“Juliana! What happened? Are you hurt?” Sebastian asked.
“The baby’s gone,” Juliana said. Her voice was flat, without a spark of emotion. All that remained inside her was a cold, endless darkness. “Our baby. Now we’re leaving. You take these, I don’t need them.” She held out the two pistols.
“Our baby?” Sebastian held her tight, his voice full of grief. She felt nothing. “Oh, God, no...Alise only told me a few weeks ago.”
“There are at least two guards at the desk outside,” Juliana said. “If they’re wearing their gas masks, you shoot them. If not, I’ll kill them. It’ll be quieter.”
“We’re leaving right now?”
“Anyone who gets in our way dies.”
He gave her a look of shock, tinged with a little fear. She stepped out of his cell and began walking up the corridor towards the heavy door at the end, keys in her hand.
Sebastian caught up with her. “We...should get Mia out. She’s pregnant, too.”
“With your baby.” Juliana’s voice remained flat and cold.
“Yes...but...only because of Alise, I promise! She can cast a spell on you—”
“I’ve been under her spell before,” Juliana told him. “I killed a man, and I was sad about it. Tonight, I’ll kill a lot of them, and I won’t care. It’s funny how things turn.”
“Okay...but listen, honestly, I had no desire to be with her, as soon as Alise stopped doping me I got into a fight with Niklaus about seeing you, that’s how I ended up down here.”
“At least we were on the same floor.”
“I’m really, really sorry. You don’t know how terrible I feel, how much I wish—”
“Stop talking.” Juliana inserted the key into the door and pushed it open.
The two guards at the desk turned with sly smiles on their faces, expecting to see the nurses and their fellow S.S. men. They stood and shouted when he saw the prisoners in gray clothes—Juliana’s hands and dress dripping blood, Sebastian pointing two pistols at them.
One guard reached for his gas mask on the desk in front of him, while the other reached for the pistol at his belt. Both of them were too slow. Juliana exhaled another writhing swarm of plague spores into their faces, eating away their flesh. Their eyelids, noses, and lips rotted away, and dark hives erupted on their eyeballs and facial tendons. They howled in agony, but they died quickly and toppled over behind the desk.
Juliana unlocked the door to the outer corridor, then ran to unlock the stairwell door.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” Sebastian whispered as they ran up the concrete stairs, their footfalls echoing up and down the stairwell.
“Alise taught me,” Juliana said. “Sometimes being under her spell has its benefits, am I right, Sebastian?”
Sebastian opened his mouth to answer, then left it hanging open, as if he’d realized there was no good reply.
The door to the dormitory level opened, and Juliana recognized the doctor who’d examined her during the miscarriage, along with the head of research Dr. Wichtmann, and a pair of younger biologists who worked in the labs.
“Juliana!” Dr. Wichtmann gasped, looking her over. “You should...you should be resting! We were coming to check on your condition.”
“He has a gun!” One of the biologists pointed at Sebastian.
“In all honesty, I have two,” Sebastian replied, raising both of them.
“Herr Doktor,” Juliana said to Wichtmann, “Allow me to return the kindness you’ve shown me as your guest.”
She seized his hand and opened her jaws, unleashing death and pain on all of them. They fell to the concrete, their limbs twisting and jerking, their bodies writhing like bugs in poison. Wichtmann himself rolled down the stairs, leaving dark splashes of his decaying, plague-infested flesh and blood behind him like footprints. His balding head cracked against the concrete landing.
“She’s one floor up.” Sebastian ran up the next flight. Juliana glanced over the dying, bleeding, groaning men, then followed him.
The door to the maternity level opened onto a spacious area with the guard station at the far side from the stairwell, next to the door to the maternity rooms. The three guards leaped to their feet the moment they saw the blood-spattered prisoners emerge.
Juliana breathed another cloud of plague spores at them, which thinned and spread out as it drifted across the room. They had plenty of time to draw their weapons, so Sebastian charged at them and opened fire with both pistols, waving the guns back and forth to try and hit all three of them.
One S.S. guard caught a bullet to the chest, and another was shot in the arm while reaching for his pistol, then in the leg. The third guard, apparently smarter than his co-workers, had ducked behind the desk, gas mask in hand. Scattered plague spores landed on the wounded guard’s face and neck, conjuring bloody lesions, as he dropped out of sight behind the desk.