Chapter 6 - The Voice in the Dark
Elias instantly grabbed his heavy pistol from his duffel bag and aimed it directly at the ceiling.
He shot the smoke detector without hesitation, plunging the small room into chaotic, ringing silence.
He woke Lily gently by rubbing her shoulder and quickly covered her in his heavy coat.
“We have to move right now, sweetheart.”
She did not complain or cry, simply wrapping her small arms tightly around his neck.
They silently slipped out the small back window of the cramped motel bathroom.
The freezing night air bit harshly at Elias’s bleeding shoulder, but the pure adrenaline kept his legs moving.
He found a beat-up pickup truck parked suspiciously behind the abandoned motel diner.
He skillfully hotwired the old ignition just as three black tactical vans aggressively pulled into the front parking lot.
He drove blindly into the night with the headlights turned off until they were miles down a deserted dirt road.
Elias finally pulled over into a dense thicket of pine trees and killed the noisy engine.
He turned on the dim dome light and opened Anna’s leather diary one more time.
He desperately needed a safe destination before the sun came up.
On the very last page of the book, there was a long string of handwritten GPS coordinates.
Right next to the scribbled numbers, Anna had boldly written the words, "The Safehouse."
Elias quickly plugged the secret coordinates into his phone's downloaded offline map.
The location was an abandoned military radar station hidden deep within the northern snowy mountains.
He looked over at Lily, who was staring back at him with large, incredibly trusting eyes.
“We are going to find Mommy today,” he promised her with absolute conviction.
He drove tirelessly through the rest of the night, his fractured mind racing with painful, fragmented memories.
He kept seeing sudden flashes of a sterile, underground laboratory.
He heard muffled screams constantly echoing in a brilliantly white, clinical hallway.
He pictured a faceless man wearing a pristine white coat, holding an enormous medical syringe.
By dawn, the struggling pickup truck was loudly whining as it climbed up a steep, icy mountain pass.
The towering radar station finally appeared like a ghost through the thick morning fog.
It looked completely abandoned, entirely surrounded by rusted, barbed-wire chain-link fences.
Elias carefully carried Lily to the massive, heavily reinforced steel door.
There was a glowing digital keypad mounted on the concrete wall.
He instinctively typed in the exact date of his and Anna's wedding anniversary.
A bright green light suddenly flashed, and the heavy steel door loudly hissed open.
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Elias stepped inside boldly, expecting to finally find the answers he had bled for.
Instead, he found the concrete walls lined entirely with hundreds of surveillance photographs of himself peacefully sleeping in his own bed.
