Chapter 11 - The Fall of the Hunters
"Go!" Daniel yelled, shoving Evelyn toward the chute while turning to face the stairwell. "I'll draw their fire!"
"No! We stay together!" Evelyn barked, catching his arm.
She grabbed a heavy, sixty-pound steel pulley wheel left on the catwalk rail from decades past—the very type of neglected equipment that had caused Tom's fatal accident. With a surge of fury born from five years of buried grief, Evelyn kicked the safety block holding the pulley.
The massive steel wheel rolled off the edge, smashing directly through the rotting wooden support beams of the lower catwalk where the scarred man was standing. The entire lower structure gave way in a catastrophic collapse of timber and iron.
The scarred man screamed as he fell fifteen feet into the lower sawdust pit, buried beneath a ton of collapsed scaffolding and rusted pipes. The second guard, seeing his leader crushed and hearing the groan of the structural frame, panicked. He dropped his flashlight, turned around, and ran back out into the blizzard, leaving his gun behind.
Silence fell over the cavernous mill, broken only by the whistling wind outside and the heavy breathing of two people on the upper ledge. Daniel looked at the wreckage below, then at Evelyn. Her face was set, her fists clenched tight, her eyes bright with a dangerous, triumphant fire.
"Tom's mill finally fixed a problem," she said quietly, her voice cold as ice.
Daniel took her hand, holding it tight. "Let's finish this."
They navigated the riverbank chute, sliding safely down the steep bank to where Mara Whitlow was waiting in her heavy four-wheel-drive truck on the main road, her hazard lights blinking in the storm.
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"You guys are twenty minutes late," Mara said, slamming the gear into drive as they climbed in. "Did you run into traffic?"
"Something like that," Evelyn breathed, leaning back against the seat as Daniel wrapped his arm around her shoulders.
