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Fight, a voice deep down inside me yelled. Fight, Alex.
But I was barely holding on to consciousness, and I went to my knees in the water.
“You think you can stop a rebellion, Cross?” Whitaker demanded, gasping, after punching me a fifth time. “An uprising?”
The cold water against my legs roused me enough to mumble, “Using nerve gas?”
“It’s how you treat any cancer. Poison the body and cut out the tumors.”
“You’re insane,” I said.
He let go of my vest then and kneed me so hard in the face, I blacked out. I fell onto the flooded gravel bar, but even with the chill water against my skin, I lost time for a bit.
Then I was aware of Whitaker stepping over me. He stood there, straddling my chest. In a daze, I saw his silhouette above me in the beam of the flashlight I had managed to hold on to. He had my pistol.
“I’m tired of you, Cross,” the colonel said. “I’ve got to move on, stoke the next phase of the rebellion.”
He swung my gun up toward me.
I did the only thing I could think of.
I dropped the flashlight, wrenched Whitaker’s knife from my thigh, turned it skyward, and swung it in an upward arc, driving the blade into the back of his left leg, high under his buttocks, and burying it to the hilt.
I felt the tip strike bone and I twisted the knife.
Whitaker screamed and fired my pistol, missing my head by an inch. He flailed, attempting to pull the blade free.
I twisted the knife again. He dropped my gun and reached back, frantically trying to stop me.
I twisted the knife a third time, then wrenched it out of him and lay there on the flooded gravel, panting.
“Ha,” Whitaker said, stumbling back two feet, splashing to a stop. “See? I’m still standing, Cross. Artificial knee and I’m still standing.”
“You’re a dead man standing, Colonel,” I said with a grunt, dropping the knife and fishing for the waterproof flashlight still shining in the water. “I just put your knife through your femoral artery.”
By the time I got the flashlight beam back on him, Whitaker had gone from confident to confused. He was bent over slightly, his fingers probing the wound, no doubt feeling the blood that had to be gushing out of him. I thought the colonel would go for his belt to try to tourniquet his leg.
Instead, Whitaker went berserk. He charged, kicking me twice before diving on top of me and grabbing my neck with both hands.
As he throttled me, I tried to hit him with the flashlight again or trade it for the knife. But between my own loss of blood and the beating I’d taken, I couldn’t fight him. I just couldn’t.
My chest heaved for air and got none. Whitaker had this wild gleam in his eyes as my vision narrowed to blotchy darkness.
This is the end, I thought. The final…
The grip the colonel had on my throat started to weaken. I got sips of air, and my sight returned.
Whitaker was sitting on my chest, his head swaying to and fro right above mine.
“No, Cross,” he said. “John Brown, he…Mercury, he never…”
He panicked then, and tried to stand.
But halfway to his feet, Whitaker lurched off me, staggered, and then crashed into three inches of cold water, dead.
Chapter
104
