“They’re right behind me. I radioed them my position!”
“Impossible. I’ve jammed everything within ten miles.”
That idea seemed to embolden him because he burst out from behind the bulldozer blade at a steep retreating angle, so fast I had no shot. He skidded to a stop right behind the gas tanks. Definitely no shot.
Unaware of what I could and couldn’t see, Edgars kept his camera rolling, set his rifle on the ground, and stood back up.
He’s filming and needs a free hand to open the gas valves, I thought, realizing in a split second that I had only one option, and I needed to take that option right now or never. I aimed at the top turret of the halo sight, right above the AR’s action, and fired my .40 S&W.
The hundred-and-fifty-grain bullet hit the turret, blew through the sight, and smashed into the action with four hundred foot-pounds of energy. The gun went skidding across the concrete floor and under a combine’s blades.
I pushed myself up into a crouch, saw a shocked Edgars spin away from the gas tanks, yank down his gas mask, and run toward the combine. I took off after him, gun up.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” I yelled a moment before I smelled the propane hissing full force from the tanks.
With my left arm and jacket sleeve across my nose and mouth, I hobbled past the women and Pratt, who was unconscious, and the tanks. Edgars was flat on his belly thirty feet beyond them, reaching under the combine. I feared shooting because of the gas. Before I could get close enough to jump on him, he twisted around, pointing the rifle and the camera at me. I skidded to a stop, aiming my pistol at him.
“Shoot him!” Lourdes Rodriguez screamed.
“Shoot him!” the other women cried.
Edgars bellowed from inside the mask, “He shoots, you all die!”
I stared at him. “You shoot, we all die.”
“Maybe that’s the point.”
“Why the hell are you doing this, Edgars?”
He looked at me as if I were stupid and said, “I hate blondes. I always have. Bitches, every one of them.”
“No one will see your last little film if you shoot and blow this place up.”
He beamed at me through the glass eyeholes of the gas mask. “The cameras are streaming, uploading over Wi-Fi.”
“We can all walk out of here.”
“No, we can’t,” he said, and he looked over the top of his busted sight at me. “Best thing? I can’t miss from here, so I get to see you die first. Just a half second before we all go up in flames.”
For the first time, I felt woozy from the gas. Edgars lifted his camera higher and glanced at the screen on the back as if trying to frame me, the gas canisters, and the women behind me for one final shot.
“All blondes must die eventually,” Edgars said. “And cops and geniuses.”
“Don’t!”
He pulled the trigger.
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.