Chapter 5 - The Deadly Escape
Victoria raised a megaphone to her perfectly painted lips.
She ordered Ethan to surrender the videotape immediately or they would breach the room.
Ethan quickly pulled the tape from the VCR and smashed it completely with his boot.
He grabbed the magnetic film ribbon and flushed it down the motel bathroom toilet.
He knew they could never let Victoria have the only proof of Olivia’s survival.
Gunfire erupted as the mercenaries aggressively shot the motel door off its hinges.
Ethan flipped the heavy mattress over to create a makeshift barricade for Lucy.
He returned fire with his pistol, taking down the first two men who entered the room.
The confined space quickly filled with deafening noise and thick, choking gunpowder smoke.
Lucy noticed a loose vent cover near the bathroom ceiling.
She quickly stacked a chair on the vanity and kicked the metal grate completely open.
She yelled for her father to follow her into the narrow air duct.
Ethan laid down a final wave of covering fire and scrambled up the bathroom wall.
They crawled blindly through the dusty, cramped ventilation shaft as bullets tore through the ceiling below them.
They finally dropped out of the vent into the adjacent, empty motel room.
They slipped out the back window and ran toward the dark, wooded hills behind the parking lot.
Ethan’s phone rang loudly in his pocket, completely shattering their stealthy escape.
He answered it, expecting to hear Victoria’s mocking voice.
Instead, he heard Marcus struggling to breathe through agonizing coughs.
Marcus confessed that Victoria had poisoned him the moment he finished burning Ethan’s house.
He realized Victoria was tying up all her loose ends, including her own accomplices.
Marcus whispered that he knew exactly where Victoria was currently keeping Olivia.
He tried to say the address, but a harsh gurgling sound interrupted him.
May you like
Marcus managed to speak one final, cryptic word before his heart stopped entirely.
“Lighthouse.”
