Chapter 5 - Fire in the Suburbs
"Return fire! Return fire!" the senior police officer yelled, pulling his service pistol and firing two rapid shots through the shattered remains of the front window, though the distance and heavy armor of the attackers made it useless.
"Don't shoot!" Vance shouted, holding a encrypted military sat-phone to his ear with one hand while drawing a sleek, suppressed Sig Sauer with the other. "If you engage them with municipal weapons, they'll call in a kinetic strike to sanitize the entire block! Get those officers back from the windows!"
Bullets chewed through the exterior siding of the house, the terrifying snap of supersonic rounds tearing through drywall filling the air with white dust and insulation fluff.
Ethan was sobbing uncontrollably, his small body shaking as I held him tight against the floorboards, my own heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
Vance kicked a heavy armchair over to serve as temporary barricade, his eyes locked on the front door as the heavy boots of tactical operatives hit our front lawn.
"They're bypassing the front porch," Vance muttered, his voice cold and terrifyingly calm. "They're coming through the back sliding glass door. They want us alive as leverage."
He looked down at me, his eyes blazing with a fierce, terminal resolve.
"Elizabeth, listen to me," Vance said, crouching low beneath the windowline. "There is a reinforced storm cellar beneath the kitchen pantry. Inside is a sat-com radio and a go-bag with biometric overrides. You take Ethan down there right now."
"And you?!" I cried, wiping blood from a minor glass scratch on my cheek.
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"I'm going to buy you thirty seconds," Vance said, racking the slide of his pistol with a crisp, lethal snap. "Because the man who’s about to walk through that back door isn't one of Meridian's hired guns."
Before I could ask what he meant, the kitchen sliding door shattered inward with a deafening crash, and a man in heavy tactical gear stepped through the smoke—holding a weapon aimed directly at Vance's chest.
