Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Y es.”
“And if you die?” How dare he do this? They couldn’t afford to lose him. She couldn’t afford to lose him.
“The response to that would be no different than if I died from a bullet wound or an IED.” His tone was even and his words rational, but she couldn’t reconcile how it sounded with what it meant.
He’d just given himself an injection of an untested homemade vaccine, one that would kill him, protect him, or might not do a damn thing.
Frustration clawed at her insides until she wanted to knock him onto his back and tie him down so he couldn’t put himself in more danger.
“You’re not replaceable, Max.”
“Bullshit.”
Now she just wanted to smack him. “How many doses do you have left?”
“One and a third.”
“How can you have a third of a dose?”
“I didn’t have enough eggs for a complete third dose.”
“One test subject isn’t very many.”
“No, I need to choose another.”
She pointed a finger at him. “Me.”
When he just looked at her, she rolled her eyes. “Why not?”
He didn’t say anything for a while, busying himself with tidying his work space. Finally, he said, “I don’t have a good reason.”
“What you have is an overdeveloped sense of chivalry.”
“I suppose.” He picked up the used hypodermic, and walked to the doorway.
“Where are you going?”
“To dispose of this in the fire.” He disappeared.
She strode over to the counter and glanced at the hypodermic with the one full dose. She was only going to get one chance at this.
Ali picked up the syringe, opened her coat and pushed her clothing aside so she could inject the vaccine into the triceps muscle of her upper arm. She hesitated only a moment before sinking the needle in and depressing the plunger.
She pulled it out, put the cap back on and put it back where she found it.
No, she couldn’t leave it there. She grabbed it and made her way to the room where everyone was sleeping and threw it in the makeshift metal fire pit with its glowing embers.
Max was talking to someone in the next room, his voice a low rumble. The sound calmed a part of her that normally never relaxed.
She left the sleepers and stood outside the room where Max spoke to Tom, Hunt, Holland, and Warren. The other two relatively healthy soldiers, Jessup and Bird, were on watch.
“We’ve received the package of standard flu vaccine that I requested and I need anyone not sick to be vaccinated as soon as possible. I’m going to need a team of two to go into the village and identify the healthy and ask them to come here so I can give them a shot. If it works, it could be the difference between life and death for some people.”
“You want us to go?” Hunt asked.
“I want Sergeant Stone to go with one of you.” There was an edge to his voice that set off Ali’s radar.
“And you’re afraid we might say something to piss her off?” Hunt asked. “Colonel, I’ve pressed my luck as far as it will go on that front already.”
“I’m not going to go there at all,” Warren said.
“Good.”
Footsteps approached the doorway, then Max stepped through it. “Sergeant Stone,” he said. “Eavesdropping?”
“I heard my name mentioned. I’m going into the village?”
“Yes, you’re less of a stressor to the locals.”
“Sir,” she said. “Instead of another soldier, I’d like to take Fatima with me. These people have been under an attack of one kind or another for days. I think they’ll respond better to a woman and a young man than to soldiers with guns.”
“Taking your weapons is not optional. You will be armed.”
“I understand that, sir. I don’t have to wave it in anyone’s face, though.”
He thought about it for a moment, but nodded after a few seconds. “Your reasoning is sound. Proceed, Sergeant.” He stepped backward a couple of steps and said to the four men he’d just left, “Did you guys catch that?”
“Yes, sir,” Hunt said. “We’re staying home.”
Ali stuck her head around the doorway. “Sorry, fellas, none of you looks good in a skirt.”
“Thank God,” Hunt muttered.
“I think I would rock a skirt,” Warren said. “I’ve got a great ass.”
“Who told you that?” Hunt demanded.
“My last girlfriend.”
Ali sighed dramatically. “Dude, she lied.”
“Fuck off.”
Grinning, Ali went into the room and woke Fatima. It only took a couple of minutes for Ali to explain what she wanted and Fatima agreed to help without hesitation.
The two women walked the short distance to Max’s lab and found him looking for something on the floor while on his hands and knees.
“Max, we’re going to head out now. Are you okay?”
He glanced at them briefly. “I’m fine.” He stopped and looked at her again, but this time his face was accusatory. “Stone, did you do what I think you did?”
She cleared her throat. “If it involved an injection, I did. I dropped the plastic into the fire in the sleeping room.”
He got to his feet, his lips tightly pressed together. “I should be angry with you. You disobeyed orders.”
“Special circumstances.”
“We’ll talk later.” That might have been the words he said, but his tone told her she was getting yelled at later.
“Yes, we will.”
She led Fatima to the exit and the two women headed out into the village. It was still dark and very few homes had a light of any kind, so they stopped at the ones that did, and found more sickness and death than anyone should ever have to see.
* * *
S o far, she and Fatima had only found a dozen people in the village who hadn’t gotten sick yet.
That, more than the lack of sleep or fear of a militant attack, made her stomach clench into a hard knot that threatened to make her throw up the eggs she’d eaten.
A dozen people out of hundreds.
Not everyone had died of the flu. Some had been killed by bullets and bad men, and others had survived the illness.
Max was going to be very worried by everything she’d seen. The sickness, murders, and abandoned homes. Twice, she’d walked into a home to find everyone dead of the flu except the woman of the house, who hung from a ceiling rafter.
Not everyone could survive the destruction of their family.
She came out of the house she was in, having found two teenage boys trying to bury their parents in their backyard garden. She sent them up to the old hospital, telling them that there was food and a place to sleep there.
She walked to the next house, rounded a corner and came face to face with eight men armed with semi-automatic rifles, all of them pointed at her.
She put her hands up in the air and began babbling in Arabic. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot. I’m not sick.”
No one moved for several seconds and the silence had begun to get uncomfortable, when movement behind the line of armed men signalled the arrival of someone new.
A man made his way to stand in front of her. Though she’d never met him, she’d seen enough pictures of the man to recognize him.
Akbar.
He looked different than the photos she’d seen. Then, he’d been an average-looking man in his late thirties, someone she wouldn’t look twice at if she’d met him on the street. Now, he sported a puckered scar along the left side of his face that went from his ear up into his hairline. He wore a hat, but she couldn’t see any evidence of hair on his head at all.
He stared at her like a reptile does when sizing up its prey.
A shiver went through her and she held herself very, very still.
“Sergeant Stone, daughter of General Stone,” he said to her in barely accented English. “When I heard they sent a woman to protect Colonel Maximillian I was skeptical, yet here you are.” He looked around the village. “And gathering the, as yet, uninfected.”
He asked no question, so she remained silent.
“My men tell me you’re responsible for the deaths of some of our fighters.” He didn’t sound or look angry.
Fear rolled over her in an icy wave that made the world spin and threatened to suck her under.
She forced herself to breathe through a throat constricted until it felt no larger than a straw.
Despite his accusation that she’d killed his men, he didn’t seem to care. His face remained impassive, cold and unmoved by any emotion. He didn’t give two shits that she’d killed people, his people.
From the shuffling of feet and hands tightening on their rifles, it seemed like his men cared. She couldn’t predict what Akbar would do next. Kill her? Disarm her and give her to his men? Use her as a hostage to get Max under his control?
Wait, Max was the important person in Akbar’s eyes. Perhaps the only person he saw as a potential threat to his plan to wipe out the world with a lethal plague. Her value as a hostage might be the only thing that kept her alive.
Movement and cries of fear from behind her grabbed Ali’s attention.
Armed men shoved forward Fatima and most of the people the two of them had sent to the old hospital.
Fatima stumbled and fell, and when Ali would have offered her hand to help the other woman up, a gunman pointed his weapon at her and shouted at her to stop and get back in Arabic.
Fatima got to her feet and spat at Akbar, calling him a murderer of children. She was too far away to hit him with it, but that didn’t seem to matter.
Akbar finally did something other than stand there and stare.
He strode over to Fatima and punched her in the face, knocking her to the ground. Then he did it again, and again, and again.
Numb disbelief held Ali immobile for two entire seconds before the heat of anger and a desire to protect got her moving. She didn’t get far. Two goons with guns got in the way and ordered her to stay back. The people she and Fatima had gathered cried out in shock and horror as Akbar continued to beat the woman until she stopped making sounds and her body flopped unresponsive on the ground.
When Akbar stepped back he was covered in blood spatter, his right fist and arm coated in gleaming red.
One look at Fatima told Ali that she was dead, her skull cracked and eyes open and sightless.
The other people held at gunpoint cried, or made sounds of horror and fear. When Akbar looked at them, all sound stopped.
Because he had no expression on his face. None. No disgust or victory or satisfaction. It was as if he’d stepped on an ant and was continuing on.
“Put these people in front,” Akbar said, gesturing at the local survivors. He looked at Ali and smiled. “She will walk with me.”
She didn’t resist when one man pushed her to a spot next to Akbar as they started walking toward the old hospital.
When they were about twenty feet from the front entrance to the hospital, one of the other men with Akbar yelled out for Max to come and negotiate or he would kill all the hostages.
All was silent until Max shouted at them from inside the building. “What do you want?”
“Your surrender,” Akbar yelled, bringing Ali along with one hand wrapped vicelike around her right biceps, until they stood where Max could see her. Akbar hid mostly behind her, denying a clear shot to anyone inside the building who might have a sniper rifle handy.
For a moment, Max said nothing, then he shouted, “Are you behind this flu outbreak?”
“I’m the wrath of God. I made it lethal. I made it a weapon to kill my enemies in large numbers. That’s how I sign my work, through the number of bodies it leaves behind.”
“Killing people isn’t an art project, it’s murder,” Max shouted back. “The scale you seem to be seeking is called extermination.”
Akbar smiled again and this time it wasn’t just cold, it was coldly satisfied. “I knew you would understand my message, Max.”
“So, why haven’t you blown me up with that grenade launcher I see behind you?”
Grenade launcher?
She whipped her head around and saw the weapon, times two. Shit, his men had two of the fucking things.
Max’s question jerked her mind out of the deep freeze it had been in and made her think. Did Akbar need Max alive for a reason beyond someone to taunt?
“Put on a pot of tea,” Akbar said pleasantly, “and let’s talk about that.”
Tea?
Akbar was crazy.
That didn’t make him any less dangerous. Think, Stone, think. What would a nutcase like Akbar want with Max?
“I have your special friend, Sergeant Stone.” He gave her a shake, as if she were a doll he could throw around. She didn’t resist. If he thought being female made her weak and not a threat, good. It was a mistake she’d ensure he’d regret.
“I promise, if you cooperate, no harm will come to her.”
That’s what Akbar wanted. Max’s cooperation, but for what?