They pressed on, with the men’s shouts and random gunshots behind them getting steadily and alarmingly closer. After another minute or two of walking, they came to another intersection of drains. However, this time, there was no perceptible slope to either of them, so Jack faced a conundrum. Should he turn left or right?
“Which way did they go?” he heard one of the men shout out behind him. They had to have reached one of the intersections, too.
“You two go up this way,” another of them responded in a deep, raspy voice. “We’ll go this way.” Then he roared out a shout in a vociferous challenge. “We’re coming for y’all, piggies! Y’all can’t keep running forever, an’ y’all can’t keep hidin’ in the dark, either! These damn sewers are a closed network, an’ up on the streets my boys are getting all the damn manholes covered, just waiting for you morons to stick yer heads outta ‘em! Y’all are finished, motherfuckers, y’all are done for!”
This man, Jack surmised, had to be the leader. And if he was telling the truth, then things were about to get a lot riskier and a lot more difficult for them. If there were indeed men moving through the streets looking for covers to aim their guns at, they would only have a few minutes to get out of the drain near the town hall before that option was closed off to them.
“What do we do, Jack?” Kate whispered urgently.
“We have to move faster,” he whispered back. “Shit,” he muttered, his heart beating faster as he debated over the coin-flip choice of left or right. “Okay, okay, this way,” he said to them, taking the right-hand tunnel. He prayed that he had made the correct choice; if he hadn’t, they would certainly end up getting caught or killed by their pursuers.
Behind them, two men were running through the drains and shouting out mocking obscenities at them and growing ever closer. There was no sign of any light ahead, and no hint that they may be getting close to a place from which they could escape the drain network. And even if they did get to a manhole, they wouldn’t know whether it was the right one—or whether there were armed men with their guns trained on it—until after Jack had popped his head out of it.
Jack knew it was a chance he would just have to take. He reached one more intersection in the drain network, but this one was different to all the others, for to the left, up a slight incline, he could see light streaming into the pitch-black drain. There was a manhole nearby, but whether it was the right one—and even if it was the right one, whether it was safe to stick his head out of was another matter—there was only one way to tell.
Before he could take another step, though, he saw another source of light, this time coming from behind him. Their pursuers were almost upon them, and even with the exit so close, he knew that there was no longer any time to run.
“Everyone, stop,” he said bitterly. “We’re going to have to fight.”
29
“Fight?” Kate gasped. “Jack, we can’t see a damn thing, how are we going to—”
“Get your heads down real low!” he hissed. “And don’t anybody else shoot, or we’ll end up killing each other! Do it right now!”
Everyone dropped down to their haunches, and Jack aimed his pistol at the steadily brightening source of light. He couldn’t see where he was aiming and prayed that everyone had gotten down low enough that his shots would fly over their heads.
Orange light flared abruptly through the drain tunnel as the men burst into the intersection. One of them was holding a burning torch brand, improvised from scrap wood and burning oil. The other had an AR-15 rifle in his hands.
Jack took in this sight in a split-second, but that was the only length of time he hesitated for. He couldn’t see the sights of his pistol, or even his hand in front of his face, but he knew that he was pointing it vaguely toward the two men, who hadn’t yet realized that they were a mere dozen or so yards from their quarry. Now, however, the hunters had become the prey. Jack started firing, squeezing the trigger as rapidly as he could, unloading his entire magazine in the space of a few short seconds. His aim wasn’t perfect, but at this short distance, it didn’t need to be. The men gasped and jerked as the bullets tore through their bodies, and then they both dropped silently into the icy, ankle-deep water. The burning torch fell with them and was extinguished with a sizzling hiss, quickly plunging the tunnel back into darkness.
For a few moments, the only sounds were the water's soft gurgle and four frightened people breathing in the dark.
“Is everyone okay?” Jack asked.
A chorus of wary affirmations met his question.
“Thank goodness,” he said. “Come on, the others will have heard those gunshots, and they’ll be coming this way. There’s a manhole up ahead, let’s move.”
They didn’t need any further encouragement to get going; shouts from their other pursuers were echoing through the drains after the volley of shots Jack had unleashed. Thankfully, the echoes through the extensive network made it difficult for the enemy men to pinpoint exactly where the shots had come from, but it wouldn’t likely take them long to find them.
They got to the opening to the street, through which a little light was shining. To their dark-accustomed eyes, it seemed like a piercing blaze of brightness, and Jack knew the snow outside would amplify the painful light. They could not waste time waiting for their eyes to adjust, though. They had to press onward, and they had to do it fast.
Jack crouched under the manhole cover and slipped a fresh clip into his pistol. This was the moment of truth. “Nick, I need your help,” he said. “I can’t raise the cover and hold my pistol at the same time. I need you to lift it a little, while I stick my head—and my pistol—out to check things out.”
Nick was shivering madly, and his teeth were chattering like an out-of-control jackhammer, but he nodded and moved under the heavy piece of metal, pressing the palms of both hands against it in preparation to give it a quick lift. “Ready when you are, Jack,” he said.
Jack breathed in deeply, held the air in his lungs, and closed his eyes for a few seconds. He prayed that sticking his head through the opening wouldn’t result in his brains and skull being splattered all over his wife and child. He opened his eyes, ready for whatever might await him. “Do it,” he muttered.
Nick pushed up against the cover, opening it to an angle of around forty-five degrees. With his heart in his mouth, Jack popped his head up, quickly sticking his hands and pistol out at the same time, waiting to see a muzzle flash and hear a bang—the last sight and sound he would ever experience.
Instead, though, the town hall's familiar sight greeted him, a large four-floor building constructed in the 19th century, and the street in front of it, which seemed to be completely deserted. He exhaled every cubic inch of air in his lungs in a huge sigh of relief and then helped Nick lift the cover completely off the manhole. “The coast’s clear!” he said to the others. “Quick, quick, let’s move!”
“Thank God,” Kate gasped.
Jack scrambled out of the sewer, double-checked that there was nobody nearby, and then hurriedly helped the others to climb out of the hole. While there was nobody in this street, Jack could hear the sound of boots running nearby and knew that the enemy would be here soon enough. As soon as everyone was out, squinting and blinking against the harsh light, Jack dragged the metal disk back over the hole and then made a beeline for the town hall.
The others scurried along behind him, battling to see as their eyes adjusted to the presence of daylight. Drifts of snow had piled up outside and around the town hall, but Jack didn’t need to dig through the snow to see that the main entrance was locked. Even so, he knew that there was another way inside.
“The oak tree behind the town hall,” he said to the others, “we’ll be able to get in that way.”
The sprawling oak in the garden to the rear of the town hall was as old, if not older than the building itself. The branches didn’t hang low over any of the upper floor balconies, but Jack had a length of rope in his bag, and he had an idea. “Up onto
the wall,” he said, climbing up onto the brick wall that surrounded the town hall and its garden to the rear. “That way, they won’t see our tracks in the snow.”
Jack needn’t have worried too much about leaving tracks in the snow, though, since the wind was picking up and snow was beginning to fall again. The snowfall was growing heavier with each passing minute.
The wind was terrible; it stung like thousands of stinging whips through their wet clothes, chilling them to the bone. They knew that they had to get out of the wind and warm themselves up before intense discomfort became something more fatal. They got up onto the wall, painfully aware of how visible this made them, and hastily walked along the top of it around the perimeter of the town hall. Once they had gotten around to the rear, where the garden was, they jumped off and jogged across the garden to the massive oak tree, which was bare of any leaves, having lost them for winter a few months ago. The fact that the tree didn’t have any leaves on it actually worked to Jack’s advantage and would make his proposed plan easier to enact.
In the streets nearby, shouts of anger from those hunting them spurred some urgency into the four fugitives. It wouldn’t be long before they figured out that their quarry had escaped the drains, and once that discovery was made, they would surely scour the town for them.
“What are we gonna do, Jack?” Kate asked, shivering, with her jaws chattering as another gust of biting cold wind blasted cold into the very marrow of her bones. “This place is locked up tighter than Fort Knox.”
“Up there,” Jack said, pointing through the falling snow to the long balconies of the upper floors, which wrapped around the whole town hall building. “Those doors are never locked. Aunt Phyllis told me that. She worked in the town hall her whole life, and I remember her saying that those doors don’t even have locks on ‘em.”
“That’s all well and good,” Kate said, “but I don’t see any ladders nearby, and I didn’t realize your alter-ego was Spiderman, either.”
“Daddy, hurry,” Susan said, shivering like a leaf in a gale, her skin taking on an alarmingly blue tinge. “I can barely feel my arms and legs anymore…”
“We have to get up into the tree as high as we can climb,” Jack said. “Then I’m going to make an improvised rope swing; we’re gonna swing across the gap from that branch to the balcony.” He pointed to a large bough that was slightly higher than the upper floor balcony. “The branch above it looks strong enough to hold a person’s weight, and the height should create enough of an arc in the swing to reach the balcony.”
“Jack, that gap is at least twelve feet, maybe more,” Kate said, looking worried. “And if we don’t make the swing the first time, we’ll end up dangling four floors up … and a fall from that height…”
“It’s our only way in,” Jack said grimly. “And if we don’t get in, we either freeze to death in the next hour or get caught by those killers. I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to meet my end by a quick fall to either of those options.”
“Let’s … do it,” Nick said, bleary-eyed. “I think … I’m dying anyway … may as well … hasten the process…”
“Come on, we don’t have much time,” Jack said, and he hurried over to the base of the tree.
The lowest boughs were too high for anyone to climb up to without assistance, so Jack helped the others up by giving them a boost. Then he took out his survival tomahawk, which had a hatchet-style ax blade in the front and a long spike on the rear. He drove the spike into the trunk and used the tomahawk as a handhold to pull himself up.
From that point on, it was easier to climb higher up the tree—or, at least, it would have been had they all been healthy and strong. As it was, the cold wind and their icy, wet clothes were sapping their strength at an alarming rate. Jack gritted his teeth and forced himself to fight through the crushing exhaustion the cold brought on.
They got to the branch from which they would be swinging, and at that point, things got even more difficult. They would have to venture out onto the thick limb without anything above or to the side to hold onto, which meant shinnying along the branch for a few yards, at which point they would have to stand up, grip the rope, and launch themselves through the air. And they would only have one shot at doing it. If they didn’t jump off at the right time after reaching the end of the swing’s arc, they wouldn’t be able to get back to the branch or to the balcony, and that would be the end of them.
In particular, Kate would have a difficult time with this, Jack knew; she hated heights. There was no other way to get into the building, though, and death would take them anyway if they got stuck outside.
“Wait here, and watch closely,” Jack said. To tell the truth, even he wasn’t one hundred percent certain that this would work. He had to try, though.
He tucked the tomahawk through his belt, slipped the coil of nylon rope over his shoulder, and then shinnied out along the cold, thick branch as far as he could go. Then, straddling the branch, he tied the end around the tomahawk. The other end, he tied around his belt. Acutely aware of how painful the cold was and how viciously it was beginning to zap his strength and numb his limbs, he stared up at another strong branch almost directly above him that extended so far that the end of it was scratching the roof of the town hall. That was the branch he would attach his makeshift swing to.
He drew in a deep breath and aimed the tomahawk just over the branch. Then he threw it. It soared up through the falling snow, trailing the rope behind it, and arced through the air. It made it over the bough and started falling, dropping quickly toward the ground. The rope attached to it abruptly halted the tomahawk’s groundward plummet and left it dangling in the air a few feet from Jack. He reached over and grabbed it, and then, with the rope now looped over the bough above, he tied a slipknot and pulled until it was tight around the branch. He then thickly knotted the end for something to hold onto. After that, he tied the rope around tomahawk at what would be the foot height of the swing. The swing was ready.
“Kate, you’re coming next!” he called out over his shoulder. “Get your butt over here, quick!”
Kate shinnied out along the branch, feeling nauseous and dizzy from the height, feeling as if gravity was pawing at her from below and malevolently willing her to fall. She would have to catch the tomahawk—which provided a pendulum-like weight at the end of the swing—when it came back after Jack had jumped off onto the balcony … if he even made the jump, of course.
Kate reached Jack. It was time. Jack stood up, gripping the rope for support and wobbling alarmingly on the uneven surface of the branch. He had one shot at this, and if he didn’t make it, death awaited below.
He drew in a deep breath and launched himself off the branch.
30
He arced through the air, hurtling toward the balcony. Adrenaline coursed through his veins. As his speed slowed as the arc came to its end, he let go of the rope. The momentum of his swing carried him over the rail and onto the balcony, and he landed on it and rolled, coming up with his heart pounding and his breath coming in heaving gasps.
He didn’t take the time to celebrate the fact that he’d made it and wasn’t, thankfully, lying dead and broken on the ground. Instead, he scrambled to his feet and spun around wildly, desperately hoping that Kate would catch the tomahawk as it swung back.
Kate had seen that Jack had made it, and her heart leaped with joy and relief, but these emotions were short-lived. She knew that everything depended on her catching the tomahawk. It came swinging toward her, looking like it would be an easy catch. Her heart was racing, blasting boosts of adrenaline-charged blood through her veins. She knew that the catch would technically be a simple one, but there was so much pressure riding on making it, so much intense, terrible pressure…
As the tomahawk started to slow at the end of its arc, she reached forward, her hands waiting. The tomahawk slid into her hands, and she closed her trembling fingers around it … and fumbled to hold on to it.
The tomahawk slipped fro
m her hands and dropped, swinging out over the abyss. Pure instinct kicked in, and Kate, before she even processed what she was doing, launched herself off the branch in pursuit of the tomahawk on the end of the rope. For one terrifying second, she found herself plummeting toward the ground at what felt like an incredible speed with stomach-lurching acceleration, but then her desperate hands grabbed hold of the tomahawk and latched fast onto it.
Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have been able to hold on for longer than a second—even though she was fit and worked out regularly, she simply didn’t have the upper body strength to do a pull-up—but the adrenaline surge of almost dying gave her a power she wouldn’t have otherwise possessed. Hanging from the tomahawk as she swung, with her arms locked straight up above her head, she saw Jack leaning out over the balustrades to catch her. Because she was five feet lower than she should have been, the path of her arc was sending her hurtling toward a collision course with the side of the building instead of over the balcony. Thankfully, she slowed down as the swing arced her upward, and when she thumped against the side of the building and the banister, it wasn’t with excessive force.
Jack grabbed her jacket with one hand and the rope with the other. He had to hold onto it because if it swung back out now, there was nobody to catch it since Susan wasn’t yet in position on the branch.
Shaking with both cold and fear, with Jack gritting his teeth and holding her in against the side of the building and the balcony, Kate reached up and grabbed the rail, using the last of her adrenaline-boosted strength to pull herself up. Jack kept a grip on the rope with one hand while helping her up and over to safety.
EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 22 | The Coldest Night Page 15
