Chapter 53 - THE HARVEST PROTOCOL
Dante did not hesitate. Sophia’s instinct was the pure, uncorrupted intuition of a child raised in the presence of wolves.
Before Matteo could take another step, Dante leaned out from behind the archway, his suppressed weapon spitting three rapid bursts. The rounds struck Matteo’s chest and throat with dull, muffled thuds. The guard collapsed backward without even completing a gasp.
Carlo spun, raising his weapon, but Dante was already moving. Dante closed the distance with predatory speed, catching Carlo's gun arm, twisting it until the bone splintered with a wet snap, and slamming the man against the damp brick wall. Carlo dropped his pistol, choking as Dante’s forearm crushed his trachea.
"Who opened the bedrock gates?" Dante growled, his voice a low, terrifying vibration in the confined tunnel.
Carlo gasped for air, his eyes rolling back in terror. "The... the Archivist... he had the master override codes... from your father’s old ledger... Don Falcone, please! They told us you were dead! They told us the girl was the only thing left!"
"Where is the extraction team heading?" Dante pressed harder, the stone behind Carlo’s head cracking under the force.
"The laboratory... in the sub-vault..." Carlo gurgled. "They brought... the synthetic centrifuge. They don't want to kill the little girl... they just need... six liters of bone marrow... they don't care if she survives the harvest!"
A red haze engulfed Dante’s vision. Six liters of marrow from a four-year-old child was an instant death sentence.
Without another word, Dante jerked his arm sharply, snapping Carlo’s neck. The body slumped uselessly into the mud.
Sophia stepped around the corner, walking past the two corpses without so much as flinching. She looked down at Carlo's dropped tactical radio, which had begun to crackle with an automated, synthesized broadcast.
*"All units. Primary target—Sophia Falcone—remains uncontained. Secondary target—Rosa Miller—exhibits terminal cellular breakdown within forty minutes. Proceed with extraction. Sector four is compromised."*
Rosa stumbled forward, clutching the rough wall, her face now completely devoid of color, blue veins showing distinctly beneath her translucent skin. She sank to her knees beside the fallen guard, her breath coming in shallow, wheezing gasps.
"Dante..." she sobbed softly. "Take her and run. Leave me here. If they take her... she will die for me. I won't let my daughter die for me!"
Sophia walked to her mother, dropped to her knees, and wrapped her small arms firmly around Rosa’s neck.
"No running, Mommy," Sophia said firmly, her little jaw jutting forward in an exact replica of Dante’s stubborn defiance. "Daddy never runs away from his house. We fight them. Then we have tea."
Dante looked down at his daughter. A savage, unbreakable resolve settled over him. He unclipped Carlo's tactical rig, pulling out two heavy magazines and a specialized high-potency epinephrine auto-injector from the guard's trauma kit.
"This won't cure you, Rosa," Dante said, kneeling beside her and ramming the needle directly into her thigh through her trousers. "But it will buy your heart twenty more minutes of oxygen. Stand up."
Rosa gasped violently as the adrenaline surged through her bloodstream, her dilated pupils locking onto Dante’s grim face. She nodded once, drawing strength from the iron will radiating from both her husband and her daughter.
"Where do we go?" Rosa whispered, standing up with Dante's support.
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"We don't go to the bunker," Dante said, his lips curling into a cold, terrifying smirk. "The Archivist thinks he has trapped us like rats in a basement. He forgot who built these catacombs. We are going to the blast furnace beneath the old foundry."
***
