Chapter 9 - COLLAPSE OF THE DEFENSES
"You touch that line and I will tear your throat out with my bare hands!" Graham screamed, backing up three paces.
He didn't look for a keycard. He didn't look for security. At the end of the hall stood a heavy steel crash cart loaded with an oxygen tank. Graham grabbed the cart, turned it around, and rammed it at full sprint directly into the floor-to-ceiling tempered glass window.
CRACK.
A spiderweb of fractures blossomed across the thick pane. Vance flinched, his hand hesitating for a fraction of a second above the IV port.
Graham pulled the cart back and rammed it again with every ounce of adrenaline-fueled strength in his body.
BOOM!
The entire window exploded inward in a shower of diamond-shaped safety crystals. Graham vaulted through the shattered opening, heedless of the jagged shards slicing through his forearms and palms. He tackled Marcus Vance around the waist, sending both of them crashing violently across the linoleum floor into the stainless steel instrument trays.
Metal instruments clattered and clanged across the room. The syringe flew from Vance’s grip, skittering across the floor and shattering against the wall, its lethal contents spilling uselessly down the baseboard.
Vance snarled, throwing a savage elbow into Graham’s ribs, rolling on top of him and driving his thumbs into Graham’s throat. "You ruined everything, Ashford! Ten years of research! A four-hundred-million-dollar valuation!"
Graham choked, his vision tunneling into black, but his right hand blindly searched the floor among the scattered instruments. His fingers closed around the cold, heavy handle of a stainless steel bone-reduction clamp.
With a primal scream, Graham brought the blunt metal clamp up in a vicious arc, striking Vance across the temple.
Vance collapsed sideways, groaning, blood pouring from a gash along his hairline.
Reynolds and three armed hospital security guards poured through the broken window frame, guns drawn, pinning Vance face-down into the shattered glass and ratcheting heavy steel cuffs onto his wrists.
"Get him out of here!" Reynolds shouted.
Graham didn't spare Vance a single glance. He scrambled to his knees, his hands bleeding profusely, and pulled himself up to the side of Lily's bed.
The cardiac monitor was screaming.
Lily’s heart rate was down to twenty-two beats per minute. Her oxygen saturation was falling through the floor—sixty percent, fifty-eight percent. The vasopressors were failing. Her pupils were fixed and dilated.
"She’s herniating!" the PICU nurse shouted, scrambling through the shattered window. "Her intracranial pressure is spiking from cerebral edema!"
"The antidote!" Graham screamed, blood dripping from his fingers onto the white bedsheets. "Where is the antidote?!"
May you like
Nurse Sarah Lin scrambled through the rubble, clutching a small, cryogenically insulated metal thermos she had pried from Vance's office safe. "I have it! AG-409 Reversal Ligand, Lot Number Zero-Zero-One!"
"Draw up five milliliters!" Graham ordered, his voice breaking into a desperate, ragged sob. "Draw it up now!"
