Chapter 47 - The Fire on Lake Michigan
"You tricked me!" Arthur roared, whipping the revolver out of his coat and leveling it straight at my face.
*Crack!*
A gunshot echoed through the subterranean trench, but it didn't come from Arthur's weapon. Hayes had fired with surgical speed from his hip. The bullet struck Arthur’s shoulder, spinning the old man around and sending his gun clattering down into the dark abyss below the gantry.
Arthur let out a guttural howl of pain, stumbling against the locked vault door. "The fail-safe! The charges! If I can't have it, nobody will!"
Arthur threw his uninjured arm against a manual emergency lever mounted into the rock face.
"Hayes, move!" I screamed.
The entire excavation pit erupted into chaos. The demolition charges planted along the limestone bluffs detonated with a series of muffled, earth-shaking thuds. Tons of rock, ancient masonry, and shattered concrete began raining down from the rim of the crater seventy feet above.
"Lenora, to the gantry stairs! Now!" Hayes roared, hauling Beatrice up by her collar with one arm while wrapping his other arm around my waist, shielding my body with his ballistic armor as slabs of limestone crashed onto the steel platform.
"My charter! My legacy!" Arthur screamed blindly, refusing to run, clawing at the impervious titanium doors of the vault as the cavern roof began to collapse upon him. "Douglas, you bastard! You buried me again!"
A massive granite slab fell from the upper bluffs, crushing the gantry bridge directly behind us and sealing Arthur Sterling beneath a mountain of rubble and twisted steel.
The air filled with suffocating white dust and the pungent stench of ruptured fuel lines. The underground chamber was collapsing, Lake Michigan’s subterranean pressure pushing through the fractured limestone walls in violent torrents of freezing, pressurized water.
"We have to climb!" Hayes shouted over the roar of rushing water and groaning rock.
Beatrice was hyperventilating, her legs giving out from terror. "We're going to die! We're going to drown! Lenora, save me! Save your mother!"
"Stand up, Beatrice!" I yelled, grabbing her by her jacket, dragging her forward through sheer, furious adrenaline. "Climb the emergency ladder, or get left behind! It's your choice!"
Driven by the primitive terror of death, Beatrice scrambled up the iron rungs embedded in the sheer rock wall, sobbing hysterically. Hayes climbed directly below me, using his powerful shoulders to brace my footing as cascading water poured over our heads like a frigid waterfall.
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Behind us, the subterranean vault of Douglas Sterling vanished beneath thousands of tons of collapsed earth and the surging, cleansing waters of the great lake.
***
