Chapter 20 - The Iron Tomb
Hissing streams of cold, pressurized nitrogen gas began venting from the ceiling grates with a deafening roar. The ambient oxygen level plummeted instantly. Marcus felt the suffocating clamp around his lungs; his vision began to tunnel into pinpricks of blackness.
Eleanor dropped the gun. She sank to her knees beside Julian’s lifeless body, closing her eyes as the invisible gas filled the room.
"Go, Marcus," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the roaring jets. "The emergency dumbwaiter behind the chemical locker... it leads to the old carriage house. Only room for one."
"Eleanor, get up!" Marcus shouted, lunging forward and grabbing her by the collar of her coat. "I’m not leaving you here!"
"I was dead twenty years ago, Marcus," she murmured, a bitter, peaceful smile touching her lips. "Be the man your father raised. Not the thing they grew in this cellar."
Marcus looked at the venting pipes. The nitrogen was falling like heavy mist. His lungs burned as if filled with broken glass. If he stayed another ten seconds, unconsciousness would claim him, followed by irreversible brain death within three minutes.
He let go of Eleanor’s coat.
Driven by raw biological instinct to survive, Marcus turned and sprinted toward the back of the rotunda. Behind the chemical storage cages, half-hidden by hanging plastic curtains, was the brass hatch of an industrial service lift—the dumbwaiter once used to transport medical waste to the surface.
Marcus threw the latch, scrambled inside the cramped metal box, and pulled the emergency counterweight lever.
The cables shrieked. The counterweight dropped, flinging the lift upward through a narrow brick shaft at neck-snapping speed just as the rotunda below was swallowed entirely by suffocating gas.
The darkness rushed past. Air—real, damp, cold autumn air—slapped Marcus in the face as the lift reached the top and slammed violently into the stop blocks. The impact threw Marcus forward onto cold, wet flagstones.
He rolled out into the pouring rain, gasping violently, drawing deep, freezing lungfuls of oxygen into his starved chest. He collapsed on his back, staring up into the storm.
Behind him, the earth shook. A muffled, deep subterranean explosion rumbled beneath the soil of the Montgomery estate, sending a plume of black smoke and heat venting through the old well pipes. The cleanroom, the vats, Julian-4, and Eleanor were gone, consumed by the failsafe thermite fire.
It was over. The nightmare had finally burned out.
May you like
Marcus slowly pushed himself to his feet. He looked at his hands—shaking, bloody, but alive. He walked toward his unmarked squad car parked at the edge of the tree line, the rain washing away the blood of a man who looked exactly like him.
He unlocked the driver’s door, sank into the seat, and turned the key in the ignition. The headlights cut through the gloom of the driveway.
