We Are Here

by Michael Marshall

  I got tangled in a mess of broken wood and was finding it impossible to strike back. After ten seconds I started to be afraid that he was going to win. He got his hands around my wrist and began smacking it against anything he could find, sticking terrier-like to the task despite me kicking and kneeing him as hard as I could. Then there was a crunching blow that took us both on the shoulders and smacked us down onto the ground.

  “Jesus,” Lydia said.

  I crawled away to see her holding the remains of the chair she’d brought down on us. “Men are all the same,” she muttered. “Get us out of here, you assholes. Then you can beat each other to death for all I care.”

  The cop had taken more of the impact and was still on hands and knees, trying to raise his head. Smoke was billowing in through the door at the end. Jeffers sat on the chair facing the congregation. He looked composed.

  “Jeffers,” I said. “What have you done?”

  He smiled with the maddening peacefulness of someone who is so far out the other side of present circumstances that he finds it hard to understand what you’re saying.

  I pulled out my phone, but the screen was blank and cracked, and I knew there’d be a phone-shaped bruise on my ribs where Reinhart’s shoe had connected with it before I pulled the gun on him. I pressed buttons and nothing happened.

  “Call 911,” I shouted to the cop, who was getting back to his feet.

  “Left it in the car,” he muttered.

  I ran to the main door and yanked at the handle. It was locked. I knew that. I’d stood and watched Jeffers do it but had been too caught up in Reinhart’s disappearance and keeping the gun on the cop that I hadn’t processed the implications.

  I looked up at the big glass windows, knowing I’d noticed the first time I’d been in the room that they were covered with wire. I jumped onto the table with the scattered remains of Billy’s last meal, and tried to see if the wire could be gotten off. Maybe—if you had a few hours and a selection of tools. Some very thorough person had bedded it into the sides of the window frames. There were no other windows in the church because there were buildings on both sides. The roof was thirty feet above my head.

  I got down and went back to the front door. I kicked it. Banged my shoulder against it. I realized the cop was heading toward me again and rounded on him.

  “Fuck with me and I’ll shoot you,” I said. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “I know,” he said—and threw his own shoulder against the door. Nothing happened. He did it again.

  I left him to it and headed back to where Jeffers was sitting. “Is there any way out through the basement?”

  “There’s no way out of anywhere.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “I understand that you’re in pain of various kinds and have things you feel you need to do. You’ve got three other people in here with you, though. You don’t get to make that call.”

  “A bad cop, a crazy lady, and a man trying to find his path,” the priest said.

  “Is that supposed to be me, or you?”

  “Oh, both, don’t you think?”

  The cop had given up on battering the door. “Look, you fucking whacko—”

  “If Reinhart’s a ghost,” I said, holding my hand out to keep the cop back, “then how is this going to help?”

  “He’s not a ghost. I thought we covered that. He’s the reason these souls are trapped in the city.”

  I could hear the crackling of wood and old paper from below. Smoke was pouring out of the basement door. “At least shut that,” I yelled at the cop.

  Meanwhile Lyds had come closer. She seemed the calmest person in the room. “But why us?” she asked.

  “I had to move quickly,” the priest said. “The battle always turns on a moment of decisive action. History shows this. Any one of you could decide to help him. It’s better this way.”

  “Reinhart’s just one of these … people,” I said. “Somehow he’s found a way of getting to the other side of the Bloom and surviving, that’s all. How do you know he didn’t put the idea for this into your head? How do you know he can’t just flip himself out of here, leaving us to burn to death?”

  “He can’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s right,” the cop said. “Reinhart can’t do that. He can hide himself in plain sight, but he can’t magic himself through walls. He’s too solid.”

  I hesitated, trying to stop myself from doing the wrong thing. When there’s a fire, you want to run. Senses shriek with how crucial it is that you get yourself away as fast as possible. I knew there was no point just running around the room. I knew also that Jeffers wouldn’t help us even if he could.

  So I grabbed a chair and went back to the street end of the room for one last try.

  I gathered all my strength and smashed the chair into the bottom of the lowest window. The chair shattered into pieces that rained all around me. The window didn’t even crack. Not just covered with wire, it turned out, but reinforced. It wouldn’t break until the temperature in here got high enough to override the pressure treatment, by which time we’d be a charred memory.

  I pulled out the gun and pointed it at the door. I emptied it into the frame and around the handle. Afterward the door looked like shit, but neither tugging or kicking made anything move.

  I became aware that Lydia was standing right next to me. She looked scared but also brave.

  “Come on,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Go where?”

  “Where the key is.”

  Jeffers got to his feet. “Turn your face from her,” he commanded, his voice low and hard. “She lies. He is inside her now.”

  “You should do it,” the cop said to me. “She’s right. That’s where the key is. That’s the only chance.”

  “So why don’t you go down there?” Lydia said. “You’re the cop, right?”

  He went back to banging on the front door. He started shouting, too, to make it look more like he was doing something of substance rather than turning away from the only road that went anywhere but death.

  Lydia took my hand, and I let her lead me toward the far end of the room. Jeffers got there first. He positioned himself in front of the doorway.

  “Every second you screw around just makes it more likely that people are going to die,” I said. “I know very little about your God and his value system, but I don’t see how that’s ever going to be a good thing.”

  “You will not pass,” he said.

  I grabbed his head and threw him aside. I pulled open the door to the basement. “You’ve done enough,” I told Lydia, and put her gently to one side.

  Then I went through the door.

  Chapter 69

  Kristina had her phone out and was on with 911.

  “Fire at a church on 16th,” she said, struggling to keep her voice calm and intelligible. “There are people inside. Please be fast.” The woman on the other end kept trying to getting her to stay on the line, but once Kris knew she’d communicated the information and the urgency she hung up and ran with Flaxon to the church.

  The smell was strong and smoke was curling out of ventilation gaps in the brickwork down near the floor inside the gates.

  “Shit,” Flaxon wailed. “What are we going to do?”

  Maj vaulted straight over the gate. He ran up the stairs to the door on the right, then came back and over to the other side. “Locked,” he said.

  Kris ran back into the street, listening for the sound of sirens and hoping to see a truck—but saw nothing other than the couple that had been at the car down the street, hurrying toward her. With early-evening traffic there was no knowing how long it would take for help to arrive. Could be five minutes. Could be twenty.

  Could be long enough for everyone to die.

  The guy called David seemed to have gotten himself together now, a little. “What’s happening?”

  “The church is on fire,” Kris said, feeling dreamlike. �
��And my boyfriend is inside.”

  There was a muted crash as a shadow came and went against the lowest of the colored panes of glass on the upper floor. John throwing something against it, Kristina guessed, and though it made her feel sick to realize that whatever he’d tried had failed, at least he was still trying things.

  “Can you get inside?” she shouted to Flaxon, who was hopping from foot to foot, desperate to do something.

  “No,” she said. “We climb well. But we can’t just go through walls.”

  Smoke was billowing out of the lower grills; then heat from below starting to build and build. Then there was the sound of eight shots. It sounded like they were coming from close to the right doorway.

  Dawn screamed. Kris listened and heard something being struck near the same position. And a shout of frustration that she knew was John.

  “Has somebody been shot?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, but she wasn’t sure and she could feel herself panicking.

  Maj turned to David. “Tell me,” he said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “What to do.”

  David had no idea what he meant. Maj leaned forward and tapped his finger in the middle of David’s forehead. “Focus. What do you do now? What do we do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So make it up, David. You know the question.”

  “What question?”

  “The only one that ever mattered to you. What happens next?”

  David looked up at the church, thinking furiously. The doors were locked and too tough to break. The windows on the second story were too high and reinforced and someone had just tried to break through them from the inside and failed. Obviously there was an air route into a basement where the smoke was coming from, but they didn’t have the tools to break through, and anyway that was where the fire was. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t …”

  Then he stopped, let himself out of the gate and stepped out onto the sidewalk, looking back at the church. He felt something coming at him, opening the door in the back of his mind.

  “What?” Maj came after him, followed by Flaxon. “What have you seen?”

  “It’s the only thing I can think of.”

  Flaxon saw where he was looking. “The roof.”

  Kristina looked up at the shallow-pitched roof, and then downward, tracing a route down the wall. Ornamental bricks stuck out at irregular intervals. Maybe you could climb that way, if you scrambled up the head-height columns either side of the doorway and then onto the roof above it. Maybe. And maybe you’d fall and die.

  “It’s all I’ve got,” David said. “I’m sorry.”

  Maj ran back into the courtyard. Flaxon followed, looking dubious. Smoke from the basement was curling up the front of the building now. Kris heard more shouting from inside. Maj reached for the column on the left side of the door and pulled himself up, then used both hands to haul himself up onto the roof.

  “But we won’t be able to break through the roof when we get there,” Flaxon said as she scaled the other column, bracing her toes on the outcrop at the bottom and pulling herself up onto the little roof, moving more quickly and with greater surety than Maj. “Even you don’t have the fingerskills for that, do you?”

  Maj shook his head. “There’s nothing else to try. We have to get up there and then see what we can do.”

  “I can do it,” David said.

  “No, David,” Dawn said firmly.

  David turned to Kris. “Keep her back,” he said. “She’s pregnant.”

  He reached for the column by the side of the doorway and started pulling himself up.

  “No!” Dawn screamed. She started to run up the stairs, but Kristina held her arms tight. “Don’t!”

  “Come back and I’ll go,” Kris said, but David had already hauled himself up onto the roof above the doorway and was reaching for the brickwork above.

  Maj climbed quickly, but Flaxon was faster. She moved up the upper face of the church like a lizard, hands and feet reaching out for the bricks that poked out. She was up and over onto the roof while Maj was still ten feet down and David had barely made it halfway.

  Dawn shook Kristina off. “But then what?” she shouted.

  The same thing had just occurred to Kristina. It was all very well getting up there and maybe even breaking through the roof, but unless there happened to be a thirty-foot ladder in the church all this would achieve was a bird’s-eye view of people being burned alive.

  She knew also that John wouldn’t be waiting for the fates to step in on his behalf. He’d be trying to break down the walls of the reality he found himself in, kicking toward some better place on the other side, even if that place didn’t exist, and even if running toward it might bring the end upon him quicker than it might otherwise have done.

  “Please, John,” she prayed, silently, but as deep and loud as she could. “I love you. Please don’t do something brave.”

  David nearly fell, twice. The bricks were cold and wet and he’d realized before he was halfway to the roof that this was an insane thing to try and he just wasn’t strong enough for it. He knew also that he wasn’t strong enough to spend the rest of his life aware that he’d stood on the sidewalk and done nothing, however. He already had too much guilt and regret socked away.

  He reached up with hand after hand and scrabbled for enough purchase under his fingers to feel he stood a chance. He was terrified. His insides were twisted so tightly that he could barely breathe. But when he felt he’d gotten enough traction with his fingertips he pushed carefully up with his right leg, straightening it, until his head was poking up over the roof.

  Maj and Flaxon were standing halfway down, as if being up here was the most natural thing in the world.

  Somehow this made David realize it was only the idea of standing on a roof that was frightening. Apart from the knowledge of what will happen to you if you fall, it’s no different from being on a slope a couple of feet off the ground. The idea felt precarious in his mind, but it was enough to get him moving again.

  He brought his left arm over and reached as far as he could, pushing up with the other leg at the same time … until he could start to haul himself up onto the tiles.

  Maj was stamping at the roof, but nothing was happening. As David pulled himself up far enough that the balance of his weight was over the roof, he realized that wasn’t going to change. He could barely feel the vibration of the other man’s foot striking the tiles, even though he was doing it time after time with all his force.

  Which meant it was down to David. He hauled himself up using his left hand to grab on to the capstone at the peak of the gable. The pitch of the roof was thankfully shallow, designed to make the space inside seem as big and impressive as possible.

  He pulled himself along the tiles toward Maj and Flaxon, using his other hand to scoot himself across the wet tiles. They were slippery and a few were missing. The second time he came across a hole he lowered his head and looked into the gap beyond.

  “Need more than that,” Maj said, shouting against the wind. David saw that he was right. Beyond the hole was a narrow space, then beams and tight-fitting planks of wood.

  Making sure he had a good hold on the capstone, he used his other hand to bang against the boards. They were very solid. Levering off tiles wasn’t going to be enough.

  “Now what?” the girl asked. She’d come over and was squatted down beside him, looking into the hole.

  “What about the other end?” Maj said. “Maybe there’s a window on the other side of the church.”

  “So what? We’re not going to be able to get to it—and even if we can, it’s obviously too high for whoever’s in there to get to, or they’d have tried it already.”

  Maj looked down at David. “This was a crap idea,” he said, not unkindly.

  Then his foot slipped on a broken tile, and he started to fall.

  From below all they saw was a shadow standing at the apex of the roof,
right at the end. The sound of flames in the basement was now clearly audible, and the smoke coming out had turned black and choking. There had been no more noises from inside the building itself.

  Dawn heard sirens and turned to look up the street. She missed the moment where Maj lost his footing, slipped, and started to topple over the edge of the roof.

  She also missed seeing David’s hand lash out.

  Chapter 70

  The other side of the door was a space barely big enough to turn around in, a narrow set of stairs leading down on the left. Within seconds of starting down it was almost impossible to see anything through the smoke.

  I didn’t want to go down there.

  I didn’t see any choice.

  I held my arm up against my nose and mouth, trying not to breathe deeply despite my lungs’ panicky insistence that they needed more air. I felt out with my foot, taking one step at a time. I’d seen the priest throw the key. Surely it couldn’t have gone far.

  Each time I went down a step I carefully swept my other foot across it, listening for the sound of something small and metal moving against wood.

  There was a split-second breeze or change of wind direction and for a moment I could see a little more of where I was—a staircase with a second landing leading down, and below that, reflections of fire on a wall. I thought that I glimpsed something down there, small and dark on the bigger step, and that it might be a key.

  It was enough to keep me going. But for how long and how far? Could I keep going if it got hotter and if I couldn’t see anything?

  I had a heavy urge to give up and turn around. It felt as if there was a voice in my head, pleading with me to stop, to turn around—not a bad voice, I didn’t think it was Reinhart; it felt like someone who had only love for me and wanted me out of harm’s way and for me not to do something dumb.