“Pregnant ladies go first.” Juliana folded her arms over her bloodstained dress. She watched Sebastian boost Mia up into the duct.
“I can’t!” Mia swayed in his arms, unbalanced as she held onto the metal rung in the wall.
“You’re doing fine.” Sebastian smiled up at her, and she smiled back, soothed by him. Juliana could have killed them both.
Mia reached up for the next rung, and the next, and he lifted her until he could place her feet on the bottom rung.
“There.” Sebastian reached for Juliana. “Now it’s your turn.”
“You go first,” Juliana told him. She could hear the sound of approaching boots.
“I can’t. Then you won’t be able to reach,” he said.
“I’m a better jumper than you think,” she told him. “I need to be last in case someone climbs up after us. And you need to be with Mia so you can play your looking-into-the-future game.”
“It’s helped us a lot,” Sebastian said. “We’d be dead without it.”
“We’ll be dead right now if you don’t get up there and out of my way. Climb fast.”
“If you really think—”
“Go!”
Sebastian jumped up and grabbed the rung with one hand. He began climbing hand over hand, pulling himself up toward the giant steel fan and the night sky above.
Juliana looked at the armored steel plate mounted on one side of the shaft. It could swing down and around to seal off the vertical air duct in case of chemical attack. She would just barely be able to jump up and grab the lever that set it in motion.
“I’m not coming,” Juliana said. “They’ll just hunt us down, and they’ll keep doing horrible things to more people, won’t they? I have to put an end to it.”
“You can’t stay here!” Sebastian said.
“We won’t make it if I don’t take the guards out while I can,” Juliana said. “We had our chance, Sebastian. We lost it. Just make sure Mia and her baby get out alive. That’s what matters.”
“Juliana, please don’t do this,” Mia begged.
“You should hurry,” Juliana said. “Look into the future if you don’t believe me.” She backed up for a running start, then jumped and pulled the lever. The armored plate swung down from the side of the duct on a hinge, then back up the other way to seal it. She heard Sebastian shout her name a final time, and Mia pleaded with her to stop. She never saw them again.
Juliana turned to face the sound of approaching boots and shouting German voices. With the vertical intake duct sealed, the array of powerful ventilation fans created a vacuum as they sucked the air out of the cavity where she stood. It felt as if the fans were trying to pull the hair from her head and the skin from her face.
The maintenance door opened, and an S.S. guard in a gas mask looked in, spotted her, and dodged aside. A column of them entered, all in gas masks and carrying machine guns.
Juliana summoned up the demon plague a final time, drawing on the last of her energy. As she breathed out, she imagined her entire body unraveling, all the way down to her heart and bones, every bit of flesh translated into deadly spores.
She breathed out a dense, dark cloud, feeling the mass of her body beginning to dissolve, as though she were hollowing herself out. The ventilation fans sucked the spores away, channeling them throughout the base.
The guards raised their machine guns, and she spread out her arms.
“Go ahead,” she told them, breathing out another dense clouds, feeling her bones weaken.
Four of them opened fire, hammering her with round after round. She staggered back, light as a ballerina, as the bullets tore her apart.
Then she floated, watching her ruined body fall to the floor like an old costume worn to rags. With her body dead, her mind followed the streams of plague flowing through the air vents, spinning through underground rooms and hallways, her consciousness suddenly formless and whirling free like a dust storm.
She had no control of the swarming spores. She could only watch distantly as they flowed through hallways and apartments, killing Nazi officers and nurses alike, then spreading through the complex, killing off the kitchen staff as well as the guards, scores of people falling dead. Even the guards in gas masks were not safe, because her final cloud of spores, filled with all her anger and hate for her captors, was so virulent and aggressive that it ate right through their greyish-green wool uniforms and burrowed deep into their flesh. If there were any innocent souls among those in the underground base, God would have to pick them out from the plague-ridden mass of bodies Himself, if God cared about such things.
She watched them die and die, all of them at once, every plague spore providing her a vantage point, as if she were thousands of different places at the same moment, looking out from thousands of viewpoints. She felt like a sandstorm, sweeping through the bodies of everyone, leaving no one behind.