“Better hurry, kid,” he said. “Flames are climbing fast.”
Glancing down, David saw the fire licking at the first landing, but smoke stung his eyes, and he had to look away. Telly and Karl made it to the top, pulled Annabelle up after them and disappeared onto the roof. David started up to the third landing, but suddenly there came a loud pop from above him, and the whole fire escape shuddered. He slammed into the handrail and went down to his knees. A corner of the third floor landing had pulled away from the wall. Cakey helped him to his feet, and he scrambled up the steps. His weight upon the third floor landing caused the broken side to pull farther away from the wall, the metal squealing loudly. The top of the wall and roof stood another ten feet above the third floor landing. David stretched up on his tiptoes, but it was still a few inches out of reach. He jumped and grabbed the top edge, but in doing so, his feet pushed the landing another inch out of the wall.
“Careful, kid,” Cakey said. “Don’t let’s kill us, okay?”
As he pulled himself up onto the roof, David looked down. Cakey and Gooty both stood on the third floor landing, one side of which was now a good foot and a half away from the wall. He heard bolts tearing out of the bricks on the lower levels. The alleyway was an inferno beneath them, and he felt the heat on his face, tasted the smoke in his mouth. Gooty held onto the railing with his free hand, struggling to maintain his grip on the rifle with the other. From somewhere below, where the rubes burned, a torch came sailing up, the last desperate act of a dying lunatic. It hit the brick wall to the right of the third floor landing, bounced to one side and headed for Gooty. He leaned forward to avoid it, but it brushed along his back before falling down. The hem of Gooty’s t-shirt caught fire, and he spun frantically to put it out. In the process, he dropped his rifle, and it went bouncing down the steps to a lower landing.
“Hold still,” Cakey said. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and spun Gooty around in one deft motion. Then he proceeded to put the fire out with his hands, patting at the shirt until it was extinguished.
Another bolt on the third floor landing pulled out of the wall, and now only one remained, a single bolt on the lower right corner holding the entire weight of the landing, as well as Cakey and Gooty. David finished pulling himself up onto the roof and reached down to help Cakey.
“I got this,” Cakey said. Instead of taking David’s hand, he leapt, caught the top edge of the wall with one hand and reached down with the other. Gooty grabbed onto his forearm. With a loud crack and a crumbling of bricks, the third floor landing fell away beneath them, rusted metal breaking to pieces and tearing away a good chunk of the second floor landing. And then the wreckage disappeared into the flames in a burst of black smoke and ashes. For a terrible moment, Cakey dangled by one gloved hand from the wall, Gooty clinging for dear life to his other hand. David reached down again to try to help.
“Back off,” Cakey snapped at him. “I told you, I got this.”
And then, with a growl, teeth clenched, Cakey kicked his leg up, hooked his heel between two bricks and began pulling himself up, dragging Gooty along with him. A bit of the ledge crumbled under his foot, but he managed to twist his oversized shoe and get the toe over the top of the wall. Then, his face contorted in pain, Gooty spluttering and whimpering beneath him, he dragged himself onto the roof, yanked Gooty up beside him, and collapsed on his back, gasping for breath.
“That was amazing,” David said.
“That’s…the inner fortitude…of destiny,” Cakey said, panting. He picked himself up and brushed off the front of his clown suit.
Gooty rose, laid a hand upon Cakey’s back, opened his mouth as if to say something but settled for a nod and a smile instead. Cakey returned the nod and moved to join the others. David was disturbed to see the condition of the roof. In places, it many places had crumbled into the building below. A massive air conditioning unit in one corner stood at an angle, somewhere around the halfway point in its years-long journey to utter collapse. Telly, Karl and Annabelle stood shoulder to shoulder on what appeared to be the only stable patch of roof. David moved to join them, tiptoeing along beams, hopping over the sagging sections.
The narrow side street that they’d just escaped lay on the west side of the building. On the east was another street, wider, more open, but the rubes were already there, a steady stream of them, weaving wildly from one side to the other, setting fire to anything that would burn. To the north and south were other buildings, all shops with offices and apartments above them.
“It’s either rubes or fire, at this point,” Annabelle said. She’d lost the dowel rod somewhere in the climb but still clutched the little knapsack in one hand.
“If that’s the choice, I’ll take rubes,” Karl said, slipping his rifle off his shoulder. “At least I can shoot a few before they get me.”
Cakey and Gooty walked up.
“Well, boss,” Cakey said. “Climbing the fire escape might not have been the best idea.”
“A terrible idea,” Gooty said. “In a long, unbroken string of terrible ideas, enano tonto.”
Telly ignored the comments as he scanned their surroundings, gripping his forehead as if to keep his skull from cracking open. He leaned heavily on his shillelagh. “We can run from rooftop to rooftop,” he said, after a moment. “The buildings are close together. That’ll get us to the end of the street, and then we’ll find another way down.”
“We’ll burn up before we get back down to the street,” Gooty said. “Rubes have already swarmed past us, and they’re setting fire to the whole block. The first floor of the building we’re standing on might already be burning.”
Telly scowled at him. “Okay, Eduardo, you don’t like my idea, let’s hear what you’ve got. What would Eduardo Gutierrez say if he were the boss? Well, let’s have it?”
“It’s a bit late to ask others for input, isn’t it?” Gooty said. “You’ve never wanted it before.”
Cakey leaned his head back and groaned. “Please, can we not go down bickering, my clowns? I’d rather die in glorious unison, with flashing blade and crack of rifle.”
“I’m with Cakey,” Karl said. “Let’s climb back down into the street and fight ‘em. Fight ‘em to the bitter end.”
“Fantastic,” Telly said with a sigh. “Any other opinions? Belle?”
She shook her head.
“David?”
David shrugged. He didn’t see how anything they did mattered at this point. Fire and rampaging sick people on all sides. They had limited bullets and were standing on top of a rickety building with no easy way down.
“Very well, I guess we go down there and fight,” Telly said. “At least then, when we’re all burning and bleeding to death in the midst of biting and clawing rubes, I can share some of the blame with Cakey and Karl.”
Telly stepped away from the others, heading across the roof. He gestured with his shillelagh at one of the larger holes in the roof. Then, without comment, he ran toward it, tucked the shillelagh against his body and leapt down, disappearing from sight.
“I guess that’s our cue,” Cakey said and went after him.
Cakey followed him into the hole. Karl came next. Gooty, Annabelle and David all hesitated. David did not like the idea of working his way in the vile darkness down inside the building. Gooty looked at Annabelle, his brow creased. Then he looked at David.
“I’d almost rather stay here,” Annabelle said. “We don’t know that they’ve set this building on fire. We might be able to wait them out.”
“I’m willing to stay,” Gooty said. He looked at David questioningly.
David didn’t want to stay anymore than he wanted to go, but he would not leave Annabelle’s side. He settled for another shrug.
“Who’s going to decide?” Gooty asked. “What’s the chain of command here? Clown before roustabout? Young before old?”
“Well, you lose on both counts, then,” Annabelle said. She closed her eyes, grunted unhappily and shook her head. When
she reopened her eyes again, she said, “We can’t leave the others. We’ve been through a thousand awful things together. We’ll face this one together, as well.”
“Bueno,” Gooty said. “Let’s go.”
He turned, dashed across the roof and plunged into the hole. Annabelle looked at David, and there was something sad in her eyes. The old familiar mischief was gone, utterly gone.
“And to think,” she said. “You could by lying warm in your bed in Mountainburg at this very moment, if not for us.”
The comment stung. Did she still think of him as the child who didn’t quite belong? “I don’t want to be there,” he said. “I want to be here.”
“Now, that’s a crazy thing to say,” she said, and a hint of mischief, like a candle flickering to life in a dark room, glinted in her eyes. “Good. Hold onto the crazy. You’re gonna need it.”
She walked toward the hole in the roof, beckoning him along. She did not run like the others, did not leap down through the roof. She was in no particular hurry. It was the reluctant stroll of the damned. David stayed right behind her, dutiful, drawing the knife out of his belt. He felt sweat running down his face and ran a sleeve across his forehead. The sleeve came away coated in greasepaint and grime. At the ragged hole, they leaned over and looked down. It was a ten foot drop onto a carpeted floor. Annabelle sat down on the edge and pushed off, landing on her feet, then somersaulting forward. David took a last look around—fires burned on all sides, the screaming of the rubes filled the night, as if the stars themselves were giving voice to their madness—then he dropped down into the darkness.
He landed awkwardly, tried to turn it into a somersault but only managed to fall on his face. When he picked himself up, he saw that he was inside an old apartment—the frame of a bed against one wall, an old dresser in the corner. Annabelle stood in a doorway, waving him on.
“They went this way,” she said.
He followed her out of the bedroom into a hallway of lush burgundy wallpaper and brass light fixtures, an odd decor that spoke of the age of this place. Fire light shone through dirty windows, casting strange shadows on the wall. David saw Gooty in the distance, racing down the hallway, and Karl beyond him, disappearing into a stairwell. He rushed after them. Halfway down the hall, he heard a loud boom, the building shook, windows cracked, and dust rained down from the ceiling.
“What was that?” Annabelle asked over her shoulder.
“I don’t know,” David said.
A few steps farther on, he heard another one, louder and more violent. Light fixtures popped loose from the wall, a window burst, a door slammed. David had no idea if the explosions were close, possibly inside this very building, or the echo of something farther away. He followed Annabelle into the dark stairwell. The handrail had crumbled away in most places, leaving a precipitous drop on one side. Worse, he realized some of the wooden steps were bent, broken or missing entirely.
“Cuidado! Be careful,” he heard Gooty say from somewhere below them. “I just nearly fell to my death.”
David started down, and the very first step broke under his weight. It went tumbling into the darkness, clattering on the stairs below. David’s legs slipped through the gap, and he fell. He caught himself on the next step and dangled there for a second, kicking in the open air. Then he climbed back up and resumed his descent far more cautiously. By the time he reached the second floor, he’d lost sight of Annabelle. He heard her somewhere below him.
And then another step broke beneath him. This time when he fell, he took out two more steps, and his whole body crashed through the stairs. He tried to grab something in passing, but his hands flailed in emptiness. He slammed into the stairs one floor below and broke through those as well with a painful thud. He caught himself on a surviving bit of the handrail but only for a fraction of a second. Then he fell again and finally landed on a hard floor in a heap of debris.
He sat up, groaning, feeling scraped and bruised, to find Telly standing in front of him, clutching his shillelagh protectively. Karl strode up behind Telly and looked down at him.
“You gotta be careful on the steps,” Karl said. “I cracked a few on my way down.”
“Yeah, got it,” David said, rubbing a fresh bruise on his ribs as he stood up.
He found himself on the first floor in a tiled lobby. The windows here were boarded up, but through the cracks between boards, he saw the hint of flames and passing shadows. The voices of shrieking rubes through the thin plywood filled the lobby with a ghostly echo. Cakey was already making his way toward the front door, aiming his rifle, as if he expected rubes to break through at any moment.
“David, did you live?” he heard Annabelle’s voice from above. He had fallen past her.
“Yes, I think so,” David said, examining a rip in his sleeve and the ugly scratch underneath. “I wouldn’t recommend the shortcut, though.”
They waited for Annabelle and Gooty, then Telly waved them all into a huddle in the middle of the lobby.
“Okay, we go out together,” he said. “Guns up front. Gooty, where’s your rifle?”
“Lost it,” Gooty said.
“Damn…okay, down one gun,” Telly said. “Cakey and Karl have rifles. That’ll have to be enough. Wasn’t there another pistol?”
“Yeah,” Cakey said. “Three, actually. Two were out of ammo, so I left them in the nightclub. Last one’s in my pocket.”
“Good,” Telly said. “Give me the pistol.” When Cakey passed it to him, he turned it this way and that, testing the weight of it. “Good, good. We’ve got what we’ve got. Cakey, Karl, take the lead. I’ll be right up there with you. As soon as you open that door, I expect we’ll have to open fire.”
“I disagree, dearest boss,” Cakey said. “We should use the ammo sparingly, if possible. We’ve only got so many bullets, you know, and quite a ways to go to get to the east wall.”
“Don’t use it so sparingly it gets us killed,” Telly said. “Be ready to do what you have to do.”
“As always,” Cakey said and flashed a toothy grin.
“Try to clear us a spot in the street away from the flames. Then everyone draw whatever weapon you’ve got and unleash hell on the rubes. Who knows, maybe we’ll live.”
“Maybe,” Cakey said. “That’s the spirit, my smallish friend.”
“When we get into the street,” Telly continued, “form a circle, back-to-back. Stay together. If we clear a path through the rubes, we head east to the wall. Got it?”
“Got it,” Karl said, patting the side of the rifle.
“Got it, my liege,” Cakey said with a theatrical bow.
Gooty settled for a nod. Annabelle held up her knapsack, looked at it, frowned and said nothing. She did not have a weapon. David offered her his knife.
“No, no,” she said, waving it off. “Not my style.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll…” He was going to offer to protect her, but he couldn’t get the words out. It was too embarrassing. He shuffled his feet and let the comment hang, awkward and incomplete.
“Cakey and Karl, at the door,” Telly said. “Get it open. This is it, folks.”
Cakey and Karl stepped up to the boarded-up front door. The others lined up behind them. Gooty was muttering something under his breath, but David couldn’t hear what he was saying over the endless rube chorus. As Cakey bent down to examine the door, they felt another shuddering boom. A light bulb overhead shattered and bits of glass rained down.
“What is that?” Gooty asked. “Is something exploding?”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Telly said. “How’s it coming along with that door, guys?”
“Door lock is jammed,” Cakey said, fiddling with the deadbolt. “Maybe it’s rusted shut, boss. I can’t tell. Let me work at it a sec, and I’ll have it open.”
“Let’s save time,” Karl said. He took a step back, nudged Cakey aside, then kicked the door with one large booted foot. The plywood board shattered and cast its broken pieces out onto the sidew
alk. There was another board above it, and he kicked that one to splinters, as well.
Because of the many fires outside, the street was well lit. Rubes passed in front of the ragged hole, some on the sidewalk, some on the street, all headed north. Across the street, some of the empty shops gushed black smoke, flames licking through windows. Bits of plywood from the broken door had hit the passing rubes, knocking one down. He landed on his hands and knees, crawled a few feet and began screaming at the top of his lungs. This drew the attention of others, who turned toward the door.
“Go, go,” Telly said, smacking Karl on the back of the leg.
Karl ducked down and slipped through the door. Cakey came up behind him. Rubes bore down on them. Many of their torches had gone out, leaving them with clubs of wood and metal, a rod that might have been a flag pole—the crimson ribbon had apparently been part of the flame’s fuel—and one gaunt rube wielding what appeared to be a fresh human femur, dripping gore. Blood oozed down bare scalps, tracing lines on sooty faces.
Karl swung his rifle up and fired the first shot, hitting one of the rubes in the chest. He went limp, hit the ground and flopped about. Others came, five, six, stepping on the body. Karl fired again and another dropped.
“Save the bullets, my giant,” Cakey said and slung his rifle on his shoulder. He drew his knife and rushed to meet the approaching rubes. “We’ll need ‘em when we get tired. Let’s do this the old fashioned way.”
Telly hopped over the debris and ran to join them, shillelagh in one hand, pistol in the other. Gooty hesitated at the door, looking this way and that, and might never have gone if Annabelle had not grabbed his shoulder and pushed him out. David stepped through the door last of all, clutching his knife in both hands, shaking all over, poison roiling in his stomach. As he stepped outside, he saw that the bulk of the rubes had already passed beyond them, headed north. Only the stragglers remained. But more and more noticed the sudden arrival of enemies and turned in their direction.
Karl took Cakey’s advice and shouldered his rifle, drawing his knife. The first line of rubes reached them, half a dozen hooting sick people bearing makeshift weapons. The rube with the flag pole took a swing at Cakey’s head. Cakey ducked it, came up with the knife and jammed the blade into his stomach. The rube hardly reacted. He brought the flag pole down on Cakey’s shoulder, then leaned forward and sank his teeth into his upper arm. Cakey drew the knife out and brought it up into the rube’s neck. Blood spurted and rube the fell, gurgling and kicking his legs.
Shadows of Tockland Page 24
