Chapter 24 - A Mother's Counterstrike
"Take one more step toward that drone and I pull this pin!" Sarah shouted.
Evelyn stopped. Sarah pulled her hand from her heavy winter coat, holding up a military-grade thermite grenade she had taken from the Interpol equipment stash.
"If this grenade ignites," Sarah said, her voice deadly calm, "the sub-zero chemical reaction will instantly vaporize every digital server drive in this room, along with all the master genetic research you spent forty years building."
Victoria panicked, drawing a sidearm from her coat. "Shoot her, Mother! Kill them both!"
"Touch her and we all burn!" I roared, lunging forward with every ounce of strength left in my battered body.
I tackled Victoria into the stone fireplace. Her gun discharged into the wooden ceiling beams as we crashed into the glowing embers. Sparks flared everywhere. Victoria shrieked as her bandages caught fire, and she stumbled backward, crashing through the glass floor-to-ceiling balcony doors and falling into the howling abyss below.
Evelyn gasped, backing toward the ledge, holding baby Leo tightly against her chest. "Eleanor, stop! You don't know what you're doing! If you destroy my research, humanity loses its greatest cure!"
"I don't care about your cure!" I screamed, stepping over the shattered glass onto the freezing balcony plank. "I care about my children! Give me my son!"
"He is my legacy!" Evelyn shrieked.
"He is a baby!" I yelled back over the roar of the blizzard and the thundering drone blades.
Sarah dropped to the floor and pulled the thermite pin, dropping the glowing incendiary device directly into Evelyn's master server bank inside the room. A blinding, white-hot explosion of thousand-degree flames erupted, melting the metal racks and showering the room in molten copper.
Evelyn screamed as forty years of her life's work dissolved into ash in a matter of seconds. In her momentary shock, her grip on baby Leo slipped.
May you like
I dove across the ice-slick balcony planks, catching my newborn son by his swaddling blanket a split second before he could slip off the edge. I pulled him tight against my chest, shielding his tiny body with my own jacket.
Behind us, the structural supports of the heavy stone chimney crumbled under the extreme thermal blast. The grand chalet roof caved in, sending tons of timber and stone crashing down onto the cliff ledge. Evelyn looked at me one last time—a look of profound horror and realization—before the avalanche of debris swept her off the mountain peak and into the dark, bottomless chasm below.
