Chapter 4 - Fire and Flesh
The temperature inside the tiny, windowless room began to rise almost immediately.
Beneath the glass terrariums, small electric heating pads began to glow a bright, furious cherry-red. The glass containers cracked under the sudden, extreme thermal shock, shattering into hundreds of sharp shards.
CRACK! SNAP!
The swarms of thousands of flesh-flies, suddenly freed from their enclosures and crazed by the rising heat, erupted into the room in a massive, terrifying black cloud. The air became thick with the deafening, frantic drone of buzzing wings. They pelted against Evelyn and Daniel’s faces, clinging to their clothes, crawling into their hair, seeking escape from the heat.
"Evelyn! What do we do?!" Daniel shrieked, swatting wildly at the buzzing storm around his head, coughing as smoke began to curl up from the flammable acoustic foam panels near the tables.
Evelyn didn't panic. Her trauma training kicked in with absolute, terrifying clarity.
"Stop swatting!" Evelyn shouted over the roar of the flies and the rising crackle of flames. "Cover your mouth and nose with your shirt! The foam will release toxic cyanide gas when it burns! We have less than two minutes before we suffocate!"
She scanned the small, burning room with her flashlight. The door was solid oak, reinforced with steel backing—there was no breaking through it without heavy tools. The walls were concrete block covered in acoustic foam.
Except for the back corner.
Evelyn ran to the back wall, where a thick, copper HVAC duct passed through the concrete wall to carry air to the rest of the third floor.
"Daniel! Help me with this table!" Evelyn ordered, grabbing the heavy steel folding table that held the remaining lab equipment.
Together, they smashed the edge of the steel table against the copper ductwork with all their combined weight.
CLANG! CLANG!
The thin copper metal crumpled under the impact, revealing a square, eighteen-inch ventilation opening cut into the concrete wall behind it.
"It’s too small for you!" Daniel coughed, his eyes watering furiously from the thick, black chemical smoke filling the ceiling space.
"I can fit!" Evelyn yelled back, wiping soot from her forehead. "I'm pulling the ductwork out! Give me the steel bar from the table leg!"
Daniel ripped one of the tubular steel legs off the broken table and jammed it into the gap between the copper duct and the concrete frame, leveraging it with all his strength. With a loud, tearing screech of sheet metal, the duct pulled free, leaving an open, ash-lined tunnel leading into the floor cavity between the second and third stories.
"Go! Get through!" Daniel yelled, shoving Evelyn toward the hole.
"Not without you!" Evelyn shouted back, grabbing his arm. "You can make it if you go shoulder-first! Crawl!"
Evelyn squirmed into the tight, dark ventilation space first, dragging herself forward on her elbows through years of accumulated dust and soot. The heat behind them was intense now; the acoustic foam had fully caught fire, turning the small hidden room into an inferno.
Daniel squeezed into the tight metal shaft behind her, his large frame scraping against the sharp steel edges of the duct, his lungs burning with smoke.
They crawled blindly through the pitch-black ductwork for twenty feet until Evelyn reached a horizontal steel grille overlooking the main second-floor gallery.
"Hold on!" Evelyn yelled, raising both her feet and kicking the decorative brass grille with all her might.
BOOM!
The grille gave way, crashing down onto the hardwood floor of the second-floor hallway below.
Evelyn dropped through the opening first, landing lightly on her feet, rolling to absorb the impact. A second later, Daniel tumbled out of the ceiling, crashing heavily onto the floor beside her, gasping for fresh air, coughing up thick black phlegm.
Smoke was already billowing out from under the third-floor doors above them, and the fire alarms throughout the massive estate began to shriek in a deafening, synchronized rhythm.
Through the large glass windows of the second-floor gallery, Evelyn saw a white cashmere coat moving quickly across the rain-slicked driveway toward a dark silver Mercedes SUV parked near the gates.
Marissa was carrying a heavy leather duffel bag—the bag containing her offshore account keys, fake passports, and the remainder of her untraceable bearer bonds.
"She's escaping!" Daniel choked out, trying to push himself up from the floor, but his ankle was badly sprained from the fall.
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"Stay here and call the fire department from your cell!" Evelyn said, her voice like ice. "I'll handle Marissa."
Evelyn sprinted down the grand mahogany staircase, grabbed a heavy brass fireplace poker from the hearth in the living room, and kicked open the front door into the pouring, freezing rain.
