Chapter 7 - The Crawlspace
The sound of twisting metal shrieked through the subterranean room as the hydraulic jack crushed the lock housing.
The heavy steel door buckled inward by two inches, breaking the concrete anchors in the frame.
“Anna, into the chute, now!” Claire yelled, pushing the younger woman toward the dark square opening.
Anna looked back at her father, her face contorted with devastating agony.
“Dad, please!”
Dr. Vance stepped back from the door, his eyes completely calm behind his soot-covered glasses.
He picked up the heavy iron pry bar Anna had dropped onto the concrete.
“I will delay him for forty seconds,” the old physician said, his voice steady for the first time since the night began.
“Make sure Michael’s killer rots in a cage, Claire.”
Claire shoved Anna into the metal opening.
Anna scrambled inside on her hands and knees, sobbing violently into the dark metal pipe.
Claire tucked the foam tray with the three glass vials of blood inside her fleece jacket, zipping the zipper all the way to her chin to hold the samples tight against her chest.
She turned, grabbed the rim of the square chute, and hauled herself inside behind Anna.
The interior of the metal chute was freezing, slick with decades of dust, spiderwebs, and accumulated rainwater from the storm outside.
The angle was steep, forcing Claire to dig her knees and elbows into the cold sheet metal to pull herself forward.
Behind them, back in the laboratory, a massive, thunderous boom echoed down the shaft.
The steel door had finally failed.
The hydraulic jack sheared through the final bolt, and the door slammed against the interior concrete with the force of an artillery shell.
Through the open hatch at the base of the chute, Claire heard the unmistakable sound of heavy leather boots stepping onto broken plaster.
Then, Julian’s voice, cold, low, and dripping with venom.
“Where are they, old man?”
Dr. Vance did not plead.
Claire heard the sharp, metallic whistling sound of the iron pry bar swinging through the air.
A sickening, hollow thud followed immediately.
A heavy body hit the concrete floor of the laboratory.
Then, a choked, wet gasp.
“Dad!” Anna shrieked from ahead of Claire in the dark pipe.
“Keep moving!” Claire screamed, her voice cracking as she shoved Anna’s mud-caked boots forward.
“Keep moving, Anna, do not stop!”
Behind them, at the bottom of the chute, a bright light suddenly illuminated the interior of the shaft.
Julian had reached the open hatch.
He thrust a high-powered tactical flashlight into the opening, the blinding white beam illuminating Claire’s kicking legs.
“Claire!” Julian shouted up the shaft, his voice echoing with horrifying proximity.
“You think you can crawl out into the woods and disappear?”
“I know every inch of these woods, little bird!”
“I bought this land three months ago!”
Claire kicked backward with all her might.
Her sodden, mud-encrusted indoor slipper caught Julian’s hand as he reached inside the opening.
The heavy metal flashlight was knocked from his grip, tumbling down into the burning laboratory below.
Julian cursed violently in the darkness.
“Keep climbing, Anna!” Claire gasped, her lungs burning from the gasoline fumes that were now being drawn up the chute by the natural chimney effect.
The smoke was pursuing them through the narrow metal pipe like a living beast.
Claire couldn't see Anna in front of her; she could only feel the frantic kicks of Anna’s boots against her shoulders.
The air grew colder.
Fresh rain began splashing into Claire’s face.
Ahead of them, Anna reached the top of the chute.
The exit was covered by a rusted cast-iron drainage grate set into the concrete apron of the exterior loading alley.
Anna slammed both hands against the heavy iron grate.
It did not move.
It was held down by thirty years of rust and dead pine needles.
“It’s stuck!” Anna cried, coughing violently as the thick black smoke caught up with them in the pipe.
“The smoke is coming, Claire! I can't breathe!”
Claire wedged her knees against the corrugated seams of the duct, bracing her lower back against the ceiling of the pipe.
She reached past Anna’s trembling shoulders and planted both of her palms against the wet cast iron.
“On three!” Claire choked out, her vision dimming from oxygen deprivation.
“One!”
“Two!”
“Three!”
Both women threw their entire physical weight upward in a synchronized, desperate surge.
The iron grate shrieked as decades of rusted bolts sheared away from the crumbling concrete foundation.
The heavy metal slab flipped backward onto the wet grass with a dull, wet thud.
Anna scrambled out of the opening, tumbling onto the soaked earth behind the clinic’s industrial garbage containers.
Claire hauled herself out an instant later, falling hard onto her hands and knees in the freezing mud.
She rolled onto her back, gasping in great, ragged lungfuls of cold, clean November air.
The rain fell upon her face like a blessing, washing away the bitter sting of the gasoline smoke.
Beside them, the rear of the clinic was already engulfed in a towering inferno.
Flames were roaring through the shattered first-floor windows, casting long, grotesque orange shadows across the tall pine trees surrounding the property.
Anna sat in the mud, staring at the burning building with dead, empty eyes.
Her father was still inside.
“Anna, get up,” Claire commanded, grabbing the woman by the collar of her wet coat and hauling her to her feet.
“We have five seconds before he comes out the front.”
“My father is dead, Claire,” Anna whispered, tears streaming unchecked down her soot-blackened cheeks.
“He murdered him.”
“Then do not let his sacrifice be for nothing!” Claire hissed, shaking Anna’s shoulders with savage intensity.
“Look at me!”
“We are holding the only evidence that can bury him!”
Claire tapped the foam tray zipped securely beneath her jacket.
The glass vials rattled faintly against her ribs.
Anna blinked, the fog of shock clearing from her eyes as the instinct for survival snapped back into place.
She nodded once, wiping her wet nose with the back of her muddy hand.
“My car keys are still in the ignition of the hatchback,” Anna said.
“We can't take the hatchback,” Claire said, scanning the dark treeline.
“He’ll anticipate that.”
“The driveway is a dead end; he’ll ram us into the ditch with Michael’s truck before we reach the county road.”
Suddenly, the roar of a powerful V8 engine shattered the sound of the crackling fire.
Around the corner of the burning clinic, the twin LED headlamps of Michael’s black luxury SUV cut through the darkness.
Julian had already exited the front of the burning structure.
He had turned the vehicle around and was accelerating straight toward the loading alley.
The heavy all-terrain tires threw rooster tails of freezing mud thirty feet into the air.
Julian was sitting high behind the steering wheel, his face illuminated by the green glow of the dashboard instrument cluster.
He saw them standing in the rain behind the dumpsters.
He did not honk.
May you like
He did not slow down.
He shifted the transmission into full throttle and pointed the three-ton steel vehicle directly at their bodies.
