A Window Breaks

by C. M. Ewan

  ‘I . . . told you.’ Brodie raised his head and looked groggily at the two men. ‘I don’t know . . . anything.’

  People talk about everyday heroes. You read about them in the news from time to time. They’re the people who show their true mettle when it matters, in the moment, based on a split-second response to an unanticipated danger. The ones who tackle a gunman to prevent a shooting spree. The ones who run into burning buildings to rescue complete strangers. The people who act when someone pulls a knife on them in a darkened alley instead of being paralysed by fear.

  Brodie was one of those people. I understood now that he was prepared to do what he could to shield my family from this horror. The ache in my heart got deeper as I thought about his courage. I knew I’d never be able to repay him for it.

  ‘You should just leave,’ he said.

  But they didn’t leave. The smaller man hit Brodie one last time and then shoved him back so hard that his chair tipped and crashed to the ground, toppling to one side. His wrists were swollen beneath their gaffer-tape bindings. His fingers were turning purple. The leg of his jeans was soaked with blood.

  The men looked at him a moment more, then shook their heads dismissively and backed up into the kitchen again. This time they talked more freely. More loudly. I supposed they were no longer concerned about Brodie hearing what they had to say. There was no doubt in my mind that they intended to kill him.

  ‘So?’ the bigger man asked.

  The smaller man shrugged and rubbed his chin beneath his paper mask again. ‘We burn them. All of them. Problem solved.’

  We burn them.

  I froze. A numbing sensation started in my fingers and toes, creeping towards my heart. It hadn’t been an idle threat. They really had been prepared to burn my family alive.

  The bigger man fell quiet. He looked away towards the deck and the sea.

  ‘What?’ the smaller man asked. ‘You think they’re just going to come out? Look at us. They know what we’ll do to them. They know what’s at stake.’

  ‘But come on. That’s—’

  ‘Hey, we have to protect ourselves.’

  The bigger man said nothing.

  ‘You have a problem with that?’

  Still he didn’t reply.

  ‘Look, we’ll give them one more chance to open the door, OK? But this was always going to end badly, one way or another. You had to know that going in.’

  ‘Not like this. You didn’t say it would be like this.’

  The smaller man didn’t respond to begin with. He just watched the bigger man. Then he shook his head and snatched the shotgun from him.

  ‘You think I like this any more than you do? We don’t have a choice. We can’t get in there, OK? And you know we can’t let them talk. This guy already turned up. Who knows who else might be coming? We don’t have time to screw around here. Think about it. They all die, and there’s nothing to connect us to any of this. So I say we burn them, then we search the rest of this place and make sure we didn’t miss anything. You have any better ideas, go ahead and tell me. I’m listening.’ He waited, but the bigger man shook his head, looking down at his boots. ‘That’s what I thought. So how about you do us both a favour and find me some matches?’

  Fiona is huddled in the darkness under a stairwell when Michael finds her. Her phone screen is glowing. She’s clutching it like a child cradling a night light.

  ‘There you are.’ He gets down on one knee and crawls under to join her. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m so frightened.’ She pulls him close. He can feel the wetness of her tears on his face. ‘I really thought they were going to find me.’

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘They’re looking.’

  Michael nods, feeling young and small against the enormity of the situation he’s been drawn into. Until he’d got here, he’d been clinging to the hope that Fiona had somehow got spooked or mixed up. That things couldn’t be as bad as she’d said.

  But when he’d pulled up outside he’d seen shadowy figures running around the car park structure, leaning out to survey the drop to the parking levels below and the street beyond that. They were obviously in a hurry. Obviously looking for something.

  For someone.

  And now, with the state Fiona is in . . .

  Michael’s never seen her like this. Never seen anyone like this.

  ‘We should go,’ he tells her.

  She shrinks back into the darkness under the stairs. It’s as if she can’t hear him properly. As if she’s on the other side of a thick pane of glass.

  ‘Fi. We have to move. OK?’

  She moans, shaking her head. Her shoulder bag is on the ground next to her, her camera poking out. Fiona has been working on the same material for close to a year now. It’s a photographic journal of Michael doing his free running.

  She’s good. Really good. And she’s so dedicated to her art, and Michael is so in love with her that he wants more than anything for her to finish the project and maybe, just maybe, get a place at uni to study photography and a chance at a career beyond that.

  That’s why Fiona’s here tonight, grabbing some background shots to add context to the last sequence he’d figured out – a kind of before and after effect. Fiona is obsessive like that. Sometimes she makes Michael repeat the same stunt so many times his calves burn and the skin is scraped off his palms when he gets into bed at night.

  He makes a grab for her bag but she recoils instinctively. It scares him to see how scared she is.

  ‘Fiona,’ he says again.

  And then they hear it. Hurried footfall. One flight up, rushing down.

  Michael grabs Fiona’s hand and her bag and hauls her out. He drags her to the stairs, where she’s shot countless sequences of him descending before. He’s performed wallflips and sideflips, aerial twists, frontflips and gainers, vaulting handrails, leaping down entire flights in one bound. On a perfect descent, he can get down faster than any elevator. But right now he feels slow, held back.

  And the footsteps chasing them just seem to be getting quicker.

  44

  Find me some matches. Words I really didn’t want to hear right now.

  The smaller man paced off down the corridor. The bigger man stood and watched him go. He raised his gloved hand and studied his mangled fingers, like he couldn’t believe the damage he’d sustained. As if maybe his broken fingers were symptomatic of everything that had gone wrong for him tonight.

  Then he rested his hand crossways over his chest and returned to the living room, shaking his head.

  ‘You don’t have to . . . listen to him,’ Brodie panted. ‘Get out of here while you still can.’

  The bigger man stood there, like he was considering it, then he grunted and stepped hard on Brodie’s wrist. I winced. Brodie hissed air through his teeth. The bigger man pressed down on his foot even more as he picked up the roll of gaffer tape and tore off a strip with his teeth. He used the swatch of tape to wrap around his two broken fingers and secure them to his little finger like a splint. When he was done, he lifted his foot from Brodie, dropped the tape in his face and moved out of my line of sight. I heard the crinkle of the thick plastic sheeting deflecting under his weight.

  My head pounded. I had a pretty good idea where he was going. The log burner, I thought. Because people with log burners and fireplaces tend to keep a box of matches nearby. But I knew he wouldn’t find any matches there. I’d drawn a similar blank when I’d been preparing to light the fire in the fire pit last night.

  And that was a huge problem for me. Because the only matches I’d found were in the pantry. I could see them now – a big box of 200 kitchen matches on a shelf to my right.

  Fear got its claws in me then. It tore at my skin. I reached out and closed the pantry door.

  Had the man heard it? I hoped not. It might have sounded like a cannon shot to me right now, but I didn’t think the noise had carried.

  I trembled in the dark, listening to the bigger man
striding back across the plastic sheeting. He passed the pantry door. I heard the crush and crumple of glass fragments under his boots from the broken window. Then other sounds. Sudden clicks. Muffled clunks. The soft whisper of metal runners on greased bearings. He was opening and closing kitchen cupboards and drawers. Every noise made me flinch.

  I stepped back. My shoulders bumped against the shelves behind me. Nowhere else to go.

  A rim of light was shining around the pantry door. Footsteps approached. I saw a bar of darkness at the bottom.

  He’s coming in.

  My heart seized. I could sense the bigger man’s presence on the other side of the door. Could he sense mine?

  ‘Hey,’ Brodie hissed.

  I wobbled like a wire.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ the bigger man growled.

  ‘You’re making a mistake.’ Brodie was talking fast and urgent. ‘You should listen to me.’

  ‘You need to stop talking or I’m going to come over there and make it so you can’t talk any more.’

  I raised the mallet above my head. It felt like I was lifting a heavy dumb-bell. My arm shook crazily.

  ‘You don’t want to go in there,’ Brodie said. ‘I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.’

  The bigger man didn’t respond. The door handle rotated. I snatched a quick breath. Then the door swung open and the rim of bright light became a rapidly widening wedge that swept in across the pantry floor and streaked up my legs and body.

  I drew back.

  The bigger man loomed there, staring at me from beneath the rim of his hood and above his mask. His eyes were red-rimmed, threaded with capillaries, strained and fatigued from a long, wakeful night trying to corner and kill my family.

  I watched his pupils go wide. I saw the shock. He’d believed I was locked in the wine cellar. Along with my family. But now here I was.

  His confusion didn’t last long. Mostly because I took a swing at him with the mallet.

  But I messed it up. I was too nervous. Too jumpy. And it was an awkward, truncated swing because of the cramped conditions inside the pantry. I had no shoulder room.

  The mallet crunched against the side of his neck. His neck was thick with muscle and swollen with fat. The impact was like hitting a mound of wet clay.

  He barely reacted.

  I stared. My knees flexed.

  Then he reached in and clubbed me behind the ear. It wasn’t a punch. Because of his broken fingers. But it was enough to knock me sideways. My cheek crashed off a shelf. The impact jolted me hard. I felt my right hand go light. He’d ripped the mallet from me like taking a toy from a child and now he took a swing of his own. I rocked back wildly. The mallet whispered past my nose. I started to fall and he helped me on my way by ramming the heel of his hand into my solar plexus, sending me clattering into the shelving on the back wall.

  A stabbing pain in my back. I dropped down. Fear flashed like a bright light in my head. One shelf came loose at the hinges and tilted, raining tins and packets on top of me. A plastic tub cracked and spilled salt across the floor. An aerosol can of cooking fat struck my forehead and bounced into a corner of the cupboard.

  I tried to get up. He wouldn’t let me. He kicked at my feet. My shins. Panic filled my throat. He tried to stomp on my ankle but I pulled my leg away. Then he dropped on me, hard, landing with both knees on my stomach. I folded up like a medicine ball had been thrown at my gut.

  Air gushed out of my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. The panic got worse. And meanwhile he swung down with the mallet in his left hand, aiming for my skull. I just about moved my head away. The mallet clipped my ear, crunching salt. My ear exploded with pain.

  Oh Jesus.

  He was so much bigger than me. So much stronger. I’m not good at fighting. I don’t have any experience. I don’t box in my spare time. I’ve never tried martial arts. But I did have one thing going for me. I was desperate.

  Attack something soft. Something vulnerable.

  I scrabbled for his face. I tried to get my thumbs in his eyes. My ear was a raging hot nub of pain. He leaned back. I tugged on his mask. Then I changed tactics, snatching for his broken fingers, trying to wrench them back and cause him pain. He yanked his hand clear, dropped the mallet and clamped his massive left palm over my face.

  More panic. My nostrils filled with the chemical stink of his glove. I couldn’t breathe. He thrust all his weight down on top of me with his elbow locked, forcing my face to the side, driving my eye into the spilled salt and exerting so much force I felt sure my cheekbone would compress and fracture. My ear throbbed and swelled.

  Fear ignited my nerves. It crackled across my body. I was beaten. I was suffocating. I was still trying to fight back, still scrabbling, but my efforts were getting weaker, limper, like I was trying to fight gravity itself.

  I closed my eyes and thought of Holly, then. I pictured her fleeing through the woods with Rachel and Buster at her side. I imagined them getting inside the pod. Finding shelter. Getting help. I knew I couldn’t hold on for much longer. I knew it was futile. But I told myself something that gave me the tiniest shred of solace. Every second I resisted was another precious second for Holly to get away from these men.

  Until everything changed.

  Until a rope appeared, looped around the man’s neck, secured by a slip knot.

  My heart stopped. I tried to kick up. How had Brodie got free?

  Still the bigger man held me down. He crowded me. I couldn’t see past him. My lungs burned. My eyes bulged. There was an intense pulsing heat in my throat.

  The rope was tightly woven, speckled in shades of light and dark blue. It was one of the ropes I’d seen among the stash of equipment the men had brought with them.

  Then the bigger man rocked to one side.

  Rachel.

  She was standing behind him, tugging on the end of the rope.

  She’d come back for me.

  My heart burst. I didn’t know whether to be elated or terrified.

  She had her foot in the middle of the man’s back, pulling with her good arm, a mighty grimace on her face.

  At last, the bigger man choked and gargled and lifted his hands off of me towards his throat. I gulped air. He tried to prise the rope away. Tried to dig his fingers beneath it and gain some slack. It wasn’t easy with gloves on. Even worse with two broken fingers. Much harder again when Rachel braced the elbow of her bad arm against the back of the man’s neck and the rope dug deeper.

  So the man changed tactics. He tried to spin in the tight space and reach backwards for Rachel. He grasped for her coat. Her hair. He gurgled and wheezed. He tried shouting for the smaller man to come to his aid but his words were no more than a hoarse rasp. Then he tried bashing a tin off the nearest shelf.

  It might have worked. Except I finally surged forwards against the lancing pain in my stomach and grabbed for his wrists. I wrenched him back around and down towards me. The hot stink of his breath was in my face. I shook and clung on with everything I had.

  Rachel clenched her jaw and yanked even harder. As a doctor, she’d know all about the effects of air deprivation. I guessed she’d try and choke him out. If he went limp, maybe the two of us could attempt to restrain him, somehow.

  But Rachel didn’t let up. Not when the bigger man stopped fighting. Not when his face flushed and his eyes protruded. Not when he stiffened, then went slack and slumped down on top of me.

  ‘Rachel?’

  Still she pulled. I stared in horror, pinned beneath the bigger man. Rachel seemed to be in some other place entirely. Thinking of Michael, maybe. Of how much she loved him. Of how much had been taken away from us.

  I felt a pang. You think you know someone. You think you know them better than anybody else possibly could. Like the way I knew Rachel. Eighteen years of marriage. Four years together before that. Two kids. Three homes over the years. A mortgage. Bills. A lifetime of shared experiences and love and pain.

  Then come the secrets. The lies. The hur
t. You see the parts of your lover they have tried to keep hidden from you.

  But still, you don’t know them. Not really. The same way I didn’t know Rachel until I watched her wrench the life from a man who’d set out to kill us both.

  45

  Rachel let go of the rope and collapsed to one side. Her face was flushed and sheened in sweat. Her eyes fluttered closed. The straps of her medical backpack were twisted over her shoulders.

  I kicked and squirmed out from under the man. My heart was beating against my ribs like a fist on a door. I had a thick ear. It was burning as if someone had rubbed sandpaper on it. I could still smell the plastic of the man’s glove when I inhaled.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  Rachel opened her eyes. They were big and shiny. I watched as she leaned forwards to put two fingers to the pulse point on the man’s neck. She held them there and waited. Then she lowered her eyes and nodded, slowly.

  My stomach knotted. I felt the pressure build inside my head. Rachel had saved me. She’d risked her life for me. But watching her throttle the man had been like watching a different person.

  She’d killed him. I’d helped her. And yes, it was self-defence, but the enormity of what we’d done seemed too big for the pantry cupboard to contain.

  ‘Where’s the other one?’ she whispered, turning to look out the door.

  I blinked. Shook my head. I felt cold and clammy. My pulse beat in my throat.

  ‘Tom, where is he?’

  ‘Outside the wine cellar.’ I swallowed. ‘He’s expecting this one to bring him matches.’

  Rachel stilled. Her face hardened. She was probably running the implications through her mind. Maybe she was picturing what it would have been like to be inside the cellar when the flames took hold.

  ‘Where’s Holly?’ I asked. ‘Is she safe?’

  It only took a second for Rachel to respond but the wait felt like a lifetime to me.

  ‘She’s on her way to the pod.’

  I let go of a breath. I should have been relieved but I wasn’t. ‘You let her go on her own?’