Chapter 6 - The Man with the Respirator
Before I could answer Lily, the electricity in the house died with a deafening pop from the circuit breaker.
The hum of the refrigerator ceased. The heating vents clicked off. The house plunged into pitch-black, arctic silence, illuminated only by the gray winter light filtering through the frozen windowpanes.
Then came the footsteps.
Slow, heavy, deliberate thuds vibrating through the floorboards from the downstairs entryway. The front door hadn't opened. Whoever was walking had come straight up from the basement.
"Lily," I hissed, lunging across the room and grabbing her off the chair. "Closet. Now."
I shoved her into the back of the walk-in closet behind my heavy winter coats. "No matter what happens, you do not make a sound. Understand me?"
She nodded solemnly, her mouth set in a firm, terrifyingly mature line. She didn't cry. She had seen this play out before.
I reached down to the floor, gripped Caroline’s dropped .38 revolver, and checked the cylinder. Five rounds left. I picked up the crowbar in my other hand, backed into the shadows beside the master bedroom doorway, and held my breath.
Squeak. Creak. Squeak.
The sound of rubber boot soles on hardwood.
A tall silhouette filled the doorway.
The man in the canvas coat. He had taken off his respirator. In the dim gray light, his face was gaunt, his skin yellowed like parchment, with sunken cheeks and deep surgical incisions running along his jawline. He was breathing through an open tracheostomy tube in his neck, each breath whistling with a wet, mechanical rattle.
He wasn't holding the saw this time. He was holding a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.
"Ryan," the man rasped. The voice didn't come from his mouth; it came from an electronic voice amplifier pressed against his throat. Metallic. Grating. "Put the gun down. You don't know the dosage schedule. If she misses her injection by four o'clock, her brain will seize. She'll be dead before the sun goes down."
"Who the hell are you?" I demanded, aiming the revolver directly at the center of his chest. "Where is Clara?! Where is Maya?!"
The man gave a thin, humorless smirk. "I was Dr. Robert Vance's primary research partner for thirty years. I am Dr. Aris Thorne. But more importantly, Ryan... I'm your uncle."
My mind spun into freefall. "My uncle died in a car crash when I was ten."
"Your father faked a lot of deaths, Ryan. It's the family business," Thorne rasped, taking a slow step into the room. "Your father built the memory erasure protocols for Aegis. He spent thirty years perfecting how to rewrite traumatic identity. When he died, he left the proprietary baseline code inside your head. You're the server, Ryan. The only living human who carries the genetic neural imprint."
"You're out of your goddamn mind," I snarled, my finger tightening on the trigger.
"Am I?" Thorne tilted his head. "Why do you think you have no memories of your mother before age eight? Why do you think you never had childhood friends? Why do you think Caroline was assigned to monitor you?"
He raised the shotgun barrel toward my face.
"Give me the safe files, Ryan. Or I blow this entire room into kindling, starting with the little girl hiding in that closet."
He knew Lily was there.
A wave of feral, unadulterated rage completely bypassed my fear.
I didn't yell. I didn't negotiate. I pulled the trigger.
BANG.
The revolver kicked hard. The bullet caught Thorne in the right shoulder. Blood splattered across the pale wallpaper, but the man barely grunted. He fired the shotgun instinctively.
The blast tore into the doorframe right beside my ear, showering my face in wood splinters. The concussive boom knocked me backward onto the floor.
Thorne racked the slide with his good arm, stepping over me to aim down at my chest.
May you like
Suddenly, a tiny figure exploded out of the closet.
Lily charged forward like a wild animal, driving a pair of sharp stainless-steel sewing scissors straight into the back of Thorne's knee.
