Chapter 32 - The Severed Cable
The sound that tore through the gorge was not the roar of the river, but the shrieking agony of eighty-year-old steel snapping under impossible shear. When Raymond shoved the surveyor’s iron pin beneath the anchor plate and threw his weight against it, the main eastern suspension cable whipped violently against its turnbuckle. Sparks exploded into the wet, clinging fog like a burst of burning buckshot.
The deck dropped four inches beneath my wedding boots in a single sickening jolt.
"Abigail, run!" Ellis screamed through the mist.
His voice was raw, stripped of everything except primal terror. He had broken through the cordon of State Troopers, stumbling onto the vibrating timbers of the bridge with the bloodied bandage hanging loose across his temple. In his left hand, the open county ledger fluttered frantically against the gale rising from the canyon, its yellowed leaves snapping like rifle cracks.
I tried to lunge forward, but the bridge was tilting sideways. The northern timber trusses were popping their oak pegs, groaning under the uneven torque. Raymond stood less than eight feet away, his suit coat drenched in river spray, his fingers bleeding where the rough iron had stripped his skin to the bone. He didn't look like my father anymore. He looked like an animal cornered in a trap of his own making, his eyes glassy and dilated, fixed entirely on the splintering planks beneath us.
"You don't take it from me!" Raymond screamed, his voice competing with the rushing torrent of the flume seventy feet below. "Sanford gave you the deed, but he gave me the water! Without the flume, the entire timber line is worthless! You have nothing without me!"
"Drop the pin, Mr. Vance!" the State Trooper’s bullhorn boomed again, the voice vibrating the wet air. Laser sights, brilliant crimson dots cutting through the gray fog, settled against the center of Raymond’s chest. "Take two steps toward the north abutment with your hands above your head! Now!"
Raymond let out a wet, breathless laugh. He didn't raise his hands. Instead, he drove the iron bar two inches deeper into the wooden seam, intending to lever the second retention cable free.
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"No!" I shouted, dropping the heavy wooden gift box to the decking and diving forward.
I didn't lunge for my father—I lunged for the iron pin. My fingers caught the rusted cold metal just as the underlying oak beam sheared completely in two. A concussive crack echoed off the granite walls of the canyon, and the entire southern half of the bridge slipped downward into the mist, throwing us into freefall toward the dark, rushing water.
