“If they couldn’t get in, how are we going to? Those bars are on the windows for a reason, Luke.”
“I can get us in.”
“How?”
“Kate, I got guns.”
“You’re going to shoot the windows out? What about the bars? I don’t think you can shoot the bars out, Luke.”
“Not those kinds of guns.” He lifted both arms and flexed for her. “These guns.”
She had to suppress a giggle.
Despite his ‘guns’, it still took Luke forty minutes of heavy exertion and a lot of grunting. Using a tire iron they found underneath the back seat of the Jeep, he was able to force one of the burglar bars all the way to one side, until it touched the next bar.
The whole time, Kate stood behind him with his baseball bat, one eye on the streets and the other on the covered windows of the Wallbys and Blockbuster stores in front of them. They had plenty of sunlight and, though she knew it wasn’t the case, the hours felt as if they were draining away at a rapid and unnatural pace.
“How are those guns holding up?” she asked.
“They’re holding, they’re holding,” he grunted back.
He kept at the bars, sweating profusely. Once he’d finally pried the first bar to one side, he went to work on the second, bending it to the other side until he had a big enough hole to fit his thin and lanky frame through. They were lucky the bars only ran up and down the window and not across, too. The idea was to not damage them in the process, so they could be bent back in place later on.
He finally stood back and gave the hole he had created a once-over. It looked too small, even for him.
“Are you sure you can get through that?” she asked. “Maybe if we cover you in butter first…”
He gave her a smirk, then began loosening up. “I’ve crawled through smaller spaces than this.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why did you have to crawl through smaller spaces than this?”
“You know, stuff,” he said, as if she should understand.
He’s fourteen. Of course he’s crawled through places smaller than this.
Luke smashed the window behind the bars with the tire iron and knocked the glass shards away from the frame. He used his hands to pick out small pieces that couldn’t be dislodged and flicked them away.
“You sure it’s safe?” she asked.
“Mostly. I’ll be careful.”
“You’ve done this before, right? Crawled through a window?”
“Nope.”
Crouching down in front of the window, he inserted himself through the bent bars and slithered like a snake through the hole, going in headfirst. She was afraid he might cut himself on some leftover piece of glass and dreaded the sound of him screaming.
Any second now, any second now…
Amazingly, he was halfway through in no time, his head pushing the curtain aside, and grabbing at something inside the pawnshop. With a grunt, he pulled himself all the way in and fell down on the pawnshop floor with a loud thump.
I guess he really has done this before.
“Bat,” he called.
She quickly slipped the bat through the burglar bars. He stood up on the other side and grabbed at the bat.
“I’ll be back in a few,” he said and disappeared from the window.
She picked up the tire iron and went back to watching the parking lot. She heard him rummaging inside the pawnshop behind her, and it took him ten minutes to find what he needed to find. She called his name every minute to make sure he was still alive. She thought he might get annoyed eventually, but he didn’t…or at least, he didn’t tell her to stop. He needed the reassurances that she was still out there, apparently.
Finally, he found a key in one of the drawers behind the counter. He quickly opened the front door and used the key to open the security gate over the door. He stepped aside and Kate hurried in, anxious to finally be indoors and hidden from prying eyes.
The store smelled of old things, but she quickly got used to it while going through the shelves. She busied herself while Luke went outside and bent the bars back into their old shape. Or as close to it as he could get them. He did a mostly good job, and she hoped the creatures weren’t too keen on details. Their lives would depend on it.
He hurried back inside and locked the security gate. Then he snapped all three locks on the door into place one after another. He walked over to the window and stared at the broken glass.
“How does it look?” she asked.
“I guess if we keep the curtain closed somehow…”
“Nail it to the wall?”
“That could work. Or tape it. You find something we can use for that?”
“I saw some duct tape. And these.”
She walked over with a machete and a curved sword, both items with price tags still dangling from their scabbards. They were the most lethal-looking bladed weapons she could find, and just holding them made her weary. The only blades she had ever wielded in her life were kitchen knives. And these looked dangerous, which was exactly what they needed.
Luke looked at the sword and grinned from ear to ear. “I call the Samurai sword.”
“I never would have guessed.”
He took the sword and slid it out of its scabbard. It made a sharp noise and Kate swore it might have hissed as the steel came in contact with air. He took a few steps and made practice slashes with the bladed weapon. She winced, reminding herself that he was just a boy, playing with sharp objects. She chastised herself for not leaving it on the shelf in the first place.
“Be careful,” she said.
“Yes, Mom,” he said between slashes against the air.
She rolled her eyes, but smiled anyway.
CHAPTER 12
CARLY
Carly heard the police siren long before she actually saw the car driving up Richmond Avenue. She watched it slow down in order to weave past a small pileup on the street below her. She glimpsed two people in the front — they had the bulk and shoulders of men — and there were big bundles in the back seats. She tried to zoom in with the binoculars, but by the time she got the damn thing working right, the car was already gone.
They drove past the ESL Language Center building that she was lying on top of and kept going. She briefly considered standing up and trying to flag the car down, but she was still thinking about it when the car vanished into the distance, and she eventually lost sight of its red taillights.
She shoved the binoculars into the backpack and left the rooftop, where she had been perched for the last few hours eating a sandwich and drinking a can of Diet Coke while scanning the horizon for survivors. Back inside, she made sure to lock the rooftop door behind her. The door was made of steel, so it closed with a solid and comforting wham! She turned the tumbler, then tested the door. She had to be sure. It wasn’t just her life at stake, and she had learned last night that they couldn’t break down doors if you locked them. Well, they could if they kept at it long enough — she had seen that, too — but they weren’t going to get through a steel door.
Hopefully.
The ESL Language Center building had four floors, and she jogged down to the fourth, where Vera and Ted were holed up. The three of them had been here since last night, when everything went to hell as Carly and Vera came out of the store with a bag full of coloring books. It was Ted who saved them, pulling them out of the streets when he didn’t have to, with chaos and people dying all around them. Carly had never believed in the whole Good Samaritan thing, but Ted had changed her mind that night.