Amirah lunged forward to bite the man, but the Marines jerked on the ropes and stopped her when her gray teeth were an inch from the Afghani’s face. Amirah snarled and then laughed. It was impossible to say whether she was enjoying this game or if she was completely mad.
As the men struggled to keep her in check they danced and shifted around, and I could see that there were two other Afghanis in the room. They lay sprawled like broken dolls. It looked like their faces had been eaten, and their throats were tangles of red junk.
“It’s getting tough to hold this bitch,” growled one of the men, though he was smiling when he said it.
“Please, in the name of God keep her away!” begged the bound man. He was already bleeding from half a dozen bites. Thin lines of dark red spider-webbed from each bite. The infection was slow for some, faster for others. Snot and spit ran from his nose and mouth as he pleaded in three different languages.
A big man with sergeant’s stripes — the only one not holding a leash — bent behind the man and spoke with sharp impatience. “We’ll fucking stop when you fucking tell us what we want to know.”
“But I don’t…. I don’t….” He was filled with too much panic to complete a sentence.
The sergeant straightened and nodded, and the men slackened their holds on the rope leashes. Amirah instantly lunged forward and sank her teeth into the flesh of the man’s shoulder. Blood spurted hot and red beside her cheeks, and even from where I crouched I could see her eyes roll high and white with an erotic pleasure. The man’s piercing shrieks filled the whole cave.
“Okay, pull the bitch off him,” snapped the sergeant, and she fought them, her teeth sunk deep into muscle. It took all three men to haul her back, two pulling and the sergeant pushing. He punched Amirah in the face and that finally broke the contact, but as they dragged her away a piece of sinew was clamped between her jaws and it snapped with a wet pop.
She licked her lips. “Delicious…,” she said in English, drawing the word out, tasting the soft wetness of it, savoring the way the syllables rolled between teeth and tongue and lips.
Bunny made a soft gagging sound beside me.
This was what I was afraid of. What Church had been afraid of. During that fight against El Mujahid, we’d encountered several generations of the Seif al Din pathogen. Most of the early generations transformed the infected into mindless eating machines. The walkers. But at the end, when I’d squared off against El Mujahid himself, he’d been among the dead but he still retained his intelligence. It was the result of Generation 12 of the disease. He bragged about how his princess had saved him, had elevated him to immortality. The name Amirah meant “princess.”
That had to be what we were seeing here. Amirah had become one of her own monsters. Was it an accident or part of some twisted plan? From the way El Mujahid bragged about it — right before I gave him a ticket to paradise — I had to believe that Amirah had chosen this path.
Chosen. God almighty.
“Fuck this,” I murmured and stepped into the cave. Bunny was right beside me. I held my .22 in a two-hand shooters grip; he had his M4. Our night vision was off, but we wore black balaclavas that showed only our eyes.
“United States Army,” I bellowed. “Stand down, stand down!”
The sergeant whirled toward me, his right hand going for his sidearm. I put the laser sight on him.
“Stand down or I will kill you!”
He believed me, and he froze.
The other Marines froze.
The man in the chair froze.
Amirah, however, did not.
With a snarl of hunger, the mad witch twisted so suddenly and violently that she tore the ropes from the hands of the startled Marines. She tore her hands free from the plastic cuffs. She screamed like some desert demon from legend, leapt into the air and slammed into the sergeant, driving him against the torture victim. They crashed to the ground amid shrieks and blood and biting teeth.
The two Marines began to move toward the sergeant, but Bunny shifted to cover them with his M4. That left me.
I stepped in and kicked Amirah in the side of the head. The blow knocked her off of the sergeant, but she had his hand clamped between her jaws. And the bound man was screaming and beating his forehead against the side of the sergeant’s head, mashing his ear.
“Holy shit, Boss — on your six!”
It was Bunny. I pivoted in place in time to catch the rush as something came out of the shadows and tackled me. It was one of the other Afghanis. One of the dead Afghanis.
His teeth were bared and spit flew from cracked lips as he lunged for my throat.
I braced my forearm under his chin as I fell backward and clenched my abs so that my flat back fall turned into a curled back roll. The Afghani went into the tumble with me and instead of him pinning me down we ended the roll with me straddling his chest. I jammed the barrel of the .22 into his left eye socket and fired. The bullet tore all his wiring loose, and he transformed from murderously vicious to sagging dead weight in a microsecond.
There were shouts all around, and I had to shove at the body to get free. As I came up, I saw that the second Afghani had clamped his teeth around the windpipe of one of the Marines. Bunny put six rounds into the Afghani: the first one knocked him loose from his victim, the second punched him in the chest to stall him, and the last four grouped like knuckles in a lead fist to strike him above the eyebrows. The man’s head exploded and his body spun backward in a sloppy pirouette. The Marine dropped to his knees, trying to staunch an arterial spray with fingers that shook with the palsy of sudden understanding. His companion crouched over him, pressing the wound with his hands, but the Marine drowned in his own blood in seconds.
Slim was in the cave mouth, his weapon sweeping quickly back and forth from target to target, not knowing whether to take a shot or not.
I dove at Amirah, who had crawled back atop the sergeant. For his part, the Marine was putting up a good fight, but it was clear that terror of the woman he had been using as a tool of interrogation was off the scale, too much for him to handle. He shot me a single, despairing glance, and I saw the moment when he gave up. It must have been one of those instantaneous moments of clarity that can either save you or kill you. His interrogation had failed. His method of interrogation was indefensible, a fact that would never have mattered if we hadn’t shown up. But we were here, and he was caught. His world had just crashed, and he knew it.
I locked my arm around Amirah’s throat and squeezed, bulging my bicep on one side to cut off her left carotid and my forearm to cut off her right. In jujutsu that puts someone out.
It didn’t do a fucking thing to her.
She bucked and writhed with more force than I would have thought possible for a woman of her size, alive or dead.
I shoved the hot barrel of the .22 against the back of her head, bent close, and whispered in her ear, speaking in Farsi.
“There is no shame to die in the service of Allah.”
Her muscles locked into sudden rigidity. The cave was instantly still. Even the Afghani and the sergeant had stopped screaming. I held her tight against my chest, and my back was to the cold stone wall. She smelled of rotting meat and death, but in her dark hair there was the faintest scent of perfume. Jasmine.
“Amirah,” I said. “Listen to me.”
I whispered six more words.