by Darrell Pitt
Chapter Five
My forward momentum takes me as far as the opposite wall. I hit it with both hands. My nails rake the brick work, but don’t find purchase. My lower body collides a moment later.
Then gravity takes hold.
To make matters worse, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, so my impact against the wall results in a slight rebound. As I fall I see something a few feet below my hands.
I reach out with everything I’ve got and one hand grabs the top of a window frame. My body swings in toward the building and then –
Crash!
I hurtle through a window and into someone’s living room. It isn’t a graceful landing. Far from it. But it’s a landing. And I’ve only fallen a few feet as opposed to a hundred feet, so it’s a win as far as I’m concerned.
I’m covered in glass, timber and shredded curtain. Picking myself up, I find I’ve destroyed someone’s flower pot and knocked over their television set. An elderly black woman is sitting on her lounge looking at me with open mouthed astonishment. I can’t blame her. It’s not every day a teenage boy comes smashing through her window.
Bang!
A bullet thuds into the carpet next to my face.
Someone’s shooting at me!
“Sorry about this,” I climb to my feet.
She stands up, waving a finger at me and yelling something unintelligible.
I charge through her apartment and, more by chance than design, find the front door. Just as I struggle to open the lock something hits me from behind. Hard. I turn around and a broom smacks me in the face. Grabbing hold of the old lady’s weapon, I get the door open and stumble into the hallway.
“And don’t come back!” she yells.
Those words I understand.
I’m in the middle of a long hallway in a rundown apartment building. A door has opened down the passage and a young mother and her son peer out in astonishment. I realize part of the curtain is still hanging off my shoulder. Knocking it to the ground I try to wave reassuringly.
“It’s okay,” I tell them. “Knocked over a vase.”
I hurry in the opposite direction and arrive at a set of elevators. I’m about to hit the button for them when I notice they’re already ascending. But is this good news? This could be Ravana’s men. Could they be that fast?
I spot a set of fire stairs to my left. Dragging open the door, I start down them. There is a gap I can look down and see all the way to the bottom. It looks to be about ten stories. I hurry down one set of winding stairs and pass the door leading from that level. That’s one floor gone. Only about nine to go. Racing down another two floors I suddenly notice a sound and stop.
Footsteps.
Or am I just imagining it?
Is it just the reverberation of my own feet? Silence fills the stairwell. Regardless, I have to keep going. I continue down another floor, slow down and listen. Sounds okay. I rush down another floor and hurry past the entry door from that level.
The door flies open.
The guy catches me from the side, throwing me to the railing and knocks the air out of me. He is tall and thin with a cruel face. He gets an arm around my throat and drags me backward.
“We’re not finished with you, kid,” he says. “The doctor’s got a long night of fun planned for you.”
It’s the reminder of Doctor Ravana that does it. I see the doctor’s face in my mind and his patient expression as he applies the probe to my hand. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that I never want to return to that room again.
Bringing my elbow up into his stomach I hear a satisfying oomph and his grip loosens. Slightly. But not enough to escape. So I repeat the action three or four times more just to get the point across. All the while we’re sliding and stumbling down the steps. I swing around and brace him against the railing while I slam my elbow into his diaphragm.
I turn around and blindly swing a fist into his jaw.
It happens suddenly. The railing is not that high. Probably some building inspector looked at it thirty years ago and gave it a green light without a second thought. Little did he think this little piece of building design would become the stage of a life and death battle.
Because at that instant the thin man falls backward. If it weren’t so horrifying it would be funny because he actually flips back like some sort of character in a comedy show. I make a grab for him, but the angle is bad and all I grab is a part of his jacket. It tears out of my grasp and he disappears from sight.
I watch him fall down the gap between the stairs. It seems to take forever. He gives an inarticulate cry. Makes a sound that has no meaning. At some stage his eyes meet mine during that endless fall. It’s almost an expression of disbelief.
How can you be responsible for my death?
Then he hits the ground floor with a terrible splat. Open mouthed, I stare down at his motionless form. Maybe he’s not dead.
Please God, let him not be dead.
I stumble down the remaining flights of stairs in a daze. I slip over twice, but barely notice. All I can think of are the man’s eyes. Such sheer disbelief. He must be alive. He can’t be dead. People survive falls worse than that and survive.
Finally I reach the final turn in the stairs. The thin man lies in a growing pool of blood. The shape of his body is like some sort of crooked swastika. His disbelieving eyes are dull with death.
I have killed him.
I have just killed a man.