Chapter 11 - Free Fall
The impact was deafening. The train pulverized the barrier, exploding into an incandescent fireball of diesel fuel and twisted iron that lit up the night sky over the harbor.
Lucas and Clara flew through the air, caught in the violent vacuum of the blast wave. The heat scorched the back of Lucas's neck, the shockwave driving the breath from his lungs as they plummeted toward the black, churning water below.
Lucas locked his grip around Clara, twisting his body in midair to absorb the brutal kinetic shock.
They hit the harbor surface like concrete.
The freezing water knocked the air completely out of Lucas’s chest. The dark sea swallowed them instantly, pulling them into a turbulent vortex of sinking metal debris and flaming fuel floating on the surface.
Darkness pressed in. The cold was agonizing, paralyzing his wounded arm. His leather belt still bound them together, but Clara was limp, knocked unconscious by the initial impact.
Swim, his mind commanded. Move, Captain.
Using his one uninjured arm and kicking furiously against the dragging weight of his soaked uniform, Lucas fought his way toward the flickering light above. Every muscle screamed in protest; his lungs burned with suffocating agony.
He broke the surface, gasping violently, pulling Clara’s head above the oily water. Around them, burning fragments of the train hissed as they died in the cold harbor.
Clara sputtered, coughing up sea brine, her eyes fluttering open. She was alive.
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In her hands, clutched with white-knuckle desperation against her chest, was the waterproof satchel containing the hard drive.
Lucas turned toward the distant wooden pilings of an abandoned pier fifty yards away. But as he began to swim, a blinding searchlight beam snapped onto them from the pierhead above.
