Chapter 67 - The Sister's Counter-Offensive
The auxiliary carriage slammed into the buffers of Sub-Level 7 with a violent clatter of chains and counterweights. Above Cassidy and Arthur, the steel hatch set into the ceiling began to spin as a heavy iron wheel was manually cranked from the other side.
*"Cassidy!"* Donald’s muffled roar penetrated the steel plating. *"Open this damn hatch or I'll blow the lock off! Everything down here belongs to me! Mom signed it over! She signed it over in the hospital!"*
Cassidy stood in the center of the rotunda, bathed in the sharp, merciless beam of an overhead tactical floodlight. Arthur stood at the primary console, his hand hovering over the pressure controls.
"Donald," Cassidy spoke into the handheld transmitter, her voice bouncing off the cold iron surfaces of the vault. "Mom is currently under federal indictment for thirty-four counts of bank fraud, wire fraud, and falsifying county title records. The signature she gave you in that hospital bed isn't worth the paper it’s printed on."
*"Shut up! Shut up!"*
A deafening crack shattered the silence as Donald fired a round through the edge of the access hatch. The ricochet screamed off the hardened naval steel, leaving nothing more than a harmless gray smear on the iron.
"Stand back, Arthur," Cassidy instructed calmly.
She reached out and engaged the primary atmospheric purge valve for the auxiliary airlock.
A high-pitched shriek of venting air tore through the shaft above. The pressure inside Donald’s small intermediate chamber dropped by five pounds per square inch in a fraction of a second.
Donald shrieked as his ears popped violently. The sound of his heavy boots scrambling across the metal decking was frantic, disorganized, and pathetic.
*"I can't breathe! Cassidy! Stop! Turn it off!"*
"The mortgage was eighteen hundred and forty-five dollars, Donald," Cassidy said, her voice cutting through his panicked gasps over the speaker. "Every single month. For seven years. Do you know what that felt like? Do you know what it was like to stand in the grocery store line, checking my balance on my phone, praying my debit card wouldn't decline over a four-dollar loaf of bread while you posted photos from your resort weekends in Cabo?"
*"It was Mom's idea! She told me you had to pay! She said you owed us!"*
"I owed you nothing," Cassidy said.
She turned the dial one notch further. A blast of dense, non-lethal carbon dioxide fire-suppression gas flooded the auxiliary hatch.
Above them, the heavy metallic thud of a dropped handgun echoed through the steel. Then came the sound of knees hitting the iron floorplate, followed by violent coughing and desperate, pleading sobs.
*"Please... Cassidy... please... I'm your brother..."*
"My brother died the day he stood by and watched Eleanor pack my life into cardboard boxes less than twenty-four hours after telling me I was worthless," Cassidy whispered into the mic.
She hit the manual release lever.
The hatch swung downward on its pneumatic hinges. Donald Vance tumbled through the opening, landing face-first onto the grated catwalk of the rotunda, covered in greasy soot, tears streaming down his grime-streaked face, clutching his chest as he gasped for clean oxygen in the vaulted chamber.
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The gun lay fifteen feet away, sliding across the slick steel until it clattered against Arthur’s boots. Arthur kicked it through a drainage slit into the five-thousand-foot abyss below.
***
