Chapter 74 - The Price of Survival
The guards moved in with mechanical efficiency. One seized Leah by the hair, wrenching her back against an examination table while another pried her arms apart to rip Maya away.
"Daddy! Daddy, help me!" Maya screamed, her small shoes kicking wildly against the guard's armored chest.
"Leah! Maya!" David roared, every tendon in his neck straining until his skin turned crimson. The guard pressing his skull into the deck bore down with his full weight, grinding David’s cheek into the cold diamond-plate steel.
"You have a choice, David," Julian said, watching the struggle with detached interest as he adjusted the suction pressure on the medical console. "Offer your compliance. Lay on the donor bed voluntarily, and I will ensure your wife dies painlessly. Continue to resist, and I will let the extraction team harvest your marrow while you are fully conscious, right before they incinerate her in the facility furnace."
"David, don't look at him!" Leah shrieked, thrashing violently beneath the operative's grip. Her elbow connected with the guard’s nose, fracturing the cartilage with a wet crunch. Blood splattered across her collar, but the second guard slammed a stun-baton against her ribs. The blue electric discharge surged through her body, causing her muscles to convulse as she collapsed to the floor, gasping for air.
"Mommy!" Maya cried, tears cutting pale tracks through the soot on her cheeks.
David’s vision tinted red. The cold analytical barrier in his mind—the careful, defensive survivalist who had spent decades measuring locks and reinforcing doors—cracked wide open. There was no strategy left. There was no negotiation. There was only the kill.
He relaxed his body entirely, pretending to go limp under the guard’s boot.
"Subject is submissive," the guard reported over his tactical link, easing the pressure slightly to reach for the zip-ties on his utility belt.
In that millisecond of shifted balance, David struck.
He drove his right elbow upward with the force of a battering ram into the guard's inner knee, hyper-extending the joint. The operative screamed as his leg snapped sideways. Before the man could fall, David grabbed the guard’s tactical vest, spinning beneath him, driving his fingers into the operative’s eye sockets through the visor gap, and snatching the sidearm from the holster at the man's hip.
*BANG.*
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The gunshot inside the enclosed steel room was deafening. The bullet took the second guard holding Leah through the neck, severing his carotid artery and painting the white ceramic wall behind him with a spray of bright arterial red.
"Breach!" Julian shouted, his composure shattering instantly. "Kill him!"
