doors. “You’ll want to barricade these doors after I leave.”
“You’ll get killed.” Esmeralda touched his face. “You can’t do that.”
“I just want you to get out safe,” he told her. He pressed the gold Indian-head coin into her hand, the one they’d traded back and forth all their life. “I’ll see you again. You know this isn’t the end. Maybe I won’t be such an asshole next time around.”
“I doubt that.” Esmeralda smiled, but her eyes gleamed with tears. She kissed him, then held the coin against her heart.
“I love you, Esmeralda,” he said.
“I love you, too,” she whispered back, and he couldn’t help smiling. At least he would die with those words in his ears.
Tommy steeled himself, then hurried out through one of the doors, closing it again behind him. He hoped they would take his advice about blocking the clinic from the inside. If his attack worked, the entire base would soon become chaotic and dangerous.
The response team already filled the corridor, but they were a little disorganized as they parted for the crazed doctors and nurses to pass through them. Tommy wished he’d had the foresight to dress himself in medical scrubs, too, instead of a t-shirt and jeans. It would have helped him blend with the escaping mob.
Instead, the guards in their biohazard masks shouted and raised their machine guns at him.
Tommy breathed deep and exhaled, pushing out the fear from deep inside of him, giving them both barrels, everything he had. He poured all his energy into it. There was no point in holding anything back now—he doubted he had more than a few seconds to live.
The mist of fear flooded the corridor, so dense and dark that the light in the hallway turned deep red, painting everyone and everything the color of fresh blood.
“General Kilpatrick’s orders!” Tommy shouted. “Everyone in a biohazard mask is the enemy! Shoot on sight!”
His shouting brought the attention of all the masked guards, who turned their guns on him. The support guards at the back, armed but without biohazard masks, shouting in fear and opened fire on the rows of guards ahead of them. The body armor and helmets shielded their torsos and heads, but the bullets sliced through their arms and legs. The masked guards began to fall, taken from the rear by surprise, flurries of machine-gun rounds hammering their backs hard enough to crack their ribs through their armor.
Most of the remaining masked guards dropped and swiveled, returning fire and escalating the battle. A couple of them near the front remained focused on Tommy, raising their guns at him.
“Do your worst,” Tommy challenged. He exhaled a last thick mist of red, and then the bullets tore through his arms, stomach, chest, throat, and face, cutting him apart. They kept firing even as the fear-giver rose and looked down on his bullet-riddled body, just a useless slab of meat now.
His life as Thomas White was ended, and he felt satisfied that he’d done his best to pay his debt to the dead-speaker, atoning for his failure to protect her in their last life. He struggled to remain focused on the dimming world of the living, determined to see her get out alive, though he now watched from beyond the grave, unable to give her any more help.
* * *
“What are you doing here?” Alise demanded, slamming open the door. Niklaus sat on his bed, drinking cheap Polish vodka and smoking cigarettes. Though the alarm had been clanging for a few minutes now, he remained where he was, in his undershirt and black uniform trousers, boots propped up on the bed’s flimsy footboard. “Are you deaf?”
“No,” he replied. He swigged vodka and smiled, offering no other explanation for his inaction.
“The supernormals are escaping!” Alise shouted. “We’re finding guards dead of Juliana’s plague. I checked Mia’s room, and it looks like she went with them. They cannot be allowed to escape, Niklaus!”
“Maybe someone will stop them.” He shrugged.
“We need your help! Get up!” She smacked his leg.
“I’m going, I’m going...” Niklaus reluctantly stood and took his time pulling on his belt, his jacket, checking that his pistol was fully loaded. He smirked at himself in the mirror as he put on his cap. It struck him as absurd, the black uniform, the silver skulls and lightning bolts, the twisted red cross on his arm. He thumped the swastika. “What is this thing, anyway? Does anyone know? Besides a big target that says, ‘Shoot me in the arm, snipers!’”
“We don’t have