Judgment

by Tom Reinhart

  She had just barely made it.

  I saw Steve follow next. Never looking back, in a panic, run headlong to the edge and leap. He too, just barely made the other side, landing on his hip with a thud, his legs dangling over the side. Margie pulled him the rest of the way onto the roof. I quickly turned to Jennifer. She was facing me now, the two angels from the other roof quickly coming up behind her. I reached out my hand towards her. I yelled out to her, “C’mon!” and she ran up to me and took my hand.

  “I can’t Adam. I can’t jump,” she pleaded.

  I didn’t have time to talk her into it. Instead I grabbed her arm and just began pulling her along as I ran. “We’ll go together. Just run as fast as you can and jump. You’ll make it.”

  Please God, let us make it.

  Twenty yards from the edge I stopped. I looked her in the face. “You can do this. Just follow me. Run like hell and jump. Okay?” She nodded that she would, but I could see the doubt in her face. I heard wings flapping behind me, as a large shadow fell over us. I let go of Jennifer’s arm and I began to run. I heard her footsteps pounding next to me, just slightly behind.

  Good. She’s gonna do it.

  All too quickly I was at the edge, and I leapt for my life. In that split second I looked down, and I saw a twelve story drop pass by below me. I felt my heart and stomach climbing up into my throat. A second later came the painful smack of gravel into my face as I landed hard on the roof next to Steve. Margie quickly grabbed me and helped me up. I turned to look for Jennifer, but only heard her screaming from across the alley. She had panicked at the last second and didn’t jump. She was crying hysterically, screaming as the angels closed in on her.

  “Jump Jennifer. C’mon!”

  Margie and Steve were both yelling to her now. “C’mon! You can make it.”

  Jennifer was in full panic mode. As the angels got near she ran away from the edge to the center of the roof. It was just her and five angels, and they were going to surround her. She ran back and forth several times to avoid them, every few seconds looking over to us and screaming for us to help her.

  Jump, God damn it. Jump.

  She ran back to our side of the roof, calling out to me from the edge. She was hysterical. “I can’t make it Adam. I can’t do it.”

  “Yes you can. Yes you can Jennifer. Please. You have to jump. Just do it!”

  She hesitated for a moment longer. Then she turned and ran back several feet. She turned, and took off in a full run towards the edge.

  No no no! Start further back.

  As soon as she started running I knew she didn’t get enough of a runway. She ran awkwardly, never getting up quite enough speed for a proper jump. It all happened too fast for me to do anything. She flew off the edge, never coming close to clearing the alley. Without thinking I dropped to my knees and reached out over the edge to grab her. Margie had to grab the back of my pants to stop me from falling over the side. In that split second Jennifer and I made eye contact, both our hands reaching out towards each other. I saw the fear in her eyes; the panic and realization that she wasn’t going to make it. I swear our fingertips missed each other by inches.

  Oh my God please. NO!

  Then I watched her fall.

  She screamed all the way down, until her head hit the fire escape around the fifth floor and she went silent. Then came the horrible smacking sound as she landed on the pavement of the alley. I just lay there at the edge of the roof, staring down in disbelief, watching the pool of red slowly grow around her head. None of us said a word. No one moved. Until we heard the wings of the angels as they flew across the alley and we had no choice.

  “C’mon. Now!” I heard Steve yell as Margie was pulling me up to my feet.

  “Move Adam. There’s nothing we can do. We have to go!”

  Halfway across the roof we ran, gravel and ash kicking up around our feet until we reached the door into the building below. It took two tries for Steve to yank the door open, and then he rushed in without worrying about what might be on the other side as the angels were quickly pursuing us across the new roof. Margie went in second, and I dead-bolted the door shut behind me as I followed her. Down we ran; two flights, then three, then four, and suddenly Steve stopped at the ninth floor, barely able to breathe. “Wait….hold on…just a second…” he gasped, dropping to his knees onto the floor. “I can’t …..breathe.”

  He was making horrible gasping sounds. It was like he was sucking in huge amounts of air but his body couldn’t use it. He was suffocating, with all the air he needed all around him. He lay down on his back, as Margie tried to comfort him. “Just slow down Steve. Breathe in your mouth and out your nose. Slow your exhales. Breathe out of your nose.”

  Huddled in the dark on the ninth floor landing, I could see Steve’s pounding heart tossing his shirt up and down, his gasps echoing around the small hallway. This building was identical to ours, except we didn’t know what was in it. I sat down next to Margie, leaning against the wall trying to catch my own breath as well. Above us, four flights up, I heard the rooftop door cracking. It sounded similar to the sound of Jennifer’s skull hitting the pavement. I struggled desperately to get the vision out of mind, but knew I never would.

  Steve’s breathing improved slightly as I heard the angels enter the stairwell up above us. “Okay. I’m okay. I know we have to move,” he said as he rose to his feet.

  Margie was quickly looking between the upper stairs and the floors below us. “What’s the plan?” she said, now looking to me. “We’re going down, right?”

  I heard the angels coming down above us. “Yeah. Right now. I’d rather be on the open street than trapped in here.”

  Without another word we were racing down the stairs. I tried to look ahead as we went, trying not to run headlong into trouble while still racing forward for our lives. On several floors I saw maledicted through open doorways. There seemed to be many more here than had been in our building.

  As we reached the second floor, the front door of the building flew open, sending sunlight bursting into the lobby. We stopped our descent and peered over the stair railing. I could see several maledicted lying on the lobby floor, until large shadows filled the doorway. Seconds later several Judges were in the lobby.

  “Shit. Quick…into the apartment,” Margie said, already bumping into me as she reversed her direction. Into an apartment was the last damn place I wanted to go, but I followed her and Steve into the closest one, shutting and bolting the door behind us. The apartment was a stark contrast of light and dark; the sunlight pouring in through the windows making the darker rooms seem even darker. Those were the rooms that bothered me. The minute we entered the apartment I could smell the maledicted, the foul odor of death filling the entire place. We all froze near the foyer for a moment, trying to be quiet to conceal ourselves from the angels while analyzing the apartment for threats within.

  It was only seconds before we heard the old woman’s voice from the dark bedroom. “Stanley, is that you? It’s about time you got home.” Her voice was old, and the death in her made her voice garbled and weird, like she had a throat full of goo. I saw her silhouette moving towards us as she entered the hallway. She stepped into the sunlight, and the full grotesqueness of her condition became visible. She was clearly dead. Apparently she had no idea about it. At least not anymore, not since the lack of real brain activity had made her insane.

  The walking corpse stared at us confused. “Stanley? You’re not Stanley. Who are you?” She had no wounds or other visible reasons for dying. It must have been just natural causes, and then her animated body simply went insane waiting for Stanley, who was probably also dead and insane somewhere else in the city. Like a light switch her demeanor suddenly changed. What was left of her eyelids seemed to open wide, and her posture became aggressive. “Get out of my house! Get out of my house!” she began to scream at us. She shambled over to the kitchen and began to open drawers. Pulling out a kitchen knife she turned to face us again. “S
tanley! Stanley, where are you!?”

  She was loud, too loud, and she needed to be shut up. The problem with the maledicted, aside from being dangerous on their own, was they had no fear of Judges, so made no attempts to be quiet. If the angels hadn’t already heard her, they would, and they would come straight to this apartment.

  Before I could react, Margie and Steve were already on her. Steve’s first blow with the lead pipe knocked her down, and Margie went to work on her with the hatchet. We had all learned to go for the face first, for the mouth and throat to silence them quickly, then for the legs so they couldn’t walk. Once silenced and immobilized, they became marginally harmless.

  In less than a minute the old woman was jawless and in pieces on the kitchen floor, all of the pieces still moving. I could see she was still trying to yell at us, but couldn’t make any sound. Steve was checking the back room for anyone else, and then returned with a blanket which he used to cover the wiggling body parts on the kitchen floor. The smell coming from the old woman was mind-numbingly disgusting.

  Reading Margie’s face, I could see the regret and disgust. “It had to be done Margie.” She nodded understandingly to me as she wiped some sort of nasty looking body fluid off of her cheek. Then the door behind me creaked and groaned under the pressure from outside. The angels had heard, and were on us again.

  Steve grabbed his pack and the pipe and headed for a window. “Shit!”

  Margie did the same, trying to open a second window. “Damn lock is stuck.”

  Slowly backing away from the door, I watched the cracks forming around the hinges. Any second it would come bursting in. “C’mon guys. Get the fucking windows open. We need out of here.”

  Steve’s window opened first. “Freakin’ second floor man. That’s a long drop.”

  Margie answered him as she continued struggling to open her window. “Throw your pack down first. Land on it if you have to.”

  I turned and saw Steve shoving his backpack out through the window. Then he began climbing out. “C’mon…lets go,” he yelled, and disappeared through the window, dragging the curtains out with him. I heard him hit the concrete below with a slap, and he yelled out in pain. Margie abandoned her stuck window and headed for Steve’s.

  Suddenly the door burst inward, and I turned to see an angel push the pieces of door aside and enter the apartment. Margie and I still had to get our packs out through the window, and both of our bodies, before getting grabbed.

  We’re not going to make it.

  Suddenly behind me a bright flash of red light erupted, reflecting off the walls and ceiling, as hot embers hit the back of my neck. Margie rushed up alongside of me, thrusting a flare forward towards the angels coming through the door. “Here, give it to me,” I urged her. “Get our shit out the window.”

  “No, you go.”

  “Gimme that fucking thing!” and I forcefully took it from her hand. “Go on. Get the packs out.”

  Two angels had entered the apartment, and a third stood in the doorway. They paused when the flare came out, stopping in the foyer. Fire was the only thing that seemed to hurt them, and the only thing they seemed to acknowledge as such. They took several steps forward, and spread apart as if to get around me from two sides. I thrust the flare forward at one of them, and he didn’t back up but he paused for a moment, then tried to circle around me again.

  I heard Margie go out the window. “C’mon! I’m out!” A second later I heard her feet land on the ground outside. I would have to drop the flair to get through the window, and I knew they could grab me before I got out. In a desperate move I lunged forward with the flare and touched it to the angel’s wing as he reached for me. The feathers instantly caught on fire and in seconds both wings were in flames. The Judge made a loud screeching noise and began spinning in a circle, crashing into the walls and furniture. Everything it touched caught on fire and the room was quickly becoming engulfed in flames. I backed to the window and dropped the flare on the floor in front of me before climbing out.

  Steve was right, it did look like a long drop. But feeling the heat of the fire building behind me and hearing the screeching of the Judges as they caught on fire, I jumped. Twenty feet below I landed on our packs. I rose quickly and found Steve leaning on Margie’s shoulder, holding one foot up off the ground. “I think he sprained an ankle. Or worse broke his foot,” Margie announced.

  Great.

  Looking up and down the street, I could see several maledicted wandering towards us from both directions. “We need to go find someplace and hunker down for a while. All this noise and excitement is going to bring more attention that we don’t want.”

  Margie grabbed her pack, and I grabbed mine and Steve’s. I reached over to help Steve, but he pushed my arm away. “I think I can walk.” He did, but barely, with a severe limp.

  “This is really going to slow us down. We shouldn’t go too far. Let’s just get Steve settled in somewhere and see how his foot is in the morning.”

  Margie agreed. “The bank. Let’s go back to the bank we were at last week. Just up the street. There’s hardly any windows and we can always lock ourselves in the vault if things go bad.”

  “I’d rather be up off the ground level,” I started, thinking hard about the decision. “But it will do for tonight.”

  A couple nods of agreement, the shifting of backpacks, and we began slowly making our way down the street. Margie kept reaching out to Steve for him to lean on her, and he finally relented. Behind us the tenement building was now an inferno that engulfed the entire building. The plume of smoke rose high into the air. I saw Judges high above, circling the area. “We need to try to go faster. I’m not feeling good about this right now.”

  I could hear Steve wince in pain with every step, but he hobbled along as quickly as he could. Half way to the bank, we passed several maledicted. One was sitting on a stoop, just staring mindlessly into the street, yelling at cars that weren’t there. Another was talking gibberish into a pay phone; a phone I was sure wasn’t actually working. Fortunately they hadn’t noticed us as we went by on the other side of the street. They were entirely unpredictable, their brain-dead insanity causing them to react to the living with anything from laughter to aggression. You just never knew.

  A half a block more and we were at the bank. A single set of double doors at the top of some steps, and two front windows too high to reach from the sidewalk were the only access points from the street. I went in first with my bat to make sure it was clear. It was getting dark inside, the afternoon sun beginning to sink behind the buildings across the street. It was clear, with no traces of dead body smell in the air. I made a few noises to draw out any undesirables, but the room answered with nothing but silence.

  Once the three of us were all inside, I slid a table in front of the doors and stacked a few chairs on top of it. If anyone tried to come through the doors we would hear the noises of the furniture moving. We set Steve and our packs down behind the teller’s windows, up against the huge steel vault. Margie insisted that if anything came in after us we could seal ourselves inside the vault, but the claustrophobia of getting trapped in there made me nervous. She swore we could open it from the inside.

  We sat for a long time just resting in silence, and after a while Margie and Steve both fell asleep. Someone always had to stay on watch, so I didn’t sleep, but I couldn’t have even if I wanted to. In my mind I kept seeing Jennifer lying in the street twelve stories below me. I could see the look on her face right at that last second as she reached out for my hand; the moment she knew she would fall.

  I should have done something else to save her.

  Over and over I heard her body smack on the ground. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I rose to my feet to walk it off, and looking out one of the front windows I could see the building down the street still smoldering. A dozen or so maledicted were milling about in the street in front of it, attracted by the spectacle. It looked as though one of them had caught himself on fire, and he
was just standing there in the street burning.

  Suddenly Margie came up behind me, startling me. “You okay?” she asked, before apologizing for making me jump.

  “Yeah. I’m good.”

  She reached out and handed me a Snickers bar that had been severely squished. “Sorry, I landed on it when we jumped out the window.”

  I chuckled a little. “It’s fine. I’m not very picky these days. Thanks.”

  “Yeah. I guess none of us are. You sure you’re okay? I’m really sorry about Jennifer.”

  I remained silent for a minute, searching for the right words. I shuffled my feet. I rubbed my hands. I stared at the ground trying to fight off the emotion I felt growing inside. “She looked to me to protect her. When it really mattered I failed her.”