Chapter 90 Chapter Ninety

As they ran, a stumbling Roger asked, "What happened? Who are you?" "Shut your mouth, save your energy and run quickly, Roger." Cole snapped. They follow the gaps in the blades through the air filtration system.Despite Trent's drag, it was far faster than when it entered from the outside just now.They ran quickly up the stairs past the fire station and onto the concrete driveway in front of the door.Puller and Cole didn't have time to stop and strip off their hazmat suits.Sweat-soaked hair stuck to their faces.They're not sweating a lot at the moment, it's just that they're severely dehydrated.

Trent was flushed and breathing heavily."I feel like I'm having a heart attack," he said. "Keep running!" Puller yelled.He pulled off his gloves and looked at his watch.Four minutes passed, and there was less than a minute left.Perhaps the explosive equivalent would be 500 tons, equivalent to 500,000 kilograms of TNT.Despite the concrete fortress, the possible radius of the explosion would be far greater than the distance they could run in the next minute, even if they were Olympic athletes.In the unfortunate event of nuclear fission, after fifty-five seconds everything would evaporate and there would be nothing left.

Cole noticed Pooler looking at his watch and the look on his face afterward.Puller also felt her gaze, and turned to look at the woman beside him.The eyes of the two locked together in the fierce running. "It was a pleasure working with you, Investigator Puller." Cole actually showed a faint smile. "It's a special honor for me, Sheriff Cole." Thirty seconds left on their lives. Taking advantage of this time, they ran another two hundred meters.Behind them, the domed fortress was still clearly visible.Puller stopped looking at his watch and just kept running.He picked up speed, and so did Cole, and even Trent.The fresh air sobered Puller, who realized they were running for their precious lives.

For a moment, Puller wondered how the shockwaves of the explosion would make people feel.He will soon feel it. Their tube of dynamite exploded inside the fort. After all, Robert Puller's method worked.A series of subsequent explosions, although only a few milliseconds apart from the first, greatly widened the gap that had been blown in the sphere, finally causing the core to burst out of it. There will be no more thermonuclear explosions. It's more of a conventional bomb now. Yet it is a powerful bomb.Drake County, which has been mining coal for so many years, has never witnessed such a violent explosion.

The ground trembled beneath their feet, but they felt it for only a second, because there was only so long for their feet to be on the ground after the explosion.In an instant, Puller, Cole, and Trent had been lifted five or six meters into the air.Under the huge shock and impact from the fortress, they were thrown back to the ground heavily, rolling continuously on the ground involuntarily.When they finally stopped, they were completely separated from each other, and they were both twenty or thirty meters away from where they were originally standing.Puller narrowly missed hitting the thick trunk of a pine tree.

Cement fragments poured down from the sky. Dazed and bloodstained, Puller slowly rolled over. The MP5 submachine gun is still with him.The barrel of the gun struck him in the face as he fell to the ground.One of his cheeks was bruised and swollen.There was unbearable pain in every part of his body.It was caused by the direct impact of the strong explosive force on his body, and it was also caused by the fact that after he was lifted into the air, he fell back to the ground at an extraordinary speed after such a long distance.A large lump of cement nearly hit Puller on the head.He quickly rolled aside and glanced back at the fortress.

It no longer exists, or at least a large part of its top is gone.Countless cement blocks flew into the sky.Smoke and dust are rising from the crumbling top of the fort.One side of the cement cover was also blown away, and the impact from this direction must have knocked them over.In Puller's eyes, this was a wild eruption of a man-made volcano. Cement shards fell on houses and streets in neighboring neighbourhoods, but there were no shouts of people to be heard.Fifty-seven residents currently live in the old houses where the employees of the pilot plant once lived.Earlier in the night, Cole had ordered her men to drive those people out of the area in the name of clearing out illegal residents.That's reason enough for county residents willing to obey the law.Residents who were cleared out from here slept in temporary shelters.The houses they lived in were waiting to die in the maelstrom of steel and concrete wreckage flying in the sky.It now appears that cleaning up the local residents was done too well.

Puller didn't know if the stuff ejected from the fortress was radioactive.But at the moment, he couldn't care less about such a question.He has to find Cole. It was Roger Trent he first discovered.Unfortunately, when he fell to the ground, he hit his head against a much stronger tree.Half of his head is gone.The coal baron's financial woes ended forever, along with his life. Another violent explosion.The ground trembled again, and more pieces flew into the air. That's when Puller finally spotted Cole.Cole was about fifty meters away from him.She is struggling to get up. "Stay there," Puller called, "I'm coming."

Puller sprinted toward Cole, dodging blocks of concrete as deadly as 50 machine gun rounds.When she was still fifteen meters away, the tragedy happened.A large clump of cement, firmly attached to the brick, hit Cole directly on the head.She fell back to the ground again. "No!" Puller yelled. Braving a torrential rain of concrete, steel, and whatever else, Puller sprinted toward Cole, as he had once again charged in Kabul or Baghdad. He ran to Cole and got down on one knee.The back of her head was bleeding.Puller saw the shattered skull through the blood. He turned Cole gently onto his side.Cole looks up at him, eyes blurred.Her brain has stopped functioning.

Puller put his arms around her in despair. Her eyes froze on his face for a second.Her lips were parted slightly, and Pooler knew she wanted to say something to him. There was one last shudder in her body.She took her last breath.Her gaze froze. Samantha Cole is dead.Puller sat down on the ground. John Pooler never shed a tear for a fallen comrade on the battlefield.Not once.Although he had many opportunities to cry.The Puller men never shed tears.This is the first house rule. But, facing Sam Cole, tears kept rolling down Pooler's cheeks.