There was a burst of static from my earpiece. Anatole’s voice came through brokenly.
‘Explosion—other lab—Friedrich and—trapped—we’ve gotta go!’
I scanned the room wildly, heart slamming a rapid tempo against my ribs.
‘Listen to me!’ I shouted in the mouthpiece, frantically opening the drawers on the medical trolleys. Ashely watched me with a puzzled frown. ‘I want you to leave right now. Rescue the others if you can, then get out of here!’
‘What about you?’ Bruno’s overwrought voice came across clearly.
I finally found what I was searching for. ‘We’ll manage. Now go!’
I lifted the sterile needle and syringe out of a plastic wrapper.
Ashely stared as I tied a tourniquet around the dead man’s arm. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘We need a sample of the virus.’ I slid the needle under the man’s skin. ‘This is the next best thing.’ Dark blood filled the syringe. I glanced at Ashely. ‘You should go too.’
His eyebrows rose behind the visor. ‘What the hell makes you think I’m going to leave without you?’
I smiled bleakly and capped the needle. I located a secured biohazard container in the next room and sealed the syringe inside.
We were slipping out of the sterile suits in the outer chamber when a second explosion made the floor tremble beneath our feet. This one sounded closer.
I grabbed the daisho and ran out of the airlock after Ashely. We raced past the dead scientists and started down the dust-filled corridor. We had just reached the junction when the roof caved in behind us. A cloud of plaster and brick dirt billowed past us.
We covered our mouths and noses with our sleeves and carried on. It was several minutes before we reached the intersection where we had parted ways with Friedrich and his men. In that time, more explosions rocked the foundations of the underground facility.
A shadow loomed in front of us.
‘It’s me,’ said Bruno into the muzzles of our guns.
The Schwatz bodyguard shifted the unconscious man across his shoulder. Anatole dragged another wounded immortal toward the containment door behind him.
I lowered the Glock. ‘Is that everyone?’
Bruno shook his head. ‘Friedrich’s still back there.’ He indicated the passage to the left. ‘He’s bringing the last of his men out.’
A sudden blast brought down part of the hall Ashely and I had just exited. A single strip light shattered onto the rubble a moment later. The ceiling creaked ominously.
We rose to our feet and observed the mound of debris.
‘It’ll be faster if one of us helps them.’ I turned and headed toward the lab where Friedrich and his men had been.
‘This place is about to come down on our heads!’ barked Bruno. ‘We should head back! Look, Friedrich’s a Hunter. This is how we work. Besides, we can dig them out later. Gabriel will—’
‘Gabriel will just have to understand!’ I snapped.
The bodyguard scowled.
‘Everyone suspects I might be truly immortal. Now’s as good a time as any to test that theory,’ I said.
The immortal looked unconvinced by my words.
I removed the biohazard container from my backpack and tossed it to Ashely. He caught the metal flask in mid air and watched me with a puzzled expression.
‘You need to go.’ This time, my tone was resolute.
The canister sailed across the corridor and hit me in the chest. A grunt left my lips.
‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’ Ashely stalked past in a huff.
I sighed, slipped the container inside the pack, and followed in his footsteps.
‘Where’re they going?’ said Anatole behind us.
‘To save Friedrich,’ Bruno replied bitterly.
I caught the immortal’s faintly murmured words as we turned the corner. ‘Goddamned bloody heroes.’
‘He called us heroes,’ I said after a while.
‘Shut up,’ said Ashely.
There was another detonation elsewhere in the facility. The floor shuddered beneath our feet. We negotiated another two corridors before turning a corner and reaching an impasse.
A wall of debris obstructed our path. The billow of dust that had accompanied the collapse of the passage was only just settling.
‘Wasn’t this the way to the lab?’ said Ashely.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Is there another way around?’
I looked over my shoulder with a sinking feeling. ‘I don’t think so.’
A noise drew my gaze to the rubble. There was a disturbance near the bottom. Dirt trickled out in a minor landslide. Fingertips appeared in the gap.
Ashely and I started to dig wordlessly. The hand became a flailing arm. We grabbed it and pulled out the buried man.
It was Friedrich. Blood oozed from a jagged wound on his grimy forehead. His left leg was twisted and looked broken in at least two places.
The Schwatz Hunter blinked at me. His eyes suddenly widened. He tried to sit up and choked.
‘One of my men was behind me!’ he gasped between hoarse coughs.
It was another minute before Ashely and I dug out the second immortal from the wreckage. The man had severe crush injuries to his chest and legs and was barely conscious.
The whole corridor shook violently as another explosion rocked the underground lab. The rubble shifted with a sinister groan.
‘I think now would be a good time to get out of here!’ said Ashely.
We hauled the wounded men up and headed for the exit.
‘Why did you come back for us?’ Friedrich asked, his words punctuated by painful grunts.
‘We don’t make a habit of leaving our men behind,’ I replied, panting.
The immortal seemed to consider this. ‘That’s all very altruistic and admirable but still, kinda dumb,’ he muttered.
‘Yeah, well, dumb’s our middle name,’ said Ashely. I smiled.
We reached the passage to the steel containment door and started up the stairs beyond. Four feet from the final landing, a detonation tore through the open stairwell above our heads.
I looked up. My eyes widened. ‘Run!’
Deadly debris smashed into the stairs seconds later.
We entered the boiler room in a thick billow of dust. The ground trembled. Pipes burst, releasing jets of steam around us. Tremors shook the walls from the impact of the wreckage pounding the stairwell.
We were halfway to the door leading to the elevator shaft when another explosion brought most of the ceiling down on us.
Buzzing stillness followed. I blinked and coughed dirt out of my mouth.
I was lying on my back under a thin layer of rubble. A jagged piece of metal protruded from the ground inches from my left eye.
I rolled over and crawled to my knees. Friedrich groaned somewhere in the gloom.
Ashely was climbing to his feet a short distance to my right. He shook his head dazedly, looked up, and froze.
‘Hell. Talk about bad luck,’ he said leadenly.
I followed his gaze. The weak glow of an emergency light revealed the mound of shattered concrete and metal blocking the access to the elevator shaft. I rose unsteadily and stared at the impenetrable barrier, anger and fear knotting my stomach.
‘We’re trapped,’ Friedrich murmured.
I climbed across the rubble to the far wall and studied the obstruction with narrowed eyes; I was damned if a pile of bricks and mortar was going to stop us after all we had been through.
‘There’s a crack in the wall,’ I said after a moment, tracing the jagged lips of the fracture with my fingers. ‘We could blast our way through.’
Ashely frowned. ‘That could bring the whole place down on our heads.’
‘Unless we decide to wait here in the hope that Gabriel will dig us out before the Crovirs blow this entire joint to hell and back, I don’t see that we have any other opt
ions,’ I retorted.
Ashely held my eyes for long seconds. A sigh left his lips. ‘That’s all fine and dandy, but where are you gonna get your hands on explosives down here?’
My gaze switched to Friedrich.
The Hunter raised an eyebrow. ‘How did you know?’
I shrugged. ‘I suspected Gabriel would’ve instructed you to destroy the lab before getting out.’
The Schwatz Hunter grunted. ‘That was a good guess.’ He reached inside his backpack and brought out a slim, rectangular block of C4.
It took several minutes to dig a trench in the debris on the opposite side of the room. I stuck the explosive inside the crack in the elevator shaft wall and joined the others behind our makeshift barricade.
‘Ready?’ I said tensely.
‘Not really,’ said Ashely. Friedrich shrugged and coughed.
‘Here goes.’ I took a deep breath and depressed the switch on the remote control detonator.
A thunderous boom reverberated ahead of us. Fragments of plaster and concrete filled the room. The ceiling groaned.
I lifted my head from my arms and peered over the lip of the trench.
‘Did it work?’ said Ashely.
The dust started to clear. A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth.
Ashely rose on his elbows. ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’
The explosion had created a hole large enough for a man to pass through. We made our way across the uneven floor and crawled into the space beyond.
A few bricks had fallen to the base of the elevator shaft. It was otherwise intact. My heart sank as I looked from the wounded immortals to the metal rungs rising up the wall.
‘It’s a long way up,’ said Friedrich. He met my gaze steadily. ‘It might be best to leave us here.’
There was the sound of another distant explosion. A fine blanket of dust rained down around us. I looked questioningly at Ashely.
He shrugged. ‘Hell, we haven’t gone through all of that just to abandon them here.’
In the end, we secured the injured men to our harnesses and hoisted them up the ladder. By the time we made it to the hatch, my arms and legs shook with effort, and my breaths came in harsh gasps. Sweat dripped down Ashely’s pale face; he looked as exgotzeted as I felt.
We reached the ventilation shaft moments later and found the zip line intact.
Ashely looked from the unconscious immortal in his arms to the tunnel on the other side. ‘How’re we gonna do this?’
Friedrich took a thin coil of climbing rope from his belt bag. ‘Here. If you go over first, you can use this to pull him across,’ he panted.
Ashely crossed the ventilation shaft with one end of the rope while Friedrich and I secured the lifeless man to the cable.
‘You’re next,’ I told Friedrich once the unconscious immortal had made it to the opposite tunnel safely.
The Schwatz Hunter nodded and leaned heavily against the wall, sweat and blood streaming down his ashen face.
I attached him to the line, tugged on his harness to make sure it was secure, and watched anxiously while he winched himself to the other side. Ashely grabbed him seconds later and helped him to the ground.
I had just locked myself onto the cable when a violent blast shook the walls around me. A jagged crack tore through the east side of the ventilation shaft. The ground shifted beneath my feet.
‘Adam!’ Ashely shouted from across the way.
There was no time to think. Heart thudding erratically in my chest, I launched myself across the gaping space.
Chunks of concrete pelted down around me as the walls started to collapse. A grunt left my lips when debris hit the zip line. The wire suddenly sagged.
I looked over my shoulder, alarm twisting through my gut; the steel arrow was almost out of the ceiling.
‘What the hell are you waiting for?’ Ashely barked. ‘Move!’
I needed no further prompting.
Six feet from the mouth of the tunnel, the arrow finally gave. I felt the abrupt slack in the line, grabbed it with both hands, and fell through empty space.
I slammed into the wall of the shaft. Air left my lungs in a stunned hiss. I slipped a couple of inches, the wire cutting into my palms.
A thunderous noise erupted above me. I looked past Ashely’s anxious face at the distant roof. My eyes widened.
The entire structure was caving in.
I placed my feet against the wall and started to climb at the same time Ashely pulled frantically on the other end of the line. He grabbed my shoulders and heaved me inside the tunnel.
A large section of concrete and the twisted remains of a metal fan crashed against the space where I had been a second ago. I rose on my elbows and stared at the falling debris.
Ashely scowled down at me. ‘What took you so long?’
‘I was admiring the view,’ I said drily in between coughs. Further explosions rocked through the earth around us.
‘Yeah, well, now’s not the time to sit and reminisce about it.’ He yanked me to my feet.
We pulled the wounded men upright and headed into the mine.
After what felt like a lifetime of obscurity and a silence that was only broken by the blasts from the underground facility and our increasingly labored breathing, a dim light grew in the distance ahead of us.
‘We’re almost there!’ I gasped to Friedrich.
Sweat drenched my face and clothes, turning the dirt coating my skin into grimy rivulets. My muscles burned from the strain of carrying the injured immortal.
The Schwatz Hunter did not respond. His eyes closed and he slipped into unconsciousness once more. I grunted and lifted him under the shoulders, my gaze focused on Ashely’s back as I took one heavy step after the other.
The elevator shaft to the upper mine appeared in the gloom. A group of figures stood bathed in the glow of torches next to the wire cage. They turned at our footsteps.
Anatole grinned. ‘You must have the lives of a thousand cats.’
Relief flashed across Bruno’s face. ‘I’ll let Gabriel know you’re safe. He’ll be—’
His words were drowned by a rising rumble. I stiffened and looked over my shoulder.
Shadows shifted behind us. Violent tremors shook the floor of the tunnel.
‘Go!’ I shouted at Ashely, my heart thundering inside my chest.
We raced the final twenty feet to the elevator shaft just as the roof of the passage collapsed behind us. I gritted my teeth and pushed Friedrich forward a second before debris hit my back. I stumbled and fell.
Darkness engulfed me as I was buried beneath a pile of rock and dirt. I lay stunned for long seconds before blinking and choking on a mouthful of dirt. I tried to move.
The rubble above me barely shifted.
Light suddenly stabbed through the gloom. A pair of hands reached in and dragged me out of my earthy tomb. I gasped and rolled over, air entering my parched lungs in giant gulps.
‘For a minute there, I really thought you were a goner,’ said Ashely.
He was sitting on the ground a couple of feet away, his breathing heavy and fast. Blood oozed from a wound on his head and the fresh scrapes on his knuckles.
The immortals were slowly climbing to their knees behind him.
I smiled weakly through the cloud of dust settling around us and grabbed Ashely’s hand. Something clattered to the ground as he pulled me upright. I turned.
The canister from the lab had slipped from my backpack.
Icy fear filled my veins when I saw the dent in the side of the container. The cooling liquid inside was already leaking through and stained the dirt a dark brown.
Ashely reached down.
‘Don’t!’ I shouted, stilling his hand.
His eyes widened. ‘Adam?’
I was surprised at the steadiness of my own fingers when I crouched and lifted the canister. I twisted the cap open and carefully removed the shattered remains of the
inner holder.
There was a small fracture in the wall of the syringe. The split widened under my frozen gaze.
My heart slammed dully against my ribs. I looked from Ashely and the frozen immortals to the cracking, blood-filled tube and the attached hypodermic needle. It took but seconds to reach the inevitable conclusion. There was only one thing I could do.
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘He did what?!’
Sheila’s outraged shriek was audible even through several layers of insulated glass.
I grimaced and gazed through the sealed port at the section of the interior ceiling panel visible above me.
Gabriel drifted into my field of view. He was talking on his cell.
‘Uh-huh,’ he said while he studied me. ‘How does he look? Guilty. No, no, he seems fine otherwise.’
A litany of Czech issued from the other end of the line; I recognized several choice expletives.
Gabriel brought the cell back to his ear. ‘I’ll get in touch when we land,’ he said drily. He ended the call, his eyes never leaving my face.
‘That was an extremely foolish thing you did.’ His voice was muffled by the protective glass. ‘Brave, but foolish.’
I shifted in my steel prison and remained silent.
We were on a private plane bound for the States.
After I injected myself with the contaminated blood and burned the remains of the syringe and needle, I sat in the twilight at the bottom of the mine and waited for Ashely and the Schwatzs to return. It had taken them a couple of hours to locate a suitable high containment transport pod and the necessary equipment they needed to move me. During that time, I prayed fervently that I would get to see the Godards again.
Night had fallen by the time we reached the military airfield outside the town of Plzeň, fifty-six miles west of Prague. A C-40 Clipper stood waiting for us on the tarmac.
I watched the plane fill up with Schwatz Hunters and crates of hardware before the container I lay in was hoisted onto the main deck.
‘Where’s Ashely?’ I said presently.
Gabriel glanced toward the back of the aircraft’s cabin. ‘I don’t think he’s ready to talk to you yet.’
‘That bad, huh?’ I grimaced. ‘How many has he smoked so far?’