Chapter 6 - The Ashes
I stole a rusted pickup truck from the rail yard and drove quickly through the back roads.
I parked a mile away from my property and approached quietly through the dense, wet woods.
The intense heat of the inferno hit my face before I even cleared the tree line.
My house was completely engulfed in roaring, uncontrollable, devastating flames.
Local fire engines were parked in the driveway, but the crews were just watching the structure burn.
Sheriff Vance had clearly ordered them to let the house turn to absolute, irrecoverable ash.
Amelia was standing safely near a fire truck, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders for the local news cameras.
She was playing the perfect, traumatized victim, watching my life burn to the ground with a hidden smirk.
They truly thought they had destroyed every single piece of evidence tying me to the truth.
They were completely wrong.
I bypassed the main property and moved silently toward my detached garage in the back.
The garage was entirely untouched, sitting quietly in the dark shadows of the blazing house.
I slipped through the side window, dropping silently onto the oil-stained concrete floor.
I walked over to the massive tool chest resting heavily against the back wall.
I grabbed a heavy steel crowbar and completely shattered the concrete floor beneath the workbench.
A hidden, reinforced steel hatch was buried two feet below the concrete foundation.
I spun the mechanical lock, typed in a twelve-digit code, and pulled the heavy door open.
The underground bunker was absolutely pristine, smelling strongly of gun oil and ozone.
It held tactical gear, encrypted communication servers, and heavy weaponry from my Tier-1 days.
I stripped off my ruined flannel shirt and dressed in a matte-black tactical uniform.
I loaded a suppressed submachine gun and strapped a serrated combat knife to my chest rig.
I booted up the encrypted server to track the hidden GPS signal on Amelia's phone.
The blue dot on the screen was not moving toward a hotel or the local police station.
The signal was moving rapidly toward the private county airstrip on the edge of town.
They were moving the stolen drone payloads tonight.
I climbed out of the bunker, fully armed and completely invisible in the smoky dark.
May you like
Just as I reached the edge of the woods, I felt the cold, unmistakable metal of a gun barrel press against the back of my neck.
"You are a very hard man to kill, Logan," Nora the waitress whispered from the shadows.
