Chapter 23 - Bloodlines and Bullet Casings
The sound of the blast door being hit by a hydraulic breaching charge vibrated straight through the concrete floor into Ava's boots. A deafening metallic boom echoed down the corridor, followed by the sickening hiss of thermite eating through the titanium deadbolts.
"They found us!" Elena shouted, pulling a Glock 19 from beneath her denim jacket and dropping into a tactical crouch behind an overturned metal gurney.
Oliver jolted awake, letting out a piercing, terrified shriek as the sudden noise shattered the silence. "Ava! Ava!" he cried, burying his face into her shoulder, his little fingers digging into her collarbone with desperate, bruising strength.
"I have you, Ollie. I have you," Ava murmured, her voice steady despite the ice running down her spine. She thrust the encrypted flash drive into the pocket of Oliver’s fleece jacket, zipping it shut, then unholstered her .38 with her free hand.
Dr. Lowe scrambled toward the back corner of the lab, his face pale with panic. "There’s no other way out! The freight elevator was our only route to the surface!"
"There’s always another way in an old hospital," Ava yelled over the sound of a second breaching charge detonation. "Where does the medical incinerator chute lead?"
"To the subterranean furnace room, two levels down!" Lowe pointed toward a heavy stainless-steel hatch set into the tiled wall behind the reagent refrigerators. "It empties into an abandoned utility tunnel that runs beneath Lexington Avenue! But the chute is a seventy-degree drop—you’ll break your necks!"
"We’ll break our necks anyway if Julian’s cleaners get through that door!" Ava barked.
A thunderous explosion tore the lab's outer blast door off its heavy hinges. The metal slab flew inward with a horrifying roar, crashing into a row of glass incubators and sending hundreds of chemical vials shattering across the floor. Through the billowing gray smoke and the blinding flash of white sparks, three men clad in matte-black tactical gear, night-vision goggles, and suppressed submachine guns stepped into the room.
*Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!*
The suppressed fire was eerily quiet, but the rounds tore through the stainless-steel cabinets with catastrophic force, punching holes through monitors and biological freezers. Dr. Lowe screamed as a ricochet clipped his shoulder, sending him sprawling into a pool of chemical reagent.
Elena leaned out from behind the heavy gurney, her Glock barking twice in rapid succession. The lead operator took a round directly to the throat, his body collapsing backward into the smoke with a choking gurgle.
"Go, Ava! Move!" Elena yelled, firing three more rounds to suppress the remaining two shooters.
Ava didn’t hesitate. She threw herself behind the reagent counter, lunged at the incinerator hatch, and yanked the heavy industrial lever upward. The hatch swung open, exhaling a blast of stale, soot-choked air from the depths below.
She turned to Lowe. "Get in! Now!"
Lowe, clutching his bleeding arm, scrambled toward the chute and slid feet-first into the black hole, his muffled screams fading rapidly as he descended into the subterranean darkness.
Ava turned to Elena. "Elena, fall back!"
Elena ejected her spent magazine, slamming a fresh one home with the heel of her hand. But before she could pivot, a hail of armor-piercing rounds chewed through the upper edge of the gurney. A round caught Elena in the left thigh. She gasped, her leg buckling beneath her, dark crimson blooming across the fabric of her jeans.
"Elena!" Ava cried, lunging forward with Oliver tucked securely against her chest.
"Don't look back, Ava! Run!" Elena hissed, tears of pain mixing with cold fury on her face. She raised her firearm with both hands, aiming directly at the smoke where the remaining operators were advancing. "Protect the boy! He’s the only one who can bring Nicholas down!"
Before Ava could grab Elena’s collar to pull her toward the chute, a grenade rolled smoothly through the smoke, stopping two feet from Elena’s boots.
Elena’s eyes met Ava’s for a split second—a look of fierce, unyielding devotion that carved itself into Ava’s memory forever. Elena didn’t try to flee. She lunged forward, throwing her entire body over the canister to smother the blast.
"AVA, JUMP!"
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Ava turned, wrapped both arms securely around Oliver’s body to protect his skull, and threw herself backward into the pitch-black chute just as the concussive roar of the grenade shattered the room behind them in an apocalyptic wave of fire and concrete.
***
