I’d Been Told I Was Paralyzed for Fourteen Months—Then One Housemaid Made Me Feel My Leg and Whispered, “You Felt That.” / Chapter 57 / 60

Chapter 57 - The Black Laboratory

The subterranean laboratory was an immaculate, clinical nightmare. Stainless steel tables, rows of humming centrifuges, and towering pressurized glass vats filled with a boiling, deep-purple compound: weaponized Centraline-B in its raw liquid state.

Standing behind an elevated, bulletproof console was a man with slicked-back gray hair and a long surgical scar running from his temple to his jawline.

Dr. Damian Cole. The younger brother of Richard Cole.

"Maxwell Vance," Damian purred through the console's intercom, his fingers flying across the keyboards without looking up. "My brother was an idiot. He thought a micro-dose in an invalid’s tea was power. I’ve turned your father's poison into an airborne empire."

Maxwell advanced across the tile floor, his rifle steady. "Where is Croft?"

"The Architect is offshore on his yacht, watching this city burn," Damian sneered. "You're too late, Maxwell. The automated purge sequence has begun. Five tons of pressurized Centraline gas will vent through Valparaíso’s municipal intake in two minutes. A hundred thousand people will freeze in their own bodies."

"You're dying with them," Maxwell said, taking up the trigger slack.

"I don't think so."

Damian slammed his palm onto a red pneumatic lever.

A ten-inch slab of ballistic glass slammed down from the ceiling, sealing Damian inside the command booth. Simultaneously, overhead ventilation nozzles hissed violently, spraying a dense, purple fog into the laboratory.

Raw, aerosolized Centraline.

"Breathe it in, Maxwell!" Damian screamed through the glass. "Feel your nerves rot! Feel the chair taking you back!"

Maxwell held his breath, but the vapor was caustic, burning his eyes and stinging the exposed skin of his neck. His fingertips began to tingle with that horrifying, familiar numbness. The living death was clawing at his motor cortex. He fired six armor-piercing rounds into the glass, but the bullets only left frosted spiderwebs across the thick polymer.

Outside on the crane, Martha tapped into the lab's security feed via her handheld tablet. Seeing the purple cloud, panic seized her chest.

"MAX!" her voice screamed in his earpiece. "The ceiling! Top right quadrant! There’s an emergency liquid nitrogen coolant manifold! Shoot the primary release valve! Liquid nitrogen will flash-freeze the organic compounds in the vapor!"

Maxwell's vision began to tunnel. His left leg buckled, his knee hitting the tiles. But Martha’s voice was the lifeline it had always been. He refused to die on his knees.

With a guttural roar, Maxwell raised his rifle with one arm and emptied the magazine into the brass manifold above.

BANG-BANG-BANG!

The pipe ruptured. Thousands of gallons of sub-zero liquid nitrogen erupted into the chamber. The temperature plunged instantly to minus one hundred degrees. The purple mist crystallized mid-air, falling to the floor like harmless violet frost.

The sudden thermal shock made the ballistic glass brittle.

Maxwell rose, frosted like a demon rising from an icy tomb. He stepped forward, swung the heavy butt of his rifle, and shattered the compromised glass into a million jagged shards.

He dragged Damian Cole out of the booth by his throat, slamming him onto the console.