Chapter 6 - The Theft in the Dark
Through the shattered glass, the emergency backup lights flickered on, casting an eerie red glow over the room. I reached Lily’s bassinet just as a hand clothed in a blue scrub sleeve slammed into my chest, throwing me backward onto the hard tile floor.
"Elena!" Mark shouted, throwing his body forward to tackle the intruder.
But the woman—the clone—possessed an unnatural, terrifying strength. She swung a heavy metal medical tray, striking Mark across the temple. He collapsed, groaning, blood pooling from his eyebrow.
I scrambled to my feet, my eyes wide with maternal fury. The clone was already lifting Lily out of the incubator. The baby began to wail, a thin, fragile sound that broke my heart into a million pieces.
"Leave her alone!" I screamed, lunging at her, fingernails aimed for her eyes.
The clone turned, and for the first time, I saw her face up close in the red emergency light. She looked exactly like Elaine, but her skin had a strange, slightly translucent quality, and there were dark, bruised circles under her eyes—the physical manifestation of her cellular decay. She smiled at me, a hollow, empty expression.
"She belongs to me now," the clone whispered. "Her life for mine. It's only fair."
She kicked me squarely in the stomach, hitting the fresh incision from my labor. The pain was blinding, white-hot, dropping me to my knees. By the time I could lift my head, gasping for air, the clone had vanished through the broken door, carrying my crying baby into the darkened, chaotic hallways of the hospital.
"Mark, get up! Mark!" I dragged myself over to my husband, shaking his shoulders. He blinked heavily, wiping the blood from his eyes, his expression waking into pure horror.
"She took her," he breathed.
The hospital alarms were blaring now, a deafening cacophony. Nurses and security guards flooded the hallway with flashlights, but the chaos was absolute. The clone had planned this perfectly, sabotaging the hospital's main electrical grid from the basement before making her move.
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Detective Vance burst into the room, his gun drawn, his face pale. "We lost her. She went down the service elevator. A black SUV was waiting outside."
"You have to find her!" I screamed, grabbing the lapels of his jacket, shaking him with a strength I didn't know I possessed. "She's going to kill my baby! You have to find where they took her!"
