Chapter 9 - THE GIRL WITH IRON IN HER BONES
I didn't turn around. I dropped flat into the frozen mud just as a high-powered rifle round punched through the air where my head had been half a second before, shattering the brickwork of the annex behind me.
Sterling’s sniper on the silo had re-engaged.
“Kill them all!” Sterling barked, diving into the back seat of the Escalade. “Raze the car! Leave no witnesses!”
The three remaining private security contractors opened up with full-auto carbines, raking the mud around me with lead.
From the sedan, the rear door suddenly flew open.
Marcus Vance screamed, “Emily, no! Stay down!”
The seven-year-old girl didn't listen. She scrambled out of the car like a feral cat, clutching my heavy wool overcoat around her body, and sprinted straight into the line of fire. She wasn't running away—she was running toward the rusted manual junction switch of the rail line.
“Mister!” she shrieked over the gunfire. “The lever! Luke said if the men come, pull the red lever!”
She threw her entire thirty-pound body against the five-foot rusted iron switch that controlled the spur line.
Her tiny boots slipped on the icy ties. She fell, scraped her elbows raw against the sharp gravel, scrambled back up, and grabbed the iron handle with bleeding hands.
One of Sterling’s mercenaries turned his rifle toward the child.
Something inside me fractured—the last shred of human restraint dissolved into raw, lethal violence.
I pushed up from the mud, charged the operator, and slammed into him with the force of an armored vehicle. We hit the ground together; I wrenched his rifle barrel upward into his face, shattering his nose, twisted the weapon from his grip, and fired a burst into the engine block of the fleeing Escalade.
At that exact second, Emily threw her weight down on the iron switch.
The ancient rusted gears groaned, sparked, and snapped into place.
Fifty yards up the line, an abandoned, three-ton gravel hopper car, perched on the elevated incline above the canal slip, slipped its brake locks. With a shriek of screeching iron that drowned out the entire thunderstorm, the massive steel car rolled down the tracks, gathering terrifying speed.
It hit the second mercenary vehicle at sixty miles per hour.
The impact sounded like a bomb going off. The Escalade was shoved violently sideways, crushed like an aluminum soda can against the concrete retaining wall of the canal basin, sparks showering fifty feet into the night sky.
Sterling crawled out of the shattered passenger window, his expensive coat shredded, bleeding profusely from a gash across his forehead, coughing up black smoke.
I walked through the smoking wreckage, pulled Emily up into my left arm, and tucked her head safely against my neck so she wouldn't see the violence. With my right hand, I pointed the captured carbine directly at Sterling’s skull.
“Where is my son?” I whispered.
Sterling looked up through his blood-soaked hair, his hands shaking violently in the freezing mud. He pointed a trembling finger toward the canal mouth, where the dark expanse of Lake Michigan opened into the pitch-black horizon.
“The tugboat Iron Vanguard,” he gasped, his teeth chattering from shock. “They’re clearing the breakwater right now. You’ll never catch them. Nothing on this river can beat twenty knots in four-foot swells!”
Emily lifted her face from my shoulder. Despite the blood on her knees and the dirt on her cheeks, her dark eyes burned with an impossible, fierce light.
“The fireboat,” she whispered into my ear.
May you like
I looked at her. “What did you say, sweetheart?”
“Luke and I used to hide in the old dock house,” she pointed through the rain toward Slip 3. “The big red boat. The workers left the keys in the cabin yesterday. Luke showed me!”
