Chapter 69 - The Fracture at Mile Zero
The analog counter on the iron desk gave a loud, metallic clank:
*00:05:00.*
"Take them!" Victoria screamed, pointing the electronic controller at Maya. "Kill the men! Grab the girl and the key! Do it now!"
The lead tactical guard never raised his weapon.
Before his gloved finger could touch the trigger of his submachine gun, a deafening crack echoed from the tree line. The front windshield of the center Escalade imploded in a shower of laminated safety glass. The driver’s head snapped back, his body slumping over the horn, sending a long, unbroken blast echoing across the frozen ridge.
"Sniper!" Cross yelled, tackling Maya to the ground and dragging her behind the reinforced steel rim of the platform.
"That's not our sniper!" Marcus shouted, returning fire toward the tree line as Victoria’s remaining guards scrambled for cover behind their armored doors. "Who's on the ridge?"
From the dense hemlocks fifty yards above the logging road, three figures emerged through the snow. They were not wearing tactical gear. They wore faded canvas hunting coats, high-visibility orange knit caps, and carried ancient, heavy-barreled Remington 700 hunting rifles equipped with weathered leather slings.
The men of Miller's Ridge.
At their head walked old man Halloway—the eighty-two-year-old former foreman of the Blackwood sawmill, his breath blooming white in the freezing air, his bolt-action rifle held at his hip with the casual familiarity of a man who had hunted these hollows before Victoria Vance’s father was born.
"Arthur Blackwood paid this county's pensions for forty years, lady," Halloway shouted, his gravelly voice cutting through the gunfire with terrifying authority. "You come up this mountain with Richmond lawyers and private thugs, you best remember whose grandfathers laid that rail spur."
Victoria’s guards tried to pivot to meet the new threat, but they were hopelessly exposed. Two more shots rang out, heavy .30-06 rounds that blew the tires out from both remaining Escalades, dropping the multi-ton SUVs onto their wheel rims with a screech of shearing steel.
"David!" Cross yelled, her hand firmly on Maya’s shoulder. "The counter! Three minutes!"
*00:03:14... 00:03:13...*
The ground began to tilt.
The six-inch displacement we had felt earlier was nothing compared to the catastrophic failure now beginning along the perimeter fault. A massive fissure, eight inches wide and spitting clouds of super-cooled subterranean vapor, ripped through the asphalt between Victoria’s vehicles and the edge of the pit.
One of the Escalades began to slide sideways, its rims screaming against the fractured granite as it tilted toward the expanding chasm.
"David!" Victoria shrieked, scrambling on hands and knees across the buckling ice, her silver fox coat dragging through the mud, her manicured fingers clawing at the stone. "David, save me! The money is down there! Hundreds of millions! We can split it! We can say the girl died in the collapse! No one has to know!"
I looked at the woman who had laughed as my daughter cried in the dirt.
I looked at the sister-in-law who had watched my wife wither away in an underfunded hospice while she carried two-thousand-dollar designer bags purchased with our family’s stolen blood money.
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"You always did worry too much about the bag, Victoria," I said.
I turned my back on her and inserted the octagonal tungsten key into the center of the iron desk.
