Chapter 19 - The Fire on the Ridge
Two men dressed in black tactical gear burst through the shattered door frame, their weapons raised, the tactical flashlights on their barrels cutting blinding swathes of white light through the dust-filled air.
I didn't hesitate.
I stepped out from behind the chimney, leveled the Remington at the ceiling directly above the entryway, and pulled the trigger.
The blast was deafening in the enclosed space. The heavy buckshot obliterated the cedar rafters, sending a massive shower of timber, drywall, and burning pine embers crashing down onto the two intruders. The lead man screamed as a burning beam pinned his leg, his firearm clattering across the floorboards.
The second man raised his weapon toward me, but before he could fire, I racked the slide, ejecting the spent red shell, and fired a second round into the floorboards at his feet. The blast chewed through the timber, throwing him backward onto the porch in a spray of splinters and snow.
Through the smoke, I saw Rebecca standing on the driveway, her face illuminated by the harsh headlights of a black SUV idling behind the trees. For the first time, her immaculate composure shattered into sheer terror.
"Maisie! Back door! Now!" I screamed, grabbing the girl’s arm, hoisting her up, and snatching the black ledger and the silver key from the table.
We burst through the rear kitchen exit into the freezing night just as the cabin’s chimney draft pulled the falling embers into the dry rugs, setting the entire front room ablaze with a roaring, hungry wall of fire.
The orange glow of the burning cabin illuminated the snow behind us as we plunged into the dense pine woods. We couldn't take the Land Rover; Rebecca’s SUV was blocking the only egress down the ridge.
"Where are we going?" Maisie cried, tears freezing on her cheeks as she ran through the knee-deep snow, her small legs pumping with desperate adrenaline.
May you like
"The old logging tramway!" I shouted over the howling blizzard and the roaring inferno behind us.
A quarter-mile down the ridge sat the terminus of the abandoned industrial tramway that Thomas Vance’s timber company had used in the 1950s to transport raw lumber down to the river valley. If the gravity-driven service cart was still intact, it was our only hope of descending the mountain before Rebecca’s men recovered and surrounded the ridge.
