Final Fuse

Cynthia’s body slammed onto the iron mesh of the center cage with a force that knocked us both to our knees. The metal shrieked, bending downward toward the bubbling red lake below. A cloud of mist billowed up around us, thick and choking, smelling of burnt sugar and rotten copper.

"Get up, Valerie!" Garrison roared. He didn’t have a weapon, but he threw his entire upper body over my shoulders, using his weight to shield me as Cynthia whipped her long, jagged arm around in a wide arc.

The bone-like talons caught the side of Garrison’s vest, ripping the reinforced nylon open and drawing a deep line of dark red blood across his ribs. He grabbed her mutated wrist with both hands, his muscles bulging as he tried to force her arm back toward the deck.

"You can’t save her, Garrison!" Cynthia shrieked. Her voice split into that horrible, multi-layered echo that rattled the iron beams overhead. The black fluid leaked freely from her ruined eyes, sizzling as it dripped onto the hot metal grate. "She belongs to the pit! Just like Father! Just like the rest of them!"

"I am not saving her from you," Garrison panted, his face pressing close to hers as he strained against her inhuman strength. "I am saving her from the mountain."

A loud, piercing alarm shrieked from the control housing. Warning. Thermal core breach in forty seconds. Structural collapse imminent.

The walkway beneath us groaned. The hydraulic chains holding the center cage snapped one by one, the iron links pinging through the air like loose bullets. The entire platform tilted at a sharp, forty-five-degree angle toward the boiling red lake.

"Valerie, the ladder!" Garrison shouted, his grip on Cynthia’s wrist slipping as the platform lurched sideways. "Move!"

I scrambled backward on my elbows, my boots kicking uselessly against the oily, sloped iron mesh. I reached out with my left hand, my fingers scraping against the hot rungs of the emergency ladder hanging just a few feet above the drop.

Cynthia hissed, a sound that belonged to an animal rather than a human, and kicked Garrison hard in the chest. He flew backward, sliding down the inclined walkway until his hand caught the base of the shattered control console.

Cynthia turned her ruined face toward me, her jagged talons reaching out to pin my ankle to the grate. "Where are you going, little sister? We still have to share the blood."

"Cynthia, look down," I whispered, my voice shaking behind my mask.

She paused, her pupils shifting downward for a fraction of a second.

The red lake below us wasn’t bubbling anymore. The immense pressure from the manual override had forced the entire volume of liquid back into the primary intake manifolds, creating a massive, unstable pocket of compressed superheated gas right beneath the floor plates. A bright, blinding white fracture line split the center of the crimson pool.

Garrison didn’t hesitate. He reached down to the ruptured hydraulic line beside the console, grabbing a loose, high-voltage copper cable that was sparking wildly against the floor. He didn’t care about the shock. He wrapped his bare hand around the raw wire and drove the sparking copper tip straight into the fracture hole of the pit.

The reaction was instantaneous. A deafening roar tore through the mountain core, louder than a hundred explosions. A wall of white-hot fire erupted from the floor, swallowing the red lake and instantly turning the entire lower chamber into an incinerator.

Cynthia shrieked, the sound cutting off mid-air as the blast wave caught her mutated frame, hurling her backward into the heart of the fire.

"Valerie, climb!" Garrison screamed, his voice barely audible over the screaming metal and the roaring flames. He was still holding the console base, his legs dangling over the expanding abyss as the walkway completely detached from the wall.

"Garrison, take my hand!" I screamed, pulling myself up to the second rung of the ladder and reaching downward with both arms, ignoring the heat searing my jacket.

He looked up at me through the wall of white smoke and flying iron shards. A calm, absolute peace settled over his soot-covered face. His fingers released their grip on the console.

"Live, Valerie," he whispered.

“No!!!”

The floor beneath him vanished completely, dropping into the white-hot core as the mountain granite caved inward with a final, earth-shattering crunch. The blast door at the top of the ladder blew open, a rush of cool, clean air from the surface sweeping down the shaft and washing over my face.

I pulled myself through the opening, collapsing onto the concrete floor of the upper garage just as the lower levels sealed themselves under millions of tons of solid rock.

The silence that followed was permanent.

I lay on the cold stone, staring up at the gray morning light filtering through the broken surface vents, the rubber mask slipping from my face as I took my first real breath of the outside world.