Chapter 66 - Broken Bloodlines
Julian tried to raise his weapon one last time as I walked past him toward the heavy industrial blast hatch at the far end of the vault. His hand trembled, the barrel swaying wildly.
"Clara..." he wheezed, the venom suddenly draining from his voice, replaced by the pathetic, sniveling tone he had used when he had walked into the nursery five months ago, sunburned and sweating, begging for forgiveness. "Clara, please... don't leave me down here... I did it for us... to give us a dynasty... you can't leave your husband to die..."
I stopped right beside him. Noah was sleeping now, his breathing deep and steady, his tiny hand curled peacefully inside my vest.
I looked down into Julian's eyes. I remembered the thirty-one hours after labor—the terror of bleeding alone in that hospital bed while Noah’s monitors flatlined, calling Julian forty-seven times while he was boarding a private Gulfstream to arrange the liquidation of our son’s genetic future.
"You were never my husband," I said, my voice dead and emotionless. "You were just an infection I had to survive."
I stepped on his wrist with precise, crushing force, snapping the bone and sending his pistol clattering across the concrete floor into the drainage sump. Julian let out a pathetic shriek, curling into the fetal position.
Above, Eleanor screamed curses, smashing the glass of the control deck, but her voice was swallowed by the sudden hiss of green halon gas spraying from the high-pressure nozzles in the vault ceiling.
"Go, Clara!" Marcus shouted, slamming his shoulder against the manual release valve of the sub-level freight hatch. The heavy steel door groaned, metal grinding against metal as it cracked open just enough for a human body to slip through.
The toxic fog began dropping rapidly from the ceiling like a suffocating blanket. Julian began coughing violently, clawing at his throat as the chemical air stripped oxygen from his lungs. Eleanor was pounding on the sealed security doors of the observation booth, realizing too late that the purge protocol she had activated didn't spare the command deck.
"Clara! Into the tube!" Marcus shoved me through the narrow breach into the dark, echoing tunnel beyond.
I scrambled through the opening just as Marcus followed, tossing a high-explosive thermite charge onto the vault's hydraulic hinge behind us.
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"Fire in the hole!" he roared.
The explosion severed the door's locking pins with an ear-splitting crack, sending a wall of fire through the breach and collapsing thousands of pounds of reinforced concrete across the entrance, permanently burying Julian and Eleanor Vance inside their own subterranean tomb.
