Chapter 14 - The Crash on Iron River Bridge
The Iron River Bridge was a narrow, two-lane steel truss bridge built in the 1950s, suspended fifty feet above a raging, rock-filled river that had swollen into a violent torrent from the autumn storm. Ahead of us, four state trooper cruisers were parked horizontally across the entrance of the bridge, their emergency strobe lights painting the steel girders in brilliant, flashing bursts of red and blue.
“Stop the vehicle! Police roadblock! Pull over immediately!” boomed a voice over a police PA system from the barricade ahead.
I eased my foot off the accelerator, pumping the brakes to slow the heavy interceptor on the slick asphalt. But as I checked the rearview mirror, my blood ran cold.
The black SUV wasn't slowing down.
Marcus’s driver—a desperate mercenary facing life in federal prison—was accelerating, his engine roaring as he aligned his heavy front bumper directly with the rear of my cruiser. He wasn't trying to stop; he was going to ram us at eighty miles an hour, using my vehicle as a battering ram to smash through the police barricade.
“Lily, hold on to the seat belt!” I screamed, bracing my arms against the steering wheel and pressing my back firmly into the driver’s seat.
The impact was catastrophic.
The black SUV slammed into the rear of the interceptor with the force of a freight train. The sound of shearing metal and exploding glass deafened me as the rear end of my cruiser crumpled inward like an aluminum can. My head slammed against the steering wheel airbag as it deployed with a violent pop, filling the cabin with white powder and the smell of burnt gunpowder.
The force of the collision launched the interceptor forward, sending us spinning out of control across the wet asphalt. We clipped the concrete guardrail of the bridge approach, showering the roadway in sparks, before spinning 180 degrees and sliding backward directly toward the police roadblock.
With a deafening crash, the rear of my wrecked cruiser slammed into the side of a state trooper sedan, finally bringing us to a shuddering, violent halt just ten feet from the bridge entrance.
Through the clearing smoke and airbag dust, I looked out the shattered windshield.
The black SUV hadn't stopped. In the chaos of the collision, the driver had lost control on the hydroplaning asphalt. The heavy vehicle swerved violently to the right, jumping the concrete curb of the bridge approach and smashing headlong into the heavy steel anchor girders of the bridge structure.
The impact tore the front axle completely off the SUV. The vehicle flipped onto its side, screeching across the pavement in a shower of orange sparks and twisting metal before slamming to a halt against the bridge railings, just thirty feet away from my wrecked interceptor.
For five agonizing seconds, there was only the sound of the torrential rain pounding against the wreckage, the wailing of sirens, and the hiss of steam escaping from shattered radiators.
“Lily?” I gasped, turning around in my seat, my vision blurred from the airbag deployment, blood dripping from my forehead into my eyes. “Lily, baby, say something!”
From the floorboards behind the passenger seat, the wool coat shifted. Lily pushed the fabric off her head, her face covered in glass dust and her lip bleeding slightly where she had bumped it against the seat frame, but she was alive.
“I’m okay, Mommy,” she sobbed, holding her arms out toward me. “Can we go home now?”
“Yes, baby,” I cried, reaching back to grab her hand. “We’re going home right now.”
Before I could unbuckle my seatbelt to reach her, the driver’s side door of the overturned black SUV was kicked open from the inside.
A figure dragged himself out of the smoking wreckage onto the wet asphalt of the bridge. It was Marcus.
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His coat was torn away, his white dress shirt soaked in blood from a deep laceration across his forehead. His right arm hung uselessly at his side—broken in the crash—but in his left hand, he still clutched his 9mm pistol. He stumbled to his feet, swaying drunkenly in the gale-force wind, his eyes locked onto my wrecked cruiser with absolute, psychotic obsession.
“Sarah!” he screamed into the storm, raising his pistol toward my shattered windshield as a dozen state troopers swarmed out from behind their barricades, their rifles leveled at his chest.
