Chapter 67 - The Timberline Retreat
The wind on the northern ridge was knife-sharp, howling through the dense canopy of hemlock and spruce. Jared stood thirty feet into the timberline, holding Ellie close against his chest inside his heavy canvas work coat while Noah crouched behind the root ball of an ancient fallen cedar.
Below them in the valley, the repair shop sat illuminated under a ghastly, flickering aura of amethyst and blinding white.
The shop’s corrugated roof groaned. Jared watched through his hunting binoculars as the metal vents on the shop's eastern wall blew out in a violent release of superheated steam. Whatever had breached Sub-Level Seven was venting pressure—hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of subterranean atmosphere that had been sealed since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
"Dad," Noah whispered, his breath freezing instantly in the sub-zero air. "The lights on the highway are out."
Jared shifted his gaze past the perimeter fence. Noah was right. The mercury-vapor streetlamps along County Road 9 had gone completely dark for three miles in either direction. The digital transponder in Jared's pocket let out a harsh, rhythmic chirping—a high-gain radiation counter ticking up into the caution band.
"Electromagnetic pulse," Jared muttered grimly. "Localized to the substation grid. It fried the transformers."
"Is Aunt Melissa down there?" Ellie asked, her small voice muffled by the wool scarf Jared had wrapped around her face. "Did she break the floor?"
Jared felt a bitter pang in his chest. In the innocence of a child's mind, the treachery of family was the only frame of reference for disaster. They knew their aunt had brought men with crowbars to ruin their lives; they knew she had tried to starve them, evict them, and strip their home down to the drywall. But this was something far larger and darker—a monstrous legacy their grandfather had buried beneath the grease and steel of the family business.
Suddenly, a dull roar shook the ridge beneath their boots. Down in the yard, the hydraulic security gates that Jared had reinforced during the siege began to twist and warp, pulled inward toward the bay by a localized barometric vacuum.
Then, from the broken roof of Bay 1, a mechanical mast extended twenty feet into the night sky. At its summit, an array of Cold War-era parabolic microwave dishes locked into position, aiming directly toward the abandoned military radar station on Black Mountain.
A voice cut through the static on the handheld tactical radio clipped to Jared's vest—a signal bouncing off the emergency channel.
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"Jared... can you hear me? Jared, please!"
It was Melissa. But her voice wasn't filled with the spiteful entitlement she had worn for years. She was sobbing, hysterical with raw, unadulterated terror.
