THE SCREAM THAT STOPPED MY HEART

By dusk, the storm had wiped away all traces of the blood at the Blackwood mill.

We couldn't go back to the house. We couldn't go to a hospital. We had traded the rusted Dodge for an unmarked station wagon abandoned behind the lumber yard, paying cash at an automated pump twenty miles south of the border.

Claire sat in the passenger seat, her teeth clenched in silent agony as I finished stitching her shoulder wound using the field kit and a bottle of cheap bourbon from a highway gas station. In the back seat, wrapped in three wool blankets, Emily had finally cried herself to exhaustion, her steady, soft breathing the only music that mattered in the dark vehicle.

We had crossed into Idaho, climbing toward the remote mountain pass that led straight toward the Canadian wilderness.

"Where do we go now?" I asked, my hands trembling violently against the steering wheel as the adrenaline finally crashed through my nervous system. My eye was swollen shut from the fight, my knuckles split to the bone. "They have our names. They have our faces. The government, the syndicate... there is nowhere on this continent they can't reach."

Claire looked at me, her face pale in the faint green glow of the dashboard instrument lights. For the first time, she reached out and took my battered hand, intertwining her fingers with mine.

"There is a place," she whispered softly. "An old fallback facility on Vancouver Island. An off-grid cabin built into the coastal cliffs. No roads. No satellite coverage. We can disappear there. Truly disappear."

For a brief, agonizing moment, a glimmer of hope flickered in the dark. We had survived. We had Emily. We were together, moving toward the fog and the wild pine forests of the north.

Then, Emily’s small pink backpack on the floorboard began to buzz.

I glanced in the rearview mirror.

"What is that?" Claire asked, her instincts instantly returning, her body going rigid despite the pain in her shoulder. "Emily doesn't have a phone."

"I... I bought her a burner phone last month," I stammered, feeling a sudden, suffocating tightness in my throat. "Just for emergencies... in case she ever got lost on the school bus. Nobody had the number except me and—"

"Give it to me," Claire commanded.

I reached back, unzipping the small pocket of the backpack, and handed the vibrating black flip phone to Claire.

The screen glowed with an unknown number. A single multimedia video message had been delivered.

Claire thumbed open the video file.

The video was short—only five seconds long, looping silently.

It was a live, high-resolution night-vision feed. The crosshairs of an advanced sniper scope were centered precisely on the driver-side window of our station wagon, tracking our speed as we drove along the deserted mountain highway.

Below the video, a single text message appeared on the screen:

*You looked behind you, Helena. You looked above you. But you never asked who hired Marcus Cole.*

Suddenly, from the back seat, Emily stirred in her sleep, murmuring softly in her dreams:

"Daddy... why did the man at the school say grandpa is waiting for us?"