Chapter 7 - The Blackout
Every light on the block vanished in an instant.
The warm pendant lamps inside the bakery died. The green glow of the cash register vanished. The streetlamps outside went pitch-black. The entire district was plunged into an absolute, suffocating darkness, illuminated only by the faint, strobing flashes of distant lightning reflecting off the driving rain against the windows.
"What the hell?" Pendelton cursed in the dark, reaching blindly for the counter. "Did a transformer blow?"
"Shut up, Arthur!" Moretti barked, his voice sharp and alert. "Draw your weapon!"
In the pitch-black interior of the bakery, the silence was deafening, save for the rhythmic drumming of the storm against the glass.
Toby shrank against the steel refrigerator, his chest heaving as he tried to make himself as small as possible in the shadows.
CLICK.
A tiny, pinpoint beam of red light cut through the gloom.
It did not come from Moretti. It did not come from Pendelton.
It originated from the dark corner of the bakery near the window—from the table where the frail old woman had been sitting.
The red laser dot danced across the dark room, gliding smoothly over the wooden chairs, over the display case, until it settled squarely on the center of Dominic Moretti’s forehead, right between his eyes.
Moretti froze. His hand, buried inside his coat, stopped dead. He was a veteran of street violence; he recognized the precise signature of a high-powered military sniper scope.
"Dominic Moretti," a voice rasped from the darkness.
It was not the fragile, trembling voice of an eighty-year-old beggar. It was a cold, precise blade of sound that cut through the dark like shattered glass.
"If your hand moves another millimeter inside your coat," Eleanor Vance said quietly from the corner, "a fifty-caliber armor-piercing round will pass through that glass window, through your skull, and embed itself in the brickwork behind you."
Moretti’s breath hitched in his throat. Sweat burst out across his forehead, gleaming in the faint red laser light. "Who... who the fuck are you?"
"I am the woman whose family you just threatened," Eleanor replied slowly.
A sudden beam of bright halogen light sliced through the room as Eleanor snapped on a high-intensity tactical flashlight held in her left hand. The blinding white beam caught Moretti and Pendelton square in their eyes, blinding them instantly.
Before either man could react, the heavy glass back door of the bakery shattered inward with a deafening CRASH.
May you like
Four heavily armed tactical operatives, clad in black armor, night-vision visors, and silent submachine guns, flooded into the room with terrifying, mechanical speed.
"FEDERAL AGENTS! DON'T MOVE! HANDS ON YOUR HEADS! NOW!"
