Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 88587 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 443(@200wpm)___ 354(@250wpm)___ 295(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88587 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 443(@200wpm)___ 354(@250wpm)___ 295(@300wpm)
I looked desperately towards the darkness where I’d last seen Beckett. What the hell is going on? All I knew was, something was wrong. I needed to go after her, but if I took my hands away, Earl was dead for sure. She wouldn’t want that. She’d tell me not to. But with every second that passed, I could feel her slipping away from me. It was Chicago, all over again. She was in danger and I was stuck here working—
I saw Bartell approaching with an armful of supplies. “I need you to take over!” I yelled. “I have to go!”
He looked at me in shock, then frowned. Shit. I didn’t have time to argue with him, or explain—
Then he saw my expression and his face softened. “Go,” he told me. He snapped on some gloves and took my place. “I got this.”
I slapped him on the arm in thanks and ran. Where the hell is she? I ran through the darkened hallways, yelling her name. When she didn’t answer, I got really scared.
Then I felt the wind. Since Beckett had smashed through the main doors, the temperature had dropped and dropped as freezing air surged in from outside. But now there seemed to be an actual current: the wind was blowing in through the front of the ER and out—
I jogged around a corner and saw the open rear door. Raced outside yelling Beckett’s name….
It was snowing thick and fast. There was only one vehicle moving, a pickup speeding away from the hospital. And inside, twisting around to look back at me as they heard me yell...Colt and Beckett.
“No!” I called uselessly. I ran after them—
But it was too late. Their taillights disappeared into the blizzard... and they were gone.
54
Amy
FOUR MEN were waiting for us at the camp. They were all carrying guns and that was scary, but what was truly terrifying was the way they reacted when they saw Colt. They snapped to attention, but it wasn’t with that look of fierce pride I’d seen in soldiers. And when they ran forward to meet us, it wasn’t with the eagerness and smiles of cultists greeting their leader. They were meek and grim.
They were scared. Many of them were bigger than Colt, younger, with more muscle. But every man in that camp was terrified of him, of what he might do to them. That was the power Colt wielded. And now he had fifty million dollars to build his army. Soon, he’d have a thousand times the manpower.
And then it got worse.
Colt led me over to a van, its rear doors standing open. The man who’d been inside scrambled out and stood to attention. “All ready, sir,” he said.
Inside the van, I could see a tangle of colored wires and then a solid wall of crates, filling almost all the space. I couldn’t figure out what they were until Colt shone a flashlight inside. Then I saw the hazard warning symbol stamped on each one: explosives. The ones they’d stolen from the mining company. My mind shredded. Clearly, they were preparing to blow something up, but what? There were no government buildings in our tiny town. Were they going to drive into Denver and blow up an FBI office or something? How can I warn them?
“Get going,” Colt told the man. “Once you get there, set the timer for thirty minutes and get back here. We’ll be ready to go.”
The man nodded, jumped in the van and sped off through the snow. A pickup followed close behind: to bring the man back, I realized. But where the hell were they going? The road they were on didn’t lead to Denver, it climbed up to….
I slowly looked up. Through the falling snow, I could just catch glimpses of Mount Mercy as it towered over the town.
Everything reversed in my head. Corrigan, Earl and I... we’d all put explosives together with far-right militia and assumed they were going to blow up a building. But we’d been wrong all along. I knew now why Colt’s gang hadn’t bothered to wear masks. The phone lines had been down since before the robbery. No one outside the town knew his gang was even here. And now, no one ever would.
Colt was going to blow up the side of the mountain and bury the town under millions of tons of rock. Everyone who knew he’d been here would die. When the snow melted, the authorities would discover what looked like a terrible natural disaster: a small town swallowed up by a landslide that had been feared for hundreds of years. My mind reeled. No one would even know the money was missing! How long would it take to excavate the town, let alone dig down to the vault beneath the bank? Years? The authorities might not even bother, once it was clear there were no survivors. The government would assume its gold was still there under the debris and leave it be.