Chapter 4 - The Backroom Escape
The cast-iron skillet connected with the tactical operative’s helmet with a dull, echoing thud that rattled the fillings in Jax’s teeth. The intruder stumbled backward, his heavy combat boots slipping on the shattered glass scattered across the linoleum, before crashing hard against a rack of potato chip bags.
“Move! Now!” Jax roared, grabbing the boy by the collar of his jacket and hauling him up from behind the bar.
Martha scrambled across the floor, pointing frantically toward the kitchen swinging doors. “The walk-in freezer! There’s an emergency service exit that leads to the alley behind the grease traps! Go, go, go!”
Jax didn’t need to be told twice. He hoisted the boy into his arms, ignoring the sudden flare of pain in his old shoulder injury, and sprinted down the narrow aisle between the tables. Another masked figure was already climbing through the shattered window, leveling a suppressed pistol toward them. A muffled thip echoed through the diner as a bullet punched through the wooden backrest of a booth inches from Jax’s ear, splintering the mahogany into fine sawdust.
“Hold your fire inside the structure!” the voice outside barked through the megaphone. “We need the boy intact!”
Jax kicked the kitchen doors open with a violent crash, sending them swinging wildly on their hinges. Martha was right behind them, hyperventilating as she shoved pots and pans off the prep tables to block the doorway behind them. The kitchen was thick with the heavy, greasy smell of old fryer oil and raw meat.
“Jax, the lock is rusted!” Martha cried, struggling with a heavy iron latch on the heavy insulated door of the walk-in freezer.
“Get out of the way,” Jax ordered. He set the boy down behind a stainless-steel flour bin, then threw his full weight against the heavy freezer door, his boots sliding on the wet tile. With a loud, protesting screech of metal, the frozen latch gave way, spilling a dense cloud of white vapor into the warm kitchen.
They piled into the freezing darkness of the industrial unit, the temperature dropping forty degrees in a single second. The boy shivered violently, his old jacket offering almost no protection against the arctic chill, his teeth beginning to chatter. Jax pulled the heavy door shut behind them, sliding the interior deadbolt into place just as heavy fists began pounding furiously on the exterior side of the kitchen door.
“They’re coming through!” Martha gasped, pressing her back against crates of frozen french fries.
“This way,” Jax said, his voice entirely devoid of panic, operating on pure, cold survival instinct. He felt along the frost-covered back wall of the freezer until his gloved fingers found the emergency push-bar of the service exit.
He threw his shoulder against the metal bar. The door popped open with a loud crunch of breaking ice, revealing the narrow, pitch-black alleyway behind the diner. A steady, cold drizzle was falling outside, turning the accumulated trash and gravel into a slick, muddy morass.
“Through the fence, kid,” Jax instructed, gently pushing the boy out into the rain.
As Martha squeezed through the narrow gap after them, a deafening metallic screech echoed from inside the diner as the kitchen door was finally breached by the tactical team.
Jax stepped out into the alley, pulling the heavy service door shut behind them and jamming his heavy hunting knife through the exterior handle to buy them a few precious seconds of time.
“Where do we go now, Jax?” the boy asked, shivering in the cold rain, still clutching the old photograph tightly against his chest like a shield.
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Jax looked down the dark, twisting alley toward the interstate where his roaring motorcycle sat chained to a heavy steel pole, and caught the glint of a second tactical SUV blocking the escape route.
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