Chapter 37: The Blackout

They were five feet from the service door, a rectangle of mundane grey in the gilded corridor. Five feet from the clattering kitchens, the loading bay, the linen van, and escape. The air was already changing, the opulent perfume of the ballroom giving way to the smell of grease and steam.

Sabe’s hand was a firm, guiding pressure on Anton’s back, his body a live wire of tension. Anton focused on the door, on the promise of the ordinary world beyond it. He could almost feel the cool night air on his face.

Then, the world ended.

It didn’t fade. It was severed. One moment, the corridor was bathed in the warm, golden glow of recessed lighting. The next, it was plunged into an absolute, suffocating blackness. The hum of the air conditioning, the distant music, the ambient electronic buzz of a modern building—it all vanished, replaced by a silence so profound it felt like a physical blow.

For a heartbeat, there was only the shocking void. Then, the human reaction erupted. From the ballroom, a collective, deafening scream tore through the darkness, a wave of pure, undiluted panic.

Anton froze, his mind, so adept at navigating the complexities of high finance, short-circuited by the primal terror of the lightless unknown. He couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face.

“Down!” Sabe’s voice was a guttural command in his ear, a sound from a different, harder world.

Before Anton could process the order, a force like a freight train hit him. Sabe’s body slammed into him, driving him sideways and down. The air left his lungs in a painful whoosh. He crashed into something hard and unyielding—one of the large, fluted marble columns that lined the corridor. The impact jarred his teeth.

He was on the cold floor, pinned. Sabe was on top of him, his entire body a protective cage, his arms cradling Anton’s head, his own back forming a shield against the open corridor. Anton could feel the frantic, hammering beat of Sabe’s heart against his own back, a frantic drum in the dark.

“Don’t move,” Sabe breathed, his voice a vibration against Anton’s ear.

Then, the gunfire started.

It wasn’t the loud bang of television. It was a series of sharp, percussive cracks, horrifyingly close. Muzzle flashes illuminated the darkness in strobic, nightmare snapshots. Anton saw, in a single, frozen image, the terrified face of a woman in a feathered headdress, her mouth a perfect ‘O’ of horror. He saw a man in a tuxedo diving under a table. He saw splinters of wood exploding from the wall where they had been standing a second before.

The shooters weren’t spraying blindly. They were firing with purpose. Controlled pairs. Sabe’s training identified the pattern instantly. They were hunting. And their first volley had been aimed directly at the space he and Anton had just occupied.

The darkness was now a living entity, thick with screams and the smell of cordite, which began to mix nauseatingly with the cloying sweetness of a thousand spilled perfumes. The gala had become a slaughterhouse.

Anton lay trapped beneath Sabe, his face pressed against the cold marble base of the column. He could feel the fine tremors running through Sabe’s body—not from fear, but from the adrenaline-fueled readiness of a predator forced to be prey. Every muscle was coiled, waiting for an opening, a target.

“They’re using the panic as cover,” Sabe whispered, his lips so close they brushed Anton’s skin. “They knew the blackout was coming. They’re herding us.”

“How many?” Anton managed to choke out, his voice strangled.

“Two. Maybe three. Suppressed weapons. Professional.” Sabe shifted his weight minutely, his head turning as he tried to parse the chaos through sound alone. The screams, the running footsteps, the shattering of glass—it was a symphony of terror, and he was trying to pick out the melody of the hunters.

Another burst of gunfire, closer this time. Anton flinched, burying his face deeper. He felt Sabe’s body absorb the tension, his grip tightening. This was it. This was how it ended. Not in a boardroom, but on the filthy floor of a corridor, crushed under the weight of the one man who had tried to save him.

A strange calm descended through the terror. If this was the end, there was one thing he needed to say. The words he had been too afraid, too proud, too controlled to utter.

“Sabe,” he whispered, the name of a prayer in the dark.

“Not now, Anton,” Sabe cut him off, his voice razor-sharp. He wasn’t rejecting him; he was saving his focus. Every neuron was dedicated to survival.

But Anton couldn’t stop. The words were a tide, and the dam had broken. “If we don’t get out of this… I need you to know…”

A new sound cut through the bedlam—the shrill, insistent blare of the building’s emergency backup generators kicking in. With a series of loud clicks, the emergency lighting flickered on.

It wasn’t the warm gold of before. It was a harsh, clinical white, casting long, distorted shadows. The scene it revealed was one of Boschian horror. The beautiful people were now a scrambling, crying mob. Tables were overturned, crystal and china shattered across the floor. A man lay bleeding against a wall, his white shirt turning crimson.

And in the newly illuminated corridor, their sanctuary was gone.

Sabe’s head snapped up, his eyes instantly cataloguing the threats. The service door was now twenty feet of exposed, brightly lit space away. The shooters would be adjusting to the new light, their eyes already accustomed to the dark.

He looked down at Anton, his face inches away. In the stark emergency light, Anton saw everything he needed to see. The fear was there, yes. But beneath it was a ferocious, unbreakable will. And something else, something that looked an awful lot like the same desperate, clawing feeling that was tearing at Anton’s own chest.

There was no time for words. The moment of confession was gone, swallowed by the returning light and the immediate, mortal danger.

“On my mark, we run for the door,” Sabe said, his voice low and urgent. “Do not stop. Do not look back.”

He shifted, ready to spring up, to become the target to draw fire so Anton could live.

But before he could move, a figure stepped into the far end of the corridor, silhouetted against the chaos of the ballroom. It wasn’t one of the panicked guests. It was a man, dressed in black tactical gear, his face obscured by a balaclava. He moved with a calm, economical purpose, raising his weapon.

He was too far for a tackle, too close for a miss.

Sabe’s options vanished. There was only one left.

He met Anton’s eyes for a split second—a look of profound, heartbreaking apology—and then he moved.

Instead of pushing Anton towards the door, he rolled, putting his own body directly between Anton and the raised gun.

He was making himself the final shield.

Time seemed to slow. Anton saw the shooter’s finger tighten on the trigger. He saw the absolute resolve in the line of Sabe’s back as he prepared to take the bullet meant for him.

“NO!” The scream was torn from Anton’s soul.

A shot rang out.

But it wasn’t from the shooter at the end of the hall.

It came from behind them, from the direction of the service door.

The shooter in the hallway jerked, a red flower blooming on his shoulder. He staggered back, his shot going wide, shattering a sconce on the wall above their heads.

Sabe didn’t hesitate. He didn’t look to see their saviour. He seized the distraction, hauling Anton to his feet.

“GO!”

He shoved Anton hard towards the service door, which was now being held open by a figure in kitchen whites—the grizzled Luxwing pilot, a smoking pistol in his hand, his face a grim mask.

Anton stumbled forward, his legs like water. He burst through the door into the shocking normalcy of the hot, noisy kitchen. He turned, reaching back for Sabe.

Sabe was right behind him, his face pale, his eyes wild. He gave Anton one last, powerful shove, sending him stumbling further into the kitchen, before slamming the heavy service door shut and jamming a metal cleaning cart under the handle.

He stood there for a second, his chest heaving, his back against the door, as if physically holding the nightmare at bay. The sounds of screaming and gunfire were muffled now, a distant horror.

In the fluorescent glare of the kitchen, surrounded by staring, terrified chefs, Anton looked at the man who had just offered his life for his. The marble column, the blackout, the gunfire, the final, self-sacrificial roll—it played in a relentless loop in his mind.

The blackout had been a trap. But in the darkness, surrounded by screams and perfume, Anton Rogers had seen the one thing that mattered with absolute, terrifying clarity. And he knew, with every fibre of his being, that he could never let it go.

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