They were speaking together but try as I might, I couldn’t make out any of their conversation. They were too far away. After a time, one pointed towards the stairwell and two of the men moved towards it while the others two began to move deeper into the parking garage. I felt myself tensing up; the two moving straight into the garage would be passing directly by me.
Moving as slowly and quietly as I could, I picked up the .38, slightly comforted by the cold, heavy weight of it in my hand. One of the men coming towards me was holding a baseball bat studded with nails, and as he got closer I recognized him as the one Luke had christened Bat-boy, the Tiger who had run from the alley.
With him was another tall Asian teenager with a youngish looking face. Both of them had automatic pistols shoved in their waistbands. I slowly scooted back, keeping the car between me and them as they passed. The last thing that I wanted to do was have to use my revolver; I knew that any shots would bring their other two friends running and if they were armed too, as they undoubtedly would be…I didn’t like my chances in a four on one gunfight.
That last thought, of the other two Tigers, brought Arthur to the front of my mind. Hopefully he would be able to avoid detection somehow, but the tight confines of the stairwell did little to buoy my hopes for him.
Daring to cast a quick glance in that direction, I realized that the other two Tigers must have already entered the stairwell, as they had been lost from my sight. I took the relative silence from that direction as a positive sign that Arthur had somehow managed to evade them. Quickly switching my focus back to the two that were walking past, I noticed that they had stopped no more than ten feet away from where I crouched.
“Are you sure it was them?” The younger looking Asian teenager said to the man with the bat. “The bastards that killed Sammo and Jack?”
“At least one of them,” Bat-boy said. “I recognized the jacket of the kid with the crossbow.”
“Come on, let’s keep going… and keep an eye out, Chen doesn’t want them to slip past us and get out if they hear him and Hammer on the stairs,” the taller teenager said. “We better not slip up; I’ve never seen him so mad as when you told him that Jack was killed. I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch that stupid enough to gun down Chen’s little brother…”
“Yeah, that little shit had better hope he dies fighting, because if we capture his ass…” He slapped the nail free part of his bat into the palm of his hand. I jerked at the meaty sound and almost fell over backwards.
Chen’s brother? The way they were talking, Chen was obviously the leader. And it turns out I had killed his brother. Great! No wonder they were so pissed. The two Tigers started walking again, and were soon far enough beyond where I squatted for me to feel a slight relief.
That feeling was short lived however, as I realized that Luke and Sonny were in real danger. I had no way of getting past the Tigers, either set, to warn them, and even if they finished with the truck and got it up and running before the Tigers got to their level, they would have to drive right by at least two of the armed thugs to get out.
I hoped that Arthur had managed to zip down the stairwell to warn Luke and Sonny before the two gangbangers that went that way had seen him. Even that would only be a small comfort, as getting out would still be a hell of a problem, but it would be something at least.
Looking down the parking garage toward where the two Tigers had vanished into the darkness, I strained my ears and could hear the faint sound of their footsteps getting further away. When I judged them to be distant enough, I broke cover from where I was crouched and quickly and quietly moved to the stairwell.
I had been in the stairwell before, when we had left the garage after burning the first Chinese truck. The street level of the parking garage was the top floor; the other six floors were located underneath, so from here the stairs only went one direction – down into the darkness.
The stairs were located at the back of a small alcove with an elevator door in one wall. The stairs wound around the elevator shaft’s column as they descended. There was a landing and elevator door on each garage level. The elevator was not working, of course, no electricity. I was listening at the entrance to the alcove, trying to hear the two Tigers on the stairs below, when I instead heard the sound of shoes slapping on the concrete behind me.
I spun around to the sight of a middle aged Chinese man sprinting at me from the exit to the street. He pulled a gigantic Bowie knife out of the sheath on his belt as he ran toward me.
Adrenaline kicked in, and abandoning any notion of stealth, I brought up the revolver and squeezed the trigger twice. The booms echoed through the parking garage. The first shot missed, I’ve no idea where the bullet went. The second shot struck the onrushing man just above the sternum, and about an inch to the left.
I expected him to be knocked backwards by the force of the shot, after all, it always happens that way in movies, but he just jerked slightly and kept coming. I stepped back against the wall, watching in disbelief as he came at me. The thought that he might be wearing a bullet proof vest crossed my mind and I was preparing to fire again when, two steps later, his legs gave out and he slammed down onto the cold pavement in front of me.
Hearing a noise, I turned with the .38 raised, to see the elevator doors opening slowly. As they slid aside I could see that the elevator itself seemed to be stuck someplace between this floor and the one below, about a foot of the carriage could be seen along with its roof. Arthur was crouched on that roof, forcing the doors open from inside.
“Hurry up and get in here,” he whispered fiercely. “Before every Tiger in the neighborhood shows up.”
“What about Luke and Sonny?” I asked as I clambered onto the top of the elevator car next to Arthur.
“I already warned them, they should be hiding in the bottom of the shaft,” he whispered back, as he let the elevators doors slide shut behind me. Darkness, absolute and impenetrable, cloaked the elevator shaft when the doors closed. “Keep your gun handy in case somebody tries to open those doors, but try not to move around or talk too much, we don’t want to give them a reason to search here.”
It didn’t take long before we could hear agitated voices talking loudly outside the elevator doors. Although we couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, the man I’d shot had been found, not exactly surprising since I’d left him lying out in the open. The adrenalin was still pumping through me and I was feeling more than a little bit jittery, so much so that when something banged against the door I was about to fire my gun, when I felt Arthur’s hand touch my shoulder.
“No,” he said, his whisper barely audible in my ear. “Shoot only if you can see light from them sliding the doors open… and make every shot count.”
The voices outside the elevator died down, and after a while stopped altogether. I thought that they had left to continue their search through the parking garage, or perhaps went out to comb the streets thinking that we’d slipped out after shooting their rear guard. But I couldn’t be certain, for all I knew there could be a Tiger standing in the alcove, waiting for somebody to stick their head out.
“Should we try the door?” I whispered to Arthur.
“No, too risky right now,” he said, producing a small flashlight from the pouch on his belt. He flicked it on. The cone of light played over the walls and floor of the shaft, and then he pointed it up.
The building that the parking garage was located under was a four story office building that had held mostly law offices and accounting firms, if the sign at the front was any indication. The shaft continued up into the building above, I assumed all the way to the top floor, although I couldn’t be certain, as Arthur’s light gave out before reaching that high. It did however illuminate two more sets of elevator doors above us, so we knew it rose to at least the second floor.
“Do you think that they’ll be searching the upper building for us?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” he replied. “Not at the moment, at least, the
only door from the parking garage into the building lobby is closed off with a chain and a padlock; I found that out when Sonny had me scout this place in case we ever wanted to dump a truck here. As long as the chain’s in place on that door, they won’t think we went in there, and the stairs only lead down further into the parking garage.”
“Do you think we can get up there?”
“I don’t know,” Arthur said. “I was hoping that there would be some sort of maintenance ladder or something, but there isn’t. Somehow I don’t think climbing the cables would be that easy, and even if we did, I’m not sure how we could get the doors open while clinging to them.”
“I see what you mean,” I said, following his light beam with my eyes. “Although, the doors have rails they slide on… Maybe, we could stand on the rails to one side of the door and push open the other side.”
“Yeah, maybe…” Arthur said, not sounding overly confident. “Another option would be to hide in the elevator car itself. There is an access hatch over there,” he shone the light over to illuminate a trap door a few feet from where I crouched. “With the narrowness of the hatch, I don’t think that any Tigers checking the elevator shaft from above would look for us in there.”
“Yeah, but if they did climb down and find us inside… well it would be like shooting two bunnies in a bucket. Not sure I want to be a bunny.” Arthur switched his light off and we squatted there in silence for a few moments.
In my mind it seems that the question was mostly theoretical, at this point anyway, as we seemed to be safe enough where we were for the time being. The adrenaline was beginning to wear off, and a vague sense of exhaustion was replacing the jittery excitement that I had been feeling. “How long do you think we should wait, before we do something?”
“Let’s give it another hundred count, at least.”
“Sounds good to me,” I answered, silently beginning to count upwards from one in my head. I took my time, carefully regulating my count speed so as not to finish too quickly. It was a long hundred seconds, but we didn’t hear a sound outside. That didn’t ease the tension and fear I felt at the prospect of leaving our little safe haven. Arthur finished counting before I did, switching his flashlight back on while I was still in the low 90s.
Holding the light in his mouth, Arthur stepped over to the door and began to slide it open. The inner door opened easily, but the outer door required more work and I began to appreciate just how difficult it had been for him to get in here, and then to reopen the door to allow me in. We got the outer door open a crack and I stepped forward and put my eye to it. I couldn’t see anyone waiting to ambush us so I gave Arthur a nod. We grabbed one door each and slid them open enough to allow us to get out. He hopped out first and I followed him, the stairwell alcove was empty. Glancing out onto the garage floor I could see that the body of the man I shot had been pulled to one side.
“I bet they’re still around here someplace,” Arthur said quietly. “The Tigers aren’t known for giving up that easily.”
“That is not gonna help their mood either,” I replied, nodding my head toward the dead man regretfully. Now that we were back out of the pitch darkness of the elevator, I had to ask him something that I was curious about.
“How did you know?” I asked. “How did you know that I was going to shoot in there? There was no way you could possibly have seen me in the dark.”
“You stopped breathing,” Arthur said. “Sonny taught me that holding ones breath is often a sign that violent or stressful action is about to be undertaken.”
“Oh. I wonder how Luke and he are doing.”
“Yeah, but we can’t think too much about it, we have to decide what to do,” Arthur said. “As I see it we have three options – we can try and make our way down to the truck and the others, we can bail and go back to the Academy, or we can stay here and basically do nothing.”
“Option two is out,” I said. “I’m not going to leave Sonny and Luke in danger.”
“If we stick to his plan, we should stay here,” Arthur said. “That’s what the plan called for.”
“Luke likes to say that no plan survives first contact with the enemy,” I replied. “I think we’ll need some revisions to Sonny’s plan.” I looked at the stairwell, and then turned toward the parking garage. “We’re going to take the long way round,” I said, “the way that vehicles normally go. If we try the stairwell there’s always the chance that we’ll miss Luke and Sonny leaving in the truck, and we can’t take that risk. If we walk down the driveway and they happen to be on the way out, we can just jump in.”
“Fine, if that’s what you want to do, let’s do it,” Arthur replied. I wasn’t sure, but he sounded a little peeved that I was taking control, and tried to wrest it back. “We are going to move quick and quiet, stay low and keep a good lookout. Try not to be seen, and for God’s sake, don’t shoot anybody.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
Creeping along the inner wall of the parking garage, we moved as swiftly as we could while still being stealthy. I knew that I didn’t want to be taken unawares by a couple gangbangers and I was sure that Arthur felt the same way. Mom, my real mom, used to say if wishes were fishes we’d walk on the sea, as a way of telling me that I wasn’t always going to be able to get everything that I wanted. Back then, when I was just a kid, I never understood what that meant, but I do now. Nobody always gets what they want.
We had just made the first turn in the garage when the guy with the bat stepped out from behind a car right in front of me. A shot of adrenalin hit me so hard that it almost hurt. I ducked as the bat whistled through the air where my head had just been, slamming into the cars fender, the nails denting and scratching the metal. I tried to bring the .38 up, but the gangbanger’s foot caught me in the pit of my stomach and I was knocked backwards to the ground, the air whooshing out of my lungs. The revolver slipped from my grasp and skittered a dozen feet across the cold pavement.
“I got one!” he shouted, stepping over me while I lay there gasping for breath. “It’s the guy that gunned down Jack! I bet you wish you had a machine gun now, don’t you, you little punk ass bitch!”
I raised my hands in some sort of hopeless gesture of self-defense as he raised the bat over his head with both hands, shit this is going to hurt, was the only thing passing through my mind. I waited for the blow to come, but it never did. Instead, I heard a grunt.
I glanced up and saw him stumble to one side. Still holding the bat with his right hand, he reached down with his left and felt his side; his hand came back up holding a bloody knife, about five inches long and flat. His face, etched with hate only a moment ago, was now white and shocked as he looked at the object in his hand. I had seen throwing knives like it before on the racks in the Academy attic. While he was distracted I scrambled desperately on my hands and knees, trying to get to my handgun.
Arthur hit the man with a vicious kick to the same place the knife had struck. Roaring with pain and stumbling with the force of the kick, the gangbanger turned to face Arthur while feebly swinging the bat one handed.
Arthur dodged it, and the thug’s arm, rather than his bat, slammed into Arthur’s side. Allowing this to happen was evidently part of Arthur’s plan, because he then brought his right arm down to trap the wrist of the Tiger and at the same time gave him a brutal palm strike to the chin. The gang member didn’t even groan as he dropped to the floor.
“Are you all right?” Arthur asked, as I scooped up the revolver and scrambled to my feet.
“Yeah, thanks,” I gasped. I was trying to regain my breath, and stood partially bent over while I sucked wind. “Is he dead?”
“Not yet,” Arthur replied. “But we should finish him off before we move…” his words were cut off by four loud shots.
I dove back to the ground, and looked under the car, scanning for feet on the far side. I saw Arthur dropping out of the corner of my eye. “Are you okay?” I whispered. There was no response and I
glanced at him. He was lying on his side with his eyes open and unblinking, a deep crimson, almost black, pool of blood was forming around him.
“Shit…Arthur?”
A noise brought me back to reality, and I quickly scanned under the car, my gaze falling on a pair of red leather cowboy boots moving cautiously toward the car that I was lying behind.
Figuring the other Tigers were probably already on their way, I decided that this was it, I was going to go out in a blaze of glory. I aimed the .38 at the cowboy boots; the wearer had stopped for a moment, almost perfectly lining them up for me. I pulled the trigger. The roar of the handgun was deafening.
The bullet struck the boot wearer’s right ankle, and continued on through his left heel. There was a cry of agony and the teenager fell to his side on the other side of the car, using his gun hand to break his fall.
I saw his wrist bend in a way that it wasn’t designed to bend in, and he let out a sharp yelp of pain. His eyes locked on mine, and for a second or two we stared at each other under the car. I knew the fear I saw in his eyes was mirrored in my own. Then he reached for his pistol with his good hand and I shot him in the chest.
I’d taken my first human life less than twenty four hours before, and now I had taken two more. It seemed I was on a roll. Maybe I was responsible for another as well, I reminded myself.
Arthur was only here because I had wanted to come this way. It may sound strange, but right at that moment, Arthur’s death weighed on me more heavily than the lives that I had personally taken. As I lay on the cold concrete in shock, I thought about Karen. If I managed to get back to the academy in one piece, I was going to have to tell her that her love, Arthur, was dead.
I remembered watching them during the week and thinking, how lucky they were to have each other as the world was falling apart around them. Now, because of my decision, Karen was going to have to face this shit-hole of a world alone. Is this really what being a leader is? Getting people killed with the choices I make? The thought frightened me, who would ever willingly accept such a responsibility?
The After Days Trilogy (Book 1): After Days Page 14