The Iron Wings Of Marietta And The Girl With One Shoe
CHAPTER 6: THE FOUNDRY FLOOR
The thunderous roar of six unbaffled V-twin engines tore through the cavernous foundry like an artillery barrage, vibrating the thick wire-reinforced windowpanes until ancient glazing putty rained down like dust.
“Go!” Gabe yelled, his arm chopping down.
Dutch slammed the heavy electrical contactor switch on the wall. The heavy corrugated iron doors on the front bay rolled upward with a shrieking grind of metal on metal. Instantly, Bull hurled two military-surplus magnesium smoke grenades out onto the crushed-stone driveway. A billowing wall of blinding white, choking chemical fog rolled ten feet into the air, completely swallowing the high-beam headlights of Rusk’s cruisers and blinding the tactical wrecker crew.
With an earth-shaking crescendo of screaming rubber and roaring exhaust pipes, Bull, Dutch, and Miller blasted out of the bay in a tight, impenetrable wedge formation. Their heavy Harley-Davidsons tore across the gravel toward Front Street, cutting through the smoke like thunderbolts, drawing the spotlight beams and two pursuing patrol cruisers away from the foundry in a screeching high-speed chase down the river road.
Inside the rear of the bay, the silence returned—cold, terrifying, and razor-sharp.
“Move,” Gabe commanded, his hand clamping onto Nora’s elbow.
He scooped Avery into his left arm, her small arms locking around his neck with the fierce, desperate strength of a child who knew her life hung by a thread. In his right hand, Gabe carried a heavy four-foot forged steel pry bar and the waterproof satchel containing the laptop and the micro-SD card. Nora stayed glued to his shoulder, her snub-nosed revolver held down along the seam of her jeans, her eyes scanning the shadows above.
They descended the narrow iron spiral stairs into the lower foundry pump room—a cavernous, brick-lined vault beneath the river waterline where the Muskingum’s dark, swollen currents were drawn through massive iron intake grates to cool the foundry’s ancient casting beds. Anchored to a moss-slick timber piling bobbed an old aluminum work skiff, twelve feet long, powered by a battered twenty-five-horsepower Yamaha tiller outboard that Gabe had rebuilt with new reed valves two weeks prior.
Gabe lowered Avery into the center bench of the skiff, beneath the shadow of the gunwales. “Keep your head down under this canvas tarp, Avery. Whatever noise you hear, whatever shouts come down, you stay flat on the aluminum. Do you hear me?”
“I will, Mr. Mercer,” she whispered, her small face pale but resolute, clutching the coarse fabric of his cut vest tightly before curling beneath the olive-drab canvas. “I won’t make a sound.”
Gabe cast off the hemp mooring painter and stepped into the stern. He reached for the outboard’s nylon pull cord, his fingers wrapping around the t-handle. But before his shoulder could pull against the engine’s compression stroke, the heavy steel fire door at the top of the brick staircase crashed open with a violent, reverberating boom.
Deputy Wade Rusk stepped onto the iron catwalk twenty feet above the dark water, flanked by two armed private security contractors wearing black tactical plate carriers and Kevlar helmets. In his hands, Rusk held a customized Daniel Defense AR-15 carbine, fitted with a high-intensity SureFire weapon light that sliced through the dark vault like a surgeon’s scalpel.
The searing white beam landed directly on the center of the aluminum skiff.
“End of the line, Gabe,” Rusk shouted over the rushing sound of the river sluice, his voice echoing off the curved brick arches. “You really thought a bunch of greasy back-alley bike mechanics could outthink the county government? Step out of that boat right now and kick that satchel onto the catwalk stairs, or I put a three-round burst through the bottom of the hull.”
Nora began to raise her revolver toward the light, but Gabe caught her forearm with a lightning-fast grip, his fingers pressing into her wrist. “Don’t,” he muttered under his breath. “Level-four ceramic plates. You won’t pierce them, and he’ll drop you before your hammer falls.”
Gabe stood upright in the stern of the boat, illuminated by the blinding tactical beam. He did not raise his hands, nor did he flinch from the rifle barrel pointed at his chest.
“You killed your brother-in-arms, Wade,” Gabe said, his voice echoing with cold, unforgiving resonance through the flooded chamber. “Calvin helped you build the timber barn on your farm. He worked twenty-hour shifts to keep your department’s fleet on the road. And you had his seven-year-old child hunted through the brush like a dog.”
“Calvin was weak,” Rusk sneered, stepping down the first five rungs of the iron staircase, his boots ringing on the open grate. “He couldn’t see the big picture. This county has been dying for thirty years, Mercer. The chemical plants closed. The coal barges rot at the docks. The only thing moving real cash through these hollows is what comes out of the evidence locker. I offered him a third of the cut. He wanted to be a martyr with a moral compass.”
“And what was your plan for Avery?” Gabe asked, stepping deliberately across the center thwart to place his broad torso squarely between Rusk’s rifle and the canvas tarp covering the little girl.
“A tragic drowning,” Rusk said calmly, his finger resting along the trigger guard of the carbine. “A distraught runaway child, a known outlaw biker fleeing felony custody, an unfortunate capsizing in the flooded lock race. The narrative is already written and sitting on the county prosecutor’s desk. You don’t have a voice anymore, Gabe.”
Rusk’s finger shifted down to take up the slack on the match-grade trigger.
From beneath the olive canvas tarp in the skiff, Avery’s small voice suddenly rang out—piercing, high, and clear as a brass trumpet:
“The shoe had your name on it, Deputy Rusk!”
Rusk blinked, his tactical discipline breaking for a fatal quarter-second as his eyes flicked down to the bundle of canvas. “What did you say, you little brat?”
“Daddy wrote your name on the rubber sole with his yellow metal paint pen!” Avery shouted, thrusting her small hand out from beneath the canvas to point straight at his face. “He wrote the date you took the white bricks, and he said you were the one who broke the world!”
That quarter-second hesitation was all Gabe Mercer needed.
Gabe hurled the four-foot forged steel pry bar upward with the savage, pinpoint precision of an Olympic javelin thrower. The heavy iron rod spun end-over-end through the air, crashing directly into the high-pressure hydraulic valve manifold mounted on the brick wall three feet above Rusk’s head.
The two-inch industrial steel hydraulic fitting sheared clean off under three thousand pounds per square inch of compressed fluid pressure.
A volcanic geyser of boiling hydraulic oil and pressurized steam erupted from the fractured line with the deafening shriek of a jet engine, hitting Rusk and his two gunmen directly in the face and chest. Rusk screamed in sheer agony, dropping the rifle as the scalpel-sharp spray of scalding fluid tore through his tactical goggles and threw him violently backward over the catwalk railing.
