Chapter 14 - Shattered Reflections
The deafening crack of gunfire echoed through the iron trusses. Bullets ricocheted off the brick kilns with terrifying shrieks. Thomas didn't hesitate; he charged out from the flank, swinging a heavy three-foot iron spanner he had grabbed from the kiln floor.
He slammed the iron bar into the nearest guard's shoulder, sending the man sprawling into the burning pallets. The guard's weapon skittered across the wet concrete.
""Get to the access tunnel!"" Thomas screamed at Marcus, pointing toward the open trapdoor twenty yards behind them.
Marcus scrambled across the floor, lifting Lily with one arm and using a pocket knife to slash through the zip-ties binding Sarah's wrists. Sarah collapsed into his side, gasping for air, but Marcus hauled her upright, driving them both toward the safety of the brick shadows.
The leader of the mercenary team recovered his footing, raising a heavy automatic pistol, his face illuminated by the raging pallet fire. He leveled the barrel straight at Marcus's back. ""Nobody leaves this floor alive!""
Thomas didn't think about his pension, his forty years of safe driving records, or the quiet retirement he had planned by the coast. He threw himself forward, tackling the leader at the waist just as the weapon discharged.
The bullet ripped through the meat of Thomas’s shoulder with a searing shock of white-hot agony. The force of the impact carried both men crashing through a temporary wooden barrier, tumbling over the edge of the second-story foundry platform and plunging downward toward the lower scrap reclamation pits below.
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They hit the pile of powdered industrial sand and crushed silica with a violent, bone-jarring crash. Thomas was thrown clear, gasping for breath, the sharp pain in his left shoulder turning his vision gray.
Above him, on the iron catwalk, the sound of a vintage diesel engine suddenly roared through the broken walls of the factory. Arthur had driven the heavy green Crown Coach straight through the corrugated side doors of the plant, its solid steel bumper crushing through support timbers and scattering the remaining gunmen in a storm of dust and splintered wood.
