Chapter 24 - The Safehouse That Wasn't Safe
The underbrush tore at Margaret’s clothes as they plunged down the forested embankment. Ethan stayed directly behind her, his hand pressed against the small of her back to keep her from tumbling down the frozen, needle-slick slope.
Noah was crying silently now, his small chest heaving, his fingers knotted into the fabric of Margaret’s sweater. “Grandma, the red light is in the trees,” he whispered between sobs. “It’s watching.”
“It’s just the snow, baby,” Margaret lied smoothly, her breath tearing at her lungs like broken glass. “Just cold stars.”
Ten minutes later, the rusted corrugated iron of the old railway switching house rose out of the snowy darkness like a monolith. The heavy oak door hung half-open on rusted iron pins. Thomas slipped inside first, his weapon raised, clearing the perimeter with swift, lethal economy.
“Clear,” Thomas hissed. “Ethan, help me wedge this crossbeam.”
The two men dragged a rotting oak beam across the reinforced frame, sealing out the howling wind. Inside, the air was dead and dry, smelling of coal dust and decades of dry rot. Margaret laid Noah down gently on a workbench in the corner, stripping off his wet boots and wrapping his small feet in her dry scarf.
“We can’t stay here until dawn,” Ethan said, pacing the length of the concrete floor like a caged wolf. “If Clara has that kind of surveillance capability, she’s tracking our cellular signals.”
“Our phones are in the glove box of the Suburban, four miles back,” Thomas replied, checking the magazine of his weapon. “We’re completely dark. The only way she finds this place is with boots on the ground.”
“Then you don’t understand Clara,” Margaret said softly, leaning back against the cold brick wall. She looked down at her hands, trembling slightly from hypothermia and adrenaline. “She doesn't track devices. She tracks psychology. She knows me. She knows I seek shelter where there is stone and heavy doors. She’s not hunting us, Ethan. She’s shepherding us.”
Noah suddenly sat bolt upright on the workbench.
“Grandma,” the boy said, his eyes wide and vacant, staring fixedly at an old industrial fuse box mounted on the wall above the bench.
“What is it, sweet boy?”
“The box is singing.”
Ethan stopped pacing. Thomas froze, his thumb flicking the safety off his sidearm.
From deep inside the padlocked, fifty-year-old iron junction box, a sound was emerging. Not an electrical hum. Not the whistle of the wind.
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It was a music box tune—the exact lullaby that played from the mobile above Noah’s crib in the nursery.
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