ring around her face, and a strand of damp, sweaty hair dropped in front of her eyes, but she didn’t brush it away.

  “Put your mask back on,” Eliza said.

  Miriam wore a distant stare. “She had to see. Even with the masks. We’re three women. We weren’t a threat, we came to help.”

  Eliza pushed down the gun and fit the gas mask back over the other woman’s face.

  Miriam looked down at the gun. Moving deliberately, she flicked the safety and tucked the gun into its holster. She turned to Eliza. “I had no choice.”

  “You did what you had to.”

  She wasn’t sure that Miriam could have stopped herself. That was the dark side of all of that training in the FBI, reinforced twice a week at the shooting range. The idea, Miriam said, was to teach your muscles to respond automatically. How did you turn that off, even if the person with the other gun was brainwashed into throwing her life away?

  One of the people on the floor groaned. Eliza pulled Lillian to her feet. She turned with a muffled sob and tried to pull free.

  “Move!” Eliza said. “Both of you. We’re running out of time.”

  “What do we do?” Miriam said. She sounded stronger.

  “Give me your knife.”

  Miriam removed her KA-BAR knife from its sheath and handed it over.

  Eliza pointed to the far side of the lounge. “Go shut that door. We don’t want any more air from that side of the compound.” She turned to Lillian and gestured to the people lying on the floor. “Find someone you can trust. No, two someones. We’re going to wake them up.”

  While Miriam went to shut the door, Eliza stripped the dead woman out of her hazmat suit, then used the knife to cut most of the suit away from the rebreather and the respirator and air tank. Blood covered her hands by the time she finished. She wiped them on the carpet, leaving dark streaks on beige.

  “I found someone,” Lillian said. “Sister Anne. And her daughter, Rachel. She’s fifteen, but a smart girl, and strong. And she’s still awake—look!”

  Rachel’s eyes turned to watch as Eliza and Miriam came over. Miriam fit the girl with the breathing mask cut from the hazmat suit. Eliza stripped off her own mask and took a breath of air that stank of sulfur, like rotten eggs. But it was the part she couldn’t smell that would kill her, the carbon dioxide that saturated the air.

  Eliza put her mask over Anne’s head and waited near the ventilation shaft to breathe the somewhat fresher air now pushing into the room. She slowed her breathing.

  Rachel rose to a sitting position shortly after taking in oxygen through the rebreather, and her mother, Anne, followed a moment later.

  “I’m down to 800 psi,” Miriam said with a glance at her pressure gauge. “Another ten minutes is all.”

  More than twenty people to drag up to the surface. If only they hadn’t burned so much oxygen looking for the ventilation shaft.

  “Lillian, you stay here,” Eliza said. “Get everyone as close to the vent as possible. Use Mary Ellen’s tank first on the children who can walk. No more than a minute per person. Use your own tank on the babies for—Miriam, how long?”

  “Thirty seconds on, thirty off. And if you get light-headed, stop.”

  Lillian nodded and started dragging people closer to the vent.

  Miriam took Eliza’s arm. “Maybe we should, you know, try to…” She stopped, then said in a lower voice, “Can we save them all? Let’s say five minutes to get them up the ladder, five minutes back. Two of us going back and forth. A few others able to walk. We’ve got to carry all these kids. We’ll run out of oxygen.”

  “Steve is waiting outside the doors. He’s got spare tanks. Heaven knows if it will be enough, but we have to try.”

  Eliza retrieved her breathing mask from Anne and took deep gulps. She and Miriam plucked up a toddler each and then got Anne and Rachel to their feet. Anne tried to pick up another child, but she and her daughter both looked too shaky, as if they were on the verge of collapse, and Eliza insisted they go alone.

  “Be careful,” Lillian said. She held a baby with her mask over his face. He took shallow breaths. “Watch for booby traps.”

  Eliza reopened the door and led Miriam and the others from the lounge toward the surface, while Lillian clanked the door shut again behind them. They found themselves in a tunnel shaped like a giant metal culvert, lit with cool fluorescent fixtures. A generator rumbled in the distance. The tunnel continued straight ahead another forty or fifty feet to another heavy metal door.

  Anne wobbled. Eliza handed the sluggish toddler to the woman’s daughter and shared the oxygen from her mask, first to the baby and then to the girl. Miriam did the same thing with Anne and with the child she carried. The air smelled awful here, the sulfur so strong Eliza’s eyes watered. She was relieved when she reclaimed the air, but her pressure was down to 350 psi. Another four, five minutes, tops.

  Eliza took back the toddler. “Hurry.”

  A broken keypad dangled from wires in the wall outside the metal door on the far side of the tunnel, and when they pushed open the door they entered what turned out to be the first missile
silo. It was a round, multistory room, fifty feet across and stretching high into the gloom above them, the sides ribbed with metal girding like an inverted underground skyscraper. Pipes and tubing snaked along the sides, and an upright metal tank the size of a small grain silo bore a sign that read DANGER: HIGH PRESSURE—PROPELLANT TERMINAL.

  A catwalk traced the perimeter to another metal door on the far side. As soon as they were through it, the door swung shut behind them, plunging them into darkness. But there was a draft passing through the room. The child coughed in Eliza’s arms, and when they reached the other side, Miriam’s child whimpered.

  Miriam’s voice floated in the darkness. “The air is better in here. Should we try to get them all in here? It might buy us time.”

  “We’ve got to get out to Krantz first. If it’s still good on the return trip, we’ll try it.”

  They entered the next passageway. Anne and her daughter stumbled forward, expressions glazed, as they tried to reach the next silo. But any hope that it would provide the same relief as the first vanished when Eliza saw the look on the teenager’s face as she passed through the doorway. It crumpled in despair, and she grabbed the catwalk railing to steady herself.

  “It’s worse than ever,” Anne wheezed. “Get us out of here. Please.”

  Miriam and Eliza shared their air for a few seconds before letting the door close behind them and continuing. They had to give more air to the children as well. On reaching the other side, Rachel promised they were almost at the end. Better be. Much farther, and the girl’s mother would be done for.

  “What about these booby traps?” Eliza asked.

  Anne shook her head with a bleary expression, so Eliza tried the woman’s daughter. “Don’t know,” Rachel said. “Brother Niels. He came earlier.” She doubled over and gasped, and then straightened again. “Carrying a bag. Weapons.”

  “And who the devil is this Brother Niels?” Miriam asked.

  “Must be Niels Griggs,” Eliza said. “The younger brother of Jacob’s grandfather. Elmo Griggs’s father.”

  “And he’s armed?” Miriam asked Anne and Rachel. “What’s he got? Is he alone?”

  But both mother and daughter could manage only a feeble shake of the head or a shrug, and Miriam gave a frustrated grunt. She double-checked her weapon while they continued.

  They passed through the final missile silo, and then they reached an elevator, but it wasn’t working. Rachel showed them a metal ladder, bolted into the concrete of a vertical tunnel that climbed to the surface. It wasn’t much wider than the ventilation shaft that had led Eliza, Miriam, and Lillian into the compound. Rachel flipped a switch that lit the vertical shaft with orange bulbs, half of them burned out and the remainder casting a sickly glow.

  They began the laborious process of fighting their way to the surface. Mother and daughter went first, followed by Eliza and the child she carried, with Miriam and her own child bringing up the rear. The metal rungs seemed to continue forever. The two refugees from the compound had only bad air to breathe, but Eliza and Miriam each struggled with a semiconscious baby in their arms. Halfway up, Anne came to a stop. She wrapped her arms around the ladder and refused to move.

  “Move it!” Eliza said. “You’re going to die!”

  “Can’t.”

  The needle on Eliza’s air gauge was at 150 psi. She climbed until she reached the woman, took off the mask, and shared her air. “Breathe faster.”

  “Save some air,” Miriam said. “You’ve got to have enough to get that kid up.”

  “It’s only a few more feet,” Eliza said. “I can manage.” She unstrapped her oxygen tank and buckled it onto Anne’s back. “Now go.”

  Eliza’s head swam. The child felt like a bag of sand in her arms. She could do this—it was only another dozen rungs to the top, and an open room that she hoped would hold the front doors to the missile base.

  “Take out your gun,” Miriam said.

  “I can’t. I might drop the baby.”

  “Risk it. Pin her under your arm if you have to.”

  Eliza gripped the child against her side, as she might do with a box, so she could use both hands. The baby was maybe six months old, with beautiful, chubby cheeks and wispy golden hair, but so still and pale that Eliza was afraid it was too late. She unsnapped her holster and took out the gun but didn’t dare to finger the safety, not while holding a baby. She struggled to continue.

  The edges of her vision seemed smudged and distant. She heard everything as if from the bottom of a well. The clank of shoes on metal rungs, her own labored breathing, the generator rumbling in the guts of the base—it all had a hollow, surreal quality. Her fingertips went numb.

  I’m suffocating. My brain is starving for oxygen.

  Now that the mother had oxygen, both she and her daughter climbed faster. Rachel reached the top first, crawling off the ladder into the small room in front of the doors. Suddenly, she screamed, then slid out of sight, her legs kicking. Next in line, Anne cried out and fumbled at the rungs as if losing her grip. Eliza lifted the gun, but it was like lead in her hand, and her head was throbbing and dizzy. The baby slipped. She grabbed at it and in the process dropped the gun, which fell end over end past Miriam’s head. It hit the bottom of the shaft with a boom that echoed back up.

  Someone leaned over the edge of the ladder from above. Another yellow hazmat suit. A gun held over the edge. Something zipped past Eliza’s ear, and then came the explosive sound of a gun firing, somehow registering later than the actual shot—almost seconds later, it seemed, although some dim part of her mind recognized that her brain was shutting down, that the lack of oxygen was warping her perceptions.

  “Move!” Miriam said from below her.

  Eliza flattened herself against the ladder, pinning the baby with her body. Standing just below her on the ladder, Miriam braced her hand against Eliza’s hip, gun in hand. It fired once. A man cried out above them. Miriam swore.

  The man in the hazmat suit was in full view now, standing with a handgun over the exit shaft but wobbly on his feet. In spite of Miriam’s curse, Eliza thought she’d shot him, but then she saw her mistake. He wasn’t injured, Eliza saw now. Instead he’d cried out as Rachel, on her knees below him, wrapped her arms around his legs. He tried to push her off, but the teenager gripped him with all the strength she’d used to clutch the ladder moments earlier.

  “This time,” Miriam said, her voice a murmur. She hadn’t moved her hand from Eliza’s hip. Her other hand wedged the second child between their two bodies, and Eliza dimly felt it squirming.

  Miriam fired again. The man jerked and staggered forward. His gun fell, ricocheting against the wall of the shaft opposite the ladder and then smacking Eliza painfully in the shoulder as it clinked to the bottom.

  The man grabbed at Anne as he fell. His fingers almost yanked her free, but she held on. His elbow slammed into Eliza’s head, but then he was past, crying out as he bounced back and forth between the ladder and the wall. A tremendous thud sounded when he hit the bottom, and then silence.

  “Go,” Miriam said. “For heaven’s sake. I’m…” She stopped and gave a feeble push at Eliza’s bottom.

  But Eliza was already in motion. Somehow she found the strength to keep going, rung after rung, until at last Anne and Rachel were above her, pulling her up. She got a glimpse of the pressure gauge on Anne’s tank. Empty. How long since Eliza had turned over the mask and tank? At least two minutes, maybe longer. Since then, nothing but carbon dioxide–saturated air into Eliza’s own lungs.

  She joined the others in helping Miriam up, and then the four of them struggled with the giant metal wheel that sealed the door shut. It groaned and then released. Air rushed in, but she knew it was more of the same.

  A flashlight glared in her eyes as she pushed into the open air. It was Krantz, a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other, but he put them both away when he saw them. “Oh, thank God.”

  Eliza collapsed into Krantz’s arms. The baby slip
ped out, but he caught its clothing in his fist and set the child on the ground.

  “Air,” she managed.

  “No,” he said. “Not here. Smell it.”

  And then she noticed that, curiously, he wasn’t wearing his mask. She took a deep lungful. It was dry and sweet, the air of the desert. A breeze whistled over the ridge, coming from the north. Anne and her daughter lay on their backs away from the doorway, breathing deeply. For several seconds they did nothing but gasp. The baby cried out where Krantz had set it. Miriam’s let out a long, desperate-sounding whine. The crying children sounded beautiful to Eliza’s ears.

  “The wind shifted a few minutes ago,” he said. “I took a chance and saved the oxygen.” He turned to Miriam. “Open that door wider. It can only help.”

  Miriam set down her child and did as Krantz said. She loaded more bullets into her gun. “We have to go back. The air is dead down there, and we can’t wait until it clears out.”

  Eliza lifted herself to a sitting position. Her head pounded. “And the wind might shift again. Lillian’s oxygen will be gone by now.”

  They swapped out their empty air tanks for the spares, and then Eliza and Miriam descended once more into the underground compound along with Krantz, who put on his own SCBA gear and carried the half tank from earlier. This time there were no surprises. They paused at the bottom, where Niels Griggs lay sprawled, broken and bloody. Krantz stopped long enough to strip him of his mask and air tank.

  When they reached the far lounge, Lillian was slumped in the corner, staring at the door with a glazed expression, but still awake. Some of the others had regained consciousness too, as she’d shared the air from her tank and what she could give them from the dead woman’s hazmat suit. Some could walk, and a couple of older children—who seemed to recover more quickly than the adults—even helped the younger ones. Krantz carried three children at a time, one on his back with arms around his neck, and one tucked under each arm. He even managed this while climbing the metal ladder. They made a second pass, but then Krantz’s air gave out, and Eliza went back alone for the last child.