Crash!
She turned, saw that the massive creature was ripping through the door across the room, striding into the screaming heat and searching, searching—
At the end of the platform, a double metal hatch. They dashed for it, Claire not thinking of anything but how to get away, how to destroy a thing that had survived all that it had—
• the door was unlocked, and they ran onto anoth-er platform; the heat in the shadowy chamber was searing, terrible—
She had twelve bullets, split between two guns. Claire stumbled to the edge of the platform, Sherry next to her, the electric orange of the molten metal bathing them in its fevered glow. Hot enough to burn anything. . . .
How? How do I make him jump?
“Sherry, go over there!”
She pointed to the farthest corner of the platform, and Sherry shook her head, her small face trembling with fear.
“Do it! Now!” Claire shouted, and with a cry of terror, Sherry ran, her locket banging against the open flaps of the denim vest—
• not a locket—
• and Sherry screamed, and Claire turned, and Mr. X was coming.
He walked into the chamber, as stiff and huge and impossible as when she’d first seen him, the eerie orange light turning him into even more of a night-mare. Claire stood her ground, jamming Irons’s gun into her shorts, the half-formed plan running through her frightened mind. It probably wouldn’t work but she had to try—
• he reaches for me, I jump over the railing, I grab on, he falls—
Mr. X turned his blank gaze toward her as he took his floor-shaking, measured steps, the black bullet holes in his face and throat just pockets of shadow in the smooth, terrible pumpkin light—
• and he turned toward Sherry, and raised his fists, and started for her.
“Hey! Hey, I’m here!” Claire screamed, and he didn’t hear her, didn’t see her, his entire monstrous being focused on the cowering, sobbing girl huddled against the far wall, clutching her locket—
• and Claire knew what he wanted. The half remembered phrases from both Sherry and Annette came together in a flash of awareness, forming the answer.
G-Virus, rip her apart, good luck charm—
Not a locket.
“Sherry, he wants the necklace! Throw it to me!” If she was wrong, they were both dead. Mr. X closed in on the girl, blocking her from Claire’s view—
• and the pendant, the G-Virus pendant that An-nette Birkin had inflicted on her young daughter came flying through the heated dark, hitting the floor in front of Claire’s feet.
Mr. X reeled around, following the path of the thrown pendant with his black eyes, forgetting Sherry the second the necklace left her grasp. It was true. Good girl!
Claire scooped it up, waving it at the monster, feeling a rush of incredible anger and malicious glee as the bloated giant started toward her with unwaver-ing intent, fists raising again, his lifeless features fixed on
“You want this?” Claire taunted, the words spilling out of the fury, for the wasted bullets, for the fear that she and Sherry had suffered. “Yeah? Then come and get it, you miserable, mindless freak!”
The monster was less than five feet away when Claire turned and threw it into the bubbling, burning hot pool, the necklace disappearing into the melted iron—
• and the superman creature that had terrorized them throughout the endless night walked straight into the rail, the metal bars snapping in his all-powerful wake—
• and plunged silently into the giant vat, a great wave of sizzling metal sloshing over the blackened sides, spontaneous eruptions of flame dancing up from the dark shape of his body as he disappeared beneath the surface of the molten lake.
Triumph, sweet and wonderful—and then the cool voice of the recording changed suddenly, wiping away the joy of seeing Mr. X take a lava bath. Over the shrill blasts of the mechanical sirens—
“There are five minutes to reach minimum safe distance. All remaining personnel should evacuate immediately. Please report to the bottom platform. Repeat, please report to the bottom platform.
Re-peat_” Sherry was at her side, and Claire grabbed her hand, and they ran.
The pain was incredible, and Ada closed her eyes, wondering if she would die from it.
“Ada, hang on! Just hang on, I’ll pull you up!” Through the throbbing, pounding sirens that as-saulted her ears, Ada heard the countdown for the fail-safe start to run. Five minutes.
He tries to save me, we both die.
Leon’s grip was strong, the determination in his panicked, pleading voice almost as strong as her own will. Almost, but not quite.
Ada turned her face up to his, saw that in spite of it all, he still wanted her to survive, he wanted to help her up and carry her away to the safety of escape. Not this time. Not for me. . . .
Her life had been about selfishness, about ego and greed. She’d seen a lot of good people die, and somewhere along the way, she’d lost the ability to care—telling herself that even the effort was a waste of time and a sign of weakness.
And I was wrong, I was selfish and wrong and now it’s too late.
Not too late. Whatever waited beneath her, the decision was made.
“Leon—go down, west, and find the cargo room, past the—row of plastic chairs. You’ll need the disk, it’s in my—pouch—“ “Ada, I have it! Cargo disk, right, I have it, I found it—don’t talk, just hold on, let me help you!” He fumbled at the rail, trying to maintain his grip. Talking was a horrible effort, but she had to finish, had to tell him before time ran out.
“The code is 345. Get to the elevator, Leon. Take it down. The subway—tunnel leads out. Have to—run full throttle . . . and watch out for Birkin, the G-carrier, he—he’s changing by now. Got it?”
Leon nodded, his blazing blue eyes filling her up. “Live,” she said, and it was a good word, a word to go
out on. She was tired, and the mission was wrapped, and Leon would live.
She let go of the railing, and Leon screamed her name, and the sound of it followed her down into the dark like a bittersweet good-bye.
TwEnfY-ninE
SHERRY WAS SCARED, BUT MR. X WAS DEAD
and he must have been the monster all along, not the one at the station but the real monster, the one that had wanted to rip her apart all along—
• but she didn’t have time to think about it as Claire sprinted, jerking her along back the way they’d come, through the machine room, through the hall with the crawl space and around a corner—
• and Sherry screamed as a zombie reeled toward them, a dead white creature made of dusty bone, and Claire raised her gun and shot—
• bang, and the dry white head caved in, the moaning dead creature crumpled to the floor, and then Claire was dragging her over the body and running for the door at the end of the hall. It was an elevator, and Sherry collapsed against one wall after Claire pulled her inside, trying to catch her breath as Claire punched the controls. After the speed of their run from Mr. X, the elevator’s descent was a crawl, a softly humming crawl.