Jack reached into his own pack and pulled out a handgun, a Glock 9mm. He didn’t point it at me, didn’t threaten me at all. Very carefully, the barrel pointing at the wall the whole time, he placed it on the floor.
“I told you one time about my contingency plan. About how I used to think about killing them in their sleep.” He continued to build the charges around the cylinders. I did nothing. I remembered quite well what he had said. It had scared me then-it scared me more now because now I knew he meant it. He went on. “There’s no hope for a rescue attempt, Dekalb. It just can’t be done. I ran through a million scenarios in my head and there’s no way the two of us come out alive.”
“You don’t know that,” I demanded.
He blinked and looked away from me. “Dekalb,” he said, “what’s the crew carrying capacity of a Chinook helicopter with the seats taken out?”
My jaw opened and closed spasmodically. “You don’t-” But he did. He knew the answer. Maybe a hundred people if you’re not going very far. We could only rescue half the survivors, even if we made it that far.
Jack clearly didn’t want to have to choose which ones to leave behind.
“There’s nothing to be gained by us dying like that. Still we can do something for the survivors. We can keep them from being his lunch. Or rather I can.”
He tossed me one of the atropine injector kits. If I was exposed to nerve gas the only thing that could save me-the only thing-was jabbing the enclosed hypodermics into my buttocks or thigh. If I hadn’t been exposed to nerve gas but jabbed myself anyway, the atropine would kill me instead.
“You can get out of here. Go back the way we came. Meet up with Kreutzer and have him take you to the UN. Get the girls off of that rooftop. You can still complete your mission. You just have to let me complete mine.”
Which meant consigning two hundred men, women and children to their deaths.
“Dekalb-I only needed you to come this far because I couldn’t carry all of this gear on my own. Now let me do you a favor. Just turn around and go.”
I didn’t know what to say. I definitely didn’t know what to do. I most certainly had no idea what my next reaction was going to be. If I could have stepped out of my body and spoken with myself I would have advised against it.
It was a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing.
The Iridium cellphone buzzed with a small, unobtrusive sound. It vibrated against the flagstone stone floor, wobbling and dancing. It slid a few inches across the floor and stopped. It started up again a second later. This was Ayaan’s signal to us, the message that she had drawn Gary’s undead army to her position. Away from us. Jack and I both stared at the phone.
We looked up at the same moment. I had my combat knife in my hand, pointed at his stomach. He had the Glock in his hand, pointed at my heart.
I lunged.
He fired.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Fifteen