by Lee Chambers
Finally, with a deep breath, slightly damp, Tremblay looked steely at Amanda and said, “All done? My turn.”
The shotgun lifted to target Amanda as she sobbed.
“Nooooooo!” Aaron yelled, rushing into the lab with the Colt pointed at Tremblay.
Tremblay grinned an all-knowing smile, swinging the shotgun barrel to face Aaron.
CLICK.
Aaron pulled the trigger, but Tremblay didn't collapse with a bullet embedded in his chest. He laughed, tickled by Aaron's confusion, “I'm not stupid enough to fall for that trick twice in a row, kid… Those idiots just needed that one at the bank for show. Now where's my money?”
Aaron stared blankly at the dummy gun. Still shell-shocked, until Tremblay repositioned the shotgun back on Amanda.
“Okay, okay. I'll take you to it.”
“Where. Is. It?”
“The basement.”
“We're going on a field trip, Miss Becker. Come on–move your ass.” Tremblay gestured with the shotgun and followed behind Aaron and Amanda.
Maybe his dad was right. Maybe he'd never amount to nothing. Never be successful like him. Couldn't even shoot a gun when it counted. Or have the smarts to make sure the gun was even loaded.
In the hallway, Amanda whimpered to see Carl, just lying there. “Oh, Carl…”
Tremblay brutishly rammed the shotgun barrel into Aaron's kidney. “Keep moving!”
Aaron released all the air from his lungs, dropping to his knees, keeling over. His cheek slapped against the cool tile floor. It felt reassuring in its chill. Like a shower on a hot summer's day. He felt alive, even though he was so close to death.
“Get up! No more games!”
Amanda reached for Aaron's hand to help him up. As Aaron rose to his feet, he spotted the shotgun shell under the locker.
“Now keep moving.” Tremblay muttered, as Aaron and Amanda continued down the hallway at a snail's pace. With Amanda's injured foot, and Aaron's exhaustion, they were quite a pair. Leaning on each other just to keep walking in a straight line.
Amanda saw Parker's body ahead of them; they had to step around it. “Oh my God… You bastard!” cried Amanda.
“Okay, that's it. I've had enough out of you,” Tremblay snapped, adjusting the shotgun in his hands.
“No! Please…” Aaron pleaded.
Wrenching Amanda from Aaron's side, Tremblay took her over to the library door and pushed her inside.
Amanda deflated, realizing this is probably it for her. She gave Aaron a fleeting teary look of goodbye and entered, resigned to her fate. But Tremblay didn't follow behind her. He jammed the shotgun through the dual door handles, barricading her inside.
Turning back to Aaron, unsheathing his Colt, Tremblay signaled with a flick of his wrist that it was just the two of them now. “Let's go.”
Behind him, Aaron could hear Amanda, openly weeping.
“I'll tell you right now, kid, if the money's not there, I'm just going to shoot you both and look for it myself.”
Aaron nodded. “It's there.”
Opening the door to the stairwell, Tremblay leaned over the edge of the railing and glanced down, before following Aaron into the bowels of the building. “Just out of curiosity, what possessed you to take my money in the first place?”
“It's not yours,” Aaron said surely, as he turned the handle, opening the next door into the basement. Stale air wafted into their faces. They entered.
“The hell it ain't,” Tremblay said, getting his britches in a knot. “Do you have any idea how much bullshit I've had to take from people like your father who thinks I'm just some sort of glorified slave whose only job it is to kiss his ass while he sells us all down the river?”
Aaron glanced over his shoulder briefly, leading Tremblay past the old lockers and black boards, stopping a few feet from the open cage door. He looked over to Tremblay, making eye contact, trying to read his next move. “Before I tell you where it is, will you promise me one thing?” Aaron asked. “Will you let Miss Becker go? I'm sure if you gave her some of the money she wouldn't say anything and…”
Tremblay's eyes trailed away from Aaron's; he noticed something on the floor behind Aaron. A $100 bill… and behind that by the cage door is another. He doesn't need this stupid kid any more. “The only thing I'm going to promise is to make sure they spell your names right in the obit--”
Just like Aaron thought–he dived behind a stack of filing cabinets as Tremblay fired. A ricocheting bullet bounced off the cabinets and disappeared, like Aaron, into the basement's shadows.
Then, silence. Tremblay aimed into the dark and pulled the trigger–it disappeared like the other–but that was his last bullet.
CLICK. Empty.
twenty nine
The trap was set. A $100 bill was the cheese, attracting the rat towards the cage.
Tremblay narrowed his eyes and crinkled his nose. Then he saw the rest of the loot, just resting on the table, the bulging backpack. He rushed into the caged area of the basement and scrambled over to the table, like an amorous lover about to embrace a much-missed beau at the airport.
The teeth of the zipper unpeeled in a second and Tremblay was confronted with something worse than stinking cheese–a stack of dusty textbooks. And he just fell for the oldest trick in one of them. A case of bait and switch.
The cage door clanged shut behind him and the seething face of Tremblay flicked around to see Aaron clicking the padlock shut through the door's slot. Locked in.
Foam bubbling at his lips, Tremblay leapt forward with a guttural inhuman roar. He lashed out but couldn't reach Aaron, who hopped backwards, admiring his catch.
“You're dead, you little bastard!”
Aaron exhaled and leaned against a filing cabinet, slowly feeling the tension leaving his body. Immediately his aching muscles spoke up, reminding him of the day and night that he had just survived. Nevertheless, these were good signs of normality returning. The nightmare was finally over.
Then, feeling an awkward weight pressing into his back, Aaron shifted and pulled the Colt from his pants. He then looked up; Tremblay was fiercely yanking books and school supplies off shelves in a crazed fury. It was amazing, Aaron thought, how even tame beasts become wild when suddenly confined. Freedom was a precious thing, and denying it would be the best punishment for someone like Tremblay. Or would it…
“I wish this thing was loaded so I could blow your head off,” Aaron said, surprising himself as he actually meant it.
Tremblay glanced down at the pile of books at his feet. Then his eyes rose to meet Aaron's. It was unnerving, even when Aaron knew he was safe and Tremblay was a caged man.
“Can I have it back?” Tremblay said.
Aaron frowned, thoughtfully examining the gun in his hand. “Why?” Then his eyes widened, the bigger picture dawning on him. “Oh my God. This is the gun you were looking for, isn't it? At the campsite, just before you killed that guy–you were asking about a gun…” Aaron smirked to himself. “You lent your own cowboy gun to the other bank robbers! What a doofus.”
Slamming against the bars, Tremblay grabbed the metal door and shook it with all his might. But, Aaron felt superior by this point. He stood his ground. Kicked the cage. Laughed for the first time in what felt like weeks, when it had only really been hours since he, Steve and Mike had shared a laugh on their walk to the forest… Not so long ago.
“I'm not scared of you anymore. As soon as the police get here, you're going to get what you deserve.”
Tremblay tapped his badge with authority. “You're forgetting something, I am the police.”
“Nah, I'm talking about the ones Mike called by now… So, you can just find a comfy spot over in the corner and wait for the real cops to arrive.”
It was only a split second, but Aaron had stepped too close to the claws of a predator. Tremblay lurched at the cage, reaching as far as his arm could've allowed, clutching a handful of Aaron's shirt collar.
Pulling it tight, T
remblay had him. Didn't matter on what side of the bars you were on, if one of you's dead and one of you's alive. There's only one winner in those circumstances.
A sharp gasp, Aaron struggled to move and then realized he had bigger problems, as he struggled to breathe. Tremblay drew the shirt collar in with his white-knuckled fist, cutting off Aaron's air.
Water filled in Aaron's eyes, blurring the room into shady blobs and smears. He flailed his arms, reaching for the edges of the cage, coughing out the choke in his throat.
“I told you I was going to kill you first chance I got.” The words were far away, fading into the recesses of the disappearing basement.
Then, Aaron felt something prickly and sharp at his fingertips that awoke his mind, jolting him back to reality–the rough grip of the Colt, as he pulled it from his waistband.
“What are you going to do with…?” Tremblay grunted as he received an abrupt answer to his question – the gun's barrel speared sharply into Tremblay's crotch, doubling him over in pain, and he immediately released Aaron's collar.
Tremblay fell backwards and Aaron tumbled the other way, choking and sputtering. Aaron rubbed his throat and Tremblay softly patted his jewels; the two stared at each other with a momentary respect–like two warriors acknowledging each other's strength in battle.
This wasn't over. Tremblay would never quit. Aaron could see it burning in his foe's eyes. Tremblay placed his hand on a shelf, easing himself up, and then suddenly he ripped the plank from its ledge. Aaron blinked as Tremblay rushed back to the cage door and started hammering the plank on top of the lock with a brute force. And then again. And again. And again. A small dent appearing in the lock's metal edging.
Aaron realized exactly what Tremblay was doing. He pulled himself up, still catching his breath, and he dashed for the exit. Not looking back. Leaving behind the sound of a beast trying to break free from its cage.
thirty
Mike looked up at the dark night's sky. A blanket of stars, the hue of Venus perhaps too. Well, maybe it was Venus. He never could tell whether it was a planet or just another star.
He sighed to himself and glanced to the only door on the rooftop–no handle on the outside. He wasn't going anywhere. Plenty of time to debate if that bright dot was really a star, a planet, or a motorcycle headlight in some faraway galaxy.
Amanda was heading upwards, too. She had scouted around the library, trapped like Mike and Tremblay, and decided to ascend the ladder into Chuck's domain; the ceiling. Dark and dangerously dusty with asbestos and God only knows what else.
She crawled forwards, holding her breath with cutely pursed lips, as the ceiling tiles heaved under the weight of her knees and elbows.
Little cracks were appearing, sending crumbling white matter down from the rafters, like confetti on the typewriter-lined desks of a business classroom below. Just as Aaron ran by, reaching the library doors, and pulling the shotgun free of the handles, tossing it aside. But, Amanda was already gone, moving stealthily above him.
“Amanda? Miss Becker?” Aaron hissed, glancing around the quiet room. As quiet as a library in fact. “It's okay, you can come out…”
His mind was ticking over time, and then he saw the ladder and his pupils walked up the steps into the hole in the ceiling. Aaron clambered up, following the path created in his thoughts, and looked inside.
“Amanda! Come back! It's okay… I locked him up,” the word echoed into the opening.
He heard a shuffle and a muffled voice. Amanda was turning around. She was coming back.
Maybe this was all going to work out.
But, Tremblay had other plans; he smiled at the broken lock on the ground in front of the caged door. He was slightly taken aback at his own success. Snapping out of his daze, he discarded the wood shelf in his hands.
Tremblay strolled out of the cage, stopping to pick up the 'bait', the $100 bill. He deposited it in his pocket and then hastened out of the basement, the wicked glint of payback in his beady eyes.
thirty one
Amanda's face slowly emerged out of the darkness. Aaron smiled and she smiled back at him. “Really, he's trapped?”
“Yeah, yeah. I tricked him. Come on out of there,” Aaron said, dipping back into the library.
Slowly but surely, she continued crawling to the light that was coming from the hole in the ceiling. Aaron descended the ladder with a smile. It was a short-lived one. Wiped from his face, as the library doors slammed open, and Tremblay charged inside.
“Nooooooo!” Aaron screamed out. Amanda knew all too well what was happening. Only one man could have such an effect on Aaron's vocal chords. A doggedly determined sheriff looking for his bag of stolen money.
Thinking fast, Aaron gripped the sides of the ladder and rushed up the steps, two at a time, pulling himself up into the hole. Still holding the ladder, Aaron twisted around and hoisted it up with him, just out of Tremblay's clawing grasp!
A baseball bat clenched in his hands, Tremblay hurled the weapon at Aaron, missing again, and bouncing off a ceiling joist before falling back down to the floor.
Tremblay could only watch feebly as Aaron slid the remaining half of the ladder into the hole. Gone.
“Nice trick kid… but it's not over!” Tremblay barked, picking up the fallen baseball bat.
As Aaron crawled off into the blackness of the ceiling, guided only by thin shafts of light leaking around the edges of the tiles; Tremblay walked along beneath him, monitoring the bangs and bumps.
There was a flash of movement in the shadows up ahead; Amanda hadn't got far. “Hurry, he's coming,” Aaron urged her.
“I thought you said he.”
“He got out, okay? Go, go, go!”
They scrambled across 10 feet of ceiling, but it felt like 20 or 30, with scraped stinging knee caps and bruised knuckles. Then, Aaron slowed to a halt. Amanda heard him stop and turned around. “What is it, Aaron?”
“Nothing, that's just it… If he was coming, we'd hear him.”
Amanda screwed up her face and strained to hear a noise, any noise, but Aaron was right. Silence. Unsettling, eerie, emptiness.
WUMP! Until the baseball bat exploded through the ceiling tile, right in front of Amanda! She screamed rolling to one side, as the bat pierced another gaping hole to the left of her.
Below, Aaron could see the menacing snarl of Tremblay standing atop a desk in the business classroom, aiming the bat for another poke at them.
“Move, move, move!” Aaron implored as the bat protruded between his legs, a narrow miss. No time for niceties now, Aaron gave Amanda's butt a hefty shove to keep her moving.
Then, Tremblay had a direct hit–breaking through the tile right underneath Aaron, stabbing the baseball bat's tip into his stomach with a jolt. Aaron grunted but kept crawling. There would be worse than that if Tremblay actually got his hands on him and Amanda.
Tremblay followed the dips in the ceiling and hopped to the next desk, heaving the bat up into another ceiling tile, knocking it upwards and off kilter.
“It's just a matter of time, people,” he wheezed, stepping to the next desk like a frog hopping lily pads, trying to catch flies.
Then, Tremblay boldly leapt down from the desk; his ears picking up a dull thud near the wall, above the door frame. He zeroed in.
“He's going to get us, Aaron,” Amanda coughed, a piece of ceiling shrapnel irritating the back of her throat.
“Stop for a sec,” Aaron whispered. “You have to go back.”
“What?”
Aaron quickly placed his finger to his lips and looked at Amanda. Again, that silence. Nothing good comes of it.
“He'll never expect us to split up,” Aaron told her.
“No, no, no…” She was already shaking her head at the thought of being alone in the darkness of the ceiling, with a mad man on their trail.
“It's our only chance. I'll distract him long enough for you to go back to the library and try to find a way out,” Aaron said, trying to convince
Amanda, tears welling in her big blue eyes. “Trust me.”
Suddenly, another tile exploded up behind them. Tremblay had missed the mark. Amanda stifled a shriek and nodded to Aaron. There was no time to argue. They couldn't play these games all night.
“Don't move until you hear the shit hit the fan, okay?”
Amanda nodded.
“Now lie down flat.”
Aaron slowly crawled over the top of Amanda, dragging himself over her to get to the other side. It could almost be considered sensual–body to body, in the warm darkness of the ceiling cavity, nerves jangling, hearts racing, rubbing, an electric friction crackling between their clothing–if it were not for the baseball bat-wielding Sheriff Tremblay, waiting to whack them. What a mood-killer.
With a sigh, Aaron looked at Amanda, one last time. Then lifted the corner of a tile, to peer inside Principal Parker's empty office.
thirty two
Tremblay was poised, standing atop the switchboard desk, with the baseball bat about to jab upwards. Then he heard the thud of movement inside Parker's office, right next door. He smiled a wily grin, and gripped the bat with both hands.
Time to knock that little punk's block off, he thought. Even if it meant never finding the stashed cash, Tremblay was too incensed to care about locating money at that exact second. He just wanted to teach Aaron a lesson he'd never forget. He screwed with the wrong cop. First in the canteen and then in the basement. Now this was his third strike…
Tremblay prepared the bat for a swing, easing into Principal Parker's office. Then in a stealthy stride, he crossed the room, stepped up onto a chair, onto Parker's desk, and rammed the bat skywards.
A ceiling tile lifted off its joist and tumbled to the floor, catching Tremblay's eye as he followed it down, cracking in half on the armrest of the chair.
He took his eye off the prize. Out of nowhere, Aaron's feet careened into Tremblay's skull. The force sent Tremblay into a somersault forwards off the desk, landing awkwardly as the chair broke his fall, and almost his back with it.
