Chapter 31 - The Casket Beneath the Concrete
The tactical fire was surgical and relentless. The rounds tore through the fiberglass panels of the airlock, chewing through wiring harnesses and showering Ethan and Leo in plastic debris and sparks.
Evelyn dropped behind an iron pillar, returning fire with three rapid shots. A muffled grunt sounded from the catwalk above, followed by the heavy crash of a tactical operator tumbling over the rail, his weapon clattering across the concrete floor.
"Move!" Ethan yelled to Evelyn. "To the emergency hatch! Sector Nine!"
"There is no exit through Sector Nine!" Clara’s voice screamed through the gunfire from somewhere deep in the shadows near the rear wall. "It’s a dead end! It’s the vault!"
"Then we make a stand there!" Ethan grabbed Julian by the collar of his sweater, tucking the four-year-old under his right arm while holding eighteen-month-old Leo in his left. He was carrying both of his sons, running blind through the crimson-lit corridors as bullets chipped concrete from the walls around them.
Evelyn covered their retreat, firing until her slide locked back empty. She dropped the magazine, slapped in a fresh one, and sprinted after Ethan into the narrow, unlit corridor marked *09 — BIOMETRIC QUARANTINE*.
Ethan kicked the heavy security door open with his steel-toed boot, stumbling inside. Evelyn threw herself in behind him, slamming the heavy iron blast door shut and dropping the mechanical drop-bar across the frame.
Heavy rounds immediately began hammering against the exterior steel of the door, producing dull, ringing dents, but the four-inch hardened alloy held.
"We’re boxed in," Evelyn panted, sliding down against the cold metal door, clutching her side where a spray of concrete shards had lacerated her ribs. "We have maybe two minutes before they bring up a thermal breaching charge."
Ethan didn't reply. He set Julian and Leo down on a rubber floor mat and turned his flashlight toward the center of the room.
Sector Nine was not a laboratory. It was not a medical clinic.
It was a crypt.
In the center of the hexagonal concrete room sat a polished bronze sarcophagus, identical in every dimension to the casket Ethan had watched lower into the ground at St. Jude’s Cemetery eighteen months ago. But this casket was connected to massive cryogenic chillers, vacuum pumps, and a glowing biometric control console displaying a flatlining vital telemetry stream.
"What is this?" Evelyn whispered, horrified.
Ethan stepped toward the casket, his boots crunching on the frost that coated the floor. He wiped a layer of rime from the glass viewing port inset into the bronze lid.
Inside the casket lay the body of a woman.
She was preserved in a bath of freezing, pale-blue synthetic gel, her features peaceful, unblemished, wearing the ivory satin dress Clara had chosen for their wedding day ten years ago.
Ethan swung his flashlight beam toward the shadows in the corner of Sector Nine.
There, leaning against the damp concrete wall, holding a diagnostic tablet with blood dripping from her shoulder, stood the woman who had walked down from the catwalk.
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"If Clara is in that box," Ethan said, his voice dropping into a deadly, razor-sharp whisper as he leveled his revolver directly between the eyes of the woman standing before him, "then who the hell are you?"
***
