"Janitor's closet," Stefan hissed, and lifted her up. "Come on! Next door down!"
He pulled her out of the room, pressing himself against the wall. Angel kept expecting the—
zombies
—refugees to be there. But they weren't, not yet.
They're coming, though.
She could sense them. They were close.
Stefan wrenched the next door open and shouted, "In!" But the door was snatched from his grip. It slammed shut in her face, nearly taking off her hand as the first of the refugees crashed into them. Dozens more followed. With an eardrum-shattering roar, Stefan shoved them back and yelled at Angel to hurry.
She found the knob and jumped inside the room, into the suffocating darkness within. Two steps, stopping, spinning around. Stefan let out another pained scream, then he was beside her, wrestling the door shut behind him.
"Damn fucking things!" he said, then found and twisted the deadbolt into place. "What the fuck is happening to them?"
She ignored the question. "Will it hold? Stefan?" She found his arm. He was trembling.
"For now," he panted. "I'm more worried about how we're going to get out."
The creatures piled up outside, clawing and scratching. The door rattled, and the knob jiggled. The hissing grew louder and angrier.
"Torches," she finally said, swiping water from her eyes. "We need torches."
There was a crash in the darkness and Stefan cursed.
"Sit down," she told him. "You are hurt. Let me look."
"Check the drawers," he snapped. "The vet reps are always giving away those damn disposable penlights. There's got to be some around here somewhere."
She could hear the pain in his voice, the difficulty he was having breathing. Based on the amount of blood on his shirt and the way he was shaking, she knew he had lost a lot of his own blood and was weakening. The wounds on his hand and shoulder looked truly horrific.
"Medications?" she asked. "Intravenous fluids. You need to—"
"No time for that! We need light!"
A drawer opened. She heard him rummage through it. Then a tiny beam of light pierced the darkness. It swung about, offering her a quick glimpse of a small room. The examination table against the wall was empty.
"He is not here!"
"Other room!" The light swung around toward a second door in the back wall.
Angel placed her ear against the cool surface, listening. She heard nothing from within.
"He's in there," Stefan said, appearing at her side. "Put him there for privacy. Probably still out." He handed her a second penlight.
The scratching and hissing continued at the outer door, but the rattling had stopped.
"Piling up out there," he whispered. "Crushing against the ones in front."
"How much time do you think we have?"
"Fire's spreading under the eaves. With the sprinkler out, ten minutes, tops." He held up a box cutter and gestured. "Open the door. Hurry. I'm going to cut through the drywall into the other runway."
They found Padraig snoring quietly on a padded table, an intravenous line dripping into his arm. He came to slowly when Angel roused him, mumbling in drunken surprise that it was so dark. He didn't seem to notice the noise coming from the other room.
"How are you feeling?"
He tried to raise himself up onto his elbow, where he swayed for a few seconds and watched Stefan work at the wall with the razor knife. Then, muttering incoherently, he settled back down with a groan.
Stefan cut into the wall for several minutes while Angel searched the cabinets for supplies. From the outer room there came the sound of wood splintering. "The door is not going to hold," she hissed.
"I'm going as fast as I can!"
Stefan's breathing grew more labored. She could hear him grunting in effort, cursing. There was a sudden loud snap and he sprawled onto the floor. She tried to help him up, but he angrily shoved her away and hurled the razor knife into the corner. "Whoever built this damn barn used plywood sheathing instead of gypsum."
More cracking sounds came from the other room.
"They are not going away," she said, grabbing his arm.
"The phone," he grunted, pointing at the unit mounted on the wall. "We've got to call the police."
"They cannot get here in time. And they will be massacred when they do."
"Dammit, Angelique!" he said, snatching the handset off the receiver and dialing. "We have to do something!"
But after listening for a moment, he slammed it repeatedly against the base until it shattered, screaming that it was dead..
Padraig raised his head. "Whaaaah's happ'nin?" he slurred.
The sounds from the hallway grew more frantic.
Stefan spun around, hurried over to Padraig's side, and started rifling through his pockets.
"What are you doing?" Angel cried.
He found Padraig's cell and tried to wake it, then cursed. "Lock screen! Wake up, man!"
"I have yours!" Angel said, suddenly remembering. The phone had buzzed at least a half dozen times in her pocket — Kurtz trying to call — but answering it had been the least of her priorities. She pulled it out and handed it over, taking Padraig's in exchange. "But they cannot get here in time. No one can."
"The guards at the gate," he yelled, dialing. The phone rang and rang, but no one picked up. "Okay, now I'm calling the police."
"There is no time," she hissed.
"What would you have me do, then?"
"I do not know! Call Kurtz!"
"What the hell for?"
"He can stop this!"
"How?"
"Because he is the one who started it! Do you not see? It is because you refused to agree to his demands."
"I didn't refuse anything!"
"Call him, then! Tell him he can have them back if he stops this."
Stefan hesitated.
"It is over, Stefan, do you not see that? Whatever you thought you were going to do with them, it is over."
He didn't reply.
"You son of a bitch!" she cried, battering him with her fists. "You have not changed a single bit after all these years! All lies!"
"I can't, Angelique! I can't call him! It's a private number. Stop it! There's no callback!"
"Try Norstrom's phone!"
Something crashed in the other room. The monsters were inside.
"Kurtz is gone! I'm calling the police."
But the phone vibrated before he could do it. Angel snatched it away and answered as the first body slammed against the inner door, which sounded less sturdy than the other. In fact, it sounded hollow.
"What the hell kind of game are you playing at?" Kurtz growled without waiting for her to say anything. "I will terminate every single one of them and then I will make your man suffer for—"
"End it!" Angel shouted. She put the phone on speaker. "Do it now! You have taken more than your pound of flesh! It is over! Do it before they all kill each other?"
"What are you talking about?"
Stefan grabbed the phone way from her. His face was twisted with rage and pain. His skin looked pale, his eyes dark, sunken circles. Sweat and blood covered his head. "How many more people are you willing to kill? A dozen? Twenty? A hundred? They're all dead now, all except us two."
Kurtz didn't reply.
"Make them stop," Angel begged. "Please, make them stop."
Once again, Kurtz didn't immediately reply.
"You bastard!"
"I didn't do this," he said. His anger was gone, replaced by something that sounded frightened. "Shit."
"Liar!" Stefan roared.
"Where are they? What are they doing?"
"They're right outside the fucking door," Stefan panted. He'd slipped down the wall, leaving a bloody streak. He held his shoulder in his hand and panted. "They're trying to get in."
"Please," Angel said. "We will agree to the exchange. We will agree, just make them stop. Put them back to sleep."
"It's too l
ate for that. There will be no exchange."
"No! Please—"
"Listen to me," Kurtz said. "I'm go— and— lease them."
He was getting harder to hear over the scratching at the door and the hissing. There was another crack and when Angel aimed the light, she saw the split in the thin wood beginning to expand.
"Please!" Angel screamed. "Stop it now!"
But the screen had dimmed. Kurtz was no longer there.
"Oh no," Angel moaned. "No no no!"
A chunk of wood broke away, fell to the floor. A hand reached through, fingers torn by the sharp splinters, bits and pieces embedding themselves deep in the pasty flesh, drawing blood the color of ink.
The hissing was gone now, turned into shrieks of hunger. The phone buzzed in her hand and she dropped it in surprise. Stefan reached over, stabbed the connect button. Nothing happened.
Then, as if it had all been a dream, it was all gone. All the noise outside the door, simply evaporated away. The hissing and the screams, the banging. Kurtz had put them back into stasis.
Stefan tried to push himself up but collapsed onto the floor with a groan.
The phone was buzzing again, vibrating in his hand. Angel snatched it away and answered it.
"It's done," Kurtz told them. "They won't hurt you now."
Utter silence reigned outside the room. The tortured sounds of Stefan's breathing filled the inside.
"Thank you. Thank—"
"I sent the command to terminate. I had to. I'm sorry. It was never supposed to come to this."
"They're all dead?" she cried. "No! I only wanted them back in stasis! Please, you cannot kill Norstrom. Please."
"I know."
A sob escaped her lips. She was relieved that the danger was over, and there would soon be time for recriminations. But for now she and Stefan were safe. The things outside the door were no longer coming for them.
"He knows, Mademoiselle. He knows where you are."
"Who? Who knows?"
"He'll be coming for you. You need to leave."
"Who?" she shrieked.
But the timer had stopped. Kurtz was gone.
She looked down at Stefan. His eyes were shut. He looked like he was dying, too. She bent down over him to let him know it was over. But he suddenly lurched upward, letting out a cry. "Help me," he gasped, and clutched at his shoulder. His back arched. "Oh, god! Oh, god— OH MY GOD IT HURTS!"
"Stefan? What's wrong?"
She pulled her hand away from the wound on his wrist and cried out in horror. The flesh there, as well as that on his shoulder, was starting to dissolve.
Chapter Twenty Six
"Hands off my biscuits," Padraig mumbled.
He blinked open his eyes and stared straight up at the smooth white surface of the ceiling for a moment, confusion pinching his face. Slowly, he rolled his head to the side. His eyes widened in alarm when they lit upon Angel, took in the dirt and blood on her face and clothes. "What happened to you?" He tried to sit up, but immediately fell back with a hiss of pain.
"Try to relax," she said.
"Why am I in an ambulance?"
"We call it the SMUR, Service Mobile d'Urgence et Reanimation," she told him, and jolted as the association of that last word hit her. In French it meant resuscitation, but because of David's fascination with horror movies, she was well aware of the English meaning of the word.
She couldn't stop thinking about the monsters the nanites had turned the refugees into. She couldn't stop seeing how rabid they had been, how vicious. Why had they done the things they did? So much blood everywhere. So much terrible violence.
"How do you feel?" she asked, swallowing dryly.
"My back. I can't feel my toes." He closed his eyes and moaned in pain. "My feet are cold."
She looked away, unable to make eye contact. He hadn't moved his legs at all since they left.
"I suppose tackling that kid back there was a bad idea," he joked. "How long have I been out, luv?"
"Hours. You had some strong drugs pumped into you. The doctor is calling ahead now. We will be going as soon as they get an okay from the hospital."
A large vehicle rumbled past outside, rocking them and sending the intravenous bag swinging over Padraig's head. A hemostat that was clamped onto the plastic line clicked against the pole.
"Hospital? I don't need a hospital. Why are we not at the ranch anymore?"
"I will tell you everything once we get where we are going."
"Sounds familiar." Once more he tried to sit up. Once again the injury to his back stopped him and he collapsed. He winced, then gave her a strange look. "What happened to you?"
She looked down at herself, saw the stains. Her sleeve was torn and one of her nails was bleeding. Both palms and elbows were skinned. She couldn't imagine what her hair must look like.
Through the open back doors of the SMUR vehicle she could just make out the firefighters finishing dousing the flames engulfing Padraig's car. She wondered how long it would take them to figure out she'd run it intentionally off the road and into a tree, then set it ablaze. It was easier than trying to explain their appearance when they showed up at the hospital covered in soot and blood.
Padraig's clothes weren't as soiled as hers. Much of what was on them had transferred from her as she carried him out to the car.
A lot of it was Stefan's blood.
His death was a terrible weight on her soul. She tried to take solace in the knowledge that it almost certainly would have ended up being much worse for him if he'd lived. But knowing that it had been she who called for his murder by ordering Kurtz to make it stop was especially hard for her to accept right now.
She squeezed her eyes shut so tightly that tears came out and rolled down her cheeks. She had fought hard to forget the nightmares of her ordeal in China, but already she had a new one, one that was so much worse. The visions flashed through her mind without end, an unremitting slide show of death scenes of various types. Malignant rib bones, dangling intestines. Norstrom bleeding in the hallway. Aston. Jamie's face, voids where her eyes should be. Duke and the other scientists lying torn on the grass.
The refugees with their liquefied bodies.
And Nordqvist.
His death was the most horrific of them all. If she had wondered before how many nanites it took to create those rib bones, now she wondered how many it took to kill a man. A few million? Ten thousand? What damage would a solitary nanite do once it received the terminate signal?
Maybe very little. Maybe a lot, like a single cancer cell slowly, interminably eating its way through the body.
She had not demanded Kurtz reverse whatever he'd done to them. She assumed it was irreversible, like the kill program. She'd only wanted him to put the test subjects into their trances so she and the two men could escape. So they could figure out how to stop them from killing.
Instead, he had sent the kill command to them all.
She hadn't wanted that. As horrific as they had been, she hadn't wanted them to die, only to be put back to sleep.
But in sending the order to terminate one and all, he had also sealed Stefan's fate and any of the others still alive outside who had been infected with the nanites through their wounds.
How many of the tiny machines would have been transferred to his body by his attacker's bites? A few thousand?
Fourteen to sixteen million per milliliter.
A teardrop might contain as many as six hundred thousand. A drop of blood or saliva just as many.
How many nanites would be needed to break down a body?
How many were needed to kill? A few thousand?
Enough, but not the numbers needed to kill quickly.
It's not your fault, Angel. You didn't ask for that. You only wanted Kurtz to stop them, to put them back into their vegetative state, not kill them.
But just like the woman Kurtz had sacrificed earlier, the order was irrevocable. Once the nanites initiated the termination program, there was no goin
g back. The first program they executed was to destroy their own ability to receive new orders.
That's when she knew for sure how Kurtz had done it all, from the moment he had them frozen. He'd sent the uncoupling signal, or whatever it was, through Nordqvist's phone. The original command had been sent during dinner. She remembered the call Stefan had received right before Kurtz's request to speak with her.
Then, the call he'd placed when they got outside, the one that killed the poor woman.
And finally, the call in the medical examination room, the one which ended it all.
All that precious time she had spent looking for a transmitter box when there wasn't one. When it was in Stefan's hands the whole time.
She found no survivors. Most of the bodies had already dissolved away; the rest were torn apart, just as Padraig had described the American and Korean seamen. Teeth marks on the bones. The flesh liquefying, albeit at a much slower rate.
Piles of wet clothing.
She prayed the other scientists and guards had already been killed before the terminate order was sent. She couldn't imagine them all going through what Nordqvist had.
The wail of the SMUR siren was so much like the sound of Stefan's cries. She could still hear him pleading with her to make it stop, to kill him before the pain became too unbearable. But what could she do? She couldn't stop it. The nanites would continue their relentless destruction until every cell had been broken down, every protein degraded, every strand of DNA unwound and clipped. Then and only then would the nanites destroy themselves.
Finally, unable to bear his shrieks any longer, she searched the room for something to slice the afflicted parts of him away, to amputate his injured wrist in hopes of saving him. But the wound on his shoulder was too close to the trunk, the tissue destruction too deep. The nanites would almost certainly have entered his torso by then. His chest was rotting away and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
In a last act of desperation, she ripped the intravenous drip from Padraig's arm and inserted it into Stefan's jugular. The man had fainted by then, though his body continued to spasm. His shoulder, chest, and neck were an ugly shade of purple and had begun to lose muscle tone; the skin was thinning, dissolving, pulling away, revealing the underlying sinew and cartilage. His fat liquefied, seeped out, and puddled onto the floor, a thick yellowish fluid tinged with corpuscles. It smelled oddly like plastic.
Iceland: An International Thriller (The Flense Book 2) Page 17