Megan didn’t have any trouble to lift the desk off of Amanda. The problem was to carry Amanda. Her roommate was taller and weighed more than Megan, so it was out of the question to pick her up. There was also the matter of the bloody gash on the back of Amanda’s head from the desk. Since she’d probably suffered some kind of head injury herself, she didn’t want to move Amanda prematurely.
She shook her roommate to try to wake her up. “Amanda, can you hear me? Wake up. Please.” Megan put her hands to her face; tears came to her eyes. She didn’t have any idea what to do. What would Amanda tell her to do?
Call for help, she decided. There wasn’t a landline phone in the room, but didn’t Amanda have a cell phone? As Megan began to ransack Amanda’s half of the room, the smell of smoke became stronger. Megan’s chest tightened and she coughed violently.
That strong of a smell couldn’t be from a cigarette or someone cooking. As if on cue, alarms started to go off. Megan stood next to Amanda’s bed for a moment and held a sweatshirt in her hands. It took her a moment to realize what these alarms meant—the building was on fire!
She dropped back to Amanda’s side and shook her friend again. “Amanda, please, wake up. The building is on fire! We have to get out of here.” Amanda didn’t stir. Megan put her hands to her face again. “Oh God, what do I do?”
She had to get Amanda out of here. If the dorm was on fire, there was no point to call for help and wait for it to arrive. The problem remained, though: how could she get Amanda to safety?
She didn’t see anything that might help her. Then she saw Amanda’s bed and came up with an idea. She pulled the flat sheet from Amanda’s bed and laid it out on the floor beside her roommate. With a grunt, she rolled Amanda onto the center of the sheet. The exertion and the thicker smoke made her cough again hard enough to double her over. She took the inhaler from her pocket to squirt some medicine into her throat. It gave her a moment of relief that allowed her to wrap the sheet around Amanda. She didn’t have any string or rope handy, but she did find a belt among Amanda’s things. With another grunt she tipped Amanda’s chest up enough to allow her to slide the belt around and then bring it around to cinch as tightly as she could.
“Here goes nothing,” Megan said to herself. She took one end of the sheet and dragged her makeshift sled to the door. She covered the few feet to the door fairly quickly and then touched the doorknob. She pulled her hand back an instant later and winced with pain. She could feel heat radiate from the knob.
Megan dragged her roommate to the far end of the room, by the window. By the time she reached the window, Megan had to get down on her knees. Her breath sounded like a boiling tea kettle as she struggled to get fresh air into her lungs, not just from the asthma, but from the smoke that filled the air.
Megan stuck her head out the window, where she could see other kids stagger around. She wanted to scream to them for help, but she couldn’t do more than wheeze. She tried to wave, but no one seemed to see her. She was trapped!
She sagged to the floor and tried to think of what to do while she gasped for breath. Amanda still hadn’t woke up, but she had begun to cough as well. Megan ran a hand through her hair as she coughed and tried in vain to think of some way out.
As she looked down at Amanda and then back to the window, Megan thought of something. Her hands trembled as she tore the rest of the sheets from both beds and rolled them into makeshift ropes. These she tied together at the ends. She knew it wouldn’t be nearly long enough to reach the ground. She added blankets, sweatshirts, and even a bra to the rope, though Megan questioned whether its tensile strength would be enough. Still, as more smoke filled the room and her throat began to feel as if someone had poured cement down her trachea, she didn’t see where she had much choice.
She tied one end of the rope to the belt around Amanda’s makeshift sled. The other end Megan tied to the foot of her bed, which she hoped would be heavy enough as an anchor. Before she tried to get Amanda out the window, she emptied the inhaler into her throat. The medicine didn’t have much effect, but it opened her airways enough so she could take a couple of deep breaths.
With all of her strength, Megan rolled Amanda up the side of the wall, to the window ledge. Halfway up she had to stop as a coughing fit seized her. Megan used her back like a brace to keep Amanda off the floor. Once she’d stopped coughing, Megan continued to roll her friend up the wall. Finally, she straightened her body to lift Amanda with her back.
She couldn’t be sure of how much farther she had to go, her body turned the wrong way to see. Then she felt the weight lift from her back. With a grateful sigh she collapsed to the floor. She wanted to check and see if her rescue ladder had held, if Amanda dangled close enough to the ground for someone to help her, but Megan didn’t have the strength. She didn’t even have strength left to try to force air into her solidified airways.
It’s probably better this way, she thought. Then she closed her eyes and decided to take a short nap. When she woke up everything would be better. As she drifted off, she wondered who had let a cat into the room.
***
Captain Donovan sat on a park bench to scribble notes in her notebook. That Amanda Murdoch had given her a lot to go on; her next stop would be Megan Putnam’s house to squeeze the maid. She might have to make up a story to get inside the house to search, or maybe she could frighten the maid with some noise about checking with INS about her status. She hated to do something like that in case some dickhead with a video camera caught her and she wound up in front of an inquiry board, but it might be the only way to scare the piss out of the maid without violence.
The story young Amanda told her at least sounded plausible enough. Megan had been humiliated by a boy and fled. She begged or perhaps bribed the maid to keep her secret. Then she had slipped back onto campus to quietly resume her life.
The only hole in that theory was the amnesia thing. Was Megan faking it? If she was, she at least had her roommate convinced. Or if they were in on it together, the roommate had done a good job to convince Donovan about its validity. The other theory was that Megan had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown and her mind had wiped itself clean to protect her from the terrible memories. A third option was that it wasn’t Megan in that room but a really good impersonator. This didn’t seem likely to Donovan, but she didn’t want to rule it out until she got a DNA test.
To run any kind of tests she would need to contact Mr. Putnam. He would probably send in a squad of lawyers and his own doctors to evaluate his daughter. Then Megan would probably spend a few months in a luxury rehab clinic or some quiet vacation spot until she found her marbles. At that point she would transfer to another school, one where a donation could answer any questions about Megan’s time at Rampart State.
Donovan reached into her jacket for a stick of gum and wished once again for a cigarette. All this caused by some dumb schoolgirl crush, at least if Murdoch’s story could be believed.
Donovan felt the ground beneath her feet rumble. From years of experience, she knew this wasn’t a natural sound. She was up even before she saw the column of smoke rise into the air. That the smoke came from the building where she had just talked to Megan Putnam and her roommate gave Donovan pause for only an instant.
By the time she reached the building, a throng of kids had gathered on the lawn outside. A few stragglers emerged from the doors; they coughed from the smoke. Donovan scanned the crowd for Megan Putnam and Amanda Murdoch, but she didn’t see them. Maybe they had gone out another way. Or maybe they were still inside.
She was on her phone to call for backup when the answer about Putnam and Murdoch came. The crowd’s collective gasp prompted her to look up in time to see Amanda Murdoch dangled about ten feet off the ground from some kind of homemade ladder made out of sheets and clothes. Murdoch was strapped into a sling made from another sheet and a belt; she didn’t appear to be conscious at the moment.
Flames from the building licked at the makeshift ladder and Murd
och’s cocoon. Donovan dropped her phone to the ground and hurried towards where Murdoch’s body continued to hover in the air. Along the way, Donovan grabbed three of the burliest guys around. “Come on!” she shouted. They continued to stand there until she turned around and said, “Move your asses!”
Donovan gathered them beneath where Murdoch’s body dangled and quickly outlined the plan. “I’m the lightest so I’ll stand on your shoulders and get her out of that thing. You two be ready to catch her.”
“Catch her?”
“Or at least cushion her fall.” She could see the doubt on their faces. “Look, this isn’t my ideal plan either but we don’t have a lot of time here. So let’s just do it.”
She had never been a cheerleader or a gymnast, so she didn’t have any practice climbing on top of a man’s shoulders. He grunted beneath her when she kicked him in the face, but his wide shoulders remained steady enough for her to straighten herself. She found herself at eye level with Amanda Murdoch, who was unconscious.
Donovan reached into her pocket for her knife. She could see it wouldn’t be necessary in a moment as the flames were about to cut through the ladder without any assistance from her. She cut through the ladder just above Murdoch’s head anyway.
She didn’t have time to do anything more than snatch at the belt around Murdoch’s midsection in a vain attempt to turn her into a horizontal position. Then both of them fell—Murdoch towards the building and Donovan in the opposite direction.
In a way she supposed it was just as well she fell on her ass, as opposed to her head. It still hurt like a son of a bitch. She let out a stream of curses as the man whose shoulders she’d stood on helped her up. “We did it,” he said.
He stepped back so she could see his two cohorts had caught Amanda Murdoch, one awkwardly around the shoulders and the other around her ankles. They carried her a short distance from the fire and then set her on the ground.
Donovan patted their shoulders. “Good work, boys.” Then she turned her eyes up to the window for Murdoch and Putnam’s room and waited for Megan to show. A full minute went by without a sign of her.
Then Donovan heard someone scream, “Look at the size of that fucking rat!” She saw what must have been a yard-long rat scurry through the grass, to head towards the building.
“What the fuck?” Donovan said. She’d heard about horses and livestock that had refused to budge even as their barn went up in flames, but she’d never heard of an animal run into a fire. Well, if it wanted to die, what did it matter to her? One less rat in the city wouldn’t make her lose any sleep.
There was still no sign of Megan Putnam. Donovan thought back to when she’d gone up to the room, the way Putnam had collapsed from an asthma attack after a few questions. All that smoke and fire and the strain from when she’d lowered her roommate—“Oh...shit.”
She had run into a burning evidence locker once to try to save evidence in a case against Don Vendetta, but she had been too late. That had been for a good cause, to take a dangerous criminal off the streets. She didn’t know Putnam; for all she knew Putnam had scammed her earlier. She thought back to Amanda Murdoch’s story and groaned to herself. “Ah, hell.”
As she was about to run into the building like an idiot, she saw someone had beat her to it. He was short and rail-thin with long, greasy hair. He must have already been in the building when it was on fire from the state of his clothes. She was tempted to let this hero try to save Putnam on his own, but she couldn’t be sure he would look for her and not a keg of beer or his favorite bong.
She borrowed a T-shirt from one of the guys to tie around her face, not that it would do much good. As she charged into the building, she wondered why the Scarlet Knight wasn’t ever around when Donovan really needed her. That magic armor of hers had to be fireproof.
Thirty years as a smoker had given her a natural tolerance for smoke, but she still began to cough before she reached the first floor. She could feel her leather jacket turn hot, but she kept it on for some small amount of protection against the heat.
There was no sign of the hero or the suicidal rat, at least until she reached the third floor. By then her breathing didn’t sound any better than Megan Putnam’s and the ends of her hair were singed. As she stumbled through the smoke on the third floor, she saw a wall of flame ahead. She ducked into the room on her left to plan on how to extricate herself from this mess.
Then she saw the hole punched through the wall, into Megan Putnam’s room. Through eyes that stung from tears and smoke, she saw Megan Putnam herself in the arms of the hero who’d run into the flames. The rat she’d thought had committed suicide stood at the man’s feet.
Donovan didn’t need to be a detective to put the pieces together. The rat at the man’s feet and the stench of sewage that somehow permeated even the smoke-filled air in the room were all the clues she needed. She reached into her holster for her gun and aimed it at the Sewer Rat’s head. “What are you doing with the girl?”
“She sick. I take her to safety,” he said in a low growl.
“Why you?”
“She my friend.”
“Your friend?” Donovan wanted to press the issue further, but heard the roof creak over her head. It wouldn’t be long before the whole place caved in on them. She stuck the gun back into its holster. “We’ll sort this out later.”
She led the way back down, which wasn’t any easier. They had to pause on the second floor as part of the roof in front of them gave way. The rubble had snuffed out some of the flames, enough that they could pass through. In a mad dash they bolted the rest of the way, out of the building.
Donovan sank to her knees and pulled off the grimy T-shirt so she could take some deep breaths. At this point she wished for an asthma inhaler, not that it would do any good. She was still on her knees, trying to breathe, when Lieutenant Cielo knelt beside her. “Captain, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you.”
“I’ve been busy,” she said between gasps. She smiled at her aide, despite that he was probably a mole. “I found Megan Putnam.”
“You did? Where?”
She looked around, but there was no sign of Putnam, or the Sewer Rat either. “Shit.”
Chapter 23
Though he wanted only to collapse on his knees next to the policewoman, Jim continued to run with Emma in his arms—if it was Emma. In her present condition she was small and light enough for him to easily carry across the campus. Pepe stayed on his heels, the rat’s fur singed, but otherwise unharmed.
He saw the fire trucks approach, as well as more police cars and ambulances. To escape from these, he turned left, into the football stadium. He had never seen the game played, nor did he care at the moment. His only concern was for Emma, whose face had turned purple.
The best thing would have been to have left her with the policewoman, but if he did that he would likely be arrested and never see her again. Not to mention that something strange had happened to her to turn her into a slight blond girl. Like Pepe, he knew it was Emma from her scent; everyone had a unique smell and hers was burned into Jim’s memory.
He carried her across the vacant football field, into the parking lot. There was only one car in the lot at the moment and a man in a sweatsuit walked towards it with a duffel bag. The man certainly didn’t look like a doctor, but he could probably tell Jim where to find one, preferably far away from the police.
“Help!” Jim said. “Help!”
The man turned around and his eyes widened. “Oh my God,” he said. “What the hell happened to her?”
“She no can breathe,” Jim said. “She in fire.”
The man looked over Jim’s shoulder and pointed to the direction Jim had come from. “That fire, over there?”
“Yes. She in building on fire.”
“Shit, she looks in real bad shape.” The man took off his baseball cap to wipe sweat away from his bald head. “We should call an ambulance.”
“They busy.”
“Well, the
re’s a nurse in the admin building. I’m not sure—”
“We go.”
“Sure, but—” the man stopped and looked down at the ground, where Pepe sat at Jim’s feet like a dog. “Jesus Christ, what is that?”
“He friend. No hurt you.”
“Look, I’m glad to help you with the girl, but that thing—”
“He no thing. He friend.”
“I’m not letting your friend in my car.”
Jim wanted to argue this point, but there was no time. As if to emphasize his need to hurry, a violent wheeze escaped Emma’s lips; her body shuddered in his arms. He looked down at Pepe and said in ratspeak, “Find the queen’s friends. We need their help.”
Pepe, who had served as Emma’s protector for almost his entire life, bared his teeth at this order. “Go. We need them.”
The rat hissed his displeasure, but he scurried away to carry out the order. The man stared after Pepe while Jim hurried over to the man’s car. He gently set Emma on the backseat and eased her head onto his lap. The car’s tires squealed as the man put the car into gear.
While the man drove, Jim stroked Emma’s strangely blond hair and whispered into her ear, “You be fine. We fix you. You not die.” Tears came to his eyes at the thought the woman he loved might die in his arms—just as his mother had so long ago.
Emma didn’t respond to him, her face still purple and body shuddering as she tried in vain to breathe. “You not die,” he said again and kissed her forehead.
“She’s not going to make it,” the man said.
“She will! She no die!”
“Right. You’re right. She’s going to be fine.” The man honked his horn as he swerved around something. Jim tightened his grip on Emma’s arm to keep her in place. The man had echoed the despair and hopelessness he felt, the fear that she would die here, in the car, before they could find help.
It was his fault. If he’d not been so selfish, if he’d left her with the policewoman, then doctors might already have cured her. If they’d taken him away and locked him into a cell, what did it matter? Her safety was the only thing that should have mattered to him. “My fault,” he said to her. “This my fault.”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 53
