They opened the locked door discreetly and went in.
The room smelled of human corruption; the soldier had shat himself many times over. The crotch of his trousers was dark with the wetness of his urine. There was also a puddle of it on the floor where he lay unconscious. He looked emaciated, pale, and wild.
The soldier's eyes fluttered but they remained closed.
Ted knelt beside the sick man, grimacing at the stench that his face cover did little to hinder. He stabbed the soldier through his uniform with the needle and pressed the cap. Clear fluid passed off into the arm.
The soldier gasped. His eyes opened, halfway. He turned his head and looked in Ted’s eyes. A flicker of human recognition passed in the bloodless orbs. Then the soldier went back to being unconscious.
They backed out of the room when the prone man’s body shook in spasms. They quickly shut the door and decided to lock it.
From behind the glass they watched.
The soldier twitched and writhed. He stopped and began again.
Santiago stared with sheer hope in his eyes.
“Come on,” he whispered.
He asked Ted, “Is he okay now?”
“Can't say. We have to give the antidote time to work.”
“Give me a shot,” Santiago ordered.
Ted looked at the major long and hard. He calculated the value of losing the major early in this debacle. He figured the admiral was probably not going to show up anymore. He had taken too long, perhaps held up by another storm.
“You don’t want to do that, Major,” he finally said. “Why don’t you wait and see if it works. There were no tests at all. Relax.”
You’ll die anyway, he thought.
—
Two miles out, a different set of soldiers were speeding towards the facility on three snowmobiles. Vasquez, one ensign, and a lieutenant. They were armed with short guns and an M16 rifle.
They have been given clear instructions by Admiral Huebner:
Find the vault door, seal off the facility, no one leaves.
—
The injected soldier didn’t seem to be breathing when Santiago went back to check him a few minutes after. Ted Cooper had gone back to the sleeping quarters.
The major gazed through the glass. He couldn’t see much on account of all the blood on the glass, and also how the soldier’s head and chest was twisted away from view. He knocked at the glass. No movement.
He opened the door slowly and went in, as cautiously as he could. He knew the soldier was dead even as he knelt to feel his pulse.
Ten minutes ago Santiago would not even touch the soldier.
They were all infected now. Certain death was coming for him too.
He sighed.
The two soldiers who had previously shown the least signs of infection now convulsed on the floor by the door where they had been on sentry duty.
Santiago pulled an armchair out of the room where the dead soldier was.
He had to think.
—
Exec Vasquez found the hatch in the ice. He and his men went down it with torches. It was dark in the hatch but they managed to go down it without making much noise. They were men who climbed up and down hatch ladders for a living.
Vasquez quickly believed that the odd smell down there was that of the putrefying bodies of the expedition crew that the admiral had mentioned.
Really, there was no use trying to save them. It didn’t take long for him to find the vault. He and his men approached it carefully.
The foul smell was stronger as they approached the vault. Vasquez peeked at the lighted hallway, wondering if anyone might still be alive.
If anyone was, he reasoned, they’d have left this awful place.
The lieutenant and the ensign went to work: blow torches and metals to seal the vault so no one would ever come out.
He prayed that they were all dead as the torch spurt blue flames.
—
Major Santiago sat up straight when he heard the sound. It came from afar but the metallic clang was unmistakable. He listened again and he heard the long fricative of metal grinding together.
He frowned. The vault.
Santiago grabbed a rifle and limped out of the room.
—
Limping forward, gun aimed at the huge metal door, the major shouted, “Who’s there?”
No response from the other side. But there was someone, or people, there alright.
“Show yourself!” he called again.
Then he heard the hum, the continuous crackling sound like fireworks. His grimace got deeper. His heartbeat raced at the picture his mind conjured. He limped forward faster.
“No, no, no! Hey!” He banged on the metal door.
He stepped back and pumped three rounds into the metal. Ineffectual sparks were all he got for the door was too thick. He screamed, he cried, and banged on the door. The crackling hum of welding continued.
He banged on the door until the side of his fist hurt, then bled. He started kicking it with his good leg. Then he kicked it with his bad leg as well.
He tired out soon and fell down in a pitiful heap.
The noise back there soon ceased and all was quiet. And lost.
—
The ensign and the lieutenant looked at each other. They stopped working, pushed off their goggles, and turned to the exec.
“Sir, there is someone on the other side.”
“What?”
“Someone is trying to get out.”
Vasquez jumped on his feet and came to the door. He put his ears to the metal.
He stepped away in dismay.
“There is nothing we can do,” he said. “Keep working.”
The two men looked at each other confused. The lieutenant said they could melt the joints off and let the person go.
“The admiral said they are all infected. He said in no account should we allow anyone out of here. Work.”
So the workers worked.
—
The expedition crew heard the gunshots.
Yet they would not leave their quarters.
Nassif trembled. He went to the door and put his back to it.
“We can’t go out,” he yammered. “They are all turned into zombies now and are killing each other.”
Ted Cooper shook his head. “You don’t strike me, doctor, as an American with the Hollywood engineered complex of the twenty-first century. Surely you don’t believe that zombies exist?”
“What about the soldier that has refused to die?”
“He hasn’t refused to die.” Ted glanced at Miller and Peter. “We are missing our Russians, Nicolai and Borodin.”
“Yes we are,” Miller said, “but they are safe.”
They heard footsteps in the hall. And more gunshots.
—
Major Santiago dragged himself back to the rocket room. His talkie was bleating. He picked it and growled into it.
“You son of a bitch!”
“Santiago, this is for the best, for the protection of the human race—”
“You tricked me, you spineless, stupid—”
“And all your men, all of them infected with the virus, who’s going to treat them?”
Fuming, breathing through his open mouth, his eyes watering from the new wave of pain and nausea that was creeping up his body through knee caps that have turned to cartilages, the major screamed, “You said you were bringing an antidote!”
“There is no antidote, Santiago.”
“You lied! You lied to me! I trusted you!”
“Let us say that is your own little contribution to the course of peace. Even if I had the antidote, I couldn’t risk my own life to bring it to you. But I want you to know this was the best I could do in the circumstances. You have done your part, Major. You are a hero, your name is going to be remembered for good. I’m going to make sure of that.”
Santiago was not listening anymore. He was looking at his men on the floor, the ones consc
ious enough to feel pain. Two were lolling on their backs, vomit coming out of their noses. The others were sprawled out, bummed out. The rancid smell of death and degradation filled his nose, fueled his terror and rage. He flung the talkie across the room.
It careened through the air and crashed into the side of the ICBM. The admiral’s voice quenched.
Santiago staggered over to the wall where his rifle was propped. He checked the rounds; it would be enough for them all.
Head shots. So they’ll not know what hit them. It was the best he could offer too. Freedom in death was better than pain in existence.
He went to the vomiting duo. He popped them first before moving forward.
Dry-eyed and grim-looking, Santiago became his own angel of death.
—
The shots ceased, followed by a deathly silence. In it, there was only the thump of her heart. Olivia steeled herself from the urge to scream or collapse in a faint. Even though she wasn’t new to gunfights, she had never imagined being holed up in a German secret facility thousands of miles from civilization, on a continent of ice and rocks, surrounded by ancient death and the smell of fear.
The others sat without talking too. Together she supposed they must mirror what it was like for holocaust sufferers of Hitler’s Germany. Huddled together on cold nights, hungry and out of anger, waiting for their turn to be filled out on the edge of a pit dug by their relatives, to be shot, and subsequently buried by the ones who they would have died for. Their relatives.
They were humble thoughts and Olivia resigned herself to take this last piece of knowledge to her grave without documenting it for the world to read.
The door opened slowly.
The major was standing there, his hands over his head. One of his legs bent to the side as if he had had a bad fall. His eyes were red and his lips had bloody splits in them. He wavered on his feet. Olivia thought he might collapse at any time.
“I have been tricked,” he said clearly enough, “just as you have been. There is nothing here but death.”
The crew looked at each other. Olivia saw color return to Peter and Miller’s faces. She saw color leaving Anabia Nassif’s own. The biologist was shrinking against the back of his bunk, not from the soldier himself, but from what he carried in him. Anabia was mumbling something, and pointing at the major.
Olivia reached for her Dictaphone. She had just been granted another day to breathe. She was going to take it.
“All my men are dead,” the major continued. “I killed them. There was no other way, no cure, no antidote—”
Anabia Nassif jumped from his bunk and dove under the bed where Miller sat. The biologist pulled the rack with the antidotes he had created.
“We made one! We can cure you!” he shouted.
“No, it killed him!”
“Killed who?”
The major turned to Ted Cooper. The professor’s face turned paper-white. His jaw tightened. He stared at the major from half-closed lids. His lips were a thin line on his murderous face.
“He injected one of my soldiers with it. It killed him.” Santiago pointed at Cooper.
Anabia Nassif said, “What is he talking about, Professor?”
Cooper sneered. “I was trying to help, since you guys were trying to sell the shit you made. I gave it to someone who needs it. How was I supposed to know that your little shitty experiment wasn’t going to work? Ain’t like you put a label on it that says, 'caution, deadly antidote, may not work on the sick.’”
Miller rose up. “Ted, you are one hell of a stupid guy, you know. We know what you’ve been doing, selling us out—”
“And we know you destroyed the satellite dish back at the camp,” Peter Williams added.
“And you have been talking with someone outside the facility, trying to make a deal,” Olivia said.
“He told me he’d steal it,” the major said.
All eyes turned to Ted Cooper. He threw his hands up. “I give up, okay. Satisfied? Now can we get out of here already? I have students to teach and women to bang back in Miami.”
Ted looked at the major.
“Amigos, you know Miami? You wanna come along, infect the whole city?”
“No, I just want to get home to my family.”
“Fair enough.”
10
They were endangered in many ways. One, the major was infected. If he joined the crew, they might as well stay back in the underground facility. Two, the team was not sure if the major had acted by killing his men under the influence of the virus, for he was infected too. He deserved the same death as his men.
He seemed lucid enough to understand the implications.
"But I could save him," Nassif insisted, shortly after the major had been sedated.
"But he is a travel risk for us all," Peter Williams said. "You heard him, there's an admiral out there who wants us to perish down here. He'll be waiting."
"Not if we could get the U-boat to work." Miller pointed.
"What's an old U-boat got on a destroyer?" said Ted Cooper. "We could never outrun him."
"But we can try," Miller responded.
The team split in two. Olivia Newton, Peter Williams, and doctor Anabia Nassif would get more files and documents from the laboratory. And the rest of the crew would get down to the U-boat pen to join Victor Borodin and Nicolai.
—
They passed by the rocket room, and Olivia wanted to take pictures. She went in against Peter Williams's disapproval. Grudgingly, the two men let her inside the place.
Rigor Mortis had set in; the bodies were stiffening. They found out that the major had piled them together in a corner, where a pool of caked blood had gathered at the base.
Nassif dashed out of the room and got sick in the hallway.
Olivia felt her stomach roil as she took some pictures. Steeling herself, she climbed up the platform. The ICBM lay on metal stilts like a huge, black ballpoint pen. She took photos of the uncompleted rocket, and as she was stepping off, she saw the remains of the major's talkie where it had hit the wall and shattered into pieces.
"Come on." Peter took Olivia's hands. "We've got to get out of here."
At the door, Olivia pulled free and went back to the heap of bodies. She pulled a talkie from the pocket of a dead soldier.
"We may need this."
She put it in her backpack.
—
Borodin stuck his head out of the hatch and said, "This boat can move, but I don't think we have enough diesel to take us out to high sea."
Frank Miller, Liam Murphy, and Ted Cooper all went down the hatch. It was warm inside the boat. It was hollow and quite cramped. They bowed their heads as they went from one compartment to the other.
"We have searched the boat, everywhere, no diesel," said Victor Borodin. His hands were grimy with black oil. Nicolai poked his head from the small hole in the floor. Below him was the engine room.
"I think we are ready, but we don't have a reserve."
Ted Cooper suggested draining the snowmobiles that the soldiers rode in.
"They run on gas," Nicolai said.
Ted threw his hands up in resignation. "Can we get a break, God?"
Miller looked around as Olivia and the other men breezed in from the laboratory with a bundle of documents. Nassif had another rack with him. He was sweating with the burden of it.
He explained, "I have been thinking, I know we are about to abandon the major here. But I could help him if I only have more time."
He grabbed a sheaf of papers from Olivia.
"Look, here we have more to go on. The scientists who worked here must have left some clue for an antidote." He held Miller's hand. "You know what they call reverse engineering?"
"I have heard of it."
"I can apply this shortly. I can come up with a solution that can stop the virus from multiplying in the major. And something like a vaccine, for us all."
Miller gave Nassif's recommendation deep thought. Nassif explained that
being exhausted, the crew was even more in danger of incubating and spawning the virus.
"We need a vaccine, and we need it before we leave this place," he finished.
Miller nodded. "Do it."
"Good." The doctor smiled. "Now we need a place in the boat, a little quarantine for the major, and anyone who may come down with symptoms."
—
Admiral Huebner watched Tomas Benjamin's ship bob in the waves not more than half a mile away. The other ships were close by too. They hemmed him.
Huebner finally got proof for Tomas. The exec came back with news of possible survivors. Huebner knew that Major Santiago was alive. And if that was true, it is not impossible the Americans were breathing too.
Huebner was convinced that he couldn't possibly green-light his way from the vicinity of Antarctica without making sure the infected people do not follow. Guided with that reality, he sent a message to Tomas and the other ships, outlining his reasons.
Tomas sent back four words: "We'll wait with you."
—
Sleep and drugs helped him achieve some clarity. Though his condition seemed to have improved, major Juan Santiago still felt as though he was dying. The expedition crew had probably left him behind. He couldn't hear a thing.
Santiago got up on weak legs. He looked around to find that he had been put in one of the storerooms of the rocket room. His head swam as he walked, but he was steadier than he had been since he got infected with the virus.
Recollection flooded the major’s head. He had come here with some men, to stop the Americans who were now trying to save him. Or leave him.
He saw the heap of dead bodies and stopped in his tracks. Confused at first, he looked around, half expecting to be gunned down too. Then he remembered what he had done.
Santiago started searching the pockets of the dead soldiers. He found a talkie. He reasoned that he couldn't go in blind.
He started running as best as he could towards the U-boat pen.
—
Nassif held the narrow tube to the light.
Hunt for the Holy Grail Page 18