“Colt, we gave you adrenaline,” said Tucker, starting to lose his cool. “You’re all fired up, but it’ll pass. You can’t get into a fight, you’ll die.”
I grabbed his gun right out of his hand and turned it on him. “Don’t tell me what I can do!” I yelled. Everyone jumped back. I struggled to my feet, using a tree to support me when my bandaged leg refused to. The rage boiled up inside me, expanding with each booming crash of my heart. These weak sons of bitches... “Unload the gold!”
Their eyes bugged out. “What?!” asked Tucker.
“Unload the goddamn gold!” I yelled, the gun leveled right between his eyes. “You can take one bar each. That’s adequate fucking compensation, if the money’s all you care about. The rest of it stays here, with me. I’ll build a new militia, with men I can trust!”
They cursed and pleaded and tried to talk me round, but I just kept the gun pointing right at their heads, my face stony. They slowly unloaded the heavy bags of gold, each man taking one shining bar for himself. Then they climbed aboard the chopper and the pilot started her up.
“Colt, please!” Tucker leaned out of the open door and yelled over the sound of the blades. “Even if you stop them, how are you going to make it out alone? The roads are still blocked.”
“I won’t be alone,” I told him. I looked around. “Where’s Seth?”
The men all shook their heads. “He never showed, Colt.”
The rage rose higher, consuming me completely. Traitor! I slammed the door and stepped back. Watched as the chopper took off.
That bastard Irish doctor. He’d taken everything from me: my plan, my men, now my son.
I limped over to a pickup and started it up. I only needed one good leg to drive.
He’d taken everything from me. I was going to take everything from him.
64
Amy
WE’VE BEEN driving too long. We were on the mountain now, right under the cliff that overhung the town, but we hadn’t seen any sign of the van. What if we’d missed it? It was black, if they’d hidden it in the trees beside the road we could have driven straight past it. And any second now it would explode and the whole side of the mountain would come down on us. Should we turn back? But what if the van was just around the next corner? I wanted to scream just to release the tension—
There!
They’d hadn’t even tried to hide it. It was just parked by the side of the road, two wheels on the pavement. I skidded to a stop beside it and we jumped down into the thick snow. We each grabbed one of the rear doors and threw them open—
I’d seen the crates and the wires back at the camp. But now they were just background: the only thing that mattered was the digital clock.
It’s hard to explain what it feels like, to see something counting down the time until you die. Death is always so distant you can push it out of your mind or so sudden you don’t see it coming. This was mercilessly exact, each change in the crimson digits another of our final seconds gone. Corrigan and I both stared at it, transfixed.
We had one minute and thirty-two seconds left on this earth.
One minute and thirty-one seconds.
One minute thirty.
We stepped forward, then looked at each other helplessly. Corrigan’s hands were doing the same as mine: grasping at thin air, aching with the need to do something, to stop it, but afraid to touch it.
“There’s got to be a way to turn it off,” said Corrigan. The stress made the Irish thick in his voice. “The people who set it, if they needed to change it….”
I nodded and tried to say right, but it came out as a weak croak. My eyes were going everywhere, searching for something marked off, but it was just a jumble of wires and circuits.
Whoever had made the thing had left their tools strewn over the bottom of the van. Corrigan grabbed a pair of wire cutters, turned them over and over in his hands as he thought... then handed them to me. I looked at him in horror. Me?!
“You have steadier hands,” he told me.
I made the mistake of looking at the clock just as the numbers slipped from 1:00 to 0:59.
I’ve killed us. I had no idea which wire to cut, or if that would even stop it. We should have stopped and turned back when Corrigan said. Now it was too late: even if we started driving now, we still wouldn’t make it out of the path of the landslide.
What am I doing here? The panic was rising up from my chest and taking control. I couldn’t breathe, my lungs moving in painful fits and starts. This is not my world. This is not what I do. Why had I ever left my operating theater? If I’d just stayed there, in my safe little burrow….