Chapter 32 - The 30-Second Countdown to Oblivion
The shockwave hit the vertical shaft like the fist of an angry god.
Even with the six-inch blast door sealed above me, the subterranean compression wave slammed down the metal tube, stripping the air from my lungs and propelling me downward through the twisting darkness like a discarded rag doll.
The roar was absolute. It wasn't merely sound; it was a physical vibration that rattled my skull, rattled the marrow inside my bones, threatening to tear my internal organs from their connective tissue. Concrete cracked. Steel screamed under the agony of hundreds of thousands of tons of alpine granite collapsing under thermonuclear demolition charges.
I hit the deceleration ramp at terminal speed, tumbling through icy muck, shattered drainage pipes, and industrial debris before rolling out onto a jagged snow-covered shelf thirty feet below the mountain's drainage exhaust.
The mountain above was hemorrhaging fire.
A plume of black and orange smoke tore into the gray Swiss sky, shredding the low-hanging blizzard clouds. The entire peak of the ridge seemed to sag, then implode, burying the Lazarus research laboratory under a million tons of fractured limestone and snow.
I lay in the drift, gasping for air, the taste of copper thick in my mouth. My left ribs were burning, every breath feeling like a serrated hunting knife twisting between my lungs. But physical agony meant nothing against the void opening in my chest.
*Claire.*
She had stayed. She had sealed the hatch. She had taken the brunt of the firestorm just to give me the three seconds I needed to clear the blast perimeter.
*She remembered. Beneath the programming, beneath the purple fire in her eyes, she remembered Lily.*
"Daniel! Move! Move your ass!"
A hand clutched the tactical webbing on my vest, violently hauling me out of the snow. I blinked through ice-encrusted lashes to see Miller, his face smeared with carbon soot and dried blood, his assault rifle slung across his back. Behind him, the twin turbines of an unmarked Eurocopter surged against the mountain gale, its skids hovering barely two feet above the precarious snow ledge.
"We have to go back!" I shouted, fighting against his grip, digging my boots into the frozen shale. "She’s in there, Miller! She’s alive! Claire is alive!"
"There is no 'in there' anymore, Dan!" Miller bellowed over the deafening whine of the helicopter rotors and the thundering groans of the collapsing mountain. "Look at it! The entire complex just dropped into the drainage basin! If she was at the blast doors, she’s buried under half a mountain!"
"You don't understand!" I seized his tactical jacket, pulling him close enough to see the sheer, unhinged desperation in my eyes. "She pushed me out. She fought the kill code. Vance didn't erase her! She’s enhanced—she has the Lazarus physiology!"
"And Vance just took off in an armed gunship three minutes before the blast!" Miller fired back, hauling me bodily toward the helicopter cabin. "He didn't stick around to confirm the kill! He’s heading south toward the coast! If you die out here on this rock, Daniel, Lily has no one left! Do you hear me? *No one!*"
The name *Lily* hit me like a bucket of freezing water.
The little girl. The three-year-old child who had watched her stepmother throw her off a sea cliff into the churn of the Atlantic. The child who had whispered in my ear on that wind-battered beach: *Daddy, the lady in the boat wasn't Mommy... but Mommy is sleeping under the mountain.*
Lily had known. Somehow, through that terrifying biological tether, our daughter had known her mother was trapped in the cold dark.
I let Miller drag me into the vibrating belly of the bird.
The pilot yanked the collective, banking hard away from the ridge just as a secondary explosion blew out the lower drainage tunnels, vomiting a cascade of molten metal and black smoke into the canyon below.
I collapsed against the cabin wall, clutching my fractured ribs, my eyes locked on the burning crater through the open bay door. But as the smoke cleared for a microscopic instant, something caught my eye on the lower treeline, half a mile down the ridge from the epicenter.
A figure. Moving through the waist-deep snow at impossible, terrifying speed.
It was a streak of pale skin and dark hair, tearing through the pines toward the valley road, completely impervious to the sub-zero gale.
May you like
And then, before I could scream to the pilot, the helicopter swung behind a granite outcrop, and the shadow was swallowed by the blinding whiteout of the storm.
***
