Chapter 22: The Ascent
A muffled, earth-shaking boom rattled the dirt from the tunnel ceiling above Chloe. The trapdoor buckled but held. Elias was gone. The cabin was gone. Chloe was entirely alone again.
She turned and ran. The tunnel was a relic of the old logging days, shored up with rotting timbers. She ran blindly, the heavy laptop banging against her hip. She ran until her lungs bled, fueled by a mixture of profound grief and a newly forged, icy rage. She emerged from a rusted culvert pipe halfway up the mountain ridge. The wind howled, whipping snow and freezing rain across the rocky peak. A hundred yards above her stood a massive, rusting radio relay tower, its red warning light blinking methodically in the storm. Behind her, down in the valley, Elias's cabin was a roaring inferno. And moving rapidly up the mountain trail were the bobbing tactical flashlights of Julian's surviving men.
