Chapter 3 - The Eighty-Foot Gamble
Down on the concourse, the tension had reached a breaking point. Kieran stood motionless, refusing the bulletproof vest Bryce tried to drape over his shoulders. His fingers dug into the fabric of his coat pockets as he watched the mechanic shimmy her body beneath the tilted coaster car, hanging horizontally above the cavernous abyss.
"Sir," Bryce whispered, holding a pair of military-grade thermal binoculars to his eyes. "The support bracket on Section Seven is bending. Look at the stress telemetry on the structural pillar. The steel is groaning."
Kieran snatched the binoculars from Bryce’s hands.
Through the high-magnification lenses, he saw the mechanic's face. She was drenched in sweat and grease, her jaw clenched in ferocious concentration as she wedged a long steel release bar into the carriage’s undercarriage. Her boots were braced against a rusted crossbeam, her body suspended over nothingness.
"She knows what she's doing," Kieran murmured, his voice laced with an intensity his men had never heard before. "Find out who she is. Everything. Family, debts, background. Right now."
Bryce immediately tapped his phone, barking orders to their intelligence network.
Up on the track, Meredith's shoulders burned with agony. The air up in the ceiling vault was hot and thick with stagnant grease. The mechanical bypass pin was rusted solid into its housing; Harris had repeatedly postponed the scheduled quarterly chemical cleanings to shave costs from the operational balance sheet.
"Come on, you piece of junk," Meredith grunted through clenched teeth, throwing her entire body weight onto the cheater pipe slipped over the release handle.
Crack.
The sound was not the pin releasing. It was the coaster car shifting forward two inches.
The front axle dropped off the emergency stop notch. A shower of rust and dried grease rained down onto the safety netting below. The entire track let out a horrific, low groan that vibrated straight through Meredith’s chest.
"Meredith!" Jolene screamed, clutching the sides of the bucket seat as the nose of the car dipped toward the concrete floor.
"I've got it!" Meredith yelled back, ignoring the blinding pain in her shoulder as she jammed the crowbar deeper into the housing. She hooked her legs around the steel girder, refusing to retreat to the safety of the ladder. "Hold on, Jolene!"
With a savage pull powered by sheer desperation, Meredith slammed her elbow against the release lever.
Clank-shhh.
The pneumatic pressure hissed loudly as the emergency valve tripped. The hydraulic harness pinning Jolene snapped upward, releasing her chest.
"Out! Now!" Meredith shouted, hauling herself back onto the catwalk with one arm and grabbing Jolene by the jacket collar with the other. "Step on the crossbeam! Don't look down!"
Jolene scrambled out of the seat just as the coaster's main carriage gave way.
The rusted safety bracket sheared completely off. With a deafening roar of tearing metal, the empty four-ton coaster train broke loose from the track, nose-diving through the air before violently crashing into the secondary safety buffer twenty feet below, demolishing the wooden maintenance staging area in an explosion of splinters and sparks.
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The shockwave shook the catwalk violently, throwing Jolene off balance.
She slipped, her foot kicking into empty air, screaming as her body plummeted over the edge.
