Chapter 54 - The Road to the Zero Line
The headlights of the lead BearCat illuminated a barricade of felled pines and twisted metal across the bridge over Cedar Creek. Two black armored personnel carriers were parked nose-to-nose across the span, their headlights turned off, their presence announced only by the faint, rhythmic idling of heavy diesel engines.
"Hold on!" Marcus shouted, bracing his arm across Maya’s chest.
Gunfire erupted from the tree line before our driver could shift into reverse. Heavy caliber rounds—seventy-millimeter armor-piercing slugs—hammered the reinforced windshield of our Suburban with deafening, spiderwebbing impacts that sounded like sledgehammers hitting concrete.
"Suppressing fire!" Cross yelled into her headset, kicking open her door as our lead vehicle rammed the civilian barricade at forty miles per hour.
The sound of shearing steel and splintering pine drowned out the sirens. The BearCat plowed through the roadblock like an iron wedge, throwing an armored pickup truck into the frozen creek below. Our driver floored the gas, tires screaming on the ice-covered bridge deck, slipping sideways before catching traction on the opposite bank.
Through the starred, bullet-cracked glass of the window, I caught a glimpse of men in matte-black winter parkas scrambling through the hemlocks, carrying short-barreled European carbines. On their left shoulders, illuminated by the red flare of our taillights, was an embroidered patch: a silver crest featuring a stylized leopard clutching an hourglass.
It was the exact same brand logo that had been stamped on the dust bag of Victoria’s designer purse.
"They aren't just private security," I shouted over the continuous rattle of ricochets against the vehicle’s floorboards. "They’re her investors’ extraction team!"
"They’re disposable assets," Cross said, reloading her sidearm with mechanical speed. "If the syndicate can't secure the core, they’ll let it melt down to incinerate every forensic trail tying them to the illegal transfer of military isotopes. Dead men don't testify before international tribunals."
We crested the final hill before Blackwood Crest. The sight that met us made the breath catch in my throat.
Our family farm—the hundred-and-twenty-year-old two-story house with the wraparound porch where I had taught Maya to ride her bicycle, where my wife had planted hydrangeas before the cancer took her—was gone.
Not burned down. Not leveled by an explosion.
The entire center of the yard, where Maya’s eighth birthday party had been set up six months ago, had collapsed downward into a gaping, hexagonal pit two hundred feet wide. The old white oak tree where the tire swing had hung was tipped sideways, its roots dangling over an abyss that glowed with sickening, pulsing lavender light.
Around the crater, heavy drilling rigs and industrial winches lay abandoned, their hydraulic lines severed and spraying black fluid onto the snow. Heavy high-voltage cables as thick as a man’s thigh snaked out of the earth and ran into a reinforced concrete bunker built directly into the side of the mountain behind the old carriage house.
"The old root cellar," Marcus breathed, staring at the concrete structure. "Arthur never let us down there as kids. He told us the masonry was unstable."
"It was the blast shelter for the surface intake elevators," Cross said, kicking her door open as our vehicle slid to a halt behind the remains of our overturned tractor. "We move now! The local tactical units won't survive another mile in this radiation field!"
I turned to Marcus. "Take Maya. Keep her behind the BearCat’s engine block."
"No!" Maya cried, her small arms wrapping around my neck with iron strength. "Daddy, don't leave me! Grandpa’s book—you don't know the numbers! You don't know the salt!"
I looked down at my eight-year-old daughter. Her face was smeared with gray ash, her eyes bright with tears, but her jaw was set with the same unyielding stubbornness that had belonged to my wife. In her small hands, she held the battered spiral notebook against her chest like a shield.
"David," Cross said, checking the dosimeter on her collar. The needle was already in the yellow zone, clicking at sixty counts per second. "She’s right. If Arthur keyed the mechanical failsafe to the sequence she memorized, we won't have time for you to guess. The thermal surge has already bypassed the second heat exchanger."
I looked at Marcus. My brother unclipped his tactical vest, pulled out a spare radio, and tuned it to our frequency. He looked at Maya, then at me, his eyes bloodshot and heavy with the weight of the last six months of hell.
"I’m covering your rear," Marcus said simply, racking his slide. "If anybody gets past me to that door, it’ll be because I don't have blood left in my veins to pull the trigger. Go save the valley, Dave."
May you like
I gathered Maya into my arms, took the heavy nylon duffel bag containing the charred evidence in my left hand, and ran through the gray, glowing ash toward the open maw of the root cellar.
***
