Patient Zero

Chapter One Hundred Nineteen

Gault and Amirah / The Bunker

GAULT TURNED BACK to face Amirah. Her hunger and hate were so strong that the metal wall between them felt paper-thin. He glanced down at his watch and felt his heart skip a beat. The team from Global Security should have been here by now.

“Are you expecting someone, Sebastian?” Amirah purred.

“You can’t win this,” he retorted. “I won’t let you destroy everything.”

Her face darkened. “Won’t let me? What does it matter what you want? It is the will of Allah that matters. That is the only thing that matters.”

Fury was beginning to burn away his grief. “You know, I’m getting so bloody tired of religious tirades, my dear. Why don’t I shoot you and then you can go and see your god.”

She ignored the threat. “There’s someone out here who wants to talk to you, Sebastian.”

He took a cautious half step forward as she moved back to allow him a better view. Down below the moans and screams had intensified. There was blood splashed on the walls as the infected who had transitioned first had now turned on those who had not yet succumbed. What he saw was a picture out of a nightmare, a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to terrible life; but that wasn’t what Amirah wanted to show him. Instead a second figure stepped into view.

It was Anah, a young woman Gault knew to be a cousin of El Mujahid. She had the same dreamy half-mad look as Amirah, and the same gray skin, but the young woman’s mouth was smeared with red and in her hands she held something so grotesque that Gault had to clamp a hand to his mouth to keep from vomiting.

Anah carried the head of Captain Zeller. The leader of the Global Security rescue team.

Gagging, Gault thrust the barrel of the pistol through the observation slot and fired shot after shot into Anah, punching holes through her chest and face, staggering her back to the metal rail and then blasting her over. Anah fell without a scream and crashed down into the mass of creatures fighting below.

“You mad bitch!” he screamed at Amirah and shot her. His first bullet hit her in the stomach. Amirah staggered back and her face twisted into a grimace of agony.

No

Not pain. Amirah was laughing. She whirled and ran along the corridor as Gault fired after her, trying to hit her, needing to kill her, wanting her death. He hit her at least three more times until she was so far down the corridor that he could no longer get an angle for a useful shot. He knew that he’d hit her, he’d seen her robes fluff out with the impacts, had seen blood splash the walls. But Amirah hadn’t even slowed down and as she ran she called his name in a mocking laugh.

The slide on Gault’s pistol locked back and he reeled away from the slot, gasping, blood roaring in his ears. With trembling fingers he fumbled for a new magazine and slapped it into place. Sweat coursed down his face and chest.

He had a flash of panic and pulled out his sat phone, but Toys did not answer. No help was coming. He was alone. Panic howled in his head.

Amirah knew about the secret passages he’d built into the place. If she and El Mujahid had been playing him then there was a good chance she’d somehow hacked into his computer. The network of hidden passages was on there. And, dammit, so were the detonation codes he had created to blow this place to atoms. Okay, that option was gone. Just as the rescue was gone.

He had two full magazines plus the one in the gun, which gave him about a third as many bullets as he would need even if every shot was a kill, and that was unlikely.

“Head shots, you bloody fool.” He cursed himself for wasting a chance to kill that witch.

Witch. He’d called her that so many times that now it came back to haunt him. It was more accurate a label than he had ever known. What she had done was the blackest kind of sorcery. A true deal with the devil, and it occurred to Gault that it hadn’t been cuckold’s horns that El Mujahid had worn. They were the king and queen of Hell. Damn them both.

He paused at a T-juncture in the corridor. To his left he could hear the hiss of hydraulics as someone-Amirah or one of her monsters-opened a doorway to his right. Okay, he thought, that simplifies things; and he took the other fork of the juncture.

There was only one more thing that he could do. One final chance left to stop Amirah’s doomsday scheme. At least the part of it that she wanted to launch here in the Middle East. He only hoped the American had been able to somehow warn the authorities before things got out of control over there. He rushed down the hallway, knowing that his one chance was slim, and even then he had almost no hope of surviving. Somehow it amused him to think that he might actually sacrifice himself to save the world.

“God they really will think I’m a saint now,” he mused. He almost laughed as he raced along through the shadows.