Chapter 8 - The Rupture
The ceiling collapse had severed the primary power grid.
Sparks showered down like falling stars from severed high-voltage cables. The emergency lockdown protocol malfunctioned, the hydraulic seals on the Glass Room hissing as the air pressure released with a massive mechanical groan.
The heavy glass door clicked open three inches.
Mark dragged himself through the rubble, his scrub top torn and bloodied from flying debris. Coughing violently through the chemical smoke, he threw his shoulder against the heavy glass door, shoving it wide.
Clara fell into his arms.
Her weight was impossibly light, like a ghost made of bone and sorrow. She buried her face in his neck, sobbing uncontrollably as her trembling arms locked around his shoulders.
"You're real... you're real..." she repeated, a mantra of three years of solitary despair breaking apart in the subterranean smoke.
"I have you, Clara. I’ve got you," Mark choked out, kissing her matted hair, tears streaming down his face. "Lily is safe. She’s at the hospital. She’s the one who guided me to you."
"Lily..." Clara pulled back, her eyes wild with terror. "Arthur... he isn't dead!"
Through the settling dust and burning debris, a hand emerged from the collapsed concrete.
Arthur pulled himself free from the wreckage. His face was unrecognizable, charred on one side from the thermite flash, his suit torn to bloody ribbons. His eyes burned with the psychotic rage of a man who had lost everything and possessed only the capacity for murder.
In his hand, he still gripped his pistol.
"CLARA!" Arthur screamed, raising the weapon with a trembling, blackened arm. "NOBODY LEAVES!"
Mark shoved Clara behind the safety of the reinforced door frame and lunged forward.
*BANG!*
A bullet grazed Mark's bicep, tearing through the flesh. Mark ignored the white-hot pain. He tackled Arthur into the rubble, both men crashing against the shattered concrete. Arthur fought with the desperate, frenzied strength of a rabid beast, gouging his thumbs toward Mark's eyes.
"You ruined it all!" Arthur shrieked. "Thirty years of building this family! For what? For an ungrateful woman who couldn't keep her mouth shut?!"
Mark grabbed Arthur’s gun wrist, slamming it repeatedly against a jagged piece of rebar until the weapon clattered down into the drainage grate below. Mark drew back his right fist and delivered three crushing blows to Arthur's jaw.
Bone shattered beneath his knuckles. Arthur slumped back onto the rubble, his chest heaving, his gaze turning glassy and unfocused.
Mark stood over his brother, blood dripping from his grazed arm onto Arthur's ruined face.
"You're not family," Mark panted, his voice deadly and final. "You're just a monster with a checkbook."
Behind them, the secondary charges began to cook off in the upper levels. Deep structural rumbles shook the mountain.
"Mark! We have to go!" Clara screamed, grabbing his uninjured arm. "The whole facility is coming down!"
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Mark pulled Clara close, shielding her under his broad shoulder, and turned toward the emergency exit stairs as the walls around them began to disintegrate.
***
