Project Apollo

by B. B. Gallagher

  “You’re going to be okay!” Xander’s eyes darted to the other body, lying on the tunnel floor. The body’s chest heaved out one last breath and then rested, still and lifeless.

  Xander motioned to one of the SWAT team members to stay behind with the injured agent. After he signaled to the man, Xander’s eye caught something quick – a cylinder, flying toward them. His mental reflex called upon his firearm. Xander jerked his accurate eye to his rifle’s sight and quickly steadied his scope on the flying object.

  One bullet pierced the canister, detonating the flash bang before it reached his team. A loud brightness consumed them. They felt the shockwave but did not lose their feet. A steady, but not deafening, ringing found its way deep in his ears though as the flash bang effects registered.

  Once their sight returned to its green state, two mercenaries had approached closer. Their weapons raised to their fire position, Xander pivoted and turned down a side tunnel as quickly as possible. Bullets lined his footsteps, shattering tile after tile behind Xander’s quick retreat. Drawing the fire by his flanking maneuver, Seamus now had the easy takedown from his position.

  Two pops each. They were down.

  They continued forward toward the West Station – their SWAT team thinning in numbers. Xander knew the layout and motioned the plan to take the office at the entrance of the West Station. After a fingered countdown, the SWAT team bolted through the open corridor to the office. Bullets hailed over them, lining their footsteps, until it caught one of the SWAT team members. The man went down. His paralyzed body received a barrage of bullets, filling him with lead.

  There were four of them left. They set up their position along the cement lining of the office, providing sturdy cover for the onslaught of bullets heading their way.

  They knelt at the ledge and scanned the trolley station, trying to decipher the exact source of each flurry of bullets. Tables were set up, along with large fermentation machines, cooling units and other lab equipment lining the room. It loosely resembled Tobias’s working laboratory in his warehouse.

  Their general surveying of the room was cut short by another downed SWAT man. A bullet carved its way through his night vision goggles and into the man’s head.

  Papers and files flew off the large table at the center of the office. The two Spartans cornered in the office, ducked and listened carefully for a series of fewer bullets. Xander was able to make out a click of an empty magazine. Upon hearing this, Xander ascended just above the cement ledge and fired off rounds at each terrorist with Seamus.

  Seamus pulled a grenade off his leg, grabbed the pin and was about to pull it. Xander’s hand immediately grabbed his, holding him back from yanking it.

  Then Xander quickly surveyed his surroundings amid the firefight. He noticed the lab tables in the line of fire, the fermentation tanks and then the refining instruments.

  And then he saw on the far wall a refrigerator.

  “You don’t want to destroy it!” he yelled.

  “What do you mean?” Seamus asked through filtered breaths. Xander then yanked his respirator off and spoke through unfiltered air.

  “There would be an isolation unit if the disease was manufactured here. There isn’t. None of the terrorists are wearing respirators.” Seamus focused in on Xander’s green lips as he formed his conclusion over the firefight.

  “That’s because they have been manufacturing the cure here!”

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Tobias watched Catherine as she scribbled over a chalkboard. She had been trying to sketch out the molecular structure of the antibiotic.

  “It would need to have a high sodium content and at least double the carbons,” she posited. She then shook her head in frustration as if finding the error in her logic. She began scratching out the mapped structure on the board with such angst her chalk snapped. Tobias could see the frustration written on her face. He approached and offered a consoling hand on her shoulder.

  “Everything is going to be okay, Catherine.”

  “Even if I could figure this out, countless people are going to die. It takes teams of people working around the clock for months to develop an antibiotic,” she commiserated.

  “Xander said that the fifth clue is to a cure. They probably already have the cure, Xander has just got to play this messed up game out.” Tobias’s tone was comforting. Catherine’s thick glasses slid down the ridge of her nose as her head hung. Her short hair fell down the sides of her face like curtains closing her in.

  “There will be a massive outbreak before we have our hands on the cure.” She raised her watering eyes to meet the news broadcast covering the chaos unfolding on the DC streets.

  “Xander will find the cure.” Tobias turned Catherine to him, her face swollen with tears.

  “How do you know?” Catherine quivered back.

  “Sometimes a feeling is all we humans have to go on,” Tobias responded with the quote. This brought an immediate smile over Catherine’s face.

  “Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise…” she responded with the quote’s source. Tobias smiled at seeing Catherine blush. For the moment, he was a man who could calm her vulnerabilities. His demeanor quickly turned from comfort to nerves, as his hands dropped from her shoulders. He brought them together and started adjusting his thumbs.

  “Catherine…” She smiled sensing the next question.

  “Yes, Tobias…” Her blush had sustained. Her voice had the cadence of romantic hope.

  “Maybe once all of this is over, you’d like to go… out with me for pizza or something… if we’re not all dead of course.” Tobias surprised himself that he got out the proposal, but what happened next surprised him more.

  Catherine smiled and leaned in, offering Tobias a kiss. They locked lips for a long moment with a slight turn of the head. It was a classic kiss from a black and white film. Everything was slow about it as they tried to the relish the taste of the moment. Tobias’s insides turned and then melted. Catherine slowly parted from his lips and smiled at him.

  “I’d love to…”

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Xander hit a charging mercenary on the attack, who fell like a brick before he reached the office. The lone SWAT team member caught another one across Xander’s position. They continued the firefight with swift, deliberate strokes, finding another terrorist and ending his life with the pinch of a trigger. The echoes remained in the chamber, but the fight was slowing as the Skeptics continued to drop. Seamus searched with an eagle’s eye out of the office for any more men taking cover. Then a wild-eyed mercenary spun into the doorway of the office, lunging at Seamus with a knife.

  Seamus, although blind-sided, spun a blocking arm to intercept the stabbing hand. Cut on the sleeve of his fatigues, he winced in pain as the blood immediately began to stream. Together Seamus and the mercenary tumbled into a battle of position holds. Xander found his feet, realizing the coast was clear. He approached the fray between the Skeptic and Seamus. The knife began its descent toward Seamus’s neck.

  Xander put the barrel of his gun to the man’s head and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet rang out.

  Silence hung in the air.

  They were all clear.

  “I had him!” Seamus exclaimed. Xander feigned agreement.

  As soon as the firefight ended, the SWAT team member pulled off his respirator and night vision goggles in a panic. It was Agent Graves.

  “Shit! Ben!? Ben!” he yelled at the dead body next to him. Seamus and Xander bowed their heads for a brief moment of respect. Graves brought his comm unit up and updated command.

  “We got at least one dead and three men down, send a medi-vac immediately!” His ear responded a confirmation. Xander offered a consoling glove on Graves’s shoulder.

  “Go check on your men back in the tunnel…” Xander suggested. With great difficulty the agent nodded an affirmative. Graves rose to his feet and ran out of the office, retreating back into the tunnel system to find his other fallen co
mrades.

  Xander paced through the lab toward the opposite wall, where he located a light switch panel through his green filtered vision.

  “Close your eyes.” Seamus clicked off his night vision, knowing what it meant. Xander did the same and flipped on the trolley stations dusty, old light fixtures. A few lights sputtered to life, flashing over the dead bodies scattered across the floor. Xander directed his focus to the make-shift lab that stood before him. He progressed past a series of lab instruments with his rifle cocked in his shoulder still but he had lowered it to a lesser position.

  And then something sparked his attention – a whisper behind him.

  He turned.

  His rifle rose to his eye.

  He sniffed out the whimper and progressed to a back area of the station. There before him were five kennel shaped cages, four of which were opened, the last of which was closed.

  An older man who was quivering and sweating sat crossed-legged imprisoned in the cage. Xander lowered his weapon and spoke to the man through the grate.

  “Hey… hey… you are okay now… We are with the US government,” Xander assured him, pitying the man, malnourished and breaking. He was huddled over his stomach in a great deal of pain. The man’s hand rose to his eyes – it was covered in blood from a fresh bullet wound.

  Seamus found a set of keys on the lab table, passing them off to Xander, who eventually found the right key. The man collapsed out of the cage and Xander pulled him free from his prison. Breathless the man began to speak.

  “Thank you… Thank you…” Xander inspected the wound as soon as he extended his torso flat.

  “I’m going to treat your wound, but I have to ask you some questions. How did you get here?” Xander asked in a soft and reassuring voice, as his hands tore the man’s shirt at the point of the wound. He pressed down hard on the wound, trying to slow the bleed.

  “I was kidnapped three months ago,” Xander gasped at the revelation before him.

  “You’re Doctor John Canterbury… You are one of the missing scientists we have been searching for…” Xander explained, loud enough for Seamus to follow.

  “Yes… they brought me to some warehouse outside the city to perform my initial tests,” he explained.

  “Did you cure the disease?” Xander jumped at the bit, seeing from the wound that the man didn’t have long left.

  “No… they already had the antibodies, I just needed to reproduce them.” He coughed an agony as his face began turning white. A pool of crimson blood formed beneath him.

  “And you did that?” Xander followed up, keeping the man’s attention off his impending death.

  “Yes… we manufactured over a twenty thousand doses of antibiotics,” he explained, still catching his breath.

  “Are you sure it treats the bacteria?” Xander asked.

  “Yes… it is the… Cure,” Canterbury said, finding solace in his life’s achievement.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because they made us test it on ourselves…” He flashed the inside of his arms, showing bruised syringe marks. His weak eyes lifted and met Xander’s.

  “You are safe now. You don’t realize how many lives you saved by doing this. Where is the cure?” His face now white as a ghost and his expressions slowing. The man raised a weak hand toward the lone refrigerator against the wall. The hand collapsed, and his life fled from his body.

  Xander contemplated a brief moment and crossed himself, murmuring a prayer for the cadaver. He lifted to his feet and met Seamus, wrapping his knife wound with gauze found on one of the lab tables. Although the pity was there, the thought had already moved to its next step.

  Together they turned to the refrigerator and approached it. Xander’s bloodied hand reached out for the lever.

  They exhaled a heavy breath and Xander pulled.

  The refrigerator gasped as it opened slowly.

  Light and cold vapor unfurled from the inside.

  As the cloud dissipated, the refrigerator’s contents became visible – it was empty.

  Seamus snapped, wrecking the glass instruments on the lab table. The chase had gotten to him, exhaustion was settling in and his patience was done.

  “Where the hell is it?! Where is the cure?!” Seamus thrashed about, while his desperate voice pounded off the walls through the tunnel system.

  Chapter 50

  The Compound

  8:45 PM

  A sizzle sounded through the glass cell as Fiona continued her interrogation of the mastermind behind the day’s crisis.

  “Where is the cure?!” Fiona barked. She turned the battery knob, sending bolts of voltage through the wires connected to Ezra.

  Ezra convulsed uncontrollably – his teeth bore down as the shock paralyzed his limbs. His whole body clenched, until Fiona closed the flow of voltage. Ezra’s body heaved, trying to catch its breath. His eyes looked up at Fiona fatigued.

  “Concluding To Find What This Game’s About, Now You, Must Hurry Before Time Runs Out, Four Clues Four Targets Add Points to the Plot, Truth is Inside, X Marks the Spot…” Ezra gasped through his weakening body.

  “Enough with the games! Enough with your damn clues!” Fiona’s rage came over her. She hastened to turn the knob again, but Ezra’s words stopped her.

  “There you go… Let the anger grow in you…” Ezra hissed. “Torture me… it will only show your truest reflection…” Fiona stopped and stared into Ezra’ eyes.

  “You are the traitor… you are the terrorist, not me…” Fiona claimed.

  “Your country compromised your humanity. They bred you into a monster, lying in wait. But you were lucky not to be a part of their sadistic game of world domination… “ Ezra breathed out the words. “But you saw the files… didn’t you? They’ve been scouting us since we were children… Tell me that’s promoting freedom.”

  “You are the terrorist, not me…” She repeated as if reaffirming her stance.

  “Look closer, Fiona…”

  Fiona’s eyes fell back as her memory flooded with the lie she had lived. Her mind met an image of her husband and the pain she could always see residing behind his eyes.

  “They used you…” Ezra continued his temptation. “If you set me free and join the Collective, you would be enlightened to the evils of your country. The same evils that the colonies revolted against, creating this once amazing nation. We are the Collective, are you?”

  “What the hell is the Collective?”

  Fiona met Ezra’s eyes as the truest sincerity spoke in his next words. They showed her a fearless honesty that she knew that those in government had all but lost.

  “Fiona, it is time for another revolution.”

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Xander held the phone to his ear, recounting the siege to Fiona, as he checked over the dead bodies in the laboratory, searching for any type of lead.

  “Something’s off,” she said with certainty, stepping away from the glass cell in the Compound.

  “What do you mean?” Xander asked with a spark of curiosity.

  “Xander, terrorists don’t operate like that… Why would they make a cure at all? They want any and all Americans to die.”

  Xander hummed an agreement, as he grabbed a syringe off one of the lab tables.

  “If you ask me they are after something bigger. Something is going on here,” she cautioned.

  “I think you’re right, this isn’t Hezbollah. This attack is not just terror, it’s manipulative. They were planning to air another message over the news tonight. It called for revolution against the government and restoring the democracy of the founding fathers… They aren’t trying to destroy the system – they are trying to change it.”

  Xander admitted.

  “Have you figured out the clue yet?”

  “We’ll crack it… How’s Ezra? Is he talking…” he asked, as he knelt next to the doctor’s body, taking out a syringe. He punctured the skin and pulled on the plunger, taking a sample of his blood.

&nb
sp; “Not really… pretty resistant to torture, he was one of us you know. I was hoping he would be rusty, but he isn’t budging.”

  “What’s wrong, Fiona?” Xander sensed a distance in her voice.

  “I’m fine…” she answered.

  “Not only have I been trained to be a human lie detector, I’m also married to you,” he reminded her.

  “Sometimes I just wonder if what we are doing here and how we are doing it is… wrong…” she confessed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were trained to get answers, no matter the cost. No wonder Ezra feels justified in doing this. But… the ends don’t justify the means,” Fiona concluded.

  “No, they don’t…” Xander agreed.

  “But how do you know if what you are doing is wrong?” Fiona questioned, obviously rocked to the core by Ezra’s mind games. Xander grabbed his crucifix and spun it between his fingers as he considered the question.

  “If you were doing something wrong… you would know, something deep inside of you would revolt. Some call it your gut, some call it your conscience, whatever it is, you always have to make sure you listen to it,” he replied.

  “Keep your head, alright babe?” Xander directed, concerned by her words.

  “I love you…”

  “I love you too…” Xander felt the breath of fresh air from her words. He looked down onto the phone and felt for his wife on the other end. She was embroiled in this mess and her life as she knew would forever be changed now that her cover had been compromised.

  “Aww… that was sweet… now if you don’t mind we need to find a cure to a deadly disease that is sweeping the city!” Seamus exclaimed over the lab table. Xander shot him a look and approached him.

  “I want you to get this sample of the doctor’s blood to Tobias and Catherine. If they actually did force him to test the cure on himself and it in fact worked, they should be able to see the antibodies in his blood and go from there,” Xander directed, handing him the filled syringe.