Chapter 35 - The 100-Mile-An-Hour Execution
The train gathered speed with terrifying rapidity, hurtling through the pitch-black tunnels cut into the sheer rock face of the Swiss Alps. Inside the swaying dining car, the three sisters stood in a deadly triangle.
Dominique was limping, the jagged cut in her leg bleeding profusely, but her gun was still firmly clutched in her right hand. Vanessa stepped out from the shadows of the pantry, holding a heavy steel wrench she had stripped from the dead guard, while Claire struggled to her feet, leaning heavily against the wall.
"You're both going to die on this train," Dominique hissed, her face contorting into an expression of pure, unbridled malice. "The automated routing system has been overridden. In eight minutes, this locomotive hits the southern junction at one hundred and twenty miles per hour. The switch is locked open. We are going off the trestle bridge into the Rhine Gorge."
Vanessa’s eyes widened. "You're insane. You’ll kill yourself!"
"I have a parachute in the rear cargo bay," Dominique spat, a manic grin spreading across her blood-flecked lips. "You two have nothing. Hand over the drive, or I jump now and leave you to burn in the twisted wreckage at the bottom of the canyon!"
"You're not jumping anywhere," Claire said softly.
Dominique fired.
The bullet tore through Vanessa’s left arm. Vanessa cried out, dropping to one knee, but the distraction gave Claire the opening she needed. Claire threw herself across the carriage, colliding with Dominique’s gun hand. The weapon discharged wildly into the ceiling, blowing out the emergency light fixtures and plunging the cabin into near-total darkness.
They wrestled desperately on the swaying floor, two identical women tearing at each other in the dark, their fingernails gouging, teeth bared, while the screech of the speeding train filled the cabin with an apocalyptic howl.
Claire felt Dominique’s fingers clawing toward her eyes, trying to rip her face apart. She blocked with her forearm, twisting Dominique’s wrist with all her weight until a sickening *pop* signaled the dislocation of the joint.
The gun skittered across the floor, sliding directly to Vanessa’s feet.
Vanessa grabbed the weapon. She rose to her feet, ignoring the blood dripping from her own arm, and racked the slide with one brutal, decisive motion.
"Get off her, Dominique," Vanessa commanded, her voice dropping into a register of icy, absolute authority.
Dominique froze.
The red emergency brake light suddenly flickered back to life overhead, casting long, bloody shadows across the cabin. Dominique was pinned beneath Claire, her dislocated wrist dangling at an unnatural angle.
Slowly, Dominique looked up into the barrel of the gun Vanessa was pointing directly between her eyes.
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"Go ahead, sister," Dominique laughed, though her voice betrayed a tremor of real fear. "Shoot me. Pull the trigger. Prove that you’re just like our mother. Prove that the Whitmore blood is nothing but murder!"
***
