“We’re not waiting for the storm to break. We’re punching through it.”
He hits the garage door opener clipped to the visor.
The door behind us rises, revealing the white void. The wind rushes in, swirling snow around the tires.
He doesn’t hesitate.
He eases onto the throttle. Controlled power.
The truck rolls forward, the heavy all-terrain tires biting into the concrete before hitting the deep drift outside. No spin. No wasted torque. We push out of the garage, shouldering into the storm with steady, deliberate force.
We leave the sanctuary behind. We leave the ghost of the life we lived for three days.
The headlights cut a frantic, swinging path through the blinding snow, illuminating nothing but the falling wall of white.
I grip the door handle. I look over at him. His jaw is set tight. His gaze focuses entirely on the invisible road.
12
The Hunted
BOYD
The truck eats the asphalt,a growling beast of iron and torque tearing through the pre-dawn dark of the mountains.
I keep the speedometer hovering at fifty. On dry pavement, it’s crawling. On this ice, it’s pushing the jagged edge of control. The tires, heavy-duty all-terrains, chew through the slush the plows left behind, throwing dirty gray slurry against the wheel wells. The cab shakes with the effort, a constant percussion traveling up my spine. It settles in my right shoulder as a dull ache.
Inside, the silence hangs deafening.
Iris stares out the passenger window, her body turned away from me. The dash lights paint her profile in ghostly greens and ambers, but she’s a thousand miles away. She hasn’t spoken since we left the garage. She hasn’t asked where we’re going or questioned the backup plan.
She knows I expected this.
The knowledge sits between us. She’s smart. She saw the go-bags packed by the door, the burner phones charged and ready, the way I cleaned the house like a crime scene before we left. She knows this wasn’t panic. It was protocol.
I’m always ready to run.
I check the side mirrors. Clear.
I check the horizon. Pitch black, white snow, black trees. Dawn remains an hour out.
“How did they find us?” She turns to me, face pale in the dash light.
I grip the wheel until my knuckles go white.
“He has the resources. Satellite tracking. Thermal imaging. He just needed to scan the sector. We generated heat. We stayed too long.”
“I thought we were safe.”
“There’s no such thing as safe. The senator’s resources and Mercer’s tech guarantee it.”
“So where are we going?”
“Secondary site. Old ranger station. Analog. No power, no heat signature.”
“And then?”
“And then we vanish completely. No grid, no footprint. We wait them out.”
