Chapter 11
The muffled yelp from inside the floor vent was cut short as Mark jammed the wooden broom handle deeper into the grate, his weight pressing down with desperate force. The gloved hand jerked violently beneath the wood before sliding back down into the darkness with a wet, heavy thud.
"Out! Into the garage, now!" Mark yelled, keeping one hand on the broom while backing away toward the open interior door.
Sarah didn't hesitate. She scooped Leo up into her arms, the toddler remaining remarkably calm as he wrapped his small arms around her neck, whispering something directly into her ear that made her gasp aloud. She bolted through the doorway, slamming it shut behind her and dropping the heavy wooden security bar into place.
The garage was dimly lit by the pale afternoon light filtering through the high frosted windows. Their Honda sat quietly in the center bay, its metallic paint gleaming with dust. Mark sprinted to the driver’s side, patting his pockets frantically for the key fob before remembering it hung on the key rack beside the kitchen door—the door they had just barricaded.
"The manual release," Mark muttered, his breath coming in ragged gasps as he popped the hood of the car and reached blindly for the emergency battery bypass cable he had installed the previous winter.
"Mark, they're at the garage door," Sarah warned, pointing toward the heavy metal roll-up door facing the driveway. The exterior keypad was flashing a frantic amber light, and the muffled sound of a motorized winch grinding against the tracks signaled that someone outside was manually overriding the electronic locks.
Leo pointed a small finger toward the rafters above the workbench. "Grandpa's toolbox," the toddler said clearly. "The override crank is behind the old paint cans."
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Mark didn't stop to question how his two-year-old son knew the exact location of a tool Mark had hidden five years ago. He leaped onto the wooden workbench, swept aside three dusty cans of primer, and grabbed the rusted iron hand-crank hanging from a hidden nail on the back wall.
With a desperate lunge, he inserted the crank into the manual socket on the garage door housing and began to spin it clockwise as fast as his arms could move. The heavy metal door groaned, resisted, and then slowly began to lift upward, admitting a blinding slash of grey daylight and revealing the cold, impasspassive face of Arthur Vance standing on the driveway with a clipboard in his hand.
