by Layton Green
But that isn’t true, Grey thought. There’s one more choice, though I don’t know what good it will do.
Then he had an idea.
It was a crazy, foolhardy thought, one that would probably leave him floating facedown in the canal, but it was all he had left.
As Klaus closed in, raising the baton and forcing Grey against the edge of the dock, Grey stepped back, pretending to lose his balance. Klaus rushed in for the kill. Instead of trying to avoid him, Grey grabbed the Nazi around the waist and jerked backwards, kicking off the edge of the wall to gain the momentum he needed to drag the powerful man into the canal.
The maneuver caught Klaus by surprise, and when they hit the water, Grey managed to squirm away. As his opponent righted himself, Grey shot straight down, searching for the body of the guard. He spied it within moments, settling against the bottom of the concrete basin. The water was dark but not impenetrable.
He sensed Klaus behind him. Grey knew he didn’t have much time. He dove straight at the dead man, fumbling for a precious moment before finding the speed release mechanism and jerking the handcuffs off his duty belt. Thank God they were steel and not reinforced plastic.
Grey turned and saw Klaus a foot behind him, arms extended. With a surge of adrenaline, Grey crouched and sprang off the dead guard, staying close to the bottom of the basin, praying Klaus had not seen what he was doing.
If the Nazi hadn’t seen the handcuffs, it might even work to Grey’s advantage. Klaus would assume Grey had found another weapon on the guard’s body and try to drown Grey before he surfaced. For all he knew, the Nazi had iron lungs and could hold his breath for thirty minutes.
Good. Let him be confident.
Grey swam for his life. He was a good swimmer, nothing special, but he was much lighter than Klaus and didn’t have far to go. He risked a glance back. Two hands, inches behind him in the water.
With a burst of effort, Grey reached his destination: the steel wall separating the loading bay from the canal. He swam a few feet to the left, still along the bottom, and felt a rush of relief when he saw the handle he had grasped onto earlier.
All the exertion had left Grey shorter of breath than usual. His lungs were on fire. Seconds remained, not minutes.
Grey turned. Klaus was right behind him. With any luck, the Nazi would think Grey had grown disoriented and swum in the wrong direction, pinning himself against the wall.
Now for the trickiest part of all.
He had to let Klaus catch him.
Kicking frantically to stir up the water, Grey hunched against the bottom of the wall. As the blond Nazi closed, Grey turned and made a show of tugging on the iron handle, as if trying to lift the door. Klaus dove straight for his throat. Grey flattened on the bottom as if trying to swim under him, drawing him lower.
The Nazi took the bait and followed him down. With his injured hand, Grey fought through the pain and threw a finger strike at Klaus’s eyes, which the Nazi swiped away.
But the strike was a diversion. Grey’s other hand had already clasped one end of the handcuffs onto the metal handle at the bottom of the door. As Klaus tried to jerk Grey off the bottom, he locked the other end of the handcuffs into place around Klaus’s ankle, then tightened them so hard they bit into the skin.
When the Nazi felt the handcuffs constricting his ankle, he bucked and jerked like a raging bull. Grey used the distraction to turn and kick off the wall with both feet. He felt exultant until Klaus made a desperate grab for Grey’s legs and caught him by the ankle.
Grey whipped around in the water, kicking to try to free himself. Klaus held fast. Starting to panic, his lungs about to explode, Grey bent double and peeled Klaus’s pinky off his heel. As strong as his opponent was, Grey was able to isolate the digit and bend it backward until it snapped. Still the Nazi held on. Spots of black filled Grey’s vision, and he felt his strength slipping away. In a last desperate attempt, he moved to the thumb and bent it backward as well, but he couldn’t seem to break it.
Klaus reached up with his other hand, trying to snag another ankle. Grey knew if the Nazi got both hands on him, he would never get free. Just before Klaus grabbed him, Grey managed to loosen the thumb enough to slip his ankle out of Klaus’s grasp. Grey threw himself backwards as Klaus thrashed and reached for him, searching in vain for another hold. Grey shot up through the water, arms pinwheeling, sucking in huge draughts of air when he surfaced.
After pulling himself out of the water as fast as he could, not trusting that Klaus wouldn’t be able to snap the cuffs, Grey darted back into the corridor and retrieved the Nazi’s gun. He stood over the water and waited in case he surfaced.
The mechanism above the steel wall shuddered, over and over. As if someone was trying to lift the entire thing out of the water.
Grey realized the steel barrier was more of a garage door than a true wall. The hinges controlling it might give, or the handcuffs might snap. It would require an immense amount of force, but he didn’t know the blond man’s limits. Grey took a step back and raised the gun. If Klaus came out of that water, Grey was going to empty the entire cartridge into his head.
It never happened. The mechanism trembled a few more times and then settled.
The ripples in the water grew still.
Just to be sure, Grey waited a few more minutes before pulling the lever. The steel door rose out of the water with Klaus still attached, dangling lifeless above the water.
Naomi gripped Viktor’s arm as he steered the powerboat beneath the corpse. Grey collapsed on his back and stared up at the body of his enemy, half-expecting the dead man’s hands to twitch.
While Viktor made a video of the control room with his cell phone, Naomi secured the boat and brought the captured guard inside. Grey dressed and studied the monitors, getting a better feel for the complex.
It wasn’t as big as he expected. He was getting the sense that while van Draker’s manor and Iceland were important pieces of the puzzle, perhaps even the nerve centers, the true strength of W.A.R. lay in its worldwide chapters, the poisonous bonds of hate that linked cities, towns, and villages.
There were forty or so rooms. Most of them small and connected by well-lit corridors. About half were laboratories of some sort. Archives. A dining hall. Sleeping quarters. Generators. A plethora of W.A.R. symbology on the doors and walls.
A few dozen guards and scientists milled about. Grey guessed some had been summoned to the manor during the distraction. Hoping another Klaus wasn’t lurking inside, he had the suspicion the dead Nazi had been the prototype, a test subject for the army of preserved soldiers waiting in the ice.
One of the labs had a Biohazard designation. On another, marked as the Main Laboratory, only the door showed on the monitor. In the hallway on the other side of the principal lab, coverage resumed, and Grey saw something that stole his breath.
A line of cell blocks with children inside.
Ranging in age from seven to seventeen, they were all children of color, all huddled in fear in their cages.
Grey felt his knees buckle.
How many people had to die to slake the thirst of tyrants? How many children?
His cell phone vibrated. A text from Jax.
Grey started to shake, an involuntary tremble born of helpless rage and fear. Not fear for his own well-being, but for the futures of those imprisoned children.
Fear that the same thing would happen to Charlie on Grey’s watch that had happened to Nya.
The emotion coursed through him, sapping his will but infusing him with fury, twisting him on the inside so violently spots of black entered the corners of his eyes and seeped inward.
“Grey?” Viktor said, in a worried voice.
Grey blinked until his vision cleared, forced himself to channel the emotions. He had to keep it together. Had to. “I’m fine,” he said in a harsh voice, then pointed at the monitor.
“Do prdele,” Viktor whispered, when he saw
the imprisoned children.
Naomi stepped between them, her face draining of color. She and Grey stared at the monitor while Viktor recorded it on his cell phone.
“I’m sending this to Jacques,” he said, “and requesting immediate reinforcements.” As his fingers worked the keypad, he frowned. “The signal’s gone. I had one when we arrived.”
Grey heard a mechanical noise from the loading bay. He looked outside and saw the steel wall lowering. With an electrical whoosh, the monitors powered down, and then the lights dimmed.
“Good luck,” a voice said, from the corner of the room.
Grey spun and found the captured guard standing next to an open electrical box.
-49-
The guard’s hands were still handcuffed behind his back. Grey rushed over and saw that he had managed to flip an emergency lockdown switch with a one-hour timer. He grabbed the guard by the throat.
“You’re not going to kill me,” the guard rasped. “You would have by now.”
Grey couldn’t raise the gun fast enough. He pointed it at the guard’s face, his finger on the trigger and aching for blood, when Viktor’s voice rang out behind him.
“Grey! He’s unarmed.”
Grey snarled and took a step back, turning to eye the monitors. The screens had faded to black, but the images of the children kept flashing in his head, as if he were still seeing them. He turned and pistol-whipped the guard, hitting him so hard the man’s head hit the wall behind him before he slumped, unconscious, to the ground.
“He might have been of use,” Viktor said. “Cell and Internet are both down.”
“We can’t trust him anymore,” Grey said. “And I know where we need to go.”
Naomi stood over the guard. “Good riddance.”
“Should we wait here, then?” Viktor asked. “Barricade the door?”
Grey eyed the timer, which showed fifty-seven minutes left. “My guess is exits on both sides are sealed. An hour delay could mean Charlie’s life. I’m going for the antidote.” He looked at Viktor and then Naomi. “You don’t have to come, but you’re probably safer with me.”
Viktor opened a palm. “Lead the way.”
Footsteps creeping down silent hallways lit by the dull red glow of emergency lighting. Guns raised, nerves on a razor’s edge. The smell of pine-laced air freshener an unnerving contrast to the threat of menace lurking behind every closed door.
“Where is everyone?” Naomi whispered.
“Waiting for their chance,” Grey said, then put a finger to his lips. He winced at the movement, though adrenaline dulled the pain of his broken wrist.
He had changed into the boots and uniform of the unconscious guard. The new clothing helped warm him up, and might give him a moment’s advantage in an altercation.
Viktor was holding an assault rifle like a first-time father holds a baby. Grey held onto Klaus’s assault rifle, while Naomi preferred her shotgun.
At the end of the hallway, a female guard emerged from a doorway with her weapon raised. Grey fired without hesitation, hitting her twice in the chest. Another door opened behind them. Grey spun and got that guard, too.
Naomi looked at Grey with raised eyebrows. He waved them forward, edging into the intersection.
Nothing but silence.
According to the monitors, the Biohazard area lay at the end of the corridor to the right. Grey moved forward, gun roving side to side, as Naomi walked backwards to cover their rear. Ten steps in, the shotgun made a deafening blast in the corridor. Grey spun. Naomi had taken out another guard.
He realized the lockdown had confused everyone else as much as it had them. Some of the guards were no doubt in hiding, unsure what had happened.
They reached the Biohazard area without another incident. The first door they saw was locked. Fearful of blasting through the entrance of a sensitive lab, Grey took the time to pick the lock, then moved inside in a crouch, his gun at eye level.
A group of scientists huddled behind an electron microscope in the center of the room. The lab was temperature controlled and well-lit, Grey assumed from a separate generator. “Check your phone,” he told Viktor.
The professor shook his head. “Still no signal.”
The room looked similar to the biohazard lab Grey had seen at the CDC. Glass cabinets, refrigeration units, complicated ductwork. A fleet of microscopes and stainless steel equipment.
None of the scientists wore Hazmat suits over their lab coats. Through a glass door in the rear of the room, Grey noticed a decontamination shower area and, beyond that, a pair of futuristic labs full of stainless steel and complex instruments.
After checking the scientists for weapons, Grey pointed his gun at their heads, one by one. Three men and three women. Grey took the one who begged for his life, a tall blond man with slicked back hair and glasses.
“Don’t kill me! I just do what they tell me!”
Grey stood him up. “That’s what got you here in the first place. Where’s the vaccine?”
The scientist looked confused, and Grey put the gun against his cheek and started to count. “Three.”
“I wouldn’t take—”
“Two.”
“Listen, I swear I’ll—”
“One—”
“Okay!” the scientist whimpered. “Okay.” He pointed at one of the refrigeration units. “In there.”
“Show me.”
With Grey pressing the gun into the small of his back, the scientist walked over to the largest refrigeration unit. The stainless steel container had a W.A.R. symbol etched into the side. A digital temperature box was set to 5 degrees Celsius.
“Open it,” Grey said.
The scientist swallowed and obeyed with jittery hands. Shelves of small glass bottles, all labeled, filled the interior. He took one off the top row and handed it to Grey.
The label read VAC1.
Grey scanned the other labels. The ones on the top row were all the same. The bottles on the second row read VAC2, and the bottles below those bore a variety of arcane markings Grey didn’t have time to parse.
“Is one a therapeutic vaccine?” he asked. He had learned from the CDC that while a traditional vaccine was a tool of prevention, therapeutic vaccines were used to treat symptoms after an infection had occurred. Antidotes, in a best case scenario.
“The one I gave you.”
“Inject yourself,” Grey said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Under Grey’s watchful eye, the scientist took a syringe off a shelf, broke the seal on the bottle, then filled the syringe and plunged it into his arm.
The other scientists watched in silence. No one seemed worried about the injection.
Grey waited a full minute and said, “How do I transport them? I want both.”
The scientist thought for a moment, then grabbed a cold pack out of a bottom drawer. In a cabinet next to the refrigeration unit, he took out a piece of bubble wrap and a plastic container the size of a coffee can. He stuffed the cold pack inside the container, selected fresh bottles of VAC1 and VAC2, then wrapped the vaccines in bubble wrap and laid them snugly inside.
“How long will it stay cold?”
The scientist handed a clean syringe and the packaged vaccines to Grey. “Six, seven hours no problem.”
Grey gave the makeshift cooler to Viktor and waved his gun at the scientists. “On the floor. All of you. Stay down and pray you never see me again.”
Remembering the imprisoned children, Grey wanted nothing more than to put a bullet in each of the scientist’s heads. Instead he took a deep breath, checked the hallway, and rushed out of the room.
Thirty minutes to go.
“I hate to say this,” Viktor whispered, “but we should think about going back.”
Grey looked over. “What?”
“We have the vaccine. If we return to the control room, we can escape in the boat once power is restored.”
“I’m not leaving without th
ose kids,” Grey said. “If we escape, van Draker will kill them to cover up his tracks.”
“And if we fail,” Viktor argued, “many lives could be lost. Thousands. We should consider the greater good.”
Grey thought about it for half a second. “Fuck the greater good.”
Naomi nodded her agreement. After a moment, Viktor eyed the lab again and said, “I tend to concur.”
At the previous intersection, instead of heading back to the control room, they continued straight. Recalling the simple layout from his memory of the monitors, Grey turned left at the next intersection, went straight through another, and found himself staring down a long corridor with glass walls.
Shapes hovered behind the glass on either side of the dimly lit corridor, causing Grey to flinch, but he quickly realized the figures were backlit specimens of some sort, a disturbing parade of animals with extreme deformities and metal components fused onto their bodies. A two-headed alligator with the spiked back of an ankylosaurus. Squirrels fused together at the hip like Siamese twins, rubbery tentacles attached to their faces and splayed around them in an unnatural halo. A hairless vampire bat with steel incisors and wing membranes reinforced with bronze. And so on.
Cyborg taxidermy, Grey would term it. Van Draker’s Believe It Or Not. A Circus of Freaks and Monsters.
Playing God with science.
Viktor was staring with grim fascination at the collection. Naomi looked as if she might be ill. Grey pressed forward to the end of the long corridor, where they encountered a door marked with the W.A.R. symbol. An ID scanner jutted out of the wall beside the door.
“This has to be van Draker’s lab,” Grey said. “Those kids are on the other side.”
Naomi cast a nervous eye down the taxidermy hall. “If there’s more guards, they must have decided to wait out the lockdown.”
“Smart choice,” Grey said.
Viktor related what he could remember from his prior glimpse into van Draker’s laboratory. Guessing the ID scanner was either locked down or disengaged, Grey expected to have to blast the door open.