Hunt for the Holy Grail

by Preston W Child

  “Now that, that’s some scary shit to say,” Liam Murphy mumbled.

  That silence that called up horrific imaginations came upon the group. To distract herself, Olivia had her notes. She wrote in longhand and made copious side notes. She’d love a couple of glasses of whiskey too, if that were possible, and if she didn’t suppose that at this time, even she needed her head working right.

  She wished, though, that the Russian would invite her to drink.

  “Alright, I’m all up for an antidote and all.” Ted joined Miller in the middle of the room. “But whatever we are gonna do, we gotta get on with, fast.”

  Olivia took a sheet off her notebook. She wrote on it and passed it to Peter. He read it and nodded.

  Nicolai got up and went to his boxes.

  He looked around the room. “I need a hand. Who wants to join me?”

  Olivia jumped up. “I will.”

  “I think I can make something simple for a weapon.”

  “What? A Molotov cocktail?” asked Ted Cooper.

  “Yes, if that is what it takes to get out of here.”

  Olivia joined the Russian. The rest of the crew watched as Ted Cooper made his exit again. When he was gone, Olivia rushed to get her camera. Peter held her hand on her way through the door.

  “Be careful,” he told her.

  The crew all nodded. Olivia slipped out after Miller quietly.

  —

  She saw Cooper go straight past the rocket room where the soldiers were. She heard the boom of the quarantined soldier as he attacked the glass windows. The professor went on without looking that way.

  Cooper went past without so much as a hoot from the two sentries at the door of the rocket room.

  The sentries appeared well, healthy. She stopped about two meters from them. Miller went out of sight into a door that the major hadn’t allowed the crew to go near.

  Disappointed, Olivia stood flattened against the wall. She had hoped to follow Miller, out to wherever he was off to. To take photos of him betraying the crew. She hadn’t factored in the sentries.

  She started back to the others.

  —

  When Olivia was back with the crew she told them what she saw.

  “Ted Cooper went out without permission, I think.”

  “What does that prove?” Itay Friedman said.

  Olivia glared at him. “That he is one of them!”

  Guided by her notes, she outlined her theory. She argued that the professor meant to see them out, either to the soldiers in the facility now, or to some third party.

  Ted was, in fact, meeting that third party right now.

  “We have to make him feel like he’s winning,” she concluded. “That’s how we beat him.”

  The men said it made sense.

  Disgruntled with the direction his expedition had taken, and in his friend, Frank Miller requested that the crew be split in two. One half would work on arming the crew, and the other must find a way to get into the main laboratory under the watchful eyes of the soldiers.

  Miller, Itay Friedman, and Victor Borodin would get into the laboratory.

  “And what if we can’t find anything there to help us?” Borodin asked.

  Miller said, “We will.”

  Friedman spread Kruger’s map and blueprints on the floor after they shut the door and drove the lock in. It would be no use if Professor Cooper found them on the floor, scheming.

  “We need a way around the guards. Ms. Olivia said there are two sentries on watch duty. Here is the rocket room, and here is the laboratory.” Miller tapped on a spot on the map.

  “And this is where we are, this room.”

  With shaking hands he traced the lines—the walls—surrounding the room in which they were. The block stretched down in one rectangular shape from the rocket room, all the way past their room and two rooms after. They had not gotten to those ones yet, and no one knows what treasures lurked in those places.

  However, to their left there was another room, larger than this one. After it was the hall that led to the U-boat pen. But between that room and the rocket room, there was the hallway.

  “If we could get from here, across the hallway and into this room,” Miller mused.

  He tapped a space right beside the laboratory, directly behind the enclosure where the ailing soldiers were imprisoned.

  “But how do we get there?” Miller said, half to himself.

  He looked at the light bulb burning low and yellow. The rest did too.

  “The vents.”

  —

  Now there was a further problem of going into the vents without drawing Ted Cooper’s attention.

  There they hit a snag.

  “Restrain him?” Olivia proposed.

  Peter shook his head. “Ted is a big man.”

  Nicolai said, “Drug him then.”

  Peter smiled. “Yes.”

  7

  That night, while the soldier who hadn’t taken on the advanced stage of the disease settled in, Victor Borodin, Liam Murphy, and a reluctant Anabia Nassif forced him into the mission because he was the only one in the group who would know what to look for.

  Ted Cooper snored under a heavy dose of a queer mixture of morphine and a certain other substance that Anabia had concocted.

  Olivia prayed. The words tasted bland but she did anyway.

  —

  At that same moment major Juan Santiago’s talkie squeaked to life. His itch had let up. It had been replaced with a headache. He had slept fitfully and he’d dreamt bad dreams earlier on.

  When his body finally won —momentarily— against the virus that was roaming and multiplying inside of him, he dropped down to a dark chasm below and knew nothing.

  Until his damn talkie started talking.

  Disoriented at first, looking up at the white ceiling above, it took him approximately fifteen seconds to realize he wasn’t in a home in Sao Paulo.

  He thought his trained ears heard rumbling. He looked from the top of the rocket where he lay and saw that all his men were asleep. The ones who snored sang, the ones who didn’t just slept on.

  There was a booted foot sprawled at the door. Santiago couldn’t see the rest of the soldier, but he knew those two had fallen asleep.

  The talkie squawked again.

  “Santiago!!”

  “I’m here, sir.”

  “I have been calling you, estupido!” the admiral barked. “Where are we with the Americans?”

  “I’m keeping them locked down sir.”

  “Good, are your men still alive?”

  Santiago wasn’t sure about the one that was locked in the small observation room. He jumped down from the platform, groaned from the pain in his muscles. “Shit.”

  He stepped forward slowly, a precaution to not agitate the mad soldier. But he was not in sight. Santiago moved closer.

  BANG!

  The sick soldier jumped at the glass and Santiago swore he should have shattered the glass. But it held.

  “Jesus Christ!” he yelped.

  “What is it, Santiago?” There was concern in the admiral’s voice. “What is the matter with you?!”

  “It's not me, Admiral. It’s the sick soldier.”

  “Good, stay put. I have to deal with the fleet here.”

  He clicked the talkie off.

  “Luigi?”

  Luigi banged the glass again. His nose flared. He huffed.

  The major gave up and went back to his bed of rocket. He was fast asleep even before his head hit the makeshift pillow comprising of his backpack and briefs.

  That rumble again, as sleep dragged him down.

  —

  The rumble that Major Juan Santiago heard was in fact the movements of men prospecting their way through the ventilator.

  Armed with pen torches and the blueprint of the facility, they made it past the hallway that led out to the U-boat pen, and that separated the crew's bunk room and the area where the rocket room was.

  Victo
r Borodin stopped suddenly. In the air vent there was little room for sideways mobility, so the Russian stopped shuffling. Liam’s chin brushed against his boots.

  Someone was talking to themselves, or so it appeared. The sound of the voice was so close that Borodin sweated even though the air in the vent was cool. The talking stopped. There was a bang, a snarl.

  That must be the sick soldier, he thought.

  Then he concluded that the other voice must be the major since his men hardly talked.

  They shuffled on when he was certain that the quietness that came after was going to be a long one.

  —

  The game had begun. In order to meet with the fleet that has come to make sure the destroyer and her crew was well and fine, the admiral would have to follow a protocol of speed and to meet the coming destroyers at a prescribed distance.

  The admiral was stalling. Leaving his present position was a predicament; one, he would have to forfeit deploying unto the Antarctic and finish his job there. And two, meeting with the fleet makes the fruition of his plan a future endeavor.

  But he didn’t have the luxury of time. A lot was riding in his delay. The soldiers he sent were sick with something he didn’t understand.

  And in just a few hours, things could change. The Americans could overpower the soldiers if their sickness persists. Then the admiral would have lost. Everything.

  On the bright side, he could tell the fleet what was going on and let them do his job for him. It was a gamble but he was willing to play it.

  So when the transmission came in asking for status, Admiral Anton Huebner replied, “Crew is well but would maintain vigilant status on account of foreign intruders on Antarctica.”

  When the admiral in one of the other ships received the message, he was more confused than when he received orders to go back for Huebner’s ship.

  “What’s on Antarctica?” he asked no one in particular.

  —

  Victor Borodin missed his way twice. The first time when they were almost over the edge of the target laboratory and when they were coming back.

  Victor had taken a look at the blueprint and at the fork in the vent, and just lost his bearing.

  Their heads were now covered with a mass of cobwebs and they were swallowing dust by morsels. Victor prayed that no one sneezed. That was exactly when the biologist Anabia Nassif got the urge.

  Victor heard him sniffle and waited.

  “What’s the waiting about?” Liam Murphy whispered.

  “Nassif, he wants to sneeze,” he answered.

  Confused, Nassif said he didn’t want to sneeze.

  Borodin checked the print again and gambled. His gamble paid off. In minutes they were looking through a mesh down into the main laboratory.

  But Borodin's heart sank because yes, this was the lab. And down there were test tubes, odd-looking microscopes, charts on the wall with formulas on them, cabinets full of documents.

  There was also the major standing in the middle of the lab.

  —

  “What is he doing?” Nassif asked Liam Murphy.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Victor, what’s going on?”

  Victor Borodin turned his head as best as he could and whispered, “There's someone down there.”

  Shocked silence followed. Raw fear and uncertainty. Nassif was shaking behind Liam Murphy.

  Murphy asked Borodin, “What are we going to do?”

  Borodin didn’t have the answer. His eyes peered at the soldier standing in the middle of the lab. The major hadn’t moved since they arrived. Five minutes ago. Nassif's sniffling increased. It was loud, in fact, in the vents. Borodin assumed the flowing air would carry the sniffling all across the network of the ventilator.

  “He’s just standing there,” Victor Borodin whispered. “He’s not moving, I don’t think he’s well.”

  “Describe what you see to me,” Nassif said.

  “His eyes are half-closed, he’s wavering as if he’s drunk…”

  Nassif thought about this and decided that they could actually step into the lab.

  “He’s sleepwalking,” Nassif said. “He can’t hear us or even see us if we are quiet.”

  “Are you sure?” Borodin asked.

  “One hundred percent.”

  —

  Each man stepped down from the vents onto a table with two racks of test tubes. The tubes jiggled against each other slightly and made music of glass. Nassif almost toppled the table as he dropped on it but Borodin was fast. He held the tipping table before the tubes fell and crashed.

  Nassif tiptoed to the major, waved a hand in front of the half-shut eyes, and shook his head. The man’s forehead sweated. The flesh around his eyes was raw and pink. His lips were an arid piece of flesh, cracked. His nose flared. Nassif was sure if he brought the back of his hand close he would feel a hot draught. His throat gargled with saliva and mucus from the sound of it.

  “He’s far gone.”

  “Come on, Nassif!” Borodin hissed.

  Liam Murphy went to the door. There was no one in the corridor; no soldiers, nor sentries. He half expected to see Ted Cooper sauntering down the hallway.

  “Hurry!” he whispered.

  Nassif glanced at the major every five seconds.

  Borodin found a small plastic bag in what he figured must be a storeroom. He picked one medium-sized microscope and a rack of test tubes, some labeled vials containing clear liquids. Nassif went to the file cabinet and began rummaging as quietly as he could.

  Meanwhile, the major slept on, on his feet. Delirious.

  Getting back up into the vents hadn’t come up in the plan. The three men stared at the vent in the ceiling in dismay. One man could push the other up into it. But how would the last man get in there without knocking the table of vials over?

  Borodin had begun going back up, quite unsteadily, without much thought about the consequences before Nassif pulled his hand.

  The table shook.

  The major mumbled in his sleep.

  They held their breath.

  —

  They were in the hallway minutes later, tiptoeing, merchandise in plastic bags, hearts in their hands.

  The hall there was vacant of any other souls. Anabia Nassif held his cache against his chest. The tubes were making those annoying clinking sounds. Liam Murphy had carried a wrench he took from Nicolai’s toolbox. He brandished it now like a sword. Victor Borodin was leading again.

  As they approached the spot where Olivia has reported seeing sentries they paused and listened.

  It seemed someone was coming.

  —

  The disease, which had attacked the soldiers and had turned one of them into a zombie, was still in its incomplete stage when the scientists abandoned the project years ago.

  Upon inhalation, a human heart ought to stop beating in approximately ten seconds. First the human would show the signs that the soldiers now exhibit in the first five seconds; painful aggression, blinding headaches because the blood vessels are dilating so much, and then death. A precursor to bleeding from the ears and eyes would be a zombie-like disposition.

  However, any infected person now would not be so lucky, as it now was for the soldiers. The human body sometimes takes liberty at doing with a foreign, incomplete compound and made with the lemon it found, lemonade.

  The soldier's immunity simply bonded with the virus, and adopted what was convenient for each body. For the first soldier, a full-blown zombie.

  For the major, before he advanced to a full-blown zombie, he sleepwalked.

  Major Santiago had risen like an undead in the middle of the night. Prompted perhaps, by a marker in his gene, an inherited habit of sleepwalking that he had outgrown.

  He wandered off. When he got to the lab, he stopped and continued sleeping. He even dreamed. The contents of his dream no one can accurately state.

  But his talkie didn’t quite sleep for the admiral’s voice spoke through it, seeking his attention. />
  One of the sentries, not infected yet but very hungry and tired from long hours of sentry duty, had woken up. He found the talkie on the rocket where the major left.

  He searched for the major in the rocket room.

  He was coming after him in the laboratory, talkie in hand, and nothing else.

  —

  The sentry walked into the three men.

  Both parties, shocked and confused—especially the sentry—took a couple of seconds for their brains to register what was happening.

  The soldier recovered faster. The voice on the talkie had clicked off in annoyance. The soldier, recognizing the ambush, threw the talkie at the man with the plastic bag against his chest. He missed.

  In the throwing process, he brought his body closer to Victor Borodin. The Russian brought the wrench down on the relatively shorter man’s head. It connected with his temple. He yelled.

  The soldier grabbed Borodin’s hand, and blocking further attack, he brought his knee against the Russian’s solar plexus. Borodin doubled in pain. His weapon fell in a loud clang.

  As Victor Borodin went down, Liam Murphy jumped on the soldier. He wrapped his hands around his neck and started choking him. Anabia Nassif, scared out of his wits, ran back towards the lab.

  Borodin staggered against the wall, regaining his composure. He searched around for the wrench but couldn’t see it. Liam and the soldier were on top of it, struggling. Borodin joined in.

  He had learned martial arts in college for a while, stopping at an intermediate stage. He grabbed hold of the soldier’s head and he applied pressure to his temple, while Liam strangled the air out of the soldier.

  The soldier stopped struggling minutes later, unconscious.

  The two men rushed back to the lab but Anabia Nassif had vanished. They found the major still slumbering on his feet and the air vent cover dangling innocently.

  Nassif had gone back through the vents.

  8

  Dr. Nassif dropped down the vents. Liam and Borodin came in through the door, confusing the rest of the crew so much.