Story code: ST-001457
Part 2: The Foyer
Carla’s knees hit the freezing slate porch so hard the impact sent a shockwave up her spine, rattling her teeth. She flattened herself instantly against the wet stone, spreading her arms wide so her palms lay flat in the pooling rainwater.
“I’m down! I’m down! I don’t have a weapon!” she screamed over the violent howling of the wind.
“Don’t move a single muscle,” a voice barked back from the darkness of the doorway. It was a man’s voice, raspy and thin with age, but vibrating with a frantic energy that made Carla’s blood run cold.
A calm man holding a gun was a tactical threat. A terrified man holding a gun was a hair-trigger death sentence.
The blinding beam of the flashlight remained fixed firmly on her head, washing out all color and depth, turning her vision into a painful, solid white void. The freezing rain continued to hammer her back, soaking through her thin diner uniform and chilling her to the bone.
“My car broke down at the bottom of the ridge,” Carla shouted, spitting out a mouthful of rainwater. “My cell phone is dead. I just need to use your landline to make one call. Please.”
“Shut up!” the man snapped. “Crawl inside. Slow. Keep your empty hands where I can see them.”
Carla gritted her teeth and dragged herself forward, her wet clothes scraping harshly against the raised stone threshold. She slithered like a snake into the dark foyer, the slick, polished hardwood floor squeaking sharply beneath her damp uniform.
The heavy oak door slammed shut behind her, cutting off the deafening roar of the storm. The sudden, pressurized quiet of the house was suffocating. It was broken only by the rhythmic dripping of water from Carla’s clothes and the heavy, uneven panting of the man standing just a few feet away.
The flashlight beam clicked away from her face, bouncing off a high, vaulted ceiling to provide a dim, ambient glow. Carla blinked rapidly, fighting the purple spots dancing in her retinas.
The man backed up against a heavy mahogany console table. He looked to be in his late sixties, dressed in an oversized flannel shirt and sweatpants. In his hands, leveled directly at Carla’s chest, was a battered pump-action shotgun. The blued steel barrel was trembling uncontrollably. His finger rested dangerously tight against the trigger guard.
“Cross your ankles,” he ordered, his voice cracking with strain. “Cross them!”
Carla did exactly as she was told. She lifted her right leg to cross it over her left, her wet, clinging jean leg riding up her calf.
The man gasped-a sharp, panicked intake of air that sounded incredibly loud in the quiet foyer. He took a stumbling half-step back, the shotgun dipping slightly before he violently jerked it back up.
The flashlight beam snapped down, pinning her lower legs in a harsh circle of blinding white light.
It rested directly on the bulky, black plastic housing of her GPS ankle monitor.
“You’re a convict,” the man whispered. The fear in his voice mutated instantly into a dangerous, righteous certainty. “You’re one of them from the state lockup.”
“No, listen to me,” Carla pleaded, keeping her head down, her voice trembling but urgent. “I’m on parole. It’s federal, not state. I have a strict curfew. I have a monitor.”
“Don’t lie to me! You broke out. You came up here to hide out from the storm, didn’t you? Figured an old man living alone in the woods was an easy mark.”
“I’m not lying!” Carla turned her head just enough to look at him, keeping her hands perfectly still on the hardwood. “If I am not inside my apartment in twenty-five minutes, that box on my leg sends an automated alert to the marshals. They will issue an immediate warrant. They’ll send me back to federal prison for five years. Please. I just need to call my parole officer and tell him my car died.”
The man let out a harsh, barking laugh that held absolutely no humor. “Nice story. Real creative. But you made a mistake. If you just wanted a phone, you shouldn’t have cut the line first.”
Carla’s stomach plummeted into an icy abyss. “What?”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” he sneered, though the gun barrel continued to shake. “The landline went dead ten minutes ago. Right before you started banging on my door. You people think I’m stupid? Who else is out there in the woods? Where’s the rest of your crew?”
“There is no crew! The storm must have brought a tree branch down on the line!” Carla’s pulse hammered furiously against the floorboards. “Look at me! Do I look like a home invader? Please, just let me plug my cell phone into a wall charger. Two minutes. Just enough to get a single percent of charge and send a text. Then I’ll walk right back out into the rain. I swear to God.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” the man said.
He reached behind him with his left hand, fumbling blindly along the console table while keeping the flashlight and the shotgun trained on her. His frantic fingers knocked over a decorative ceramic bowl, sending car keys and loose change clattering violently to the floor. Finally, he found what he was looking for: a thick roll of heavy-duty silver duct tape.
He tossed it onto the hardwood. It rolled in a slow, agonizing arc and bumped gently against Carla’s left elbow.
“Tape your own ankles together,” he commanded, stepping further out of her reach. “Tight. Three wraps. Then your left wrist to your right. You’re gonna sit right there in the dark until the county plow comes up this road tomorrow morning and the sheriff takes you off my hands.”
Carla stared at the roll of silver tape. Her mind raced, the freezing cold of the floor seeping deep into her bones. Tomorrow morning. If she stayed bound on this floor until tomorrow morning, she was a fugitive. The automated system wouldn’t care that she was held at gunpoint by a paranoid man. Her parole officer wouldn’t care about a dead car or a dead phone. They only cared about the missing signal.
She looked up at the trembling, hollow barrel of the shotgun, and then at the terrified, sweating face of the man holding it.
She had twenty-two minutes left.