Chapter 9 - The Final Stand
Through the billowing gray smoke of the shattered doorway, Marcus Collins stepped into the bunker. His face was smeared with mud and gunpowder, his eyes wide with a manic, psychotic rage. In his right hand, he held a sleek tactical pistol raised toward Vance.
"Game over, Sheriff," Collins snarled, stepping over the fallen metal door.
Vance brought his shotgun up, but Collins was faster—he fired a shot that caught Vance in the right shoulder. The impact threw the older Sheriff back against the wall, his shotgun clattering to the concrete floor out of reach.
"No!" Elena screamed. She grabbed the heavy iron poker from the corner and lunged at Collins with all the strength left in her battered body.
Collins swung his left arm around with brutal force, backhandling Elena across the face. She crashed to the floor, her lip bursting open, her vision spinning in darkness. Her phone slipped from her hand, rolling across the floor and stopping at Collins’s feet.
Collins looked down at the phone, then raised his heavy tactical boot and stomped down on it with all his weight. The glass screen shattered into a thousand tiny fragments, the internal components crunching under the iron heel.
"There goes your precious evidence," Collins laughed, a hollow, psychotic sound. He pointed his pistol directly at Elena’s forehead as she lay bleeding on the ground. "You should have stayed in that bedroom, Elena. You should have learned your place."
Elena looked up into the barrel of the gun. The terror that had controlled her for months was gone, replaced by a cold, unwavering defiance. She looked Collins directly in his eyes.
"It’s already uploaded, Marcus," she whispered, a bloody smile touching her lips. "The whole world knows what you are."
Collins’s smile vanished, replaced by an expression of pure, unadulterated shock. He clicked off the safety of his pistol, his finger tightening around the trigger. "Then you go first."
THUNDER!
The roof of the bunker seemed to explode as a massive, twin-engine Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter descended out of the fog directly above the summit. Its powerful searchlights flooded the interior of the bunker with blinding, blue-white light.
"FEDERAL AGENTS! DROP YOUR WEAPONS IMMEDIATELY!" a voice roared over a massive loudspeaker system attached to the helicopter.
Through the shattered doorway, four tactical operators dressed in olive-drab federal SWAT gear rappelled down from the hovering aircraft, landing instantly on the rocky summit.
"Drop the weapon! Do it NOW!" a federal operator bellowed, aiming an M4 rifle through the doorway directly at Collins's chest.
Collins froze, his body shaking violently with rage and panic. He looked at Elena, then at the dying Sheriff on the floor, and finally at the overwhelming line of federal rifles pointed at his heart.
"Drop it, Collins," Vance croaked from the floor, clutching his bleeding shoulder, a grim smile on his battle-weary face. "You’re done."
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Slowly, agonizingly, Collins let his fingers loosen. The tactical pistol slipped from his hand, falling onto the shattered remains of Elena's phone with a dull metallic thud.
Two federal agents rushed into the bunker, violently slamming Collins onto the cold concrete floor, pulling his arms behind his back, and snapping heavy steel federal handcuffs around his wrists—this time, with permanent, inescapable finality.
