Kim cursed at him in Korean. She had done so before, but always with a half smile or a loving glint in her eye. Tonight she had neither. She stared at the backpack, then turned to look at the contagion box—the cracked Pandora jar remained inside, exerting its sickening influence.
“Screw it,” she said, reverting to English, and she crossed the four feet to the altar.
“Kim, no!” Walker shouted, too late.
She picked up the contagion box, slung its strap over her shoulder, and turned toward Dunlap.
“Sergeant, we’re leaving.”
Dunlap nodded, keeping his gun aimed at Walker.
A grunt and a cough came from the stairwell, then someone called Kim’s name. They all turned to see Private Carson, weeping lesions all over his face and hands, stumble into the Pandora Room. Walker’s fingers twitched with the urge to reach for his gun, but Carson made no move to attack them.
“Give me the box, Miss Kim,” Carson wheezed. “It can’t do me any more harm than it already has.”
Kim seemed to be considering it.
Dunlap’s gun hand twitched toward Carson, which was the opening Walker needed. He launched himself at Dunlap, trying to wrest his gun away. Dunlap headbutted him in the jaw, and Walker tasted blood in his mouth.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of someone in the shadows, watching the violence with eager eyes. Not Kim, and not Carson, but a ghost of ancient sins, ancient hungers.
Kim shouted at them both, holding the contagion box against her abdomen.
Inside the backpack, the countdown continued.
* * *
Beyza stood frozen in the atrium. Her breath came in such tiny, panicked sips that she feared her filtration mask had somehow become blocked.
“Where you running now?” Cortez asked, in a voice not his own. “Where you going?”
He’d chased her into the atrium, hands reaching out for her with hooked fingers. The ghost clinging to his back peered over his shoulder at her, its hateful eyes trailing mist. For a moment, his fingers had caught her hair and she’d turned left instead of right, lurching away from him. Cortez took the moment to cut off her path.
Now he stood between her and the dark, yawning entrance to the deeper tunnels, to the chambers and steps that led back to where Sophie and the others were making a last-ditch attempt to find them a way out.
Up the slope of the atrium floor, the echo of gunfire grew louder and louder. It might have been a trick of the ear, the sound reverberating off the walls, but she thought the gunfight must be coming nearer, sliding down Derveyî’s throat. She wanted to run, to scream, to do anything, but the only way out or back to her friends was past the dying man in front of her.
“You can feel it. The itch under your skin,” Cortez said in that other voice.
The hell of it was that she could. Beyza scratched at her throat, and the tip of her finger punched through a wet, scabby patch of skin. Her breath caught, and she wanted to collapse right there. The contagion was in her—Cortez had been right. He had been infected when they’d made love, and now the sickness had taken root. She felt the black bile in her throat and tried to cough it up, despite her filtration mask—a mask which now seemed useless to her.
“Let me pass,” Beyza said. She wanted it to sound dangerous, like a warning, but instead the words came out as a plea.
Cortez’s face went slack and his eyes rolled back to white, but on his back, the ghost laughed. It seemed to slide deeper inside him as if stepping inside a sweating, bleeding costume that looked something like her lover.
A fresh round of gunfire echoed through the atrium, closer still. Panic clawed at her chest, and Beyza slapped her hands over her ears. She wanted to scream, but before she could, she heard other voices screaming.
She turned, but not up toward the exit. The screaming came from her left, from a passage that led to the south wing. Martin Jungling burst from the shadows, bloody tears on his cheeks. His scream turned into an eruption of coughing, but instead of letting that stop him, he barreled forward, and Beyza saw why.
Behind him came some of their friends. Their colleagues. So sick they looked near death, so twisted by the hate and cruelty inside them that they pursued him nevertheless, bodies riddled with plague and rot. In a moment between heartbeats, Beyza saw what she would become, what Martin would become, and she wondered why they bothered trying to escape the fate that had already claimed them.
Then the ghosts came screaming out of the passage in pursuit of the dying and in pursuit of Martin, and she wept … but she turned to run, the will to live more powerful than her despair.
Cortez still blocked her path. He lunged at her.
Martin used his momentum, shifted course, and barreled into Cortez. The two of them crashed to the stone floor, and then Martin rose and kicked him in the skull once, twice, a third time. Something soft gave way, even as the sick and the spectral sins caught up to both Martin and Beyza, only a dozen feet away.
Their screams were drowned out by a fresh eruption of gunfire, louder than ever. New shouts joined the hellish chorus, and Beyza whipped around to see American and Kurdish soldiers falling back into the atrium, firing their weapons at the dark passage toward the surface. There were perhaps twenty of them left, and in that frozen moment, two of them were ripped apart by gunfire from the exit.
The jihadis rushed in. The gunfire seemed deafening. Bullets flew indiscriminately as they shot not only at the soldiers but at anyone inside the atrium. Several of the plague-ridden victims jittered as bullets punched through them, and the others turned toward the soldiers and rushed in that direction.
Beyza blinked once, but she would not freeze again. She bent and grabbed Martin’s wrist, yanked him away from Cortez, who lay twitching and seizing on the floor.
“Let’s go!” she shouted, and she gave him a shove to get him moving.
Together, they rushed to the base of the slope and through the doorway into the half darkness of the passage that led deeper into Derveyî. Once this would have seemed like suicide. Now it was their only hope.
* * *
Lieutenant Cobb died because his mother had taught him not to slouch. He had been five foot eight by the fifth grade, so much taller than the other kids that he felt constantly self-conscious. His mom, Rita, had noticed that he had begun to duck his head or drop his shoulders so that he would not be so conspicuous, and from then on she had reminded him many times each day to stand up straight. To be proud. When Cobb had told his mom that he was embarrassed, she had fixed him with a soul-deep stare and said, “Live a life you can be proud of and you won’t need to slouch.” He had often credited this advice with his rapid advancement in the U.S. Army.
The bullet struck him in the right temple.
Cobb spun around, went down on one knee, and then pitched onto his chest. He heard Karnacki shouting, immediately barking orders at the rest of them to fall back, to keep firing. The gunfire went quiet somehow—still there but muffled, as if Cobb had sunken into a tub of water and the battle went on without him.
Someone put a hand on the back of his neck. Lieutenant! Are you …
The voice cut off. The hand touched his throat, searching for a pulse. Cobb could feel his pulse slowing, could feel the blood surging in his head. Someone knelt beside him, and he saw it was Ellison. Her eyes were sad, and he wanted to tell her not to be fucking stupid, to run, to fall back, to take care of what remained of their unit.
He saw Ellison twist her head to one side, watched her face contort with fear as she raised her gun. She stood, nothing but her legs remaining in his field of vision, and then she fell backward as her blood showered down around him.
The stone felt cold beneath him. The crack of gunshots and the voices shouting in two languages became nothing but white noise, like the burr of the fan he had used every night as a child, summer and winter.
Boots tromped past his face.
Cobb exhaled. He had lived a life he could be proud
of, and he had stood tall.
* * *
Kim held the contagion box in her hands and wondered how she could have been so foolish. It had been dumb enough to be surprised that Walker had acted without consulting her—this was his job, after all, and he had made no secret of that. But a plague had spread underground, sickened people and driven them mad. Many had died, and many more would follow. An army of religious zealots who would sacrifice their lives for their hatred was attacking from above, just to get their hands on the horror inside the contagion box. And she, Kim Seong, had been crazy enough to pick the box up in her bare hands.
She still wore a filtration mask, and the box itself was meant to keep contagion inside, but she couldn’t escape the certainty that she had made a terrible mistake.
“Walker!” She strode across the Pandora Room with the box clutched between her hands, and she kicked Walker in the ribs.
Sergeant Dunlap got his hands around Walker’s throat and slammed him to the floor. Over in the corner, the moaning Private Carson pleaded with them to stop.
“Don’t be … assholes…,” Carson croaked.
Which summed it up pretty well for Kim. She swept her leg back to kick Walker again, and despite Dunlap on top of him, he managed to reach out, grab her booted foot, and shove her backward. She pinwheeled until she collided with the wall but managed to keep from falling. The hurt in his eyes at that moment shocked her. It had seemed that he had moved beyond their intimacy, beyond recrimination or trust, but somehow he still thought they had a personal connection, unable to see what he had done to shatter that relationship.
Dunlap smashed Walker against the floor again. This time Walker shot a hard punch into Dunlap’s solar plexus and, in the moment the sergeant was stunned, tossed him aside. Bloody-faced, their filtration masks dangerously askew, the two men faced off against one another.
“The countdown is on!” Walker shouted. “If we stay here, we’re going to be obliterated. We have to get out of here!”
On the floor in front of the altar, the backpack sat inert. If Kim had any suspicion he might be bluffing, the look on his face would have erased it.
Dunlap lunged for him. Walker snatched his wrist, twisted, and slammed a knee into the sergeant’s abdomen. As Dunlap grunted, doubled over, Walker hooked one foot behind him and shoved the man backward. With both of them reeling, it came down to training and experience now, and Walker had more of each. If he had wanted to damage Dunlap further, he could have. Instead, he spun to glare at Kim again.
“Put that fucking thing back on the altar and let’s go! We don’t have another choice!”
Kim hesitated, wondering if he was right after all. Wouldn’t it be better for all of them to die here than for her to risk the jihadis getting their hands on the jar? The logic seemed so clear suddenly. The things that shifted in her peripheral vision, the twist of sickness in her gut, made her want to run, but what kind of solution was that?
“We’ll never make it,” Kim said, not sure if she meant they would never escape the plague or the explosives. Maybe both.
Dunlap staggered to his feet.
Walker stared at Kim. “Seong … there is no other option.”
The quiet, terrible moment of realization that followed was interrupted by a shuffling thump and a plastic crinkling, and they all turned to see Dr. Tang step out of the stairwell in a blue hazmat suit.
“Erika, no,” Kim said. “You can’t be here—”
Dr. Tang pointed at the contagion box in Kim’s hands. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing with that,” she said, her voice muffled inside the hazmat suit, “but you’d better hand it over to me.”
Walker started to argue with her.
“Hush,” Dr. Tang said. She glanced at Dunlap, then back at Walker, and finally at the backpack in front of the altar. “Idiots. Listen up. They’ve broken through the wall, and there is definitely a tunnel there, including an underground river.”
“There’s no time,” Walker said. “The jihadis are going to get through.”
Dunlap eyed him warily. “You don’t know that.”
Kim faced Dr. Tang. “There are explosives in the backpack. It’s on a timer. We need to go.”
“Agreed,” Dr. Tang replied.
Carson coughed, leaning against the wall. “What difference does it make? Nobody’s making it out of here.”
Dr. Tang put a hand on his arm, helping to steady him. The hazmat suit crinkled with her movement as she turned quickly to stare at Walker.
“I understand the temptation,” she said. “But there are already enough people infected, and we need to study the jar if there’s any hope of creating an antidote to its effects. Never mind that if you blow up the jar, you could cause a cloud of this stuff to shoot out through the vents aboveground, infecting the jihadis. They take that contagion home and it is going to get ugly very fast.”
“Why the hell are you worried about them?” Dunlap growled.
“Because it won’t end with them,” Kim said.
Dr. Tang nodded.
“You sure this new tunnel is a way out?” Walker asked, glancing nervously at the backpack. He reached up to adjust his filtration mask, making sure it was tight on his face.
“How could we be?” Dr. Tang replied. “But there’s a draft and water, and it beats dying in this room or being murdered by jihadis.”
“Walker,” Kim said, sliding the strap of the contagion box over her shoulder. “I’m going. You want to stop me—”
He threw up his hands. “Hell, no. If we’ve got an exit, let’s take it.”
Dunlap looked as if he might want to pick up where the fight left off, if they lived long enough, but instead he pointed at the backpack. “What about that?”
Walker rushed over to Carson and helped the man to stand up straight. “You want to bring it along, be my guest, but I have no idea how to stop the countdown.”
Dunlap took one more look at the backpack, then hurried for the thirteen steps. Dr. Tang went up ahead of him, hazmat suit whickering noisily.
Kim followed them, with Walker and Carson coming up behind her.
“Sophie’s going to kill you for destroying this room,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “If I don’t kill you first.”
“Sorry, honey. A leopard can’t change his spots.”
“You’re not a leopard. You’re an asshole.”
Walker didn’t argue.
TWENTY-FOUR
Heart thrumming in panic, struggling to breathe, Sophie wanted to rip the hazmat suit off. Being underground all these months hadn’t bothered her as much as she had feared, but that had changed. The mountain pressed down on her from above. The tunnels were filled with human frailties, the air choked with them, and sickness gusted along the corridors and through the vents. She wore a filtration mask, and the hazmat suit over that, and her chest ached with a congestion she tried to ignore because she knew what it signified. The tickle there, and the wheeze in her throat, told her the mask hadn’t been enough and the suit had been too late.
Maybe she wouldn’t get any sicker, maybe it would be slowed by her limited exposure, but she had been infected. She imagined they all had. The knowledge made her want to rip off her skin along with her suit, to rush out of the caves and across the desert, to pump her legs until she reached her mother and father in France.
Yes, she thought. Bring them more disease. That’s all they need.
Sophie shifted her weight from one leg to the other and tried not to shout out her frustration and fear. She glanced at Taejon and Ruiz. “What’s taking them so long?”
“No idea,” Taejon said. “But you’re the boss. How long do we wait?”
“You think we should leave them all behind?”
Taejon cast her a sidelong glance, a sad wisdom in his eyes. “I’m a soldier, Dr. Durand. I’m not inclined to leave anyone behind. But a lot of people down here are past saving, and I don’t want to be one of them. I figure we give them a few minutes longe
r, and then we get out of here.”
Sophie looked at him. Her heart pounded in her chest. Abandoning the others did not sit well with her, especially Beyza and Dr. Tang, but neither did standing around waiting to die. She replied to Taejon only in her head, knowing what she intended but unwilling to admit it out loud.
Come on, she thought, glancing both ways along the tunnel. Come on.
A draft issued from the hole in the wall behind them, and she nodded slowly. It felt almost like the spirits were trying to tell her something.
“Two minutes,” she said. “Then we go.”
She’d barely uttered the words when the group of them came up the corridor from the direction of the column chamber. Kim led the way, moving fast with the contagion box slung over her shoulder and clasped between her hands. Dr. Tang and Walker hurried after her, but behind them, Dunlap helped a visibly sickened Carson. A wave of revulsion swept through Sophie, and she wished they could leave Carson behind, then hated herself for that wish. Bad enough they weren’t going back for the others, not knowing if they were alive or dead. Carson was right there with him, and they couldn’t just abandon him.
“Jesus, man,” Ruiz said, moving to help Dunlap with Carson. “You look like shit warmed over.”
“Feels about right,” Carson wheezed.
Sophie tore her gaze from the men. She turned and picked up the plastic package from the floor and handed it to Kim. “Your hazmat suit.”
From down the corridor, they heard the muffled sound of gunshots, and Sophie glanced in that direction. With the stairs and the worship chamber and the Alexander Room, they should have been barely able to hear such sounds except through the vents, but this wasn’t from the vents. The noise didn’t come from outside but from there underground with them, and it was getting closer.
“Make it fast,” Sophie said, even as Kim tore open the package.
Walker strode to the opening they had smashed through the wall. He picked up the pickax and ducked his head through the hole, glancing around a moment before turning back to her.
The Pandora Room: A Novel Page 28
