Chapter 10 - The Fall Through the Branches
The rough oak branches whipped against Chloe’s skin like leather straps, tearing her light blue camisole and scraping deep red gashes across her arms as she plummeted downward. She threw her hands out instinctively, catching hold of a thick, mossy limb that momentarily broke her fall before snapping under her weight with a loud, echoing crack.
She hit the overgrown lawn with a breathless thud, the wind knocked completely out of her lungs. Pain flared across her ribs and lower back, but the cold adrenaline pumping through her veins kept her from blacking out. Clutching the passport and the small lockbox tightly to her chest, she rolled awkwardly into the tall weeds bordering the rotting wooden fence.
Above her, Mark’s face appeared in the shattered frame of the second-story window, coughing violently from the thick black smoke pouring out around him.
"You can't hide from what you are!" Mark shouted hoarsely into the smoky morning air.
Sirens wailed wildly closer now, the flashing red and blue lights reflecting off the wet pavement of the street out front. Heavy boots thudded around the side of the house as officers rushed toward the back yard, shouting commands to secure the perimeter.
Chloe scrambled on hands and knees through the damp grass, pushing past a rusted lawnmower and an old plastic swimming pool until she reached a loose panel in the rotting back fence. With a desperate heave, she shoved the wooden slat aside, squeezing her bruised body through the narrow gap just as a powerful beam of a police flashlight swept across the weeds where she had been lying seconds before.
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She tumbled out onto the desolate industrial alleyway behind the subdivision, gasping for air in the biting morning wind, only to find herself staring directly into the polished chrome bumper of a black sedan idling quietly in the shadows.
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