Chapter 9 - The Siege of Oak Street
The smoke rolled through the ground floor like a dense white wall, stinging my eyes and tearing at my throat.
I scrambled up the wooden staircase on my hands and knees, coughing violently, as heavy, tactical boots thudded onto the shattered foyer floor below.
"SEARCH THE HOUSE!" a harsh, synthesized voice shouted through a respirator mask from the hallway. "FIND THE CELLAR ENTRANCE! SECURE THE CHILD!"
My heart stopped. Secure the child.
They weren't just here for Arthur's ledgers. They were here to use Maddie as leverage to force us to unlock the subterranean vault.
I threw open Maddie's bedroom door. She was huddled in the corner between her bed and her desk, holding a bath towel over her face, tears streaming down her red cheeks.
"Mom!" she sobbed, scrambling into my arms. "What's happening?!"
"Listen to me, Maddie," I whispered, grabbing her face in both my hands, ignoring the burning sensation in my own lungs. "We are going out through your bedroom window onto the garage roof. Do you understand me? You do not look back."
I grabbed her heavy wooden desk chair and drove it straight into the double-hung glass window of her bedroom. The glass exploded outward into the night air, letting in a cool blast of rainy October wind that swept away some of the thick white smoke filling the room.
Below the window, the flat asphalt roof of our attached two-car garage stretched ten feet out toward the thick pine trees bordering our backyard.
"Go! Slide down the roof drainpipe!" I commanded, pushing her through the broken window frame onto the wet shingles.
Below us, inside the house, the sound of gunfire suddenly shattered the night.
POP-POP-POP-POP!
The sharp, deafening cracks of low-caliber handgun fire echoed up through the floorboards, followed by the sound of heavy bodies crashing into furniture and the splintering of wooden cabinets.
"Julian!" I heard Brian scream from the kitchen below. "IN THE CELLAR!"
I looked back at the bedroom door. The thick white tear gas was seeping under the frame, glowing ominously with the flash of muzzle sparks down the corridor.
I couldn't leave Brian.
"Maddie, get into the woods and hide in the old shed behind the neighbor's fence!" I ordered her as she slid safely onto the grass below the garage roof. "If I don't come out in three minutes, run to the main road and flag down a police car!"
"Mom, no!" she cried from the lawn.
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"GO!" I screamed.
I turned back into the smoke-filled bedroom, grabbed a heavy iron desk lamp from Maddie’s table, and rushed out into the dark, poisonous hallway to save my husband.
