by Blake Crouch
Hold it together. You’ve been through worse. This is for Max. For Andy.
“You aren’t freezing on me up there, are you?”
“No.”
Her words thick in her throat, palms sweating, sliding too easily across the metal rung. There was a tremor in her right leg as she started to climb again. Exhaustion and fear and the adrenaline running out, leaving her muscles shaky.
But she kept climbing.
A freezing drizzle needled the side of her face.
The steps becoming slippery.
Vi looked up. Three more rungs. Almost there.
She pushed on.
Two more.
Then reached up, her right hand clutching the water-beaded railing, and pulled herself onto the catwalk that encircled the water tank.
It spanned twenty-four inches, but at least it had a railing, a flimsy semblance of protection.
A small camera, just out of reach, had been mounted to the water tank.
It aimed down toward where the ladder joined the catwalk.
Violet flattened herself on the cold metal, her heart beating against it. She didn’t want to do it, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking out across the urban wasteland that sprawled beneath her—block after block of derelict neighborhoods. A six-story housing project—black windows, a crumbling playset in what remained of the courtyard. She craned her neck. Abandoned factories loomed in the distance around the other side of the tower. A series of buildings. Brick chimneys, smokeless and soaring into a ceiling of slate. Everywhere, nothing but industrial decay. A ghost town. Only in the far distance, a mile or more away, did she discern the hum of automobiles, and further on, the feeble skyline of the city.
The speaker crackled in her ear.
“Get up.”
Vi wiped the rainwater out of her eyes and got back onto her feet.
“I told you I had something for you, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“That was a lie. Not something. Someone.”
Violet felt a vibration under her feet. She grabbed hold of the loose railing, didn’t like standing upright, the swirl of vertigo threatening.
She staggered back over to the ladder and looked down.
They’d only just started, but someone climbed quickly, with purpose.
“You’re coming up here?” she asked.
“That’s not me. Her name is Jennifer. She woke up here just like you, about an hour ago. Also like you, she’s a new mother. Her daughter, Margot, is sharing a crib with Max as we speak.”
Vi could hear the woman’s footfalls clanging on the metal rungs.
“Why’s she coming up here?”
“Because she doesn’t want her daughter to die. I assume you feel the same way about Max?”
Vi felt a tightening in her chest.
“Whichever one of you isn’t thrown to their death in the next ten minutes can also rest assured their child will be safe a little while longer.”
“Luther, for God’s—”
“Should be fun.”
“I can’t do this.”
“No one’s asking you to do a thing.” Clang. Clang. Clang. “Just stand there for all I care, let her throw you off.”
Violet backed away from where the ladder joined the catwalk.
Still, she had that lilting wooziness in her stomach, the height unnerving.
She leaned against the side of the empty water tank, her hands beginning to shake, listening to the woman approach.
And then the clanging was right there, and she saw hands grasp the railing and a head of dirty-blond hair lifting into view.
The woman climbed onto the catwalk and stood facing Violet. Ten feet away. She was a few years older, early thirties at most, wore a pink tracksuit and had about six inches on Vi. Deep, black bags formed half-crescents under her eyes, her skin molting with old mascara. The drizzle had flattened her hair. She looked sturdy, scrapy, angry, and scared.
“Hey,” Vi said.
The woman just stared, but something was breaking inside of her.
“Oh, I should’ve mentioned,” Luther said, “what with you being a cop and all your training, I gave her a knife. It’s only fair.”
Violet said to the woman, “Let’s climb down. We don’t have to do this.”
“He has my angel.”
“I know. He has my son. But we can’t do this. What he’s trying to force us into.”
“We don’t have a choice.”
“Let’s go down,” Vi said again. “We’ll figure something out.”
The woman shook her head, tears already trailing down her face. She reached back and her hand reappeared grasping a large hunting bowie with a wicked point and a nasty, serrated blade that looked unnatural in her hand, her eyes constantly shifting down to look at it, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she held.
“I’m Violet. You’re Jennifer?”
The woman gave an uncomfortable nod.
“The only way he wins is if we do what he wants. If we don’t go after each other, he has no power.”
The voice in her head said, “Not exactly true, Vi.”
“Jennifer, I used to be a cop. Will you trust me?” Violet edged forward, extending her hand. “Just drop the knife, okay? We’re stronger together.”
Jennifer’s lower lip trembled. “He’s going to kill my daughter.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
“You can’t make that promise.”
Babies suddenly cried through the tiny speaker into Violet’s ear.
She and Jennifer shouted, “No!” in unison, both clutching their earpieces.
“Stop, Luther!”
“Please!” Jennifer screamed.
Vi took another step forward, her head spinning with the tiny, wailing cries.
“Look at me Jennifer!” she shouted.
The woman met her eyes.
“He wants this, okay? Do you understand that?”
“He’s hurting her!”
Jennifer swung the bowie at Violet, who leapt back.
Her impact sent a tremor through the catwalk, the metal vibrating, and Vi had to grab the railing to steady herself.
Her stomach burned. She touched her hand to the front of her tracksuit, and it came away red. The blade had passed through the nylon and cut a shallow streak across her abdomen.
She looked up at Jennifer who seemed stunned at what she’d done, fingering the blood on the knife.
Jennifer’s face broke. “I’m sorry,” she said.
The babies still screamed through their earpieces, and Luther was saying something that was lost amid the cries.
“I have to do this,” Jennifer said.
She stepped forward and Vi stepped back.
They both froze.
Jennifer rushed forward, and Vi rushed back.
Like some terrible dance.
When they stopped again, they were still six feet apart, both panting.
Jennifer faked a step and turned, sprinting in the other direction, disappearing around the other side of the water tank.
Vi stood motionless, listening. She could no longer hear the woman’s footsteps—nothing but the wobble of the railing, the pattering of the rain on the tank.
She could only see several feet in each direction before the catwalk disappeared around the curve of the water tank.
The sound of the crying babies had faded away.
Violet said, “Jennifer?”
She ventured three steps around the tank—nothing.
“Jennifer?”
She never heard the footsteps, only felt a new vibration in the catwalk, turned just in time to see Jennifer charging her in socks, the woman’s face overcome with a sudden ferocious flush, eyes gone cold and determined.
Predatory.
Vi watched the knife moving toward her, everything replaced by a diamond-hard streak of self-preservation.
Twenty-four inches of walkway left little room to parry the oncoming attack, and with Vi a
lready pressed up against the water tank, she simply reacted without thinking, her right hand deflecting the knife thrust, clenching Jennifer’s wrist, and before she realized what she was doing, she’d simultaneously struck Jennifer’s arm above the elbow and jerked her wrist back against the blow.
The woman’s radius snapped and the knife clattered to the metal walkway and Vi drilled her chestplate with a palm-heel strike.
From Jennifer’s charge to this moment had taken the blink of an eye, Vi running on instinct and muscle memory. Vi lunged to grab the woman, her fingertips just missing the tracksuit as the backs of Jennifer’s thighs hit the railing, her momentum carrying her torso over the edge.
Vi caught a glimpse of the heels of her tennis shoes and then the woman was gone but for her fading scream—three and a half seconds of pure, vocalized terror.
She’d never heard anything to rival the sound of a human body slamming into a concrete slab from a hundred seventy-five feet.
A thousand things breaking in the space of a millisecond.
Then silence.
Violet gripped the wet railing, staring down at Jennifer, sprawled far below.
She’d killed before, but they’d been monsters.
That woman was an innocent.
This felt…wrong.
She backpedaled into the water tank and sank down onto the walkway.
“Please don’t hurt her baby,” she said. “Please.”
“You are good,” he said. “You are very good.”
“Will you spare her child?”
“For no reason?”
“I’ll earn it.”
Vi could feel herself coming unhinged, a psychotic refusal to acknowledge what had just happened.
“That could be interesting.”
“Promise me.”
“Head back down. We’ll talk when you reach the ground.”
For several minutes, Vi sat there, unmoving.
The drizzle had become rain and it beat down on her head, a bitter cold beginning to fester someplace deep inside of her.
Andy
On the screen, I watched Violet slowly working her way down the water tower’s ladder. The camera shot came from over a hundred yards away—handheld and constantly zooming in and pulling back to correct the focus. Condensation on the lens lent a foggy overlay to the picture.
I’d heard everything Luther had said. Watched the fight. Seen Violet throw the woman over the railing.
Now the screen went black.
Again, I sat in darkness, the thought crossing my mind that I had just dreamed all of this.
Sleeping was sight and picture and color.
Waking this unending night.
His voice convinced me otherwise.
“She’s amazing, isn’t she?” Luther said. “It must be something to know her. I mean, really know her. Do you really know her, Andy?”
“Whatever you want with Violet, use me,” I said. “I’ll go along with anything you want, but please, let Violet and her son go. They don’t need to be a part—”
“You love her, huh?”
The question more painful than anything I’d experienced sitting in this chair.
Emotion swelling in my throat.
“I owe her,” Luther said, “and still…”
His voice trailed off, and for a moment I could only hear him breathing, and the patter of rainfall on plastic.
Violet
Her feet touched the concrete slab, and despite the horror of the last fifteen minutes, the relief of being off that tower was palpable.
She stared over at Jennifer, fought off a surge of nausea.
Such destruction.
Pointless.
Vi climbed back over the barbed wire fence.
So tired. So cold.
Think, Violet. Think.
She scanned the houses and buildings in the distance.
Nothing moved in the gray, steady rain.
She had Jennifer’s knife hidden up the right sleeve of her tracksuit, the butt of the handle resting in her palm. It had made descending the slippery ladder more difficult, but now she had it, and she prayed he hadn’t noticed.
He was watching her, she was sure of it. Had to figure on surveillance cameras everywhere. Maybe someone helping him.
She could make a run for it, try to reach civilization, but he had her son. Had Andy.
Vi jogged across the road toward a brick building with a fifty-foot chimney on the far end.
Time to get out of this freezing rain.
“Turn left,” Luther said.
Or not.
She veered away from the abandoned factory.
“Now run,” he said.
She accelerated, the shuddering footfalls driving pain through her right ear, where she was beginning to suspect that Luther had stitched the earpiece into her skin.
Otherwise, it felt good to run, the exertion warming her against the chill.
She ran down the street for several minutes before he spoke again, passing ruined automobiles and more rotting houses.
“The housing project. See it?”
“I see it.”
“That’s your destination.”
The building loomed fifty yards away, rising above the oaks whose brown leaves had fallen and become rain-plastered to the pavement.
“What’s in there, Luther?”
Violet crossed the street and stopped out-of-breath where the sidewalk entered the courtyard of a six-story structure that resembled a crumbling L.
“Did I tell you to stop?”
She went on past a collapsed swingset and an overgrown sandbox, its only remnants the two-by-six board frame. A few toys had been left behind—a front-loader, a big-wheel missing its big wheel, plastic green army men scattered in the grass, casualties from some long-forgotten war.
She approached the double-doored entrance which had been leveled years ago, the building’s windows glaring down like a hundred black eyes.
Over the threshold into a darkness that reeked of mildew and decay.
Her wet shoes tracked over the peeling linoleum, and the farther away she moved from the entrance, the darker, more claustrophobic it grew.
Where the lobby intersected with the first-floor corridor, she stopped.
Up and down the hall—pockets of black offset by pockets of dismal light that filtered in from outside.
“Where am I going?” she asked, but no answer came.
She let the hunting bowie slide out of her sleeve and into her hand.
The fear paralyzing, all-consuming.
For a long time, she stood listening.
Water dripped.
The soft moan of wind pushing through one of the upper corridors.
And then…snapping. Cracking.
Woodsmoke.
Violet followed the smell into darkness and then out again.
Daylight passed through the open door of what had been an apartment and struck a wall covered in graffiti.
Clothes and toys and all manner of garbage littered the corridor.
The scent of woodsmoke was getting stronger and now she could see firelight flickering across the wall at the end of the corridor.
“Hello?” she said, and then softer, “Luther, is that you down there?”
Violet came to the end.
In an alcove, she saw the source of the firelight—an oil drum filled with scrap wood burning next to a busted window. Most of the smoke escaped outside, though enough had become trapped to lay down a foggy veil in the room. As she drew near, she could feel the warmth of the fire, and had just noticed the bedroll in the corner under a cardboard box when she heard the crunch of glass directly behind her.