Chapter 69 - The Mother's Fury
The first two shock troopers crossed the steel gangways with brutal speed, their electro-shock suppression batons crackling with twenty thousand volts of blue electricity.
They weren't using firearms; Arthur could not risk stray rounds puncturing David's vital organs or destroying the precious neural tissue inside his brain.
David met them at the threshold of the coupling.
He ducked beneath the sweep of the first baton, catching the soldier’s wrist and driving his shoulder upward into the man’s elbow joint. The bone snapped with a sickening wet pop. David ripped the crackling stun weapon from the operative’s grasp and jammed it directly into the second soldier’s neck seal. The high-voltage arc exploded through the man’s central nervous system, locking his muscles into an agonizing convulsion before David threw him over the side of the car. The soldier vanished beneath the grinding steel wheels beneath the train.
But the sheer numbers were overwhelming.
Two more operatives leaped across the gap, tackling David to the steel decking by sheer weight of armor. A third soldier fired a pneumatic net canister. The heavy Kevlar weave expanded in mid-air, wrapping around David’s limbs and pinning him against the rusted iron bulkhead of the hopper car.
High-voltage taser probes fired into David’s shoulder.
A scream of pure, biological agony ripped from his throat as hundreds of thousands of volts flooded his nervous system, overloading his synthetic cellular pathways and dropping him to his knees in the rushing wind.
"David!" Leah screamed.
The fourth operative turned toward the undercarriage where Leah was crouched with the children. His gloved hand drew a heavy combat knife, his mission clear: eliminate the maternal variable.
He never reached the crawlspace.
Leah didn't retreat. She didn't cower. The terror that had haunted her since the night her nursery door was breached melted into a cold, incandescent fury that transformed her into something terrifying.
She snatched the emergency heavy steel coupling pin—a fifteen-pound rod of solid forged iron used to link railcars—from the floor of the deck.
With a primal scream that echoed over the deafening roar of the train, Leah swung the iron rod with both arms.
The heavy steel caught the operative squarely across the side of his helmet. The impact cracked the reinforced visor in half, sending the soldier spinning backward across the narrow gangway. Before he could recover his balance, Leah lunged forward, driving the blunt iron bar into his chestplate with every ounce of maternal rage inside her soul, shoving him straight off the platform into the narrow, roaring gap between the trains.
The soldier disappeared into the grinding darkness below.
Leah dropped the rod, drew her ceramic pistol, and fired three point-blank rounds into the winch mechanism holding David’s restraint net.
The cable snapped. David, his body smoking from the taser discharge, his eyes blazing with a feral, electric blue, tore the netting from his arms with a roar of pure defiance.
Across the gangway, inside the luxury car, Arthur watched in mounting horror as his elite unit disintegrated before his eyes.
"Evelyn!" Arthur wheezed, his skeletal hands reaching for a manual override switch on the console beside his wheelchair. "Tell him! Tell him to kneel, or I'll eject you onto the tracks!"
Evelyn looked at the dying monster beside her. Then she looked across the gap at Leah, who was standing over David with a smoking gun, a mother willing to die to protect her blood.
A serene, beautiful smile crossed Evelyn’s ruined face.
"He was never yours, Arthur," Evelyn whispered softly.
May you like
With a sudden, violent twist of her restrained body, Evelyn threw herself backward against the emergency release lever of the luxury car’s main power coupling.
***
