Chapter 6 - The Trap
The heavy steel maintenance door locked with a terrifying, final clank.
I pushed against it with all my strength, but it wouldn't budge an inch.
We were completely trapped in a small, damp concrete room beneath the city.
The only other exit was a heavy iron grate set into the floor, leading to a drainage pipe.
Elena quickly finished bandaging my shoulder, her hands steady despite the chaos.
She looked at the grate and then at me, her expression grim.
She told me that this room wasn't on any of the city's blueprints.
It was a holding cell, designed specifically to trap anyone who tried to escape the facility above us.
I realized with horror that we hadn't run away from the danger; we had run right into the heart of it.
The agency hadn't just intercepted our extraction; they had guided us perfectly into their trap.
The sound of heavy machinery echoed from the walls, grinding and shifting.
The room began to shake, dust falling from the ceiling as the floor slowly started to tilt.
They were trying to dump us into the drainage pipe, flushing us away like garbage.
The boys screamed, scrambling toward the highest side of the room to avoid sliding down.
I grabbed a metal pipe from the wall and jammed it into the gears near the door, trying to stop the tilting mechanism.
The pipe groaned and bent under the immense pressure, but the tilting stopped momentarily.
I knew it wouldn't hold for long.
I looked at Elena, demanding she use her agency knowledge to find a way out.
She frantically searched the walls, her fingers tracing the concrete seams.
She found a small, hidden control panel near the ceiling, covered in dust.
She typed in a sequence of numbers, praying her old clearance codes still worked.
The panel beeped, and a small, red light began to flash rhythmically.
She told me she had triggered an emergency override, but it required a manual reset from the outside.
Someone had to open the door from the other side, or we were all going to die in this room.
The metal pipe I had jammed into the gears suddenly snapped with a loud crack.
The floor tilted sharply, sending us sliding toward the iron grate over the drainage pipe.
I grabbed the boys, holding them tightly against me as we slid closer to the edge.
May you like
Just as we were about to fall, the heavy steel door suddenly swung open.
Standing in the doorway was Dante, my loyal guard, holding a massive, bloody wrench.
