Chapter 8
The darkness in the study was absolute, thick and suffocating, broken only by the faint, rhythmic scratching sound coming from beneath the broken floorboards where Dr. Harrison was still trapped. Clara sat frozen in her wheelchair, her hands gripping the steel rims so tightly her knuckles ached in the cold air. The emergency shutters outside muffled all ambient noise from the suburban street, turning the house into an isolated tomb cut off from the rest of the world. Suddenly, a low, metallic static hiss crackled from the ruined computer console on the floor, followed by the sound of heavy breathing.
"Clara?" a faint, distorted voice whispered through the broken speaker wires of the terminal.
"Clara, can you hear me? Tap the wheel twice if you're still alive."
Clara's heart leaped into her throat. It wasn't Dr. Harrison trapped in the floorboards anymore—that was Leo's voice coming through the auxiliary intercom line that connected the study to the basement root cellar.
"Leo!" Clara called out, her voice cracking with overwhelming relief as she wheeled herself toward the sound of the static.
"Leo, where are you? Are you hurt?"
"I'm in the old ventilation shaft behind the brick chimney," Leo whispered urgently, his words coming in rapid, exhausted gasps.
"I heard the lockdown activate. Listen to me very carefully, Clara—Harrison didn't lock just the doors from the outside. He wired the entire house with a remote surveillance jammer connected to his phone."
From the hole in the floor, Dr. Harrison let out a low, venomous laugh in the dark.
"You think your brother can save you, girl?" the doctor mocked, his voice strained as he struggled to pull his trapped leg free.
"The moment that jammer turns on, no signal gets out of this property. Your little cloud backup is sitting in a queue that will never upload."
Clara ignored him, keeping her face close to the static-filled speaker grill on the desk.
"How do I turn the jammer off, Leo?" she asked, her voice steady and resolute in the pitch black.
"Tell me what to do before the backup generator fails."
"You have to find the master control box behind the sliding bookcase on the east wall," Leo instructed, his voice breaking as a coughing fit seized him on the other end of the line.
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"There's a manual override switch, but to reach it, you have to leave the wheelchair."
Clara stared across the dark, debris-filled room toward the east wall, where the heavy wooden bookcase loomed like a giant shadow in the moonlight.
