Chapter 13 - Midnight in the Timber
We never made it to the truck.
The rumble through the pines wasn't a lone scout; it was a blockade. As we reached the mudroom, the front window shattered inward in a shower of diamond-sharp glass. The deafening report of a high-caliber suppressed rifle echoed a half-second later, the round punching through the pine wall where my head had been resting against the jamb.
"Down!" Claire roared, tackling me to the hardwood floor.
Another round tore through the roof, showering us in insulation and splintered timber. The scent of ozone and cordite filled the air.
"Rear exit!" Claire hissed, staying low, crawling toward the kitchen with predatory efficiency. "They're using subsonic .300 Blackout. They don't want the Darby police hearing a firefight. They’re containing the perimeter."
"What about Emily?" I yelled over the smashing glass. My panic was blinding, my heart feeling as though it would burst through my sternum. "Emily is at the school!"
"They sent the photo as a psychological lever to freeze us in place!" Claire fired twice through the kitchen window, shattering the glass and dropping an operative dressed in winter woodland camouflage who was advancing past the woodpile. "If they already had Emily, they would have sent a live video, not a still from yesterday! She’s safe until the end of the school day, but we won't survive the next three minutes if we don't clear this treeline!"
She threw open the cellar hatch. We tumbled down the wooden steps into the darkness beneath the house. The cellar had an old root-cellar blowout that led into a drainage culvert running behind our property toward the dense timber of the national forest.
Footsteps pounded above us, heavy boots crushing glass across the living room floor.
"Clear the floor!" a gravelly voice barked above in Russian-accented English. "Find the woman! The asset wants her intact!"
Claire reached into her coat, pulled a flashbang canister from her tactical harness, pulled the pin with her teeth, and hurled it back up the cellar stairs.
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*BANG.*
The concussive wave shook the foundation. Agonized shrieks tore through the ceiling. Claire shoved me through the narrow culvert hatch into the knee-deep, freezing runoff water of the creek. We scrambled through the mud, dragging ourselves into the suffocating gloom of the towering firs. Behind us, our dream home—the quiet life we had bled to purchase—was swarming with wolves.
