He looked at the Lieutenant, whose silhouette looked quadrupled to him. His dozen eyes were flickering left and right and his white rabbit front teeth were clattering vertically.
“So, this is traveling in time”, Hans thought and with his last remaining impulse pushed with his body Babyface on the sand.
The whole ship for an instant was reduced to a black dot and disappeared with fiery flame from the horizon. White glow in colorless thin mist.
Nothing.
It was finished.
The submarine and the Cube were no longer there.
Alan was sitting on the covers and his only leg was dangling down helplessly. Marcela was leaning on the bed beside him. Dark shadows beneath her eyes and tiredness had marked her beautiful face.
Norman had gone to inspect the trucks and had been away for more than an hour.
“The serum worked, March.” Babyface handed her the empty retort.
“What was that, Lieutenant? It really killed him instantly.” Hans asked.
“Well, nothing much…”
“Don’t play modest, March, this miracle saved my life!” Hans’s disheveled head was bandaged and he wore another bloodied bandage on his arm.
“Each cell contains in itself the key to self-destruction. Nature has encoded our own death in us in this way.”
Babyface was all the time looking outside through the small window, seemingly uninterested in the conversation. He was worried about the Major and the spooky sensation that they were being watched never left him. The traces near the submarine did not give him peace.
“Apoptosis. A programmed cell death”, he said curtly. “Yes, almost.” Marcela did not hide her surprise. “I separated the lysosomes of Golgi Apparatus and managed to isolate a protease, an enzyme responsible for leasing, i.e. ‘melting’ of the cell and its destruction. In short, with the doubles that enzyme was built only of proteins and did not contain any non-organic ions. I added iron and the enzyme became hyperactive, in other words, it was destroying all the proteins coming its way.”
“Where did you manage to add iron from, March?” Michael asked.
“From our blood.”
At this moment Norman came in the bio lab, all dusty, with the dirty cloth around his head and the goggles, covered by sand. He was walking a bit funny, slowly, as if he had hurt his knee. He held a machine gun, hanging down his legs, went to Alan and put his hand on the sheet in the place of his missing leg, then stood as if made of stone, facing the patient.
Marcela and the Lieutenant exchanged glances.
“Hey, Norman, how’s the truck? When will it be ready, so we can clear out of this place?” Marcela approached him.
Norman did not turn back but put his other hand on Alan’s good leg.
“Norman, why are you wearing goggles?” Hans retreated a step back.
A shot blasted and Norman fell abruptly on the floor. “What the hell are you doing, have you gone mad?! What are you doing, for god’s sake?!” Marcela was shouting hysterically at Babyface, who bent over the dead body and took the goggles off.
The bloodred pupils shone even after death as hot embers.
Babyface leaned and took out the M11 from the double’s belt, handing it to Michael with its handle forward. The young man hesitated, looked at Marcela and Hans, then took it awkwardly and started examining it.
“Whoa, be careful, this is not a toy! Have you ever practiced shooting?”
“Yeah, once, last year. Me and Mary Ann went to an amusement park in Miami, there was an enormous shooting gallery and I won for her a stuffed dinosaur.” The memory of that day made him smile.
“Okay, when it gets heated, try to stay behind me and not to shoot, if possible. Except in extreme situation. Understood?”
Michael and the Lieutenant were moving slowly, almost glued to the ground. Luckily the weather was bright and sunny, so they could see all the way to the horizon.
However, this also meant that they were easily noticeable too. They were not talking, the Lieutenant giving directions to the young man only with brief gestures. Now he waved to him to follow track. Both men went around the burned ruins of the two domes and reached the remains of the watchtower.
Then they saw the first explosives. They were half-buried in the base of the watchtower. Babyface stopped abruptly and Michael almost fell over him from behind.
The bomb was as big as a stack of cigarettes and perfectly placed under the thick metal column. Exactly on the place where it would cause maximum of material and human damages.
Complete annihilation. The plastic explosive under the base of the tower would fry everything alive at a distance of a mile just a moment after the detonation. The Lieutenant and Michael exchanged glances.
The digital clock was changing the figures inexorably.
00:54:48
00:54:47
00:54:46
00:54:45
The red lamp was blinking at an interval of one second. There were no wires or buttons. Professional work with remote control for activation.
The Lieutenant gestured with his hand for Michael to wait for him there and started crawling forward.
The young man was not particularly happy to remain in the company of that hellish blinking contraption, but just nodded affirmatively.
He looked at his watch every twenty seconds. Almost ten minutes passed and there was no trace of Babyface. Michael started really worrying, he tried to scan the entire place but was rather turning like a steering wheel without being able to focus.
He felt far more confident with the little man next to him and now those ten minutes seemed to him an eternity. He took a relieved breath when he saw the small blond head approaching quickly.
He gave him a sign. They were going back to the bio lab.
There was no trace of Norman.
They approached tentatively and were so near, that they heard Marcela’s and Hans’s voices, talking inside. They huddled behind the remains of one of the Rovers, who had burned to the iron base. But the storm had brought in sand and it was the the perfect cover.
They noticed a low shadow that walked quietly along the main dome, stopped by the small window of the bio lab, and watched the shadows inside.
Suddenly a shot fired that hit the double in his left thigh. His body did not react, no cry of pain or surprise was heard, it just turned to them.
Mike was aiming at the shadow. The double ducked and managed to avoid the shot. The student was pouring a raging rain of bullets at the small silhouette. He was absolutely sure that he hit him at least three times in the back, the chest and the legs, but the creature seemed to feel no pain and continued running fast towards the fence. Babyface shouted:
“What are you doing, for god’s sake, we have no more bullets, stop shooting!” The Lieutenant ran after his own double with surprising speed.
The creature made a sharp stop and started in the other direction, while the Lieutenant lost his balance and could hardly twist his body.
“Fuck you, nasty freak!” he cried loudly, feeling that he was outrun.
The double turned his head to see where the shouts were coming from and did not notice the body in front of him. He stumbled and fell to the ground. This momentarily devoid him of his advance and turned the tables in favor of Babyface who with a lion jump threw himself against his back.
He managed to pin him to the ground, then, quick as a lightening, took out the huge knife from his belt and dug it in the double’s neck.
He was trying to cut his head but the double’s tissues were resisting under the knife, unnaturally wiry and stubborn. He cut the front part of the neck, the wind pipe and the gullet, while the metal blade touched the hardness of the cervical vertebrae.