Chapter 6 - THE SIEGE OF CABIN 4
"How could they have tracked us this fast?" David hissed, grabbing the hunting rifle Clara had dropped earlier and checking the chamber with shaking hands. "There are no GPS trackers on our car!"
"Not on the car," Clara said, her face draining of all color as she looked down at the silver bracelets sparkling on our daughters' wrists. "Those bracelets. They aren't just souvenirs from the clinic. They contain micro-RFID tracking chips embedded in the metal clasp. Apex uses them to monitor high-value assets during transport."
I looked down at my wrists, remembering the day the agency gave them to us with a smiling nurse saying, "A commemorative gift for your blessed journey." It was a leash. A high-tech digital leash.
"Take them off!" I cried out, desperately trying to unlatch Lily's bracelet. But it was welded shut with a microscopic security clasp. "I can't open it!"
Outside, the heavy crunch of boots on frozen pine needles surrounded the cabin. A megaphone crackled to life, slicing through the eerie silence of the mountain forest with deafening static.
"Mr. and Mrs. Hayes. Clara Bennett. This is Director Julian Vance speaking. You are harboring stolen proprietary assets of Apex International. Drop your weapons, step outside with the children, and no one else needs to get hurt. You have precisely sixty seconds before we breach."
"We need a back way out," David said, his eyes darting desperately around the rustic room.
"There is no back way," Clara said, pulling a heavy oak dresser in front of the front door with Margaret’s help. "It’s a single-room forestry cabin. The windows are barred with reinforced steel mesh from the old days when rangers kept poachers out."
"We're trapped," Margaret whispered, her voice trembling as she gathered the three terrified girls into her arms, pressing them against the farthest corner of the room away from the windows.
The countdown began outside.
"Thirty seconds!" Julian’s amplified voice echoed through the woods.
David raised the hunting rifle, his hands steadying despite the adrenaline flooding his veins. "If they break that door down, I'll cover the exit. Clara, take the girls through the floorboards. There's an old root cellar beneath the rug."
Clara dropped to her knees, ripping up a frayed woven rug to expose a heavy iron ring set into the rotting wooden floorboards. She pulled it open, revealing a dark, damp concrete shaft leading down into the earth.
"Get in, babies," Clara whispered, tears streaming down her face as she lifted Lily down into the pitch-black opening. "Grandma Margaret, go with them."
"I'm not leaving you, Clara!" Margaret sobbed.
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"You have to! Protect my girls!" Clara shoved Margaret toward the opening just as a deafening explosion rocked the cabin.
The front door blew inward in a shower of splintered oak and blinding white flashbang grenades.
