The fight had gone out Scalpel, but there was still a little bit of flight left in him. He heaved himself onto his side, ignoring the crunching noise that could only be parts of his own skeleton grinding together, and then got to hands and knees. He couldn’t seem to get his feet under him, but thought he might be able to crawl, and so he did.
The passage out of the stair chamber lay just ahead and he plunged into its dark depths. He measured out the journey in a rhythm of grunts; after about twenty such agonized exhalations, he saw a light behind him.
Bones made no sound as he walked, but Scalpel could judge the pace of his pursuit by the increasing brightness.
He’s playing with me, Scalpel thought angrily, but there was nothing to be done about it. He had to keep going, keep moving.
He reached another of the round chambers, and was confronted by a choice of paths. Which way? He had been following Ray during the ingress and while he vaguely remembered that his employer had said something about making the Sign of the Cross, the significance of the statement eluded him.
Don’t stop. Keep moving.
He crossed the chamber to the opposite arched opening and kept going. Bones was only a few steps behind, but made no effort to close the remaining distance. Instead, after taking only a few steps into the passage, he stopped.
It took Scalpel a few seconds to process this change. He kept going, deeper into the tunnel, then finally turned. “What are you waiting for?”
Bones shone the light in Scalpel’s face, blinding him momentarily. “I want you to understand why this is happening.”
Scalpel knew why. “What? The girl? Is that it?”
“Her name was Gabby.”
“She sold you out.” Every word was an effort, forced out through teeth gritted together against the pain.
“Then that was between me and her.” The light got brighter, closer. “This is between me and you.”
Some part of Scalpel wanted to get up, stand his ground, face death on his feet…but the reptile brain controlled his body now. He shied away from the light and squirmed further into the passage. If Bones wasn’t going to come after him, maybe he could get away.
It did not occur to him until he heard a heard a loud click followed by a strange noise that seemed to come from behind the walls, that there might be another reason why Bones was holding back.
Bones looked on impassively as the fires took Scalpel. He felt no deep satisfaction or solace in the man’s immolation. He wasn’t even sure why he felt such a compulsion to avenge Gabby, especially if the accusations against her were true, as they seemed to be. He had liked her, and maybe it was the fact that he had let those emotions make him vulnerable that troubled him the most. Maybe if he hadn’t been distracted by her advances….
Doesn’t matter.
The only reason he lingered to watch Scalpel burn was to ensure that, this time, the man stayed dead. When the supply of oil in the Templar trap finally ran out and the flames surrounding the smoking corpse flickered out, he turned away and struck the image forever from his memory.
CHAPTER 25
The blast erased most of John Lee Ray from existence. What parts of him that were not vaporized by the explosion joined with the spray of steel shrapnel that shredded the entire upper section of the rail car.
On the lowermost tier, Dane and Alex were sheltered from the deadly spray, but the concussion in the enclosed space felt like a slap from God. Dane had covered up and remembered to open his mouth at the last second, a precaution, albeit a desperate one, to survive the sudden expansion of air spaces in the body from the heat caused by the overpressure wave. It must have worked because he didn’t die, but for a few seconds he thought that might have been a preferable outcome.
His awareness returned almost as abruptly as it had left. He felt Alex moving beneath him….
She’s still alive. Good
But then he felt something else as well, a tremor that vibrated up through the floor. He struggled to a sitting position. The damage to the car was so extensive, he felt a momentary dislocation. All the windows had blown out and the roof had peeled back like the lid of a sardine can, opening the car to the night sky. A blast of frigid air hit him in the face, and only then did he finally grasp what all of these disconnected sensations were telling him.
“We’re moving.”
Alex stirred and then looked up at him. She seemed unhurt and after looking around for a moment, her mouth moved but Dane couldn’t tell if she’d said anything. He got to his feet and peered through the nearest side window.
The dark landscape was rushing by, much faster than he’d seen it move during his earlier ascent. Dangerously fast. They weren’t just moving, he realized, they were out of control.
With a steadying hand against the sidewall, he clambered up the steps to the damaged upper portion. The end of the car had been almost completely destroyed. Nothing remained of the operator’s booth. Through the gaping hole, he saw that the open air platform he’d climbed onto only a few moments before, was now dangling precariously, held in place by a single twisted metal bracket. As it bounced and clattered noisily along the railway ties, he glimpsed something else trailing behind the car, a length of cable, frayed at the end where the platform had severed it.
Now he understood why they were moving. The funicular functioned by connecting two equally weighted rail cars with a cable; the cars acted as counterweights for each other, providing both motive and braking force with just a little extra energy from the drive motor at the top of the line. With the drive cable broken and the onboard safety brakes evidently disabled in the explosion, the car was essentially a roller coaster, hurtling down the track, accelerating to the physical limits of its rolling wheels, which far exceeded safe operating speed. Dane didn’t know the length of the upper line. The lower line, from Schwandegg to Mulenen was just over a mile, and he recalled the operator telling the passengers that the upper section was shorter.
Calculations raced through his head. If the car was traveling just thirty miles an hour, they had less than a minute before reached the end of the line. He and Alex might survive the ensuing collision, might not, but his bigger concern was the passing loop at the halfway point.
The funicular was a single track — a pair of rails — except in the middle where the line split briefly to allow the cars to pass each other. At normal operating speed, the diversion was barely a bump in the road, but at terminal velocity, there was a good chance the car would jump the tracks and go tumbling down the mountain. That was something he didn’t think was they would survive, and he had less than thirty seconds to do something about it.
Jump?
The tracks were elevated, so if they tried jumping out the side, they would fall maybe a couple stories onto an uncertain surface, while still carrying all the forward momentum of their journey. They could jump onto the tracks behind the car, and probably suffer nothing worse than a lot of broken bones. Not his first choice, but an option.
Stop the car, or slow it down. How?
He looked around the destroyed interior for anything he could throw out in front of the wheels to create some friction braking, but saw nothing…except for Hancock’s body.
He leaped down the stairs and hastily searched the pouches on Hancock’s vest, found what he was looking for.
“Get up to the top,” he shouted. “And find whatever cover you can.”
Alex stared at him blankly until she saw him prep the grenade. “You’re not—”