Chapter 69 - Dangling Over the Thousand-Foot Drop
Gravity ceased to exist for a split second.
The steel roadway plunged downward, swinging like a severed pendulum into the freezing fog of the canyon. I lunged forward on my stomach, digging the steel toes of my boots into the expanded metal grating, one arm clamped tightly over the baby inside my jacket, the other hand reaching out blindly into the roaring void.
My left hand caught a dangling secondary sway cable just as the bridge deck dropped out from beneath me.
I swung through the freezing air, dangling by one arm over a drop of one thousand feet. The baby against my chest let out a faint, terrified wail—a sound that cut directly through the thunder of collapsing steel and raging blizzard.
"I have you," I whispered through gritted teeth, my shoulder screaming as the joint nearly dislocated under the violent momentum. "Daddy's got you."
Above me, Khloe was clinging to the concrete abutment on the cliff's edge. Despite having Grace strapped to her chest, she threw herself flat onto the ice, reaching down with both hands over the lip of the precipice.
"Grab my hand, Mark!" she cried, tears freezing instantly on her cheeks. "Look at me! Don't look down, look at me!"
Fifty feet above us, the black Eurocopter hovered in the blizzard. Catherine Vance stood in the open cabin door, hooked into a safety harness, looking down at us with a pair of high-powered binoculars. She saw me dangling. She saw the baby inside my coat.
Through the radio headset still pinned to my ear, her voice crackled over the open frequency:
*"You should have taken the settlement in Boston, Mr. Miller. Now, your children will learn what gravity feels like."*
Catherine nodded to the door gunner. The heavy barrel of an FN Minimi light machine gun tracked down toward the sway cable I was clinging to.
"No!" Anthony's voice roared, not from the helicopter, but from the wreckage ten feet below me.
Anthony hadn't fallen with the Maybach. His mangled body was tangled in a web of severed safety netting hooked onto the bridge's main truss. Half his clothes had been ripped away, and his left arm dangled uselessly, but in his right hand, he held a flare gun he had ripped from the Maybach’s emergency door kit.
Anthony looked up at the helicopter. His face, smeared with engine grease and blood, bore a smile of total, unhinged clarity.
"Hey, Mother!" Anthony screamed into the gale. "LOOK AT YOUR INVESTMENT!"
He pulled the trigger.
May you like
The magnesium flare shot upward in a blazing red streak, slicing directly into the helicopter's open engine intake.
***
