The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation (19 page)

He pressed his right hand up over the
makeshift mask and nodded.

I climbed to my feet and began feeling my way
clockwise around the room, keeping as low as I could in search of
breathable air. I still had my shirt pulled up over the lower half
of my face, but it was being overwhelmed by the ash content of the
atmosphere. I could see that Ben was moving on the other side of
the room, engaged in the same search from the opposite
direction.

“Back wall,” Deckert croaked, barely audible
over the din of the fire.

“Where?!” Ben screamed.

Deckert motioned with his right arm as he
sputtered and coughed, repeating, “Back wall.”

I tried to move quickly in the direction he
had indicated and nearly fell as I bounced from a stack of boxes. I
was almost reduced to being on my hands and knees, so I sucked in a
halting breath then half stood before propelling myself forward. I
made it three steps before hammering face first into something that
felt cold and metallic. I let out a yelp as my forward motion was
immediately impeded and the air forced from my lungs. I groped
through the harsh smoke, feeling my way in the darkness as I
lowered myself down to the floor. I blinked hard and gulped in a
breath, holding my hand against the metal for fear of losing it. I
was just getting ready to yell that I had found the door when my
eyes focused on the old refrigerator to which my hand was
plastered.

“Over here!” Ben’s strained voice pierced
through the roar.

“Where?!” I screamed out in return.

“On your right!” came his reply.

I twisted my head and could see him kneeling
down next to the wall. On my hands and knees, I scrambled across
the concrete floor toward him. Carl was still several feet away,
and though he was still kneeling, I could see that he had propped
himself against the waste pipe that jutted upward from the floor in
the center of the room.

Before I reached my friend, he had gulped in
a fresh breath of air and was now standing again. I could hear him
thumping against the door, the hammering noises coming as
punctuation to the high-pitched groan as yet another section of the
drop ceiling grid crashed to the floor in the next room.

Ben dropped back down beneath the billowing
haze. His face was smeared with soot, and his lower lip was
bleeding. I struggled to focus on him and suddenly realized that my
glasses were missing. Still, even with that handicap, I saw what
could only be fear in his dark eyes.

“Metal door with a deadbolt,” he told me, his
voice hoarse but raised in order to compete with the conflagration.
“Fuckin’ keyed on both sides.”

Keyed on both sides; that was definitely not
the kind of news I was wanting to hear. There was no way to open
the door, and finding a key in this holocaust was unthinkable even
if there was one to be found.

“What are we going to do?” I screamed the
question, unable to keep the terror out of my voice. “Can’t you
shoot it or something?!”

“This ain’t a goddamn movie, Rowan!”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Desperation, the greatest motivator of all,
overtook Ben and became the deciding factor. With it as an impetus,
it took him less than a second to seriously consider my idea. He
clutched my shoulder and pushed me away as he ordered, “Move back!
Get outta the way!”

I followed his instruction as if I had any
choice, dragging myself backward as quickly as I could. As I
watched, he reached inside his coat then withdrew his hand. In it
was clutched a nine-millimeter Beretta.

“This is gonna be loud,” he screamed at me.
“Cover your face ‘cause shit’s gonna fly!”

With the instruction given, he stood and felt
about on the door for a moment. I watched the blurry scene playing
out before me, as he settled on a spot then raised the handgun
until it disappeared into the thick haze of smoke. I saw his legs
move as he took a measured step backward.

A bright flash of yellow-white erupted within
the billowing cloud, coupled with a sharp sound of the muzzle
report as it echoed from the walls. My ears popped and filled once
again, feeling as though they’d been punctured by ice picks, and
then a tinny ring settled in for good measure.

At the same instant, something hard, hot, and
sharp hit my cheek and sent a sting through it. I reached up and
felt it protruding from the skin, and even more blood began to run
in a warm rivulet across my face. My arm automatically flew over my
eyes just as the next flash of light and controlled explosion made
themselves known. The second was followed by a third and that by a
fourth. By the time Ben had snapped off the sixteenth and final
round from the semi-automatic pistol, the sound seemed to me to be
no louder than the pop of someone clapping hands.

I peeked out from beneath my arm and saw that
a small shaft of light was streaming in to illuminate the cloud of
smoke. Ben dropped himself downward and wheezed in a deep breath.
As he came fully into my field of vision, I could see that his
hands and face were cut and bloodied from the blowback of the
shrapnel.

I couldn’t hear him, but I could see him
laboring for a breath as he moved himself to the door. The shaft of
light flickered as he reached up and tugged at the barrier. It
didn’t budge.

My heart fell, and the acidic bite of
terror forced its bitter taste upon the back of my tongue. A gelid
finger ran up my spine before chilling the back of my brain, and I
swore I heard the sigh of the Dark Mother calling me. In the front
of my mind, I saw my wife’s tense face and clearly heard the echo
of her voice,
“Aye, go. You go, but you’d
best come back.”

I continued to watch as my friend worked his
finger into the hole and then seemed to struggle with it for a
moment. His hand jerked as if something had given way, and he
pulled hard.

Suddenly, he fell back, and the door swung
inward allowing the light to grow from a small shaft to an enormous
beam. Coldness spilled in across the floor, and the smoke punched
upward for a second then began rushing outward through the opening
as more flowed in from behind. Fresh air hit us low, and we gulped
at it as we crawled across the floor. Unfortunately, it also
provided a new source of oxygen for the insane combustion behind
us.

The orange flames that had been clawing at
the doorway now paled to a bright yellow as they expanded. The
wooden doorframe that had until this point only charred and
smoldered now offered itself up for sacrifice as fully involved
fuel. In an instant, the remaining bits and pieces of drop ceiling
crashed downward and swung in through the blaze-encircled
opening.

I scrambled up from the floor, making a half
step-half leap into the space between Deckert and me in the
process. He was still leaning against the waste pipe but was now
slumped and unresponsive to his surroundings. I covered the short
distance fast, but the flaming debris had a head start.

I landed just short of Carl, and a single
heartbeat after, a piece of burning acoustic tile impacted his back
and set his coat ablaze. I scrambled to my knees and pulled my bare
hand up into my coat sleeve, slapping at the flames to keep them
away from his head as I struggled to pull his coat off. Ben was
immediately on the other side, hefting him up and extracting his
right arm from the sleeve. With a quick twist, we wrenched Deckert
out of the lined trench coat and threw it across the room.

Ducking under his limp arms and draping them
over our shoulders on either side, we supported him between us and
rushed headlong for the now open door. The cold air embraced us as
we stumbled through the opening, me going first. Ben supported
Deckert’s weight from below as we struggled up the concrete
stairwell, slipping and sliding on the fresh snow.

Ben pushed upward, and I shouldered more of
Carl’s weight as he moved up the stairs. I twisted to increase my
support and slipped from the edge of the step, tumbling backward.
Ben caught Deckert and held him as I grabbed frantically for the
handrail. I managed to grip the cold metal at the last moment,
keeping myself from crashing at the bottom but ending up a pair of
steps below the two of them.

I started back upward, and a heavy “whump”
sounded behind me. A rush of hot air and smoke pushed past through
the door and into the exterior stairwell, forcing us to choke on
our breath once again. Flame licked past me on the right, and I
ducked my face into my shoulder as I continued to move. Fear kicked
in once again, and I scrambled up the stairs, ducking beneath
Deckert’s shoulder and taking the lead once again.

The frozen precipitation was coming down hard
above us, forming its own brand of haze in the atmosphere, and our
labored breaths puffed out like bursts of steam escaping from an
old locomotive. The frosty air filled my lungs only to be vomited
back out in a violent sputter. I hacked violently and felt myself
going lightheaded. I pushed hard, the muscles in my legs burning
with the strain. We had to get away from the house, and Ben wasn’t
going to be able to drag both of us. I gulped in another deep
breath and willed myself to hold onto it.

I topped the stairs and pushed out, trying to
pull the dead weight behind me, all the while hoping that the
“dead” part would remain a figure of speech. I found my footing as
I stepped into the yard and pressed forward. A split second later,
Ben crested the flight of steps, and we limped away from the danger
of the house, trudging through a good two inches of icy, white
fluff.

We were stumbling almost drunkenly across the
yard, traveling in no particular direction other than away. The
sound of a distant siren tickled the inside of my ears, thrusting
itself past the ringing that had been left in the wake of the
close-proximity gunfire.

I hoped that it was on its way here.

My cheek was beginning to throb where the
shrapnel had impacted it earlier, and I remembered that it was
probably still protruding from my face. The fog in my brain was
starting to clear, ushered away by the quick dose of adrenalin my
body elected to inject into my bloodstream at the bottom of the
stairs. I realized that I was aching in more places than just my
cheek, and I was going to have to take inventory at some point.

However, at this particular moment, Deckert
was my primary concern. I released the breath to which I had willed
myself to cling and drank in a new volume of the clean atmosphere,
continuing to press forward. Even though we were heading away from
the house at a wounded trot, the stench of the fire remained with
me as if I was still standing in the basement. I was afraid to look
back at the house because I feared that I would see the monster
chasing after me. I could still feel the heat at my back.

I continued on my trajectory in the opposite
direction of the burning house, not exactly sure where we should
go. I only knew that we needed to get far enough away that we would
be safe, and then we could use a cell phone to call for help.

I was just about to look up and try to gain
my bearings when the dull pain of a full-force tackle tore into my
back. I was twisted away from Deckert by the blow, and pitched
forward. An unintelligible banshee wail soaked through the curtain
of semi-deafness in my ears, and someone rode me to the ground,
flailing madly all the way.

The utter shock of being tackled took a
moment to set in. Initially, my face was filled with snow, and I
was blinded to what was going on around me. That, combined with my
still diminished hearing, left me in a surprised daze. All I knew
was that someone was on top of me, and I thought that I was being
hit repeatedly. Whoever was attacking me was also yelling
something, which to me was, for all intents and purposes,
unintelligible, coming across as nothing more than a jumble of
excited noise.

I was pinned in place and stunned into
immobilization. As the bewilderment wore off, however, I could
definitely feel the thumping against my back. I started to wince as
the next blow fell and then realized that it didn’t really hurt all
that much. My mind raced as I tried to reconcile the absence of
serious agony in connection with the blows. Unfortunately, the
equation simply didn’t work out for me.

I finally decided that either I had already
taken so much abuse while in the house that it just didn’t matter
any more or that the adrenalin in my system was dulling the pain
for the time being so that it could spring it on me later.
Whichever it was, my attacker was having very little effect at the
moment other than just generating some general discomfort.

I suddenly felt myself being rolled to the
side, and it crossed my mind that maybe I could seize the
opportunity. I clenched my fists, preparing to fight back against
the mysterious combatant. As my right shoulder rotated upward, I
pulled my left arm in and slid it beneath my rising chest. By the
time I was on my side, I had twisted it free, and I tensed my
muscles in preparation. Using the supplied momentum to roll myself
the rest of the way over, I swung my left arm in a wide, roundhouse
arc.

Fortunately for both of us, the firefighter
kneeling next to me jerked back just in time to cause me to
miss.

“Whoa, sir!” she shouted as her hand came up
and deflected my arm.

Her voice was just audible enough for me to
make out what she had said, and the sight of her brought my tension
back down to a manageable level. I allowed myself to relax, and my
head fell back into the snow. “Carl…” I wheezed. “Heart…”

Her lips moved, and I shook my head.

“He’s right here.” She raised her voice and
repeated the comment as she fought the zipper on the front of my
coat with a sense of urgency. “The paramedics are already with him.
Are you having trouble hearing?”