Chapter 4 - DECIPHERING THE THREAT
Lily knew she had to act, but she also knew that running downstairs to try and hold the door shut was a terrible idea. She weighed only seventy pounds; the intruder was easily over a hundred and eighty. If she confronted him, she would lose instantly. Her mind, her analytical, puzzle-solving brain, was her only weapon.
She slid off her bed, moving as silently as a ghost. The emergency amber lights in the hallway cast long, geometric shadows across her bedroom floor. She walked over to her father's small desk in the corner of her room—a space he had set up so he could work near her when she was sick. On the desk sat his old engineering tablet, a bulky, military-grade device with a stylus.
Lily picked up both her father’s old smartphone running the SafeHome app and her own active phone. She sat cross-legged under the desk, pulling her knees to her chest. The small space beneath the desk made her feel sheltered, giving her a psychological sense of security while she formulated her plan.
She looked at her active phone. The battery was at ninety-two percent. Good. She opened her father's tablet, which was connected to their local, generator-powered intranet. Because her father was a stickler for network security, he had a local backup drive attached to the router.
Lily’s fingers flew across the tablet screen. She accessed the SafeHome admin panel. She knew the password; her dad had used the coordinates of their first family camping trip: 41.8781N87.6298W. She typed it in, and the admin panel unlocked.
"Come on, come on," she whispered, her eyes darting between the tablet and the old phone screen.
On the phone screen, the intruder was actively working. He had wedged the crowbar into the lower track of the sliding door. She could see his shoulders tensing as he applied downward pressure. The glass door was beginning to lift slightly, the frame groaning under the immense mechanical leverage.
Using the tablet, Lily bypassed the app's standard user interface and accessed the camera’s raw video stream. She wanted to run a digital contrast enhancement filter to see if she could get a look at the intruder’s face beneath the hood, or at least identify any marking on his jacket that could help the police.
She dragged the contrast slider to eighty percent and decreased the noise reduction. The grainy, gray image sharpened. Lily zoomed in on the intruder's hands. He was wearing heavy, yellow-trimmed work gloves—the kind construction workers used. On the back of his right glove was a distinctive red logo of a stylized wolf.
"Wolf-grip gloves," Lily muttered, committing the detail to memory. She took a quick screenshot on the tablet, saving the image to the local backup drive.
Then, she looked at his face. The raincoat’s hood was pulled so low that his features were completely hidden in shadow, but as he turned his head slightly toward the camera’s direction, the infrared light caught the edge of a black neoprene mask covering his nose and mouth. He was completely disguised.
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Creak.
A low, vibrating groan echoed through the heating vents of the house. It was the sound of metal stripping against metal. The sliding door’s lock was beginning to bend downstairs. Lily’s time was rapidly running out. She had to transition from observation to defense.
