Chapter 6 - The Rust Belt Line
The darkness smelled of sulfur, damp soil, and burning insulation. Ava woke choking on pulverized drywall dust. Her vision was a blur of spinning shadows, every nerve in her left leg screaming in absolute agony. She was lying on a dirty canvas tarp inside the hollow belly of a rusted cargo container.
Above her, the rhythmic clack-clack, clack-clack of iron wheels on rails vibrated through the floor. A freight train. They were moving.
"Stay down," a voice rasped from the gloom.
Cole was sitting against the corrugated metal wall, his shirt soaked through with dark crimson. He had hastily wrapped a dirty utility rag around his midsection, his breath wheezing through clenched teeth. On an upturned wooden crate between them lay a military field-dressing kit, an unbent scalpel, and a bottle of iodine.
"Where is my mother?" Ava choked out, her voice cracked and raw. "Where is she?!"
Cole didn't answer immediately. He struck a flare, illuminating the cargo container with an eerie, flickering red glow. "She brought the ceiling down on him. She bought us an hour. Maybe two."
"She’s dead?" Ava’s chest seized, hot tears carving paths through the gray dust on her cheeks. "You let her die!"
"Karen has survived three government purges, kid," Cole muttered, leaning forward and opening the scalpel package. "If anyone crawled out of that rubble alive, it’s her. But Richard crawled out too. I saw him running along the embankment before we hit the switcher yard. He’s tracking the beacon."
Ava shrank back, pressing her spine against the freezing steel wall. "What beacon? You said it wasn't a tracker!"
"It isn't a passive tracker," Cole said, his eyes cold and clinical under the crimson flare. "It’s a biometric transponder. The moment your heart rate exceeded one hundred and sixty beats per minute during the explosion, it tripped an active distress ping. Every private defense contractor within a five-hundred-mile radius has your coordinates triangulated right now."
Ava looked down at her swollen, bruised leg. The skin over her tibia was purple, taut, and hot to the touch. "You’re going to cut it out."
"I have to," Cole said simply, picking up the bottle of antiseptic. "If that train hits the state border with that signal transmitting, an Apache gunship will turn this cargo car into Swiss cheese. Bite down on your jacket."
"No... please, no! There’s no anesthesia!" Ava wept, curling inward.
Cole caught her shoulders with surprising strength, pinning her flat against the tarp. "Listen to me, Ava! You want to know why your mother lied to you your whole life? You want to know why Richard kept you caged?"
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He thrust the glowing red flare toward her face, his gaze burning into hers. "You aren't Karen's daughter. You're the daughter of Marcus Vance—the man who engineered the global kill switch. And that little piece of metal in your leg is the only reason this country hasn't collapsed into total blackout."
Before Ava could comprehend the words, the heavy roof of the cargo container screeched, metal groaning under the weight of someone landing heavily on top of the train car.
