by John Randall
Because the library structure was so unusual, the center of balance for the building, the building’s core was offset from a normal building; which meant finding the elevators and either of the two stairwells was a detour in logic. The first one was easy to find; the elevator bank and stairwell was right inside the Fourth Avenue entrance.
This was the stairwell that pretty, curly-haired 22-year old Molly Abrams found herself running for. She was the last one not in a “safe” position.
From the bottom of the escalator Marmaduke bound across the floor toward the thugs that had just broken inside. I can smell him. I can smell him. He smells bad.
It was triple dark inside the Library, only just single dark outside, but it was enough to see that Molly was running for the stairwell—that and the fact that she was screaming bloody murder. What she didn’t figure on was not getting to the door in time; the crash bar would push the door into the stairwell, but she never made it. In virtually a windmill-fashion, the tall thug’s right arm came down on her right shoulder and dropped her smack to the ground.
Molly screamed.
Dude’s posse was scattered in the entrance area; not having clue one what the hell was going on, screaming and gunfire in the distance above, bloody murder screams in front. ESL? What the hell’s that?
“Where is she?” shouted a disheveled, heavy-set soccer Mom named Susan Drummond, 35—her thick blonde hair looking like a makeover that had collided with a blender. Dressed in big-girl’s sweats as local color from Lynnwood, a northern suburb of Seattle (go Royals!), Susan had decided that day to get into Seattle early in order to go to the Social Security Administration, which opened at 7:30 a.m., in order to replace her SSA card which she’d stupidly lost nearly a month ago; in order to apply for a job you had to have your Social Security card, driver’s license and birth certificate. Well, guess what? Someplace along the way she’d also lost her birth certificate.
Running late as usual, about to be drummed out of Soccer Moms of Lynnwood, she’d been heading for the SSA building at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Madison Street when everything had turned to shit. Stranded on I-5, she abandoned her car and started walking. Worst decision of the day; she was there as she saw the tsunami recede, somewhere between Third and Fourth Avenues. If she had been there in line waiting for the doors to open at the SSA, she would have been consumed in the tons of crap (including the WSDOT Wenatchee) flowing eastward uphill.
Now she stood at the top of the landing between the first and second floors of the Seattle Public Library and heard her friend of two hours plead for help. The heavy stairwell doors did little to mask what was happening on the other side.
Inside the stairwell, booby-trapped as best they could, Molly’s screams of pain could be easily heard.
Susan turned to her new friends; who like her, had been working hard for the last hour to pile up sufficient crap into the stairwells and/or make ready for what they knew would be an attack up the stairwells. All Susan could see were the whites of several sets of eyes, dimly illuminated from the open door leading into the second floor. They also heard the frantic barking of the big dog, who in eye’s image was trying to protect the diminutive young woman.
“We aren’t going to let this happen? Right?” The way Susan phrased the situation, her statement was a rhetorical question. She turned and slowly headed down the littered steps toward the emergency door. Molly was going to be the one to block the door from the inside using a portable book rack that they’d found in the sorting area, rolled over to the stairwell and tumbled down to the first floor. “Get out! Get out of our building!” Susan was angry. “Grab something! They can’t get away with this shit!”
On the other side of the door it wasn’t going well with young Molly. Two other thugs were there helping Third Dude finish the task from earlier in the afternoon. He’d been able to rip her shirt off and had her pants down before Marmaduke, racing across the slick floor, skidded to a stop and jumped on him.
Marmaduke was doing his best, his huge mouth chomped firmly on Dude’s right arm, angrily shaking it like a chew toy. But this time, Dude had a beatin’ stick of his own and was able to start hitting ‘Duke across his legs; at first merely annoying the big dog, but with repetition began to inflict pain; Marmaduke’s barks more high-pitched. Molly screamed as loud as she could, hoping Ray could hear her; but knowing that he had his hands full. The worst seemed inevitable.
I’m going to stop wearing underwear.
One of the differences between man and beast is that the objective stays clearly in the beast’s mind, never wavers. Bad man is bad man is bad man, and ne’er the twain shall meet. While Third Dude was the one wanting the tasty poon, he found himself occupied to distraction yet again. While one of his fellow scumsquats was scared out of his bean by the huge dog; the other, Mycah Jarimyah Jackson, who at age 14 started pimping his eleven-year old sister in order to build up a “lifestyle” within the gang; the more money you had, the more bad your ass.
His eyes got a bit wide as the nice white meat was exposed. He was quite willing to hold down the squirming young woman and grope her up and down, but the Big Fucking Dog three feet away with the big teeth shaking his buddy’s arm around, managed to sever the erection signal coming from his brain. The little shaved pink tush would bring some long green; pump her with drugs, then beat her, then pump her, then beat her; four or five times in a row and she’d do anything you wanted her to, just to stop the pain. Dress her up in a schoolgirl skirt and blouse, she could keep the orange thong, after all it was a surprise; and she’d make the hotel circuit, big time.
The Fourth Avenue stairwell door opened.
Meanwhile, the remaining four thugs, led by James “The Bone” Foster headed as straight as they could for the other stairwell on the opposite side of the first floor; passing by the long escalator leading to the third floor, they couldn’t help but hear the confusion, gunfire and yelling at the top of the stairs.
Bone Foster was a Mandingo of sorts, a tall massive man with 10” flopper. Refusing to butt (so to speak) into Third Dude’s territory, actually named Wayne Clark, Bone had started his reputation as a 13-year old by waving his thing at adult parties where he was the only teen; well, he and the ten- and eleven-year old girls he boned for exhibition while the others egged him on to the heavy beat; bringing fame and attention to himself, shame, humiliation and servitude to the pre-teen girls. Both men, now in their late 20s, were The Intimidators.
“There,” he shouted, pointing toward the opposite side of the huge room, on the other side of the extended third floor auditorium; in absolutely the darkest part of the first floor, with no view of the Fourth Avenue entrance; Bone slowly led his men toward the stairwell, finding the auditorium walls, then across the hall to the opposite wall to a push door. Bone didn’t know diddley-squat about lumens; but, he’d been around his share of empty, dark buildings before.
Cachunk, the door opened inward.
The stairwell lobby was filled with crap; at least that’s what his feet told him as he brushed aside little shit, stepped on broken glass. His hand waved in front of him, then realized he had a Bic in his pocket. Duh. Bics were universal weapons of last resort. Fire a Bic up a dude’s nose in a fight and you were on top, not on bottom; or, as it’s referred to “Bics da shit.”
Bics, however, don’t send out much illumination (it’s a lumen thing, surf the web). You could light a Bic at the landing of a stairwell and not make out anything at the half-way point to the next landing, but you can sure as shit can see your feet.
A twenty-five pound PC monitor landed next to Bone’s feet and shattered, followed by “GET OUT OF OUR BUILDING!” from a female voice.
Some ho is up there tossin’ computers at me.
Bone Foster started up the stairs. “Baby, baby,” he started in a deep voice which became lost in the dark. “I have a ten-inch dick ready for your pussy; except baby, you’re treating me bad; so after I finish fuckin’ you ‘til you puke, I’m goin’ s
tick my pole up your white ass ‘til it comes out your fuckin’ nose.”
Not exactly the conversation the Second Floor Crew; all female, all white, all suburban wanted to hear.
Ray fired two shots in the darkness up the escalator where he knew Diane had been leading the Fifth Avenue Defense crew. The three shots from Dickhead #5 had fortunately been wild; but Dickhead was dead before he hit the escalator again; the two shots ripped through his torso south to north, exiting and hitting the back of the cube section that currently blocked the top of the escalator.
“Is everybody OK?” Ray shouted, no negatives replied. Ray began to move up the escalator from his position twenty feet on the downside. “You OK, John?” he asked his volunteer in the other escalator.
“Yeah, but I think I’m going to have to talk to Hyatt about these reward points,” the Sacramento native replied, smiling in the dark.
“Count ‘em off as we go up, OK? We have work to do,” Ray instructed quietly. “Get their weapons.”
The last of the scumbags who had been tricked into going to the escalators had been thoroughly beaten around the head and shoulders by the volunteers standing on either side of the top of the escalator; one critically. There were broken Molotov cocktails on two of them; however one gangster had two remaining in his oversized trench coat that were intact. Muy buen.
“Move all this back to the entrance door, except for these two,” Ray instructed. The FriendsShop was back on rolling canisters. “Diane, you OK?”
“OK, boss; like I tell you, we have a job for you,” she smiled.
“John, can you get these scumbags up and out of here? Maybe into the auditorium; tie ‘em, gag ‘em; hit ‘em hard if they wake up and try to talk. I mean, hit them hard! They were here to kill us and burn the building. And, we’re not out of the woods yet. I have to get down and help the second floor. Diane, here’s what I want you to do.”
Although they weren’t out of the woods, they were definitely out of the panties. Naked went the 22-year old again; pants and thong down to her ankles, shirt ripped, undershirt torn, no bra because there wasn’t much to cover.
The stairwell door opened and out rushed as motley a crew as you’d ever put together in one place; Susan the Soccer Mom from Lynnwood, James (42) and Charlotte (40) Smith from West Bend who were starting a five-day vacation that morning with plans to circle the Olympic Peninsula, all ready to take the ferry Wenatchee back to Bainbridge Island; fortunately were late and got stuck in downtown traffic when the earthquake hit. If they’d been on time they would have been at the ferry terminal along with the sixty or so cars ready to go west across the Puget Sound; and would have seen the tsunami up close and personal; they would also have been very, very dead. Jim and Charlotte were fifth generation “benders” and had no truck with asshole punks. The fourth member was Gerri Greeley, 56, semi-homeless from the Cherry Hill neighborhood on the east side of I-5 near Swedish Medical Center. She managed to keep clean and didn’t beg; the library was her home during the day, a God-send if ever there was one. Like Ray, Gerri treated the library as her building. Although rumpled, she made sure she didn’t offend by cleaning herself in the bathrooms on her “route”.
The four of them burst out of the door yelling at the top of their lungs; GET OUT OF HERE! THIS IS OUR BUILDING! STOP THAT! GET OUT OF HERE!
The one punk who was just standing around picking his nose while the big dog tried to amputate Hard-On’s arm, stood there slack-jawed as four middle-aged strangers came roaring out the stairwell in an attempt to rescue Molly, not knowing if there were ten thugs on the other side of the door or not. Jim and Charlotte went after Mycah Jarimyah Jackson, whose mother, an obvious schoolteacher candidate in Bible Studies, had won the fifth grade spelling bee before she started dropping babies, including Clunkhead Dickhead.
The four plus Molly plus Marmaduke then were face-to-face. Marmaduke let go of Hard-on, aka Wayne Clark, and went after Second Groper just as Susan barreled into him, knocking him back on his ass; the thick-legged Mom started thrashing him with her tiny fists while Marmaduke chomped his left leg at the knee and began to do the Bite and Shake.
“Run!” Susan shouted to Molly, pointing to the stairwell. Small, nearly naked women hold little value in a fight; Molly stumbled toward the stairwell and shouted “It’s me!” as she opened the door; as in don’t hit me with a computer monitor.
On the third floor, Ray sprinted toward the Fifth Avenue staircase which was on the north side of the auditorium over where the Friends of the Library cube and coffee shop used to be; old-time library folk would sometimes give directions to the third-floor Fiction as being next to where the Friends cube used to be; which, if you’ve ever been to Costa Rica, is the way all directions are given; where do you live? Fifty meters north, two hundred meters west of the white church that burned down six years ago. Oh, OK.
Opening the stairwell door Ray could hear nothing but chaos below; shouts and curses, noise from banging things. He was also now in a new level of darkness. Looking down the stairwell there was a pinpoint of light somewhere up ahead. He wanted to go faster but was limited by his cargo; pad-pad-pad-pad-pad-pad his steps made sounds as he hurried down the stairwell, getting to the second floor landing just in time to hear Mandingo threaten to stick his pole so far up that it would poke out somebody’s nose.
Yeah, well—good luck on that one. See how you like this one, bozo.
Out of breath, Ray gently pulled out one of two remaining firebombs that were intact. Oh, shit. His heart pounded in his chest.
“I hope one of you ladies smoke.” No matches, no Zippo, no Bic. “I need a light.”
Silence.
“I’m trying to quit,” said one, her voice quivering, handing Ray a simple lighter from AM/PM.
It never hurts to be lucky.
“Thanks, give ‘em everything you’ve got.”
The Fifth Avenue Stairwell Protection Agency began to throw everything they’d accumulated down the steps, aiming for around the corner for maximum wall effect of the shattering glass.
“OK, now inside,” he ordered softly.
Ray took three steps down the stairwell, to the point where he could see the light from Mandigo’s Bic as he slowly made their way up the steps; he could hear their breathing. Ray lit the rag fuse, damp with kerosene, amazingly intact considering what had happened, and arched it downward, it clanked against a wall, and shattered.
No sense staying for the parade. Ray ducked into the 2nd floor.
The noise of the explosion in the enclosed stairwell startled him.
Ray started to shake “No, no, no! No! God-damn it--no!” He could feel the PTSD symptoms returning—current time and Fallujah time melding together. The screams in the stairwell were terrifying as the four West Side Mobb members were roasted. The screams, people burning and dying—just like when an IUD hit a supply truck
In the stairwell Mandingo saw the bottle out of the corner of his eye; saw it shatter against the outside wall, and before he could turn around was engulfed in kerosene. The bottle exploded, sending a billion shards of hot glass in the small area; by instinct, they found the door, and came crashing back into first floor; get it off me get it off me get it off me as black skin was roasted like a hotdogs left on a grill too long.
The four men, seconds from death, went screaming through the lobby, skin and clothes on fire; human torches. They managed to make it near the ESL area before collapsing: one-two-three-four on the floor. The smell was--unique. Behind them, the stairwell was filled with acrid, black smoke; making it virtually unusable.
Back on the second floor, Ray and The Tiger Ladies started across the second floor to the Fourth Avenue stairwell and ran into Molly, butt naked but for shoes and socks who was hustling back to see if she could help the Fifth Avenue stairwell.
“Well, you don’t see that every day,” Ray shook his head.
“They’re in trouble!” Molly blurted, out of breath.
In the stairwell the noise from b
elow reverberated; the stairwell was littered with PC and office junk; Ray carefully made a path through the junk to the door, and was inside, the other ladies following.
The fight was getting intense as the four West Side Mobbsters, all strong men, were rapidly getting the upper hand from the initial surprise. Barking angrily, Marmaduke seemed to be in every individual fight, which had started to walk itself backwards about ten feet. The screams from Mandingo and his buds added to the chaos; the black smoke from their burning bodies clearly identifiable in the huge lobby.
Ray went after Hard-on; cut ‘em off at the nuts and the rest will follow. The dude was strong; this time resisting some of his military moves.
“Aaaaaiiiieeee! Get out of our building!” The yell was piercing and came from afar.
At the top of the escalator on the third floor, Diane and John had followed Ray’s instructions, pulling the dead weight out of the escalator pit, smacking the crap out of them to keep them out, then cleaning up afterwards and then back down the escalator to disconnect the Ethernet cables still left as traps. There was no sense going all the way down; either the plan was going to work or it wasn’t; but, they managed to disconnect the second set of cables Ray had booby-trapped half-way down; then slugged their way back to the top of the escalator.
“He said we’d know,” said Diane. My gut says ‘yes’, how about you?” she asked John.
“Yeah, do it.”
From down below all that could be heard was a clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk sound, then more rapidly clunkclunkclunkclunk. All was darkness. The escalator could hardly be seen.