Chapter 7 - HOUR ZERO
The reinforced blast doors did not merely buckle; they disintegrated under the kinetic force of a commercial-grade thermite breaching ring.
Chunks of smoking concrete and jagged steel shrapnel rained down the stairwell, bouncing off the secondary armored glass partition that separated the lower laboratory from the entrance. Through the choking haze of gray smoke and burning magnesium, figures moved with terrifying speed.
Vance Sterling’s cleanup squad had arrived.
"Lawson!" Prescott yelled from the lower barricade, his good hand leveling a submachine gun through a firing port in the armored partition. "We have eight operators descending! Full tactical kit! EMP grenades incoming!"
"Do not let them touch the power feeds!" I roared back.
Beside me, the apheresis machine was screaming an alarm. Elena’s pulse had dropped to thirty-four beats per minute. Her lips were turning an icy, cyanotic blue, her head slumped sideways against the vinyl headrest of the harvest chair. Her veins were collapsing under the monstrous volume of blood being pulled through the centrifugal filters.
Yet, inside the two pediatric pods, a miracle was beginning to unfold.
The luminescent violet serum was surging into Jonah and Blythe’s venous lines. On the digital blood gas analyzers, their cellular oxygen saturation was skyrocketing from forty percent to ninety-eight percent in real time.
The chimeric kill-switch, engineered to consume their bone marrow, was being ripped apart by the live antibodies produced by Elena’s stem cells.
Jonah’s heart monitor, which had flatlined two minutes prior, gave a sharp, violent hitch.
*Beep.*
Then another.
*Beep-beep.*
His small chest rose—not under the mechanical force of the ventilator, but with a deep, autonomous, life-affirming gasp of air.
Beside him, Blythe’s eyelids began to flutter. The dark purple purpura along her neck and arms was visibly fading, the necrotic subcutaneous bleeding halting as the Chrono-Antigen rebuilt their blood’s clotting cascade from the inside out.
The cure was working.
Genevieve’s science was holding.
"Infusion at sixty-two percent," the automated console chimed. *"Estimated time to stabilization: four minutes, thirty seconds."*
Four minutes.
In a combat zone, four minutes was an eternity. It was a lifetime. It was the difference between an unbroken bloodline and four corpses rotting in a forgotten hole beneath the lake.
"Prescott!" I shouted, sprinting toward the weapon lockers anchored to the laboratory’s rear wall. "Cover the intake corridor! I’m going to meet them on the stairs!"
"Lawson, you're outgunned!" Prescott shouted back, firing a three-round burst through the smoke as the first enemy flashbang shattered against the outer partition.
"They brought guns to a nursery, Prescott," I said, racking the bolt of a customized Benelli M4 tactical shotgun and slamming seven rounds of solid copper slugs into the tube. "They don't get to walk out of here."
I unsealed the secondary partition, stepping out of the sterile medical sanctuary and into the violent, cordite-choked darkness of the stairwell.
The first operator rounded the landing, his weapon raised, the green infrared laser of his night-vision optic sweeping toward my chest.
I fired before his finger could tighten on the trigger.
The copper slug punched through his ballistic shield, collapsing his chest plate and lifting his two-hundred-pound frame off his boots, sending him tumbling backward down the concrete steps into the operator behind him.
I advanced up the stairs, firing in a rhythmic, devastating tempo.
*BOOM.*
The second man’s weapon was shattered in his hands as the heavy slug tore through his forearm and ricocheted off the concrete wall.
*BOOM.*
The third operator took a hit to the pelvis, collapsing with a shriek of agony onto the metal grating of the landing.
They hadn't expected a billionaire to fight like a trench soldier. They thought they were clearing a laboratory occupied by a grieving father and two dying toddlers. They had forgotten that before I built Mercer Life Sciences, before I wore six-thousand-dollar Brioni suits, I had spent six years in the Tier-One corridors of the 75th Ranger Regiment hunting insurgents through the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
"Fall back! Fall back to Bay Four!" a voice screamed from the top of the stairs.
"Nobody falls back!"
Vance Sterling’s voice cut through the carnage from the upper warehouse floor.
"Kill him! Detonate the fuel cells if you have to! I want that vault turned to ash!"
A heavy metallic canister bounced down the concrete steps, hissing an acrid, yellow-green vapor that made my eyes burn instantly.
*Chlorine gas.*
The cowards were pumping industrial chemical warfare agents down the ventilation shaft to choke us out.
I grabbed the canister with my gloved hand, spinning on my heel, and hurled it back up the stairwell just as a thermite breaching charge detonated directly above the landing.
The concrete ceiling collapsed in a blinding shower of sparks and structural rebar.
The shockwave knocked me off my feet, sending me tumbling down the stairs, my shotgun clattering across the lower landing. I hit the concrete floor hard, my shoulder dislocating with a sharp, sickening crunch that sent white-hot fire screaming up my neck.
I lay in the rubble for two seconds, gasping for air, the taste of copper and concrete dust thick on my tongue.
Through the shattered lower doorway, I could see the laboratory.
The automated voice was counting down.
*"Infusion at eighty-nine percent... ninety percent..."*
In the donor chair, Elena was convulsing. Her hands were curled into rigid claws, her head thrashing against the headrest as her heart began to fibrillate under the catastrophic blood deficit.
She was dying right in front of me.
She was trading her last heartbeats so that Jonah could open his eyes, so that Blythe could live to see another summer.
"No," I growled through clenched teeth.
I rolled onto my stomach, grabbed my dislocated right arm with my left hand, jammed my elbow against the bottom edge of a reinforced steel step, and *pulled.*
*CRACK.*
The joint snapped back into the socket with an agony so pure it made the edges of my vision turn completely black.
I didn't scream. I swallowed the bile rising in my throat, stood up on shaking legs, and drew Genevieve’s heavy titanium combat knife from my boot.
Heavy tactical boots crunched down the rubble-strewn stairs.
Vance Sterling stepped through the dust, flanked by his final two bodyguards. He had discarded his trench coat. His gold-plated pistol was raised, his eyes manic with the desperate, cornered realization that his entire corporate conspiracy was slipping through his fingers.
"You should have stayed in your office, Lawson," Vance whispered, leveling the barrel at my forehead. "You could have mourned them. You could have inherited the Aegis dividends. We could have ruled this city together."
I looked Vance dead in his cold, parasitic eyes.
May you like
"You touched my family, Vance," I said, my voice dropping into an icy, bottomless whisper. "There was never a world where you survived this night."
***
