Seven Demons by Aidan Truhen (best motivational books for students TXT) 📕

heading into the bank and those guys…yeah they’re likely not gonna make it. Figure there’s about thirty or forty of those.

Someone somewhere is calling in his helicopter to get him the fuck out and what the outcome is for him largely depends on the timing and I got no control over that now.

This is going down.

I can’t see it—in fact no one can see it except maybe Rex if he’s lasted this long in his suit, and I like to think that he has, so let’s say that’s what’s happening.

Rex fell down over the ledge into the dark and the suit kept him alive exactly this long and he knows—he knows, down there under all that water—that he is no way getting out and the only question is whether the suit fails or he runs out of air and that is a shitty way to go either way.

But he’s not alone down there.

Down there under a bajillion tons of water at a squidzillion atmospheres there is a pile of boxes with a coffin on the top.

Volodya’s coffin of course.

And under him well under Volodya there is a bunch of boxes of Swiss junk ground up really small to powder. And I mean really a lot.

About a hundred tons of it.

And I threw in some magnesium from the fireworks Rex bought, and Flavia—yeah that Flavia who was hanging with Mozart—Flavia gave me some Z-Vat so that whole thing is kinda stuffed up together in a giant spiderball.

Copper oxide.

Aluminum.

Magnesium.

That is a mixture I have mentioned at certain times in other contexts. It is volatile and it is not your friend unless you like having dangerous and exothermic friends.

Which I do.

So here is what Rex sees in this last moment:

He sees a burst of light like a white basketball made of fire is eating into a tea crate. And then the greedy aluminum starts ripping oxygen away from the copper and the copper is not giving it up easy no sir. Not at all. That copper is stubborn Swiss cow copper it has seen life and it has done its military service and it will not be fucked with but in the end well there are laws and it has to comply.

In the dark heart of the mountain there is a miniature sun.

That is the moment at which Rex unquestionably dies and you know he was a Demon and he dies in a literal blaze of glory so there is that.

Now I am absolutely an amateur at this explosives stuff and if I still had an explosives guy on my team, I’d have known not to do it with a hundred tons of the mixture but you know, man, that’s what happens in the world, people just aren’t there when you need them, right, I mean they just wander off or marry a stripper with neck-down volitional alopecia or they get swept away by a death trap in a bank robbery. I mean that is just how things are and when those things happen there are echoes in the world and sometimes the echoes are small and sad and sometimes they are really loud and that is just the butterfly effect is what.

Tragic onward consequences here is what I’m saying.

Motherfucking tragic.

Here is a given amount of water occupying a given amount of space and it has no easy exits. And here now in the heart of that tense yet balanced natural relationship of pressure, cold and stone is a ball of superhot exploding steam which is expanding really fast and really hard. Some of that pressure goes outward in a wave and bounces off the walls of the lake—that is to say basically off the European continental plate, which is big enough to take it—and rebounds inward to the point of origin. Above that point there is now a column of rising steam and bubbles frothing like extreme cappuccino-style up into the vertical pipe leading to the Kircheisen vaults. Up above it there is a great plug of cold water and that water falls downward through the steam, which loses heat and energy and compresses rapidly so that the whole load falls down hard in time with the compression wave. Everything arrives in the same place at the same time.

This time, pretty much all the force of the explosion goes up the pipe looking for a way out.

Which isn’t there.

Because Hans Eiger’s vault is fixed over the top.

It’s the weakest point in the mountain so—

The Kircheisen Festung explodes.

We can see what happens perfectly because of the spotlights. The mountain crinkles like cooking foil and then a piece slips and slides off to the side. The rumble in the ground becomes a howl like the biggest bottle in the world being filled from a spigot. I can see people running and being blown clear off the edge of the mountain and then—

The metal frame of the vault rips out like a spaceship launching on a pillar of steam and screaming white fire.

For a moment it just hangs there in the air at the top of a shallow arc.

Present moment perfect moment: I have made a bank fly.

Some parts of the mountain come too although not a whole lot percentage wise and I would say not very many people from the plateau but that’s kinda ballpark.

Agent Hannah will probably be fine.

The vault turns through ninety degrees in place just like a diver coming off the high board.

And then it falls.

Down.

Down.

Down the way you always imagine God will come when you’re a kid and someone’s shitty to you and he never does come.

Until now.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Onto the cable car station.

And two dozen French Nazis in a fleet of four-wheel-drive cars.

And an old Dutch lady who was very rich and smelled like cheap chocolates.

And a saluki called Marta who really did not deserve any of this.

Say one thing for German auto design say this: the vault does not actually crush them completely flat. There’s like a five-inch gap between the metal base and the soil.

I do not imagine the