Chapter 56 - The Sub-Aquatic Rupture
I caught her wrists with both hands.
The ceramic point stopped an inch from my left pupil. I could see my own blood reflected on the razor-sharp edge. I could smell the expensive lavender water she wore—the same scent she had worn when she tucked me into bed as a child and told me that monsters weren't real, that nothing in the dark could ever hurt me.
She had been right. The monsters weren't in the dark.
The monsters were sitting at the dinner table, smiling, passing the bread, and planning how to harvest their children's brains.
"You... are not... my mother," I ground out through clenched teeth.
With a surge of adrenaline that defied my exhaustion, I twisted my hips, throwing Miriam off balance. Her weight shifted, and I drove my forehead upward in a vicious headbutt, smashing my skull directly into the bridge of her nose.
There was a wet, satisfying *crunch*.
Miriam shrieked in pain as her nose broke, blood exploding from her nostrils. She recoiled, dropping the ceramic blade, clutching her face with both gloved hands.
I didn't hesitate. I rolled over, snatched the ceramic blade from the steel deck, and drove it deep into the meat of her right thigh.
Miriam screamed—a raw, guttural, animal howl—and collapsed onto her side, writhing on the grating.
I scrambled to my feet, wiping the blood from my eyes, and ran toward the cryo-sphere.
Above us, the ceiling gave a massive, groaning shudder that vibrated through my boots. A crack, jagged and white, spiderwebbed across the three-inch-thick reinforced acrylic dome that held back the black waters of Lake Michigan.
A high-pressure jet of freezing water burst through the seam, shooting thirty feet downward like a solid steel rod, smashing into an auxiliary electrical panel.
Sparks exploded across the room in blinding, violent blue arcs.
*WARNING: STRUCTURAL COMPROMISE IN SECTOR 7. CONTAINMENT MATRIX FAILING. AUTOMATIC FLOOD PROTOCOL IN T-MINUS THREE MINUTES.*
"Julian! How do we get her out?" I yelled, pounding my fists against the thick glass of the sphere.
Julian limped over, clutching his bleeding side, his face white from blood loss. He looked at the hydraulic manifold beneath the sphere.
"The drainage sequence takes ten minutes!" he yelled over the sound of shrieking metal and rushing water. "We don't have ten minutes! The acrylic dome is going to collapse under the pressure!"
*"Clara!"*
The voice did not come from Arthur this time.
It came from the speaker, but the tone had shifted. The cold, dry, ancient rasp was gone. It was small. It was trembling. It was terrified.
*"Clara... it hurts... please... help me..."*
Sarah.
Her eyes had returned to their natural dark hazel. The purple light in the cradle was flickering, short-circuiting as the brine from the ceiling jet began to pool around the base of the supercomputer.
Arthur’s consciousness had lost its grip on her neural pathways when the injection was interrupted. The monster was trapped in the buffer, fighting to regain control.
"Sarah! I'm here! I'm right here!" I cried, pressing my face against the glass.
"Clara, step back!" Julian shouted.
He didn't try to operate the console. He reached down, grabbed Nicholas Prime’s heavy, customized Desert Eagle from the floor, and pointed it directly at the pneumatic release valve at the bottom of the acrylic sphere—the hydraulic pressure seal.
"Cover your face!" Julian roared.
He pulled the trigger three times.
*BANG! BANG! BANG!*
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The heavy .50 caliber rounds tore into the titanium valve assembly. The pressurized hydraulic fluid inside erupted in a volcanic geyser, blowing the seal clean off its mountings.
The entire glass sphere shattered outward with the force of a bomb blast.
