Chapter 22 - The Detonation Chamber
The click of the toggle switch was small, almost lost beneath the deafening wail of the approaching state police cruisers, but the sound ripped through the frozen air like a crack of thunder.
For half a second, nothing happened. Martha’s smile widened, her eyes wild with ecstatic malice, waiting for the blast that would consume us all in a pyre of pulverized stone and ancient bone. But instead of an immediate volcanic rupture, a sharp electrical pop hissed from the subterranean vents below the floor slabs, followed by an acrid plume of burning wire.
Daniel didn’t hesitate. He launched himself across the floor, driving his entire weight into Martha’s midsection.
The impact cracked Martha’s breath from her lungs in a wet gasp. The assault rifle went skittering across the flagstones, clattering against the marble pedestal of Arthur Senior’s tomb. Daniel pinned her to the floor, knocking the detonator from her grip, but Martha was fighting with the feral, inhuman strength of total psychopathy. She clawed at his eyes, her manicured nails tearing bloody furrows down his cheek.
"Raymond!" she shrieked, spitting blood. "Shoot him! Kill them both!"
Behind the central pillar, Raymond Sterling didn't fire at Daniel. He didn't fire at me. His cold, calculating eyes flicked toward the detonator lying three feet away on the cracked marble, its red LED blinking frantically as secondary charges began to cook off in the crawlspace beneath us. Sterling didn't want a murder-suicide; he wanted the clean slate. He wanted the explosion to erase everyone inside the vault while he slipped out the rear escape route.
Sterling lunged for the remote.
"Don't touch it!" I screamed, lunging forward despite the searing agony in my fractured hip.
My fingers caught the heavy iron fire-stand leaning against the wall. With a guttural cry ripped from the depths of my bruised chest, I swung the iron bar with both hands, slamming it squarely into Sterling’s extended forearm. The bone snapped with a sickening crunch. Sterling roared in pain, dropping to his knees, his pistol clattering down a fissure in the floor.
Then the first secondary charge detonated.
It wasn't a fifty-pound concussive wave, but a muffled, catastrophic rumble deep in the bedrock. The foundation groaned. The massive marble slabs beneath our feet buckled upward, spitting shards of granite like shrapnel. The ceiling of the mausoleum—thousands of tons of limestone carvings and heavy masonry—split with the sound of a tearing locomotive.
"The tunnel!" Daniel shouted, wrenching Martha’s arms behind her and cuffing one wrist before she could twist away. "Elizabeth, the floor is giving out!"
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Before I could take a step, the flagstone beneath me gave way into empty space. The earth opened its mouth, swallowing dust, shattered marble, and the screaming bodies of the Vance family into the darkness below.
***
