Chapter 28 - The Falling Spire
The world became deafening fire and shearing metal.
The shockwave tore through the iron deck plating, ripping the center seams apart with the sound of a dozen freight trains colliding. I was thrown violently backward against the thick curved glass of the lantern room. The glass, frosted with decades of salt and sea spray, fractured into a thousand spiderwebs before blowing outward into the night, raining sharp shards into the boiling surf eighty feet below.
"Nola!" Clara’s voice was a ragged scream amidst the thunder.
Through the rising plumes of black smoke and licking ribbons of flame, I saw Blackwood stagger. The blast had caught him off-balance; his knife slipped from his fingers, clattering through an open rupture in the catwalk into the inferno below. But he didn't care about the weapon. His eyes were fixed on Ruth's wool coat. With an animalistic growl, he lunged across the buckling iron floor, his massive hands reaching for the old woman’s throat.
"Where is the master key, you old witch?" he screamed, his face blackened by soot. "Where is the physical cipher?"
Ruth didn't flinch. For an eighty-year-old woman, her movement was shockingly deliberate. As Blackwood lunged, she swung her heavy, salt-dampened canvas handbag with the full rotational momentum of her spine. The bag struck Blackwood directly across the temple with the dull, metallic crack of solid lead. Inside wasn't makeup or mints; it was the heavy bronze mooring winch handle she had lifted from the dock hours earlier.
Blackwood went down on one knee, roaring in pain, blood streaming from his split hairline.
"I buried it forty years ago, Victor," Ruth hissed down at him. "In the only place you'd never look: inside your own daughter's coffin."
Blackwood’s eyes flared with an expression of pure, unadulterated madness. Before he could push himself upright, Maeve grabbed the collar of his tactical jacket from behind.
"Leave her, you fool!" Maeve yelled over the roar of the fire. The flames were licking up through the floor grates now, blistering the leather of our boots. "The fuel line is compromised! The foundation tanks are going to blow in sixty seconds! We get to the plane now, or we drown in burning oil!"
Maeve dragged Blackwood toward the emergency utility ladder that clung to the outer seaward wall of the lighthouse tower. She didn't look back at Clara. She didn't look back at me. As she swung her leg over the outer railing into the howling wind, she pulled an automatic pistol from her belt and fired three blind, suppressing rounds across the platform.
One round tore through Julian's shoulder. He grunted, a sharp intake of air through clenched teeth, and slumped against the railing, his dark jacket instantly soaking through with crimson.
"Julian!" I scrambled across the buckling iron floor on hands and knees, ignoring the blistering heat radiating through the metal. Clara was already there, ripping her scarf from her neck and pressing it into the wound beneath his collarbone.
"I'm fine... it went through the meat," Julian gasped, though his face was gray in the orange glow of the encroaching fire. "The internal stairs are gone. The entire core of the lighthouse is a chimney right now. If we don't go over the exterior catwalk, we're going to cook."
"My mother can't make that climb!" Clara cried out, looking at Ruth.
Ruth stepped toward us through the swirling embers. Her face was grim, her eyes burning with an adrenaline that seemed utterly unnatural for her frail frame. "Your mother spent twenty years running contraband off the Grand Banks while you were in diapers, Clara. Stop weeping and move your feet."
She reached down, grabbed Julian under his uninjured arm with surprising strength, and pulled him toward the maintenance ladder.
A secondary explosion thundered from the base of the tower. The entire lighthouse shuddered violently, listing three degrees toward the black Atlantic. Heavy granite blocks around the foundation began to shear away into the foam, their ancient mortar pulverized by the concussive force.
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The salt wind whipped against us as we stepped onto the rusted, trembling iron rungs of the exterior ladder. Above us, the spire of the lighthouse was crowned in a brilliant, terrifying halo of fire. Below us, eighty feet straight down in the pitch darkness, the sea was an undulating mass of whitecaps and jagged granite teeth—and the black seaplane was already turning its twin propellers, its pontoons cutting through the swelling tide toward the open channel.
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