Chapter 11 - The Ambush at the Freight Yard
The blinding high-beams of the idling black SUV cut through the pitch-black night, pinning Arthur, Sarah, and young Lily against the rusted chain-link fence of the old freight yard like trapped insects. The heavy engine hummed with a low, predatory vibration that seemed to rattle the loose gravel beneath their boots. Two heavy-set men in dark tactical gear stepped out from the vehicle’s blind spots, their faces obscured by matte-black balaclavas, each holding a suppressed carbine raised in a ready position.
“End of the line, Sterling,” one of the operatives called out, his voice modulated and flat through a comms unit. “Hand over the drive and the girl, and maybe Project Prometheus will let you walk away with your lives.”
Arthur instinctively threw his arms out in front of Sarah and Lily, shielding them with his body despite having no weapon to defend them with.
“Don’t listen to them, they’ll kill us the second they get the data,” Arthur muttered under his breath, his mind racing frantically to find an escape route through the rusted razor wire atop the fence behind them.
Sarah clutched the small metal flash drive tightly in her jacket pocket, her knuckles white with tension. She looked at the armed operatives, then down at Lily, who was trembling uncontrollably and burying her face in Sarah’s waist.
“You wanted this technology so badly that you dragged us into your nightmare, David,” Sarah whispered fiercely, her voice trembling with a mixture of fear and absolute fury. “Now find a way to get us out of this!”
Arthur didn’t hesitate. He reached behind his back, grabbing a heavy rusted iron crowbar he had pulled from the railway tracks a mile back, and hurled it with all his might directly into the glass casing of the freight yard’s overhead security floodlight.
Clang!
The bulb shattered into a million glittering shards, plunging the immediate area into sudden, absolute darkness.
“Now! Run!” Arthur roared, grabbing Sarah’s hand and dragging her hard to the left as a flurry of suppressed gunfire chewed viciously through the chain-link fence where they had been standing a second prior.
They scrambled blindly behind a towering stack of rusted shipping containers, the sharp ping of bullets ricocheting off the corrugated steel echoing all around them. Panting and stumbling over loose rocks, they rounded the corner of a large warehouse just as the heavy metal sliding door of the building groaned open from the inside.
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A hand reached out from the pitch-black interior, grabbing Arthur by the jacket collar and violently yanking all three of them inside before the heavy door slammed shut and dropped into place with a resounding, metallic crash just as a volley of gunfire struck the exterior wall.
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