Chapter 5 - The Oxygen and the Oath
The air inside the nursery tasted thick, cold, and entirely devoid of life. The faint, sweetish odor of Halon gas hung heavily in the air, wrapping around the furniture like an invisible shroud.
I didn't care about the poison burning my lungs. I dropped the crowbar, hit the floor on my knees, and scrambled across the nursery rug.
"Rosalyn! Camille!" I yelled, scooping both limp bodies into my arms.
Rosalyn stirred weakly, her eyelids fluttering open. "Daddy…?" she whispered, her voice a fragile rasp.
"I've got you, sweetheart. I've got you," I choked out, tears finally breaking free, hot and blinding against my cheeks.
I scrambled toward the barred window, where Martha was still swinging the iron pipe with desperate energy. With a loud crack, the rusted iron bars—weakened by years of weather and finally compromised by the heavy pipe—snapped loose from the brick frame. Martha shoved her hands through the open gap, grabbing Camille from my arms and pulling her out into the cool, clean night air of the courtyard.
"Give me the other one!" Martha shouted, her voice rough, urgent, and fiercely maternal.
I handed Rosalyn through the window, following them out just as Calvin dragged his tactical frame into the room, coughing violently and pulling emergency rebreather masks from his vest.
Out in the open air under the vast, starlit Nashville sky, Camille gasped, drawing in a massive, ragged breath of fresh oxygen before letting out a loud, healthy wail. Rosalyn clung to my neck like a drowning child, her small, bird-like ribs heaving as she breathed in the damp night air.
Martha knelt beside us, her weathered hands gently rubbing Camille’s back, whispering soothing, incoherent words in a soft Southern drawl.
"You're Martha," I said, looking up at the homeless woman through a haze of shock and exhaustion. "You've been feeding them for months."
"Someone had to," Martha replied quietly, her dark eyes flashing with an unexpected, fierce dignity. "I used to work the kitchens here twenty years ago, before this place became a fortress. I knew the old blueprints. When I saw those little girls pressing their faces against the glass, looking like skeletons while that witch Hilda threw away thousand-dollar food receipts, I knew what was happening. I couldn't break the doors, but I could slip them broth through the bars."
"Why didn't you come to me?" I asked, my voice cracking. "Why didn't you stop me on the driveway?"
Martha let out a dry, bitter laugh. "And tell you what? That the billionaire master of the estate was too blind to see his own kids starving? You would’ve had your guards throw me in a cell before I finished the sentence. It took seeing you on the brink to make you open your eyes, Arthur."
Before I could answer, a loud, thunderous explosion echoed from the western side of the estate.
The ground beneath us shuddered. A thick plume of dark, greasy smoke billowed into the night sky from the subterranean access tunnel near the old storm shelter.
Calvin stumbled out through the French doors of the main house, his face blackened with soot, coughing into his sleeve.
"Mr. Vance!" Calvin shouted over the ringing in our ears. "Hilda blew the subterranean corridor! She detonated a localized seismic charge to bring down the vault ceiling! She’s trying to bury Elena!"
My blood ran cold. The girls—safe for the moment in Martha’s arms—began to cry harder at the deafening noise.
"Take the girls to the armored vehicle at the east gate," I ordered Calvin, my voice dropping into an icy, dead calm as I gripped the Sig Sauer in my hand. "Lock down the perimeter. No one leaves."
"Arthur, you can't go down there alone—" Calvin started.
"I didn't survive two years of living in a lie to let her bury my wife twice," I snapped, turning away and sprinting toward the smoking ruin of the basement entrance.
The air grew hot and thick with dust as I descended the ruined stone steps into the subterranean corridor. The concrete walls were cracked, spiderwebbed with deep fissures from the blast. Dust hung in the air like thick fog, illuminated only by the frantic beam of my weapon's tactical flashlight.
I reached the storm shelter. The heavy steel vault door—the one Hilda had welded and polished—was now blasted half off its reinforced hydraulic hinges, leaning precariously against the fractured concrete frame.
I kicked the door inward, stepping over heaps of fallen rubble and rebar.
"Elena!" I called out, sweeping the flashlight beam across the dark, ruined interior of the vault.
May you like
Silence answered me, broken only by the steady, ominous drip of water from a severed pipe and the crackle of exposed electrical wires.
Then, near the far corner of the vault, beneath a massive slab of fallen concrete and tangled rebar, I saw a pale, bloodstained hand reach out.
