DEAD LOAD (A Nick Stello Action Thriller) Chapter Two: The Load Path

CRACK!

The hammer struck the diagonal brace exactly where Nick intended. Dry pine splintered outward from the impact point. The unstable frame lurched to the left, pressing against the scaffolding, buckling a weak strut.

Nick never saw most of it. The moment the hammer left his hand, he was already moving.

A wall doesn’t fail because one stone falls. It fails when several stones fall simultaneously. In the same way, a good plan requires several independent pieces moving at the same time.

Tough to do when you’re acting alone.

Only Nick wasn’t alone. He had gravity as his partner. If it chose to play its part.

Would it?

The damaged scaffolding answered the question.

At first the sound was subtle. A groan. The complaint of overloaded timber shifting beneath a weight it had carried too long. One support began to bow. Another twisted slightly as the load redistributed itself through the frame. Two thousand pounds of stacked granite, planking, and heavy steel rods leaned forward as the scaffolding searched for a new path to the ground.

SNAP!

The support finally surrendered.

The collapse came all at once.

Stone, timber, and scaffold planking toppled toward the oak cribbing stack in a violent cascade. The centering beneath the arch held. The keystone remained suspended above the second hostile, secured by the retaining pin and leveling winch.

The first hostile had just enough time to turn toward the noise before the structure swallowed him. A cloud of dust and shattered wood erupted around the oak cribbing stack. Something metallic cartwheeled across the hard ground and disappeared beneath the debris. Nick didn’t stop to identify it.

The second hostile reacted faster.

His hand flashed toward his sidearm as he pivoted in the direction of the collapse, but momentum is a kind of structure. Once weight commits, it takes time and effort to move it somewhere else. Nick had spent most of his adult life studying versions of that principle, first in stone and later in men. By the time the hostile realized the attack wasn’t coming from the falling scaffold, Nick was already inside his reaction cycle.

The steel pitching tool left Nick’s hand from less than six feet away.

The sharpened point struck the man’s forearm just below the elbow. Not deep. It didn’t need to be. Pain was unreliable. Anatomy wasn’t. An involuntary spasm opened the hostile’s fingers. The man’s body jerked, knocking the radio from his belt. It bounced into the shadows and skittered across the still-frozen dirt. Before the man could recover, Nick grabbed the front of his vest, pulled him off balance, and drove him backward across the threshold until he stood directly beneath the suspended keystone.

Before the hostile could regain his footing, Nick reached for the leveling winch. It sat exactly where he had left it the day before.

His hand found the quick-release lever without looking. Muscle memory handled the rest. The retaining pin shot free with a metallic snap and, for a fraction of a second, nothing happened.

Then the keystone accepted the argument gravity had been making all morning.

The hostile’s eyes flicked upward.

People always looked up.

The three-hundred-pound block of dressed granite dropped straight down.

The impact shook dust from the rafters.

The scream that followed sounded less like language and more like instinct.

A wave of powdered mortar, sawdust, and granite dust rolled through the doorway. Nick stepped into it.

The workshop emerged slowly through the haze.

Familiar benches. Familiar tools. The smell of cut lumber and hydraulic lime. The long worktable he’d built himself along the north wall. The racks of chisels and pitching tools hanging exactly where he’d left them the night before.

And Kate.

She sat bound to one of the heavy timber office chairs near the center of the room. Two ropes circled her torso, one beneath the shoulders and another above the waist, pinning her arms securely against the chair back. Her white blouse was wrinkled and dusted with sawdust beneath the dark cardigan she’d worn that morning. A strand of hair had escaped and fallen across her cheek.

Nick’s eyes moved over her automatically.

No blood.

No visible fractures.

No swelling around the face.

Whoever had tied her knew the difference between restraint and punishment. The ropes denied leverage without restricting breathing. As the dust drifted through the workshop, the fabric of her blouse rose slightly and settled again.

Alive.

The assessment took less than a second.

The movement behind her took even less.

A man stepped out from the darkness near the tool racks.

Unlike the other two, he carried no rifle. Only a black Glock held in a steady two-handed grip. He placed its muzzle lightly against the side of Kate’s head.

He wasn’t shaking.

He wasn’t panicking.

If anything, he seemed mildly annoyed, as though the destruction outside had complicated a timetable rather than ruined a plan.

His eyes flicked once toward the doorway.

The collapsed scaffolding.

The dust cloud.

The trapped hostile beneath the fallen keystone.

The silence where two security men should have been reporting.

Then his attention returned to Nick.

“Interesting,” he said.

Nick stopped moving.

For several seconds neither man spoke.

The Glock remained pressed against Kate’s temple. Kate didn’t cry. Didn’t plead. Didn’t even look at the gun. Her eyes never left Nick.

The man studied him carefully.

Work boots.

Canvas jacket.

Stone dust.

Empty hands.

Then his gaze shifted to the broken arch and the ruined scaffolding beyond it. He looked at the trapped hostile beneath three hundred pounds of granite. He looked at the shattered remains of a plan that had been functioning perfectly less than thirty seconds earlier.

When he spoke again, there was no anger in his voice.

Only calculation.

“I was told we were looking for a stone mason.”

Nick looked at the pistol against Kate’s head.

“And I was told gravity always wins the argument.”

For the first time, the man smiled.

Not because he found the remark amusing.

Because he finally understood that the briefing he’d received had been incomplete.

Nick reached exactly the same conclusion.

The man holding the Glock wasn’t muscle.

He wasn’t security.

And he wasn’t panicking despite the fact that his team had just been dismantled in less than half a minute.

Which meant he was something worse.

The smile disappeared.

For the first time that morning, Nick found himself facing someone who appeared to understand exactly how dangerous the situation had become.

The workshop suddenly felt much smaller than it had a minute ago.

It fell into an unsettling silence.

Not complete silence. Outside, the hostile trapped beneath the fallen keystone dragged in a ragged breath and let it out as a low, broken moan. Timber shifted somewhere inside the collapsed scaffolding. Dust whispered down from the rafters and collected on the benches, the tools, and the shoulders of Kate’s dark cardigan.

The Glock dug a little deeper in the skin near her eye.

The leader studied Nick with the detached concentration of a man inspecting damage after a structural failure. His first assessment had been wrong. Nick could see him correcting it now, working backward through the last thirty seconds and separating cause from effect.

“You set that up from the treeline.”

Nick said nothing. His hands hung loose at his sides, and his weight remained evenly distributed over both feet. The leader had chosen his bearing well. Kate shielded most of his body. The oak workbench protected one side, and the heavy chair prevented her from dropping straight down without taking him with her. The pistol needed only a few ounces of pressure to end the problem.

The man glanced toward the doorway. “The scaffolding drew both men’s attention, giving you cover in the open field. With the first man taken out by the scaffolding, you drove the second beneath the arch because you knew what would happen when you released the winch.”

It was not a question. He had reconstructed the sequence accurately enough to confirm what Nick already suspected. The other two had been security. This one had planned the operation.

“Not bad for a stonemason,” the leader said.

“That’s what I am.”

The answer brought the faintest tightening around the man’s eyes. “Stonemasons don’t dismantle professional teams with construction equipment.”

“”

For the first time, uncertainty entered the leader’s expression. Not fear. Nothing that useful. He was simply beginning to understand that the occupation and the threat were not separate things.

Kate watched Nick without speaking. Her face had gone pale beneath the settling dust, but her eyes remained focused. She knew him well enough to recognize his voice and posture. She did not know the man the leader appeared to be seeing.

The Glock dragged back slightly before pushing more firmly into her hair.

“Whatever you’re measuring,” the leader said, “stop.”

Nick let his eyes move through the workshop without appearing to fix on anything. The windows were too far. The workbench blocked a clean approach from the right. The chair was heavy timber, built to survive years of muddy boots and careless apprentices, but it was not bolted to the floor. Kate’s feet rested flat on the concrete. Her fingers curled around the seat rails beneath the ropes.

Between them stood the industrial wheelbarrow Nick had loaded that morning with fresh hydraulic lime mortar. The mix had begun to tighten but remained workable. Nearly two hundred pounds of lime, aggregate, and water rested above a single steel wheel, with the handles pointed toward him.

Before Kate’s text, the mortar had been intended for the arch. Now it was simply part of the room.

Nick knew every object in the workshop because he had placed nearly all of them there. The benches were his. The tool racks were his. Even the shallow pitch in the concrete floor belonged to him. It fell just enough toward the central drain to carry snowmelt away from steel tools and stacked lumber. A stranger saw a room filled with obstacles. Nick saw weight, balance, and leverage.

The leader followed his gaze toward the wheelbarrow, then returned his attention to Nick.

The glance lasted less than a second. It was still enough.

The leader had noticed the wheelbarrow. He had classified it as cover or obstruction. He had not considered what happened when two hundred pounds stopped being stationary.

“Who are you?” the leader asked.

Nick looked past him toward the row of rough granite blocks stacked along the north wall. They had come from the quarry with fractured edges, drill scars, and no useful face. An inexperienced eye saw unfinished stone and assumed weakness. A mason saw the shape waiting inside it.

A rough ashlar was not useless. It simply had not yet been worked.

The leader shifted the pistol slightly. “Last chance.”

Nick allowed his shoulders to settle. It was a small concession, the kind a man with leverage expected when the threat finally began to work. The leader’s attention narrowed onto Nick’s hands.

Kate saw the change before he moved. Her fingers tightened around the rails.

Nick propelled the toe of his boot beneath the nearest wheelbarrow handle and drove upward.

Now It’s Your Turn To Play!

AGENT DECISION:

Question: What does Nick intend the wheelbarrow to accomplish? (Select one)

• Knock the leader off his feet.
• Force the leader to move the Glock away from Kate.
• I’d rather find out in Chapter Three.

If choice is 3, ask “Why did you choose that?”

• I enjoy being surprised.
• I don’t want to stop reading.

[Continued in Chapter Three.]

Would you like to learn more about this Action Thriller Visual Novel Game? Click here to go to NickStello.com