Chapter 80 - The Awakening in the Trench
I lunged forward, ignoring Eleanor as she crawled toward her dropped weapon, and drove my combat knife straight into the primary fiber-optic conduit feeding Hannah’s neural interface.
Sparks erupted in a blinding blue shower. Hannah screamed—a high, agonized shriek as forty thousand volts of feedback surged into the electrodes on her temples. The CRT monitors imploded in sequence, filling the control room with toxic white smoke and the stench of burning insulation.
The entire submarine shuddered with a violent, catastrophic impact.
Through the forward observation portal, the dark waters of the Black Trench illuminated with a horrific, blinding radiance.
It was not a weapons cache.
Rising from the ocean floor four hundred feet below, dragged upward by the automated cycle Hannah had triggered before the cable was cut, was a massive, subterranean structure—a forgotten naval research base, its docking clamps unlocking with hydraulic groans that shook the very foundations of the seabed.
The radio array crackled to life across every speaker in the command room, broadcasting on an unencrypted global emergency frequency.
*WARNING. TRENCH FACILITY ALPHA UNSEALED. RETRIEVAL PROTOCOL ACTIVE. BIOLOGICAL CONTAINER DETECTED.*
Eleanor, bleeding from the mouth, hauled herself up by the edge of the console, staring out the reinforced viewport with sheer, unadulterated madness.
"You fool..." she wheezed, her bloody teeth bared in an ecstasy of horror. "It wasn't a bank vault. It wasn't bearer bonds. It's the original pathogen... the one they tested on Cape Sorrow in ninety-four... Harold didn't steal a key to money, Clara. He stole the key to the quarantine."
The massive pressure doors on the deep-sea facility below slowly began to iris open into the pitch-black water.
A rhythmic, thunderous banging began to reverberate from inside the sunken installation—slow, deliberate, and impossibly loud, rising through thousands of fathoms of sea.
May you like
Something down there had been waiting thirty years for the key to turn.
And the hatch was now wide open.
