“I got you,” Ivy said, helping Jaime, whose face was bright red, sit down on the intricate staircase.
“Here, Ivy,” I said, tossing her a bottle of water. “Get her to drink something. They’re probably dehydrated.”
At the elevator, Jacob and Jorge helped Emma down. She squeezed through the gap without issue, waved off my offer of water, and looked back up into the lift. “Pippa, come on! It’s your turn.”
Pippa had moved away from the opening, invisible to us. “I can’t fit.”
“Yes, you can,” Emma urged. “Just try.”
“I already know I can’t fit!”
Jacob balanced on his toes in an attempt to find his sister again, but he was too short to see to the top of the elevator. “Pippa, you have to try.”
“Stupid blackout,” she muttered from out of sight. “Stupid baby. Stupid boyfriend!”
“Pippa! Get down here!”
“Shut up, Jacob!”
“Okay, just stop,” I said, pushing Jacob away from the open shaft. “Yelling at her isn’t going to help this go any faster. She’s probably right. Jaime and Emma barely made it through that gap, and they’re not pregnant. Let’s not make things worse by making her force her way through. It could hurt the baby.”
Jacob couldn’t tear his gaze away from the doors. “What do you suggest then? We can’t leave her there!”
“No, of course not.” I turned to the custodian. “Jorge, can you open the doors on the second floor?”
“Certainly.”
“Excellent. Please go do that for me.” As Jorge jogged up the staircase, I turned back to Jacob. “I need you to give me a boost.”
“What?”
“Lift me up so I can get into the elevator.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You want to get inside the elevator?”
“Someone has to keep Pippa calm and help her get out,” I said. “There’s no way you’re fitting through that gap, so it has to be me. Now give me a boost.”
Grudgingly, Jacob knelt by the open door and cupped his hands together in a makeshift step. “Be careful. I don’t want to have to go down to the basement and fish your body out of the shaft.”
“It’s not that far,” I said, but I gulped as I looked into the darkness below. The drop was about ten feet, but the last time I’d been this high above the ground, I’d fallen off a roller coaster and broken my finger. I shook off the thought and placed my boot in Jacob’s hand. “Pippa? I’m coming up.”
Jacob lifted me upward, and I caught the floor of the elevator, flinching when my head bumped against the top of the door frame. Pippa sat in the far corner of the elevator, curled in on herself. Her face was red and puffy, though I wasn’t sure if it was from the cold or her emotions. I lifted myself through the gap as Jacob pushed me up from below until I was all the way in. The elevator smelled faintly of body odor, but the fruity perfume of teenaged girls overpowered it.
“Georgie, what are you doing?”
“Helping.” I slid over to Pippa and pulled her to rest against me. The tip of her nose touched my neck, and I tried not to grimace. She was freezing. I wormed out of my sweater and maneuvered it over her head instead. It didn’t quite cover her baby bump, which had grown tremendously since I’d last seen her, but at the very least, it provided another layer over top of her thin school uniform.
“You’re going to freeze,” she mumbled, plucking at the thin cotton of my shirt.
“I’ll be okay,” I told her. “It’s you I’m worried about. Let’s get out of here, yeah? Your parents are waiting for you back home.”
“Girls?” Jorge’s voice floated through the closed doors on the second floor. “I’m getting started, okay?”
“Okay!” I called back.
A clang echoed through the shaft as Jorge fit the crowbar between the doors and levered them open. Suddenly, the elevator jerked, and Pippa shrieked as it dropped an inch.
“Pippa!” Jacob reach into the shaft from below as if he could catch the elevator should it drop the rest of the way.
“Move, Jacob!” I clutched Pippa tighter to me. Jorge had gotten the doors to open about two feet. “Jorge, is that as wide as they’ll go?”
“I’m afraid the elevator might drop even more if I try again, miss,” he replied. “I think it’s best if you try to get out now.”
Heart pounding, I unfurled Pippa’s fingers from my shirt. “Pippa? Listen, we’ve got to try and get out of here, okay? I’m going to give you a boost up to Jorge, and he’s going to pull you out.”
Pippa shook her head furiously. “If we move, this whole thing’s going down.”
“No, it isn’t,” I assured her, though I had no idea whether I was telling her the truth or not. “Even if it was, we can’t not try. We need to get you somewhere safe.”
“I’m not moving.”
“What did she say?” Jacob shouted up. “Pippa, what’s the problem?”
Pippa’s eyes flashed to the first floor at the sound of her brother’s voice, but I took her face in between my hands and made her look at me.
“Ignore him,” I told her. “Look at me. I’m in here with you, okay? You have me. We can’t stay here forever though. You have to take the boost.”
Her lip trembled as she held back tears. “I’m scared.”
“I know,” I said. “But you’re also incredibly brave. You know how I know that? Because no other seventeen-year-old would go through with an unplanned pregnancy with the same amount of finesse that you have. This is no different from you walking down the halls in maternity wear, Pip. You can do this.”
She tucked her head into my chest. “I don’t want to.”
“You have to,” I muttered into her hair. “For your baby.”
She sniffed once and nodded. I stood up before she could change her mind, trying to keep my feet as level as possible. The elevator swayed but held firm. I had no idea what might’ve caused it to drop, but I wasn’t keen on repeating the experience. I doubted two and a half floors was tall enough to pick up a dangerous speed before we hit the basement, but any kind of big jolt would be bad news for Pippa and the baby. My goal was to keep Pippa’s baby inside her for as long as possible. This wasn’t a world for a newborn.
“Up you get,” I said to Pippa, lifting her from underneath her arms. When she was standing, I interlinked my fingers to make a step as Jacob had earlier. “All right, let’s go. I’ll lift you up.”
She steadied herself against the wall of the elevator, one hand cradling her belly, and looked up to Jorge. “You’re going to get me up there, right? It’s been a while since I’ve done a pull-up.”
Jorge smiled down at her. “I have a daughter your age. I will treat you as if you were my own.”
“Wait!” Jacob called. “I should do it. I should be the one to pull her out.”
“We don’t have time, Jacob,” I said. “Stay down there in case this goes wrong. Pippa, let’s go.”
“Georgie—”
“Quiet, Jacob!”
Pippa braced herself on my shoulder, planted her white Oxford shoe in my hand, and stepped up. I bent my knees and tightened my core as she wobbled unevenly, trying not to let out a strained grunt as I heaved her up toward Jorge. Even with the baby, Pippa didn’t look like she could possibly weigh as much as she did. Then I remembered that prior to her pregnancy, she had been a prominent player for the field hockey team. The girl was all muscle. That was a good thing. Her back and shoulders flexed as she gripped the floor above and hauled herself up into Jorge’s grasp. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to safety on the second floor.
“Is she good?” Jacob asked. “Is Pippa safe?”
“She’s fine,” I started, leaning down to peek at Jacob through the gap. “Get back so I can slide out—”
I didn’t slide out or finish my sentence because the hydraulics gave up entirely and the elevator plunged into darkness.
Jacob’s horrified yell followed me down. The elevator whizzed past the fi
rst floor and headed for the basement. Time seemed to slow down and speed up all at once. I had no chance to react or access the part of my brain that might have stored away the information regarding the best way to minimize injury in a scenario like this. Was it to jump the second before the elevator hit the ground? Or were you supposed to lie flat on your back to allow the impact to spread across your entire body rather than one localized point? I remembered that a woman named Betty Lou Oliver held the Guinness World Record for the longest fall survived in an elevator. She fell seventy-five stories through the Empire State Building when some idiot flew a plane into it. If she could make it, so could I. There was nothing else to do but prepare myself for the crash, so I held onto the support rails on the sides of the elevator for dear life and lowered myself so that only my heels were touching the floor. Then I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for the boom.
It came with an atrocious earsplitting crunch of metal on concrete, ripping my grip from the elevator. The impact traveled through the soles of my boots and rattled upward until it felt as if my head might shake clean off my body. The cheap ceiling tiles rained down from above, showering me with stucco and plaster. Then everything settled. That was it. My heart pounded and my head ached, but I was otherwise no worse for wear.
Jacob’s terrified shouts echoed from above, but the ringing in my ears made it difficult to hear his words. I slumped to the ruined floor, letting the surge of adrenaline run its course. It was my second free-fall experience in as many days. At this rate, I was going to develop an extreme fear of heights in no time.
Minutes later, while I was checking my feet and legs for fractures, the crowbar found its way between the doors leading to the basement, and someone ripped them apart so quickly that it left a dent in the metal. I squinted into the murky darkness, the only light filtering in from the shaft above. Jacob stood there, chest heaving, crowbar in hand. There was a look on his face that I couldn’t quite figure out. It was two different emotions, as if hope and despair warred with each other to gain control over his eyes and mouth. Then I understood. He’d hoped I was alive, but he expected me to be dead.
“It was only two floors,” I said.
“Georgie!” He rushed in and practically collapsed to pull me against him. I pressed my face to his neck and took a deep breath. His spicy sweet cinnamon scent had a tang of nervous sweat to it now. “Oh my God, you’re alive.”
“Careful.” I winced as he rocked me back and forth. Something in my neck twinged. The collision had wreaked havoc on my alignment. “My whole body hurts. Is everybody okay?”
He drew away and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “Yeah, everybody’s fine, thanks to you. God, I thought I was going to go home with Pippa and not you.”
“We’re both going home,” I told him. “And then we’re all leaving town.” I tried to get my feet under me, but my legs were shaking so much that I couldn’t control them.
Jacob ducked his head under my arm and lifted me to stand. “Be careful. The basment’s a mess. It looks like no one’s been down here in ages.”
“Maybe it’s haunted,” I said as he led me out of the elevator. Storage boxes lined the underground room, piled in high, precarious columns.
“Don’t joke,” Jacob said. “When I went to Saint Mark’s, they sent kids who misbehaved down here to watch old sex ed tapes. It was torture.”
“Had a lot of detention, did you?”
“No. Maybe.”
“Jacob Mason, you are not who I thought you were,” I joked as he carried me into the concrete stairwell.
“Neither are you.”
Chapter Eight
In the main entryway, after everyone was done expressing their awe at my lack of injury, we planned our escape route from the school. One look through a gap in the boards on the windows showed us that the looters had yet to give up. A few of them had almost made it to the top of the gate a couple of times. Once someone finally produced a ladder, it would be easy to find a way into the school.
“It’s not safe to stay here,” I told Jorge when he returned from the kitchen with a care package that the other teachers had put together for us. “You can’t defend the entire school. That mob outside is going to get in, and when they do, they won’t care about what happens to this place or the people inside it. They’ll hurt you and the others to get to that store room. It’ll be a mad house.”
“I wasn’t planning on staying anyway,” Jorge replied. “I have a family to get back to.”
I hugged him. “Thank you for everything, and be careful out there.”
“You too,” he said. “And stay out of trouble. You seem like the type of girl that goes looking for it.”
“I don’t,” I told him as I drew away, aware of Jacob’s eyes on the back of my head. “Trouble tends to find me.”
“Even so,” Jorge said, his voice fading as he moved toward the kitchen. “You stay safe.”
I sighed as he left and turned to the rest of our party. “We shouldn’t go around the front. With this many people, someone’s bound to notice us, and we have a giant box full of food that screams trouble.”
Emma, Pippa’s friend, pointed toward the rear of the school. “I’m heading that way anyway. Don’t worry about me.”
“Me either,” Jaime said. Now that she was free of the confines of the elevator, she appeared more sure of herself. “I live over there too.”
“The two of you shouldn’t go alone,” I said.
Emma slung an arm across Jaime’s shoulder. “We won’t be. We’ll have each other.”
“You know what she meant,” Jacob said. “I don’t feel comfortable sending the two of you home alone. Why don’t you come with us?”
I suppressed a ripple of agitation. We couldn’t take care of everyone that Jacob or Pippa knew. Ivy was one thing—she didn’t have the means to take care of herself—but Emma and Jaime had families of their own.
“I can’t,” Jaime said. “My parents are out of town, which means my little brother is all alone at our house. I got to go find him.”
“And my parents are probably apoplectic over the fact that I haven’t made it home yet,” Emma added. “We’ll be fine. We’ll stick to the back roads. And if anyone messes with us—” she banged open one of the lockers, pulled out a field hockey stick, and brandished it about “—they’ll be damn sorry about it.”
“She’s not kidding.” Jaime smirked. “I saw her clock a guy in the shins after a game once just because he tried to hit on her.”
“That pickup line was terrible,” Emma said.
Jacob stepped between the two of them. “Listen, girls. Don’t linger out there. Go straight home. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t go into any of the stores—”
Emma saluted him. “Yes, sir, Big Brother.”
Jaime threw her arms around Pippa. “I wouldn’t want to be trapped in an elevator for fifteen hours with anyone but you. Be careful, okay?”
Emma joined in on the hug, and Pippa squeezed her friends tightly. “You guys be careful too. Don’t hesitate to use that hockey stick on anyone.”
Emma grinned savagely and swung the stick through the air with a menacing whoosh. “Oh, don’t you worry.”
“You’re giving her too much power,” Jaime muttered as she straightened out the collar of Pippa’s shirt beneath my sweater.
“Let’s go, Jaime!” Emma hollered, already on her way toward the rear hallway. “I’m ready to bash some heads in.”
Pippa rolled her eyes and kissed Jaime on the cheek. “Go. I’ll see you later.”
“Hopefully.”
And then Emma and Jaime were off, the heels of their shoes clicking against the marble floors as they jogged toward home.
“Pippa, do you have a nail file?” I asked her.
“Sure.” She dug through her backpack, stamped with the Saint Mark’s crest, and produced a metal file. “What do you need it for?”
I wiggled the file into the seam of the closest locker and popped the lock out of
place. “Your friends gave me an idea.”
“Stealing?” Jacob asked, his tone dry. “That’s your idea?”
The locker swung open, revealing several textbooks, general trash, and a Saint Mark’s peacoat. I drew open the coat and flapped it open. It was tiny, so I handed it to Ivy, who promptly drew it on over her ratty sweatshirt. I moved on to the next locker, where an extra-large coat had been crammed inside.
“Here,” I said, helping Pippa into the sleeves. It swamped her, hanging almost to her knees, but at least she would be warm. “Do you still disapprove, Jacob, or would you like your sister and her baby to freeze to death out there?”
Jacob was smart enough not to answer as I perused the row of lockers for anything else we could use. I found another coat for myself and a couple of apples that I shoved in the box of food that Jacob was carrying. Then I waved our group toward the exit.
We left the school the same way we can in. We locked the doors behind us, and Ivy pulled the basement window shut, just to buy the teachers inside a little more time when the mob at the front gates finally found a way through. After filing through the gap in the iron bars, we turned right toward the road behind the school rather than left toward the havoc. Pippa and I leaned heavily on one another, supporting each other’s weight. Ivy led the way as Jacob brought up the rear. She had been quiet since our talk at the school. I couldn’t help but wonder what she was thinking about. Out of all of us, she was probably the second most prepared for this sort of thing after me. If I knew anything about the lives of abused, half-homeless children, it was that they harbored a resilience like no other. Was Ivy’s silence a coping mechanism, or had the events of the day begun to wear her out already?
I didn’t have time to ask her. We turned down a dark alley, trying to find an alternate way to the street that would lead us back to the Masons’ apartment building, and a shambling shadow appeared at the opposite end. Ivy froze in place, causing our party to come to an abrupt halt behind the little girl. The shadow paused and half turned toward us. It was tall and thin, with angled limbs that seemed to jut out at unnatural angles.
Blackout: Book 0 Page 11
