by J. Bryan
They passed the offices and reached an intersection of corridors.
“If it’s laid out like our section, the exit should be somewhere...” Sebastian pointed to their left.
“You’re right,” Mia said, still holding onto him. “But the guards are waiting for trouble, and they have machine guns. We don’t make it out alive, that’s what I see.”
“We can’t go back!” Sebastian said.
“No, they’re coming from that direction, too. We’ll die fast,” Mia agreed.
“Where can we go and survive? Hide in the offices? Can we try that?”
Mia concentrated. “You’ll die. We have to move from here!”
They ran down a side corridor, towards the network of supply and maintenance tunnels. Sebastian kept pointing to different doors, asking Mariella what she saw.
“Where do we go?” he kept asking. “That storage room? That maintenance closet?”
“That...yes! We live longer if we go in there.” Mia smiled, pointing to the door marked MAINTENANCE.
“Are you kidding?” Juliana asked.
Sebastian pulled on the door. “It’s locked!”
“Here!” Juliana threw him the keyring she’d lifted from the guard. “Maybe one will work.”
“Which one?” Sebastian started testing them, one key after another.
“It ends up being that one.” Mia picked out a key, and Sebastian skipped to it.
“Yes! Thanks!” He opened the door, and cool, dank air whirled out. “It’s a...cave.”
“The S.S. are going to gun us down in about ten seconds!” Mia told them, letting go of Sebastian and running into the open door. “Unless we go this way now!”
“I’m convinced,” Sebastian said, following Juliana into the door and closing it behind them.
They moved into a rocky cave space where the air was stale and thick. It was dimly lit by scattered electrical bulbs, and it echoed with the familiar rattling sound they’d heard every night from the ventilation panels in their rooms, only a hundred times louder. They faced a piece of machinery as big as a small house, with wide ventilation ducts running horizontally over their heads, feeding fresh air all over the administrative quadrant. The lower levels beneath the offices, she knew, were the residence and recreation areas for the officers, the scientists, the medical staff, and the administrative personnel.
A single enormous vertical duct extended from the top of the machine and vanished into the rock ceiling overhead. It would reach all the way to the surface, sucking in air from above. Juliana now fully understood why they would need such an elaborate ventilation—the air in this cave area tasted like death, with no plants anywhere to refresh it.
Sebastian opened the access panel to the machine, which was the size of a small door, and he stepped inside. Juliana leaned in for a look.
He stood in a steel-walled cavity the size of Juliana’s room down in the cellblock. A constant blast of fresh, cold air hammered down from the giant shaft to the world above, creating a windstorm that blew Sebastian’s hair back and forth across his face. A coal-powered furnace heated the air, its exhaust whisked away by a narrow duct—even in spring, the mountain air in Germany was chilly. An array of large fans all around him sucked the heated fresh air away along a tangle of aluminum ducts to feed the rooms inside the base.
“Look!” he shouted to be heard over the clanging machinery and whooshing air. He jumped up, reaching into the wide vertical duct, and then he hung there, swinging in midair, one hand out of sight. He waved with the other. “Rungs.” He dropped to the floor, his nose crinkling. “Smells like somebody cleans this duct with some nasty chemicals, too. Don’t breathe too deep in there.”
“Do the rungs go all the way up?” Juliana asked.
“It looks like it. Will we live if we go this way?” Sebastian asked, taking Mia’s hand so she could look into his future. Juliana couldn’t help resenting it.
“Maybe...it’s all confused, I can’t see...” Mia’s forehead crinkled.
“What if we stay right here?”
“They’ll hunt us down.”
“‘Confused’ sounds better to me than getting hunted down. Ladies should go first.” Sebastian held out a hand to Juliana.
“Pregnant ladies go first.” Juliana folded her arms over her bloodstained dress. She watched Sebastian boost Mia up into the duct.
“I can’t!” Mia swayed in his arms, unbalanced as she held onto the metal rung in the wall.
“You’re doing fine.” Sebastian smiled up at her, and she smiled back, soothed by him. Juliana could have killed them both.
Mia reached up for the next rung, and the next, and he lifted her until he could place her feet on the bottom rung.
“There.” Sebastian reached for Juliana. “Now it’s your turn.”
“You go first,” Juliana told him. She could hear the sound of approaching boots.
“I can’t. Then you won’t be able to reach,” he said.
“I’m a better jumper than you think,” she told him. “I need to be last in case someone climbs up after us. And you need to be with Mia so you can play your looking-into-the-future game.”
“It’s helped us a lot,” Sebastian said. “We’d be dead without it.”
“We’ll be dead right now if you don’t get up there and out of my way. Climb fast.”
“If you really think—”
“Go!”
Sebastian jumped up and grabbed the rung with one hand. He began climbing hand over hand, pulling himself up toward the giant steel fan and the night sky above.
Juliana looked at the armored steel plate mounted on one side of the shaft. It could swing down and around to seal off the vertical air duct in case of chemical attack. She would just barely be able to jump up and grab the lever that set it in motion.
“I’m not coming,” Juliana said. “They’ll just hunt us down, and they’ll keep doing horrible things to more people, won’t they? I have to put an end to it.”
“You can’t stay here!” Sebastian said.
“We won’t make it if I don’t take the guards out while I can,” Juliana said. “We had our chance, Sebastian. We lost it. Just make sure Mia and her baby get out alive. That’s what matters.”
“Juliana, please don’t do this,” Mia begged.
“You should hurry,” Juliana said. “Look into the future if you don’t believe me.” She backed up for a running start, then jumped and pulled the lever. The armored plate swung down from the side of the duct on a hinge, then back up the other way to seal it. She heard Sebastian shout her name a final time, and Mia pleaded with her to stop. She never saw them again.
Juliana turned to face the sound of approaching boots and shouting German voices. With the vertical intake duct sealed, the array of powerful ventilation fans created a vacuum as they sucked the air out of the cavity where she stood. It felt as if the fans were trying to pull the hair from her head and the skin from her face.
The maintenance door opened, and an S.S. guard in a gas mask looked in, spotted her, and dodged aside. A column of them entered, all in gas masks and carrying machine guns.
Juliana summoned up the demon plague a final time, drawing on the last of her energy. As she breathed out, she imagined her entire body unraveling, all the way down to her heart and bones, every bit of flesh translated into deadly spores.
She breathed out a dense, dark cloud, feeling the mass of her body beginning to dissolve, as though she were hollowing herself out. The ventilation fans sucked the spores away, channeling them throughout the base.
The guards raised their machine guns, and she spread out her arms.
“Go ahead,” she told them, breathing out another dense clouds, feeling her bones weaken.
Four of them opened fire, hammering her with round after round. She staggered back, light as a ballerina, as the bullets tore her apart.
Then she floated, watching her ruined body fall to the floor like an old costume worn to rags. With her body dead, he
r mind followed the streams of plague flowing through the air vents, spinning through underground rooms and hallways, her consciousness suddenly formless and whirling free like a dust storm.
She had no control of the swarming spores. She could only watch distantly as they flowed through hallways and apartments, killing Nazi officers and nurses alike, then spreading through the complex, killing off the kitchen staff as well as the guards, scores of people falling dead. Even the guards in gas masks were not safe, because her final cloud of spores, filled with all her anger and hate for her captors, was so virulent and aggressive that it ate right through their greyish-green wool uniforms and burrowed deep into their flesh. If there were any innocent souls among those in the underground base, God would have to pick them out from the plague-ridden mass of bodies Himself, if God cared about such things.
She watched them die and die, all of them at once, every plague spore providing her a vantage point, as if she were thousands of different places at the same moment, looking out from thousands of viewpoints. She felt like a sandstorm, sweeping through the bodies of everyone, leaving no one behind.
In time, she drifted back to gaze at her own bullet-shattered corpse, with no more emotion for it than a cast-off piece of clothing on the floor. She’d already begun to see that her life as Juliana was only the most recent chapter in a story that stretched back a hundred thousand years, all of her lives as a human being. She recalled that she was an outsider on this plane, in this world, not a human soul at all. If human beings had an afterlife, that was not for her to experience. She could only wait for the opportunity to be born again. Until then, she was isolated. Between lives, her kind could only communicate through formless feelings and sensations. True communication and contact required a human shape.
She was dead, beyond pain, beyond suffering, beyond desire, beyond hope. In the native formless condition of her soul, she could only watch, wait, and listen.
Chapter Forty-Five
It was three in the morning when Tommy opened the door to Esmeralda’s concrete cell. He left the lights off, though the camera in her ceiling probably had a night mode. He shook her by the shoulder. “Wake up. We’re going.”
“What?” Esmeralda sat up, rubbing her eyes. “Who...what are we doing?”
“I’m helping you escape,” he whispered. “Like you wanted. We have to go now. I brought you these.” He dropped a folded set of surgical scrubs onto her bed. “You don’t want to be wearing the orange jumpsuit.”
Esmeralda looked at the thin blue shirt and pants.
“We have to go now. You know they’re watching,” Tommy urged.
She nodded and got out of bed. He relished a moment of seeing her in the simple cotton bra and panties they’d issued her, the delicious curves of her warm, brown body...her long, glossy black hair, her deep, dark eyes. He’d missed her badly. He’d made a few more visits at Ward’s instruction, explaining why she needed to agree to work with ASTRIA. He knew her life would be in danger if she didn’t start acting happy to cooperate. The flickers of past-life memory he’d experienced since arriving Germany made that clear. When Ward, or Kranzler, was done with you, your life became disposable.
“I’m ready,” she whispered.
“They’ll be coming for us.” Tommy led the way out into the cellblock corridor. He’d spent more than a week working out his plan, such as it was. He’d blasted a guard full of fear and taken his access card, then gone down to the cellblock and terrified the guards there, breaking their minds.
“We should get Jenny,” Esmeralda whispered as they hurried along the corridor.
“I thought of that,” Tommy said. “Look.”
Mariella and Seth emerged from Seth’s cell. Like Esmeralda, Seth had changed from his jumpsuit into surgical scrubs. Mariella had come down with Tommy, and she’d freed Seth from his cell with an access card taken from one of the cellblock guards.
Seth looked suspiciously at all three of them—Tommy, who’d always been his enemy in their past encounters; Esmeralda, who Seth had seen possessed by Ashleigh’s soul; and Mariella, who had been cooperating with Ward for months.
“If this is a trap, you’re all dead,” Seth told them. “I mean it.”
“It’s not a trap, Seth. The guards could be here any second.” Mariella took Seth’s arm, and her expression turned to one of horror. “They’ll be here in a minute, a response team with biohazard masks and automatic rifles. We have to run!” She pulled Seth behind her as she ran north along the wide corridor.
“Who is she?” Esmeralda whispered to Tommy as they started running.
“Mariella,” Tommy said. “She can see the future.”
Tommy had taken a huge risk asking Mariella to help him break Esmeralda free. Mariella saw Tommy as someone loyal to Ward, and he was supposed to see her the same way. He’d only approached her with the idea because he remembered that she had decided to escape in their last life. Tommy no longer cared what happened to himself—he was determined to help Esmeralda. So he’d taken the risk, suggesting they could free Jenny and Seth at the same time. He had gambled that Mariella wanted to help her friends.
It was paying off—once they freed Jenny, the five of them would be far more difficult for the guards to stop than Tommy and Esmeralda would have been on their own.
They passed the guards who’d been on duty at the cellblock desk, one of them now trying to hide behind a fake potted plant, the other waving his TASER and screaming at shadows on the ceiling.
From his previous life, Tommy knew every inch of the facility, the side corridors and maintenance tunnels. Anything might have changed since then, doors and hallways could have been sealed, but between Tommy’s memories and Mariella’s ability to see the future by keeping her hand on Seth’s arm, they found the safest course through to the lab corridor, avoiding the guards ahead and the heavily armed team pursuing them from behind.
Mariella predicted that two guards had been stationed in the lab corridor, dressed in biohazard armor but armed only with TASER guns, unlike the response team coming up behind them, who were armed with machine guns. They’d been ordered to stand in front of the door to Jenny’s lab.
“I’ll go first,” Seth said when they reached the door. The small guard station by the lab corridor was unmanned. Ward was clearly relying on digital surveillance to replace some of the roaming guard patrols and numerous small guard stations of the Nazi days. This also meant that someone was watching, telling the armed response team exactly where to find them.
Seth closed his eyes for a moment, and his skin slowly took on an unearthly white glow, making him look almost angelic. Even his hair gleamed like gold. He must have been summoning up his power, turning it up the way Tommy could turn up the fear if he really wanted to blast someone’s mind apart.
“Tommy, you have to help me,” Seth whispered. “Whatever they do to you, I’ll fix. Ready?”
Tommy nodded, and Seth charged through the door, shouting at the top of his lungs, Tommy running alongside him. Tommy was ready to lash out, breathe out fear as he’d done in Charleston, but he held it in for now. It wouldn’t do much good against the two guards’ biohazard armor, he thought.
As Seth and Tommy approached, the guards shouted at them to freeze and raised their yellow stun guns. Seth pulled ahead, guarding Tommy, and he took an electrified barb in the chest. It trailed wire back to the guard’s stun gun, like a sharp little harpoon.
Seth crashed to his knees, his spine snapping back and forth like a whip, foam spilling from his mouth. He flopped over onto the tiled floor and lay there like a fish choking on the air.
Tommy zigged and zagged toward the guards, making it more difficult for the second guard to get a good shot at him. While he did, the first guard pulled a long, steel flashlight from his belt, ready to bash Tommy.
Neither guard expected Seth to leap up from the floor, ripping the stun gun from the first guard’s hands. Seth threw himself directly at the second guard, not bothering to weave and du
ck like Tommy, and he caught the second TASER barb in his stomach. He tumbled again to the floor.
Tommy dodged behind Seth and attacked the first guard, grabbing for the blunt flashlight in his hand. He held it up while the guard tried to force it down on Tommy’s head. With his other hand, Tommy grabbed for the straps of the guard’s masked helmet, but the guard’s other arm rose to block him.
While Seth writhed on the floor, the second guard came after Tommy, cracking his steel flashlight down on Tommy’s head and back. Tommy held onto the first guard with the fixation of a rabid dog.
The blows stopped coming, and he heard the sound of girls screaming. Through the blood leaking down into one eye, he saw that Mariella and Esmeralda had attacked the second guard, Esmeralda trying to wrestle the steel flashlight from his hand, Mariella ripping at his mask. When she pulled it off his head, Tommy grabbed the man’s face and filled him with fear.
The guard crawled away, sobbing and screaming about “Mr. O’Grady’s dog.” The girls turned their attention to the first guard, still wrestling with Tommy. Mariella stripped his helmet off, while Esmeralda pulled his steel flashlight free and cracked him across the head. The guard sank to the floor, unconscious.
The girls helped Seth to his feet. His blue eyes were dazed, and he smelled like burnt hair.
“We have to keep moving,” Mariella said. “The real guards are coming.”
Tommy swiped his stolen access card through the slot next to the steel door to Jenny’s lab, but the little indicator light stayed red.
“This card doesn’t access her lab,” he told the others.
“Tommy, look at you!” Esmeralda touched his face. “You’re bleeding.”
“Maybe this guy can open it.” Seth took the ID card from the unconscious guard and swiped it through the notch in the reader. The light flicked from red to green, and he hauled open the heavy door and ran inside.