Chapter 3 - Blood and Betrayal on Highway 41
The siren stayed silent, but the red and blue strobes of the cruiser painted the torrential rain in flashes of neon crimson and ice blue. Marcus drove with surgical focus, his knuckles white against the steering wheel as the heavy Ford Interceptor tore down the winding backroads of Miller County at eighty miles per hour.
In the back, I was on my knees on the floorboards, my hands working inside the Isolette.
“Hold her head steady,” I instructed as Marcus hit a slick curve, the cruiser’s tires hydroplaning for a terrifying half-second before catching the asphalt. “If this endotracheal tube shifts even two millimeters, she’ll asphyxiate on her own secretions.”
“I’ve got the road, Maya,” Marcus said through clenched teeth, his eyes darting to the rearview mirror. “Just keep her breathing. How bad is she?”
“She was born at thirty-one weeks,” I said, drawing a sterile vial of synthetic surfactant into a fine syringe with steady hands despite the swaying chassis. “Her lungs haven't developed enough dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine to keep the alveoli from collapsing upon exhalation. Vance knew that. He intended to let her die if the buyer didn’t wire the second half of the deposit tonight. He told Clara the infant suffered fatal meconium aspiration.”
In the metal cage between the front seats and the trunk area where Briggs lay handcuffed and groaning, the deputy’s voice suddenly cut in.
“You’re… you’re both dead,” Briggs muttered, blood dripping from his nose onto the vinyl seat. “You think Julian Vance is just a doctor? He’s the chairman of the State Health Authority. The governor’s campaign is run out of his guest house. If you take that car up to the ridge, his private security will erase you, Marcus. They’ll bury you right beside your daughter.”
Marcus didn’t look back. He simply reached over, pulled the microphone from the center console, and keyed the county wide-band frequency.
“Dispatch, this is Unit One. Give me an open line to the State Patrol Post in Albany.”
Static hissed through the speaker. A crackle, followed by a voice that sounded strained, distant, and cold.
*“Unit One, this is Dispatch Supervisor Henderson. Stand down your traffic. We have an executive directive from the County Commission. Your badge has been suspended pending an emergency administrative review. Relinquish your service vehicle to Deputy Briggs immediately.”*
Marcus let out a bitter, humorless laugh. He let the microphone drop to the floor.
“Henderson’s brother got a five-hundred-thousand-dollar construction contract for Vance’s private surgical wing last year,” Marcus murmured, more to himself than to me. “The rot goes all the way to the foundation. Every single pillar of this town is bought and paid for.”
“Then we have no backup,” I said, gently pressing the plunger of the syringe, delivering the life-saving medication into the catheter line running into Chloe’s airway.
“We never did,” Marcus replied, cutting the cruiser’s headlights and veering sharply off Highway 41 onto an overgrown, unpaved logging trail known as Old Mill Road.
The darkness swallowed us instantly. The rain battered the roof like machine-gun fire. Marcus killed the cruiser’s interior dome lights, driving solely by the faint gray glow of the night sky reflecting off the puddles ahead.
Suddenly, a series of bright, high-intensity halogen beams exploded through the tree line ahead of us.
Two black Cadillac Escalades were parked diagonally across the narrow timber bridge that crossed over the swollen waters of Chickasaw Creek. Standing outside the vehicles were four men dressed in tactical rain gear, holding semi-automatic rifles.
“They anticipated this route,” Marcus whispered, stomping on the brakes. The cruiser slid to a halt fifty yards short of the bridge, hidden partially behind a grove of weeping willows.
“How did they know?” I gasped, bracing the Isolette with my torso.
From the back cage, Briggs let out a low, bloody chuckle. “Emergency transponder in the cruiser, you old fool. Vance’s IT security tracks every county vehicle by GPS ping. You drove right into the funnel.”
Marcus unbuckled his seatbelt with terrifying calmness. He reached into the lockbox mounted between the front seats and pulled out his personal Colt .45 and two tactical flashbang grenades from his SWAT locker days.
“Maya,” he said, turning around to look at me. “Do you trust me?”
“I don’t have a choice, Sheriff.”
“I’m going to draw their fire to the left ridge. The creek bank drops twenty feet into a drainage culvert that leads directly under the bridge. Take the medical pack and Chloe’s portable life-support pod. There’s an abandoned hunting cabin three hundred yards past the bridge on the east bank. Go there. Don't stop for anything. If I’m not there in fifteen minutes… you take my truck keys from my spare pocket and keep running north.”
“You’re one man against four mercenaries, Marcus!”
“No,” he said, his eyes burning with the raw fury of a protective father. “I’m a grandfather who just found out his family was butchered by cowards. They’re the ones who are outnumbered.”
May you like
Before I could answer, Marcus kicked open the driver’s door, raised his standard-issue Remington 870 shotgun from the rack, and racked the slide with a thunderous echo that shattered the Georgia rain.
---
