The Darkest Hour(53)

Tilly plays along with my distraction, yanking at my arms, shoving the rifle butt against my back. The soldier at the fence shouts at us louder, but there’s a dismissive look in his eye that wasn’t there before. Nothing to see here, just a hysterical woman who has wandered to a place she shouldn’t have. But how long is he going to accept this routine before his suspicions return? Fortunately I don’t find out the answer to that—because Sabine finally delivers on her word.

An explosion hammers into my eardrums. A burst of angry fire blooms along the far corner of the fence, knocking one of the patrols onto the ground and melting the barbed wire into metal puddles. The soldier in front of us falls backward, his helmet rolling off his head, and he forgets about Tilly and me entirely as he hurries to the thick black smoke. Three of his colleagues peel off after him, shouting orders and grabbing their rifles. Not only that, when I search over the sniper’s nest I see the sniper’s rifle pointed away from us and toward the fence. This leaves us with a few precious seconds to get inside the compound.

“The keys!” I say to Tilly. Sabine, to her everlasting credit, launches another grenade, not far from the first. The soldiers scatter—some toward the first explosion site, some toward the second. It’s chaos for them and the perfect cloak for us.

We scramble to the lone building without any trouble. When I reach the main metal door, though, I pause. I know better than to throw it open. I’m sure there will be a wall of soldiers on the other side, with their guns pointed straight at us.

“The tear gas!” I say to Tilly, but she’s one step ahead of me. She shoves a mask at me and dons the other one, and I barely have time to tighten the straps on mine before she thrusts a live gas pen inside. We throw ourselves against the door to block the soldiers from getting out. Soon their fists slam against the metal and their screams claw into my ears, but we don’t budge until those screams turn into coughs and those coughs shift into nothing. I nod at Tilly, and we yank the door open. Two soldiers stagger out and fall onto their knees, retching. They don’t even see us—their eyes are swollen shut.

Tilly sweeps a spray of bullets inside the building while I take care of the ones who’ve escaped. I breathe out and aim, and I think about Theo. About the Nazis who killed him. I squeeze the trigger three times into the Nazis’ backs before my hands can think about trembling. One soldier tries to run, but he falls after I fire into his back. When he goes limp, I expect the nausea to hit my stomach, but it doesn’t come.

After Tilly gives me the all clear, we duck through the door. Curls of gas still swirl inside the room. There’s not much inside aside from two desks and the five bodies on the ground. No, six bodies. The last soldier alive coughs and reaches for his dropped pistol, but I rush forward and kick it out of his grasp. Tilly comes behind me and finishes him off with a bullet right through the head, like she was taught. She then pockets the gun for herself while I grab another one from off the floor. We’ll be facing a lot more Nazis today, and we need all the firepower that we can get our hands on.

“This way,” I say, remembering the schematics Dorner gave me. I spent most of last night memorizing them and plotting out a plan of attack. I lead us around the corner, and we find ourselves in front of an elevator. Tilly grimaces, and I know what she’s thinking. An elevator is the last place we want to be—a tight metal box that we could easily get trapped in—but we have no other choice.

I press the down button and the doors slide open like they’ve been waiting for us. We step inside. While the elevator creaks and groans, the lone lightbulb above our heads swings back and forth, blinking in and out. It feels like an entire decade passes before we reach the bottom, but at least it gives Tilly and me time to go over our weapons. We have five pistols between us, along with a handful of pistol pens and tear gas pens, not to mention a half dozen knives strapped to various body parts. And the bomb, of course. Still, I wouldn’t mind adding Sabine’s little machine gun to the mix. Or I’d settle for just plain Sabine.

Once the elevator stops and its doors screech open, Tilly and I glue ourselves against the walls to brace for the gunfire that’ll come at us. But there are no shots. No shouting soldiers. There’s no sound at all except for the hum of the lightbulb.

Tilly looks at me, confusion written all over her, but I don’t have an answer for her because I’m just as puzzled. With my pistols nearly jumping out of my hands, I dart a glance beyond the doors, but I find an empty corridor. The hallway is bathed in white and sterile as a hospital floor, but in a hospital you’d find gurneys and wheelchairs and waiting rooms. Here, there’s none of that, just a big hollow space.

Where are the soldiers? The scientists?

“This doesn’t make sense,” I whisper.

Tilly nods. “Let’s plant the Jemima and get out fast.”

Uneasiness spreads through my stomach, but we have a job to do and we can’t do it from the elevator. Our boots squeak over the waxed floors that have been polished to a sheen, and we pass door after door, each one shut tight. I don’t want to even imagine what lurks behind them: vials filled with Zerfall, samples of blood, autopsied corpses.

I cross over a wide hallway—this one as cold as the one we’re walking in—but as I pass over it I hear gunshots. Dozens of them. I duck down at once and search frantically for the source. Not behind us. They’re coming from down the hall I just crossed. And that’s when I notice that Tilly never made it over with me. She’s still on the other side, a gun in each hand.