Chapter 110
There was a clank and a tremendous bang, and my heart almost stopped; I expected the gas to ignite and blow up the tanks, and me and everyone else with them.
Instead, Edgars screamed and writhed on the concrete floor, his bleeding hands clawing at the gas mask, his rifle three feet to his right, ruptured and smoking. Adrenaline poured through my veins, making me shake so bad that several moments passed before I realized what had happened.
Damaged by my earlier shot, and set to full automatic fire, the action of Edgars’s gun must have backfired, jammed, and exploded, sending chunks and slivers of metal back into the coder’s face and neck.
Edgars tore off the gas mask. His left eye was punctured and weeping blood. His cheeks and forehead were gashed horribly, flayed open, and gushing blood.
My head swooned from the gas. Throwing my jacket sleeve across my mouth again, I kept my gun on him and moved forward fast, meaning to subdue and handcuff him.
But when I got close, Edgars lashed out with his steel-toed boot and connected squarely with my bad ankle. I felt something snap. A bolt of fire shot through me; my leg buckled, and I went down on my side.
My ankle felt like someone had set a torch to it. My stomach turned over from the agony and the gas, and my head swam; I thought I was going to pass out.
“The gas!” Gretchen Lindel cried weakly behind me. “The gas!”
I shook my head, saw Edgars struggling, trying to get to his feet. I aimed my gun at him but didn’t shoot because he seized up before he could fully stand, looked at me puzzled, and then felt his neck.
Something had ruptured, probably the carotid, pumping out blood. He staggered, moving his lips but making no sound, and then fell for the last time.
The gas, I thought through a building daze.
Forcing myself up onto all fours, I turned my back to Edgars and crawled toward the tanks. I reached the post they were chained to and, holding my breath, used the post to pull myself to my feet.
I grabbed the knob to the hissing gas valve, tried to twist it shut. But it wouldn’t budge. Neither would the other one. They were locked open somehow.
My stomach roiled. I fought the urge to puke. But then I looked to Gretchen Lindel and the other six women hanging from the cables. Heads down. Bodies slack. They were dying.
Dying.
My head spun again, and I almost went down for a second time.
You’re dying, Alex.
It was Bree’s voice. It was Nana Mama’s voice. And my children’s voices. All at once, telling me to fight.
In a haze I raised my head, looked around, saw the door where I’d entered the building. Open it, Alex.
Not enough air.
I saw the window I’d looked through. Break it too, I thought.
Not enough, the voices said.
Turning my thickening, spinning head, I looked past the dying women and spotted my only hope.
Do it, my family said.
My love for them surged up inside me. I used it to steel myself and push away from the post and the gas tanks. The pain in my ankle felt electric, and it jolted me, made me more alert and more determined.
My head started to pound. Every step was brutal. With every breath I wanted to stop, lie down, and surrender. But my family’s voices kept urging me on, telling me that pain was temporary, but death was not. Death was...
I reached the long wall of the steel building and fell against it, gasping, tasting the gas, and feeling like my ankle and my head were going to burst at the seams and split apart. Dark dots danced before my eyes, gathered, and threatened to blind me.
Dad!
Alex!
On the edge of collapse, I reached up and flailed at three buttons on the front of a metal box attached to the wall. I missed, groped, stabbed at them again, and felt them click one by one.
Nothing happened, and for a single, disbelieving moment, I thought there was no hope. That I was—
Gear engaged. Electric winch motors turned. And one, two, and then three of the overhead garage doors began to rise.
I ducked under the one closest to me and felt a strong cold breeze hit me in the face as I stumbled and went to my knees outside in the melting snow and mud.
I coughed and swooned but then scooped up a handful of snow and cold mud and splashed it in my face. I had to go back. I had to get them out.
I crawled back and saw Pratt lying motionless on top of his gas mask. Taking a big breath, I scrambled to him, rolled him over, and put the mask on.
After opening the door I’d come through, and the window, and feeling the air moving, I found the ropes attached to the cables holding the women and cut them all down.
One by one, I grabbed them and, still crawling, dragged them out into the snow. They were all outside and breathing when I heard the chug of a helicopter, looked back toward the bluff, and saw a Life Flight chopper coming in for a landing.
Chapter 111
Shortly after four that afternoon, Eliza Lindel broke down sobbing in Bree’s arms. I leaned over on my crutches and rubbed her back.
“Please,” she cried softly to me when she drew away from Bree. “You’ll have to come with me to tell Alden.”
I glanced at Bree, who nodded.
“Of course,” I said.
Gretchen Lindel’s mother wiped at her tears, then reached up and kissed my face. “I want you to know that you’re a good man, Dr. Cross.”
My eyes started to water. “Thank you.”
Bree held her hand. I followed them through the door at the far end of the kitchen into Alden Lindel’s small world. The shriveled man in the bed took his eyes off the latest Game of Thrones episode.
Eliza Lindel came around me and shut it off. “Dr. Cross has news, Alden.”
His eyes went to the tablet. The synthetic voice said, “Gretch?”
I smiled. “She’s safe, Mr. Lindel. They’re all safe. She’s on her way here. We tried to convince her to stay in the hospital, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”
Lindel shut his eyes tight, and then he looked to his tablet. “Thank God,” his mechanical voice said. “Thank God.”
Tinker, the Jack Russell terrier, started barking and yipping with excitement in the kitchen.
“Mom? Dad?” Gretchen cried weakly.
An EMT was pushing her in a wheelchair. She’d been washed clean of pig’s blood and wore a pair of hospital scrubs. An IV in her arm was connected to a bag mounted on a pole attached to the chair.
Her mother ran to her and hugged her, and they sobbed with joy, the little dog dancing on her hind legs and barking madly. They all went to Alden’s side. The dog jumped on his bed. Gretchen got up on wobbly legs, threw her arms around her dad, and kissed him.
“I never gave up, Dad,” she said, weeping. “They tried to reach inside and destroy me, but they couldn’t. Because of you, and what you taught me, they couldn’t.”
He broke down, made choking sounds of love, which Bree and I took as our cue to slip out, our job done. Outside, we smiled like happy idiots. It was a crisp late-fall afternoon, and I felt damn lucky to be alive.
“That Find My iPhone app is something, isn’t it?” I said, putting the crutches in the backseat and then hopping to the front, grimacing as I gingerly drew my splinted lower leg inside. “It can track the phone even if the phone’s not signed in.”
“Definitely helped find you faster,” Bree said, starting the engine. “That and Batra and the Life Flight pilot hearing your radio call.”
We drove toward GW Medical Center, where Ned Mahoney was in surgery. While Bree called Chief Michaels and filled him in, I prayed for Ned, and for Delilah Franks, Cathy Dupris, Ginny Krauss, Alison Dane, and Patsy Mansfield, hoping to God that they’d come to find peace with what had happened to them. Somehow, I knew Gretchen Lindel was going to be all right.