Chapter 32 - THE WATER MILL EXTRACTION
The roar of Goose Creek was deafening, swollen into a churning brown monster by four straight days of November rain. The wooden planks of the two-hundred-year-old mill groaned under the combined weight of the breaching squad and the hydraulic pressure of the river below.
Emily had nowhere left to run.
Her back was pressed against the massive, water-logged grindstone inside the lower mill chamber. Her fingernails were bloody, torn to the quick from forcing the rusted iron bolt on the rear escape hatch. In her arms, Lily wasn't crying anymore. The little girl had gone completely silent—that terrible, catatonic silence that Daniel had learned to fear more than screams. Her tiny arms were locked around Emily’s neck, her face buried into the collar of her mother’s soaked jacket.
"Nicole! The sluice gate!" Emily screamed over the roar of the water.
Nicole stood ten feet away, clutching an iron pry bar she had yanked from the mill's gears. Her face was bruised, her hair plastered to her forehead, but her eyes burned with the fury of a sister who had spent twenty-five years living in the shadows of a stolen life.
"I've got the gate!" Nicole yelled back, jamming the bar into the emergency release lever. "If I drop the timber, it floods the catwalk! They can't cross from the south!"
"Do it! DO IT NOW!"
The wooden exterior door blew apart. Wood splinters whipped through the air like shrapnel.
The point-man of Julian’s tactical team stepped through the breach, his helmet-mounted night-vision goggles glowing an eerie green. He raised an MPX submachine gun, aiming straight for Nicole’s shoulder. "Drop the iron! Hands where I can see them!"
*BANG.*
The operative didn't fire. A heavy .45 caliber hollow-point bullet punched through the wooden wall behind him, striking him square in the neck plate. The man choked, stumbling sideways off the slick wooden landing and falling twenty feet down into the raging, churning black water of the mill race.
Daniel burst through the side window, shattering old glass with his forearm, rolling onto the rotting floorboards. He was covered in mud, rain, and blood, but his eyes locked onto his wife and daughter.
"Daniel!" Emily sobbed, the sound torn from the deepest marrow of her bones.
"I have you. I'm here," Daniel gasped, pulling them both into his chest for half a second. He could feel Lily’s ribcage vibrating against him—her heart beating like a trapped hummingbird. "Lily-bug. Look at Daddy. Look at me."
Lily lifted her head slowly. Her lips were blue from the chill, her porcelain skin translucent under the flashlight beam. She looked at Daniel, her eyes wide, glassy, and impossibly ancient.
"Grandpa’s truck is outside," she whispered. Her voice was steady, terrifyingly devoid of child-like panic. "The man with the silver ring told Grandma he was dead. But Grandma lied. She lies about everything in the dark."
Before Daniel could process the words, the second operative rounded the corner, carbine leveled directly at Daniel's forehead.
"Down!" Nicole screamed, throwing her entire weight onto the iron pry bar.
The rusted chain snapped. The massive wooden sluice gate dropped like a guillotine. Thousands of gallons of diverted river water exploded into the upper chamber, blowing out the side retaining wall in a violent cascade. The rush of water caught the operative mid-stride, sweeping his legs out from under him and slamming him against the churning wooden paddle wheel with a sickening crunch.
"Go! OUT THE NORTH RUN!" Daniel roared, hauling Emily to her feet while Nicole grabbed Lily’s hand.
They scrambled out through the drainage breach just as the upper level of the mill began to collapse under the weight of the flood. They spilled into the mud on the opposite bank of the creek, scrambling up the steep embankment toward the pasture.
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Through the curtain of rain, the battered, steel-plated grille of Arthur’s pickup truck tore through the briars, sliding sideways to a stop ten feet in front of them. The passenger door swung open.
"Get in, Daniel!" Arthur shouted from behind the steering wheel, his weathered hands gripping the wheel like vice clamps, the barrel of his smoking M14 resting against the console. "Julian’s second intercept team is two miles down Old Dominion road! If we aren't past the gap in ten minutes, the Air National Guard will be running this hunt!"
