Chapter 46 - The Dead Son's Vengeance
The digital timer blazed in merciless crimson: *00:14... 00:13... 00:12.*
The heavy blast doors groaned against their hydraulic hinges, screeching like dying whales before buckling inward. Through the narrow gap of twisted steel and ruptured concrete, Anthony Vance dragged himself into the blinding sterile glare of the Swiss laboratory. He was an apparition forged in ice and butchery. The pristine grey tailored suit he had worn in New Hampshire hung from his frame in blackened ribbons, soaked in freezing lake water and crusted with brackish harbor mud. The entire right side of his skull was a roadmap of purplish-black contusions; his right arm dangled limp and useless, shattered at the collarbone. But in his left hand, locked in a white-knuckled death grip, was a combat-grade Benelli M4 shotgun.
His breath rattled in his chest, a sickening whistle of punctured lung and hypothermic fever.
"Mother," Anthony rasped again. The acoustic tiles of the high-tech ceiling caught the sound and magnified it into an executioner’s hiss. "You flew away in the Gulfstream while I was drowning beneath the ice."
Catherine Vance did not flinch, but the diamond ring on her trembling index finger clicked sharply against the steel console. "You were always too sentimental, Anthony. A flawed prototype. Put the weapon down before you ruin everything we built."
*00:09... 00:08...*
"Marcus! The baby!" Khloe screamed, her voice tearing through the suffocating tension. Her fingernails dug into my forearm with the desperation of a mother drowning in open water.
I didn't think. There was no room left for fear, no space for calculation. As Anthony raised the barrel toward his mother, I lunged across the operating theater, slamming my shoulder into Dr. Weiss. The German geneticist collapsed against the override terminal with a wet smack, his eyeglasses shattering across the linoleum.
"The override code, you bastard!" I roared, dragging him up by his lab coat lapels and smashing his skull back against the control bank. "Cancel the depressurization or I’ll snap your neck right here!"
*00:05... 00:04...*
"It... it cannot be stopped from this station!" Weiss wheezed, spit and blood flecking his chin. "The master purge key... Catherine holds the biometric bypass on her medallion!"
*00:03...*
Inside the glass chamber, the sound changed. It wasn't just a hum anymore; it was an angry, vortex-like suck of air. The synthetic fluid began draining rapidly through the floor grates of the incubator. The tiny infant inside—our daughter, the stolen twin Khloe had been made to believe died in utero—began to twitch frantically as her delicate skin touched the raw, frigid atmosphere. Her chest rose and fell in silent, oxygen-starved spasms.
"Shoot her, Anthony!" Khloe shrieked, throwing all dignity to the wind. "Shoot your mother!"
Anthony’s eyes, milky with concussion and pure, undiluted malice, swung toward Catherine. "You chose the bloodline over me. You always chose the paper."
"Anthony, don't—" Catherine began.
*BOOM.*
The shotgun roared in the enclosed subterranean vault. The sound was deafening, a physical concussive wave that blew out three fluorescent panels overhead, showering the room in rainfalls of sparking glass. Catherine didn't fall—the blast struck the Kevlar-lined bulkhead just inches above her ear, chewing the reinforced wall into jagged confetti and knocking her flat onto her knees.
I didn't wait for a second shot. With the timer flashing *00:01*, I grabbed the heavy chrome nitrous-oxide tank standing beside the surgical cart, swung it like a sledgehammer with every ounce of adrenaline coursing through my veins, and hurled it directly into the center seam of the primary glass incubator.
The three-inch reinforced acrylic groaned, spider-webbed, and then shattered with the explosive force of a car bomb.
A wall of warm, synthetic amniotic fluid crashed forward, washing across the linoleum in a scented wave of saline and clinical chemicals. I lunged forward into the razor-sharp cascade of falling acrylic shards, disregarding the hot ribbons of blood opening across my forearms, and caught the fragile, trembling body of our daughter into my bare hands just as the vacuum pump choked on broken glass.
"Khloe! I have her!" I yelled, pulling off my soaked flannel overshirt to swaddle the blue-tinted skin of the newborn. "I have her!"
Khloe fell to her knees beside me, sobbing so hard she could barely breathe, her trembling hands hovering over the child's chest. "She's breathing... Marcus, she's breathing..."
Across the ruined operating theater, Catherine Vance pushed herself up from the floor, her cheek dripping crimson from a flying glass shard. She didn't look at us. She looked straight down the smoking barrel of Anthony’s shotgun.
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"You should have aimed lower, my son," Catherine whispered, her lips curling into a smile devoid of humanity.
From beneath her designer coat, her right hand emerged holding a matte-black Sig Sauer. She pulled the trigger twice with clinical, rhythmic precision.
