Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

Danny looked up the hill towards the cabin, but he couldn’t see Hayley. He knew she was there somewhere though. He shoved the bodies of the man and dog into the stream, under the bridge. Then he and Cameron continued up the hill towards the cabin.

Two more men emerged from the blind, now fifty yards back, and Danny took both of them down with his suppressed R11. One of the soldiers had been restraining another snarling dog. When the man fell, his dog charged up the hill towards the boys. The dim exterior lights on the cabin went out at that moment, and the door opened twenty yards ahead of them. Hayley stepped out and beckoned them into the cabin. She shut the door just as the dog threw its full weight against it, knocking her to the floor. Momentarily stunned, she watched as Danny shoved the dog back outside with his boot and closed the door. Cameron pulled Hayley up, and she directed them over to the fireplace, where Wes was waiting.

They scrambled down the ladder through the floor of the fireplace. Wes locked the ceiling tiles in place and dropped down with them seconds before the soldiers kicked in the front door. He sealed the bunker hatch moments later. A monitor showed two soldiers searching the main room of the cabin above us. The soldiers didn’t know for certain that we were in here, but the dog did. It had been barking and clawing at the door when these two soldiers arrived, and they figured it had found something in the cabin. But their search turned up nothing.

We figured it wouldn’t be long until the dead soldiers were found, and we were right. Through the surveillance audio equipment we heard whistles, voices, and vehicles being summoned to the bridge below the cabin.

Within minutes it was a zoo outside. Searchlights blanketed the bridge and the once hidden tunnel beneath it. More soldiers were coming up the hill towards the cabin. A crowd of men had gathered around our side of the bridge where the soldiers had fallen. Through the surveillance audio we could hear plenty of shouting and barking, and we could see more and more soldiers combing the area with their lights.

Concerned about the audio and video equipment giving us away, Danny asked Wes about it. “We’re good,” Wes replied. “Every cabin on this lakeside loop has the same external ‘security system.’ Mine is a little more advanced, but they all appear the same. If they look in the office upstairs, they’ll see dummy equipment, and it will only show everything as it appears with the human eye, which now would be mostly dark and distant. Down here I can zoom and span the cameras around and even get a little audio, as you can tell. I have twenty other cameras set up around the lake and woods we use for hunting and observing traps and can access them all from here. Those can be turned on if we need them, and none of them are any bigger than a quarter and well hidden.”

“So there are no lights or visible motion on the outside?” I asked.

“None,” Wes replied with a smile. “It’s state of the art. A military buddy of mine hooked it up. No way anyone suspects a thing. We’re also completely soundproof down here. We could fire off a cannon and no one would hear us.”

That seemed to ease Danny’s mind. He extended his hand to Wes. “Thank you. Again.”

“Sure thing,” Wes replied.

“Seriously,” Danny continued. “That hunting blind under the bridge was a lifesaver. Genius.”

“Yeah,” Wes agreed. “We always liked that one. That was all Sam’s idea.”

Danny thanked Sam. He then turned around and handed the two arrows to his sister. “I assume these are yours?”

Hayley took them and hugged him. “Maybe.”

“Thanks, sis.” He squeezed her. “That was damn close.”

“I didn’t know you could do that with a bow,” Wes said, having watched it all on the monitors downstairs. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

Hayley pointed at me. I laughed. “Right.” I pointed back at her. “No. That’s all her.”

Cameron hugged her. “She’s a star.”

She definitely is .

Danny’s eyes were again on the monitors, where he focused on one screen in particular—the one with the giant African captain. He was approaching the cabin with a few other men. Danny raised a hand in the air and everyone quieted down, despite the fact Wes claimed the bunker was soundproof enough to conceal a Metallica concert. But Danny wasn’t worried about our sound; he wanted to hear theirs. Anything we could overhear might be useful. We all strained to listen.

Danny pointed out the man the soldiers had referred to as “Captain Eddie,” who was walking a full circle around the cabin. He was eying the cameras and then he entered the front door. Another man entered behind him. “Where’s my brother?” the captain asked him. Wow, that’s a thick accent .

“Outside,” the man replied.

“Get him,” Captain Eddie ordered. “And go bring the bodies up here to me.”

“Lazzo,” the man shouted, as he exited the cabin. Lazzo came in a minute later.

“That dog was at this cabin?” Captain Eddie asked him.

“Yes,” Lazzo replied. “But there was no one here. They searched it already.”

Captain Eddie grunted and continued to look around, knocking on walls and occasionally stomping on the floor. As he approached the fireplace, he glanced up at the moose head hanging above it. With cameras in each eye it seemed as if he was staring right at us. Eddie picked a picture up off the mantel and looked it over, then let it drop to the floor. It shattered, and Eddie turned back towards the front door, just as several men carried in the dead soldiers. They set the bodies on the ground, and Eddie examined them. He knelt beside the two men with holes through their throats. “Lazzo, what did this?” he asked, touching the wounds in their necks.

“Bullet?” Lazzo replied.

“What?” Hayley whispered next to me, not completely following his accent.

“He thinks it was a bullet,” I whispered back as Danny hushed us.

“No,” Captain Eddie growled. “No bullet.” He stood up and addressed the other soldiers in the room. “These men were killed by experts. Is not a hunter. Search all the cabins. Then burn them to the ground. Start a fire outside too. Burn this whole place down.”

The men hurried off to carry out his orders. Captain Eddie walked back outside and took one more look at the camera above the door. He shook his head and walked away, back towards his high-tech tracking system. He had seen activity around this cabin on his screen when they’d first turned it on. He’d figured it was his men, but maybe it hadn’t been. Still, he’d found nothing in the cabin, and they’d found no signs of life anywhere else. Maybe the dog was just crazy.

Eddie stroked his scruffy chin as he stared at the tracking station monitor. That was unlikely. There were people hiding in this area somewhere. His screen showed red dots moving about in twos and fours. Some of the patrols had an extra dot, if they had a dog, but none of their visible movements suggested anything unusual. If none of these dots on his screen were their targets, then where were the Americans? Was it possible they had some form of defense against his thermal scanner? How? And exactly how many of them were hiding out here?

If Eddie burnt the whole place down he’d find out. There’d be nowhere for the Americans to hide, and his soldiers could simply sit outside the fire and wait.

We watched through the monitors as the soldiers doused the cabin above us, and the others down the road, with gasoline. As the flames leapt up and spread to the dry brush and trees around the buildings, a wall of fire spread across the hills and brought the world outside crashing down. We lost all of our visual aids. Wes manually flipped on each of the tree cameras, but the heat from the expanding flames rendered their sight lines useless. We were blind for now. And suddenly, we didn’t feel as safe.