Either way, he was no longer there.
The hellish sounds of screaming and explosions had faded into the background. There was a general hubbub of far-off noise, but we were far away from the centre of the city now, enough that there weren’t too many people outside in the street, if any at all.
Amongst it all, after a few minutes, I steadily noticed a flat, repetitive sound. It was as if somebody was knocking against something, perhaps a front door, but it continued on monotonously.
Some other conflicted part of me felt deeply unsettled by it, though.
I stood from the seat, taking up the gun in my hand. Its purpose as a projectile had been lost to me – I had been holding it pathetically, like a safety blanket, although at that point I hadn’t realised it.
I operated under the assumption that Maureen had gone to bed. I looked back at Luke one last time before setting off across the room.
There was an enticing mystery to all of this – the blinds were shut and let in only a little light, and despite the fact that I could have looked out of them and seen the sight in the street then and there, I didn’t want to. I felt as if I was in a haze, as if everything that had been happening that night was some impossible dream.
I crossed the room and turned the door handle, finding it unlocked. I headed into the hallway and quietly made my way down the flights of stairs.
Not a single thought passed through my mind – I was running on instinct.
I reached the ground floor, looking along the short hallway at the front door of the building. Despite the darkness, there was a flickering light outside, its gleam jumping about wildly. Amidst these odd, schizophrenic movements, there was a booming laugh drenched in psychopathic indulgence.
I took up the gun and checked that it was loaded, making sure that I had it at the ready. I didn’t want to admit that I knew I was approaching something terrible, but in those few footsteps some part of me had to come to terms with it.
I opened the door without hesitation and took in that strange, terrifying scene.
A group of figures stood in the centre of the street up ahead. Most were laughing, but ones laughter arched out annoyingly above all of the rest. He was the one with the torch in his hand, spinning it around lazily simply for something to do.
Then I realised who they were. They were the group from earlier, no less than half an hour ago, who had tried to attack Jack.
‘Who’s that?’
The voice came from one of the indistinguishable group that stood in the circle. As they turned the ones obscuring my view of the thing they surrounded moved aside, and the torch moved its gleam over the ground in front of them.
It had only taken a second for me to glance upon what was on the ground – Jack’s body, and a mound of blood across what was left of his destroyed face. He was spread eagle, his head smashed thoroughly.
My breath caught in my throat as the light shined in my face and I processed the events that were before me.
I wasn’t scared, though. My heart held steady, beating rhythmically, neither speeding up nor slowing down.
‘This asshole again,’ the ringleader shouted, that insane laugh bubbling up. ‘The fuck are you gonna do with that? I’ll cave your fucking head in too. Maybe I’ll even head upstairs and see that buddy of yours. See if this headless fuck has a lady, too-’
I raised the gun and pointed the barrel at him, this nameless figure. His name didn’t matter, of course – only the act that he had committed.
I pulled the trigger.
I wasn’t unfamiliar to the sensation of it firing in my hands, of that jolting movement as the bullet left the chamber. In the same moment – the sound, the small explosion that lit up the dark air briefly as it left the gun, the force of it striking him in the chest and knocking him to the floor – there wasn’t a single thought passing through my mind other than the feeling of that raw, redemptive emotion.
When the leader falls, the lackeys scatter, and that was exactly what they did. All five took off in different directions, with nobody looking after anybody. They knew that they were fucked, and they took off.
My heart had never been calmer.
I walked down the steps from the front door, taking each motion one at a time until I reached him. The torch had fallen from his hand, and looking down at it I realised it was the wind-up torch that Jack had been using when we had met him just a short time ago.
His assailant was still alive, on his back, a little way from Jack. I could only moderately see him in the fading glow of the torch, but in that moment he looked up at me with wide, confused eyes.
I raised the gun again, pointed it at his face, and pulled the trigger.
Another small explosion lit up the oblivion that became of his head, a splatter of blood smearing over the tarmac. The sound of the shot echoed as I remained stood there, still pointing the gun at its target, waiting.
No sirens, no shouts, no gunshots at the ready to end me. The city’s chaotic noises proceeded on as they had done since the plane came down at the start of the night. Now I was a part of it – the hellish noises of the end of civilisation. I was somebody else’s background noise.
I lowered the gun, taking a long, drawn breath.
I had taken a life, and nobody was coming to get me.
How long I was stood there for I don’t know, but eventually I heard footsteps behind me.
‘Sam?’
Luke hurried over to my side.
‘What the fuck happened?!’
‘They killed him,’ I said simply. ‘He was just trying to keep to himself and they killed him.’
Silence. Luke took it in.
‘Maureen… What about her?’
‘She’ll be okay. Upstairs is the safest place for her now. Nobody’ll bother her. I hate myself for saying that, but there’s nothing else we can do for her. We can only take the least shit option.’
‘… We should get out of here.’
‘Yeah.’
I was about to set off running with him by my side, but as my eyes caught the sight of the fading glimmer emanating from the wind-up torch, I stopped. I hurried over to it, taking it up tightly in my hands as the light slowly went out. I looked down at Jack one last time, one of the last glimmering hopes that had existed in our journey, and turned away, leaving this tragic scene behind
‘Luke?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Don’t ever mention this to Helen.’
‘I promise.’
We walked in silence to the end of the quiet street.
‘Only a few more blocks,’ I said, holding on to some semblance of hope.
Chapter Twelve
The Jump
We had finally made it.
I hurried to the front door of the building, slinging the gun over my shoulder via its strap, and wrapped my fingers around the door handle. I had put so much stock into it that I could already feel the oncoming relief before I opened the door,
The problem was, though, that that wasn’t what happened.
Because the door was locked.
‘Shit,’ I muttered, rattling it on its hinges. I looked about myself, seeing the various people in groups passing by with bags in their hands, others making their way inside houses, others leaving them.
‘Let’s just break it,’ Luke said, knocking against the glass lightly with his bat. ‘A few hits and it’ll give for sure.’
I was about to agree with him when we saw Wentworth’s face gazing at us through the dark.
Remember him? I mentioned him a while back. He was the asshole who had had a thing for Helen since the beginning of time, or however long it had been since she had moved into her current building. He was a tall guy with an obscenely scrawny frame. Honestly, I could have liked the guy if he wasn’t such a pretentious douchebag about absolutely everything. I had only spoken to him a few times, and I already knew what kind of a person he was.
‘Get away!’ He shouted. ‘I’m warning you. I have a weapon, and I wil
l use it.’
‘Everybody’s got a weapon out here,’ Luke said, ‘just let us inside.’
‘Absolutely not, the city’s on lockdown!’
‘The city’s not on lockdown, you dumbass. Everything’s gone out. Just open the fucking door!’
‘Look,’ I said loudly through the glass, ‘You know who I am, Wentworth. We’ve spoken more times than I can count. I’m Helen’s boyfriend. Just let me inside. I need to know if she’s alright.’
‘Unless you have a key card or identification that you’re a member of this block, then I can’t let you in… Or you can be buzzed in.’
‘The electricity’s out, you fucking asshole! How am I supposed to call her?!’
‘Don’t take that tone with me, sir. You’ll have to wait for it to come back on.’
‘IT ISN’T COMING BACK ON, YOU FUCKING-!’
‘Sam!’
‘What?!’
I could feel how warm I had become, how the heat had risen to my face with the overwhelming frustration that I was feeling right now. I snapped my head around to look over at Luke, only to see him wink at me and nod in the direction of the nearby alley.
I looked past him at the entrance to it, before looking back to him and shaking my head in confusion.
Then it struck me.
It took a second for me to regain some element of control over myself – the thought of Helen being in danger was one of the only things that made me get this angry, but in an instant I knew what Luke was indicating – at least I thought I did.
‘Fine,’ I said, the anger still remaining in wisps about my mind like flies buzzing around me. ‘Fuck you.’
It was part in anger and part to make him think that we had left the place – we were, but then again, we weren’t.
Let me explain.
We took off towards the alley, readjusting our weapons in our hands.
‘Fire escape?’ I said. ‘That’s what you were thinking, right?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Thank God. I could’ve looked like a real moron right there.’
***
We stood in the alleyway staring up at the rickety, metallic flights of stairs that rebounded on each other side-to-side, over and over again. I put my hands on my hips and saw what I could of it in the dark, before looking about at the silhouettes in the alleyway.
‘There.’
Luke followed me over to a dumpster, just one of a hundred thousand in this city that seemed grafted into the concrete below. We kicked the boxes aside from both ends, as well as the smaller trash cans, and somehow managed to dislodge its wheels. We heaved it over to the spot beneath the lowest point of a ladder that was hanging down from the fire escape.
I made my way up onto the top of the dumpster and got a hold of the ladder, pulling myself up with all of my strength and climbing up the rungs to the first platform. Behind me Luke followed, and before I knew it we were both stood up there, I realising just how close I was to seeing Helen again.
‘Does her window even come out on to the fire exit?’ Luke asked.
‘No…’ I said, only realising the implications of the words after I had said them.
‘What should we do?’
‘We’ll figure it out when we get there.’
With that, we set off up the steps. I couldn’t help myself from taking them at a jogging pace, leaping up them two at a time before rebounding along the next platform and making my way up to the next. I could feel my heart racing faster and faster the closer we got, the infernal sounds of the city around me in the chaotic whirlwind of events that were occurring in this lost landscape.
Finally we reached the platform we needed to be on, and only then did I take in the gravitas of the fact that the window was two feet away from the fire escape, and locked shut.
‘How am I supposed to do this?’ I asked myself. I looked about my feet and saw two bricks sat on the railings, likely having been used as makeshift ashtrays for anybody wishing to sneak a cigarette without straying too far from their apartment.
I hurled it at the wall of the building, watching it shatter into a myriad of different pieces – that part had worked properly, it was just everything else in this bullshit plan of mine that I was worried about. I snatched up the pieces of brick that hadn’t fallen through the gaps and threw one at the window.
‘Helen!’ I shouted. ‘Are you there?’
We waited in silence, but were given no response. I tried again, and there was no answer.
‘Maybe she’s asleep,’ Luke said. ‘We can’t rule it out, even with everything that’s happening. Some people might still be sleeping through it right now.’
I considered it, but that couldn’t have been the case. She was always so overwhelmed with work that she had taken to checking her phone at 2am – not by alarm, but by some internal clock that just knew to wake her up then.
She would have already known by now.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘We need to get inside somehow.’
Luke nodded towards the nearby window, the one belonging to the apartment that gave right on to the fire escape. He drummed his fingers against it.
‘Hello?’ He said loudly. ‘If you’re in there we don’t want any trouble. We just need to get next door? Could you let us i-’
His words, of course, were suddenly cut off by a bullet that came whistling straight through the glass panel, which twanged and broke before my eyes. Luke screamed out, reaching up to clutch at his arm.
Without even thinking about it I grabbed my friend and pulled him to the side, shoving him against the wall as he kept his hand pressed against his arm, just below his shoulder.
‘Ah, fuck…!’
I pressed myself up against the wall by his side, making sure that he kept doing the same thing.
‘Keep the fuck away from my window, whoever you are! Get away!’
It was the voice of an elderly woman – I had seen her a couple of times when I had stayed at Helen’s apartment.
‘It’s me! Sam! You remember me, don’t you?’
I couldn’t come up with a name, whoever she was.
‘I don’t care who you are, just keep yourselves away from my property!’
By my side, Luke took some deep, heaving breaths and pressed his hand against his skin, hard.
‘I just got shot, Sam…’ Luke groaned through gritted teeth. ‘What do I do?’
I could tell by one look at him how terrified he was. He was breathing faster than ever.
‘Keep a hold of yourself,’ I said quickly, ‘You’re going to start hyperventilating. How bad is it?’
Luke turned his head to look over at his arm, checking his hand for the amount of blood that would be smeared upon it.
‘It’s just a flesh wound,’ he muttered quietly. ‘It hasn’t gone through. I’ll be alright… What do we do?’
I thought as quickly as I could, trying to work my way through this entire situation in my head.
We couldn’t go through this psychotic old woman’s apartment because she would fucking shoot us.
We couldn’t go through the front door and just take the stairs because the doorman was a complete asshole.
I briefly considered the possibility that we could try another fire escape, but there was just as much chance of us running into some other crazy person with a gun, and Luke was already injured. We had gotten lucky this time, lucky enough that the bullet hadn’t hit somewhere else.
Either we left or we made our way inside, and I certainly wasn’t doing the former of the two – which meant there was only one route to take that would land us in Helen’s apartment.
‘We need to go through the window,’ I said plainly.
‘Are you fucking serious?’
‘Trust me, this is the only way.’
‘It’s over there! How are we supposed to make that?’
‘It’s only a couple of feet.’
‘The windows locked, though. How are we supposed to get through?’
/>
I snatched the bat out of his hand and swapped it for my rifle, handing it over to him. I headed over to the edge of the platform and looked out over the edge. Even though it was dark I could see the kind of hellish drop that would await me if I made the slightest of incorrect moves. It would send me toppling to the ground and leave me in a bloody, mushed up mess, splattered in an alleyway, forgotten amidst the apocalypse.
Screw it.
I reached a leg over the railing and straddled it before standing out on the edge, clinging tightly to the barrier with one hand, the bat in my other.
‘Sam, what are you doing?!’
I didn’t respond, simply leaning over to the spot by the window, and holding the bat out as I steadied myself.
Luke brought himself over to me, taking a hand away from the wound and clutching a hold of the sleeve of my jacket to add another level of safety to this whole charade.
Checking myself for the last time, I swung the bat out and brought it against the window, hard.
The first time it clunked. The second time it cracked. The third time, those cracks ran through the entire pane. The fourth time, the whole thing shattered.
Glass went falling into the alleyway below, and seconds later I heard the clunking of the pieces against the concrete.
I pulled myself forward, holding on to the barrier and waiting as Luke reluctantly released his hold on my jacket.
After what must have been twenty seconds, there was still no response.
‘Where the fuck is she?’ I asked, questioning nobody in particular. ‘I’m going inside…’
Aiming carefully, I threw the bat through the open window, watching it clank against the frame before falling into the darkness of the apartment’s living room.
It was only two feet, but looking at that off-centred leap between where I was and where I needed to be was more terrifying than anything that I had experienced that night.
I didn’t even think, didn’t even give any warning to Luke – it was like one of those videos you see of the parkour guys doing a little jump over some maddeningly steep drop.
I jumped.
Somehow, and it’s something that I’ll never be able to comprehend because the adrenaline from the incident has clouded the memory, I made it. I dove through the window, slamming into the far side of the window frame with my shoulder, and fell into the darkness of Helen’s living room.
The Solar Pulse (Book 1): Beyond The Pulse Page 8
