Chapter 53—The Fall
Mark stood outside the driver’s side door and checked the car’s clock. Three minutes. Three minutes until the demise of them all. He tapped the open car door, impatiently watching the radio. Sylvia sat in the driver’s seat as Aidan paced back and forth behind Mark. All of them waiting. Everyone silently counting down the minutes, trying not to watch at the clock.
“Got it,” Rogers said over the radio. They relaxed a little. “Leonard’s entire file. Now, what should I be looking for?”
“Anything to do with his death,” Sylvia said.
“Let’s see,” Rogers said. They heard papers being flipped. “Hmm, name, age, date. Date of death?”
Sylvia looked at Mark. He shook his head, unsure. “I guess.”
“Try each of those,” Sylvia said. Two minutes to go. They heard Rogers muttering to himself, entering in the date.
“Didn’t work,” he said. “Maybe the year only?” A period of silence. “Nope. Not that either. Uh, we got home address, but that’s only three numbers.”
“What about the funeral home?” Mark asked. He turned to the building, but was crestfallen to find only three numbers visible on the wall of the building.
Crash! They turned to look at the roof of the funeral home. Finster rolled along its flat top. Lydia tumbled out with him. Sylvia pulled out her pistol and took up a position behind the car. She handed the radio to Mark as she aimed at the combatants. “Can’t get a clear shot,” she said.
One minute left. Mark was sweating bullets. Rogers continued to read through the file, listing off the sections one by one. “Er, bunch of signatures, cause of death, time of death. What else? What else?”
But Mark was no longer listening. The last word stuck out in his head. Time. Rooke had been livid when the nurse announced Leonard’s time of death. No, livid was the wrong word. He had fallen into a frenzy, becoming hysterical. Then, as if thumbing through a scrapbook of the past couple of weeks, Mark recalled how much Rooke had mentioned time, some examples sticking out like hint signs. “Time to take back his gift,” and “how they had a “short time left.” Maybe Rooke had been unconsciously revealing that the answer was time. It was a stretch, but as more examples slapped Mark’s mind, the more he believed he was onto something.
“Wait, it’s time!” Mark said. “The time! Try inputting the time of his death, the medical time!”
Rooke burst out of the building, spraying bullets at them. They hid behind their car as he ran to his broken hearse. He opened the rear door and crawled inside. He kicked the lid off of a coffin. Then he pulled weapon after weapon out of the coffin. Pistols, rifles, anything and everything. Then he opened the sunroof and began to fire at the police car. When he ran out of bullets for one gun, he would discard it for another.
“The time? Okay. Fourteen hours and thirty-three minutes is when he died,” Rogers said. Sylvia tried to focus a shot on Rooke, but he kept up a constant fire. All they could do was to wait, their eyes glued to the radio. “Nope. We’ve got about thirty seconds, folks.”
The medical time didn’t work? But Mark had been so sure. It made sense! A string of bullets sped by him. I can’t think with all this! he screamed inside his head. They had to try once more! Fourteen thirty-three. He knocked on his head, beating his train of thought back onto the tracks. What‘s fourteen thirty-three in normal time? Two thirty-three? It did sound like the correct translation. “Try two thirty-three, then.”
“Rooke is a physician. He would’ve used medical time,” Rogers said.
“We already tried that,” Aidan piped up. His eyes were darting to the clock and he was tapping on the car door. “What have we got to lose?” Rogers sighed and agreed. Then Aidan muttered, “Except our lives.”
“Fifteen seconds, sir,” someone said on the other line.
“Pray this works,” Rogers said. They barely heard him over Rooke’s continuous barrage of bullets.
“And now,” Rooke shouted atop the hearse, “embrace death!”
A pause in the air. Even Rooke stopped firing, but his head ducked out of their view. Sylvia had her gun trained on him, but he was using the coffin for cover. Meanwhile, Aidan and Mark were staring at the radio, hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.
“It worked!” Rogers said. Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief. The clock struck eleven. “It worked.”
“Good job,” Sylvia said to Mark. He nodded and took a deep breath. The crisis was over. They would live. Rooke raised his head out of the hearse. His face scrunched into a twisted frown as he realized what had happened. “No,” he said. “No, it’s impossible!”
“Bartholomew Rooke!” Sylvia called out. “Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air!”
Instead of complying, he fired on their car. He stepped out of the hearse, dragging out the coffin as he continued shooting. He produced a bevy of grenades, lobbing them at the car, the funeral home, and all around him. “I won’t fail! Not in this, not to you! All of you will die!” he said, complementing his vow with explosion after explosion.
Sylvia hurried Aidan and Mark away from the carnage and down the street. Rooke fired a pistol in all directions as he dragged the coffin along with him while circling around the front. He disappeared behind the side of the building. Mark heard the sound of an engine starting up and a shiny new hearse appeared, Rooke at the wheel. He tore out of the lot and down the street. Sylvia shot at him, managing to put a few holes in his trunk.
Before they could chase him in their car, their attention was stolen by the funeral home. It groaned and creaked. Lydia and Finster halted their fight on the roof, staying perfectly still for a moment.
“Aidan,” Sylvia said. “Do you think you can fly?”
“Um. ..” He looked at the building and swallowed hard.
“Never mind. I’ll try to get her to come down. You two stay here—Mark!”
Mark was already running away down the street. Sylvia called again, but he didn’t slow. He wasn’t about to stay and be arrested. His services were over. He had to take care of himself now. Heather was nowhere to be seen. Finster was preoccupied.
He was alone.
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Halfway Heroes Page 98
