Chapter 10 - The Price of Survival
The emergency red backup lights flickered on three seconds later, casting the room in a bloody, surreal crimson glow.
The sudden shudder of the sinking vessel had smashed the heavy medical monitors against the polycarbonate partition, cracking the lower edge of the reinforced glass frame.
The three armed guards inside the observation booth were still struggling to regain their footing on the listing deck.
I didn't waste half a second.
I fired three consecutive rounds into the cracked base of the observation glass, shattering the structural integrity of the frame.
I lowered my shoulder and slammed my entire weight against the weakened barrier, bringing the entire three-ton sheet of glass crashing down into the observation room in a shower of heavy shards.
The first mercenary raised his rifle, but my combat knife went through his forearm before his finger could squeeze the trigger.
I wrenched the weapon from his grip, spun him into the path of his partner's incoming fire, and eliminated both men with a controlled burst from the captured rifle.
The third mercenary dropped his gun and bolted for the bulkhead emergency exit as water began to slosh around our ankles from the flooded lower decks.
Inside the glass room, the anesthesiologist was huddled in the corner, holding her hands over her ears, screaming in German.
I tore the intravenous needle from Leo’s arm, pressing my thumb over the small puncture wound to stop the trickle of blood.
Leo leaped into my chest, his small arms wrapping around my neck with a desperate, suffocating grip, his wet face buried against my collar.
“Uncle Ethan... you came... you really came...” he sobbed, his entire body trembling against mine like an injured sparrow.
“I told you nobody touches you in my city, kid,” I whispered into his hair, pulling him tight against my tactical vest with one arm while keeping my pistol raised with the other.
Behind us, a wet, rattling gasp echoed from the motorized wheelchair.
The sudden loss of the ship’s primary power grid had severed the life-support pumps connected to Marcus Vance’s chest.
The old man was slumped sideways in his leather seat, his face turning an ashen, cyanotic blue as his lungs collapsed without mechanical ventilation.
His trembling fingers clawed weakly at my pant leg as water rose above his ankles.
“Ethan... please...” the monster wheezed, his yellow eyes wide with the raw, pitiful panic of a dying tyrant.
“The backup generator... on Deck Four... start the pumps... I am your father...”
I looked down at the man who had beaten us in that Brooklyn basement, who had burned my sister’s youth into ash, and who had tried to slaughter a five-year-old child for five more years of miserable life.
“You were never my father, Marcus,” I said, my voice dead and emotionless over the rising roar of rushing seawater.
“You were just the first monster I had to survive.”
I stepped backward through the shattered glass, carrying Leo toward the upper escape companionway.
The old man let out one final, gurgling curse as the rising sea surged into the surgical suite, knocking his wheelchair onto its side into the dark, freezing brine.
We fought our way up the listing stairwells to the main helicopter deck, where the cold Atlantic wind howled under the midnight rain.
The Leviathan’s stern was already sinking rapidly beneath the foaming black waves.
Waiting on the wet helipad was Marcus, holding a flare, standing guard beside the interceptor’s boarding winch.
And standing right beside him, clutching her soaked coat against the gale, was Clara.
“Mom!” Leo cried out into the storm.
Clara dropped to her knees on the pitching deck as I set the boy down in front of her.
She gathered him into her arms, weeping openly, burying her face into his neck as if she would never let him go again in this lifetime.
Leo reached into his wet pocket and pulled out the battered red toy truck, holding the broken pieces up between them.
“I kept it safe, Mom,” the boy whispered through his tears.
“The angel heard the truck.”
Clara looked up at me through the pouring rain, her hazel eyes clear and bright for the very first time in twelve years.
The ghost ship slipped beneath the dark Atlantic waters with a final, violent hiss of steam and iron, sinking three hundred feet down into the cold abyss where its secrets could never hurt anyone again.
May you like
I reached down, helping my sister and her son to their feet as the gray light of a new dawn began to crack through the storm clouds over the distant silhouette of the Manhattan skyline.
The mob boss who had ruled the city with fear and silence was gone.
