by Rob Aspinall
“Open up,” said a gruff policeman on the other side.
“The first rule is, we have to whisper,” I said.
Jenny snatched the note from my hand and the kids nodded; Pablo tucking a fifty of his own inside the waistband of his shorts.
“The second rule is, we can’t let the police in,” I said.
“Why?” Jenny whispered back.
“It’s like hide and seek,” I said. “And we’re it.”
The policeman banged again on the door. “Police … If you’re in there, open up.”
We all froze and stayed quiet. I crept over to the door and peered through the spy-hole.
“I think this one is empty,” a man in full tactical gear said. Only his eyes visible between helmet and balaclava.
He and a female cop turned and walked further up the hall. I backed up sharply, not realising Nathan was stood behind me, trying to get a look. I accidentally stood on his foot. He caught his own cry, but Pablo couldn’t help laughing.
I heard heavy boots return. A thumping on the door. Harder and faster.
“Armed police. I know someone’s in there. Open up now!”
“Pablo, does your dad keep a gun in the apartment?” Nathan whispered.
Pablo shook his head.
“You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” Jenny said, keeping her voice low.
“We got in trouble with the gangs,” I said.
“Then that’s why the police are after you,” Jenny said. “Dad says they’re corrupt. He says never open the door to police, either.”
“Is there a place you can both hide?” I asked them.
“No, let them answer the door,” Nathan said. “Then we can hide.”
“They’re just kids,” I said. “We can’t-“
The cops banged again. “You’ve got thirty seconds. Then we’re breaking down the door.”
Jenny got up off the sofa. “Pablo. Show them the escape route. I’ll deal with this.”
Jenny. Seven or eight years old and the one in control.
“Go!” she whispered, pushing Pablo in the back.
“Through here,” Pablo said, running into a tiny bathroom without a door, but with a toilet, a sink and a dented steel bathtub without taps.
Jenny paused in the middle of the living room. “Just a minute!” she shouted, watching us over her shoulder.
Pablo climbed on the window ledge and beckoned us on.
Nathan went first. He didn’t look impressed. “This is your escape route?” he asked Pablo.
“Go!” I said, nudging into him, glancing over my shoulder.
“You’re not seeing what I’m seeing,” he said, as he got on his hands and knees.
As I climbed on to the window ledge next to Pablo, I got a good look at what Nathan was talking about.
Holy break-dancing Jesus.
27
The Ladder
Our one escape route was almost as suicidal as sitting on the couch and waiting for the police to barge their way in. Nathan shuffled across a ten-storey drop between the pink apartment block and another building painted custard-yellow.
We were aiming for another open window on the opposite side, the pane smashed out.
Now, the big problem wasn’t the drop itself. But the decrepit wooden ladder we had to climb across to get to the other side.
I didn’t have time to let Nathan cross first, meaning the sagging, spindly ladder had to take our combined weight at the same time.
“Go,” Pablo said to me.
I made my first tentative moves across the ladder, shuffling out over the void on all fours.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Pablo run to join Jenny at the door, hearing the faint sound of a policeman counting down from three.
Jenny opened the door on the latch at the last second. She kept them talking, glancing over her shoulder to see if we’d made it.
Hold them Jenny. Hold them just a few more seconds.
I shuffled faster, hands gripping tight. My whole body tense. The ladder creaking and groaning. Wobbling left and right too, thanks to Nathan’s awkward shuffling style ahead of me.
I kept my hands off the rungs in case they snapped. Nathan didn’t have that luxury, hauling himself forward, rung by rung with his hands. I had no idea how he was even doing it, other than the fact that fear and desperation were great improvisors.
I fixed my attention dead ahead, trying not to look down. But of course, I always looked down.
A gathering of police and La Firma swamped the street below. If one of them happened to look up, or the chopper happened to hover over, we were screwed. If Jenny let those police in a second too early, we were double-screwed. And if the bending, rotting ladder broke … As if on cue, Nathan put his hands through a weak rung. He gripped the next one along and froze.
The rung spun to the ground, falling a whisker behind the nearest cop. In all the commotion, he didn’t see or hear it hit the floor. Nathan resumed his crawl across the ladder, until he reached the window ledge. He dragged himself on, slipped inside and disappeared.
The thought occurred to me that he might do a runner; find something to cut his ties on and then cut his ties with me. I shuffled as fast as my terrified, jumpy body would allow, ignoring the sudden sting from a splinter in my right thumb as I shifted my hands over the rough, gnarly wood.
I was just a foot away from safety, when I heard a splintering sound from behind. I felt a sudden shunt; paused to look over my shoulder. Big mistake. The ladder snapped in the middle. I reached out instinctively, but my hands were despairingly short of the window ledge.
I grasped at thin air.
And as the ladder fell, it took me with it.
28
Rat Attack
A pair of hands came out of nowhere and caught my right wrist, only my stomach plunging ten storeys down. I looked up and saw Nathan holding on to me, half of his body leaning out over the window ledge. He hauled me up, all the way in through the window.
We collapsed on a cool, dusty floor inside, before sorting ourselves out of a human tangle and peeping over the ledge. The cops and La Firma in the space below buildings were shouting and pointing to the sky, the ladder in two broken pieces on the ground. A handful of injured men getting urgent attention, having shared the impact of the falling wood.
I looked across the gap and through the bathroom window we’d just climbed out of. Jenny and Pablo were rockstars. They’d kept the cops talking just long enough for us to climb to safety.
Me and Nathan watched on as the two kids opened the door and let the police in. As four cops went about searching the apartment, we ducked beneath the window ledge.
“I suppose I should say thanks,” I said to him, as we sat side-by-side with our backs to the wall.
He held out his wrists again. “Too much to ask?”
“Fuck it,” I said, reaching into my trouser pocket. “You’re the least of my problems.”
I took out the penknife and sawed through the tie around his wrists until the plastic snapped in two.
Nathan let out a deep sigh of relief, rubbing his red-raw wrists. “Small mercies,” he said.
“So,” I said, listening to the beat of the helicopter blades bouncing off buildings. “The rooftops are pretty much out.”
“God, I could use a coffee right now,” Nathan said.
I looked around the room. The latest stop on our magical mystery tour. A couple of upturned desks and a sea of yellowed papers, punctuated by fallen plaster and aluminium blinds torn off the windows.
“Do you think they spotted us from down there?” I asked Nathan, grimacing as I pulled a whopping great splinter out of my thumb.
“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Nathan said, shaking his wrists loose. “They’ll be searching this place anyway. Let’s try and find a way out.”
We trod over a flattened door, feet crunching over shards of glass, out into a whopping big corridor that stretched far and wide. A stray gurney sat up against one wall,
while signs in Spanish pointed the way to a host of medical departments with names longer than a 10k run.
“Looks like an abandoned hospital,” Nathan said.
“Reminds me of when we first met,” I said. “You tried to choke me out, remember?”
“Ah yes,” Nathan said, with a wistful smile. “And you stabbed Terence in the eyeball with that needle.”
Nathan put on a a stupid voice. “My eye, my eye.”
I couldn’t help laughing with him.
My God, what have I become?
We walked underneath a giant hole in the roof, as if someone had let off a grenade. We pinned ourselves to the nearest wall as the police chopper buzzed overhead. Along the corridor, multicoloured scrawl covered the walls. Childish drawings in marker pens the likes of Pablo and Jenny had probably done, including a large smiley face drawn in green. It said Hola! A little further down, someone had spray-painted a blood-red skull and cross-bones with the message: abandon all hope.
But there was no time to stand there and admire the artwork. I heard yet more voices, echoing along corridors.
“Come out, come out wherever you are little rats!” one of them shouted in a shrill male voice.
Clearly they weren’t cops. Which meant they where most likely La Firma; paid by the pound of flesh. And they were close. I looked around us, unable to see a set of stairs or a working elevator.
“Find somewhere to hide,” Nathan said, running a hand over his mouth.
I looked left to right. One end to the other. I saw a sign for an operating room.
“Come on.” I said quietly, already on the move.
Nathan followed me in through a pair of swinging doors. The place smelled rotten. Funkier than a slap-bass convention. It was a mess too. Pale blue tiles smashed in and rusty equipment turned over. The familiar sight of an operating table greeted us in the centre of the room, below a cluster of surgery lights half-hanging off the ceiling.
“There,” I said, pointing to the lights.
Between the light fitting and crumbling plaster, I’d spotted a gap.
I climbed on the operating table and hoisted myself up into the tiny, cramped space above. I heaved myself in on my belly. Nathan did the same. We crawled further into the ceiling space and lay still above the far end of the theatre.
I heard the men coming. One of them ran a steel bar along the old, fat radiators that lined the wing. The sound travelled through the walls and went right through me. I felt the thin metal framework of the roof digging into my ribs and hips and knees.
By the sounds of it, the gang had passed right by the theatre to where we’d crawled in.
That’s it mo-fo’s. Keep on walking.
“Let’s look in here,” one of the gang members said; very, very close to the theatre doors.
Next minute, they were inside. Three or four, from what I could hear.
“This place freaks me out,” one said. “I heard there are ghosts here and shit.”
Ghosts too? Hurrah! All we needed now was a … Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding.
Here it came. Scurrying towards us. A rat the size of a cat. Scuttling directly towards me, on a collision course with my face. I shooed it away with a hand. It wouldn’t go. I shooed it harder and faster in a panic. Electric static up my spine.
Nathan caught my hand and held it firm. His eyes even firmer, telling me to stop moving. Okay for him,. He didn’t have a phobia of rats, spiders, snakes, scorpions, wasps, snag toenails and every other thing that had busted it’s way out of hell.
As the men shuffled around below us, idly chatting:
“There’s nothing here. Not even a fucking ghost.”
“Even if there is a ghost, I’ll gouge the fucker’s eyes out.”
“You can’t gouge a ghost’s eyes out, you stupid fuck. They’re ethereal beings.”
“Well whatever, if those dead hospital kids come near me, I’m kicking their little butts.”
With the rat still looming in my immediate area, I couldn’t help but gag at the sight of it. The first wasn’t too bad. The second was harder, louder. I made a throaty blurgh noise.
“Hey, what was that?”
“I heard it too.”
“Could be a rat.”
“Could be someone hiding up there.”
Nathan’s eyes were just about ready to pop out. I was ready to say fuck it. Punch through the plasterboard and drop into a brand new fight.
That was, until one of them said: “Hey, use your sword.”
Sword?
“Why not just use the machine gun?”
Machine gun?
Nathan and me stared at each other. Trapped. Doomed. Badly in need of a shower.
“Nah,” said one. “Let me use the blade. I only just got it. I wanna test it out.”
“Yeah, old school and shit,” said another.
Ironic, really. I was gonna die in hospital after all.
29
The Kiss Of Steel
The first thrust of the blade cut right through the plaster between my head and the rat, sending the little shitball squeaking and scurrying out of sight.
The blade drew out and scythed in again, an inch in front of Nathan’s face. The next, a whisker in front of mine.
I swallowed down a yelp, putting a hand to my mouth.
Shing! The blade sliced through one of the metal struts holding the ceiling in place. Clean through, like butter.
“Hey, give me a go,” one of the gang members said.
“No way. Get your own blade, bitch,” the guy with the sword said, thrusting the tip of the long, steel blade upwards between my legs.
Getting impatient, the guy stabbed in rapid fire movements, in a straight line between me and Nathan. We rolled our bodies away from each other to create a gap, but I felt a stinging pain in my left side, an inch above the waist. A flesh-wound, but a bad one.
“I think I hit something,” the swordsman said, slowly withdrawing the blade; my blood all over the tip.
If they saw that blood, we were both dead.
As the sword drew back out through the plaster, I grabbed a handful of my shirt tail and held it against both sides of the blade.
As the blade withdrew out of the plaster, I pushed the blood up off the tip, wiping it clean.
Through one of the narrow holes made in the ceiling tiles, I could see the men moving around below us.
The guy looked at his sword. He was a mean creature, missing a few teeth and a soul behind his deep-set eyes.
“Nah, you didn’t hit anything,” one of his gang mates said; an overweight guy in a red baseball top and black bandana. A gold chain around his neck and a pencil moustache. “Come on man, ain’t nothing in this dump. Let’s get out of here.”
As they turned and walked away, droplets of my blood dripped from another hole and spatted behind them. I expected them to spin around and see the blood on the floor, figure it was us and start shooting.
They pushed their way through the theatre doors instead, chatting about random nonsense as they went.
Me and Nathan shared a sigh of relief, before I remembered how painful the cut to my side was. I held a hand to the wound as we climbed down into the operating room.
With half my shirt covered in blood, we set out to find a dressing. A few rooms along, we found a drawer full of them. Still in their plastic wrapping. As I held my shirt up, Nathan poured a bottle of iodine over the wound.
I sat on the edge of a now blood-stained gurney. I bit my fist and only let out the mildest of whimpers. The cut was clean and the wound narrow; almost closed.
“We still need to sew it up,” Nathan said, tearing a needle and surgical thread out of their dusty packaging.
He held the needle up to the light as he pushed the thread through the loop.
I looked at my wound, looked at the needle and blacked out.
30
In Stitches
By the time I woke up, I was flat on my back on the gurney, with Nathan taping a dr
essing over the wound.
“There,” he said, proud of his work. “That should keep you going.”
I sat, stood and got my balance. The pain in my side hadn’t gone away, but I could move around fine, the stitches holding firm. JPAC first-aid training really was the best.
“Thanks,” I said, rolling my shirt down over my side, the cotton stiff with dried blood. “Let’s get going.”
“No,” Nathan said, snapping a pair of latex gloves off his hands.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Well let’s see,” Nathan said, perching his behind on a medical cabinet. “We’ve got the entire Special Unit and most of La Firma searching for us. Not to mention anyone else who fancies a quick peso. I give us two or three more blocks before we’re finally caught.”
“At least we’re making progress,” I said. “I say we keep going.”
“That would be a tactical error.”
“It’s not up to you,” I said. “This is my operation.”
“Oh, is that what this is? An operation? Well, in that case, lead the way. It’s going swimmingly so far.”
“Listen, you saved my life back there,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I trust you.”
Nathan shrugged. “Then what do you suggest?”
“It’s simple, isn’t it?” I said. “We run. We fight. We make out of here by nightfall.”
Nathan waved a hand towards the doorway of the old nurse’s room we’d found the medical supplies in.
“After you then, Rambo.”
The guy had a mocking tone that made you want to rip out his fingernails with a pair of pliers, but I didn’t have the time or energy to give it to him both barrels. So I went first, edging out of the doorway into the corridor; where weeds had begun to grow out of the floor. Eerie and weird. Like some post-apocalyptic landscape.
Struggling to stop a dry, rasping cough, I prodded around my throat. The glands swollen and hard, like peach stones.
