Chapter 9 - Flight into the Dark
The bullet punched through the drywall of the hallway, showering plaster over the framed family photographs hanging near the front door.
Daniel ducked, pulling Judge Harrison down with him as they scrambled out onto the porch. Behind them, Ryan and their father had successfully broken through the screen of the side bedroom window, helping their mother—still wrapped in her floral bathrobe and gasping in utter bewilderment—out into the damp grass of the front lawn.
"Get to the SUV!" Harrison shouted over the chaos, tossing his keys toward Daniel. "The doors are unlocked!"
Daniel caught the heavy key fob out of the air. He looked back toward the open front door. Through the shattered frame, he could see the tactical operative stepping into the foyer, scanning the room for targets.
"Dan! Come on!" Ryan screamed from the passenger side of the black SUV, frantically pulling their mother into the back seat while their father scrambled inside behind them.
Daniel leaped off the porch, sprinting across the gravel driveway as another muffled pop echoed from the house, the bullet clipping the trunk of the oak tree inches from his head. He dove behind the rear door of the SUV, yanking it open and diving onto the floorboards just as Judge Harrison slammed his foot on the gas.
The SUV surged forward, tires spinning wildly on the gravel before gripping the asphalt and tearing out of the property, leaving the dark sedan in the dust.
Inside the vehicle, the air was thick with ragged breathing and absolute, stunned silence.
Their mother sat huddled in the center of the back seat, her hands clamped over her mouth, staring blankly at the dashboard. "What... what was that? Who were those men? Ryan, what is happening?"
Ryan didn't answer. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield, his hands trembling as he gripped the armrest.
In the front passenger seat, Daniel sat with the cold metal drive clutched tightly in his hand, his chest heaving. He looked over at Judge Harrison, who was steering the vehicle with terrifying, icy calm down the winding Indiana backroads.
"Where are you taking us?" Daniel asked, his voice raw.
"To a federal safehouse twenty miles outside city limits," Harrison said, not taking his eyes off the road. "Where the local precinct doesn't have jurisdiction, and where the people tracking that metadata can't ping our location without a direct order from the Attorney General."
"And my house in Chicago?" Daniel asked bitterly. "My apartment? My life?"
"As of twenty minutes ago, Mr. Carter, your apartment no longer exists as a safe space," Harrison replied coldly. "Neither does mine. The corruption network we've been unravelling isn't just a municipal problem. It reaches deep into the federal oversight committee."
Daniel looked back at his family. His mother was finally crying softly, her rigid composure completely shattered, comforted clumsily by their quiet, bewildered father. Ryan sat rigidly beside them, looking not like the golden child of their mother's mythology, but like a young man whose entire world had just burned to ash in a single night.
For twenty-six years, Daniel had believed that his family's problems stemmed from favoritism, from a mother who loved one son and dismissed the other. Looking at them now, huddled together in the back of a federal judge's SUV while armed men hunted them through the Indiana countryside, Daniel realized how small their old grievances truly were.
They weren't fighting for a spot on the mantel anymore. They were fighting to survive.
Harrison took a sharp turn onto an unpaved logging road, the headlights cutting through dense walls of pine trees that swallowed the darkness whole.
"We're here," Harrison muttered, slowing the vehicle as a rusted iron gate loomed ahead in the shadows.
Daniel leaned forward, squinting through the windshield. Beyond the gate sat a modest, fortified stone cabin surrounded by high security fences and overgrown brush. It looked abandoned.
But as Harrison pulled up to the electronic keypad and punched in a twelve-digit security code, a heavy metal camera mounted on the roof swiveled down, its red lens locking directly onto the front grille of the SUV.
May you like
"Before we go inside," Harrison said, turning off the ignition and looking back at Daniel with a hard, unreadable expression, "you need to know one last thing about what's on that drive."
---
