Chapter 6 - The Lighthouse Trap
The narrow coastal trail was treacherous, choked with mud, loose gravel, and spiky sea brambles that tore at Nora’s clothes as she ran through the blinding fog.
Behind them, the high-pitched barks of guard dogs and the beam of tactical flashlights cut through the mist.
"They're coming, Mommy!" Madeline cried into Nora’s ear, looking back over her mother’s shoulder.
"We're going to make it, sweetie! Don't look back!" Nora gasped, her lungs burning like fire as her boots pounded against the rocky path.
Ahead in the darkness, the massive, dark silhouette of the abandoned Blackwood Point Lighthouse emerged from the fog like a giant stone cylinder.
The lighthouse had been decommissioned twenty years earlier, its iron door rusted and hanging half-off its hinges.
Nora knew she couldn't outrun trained attack dogs on an open cliff path with a child on her back. She darted off the trail, shoved Madeline through the narrow gap in the lighthouse door, and scrambled inside behind her.
Nora grabbed a heavy rusted iron beam lying on the concrete floor and wedged it firmly across the doorframe, jamming the latch shut.
Seconds later, heavy bodies slammed against the outside of the iron door, followed by the vicious, frenzy snarls of German Shepherds scratching at the metal.
"Nora!" Eleanor’s voice echoed through the iron door, amplified by a bullhorn. "There is no way off that rock! The lighthouse is a dead end! Give me the child, and I will let you walk away with ten million dollars in a Swiss account! You can start a new life!"
Inside the dark, damp base of the lighthouse, Nora ignored the voice. She pulled Madeline close, kneeling down in front of her.
"Madeline," Nora whispered, holding the child’s small, wet face in her hands. "Look at me, baby."
Madeline looked into Nora’s eyes, her small chin trembling, but her hazel eyes were bright and filled with trust. "I'm not scared, Mommy. You're with me."
Nora felt a tear cut through the dirt on her cheek. "I need you to be very brave. Is there a cell phone in your raincoat?"
Madeline shook her head. "Grandma took it."
Nora reached into her own waterproof pocket. Her phone was dead—soaked by seawater during her crawl through the drainage culvert.
She looked up at the spiraling iron staircase winding up into the dark interior of the lighthouse tower.
At the very top of the tower, three hundred feet above the sea, was the old emergency radio beacon room—a facility installed by the Coast Guard in the 1980s that maintained its own solar-powered backup generator.
"We go up," Nora said, taking Madeline’s hand.
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They began to climb the spiral stairs, their footsteps echoing like iron drumbeats inside the hollow stone tower.
Behind them, the sound of an oxyacetylene torch began to hiss against the lower iron door, white-hot sparks flying into the dark base of the tower as Eleanor’s men began to cut through the metal.
