A Window Breaks

by C. M. Ewan

  The man’s suit went up like it was beaded with gasoline. The flame was ghastly and riotous. It started at his wrist and streaked up his sleeve.

  He screamed and slapped at his arm, batting it hard, but the fire scrabbled at the side of his face and ignited his hood before whipping around to the back of his neck and upper back, ripping up and down in an angry surge.

  Too hot.

  Too close.

  I dropped the can and moved clear, the heat raging in my face. The man bucked and twisted, howled and flailed. He threw himself against the ground and thrashed. I stared in horror. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the fire had extinguished, but then the front of the man’s coveralls ignited with a sudden whoosh of flame.

  He pushed up to his knees, eyes crazed and straining from above his mask. He stared at me, incredulous, and streaked out of the room.

  I didn’t pause. Didn’t think. I grabbed for his handgun and ran after him in my oversized boots, my heart hammering in my chest.

  He was still alight as he fled down the corridor and blasted through the door with the porthole of glass in it. The door swung back at me as I chased him through.

  He leaped for the swimming pool. His feet dragged on the surface. Then his knees folded and he toppled forwards, the bright flames spreading and hissing as he plunged face down.

  I skidded to a halt, planted my feet and juggled the gun in a hasty two-handed grip.

  Could I do this? Could I shoot him?

  Yes.

  For Holly, I could.

  I aimed. Squeezed the trigger.

  The gun flashed and boomed inside the echoing, tiled space. My hands leaped with the recoil. The bullet went spiralling through the water off to the man’s right.

  I swallowed my heart back down out of my mouth. My hands trembled wildly. The man was horribly burned, flailing in the water. I tugged the mask off my face. Fired again.

  Another gigantic boom. It echoed inside my chest.

  The bullet clipped off a floor tile at the far end of the pool, then skipped on and obliterated a panel of tinted glass. I ducked. The glass exploded and fell down in one collapsed sheet, like a shower curtain dropping from a railing.

  My hands jumped with my racing pulse. I gritted my teeth and fired a third time.

  A dry click.

  The gun was out of bullets.

  A void opened up inside me. I wavered, knees quaking, wondering what the hell to do. The man was swimming towards the side of the pool. He looked angry. Looked livid.

  Do something at least!

  I tossed the gun to one side, dived into the pool and immediately realized my mistake. I still had on the plastic coveralls over my outdoor jacket. Plus my jeans. Plus the too-big rubber boots.

  Terror gripped me. It dragged me down. I floundered and sank, kicking off the boots, pulling up desperately towards the surface just as the smaller man reared around and put two hands on my head, forcing me down.

  I was twisting. Writhing. Clawing for the surface.

  It was unreachable.

  My toes grazed the bottom of the swimming pool. I sprang up and felt the immense drag of my clothing pulling against me.

  And the man’s knees on my shoulders. His hands on my head.

  Pure panic overwhelmed me then. It sparked in every fibre and synapse of my body. It flooded my brain.

  I went nuts. Full-on frenzied. I flapped and grappled for a handhold, my fingers tearing free from his waxed coveralls. It had no effect. The man pushed down on me even harder, thrusting with his legs, bouncing from his knees.

  I sank way down and looked all around me. Terror swelled in my chest until it felt like my heart would explode. Chlorine stung my eyes. The submerged bulbs shone murky and green. I could feel an immense and urgent pressure building inside my lungs. The desperate, pulsing, life-defining need to breathe.

  Get away from him. Do it now!

  I sculled backwards along the bottom of the pool, staring up wildly at the man’s legs scissoring and kicking.

  Somewhere behind him there was a sudden pluming froth of bubbles. The bubbles spun and twisted, then hung suspended for a moment before fizzing and dissipating to reveal Rachel swimming underwater, her sweater bulging around her, her hair floating about her face.

  I screamed underwater. My wife had come to help me again. But this was too dangerous. Too much. I couldn’t let him hurt her.

  I pushed off from the bottom, spearing upwards, scooping great handfuls of water with my palms.

  I broke the surface close to the end of the pool. Too close to the man.

  He was on me instantly. He grabbed for my throat, my face, forcing me down, cracking the back of my skull off the tiles.

  My sight went hazy. My eyes roved. I gurgled water. Coughed. Swallowed water again.

  Through the boiling green waters, the man’s face was a vivid red, his eyes shining black and beady against the peeled skin all around.

  My legs and arms felt so heavy.

  Then his hold on me loosened.

  I saw legs. Arms. Twisted. Combined. A churning of water. Feet, kicking.

  Rachel. I had to help her. I had to . . .

  But my body wouldn’t obey. My movements were so limp and weighed down. I kicked for the surface. It took an age for me to get there.

  When I finally broke through, I grabbed for the side and gulped air.

  Rachel and the man were in the middle of the pool. She had her arms around his neck. Her legs circling his waist.

  Like a role reversal from what had happened in the alley.

  Because the man’s mask was fully down now. The blistered and blackened remains of his hood were melted onto his skin. And no, he wasn’t wearing a pair of tights under a hoodie. His face wasn’t squished and contorted. And he was terribly burned. But there was no question in my mind that he was the man who’d mugged us. He was also the driver of the car that had followed Michael.

  Oh God.

  My heart plummeted as he reached up and backwards for Rachel. He took a fistful of her hair, dragged her face down underwater, held it there.

  I dived towards him. A surge of water came with me. I swam and floundered.

  They were still several strokes away.

  Rachel thrashed and fought.

  The man bared his teeth and snarled. He would drown her. He would kill her. There was no doubt in my mind about that.

  Help her. Get to her. You have to . . .

  I saw her reach up, hopelessly. I saw her hand grasp air once. Twice. Her fingers went limp.

  A terrible chill spread through me.

  No. Not now. Not when we were so close to surviving this.

  I took two more strokes, then lashed out with my right fist and connected with a weak punch to his right temple. My knuckle cracked. His face splashed into the water but he didn’t let go of Rachel’s hair.

  Panic swirled in my mind.

  How long had she been under? Thirty seconds? A minute? But time had no meaning now. Because any time at all was too long. Had Rachel got any air before he’d forced her under? I didn’t know.

  The man snarled, baring his teeth. I hit him again. And again. In the eye. On the mouth. I rained down on him with a series of blows.

  When Michael and Holly were young, I bought them an inflatable toy they could hit that would always bounce back up. This man reminded me of that. Or maybe my punches were pathetic.

  He didn’t release Rachel. He pushed her down even more, grinning horribly like he was enjoying it. I pulled my fist back again for another punch. But before I could throw it I heard two loud, concussive thuds and the man convulsed twice in a fast jerking movement, like someone had grabbed him by the shoulders and wrenched him violently to the left, then to the right.

  He pitched sideways. He lolled face down.

  I turned, my body locked with fear, and saw Brodie leaning against the tiled wall to my right. He clutched his bloodied calf in one hand, lowered his gun in the other, slid to the ground.

&nb
sp; For what could only have been a split-second – but felt much, much longer – I stared at the dead man sinking below the water; at the fine scarlet threads weaving up from the wounds in his chest and at the scorched fragments of plastic drifting around. Then I took a breath and dived, grabbing for Rachel’s sweater, her arms, lifting and dragging her, pulling her up with me towards the surface as fast as I could.

  49

  I mentioned before about Rachel holding my hand when she was in labour with Michael and Holly. What I didn’t explain was that Michael’s birth was complicated. Rachel was nearly two weeks overdue. She had to be induced. She was in active labour for more than nine hours with no sign that the baby would come. Then a new consultant came on shift, checked in on Rachel and immediately ordered an emergency caesarean. Her vitals had crashed. Mother and baby were in danger. In the moments after the epidural went in, I stroked Rachel’s face and – for the first time in our marriage – confronted the very real possibility that I might lose her. She was so weak. So disorientated. I had visions of the midwife handing me our baby in the moments after my wife had passed. I knew I couldn’t cope without her. I had no idea how I would go on.

  This felt like that, only worse. I heaved her out of the pool onto her back. Her skin was translucent. She wasn’t breathing. She was so terribly limp.

  Oh, please, no.

  Why had she dived in after me? She shouldn’t have done that. I’d wanted her to be safe.

  Fear paralysed me then. I had no idea what to do. I looked over at Brodie. He stared back, his face tight with horror, shaking his head with wild urgency. There was no team of trained medics around me. There was only Rachel, lying unresponsive on the cold tiles.

  Don’t let me lose her. Not now.

  It was too cruel.

  I tilted her chin up, pinched her nose. Rachel was the doctor. She should be the one telling me how to do this. I leaned down to give her mouth-to-mouth and . . .

  Her chest bucked, her throat swelled and she coughed up half the swimming pool.

  I rocked back and looked up at the ceiling. I cried. I heard Brodie exhale with a pained groan of relief. I choked out Rachel’s name and rolled her onto her side, patting and rubbing her back. She coughed and spat and gasped, curling up into a ball. I cleared her hair from her mouth. I stroked her face. She reached back and clenched my hand.

  If I hadn’t got her out of the water when I did . . . Well, I don’t really want to think about that.

  I knelt on the tiles, still holding her hand. Darkness faded in from the corners of my vision. My head dipped. My eyelids drooped.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there exactly. Long enough for Rachel to stop coughing and for her breathing to become less hoarse. Long enough for the questions to begin to swirl in my mind. Questions I didn’t want to confront. Questions I knew I had to.

  I thought about Brodie and the feelings he seemed to have for my wife. He hadn’t called the police before coming here but he’d turned up with a gun in the middle of the night. Why? What had he expected to find? And he’d shot a man. Cool and collected. As if it was something he’d done before.

  The smaller man was dead, drifting and bobbing in the swimming pool. The bigger man was dead in the pantry. Maybe I should have felt bad about it but the truth is I didn’t. They’d tried to kill my family. They’d terrorized us. I thought about the sick smile on the smaller man’s face when he’d been drowning Rachel. The way he’d dashed my head against the side of the pool. The chemical stink of the bigger man’s glove as he shut off my air. I still didn’t know either of their names. I didn’t know why they’d pursued my son to his death or why anyone could have wanted to kill Michael or Fiona. Rachel had said they’d come for us tonight to prevent the truth getting out. But I still wondered if there was more to it than that.

  Who had been sitting behind Michael in my car? What was their connection to the smaller man and the bigger man?

  I suspected Rachel and Brodie knew at least some of the answers to those questions and others besides. I was going to have to insist they told me. But first, I needed to race into the woods and find Holly. I wanted to tell her she was safe, wrap her in my arms and never let her go.

  ‘Tom?’

  Rachel pushed up on her elbow and leaned towards me. She put her hand on my chest and rested her forehead against mine. Her dark eyes searched me for something – some kind of understanding or forgiveness I wasn’t sure I was ready to give. That could come later. Maybe. I hoped.

  From across the room I heard Brodie grunt and grimace. We both turned and looked towards him. The tender spot on the back of my skull throbbed and bulged. The room slid in and out of focus. Brodie was pushing himself up with his back against the wall, his legs splayed, blood trickling across the tiles beneath his left calf. His face was bruised and weeping.

  ‘You saved us,’ I told him.

  He stared back, but not at me. His attention was focused solely on Rachel. That strange energy again. The yearning in his eyes. He panted hard, grimaced, then something in his face began to break, as if he might weep, and he shook his head, like a wordless apology.

  For what?

  A hand touched my cheek. Rachel was pulling me back to look at her again. I fell into her eyes.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ I whispered.

  ‘You did. But only for a little while. And I’m not just talking about tonight.’

  I felt the love spread all the way through my chest. I lifted my hand to the back of her neck. She closed her eyes. A tear rolled down her cheek. I pulled her towards me. Her lips parted. I loved her. I loved her so much.

  But we didn’t quite kiss.

  Before our lips touched, we both startled and broke apart.

  From somewhere out in the woods, a sharp bang echoed.

  It sounded like the roar of a shotgun blast.

  50

  I sprang to my feet. The room teetered and swayed. The shattering bang repeated in my head. It seemed to get louder, brasher, more terrifying. The pain at the back of my head bulged and swelled but I didn’t care about that right now. I thought about Holly and the gunshot and my throat closed up as my mind shut down.

  I wanted to run out into the woods but I was so very afraid of what we’d find. Two men had come for us. Two men had hunted us. Both were now dead.

  What was going on?

  ‘Did you see anybody else out there?’

  ‘No,’ Rachel told me.

  Her dark eyes were blank. Horrified. When she got to her feet, it was like she was collapsing at the same time.

  ‘Brodie?’

  He didn’t respond to begin with. He was too busy staring at Rachel, slack-jawed and beaten up. He tried to push himself to his feet. His elbows shook wildly. Then he groaned and his arms gave out and he slid back down.

  ‘Brodie! Listen to me. Did you see anyone else?’

  ‘No.’ He snapped out of it. ‘No one.’

  Rachel turned from him to stare out at the woods. I watched her. She looked like she was staring into the darkest folds of her heart.

  ‘I’m going to find her,’ I said.

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘No.’

  Rachel had almost drowned. I wasn’t sure she had enough strength to cross the room let alone help me to find Holly.

  ‘I’m coming,’ she said again, sterner now, beginning to push her way past me.

  ‘Wait!’ Brodie yelled.

  He flopped to one side and stretched for his pistol with a mighty groan. His fingers brushed the barrel. He stretched even further, then gathered the gun in to his stomach and bared his teeth as he pressed a recessed button on the side of the grip. A magazine dropped out into his lap. He reached inside his fleece for a replacement and slapped it into the butt with his palm, then beckoned Rachel towards him.

  When she was close enough, he pressed the gun into her hands, clasping her fingers over it. She tried to turn away from him. He clung on.

  ‘Nine rounds,’ he
told her. ‘You just point and shoot. OK?’

  She looked down at the gun without speaking.

  ‘Rachel. You can do this.’

  Enough. We didn’t have time. I rushed over and pulled her away from him, snatching the gun for myself.

  ‘Hey, Tom, don’t—’

  ‘Come on, Rachel.’

  She tripped and stooped low as I yanked her after me, grabbing up her hiking boots from where she’d kicked them off before diving into the pool. She stopped briefly to pull them on and I picked my way between the broken glass onto the deck.

  The wind scoured against us. The sea clashed and raged. The saturated white plastic suit I had on clung to my body like I’d been shrink-wrapped. I tore it from me in strips, then turned and looked all around, listening for anything. For Holly. Some noise.

  Rachel peered into the dark. Her face was pinched and urgent. She wouldn’t look at me right now.

  ‘Did the gunshot come from the stargazing pod, do you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I told her.

  I closed my eyes and tried to tune in to the trace of the bang that still lingered in my mind. I was shaking all over. I couldn’t be certain where the sound had originated from. And I didn’t want for us to run off in the wrong direction.

  So I took a chance. I squared my shoulders and I yelled Holly’s name.

  Nothing.

  Just wind and waves. Just silence. It seemed such a sad and ominous thing, shouting my daughter’s name into the void.

  I shouted again.

  The woods swallowed my words.

  I was wracked with fear. It crackled through me. Rachel bent at the waist and covered her mouth with both hands like she might retch. I’d seen her do that before – when we’d gone together to view Michael’s body. Even after everything we’d been told. Even knowing our son was dead. I don’t think either of us had truly believed it. There’d still been that ridiculous, faint hope that maybe there’d been a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t Michael. But of course that hadn’t happened. We’d looked down at our son and it had been real. And Rachel had covered her mouth just like this.

  Please, God, we’d lost one child already.