Chapter 6 - The Iron Span
The historic Blackwood Rail Bridge was an eight-hundred-foot span of riveted nineteenth-century iron trusses suspended one hundred and twenty feet above the churning, boulder-choked waters of the river.
The northern approach was a slaughterhouse.
A dark blue Ford F-350 had rammed Vivian’s transit bus off the asphalt, spinning the fifty-passenger vehicle into the rusted guardrails, leaving the front axle dangling forty feet over the abyss.
Six men in black tactical gear and balaclavas, armed with foreign automatic carbines, were advancing across the pedestrian walkway, firing suppressed, rhythmic bursts through the reinforced glass of the bus windows.
Inside the bus, fifteen local factory workers were screaming, crouched beneath the vinyl seats amidst shattered glass and weeping fuel.
At the rear of the bus, holding an iron fire extinguisher in her hands, was Vivian.
Her forehead was bleeding from a shrapnel cut where the side window had exploded, blood dripping into her left eyebrow, but her eyes were clear, fierce, and completely devoid of panic. She stood in front of an elderly woman and two young schoolgirls, her jaw locked, her arms braced, ready to drive the heavy red cylinder into the skull of the first mercenary who breached the emergency door.
"GET THE GIRL!" a voice shouted in Italian from the smoke outside. "DANTE WANTS HER ALIVE FOR THE VIDEO!"
The rear door was kicked off its hydraulic latch with a deafening metallic screech.
A mercenary lunged through the threshold, raising an unbranded automatic pistol.
CRACK.
The back of the mercenary's tactical helmet erupted in a spray of bone, lead, and Kevlar fibers.
The man collapsed outward onto the catwalk like a sack of wet cement.
Through the drifting smoke and burning diesel fuel, Lorenzo Falcone arrived.
He didn't take cover.
He walked down the center of the rail bridge like an executioner stepping onto a scaffold, his charcoal overcoat flapping in the gale, his shotgun firing with rhythmic, surgical, and concussive devastation:
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Three mercenaries were blown backward through the rusted guardrails, their bodies tumbling through the open air into the rocky gorge a hundred feet below.
Lorenzo discarded the empty shotgun, pulled two customized high-capacity semi-automatic pistols from beneath his armpits, and closed the distance, firing eighteen rounds in four seconds, clearing the catwalk with absolute, merciless precision.
"LORENZO!" Dante Moretti’s voice screamed from behind the engine block of the burning pickup truck.
Dante lunged out from the smoke, drawing a heavy hunting blade, lunging toward Lorenzo’s throat with suicidal, blind fury.
Lorenzo didn't dodge.
He stepped directly into the blade's path.
The five-inch steel blade drove deep into Lorenzo’s left shoulder, burying itself to the hilt in the scar tissue of his earlier wound, but the mob boss didn't even flinch.
Lorenzo’s right hand shot out like an iron hydraulic piston, clamping around Dante Moretti’s throat with bone-crushing force.
He lifted the two-hundred-pound Sicilian off his feet with a single arm, driving him backward into the iron truss of the bridge with a concussive impact that knocked the breath from the killer's lungs.
"You touched her city, Dante," Lorenzo whispered.
His voice was so low, so cold, that it cut through the roaring flames of the diesel truck.
"You made her bleed."
Lorenzo drew his service pistol with his left hand, pressed the muzzle directly beneath Dante’s jawline, and pulled the trigger.
Crack.
Lorenzo dropped the lifeless body onto the iron catwalk, turned slowly, and looked toward the shattered rear door of the transit bus.
Vivian stood in the opening, holding the red fire extinguisher, her face covered in soot, blood tracing a dark crimson path down her jaw.
She stared at the man who had just dismantled an army of contract killers with his bare hands.
Lorenzo stood ten feet away, covered in his own blood, the hunting knife still buried deep in his left shoulder, rain beginning to fall through the smoke, washing the crimson from his knuckles.
He looked at her.
He didn't speak.
He didn't ask for forgiveness.
He didn't move toward her.
He simply stood as a shield between her and the burning world, his dark eyes locked onto hers with an unshakeable, sacred devotion that needed no words.
May you like
Then, his knees buckled.
Lorenzo Falcone collapsed onto the wet iron plates of the bridge, his blood pooling in the rivets, his eyes staying fixed on her face until the darkness finally swallowed him whole.
