Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Three

Gault and Amirah / The Bunker

GAULT SCRAMBLED FORWARD in a panic, feeling for the etched markings as Amirah’s eerie voice floated through the darkness toward him, louder each time she called his name.

“Sebastian!” She drew it out, making it a perverse song.

His fingers scrabbled across an uneven spot on the wall and he stopped, fumbling at it. Yes! He felt for the upper-right corner of the panel and then punched it with the side of his fist. The corner folded inward and he gripped the edges and tore the whole panel away. A small red light flicked on inside the compartment, illuminating the rubber-coated handles of six big levers.

“Sebastian!”

“Witch,” he breathed and grabbed the first handle and pulled. It was much harder than he thought it would be, and the angle was bad. He had to stand hunched over and throw his entire weight backward to move the handle. On the first pull it only moved five inches.

“Bastard!” he growled and tried again, screaming with effort. This time the handle tilted toward him and locked into place. There was an anticlimactic silence for a few seconds and then far away there was a heavy rumbling that he felt more than heard.

He grabbed the second handle and again it took him two pulls to lock it down.

“Sebastian!”

Her voice was close. God, he thought . . . God!

Even as the rumbling started for the second collapsing vent pipe he threw himself back with the third, and this one locked down on the first try. The rumbling started at once.

“Sebastian!” Now there was a different tone in her voice. Perhaps a faint flicker of doubt. He grabbed the fourth lever and pulled. It was so hard, so stiff that it took him five tries to lock it down, but finally it clicked and the rumbling started.

“Sebastian!” He could hear the hurried scuff of her feet and her voice definitely had a note of alarm in it. It gave him strength to hear the fear and he tackled the fifth lever with a will and in two grunting pulls it locked down. Already the ambient temperature was rising as the superheated gasses began recoiling from blocked vents. A deep red glow was reflected through the steel passages and it bathed him in a bloody light.

“Sebastian!”

He turned and she was there, not twenty feet away. Her robes were torn and she was covered in blood. God knows whose blood it was. In the fiery glow of the lava she looked like a monster from hell itself. The blood on her lips and hands was black and her eyes were so shadowed that she looked more like a skull than a woman whose beauty had once made him gasp with but a single slanting glance.

“Listen to me, Sebastian,” she said, her voice thick and heavy. “Stop this . . . I can share Generation Twelve with you. If you truly embrace the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet I can make you one of us; I can make you one of God’s immortals.”

“You’re insane, Amirah. You’ve turned yourself into a monster.” He put his hand on the sixth lever.

“I am Seif al Din,” she retorted, her dark eyes flashing. “Don’t you understand? I am the plague, I am the Sword of the Faithful. We don’t need laboratories or test subjects anymore. I am the breath of God that will blow across the entire world. The faithless will die and the faithful will become immortals. Like me. Like El Mujahid.” She reached a hand toward him. “Like you, Sebastian . . . if you only accept.”

He shook his head and tears spilled down his cheeks. “I’m a greedy heartless bastard, Amirah . . . but I’m not a monster.”

Amirah spread her hands and smiled at him. “Am I a monster, my love?” she said in that old familiar voice that turned a knife in his heart. It was so bizarrely at odds with the bloodstained thing she had become.

“Yes, you effing well are!” The answering voice came from the shadow behind her. Toys.

Amirah turned to look behind her and there was Toys, his clothes torn, his face streaked with blood, his eyes swimming with pain. He leaned one bloody hand against the wall and with the other he held his pistol aimed at her. The barrel trembled.

Amirah hissed at him; and Toys managed a mean little smile and hissed back. He looked past her at Gault and at the lever he held in his hands. Toys took a ragged breath.

“Do it,” he said.

Amirah swung back toward Gault.

“No!”

“God,” he said softly as the mountains rumbled around him and the heat scorched the air between them. “I loved you, Amirah.”

“Sebastian . . .” They both said it, Amirah and Toys.

Gault tightened his grip around the handle and tensed his muscles.

“God help me,” he murmured, “but I will always love you.”

She lunged at him as Toys fired the gun and Gault threw his weight back and pulled the lever. Their screams were lost in the rumble as tons of rock collapsed onto the last pipe. In the bowels of the earth, in the furnace of hell, the hand of Satan clutched its fiery fingers into a fist and punched upward toward the Bunker.