Authors: Nancy Kress
Twenty-four
A
W
EDNESDAY
AMY WOKE WHEN
a sprinkler came on over her bed, drenching her.
Smoke filled her nose, mouth, throat, lungs. Now she heard the alarms that, in her exhaustion, she had simply slept through before. The room was hazy with gray smoke pouring from a vent.
“Amy! Amy!” Gran called feebly from her room. Choking, Amy rushed to her room. There was less smoke there.
“It’s a fire! Get out!”
“I—”
“Didn’t you hear the alarm?”
Amy shook her head harder than necessary, trying to clear it. She’d been conscious of nothing except her troubled dreams. She tried to think.
“Get out!” Gran said. She lay collapsed sideways on the bed and on top of the duvet, as if she’d tried to get up and could not.
“I’m not leaving you!” In her wet pajamas Amy rushed to the window, slamming the door to her own room on the way. Seventeen stories below, fire trucks screamed down the avenue, joining those already there. Police cars, more of them than Amy had even known existed, surrounded the building. Beyond them, people huddled in groups as vans arrived to take them away. But something was wrong—other people, some in body armor and some not, were jumping on the vans, throwing rocks at the police, being clubbed and dragged away. Seen from so far up, the scene had the monstrous feel of a battle waged in miniature, as if by human ants.
“It’s not just a fire,” she said to Gran, and was surprised at her own tone. Some switch had turned on in her brain. She felt not panicked or terrified, but coldly rational, as if facing a strong chess opponent. “Those are protesters, and SWAT teams! I think the anti-Pylon people have seized the building.”
“And set it on fire?”
“I don’t know. Most people seem to be out. How long ago did the alarm start?”
“About ten minutes. And someone pounded on the door. I tried . . . I tried to . . .” Gran’s face crumpled.
“I know you did,” Amy said, still in that hyperrational tone she hardly recognized as her own. And yet she did. It was hers, and she was the one going to get them both to safety. Wherever that was.
She ran into the main room of the suite and put her hand at the bottom of the door. Not hot—good. Cautiously she opened the door. No fire in the hallway. No people, either. “Hey!” Amy screamed. “Anybody here!”
Waverly ran into the hall, dressed in a satin bronze robe and combat boots, her hair tumbled on her shoulders. “I just woke up, I took two sleeping pills, I don’t usually but yesterday—there’s a fire!”
Amy wasn’t interested in Waverly’s drug routines. “I think the building’s been taken by protestors. We have to get out.” Already Amy was running back inside her suite. Waverly followed.
“Protestors? Then come on!”
“I can’t leave my grandmother here!”
Amy darted into the bedroom. Gran looked at her with the sternest expression Amy had ever seen on that face. She said, “I told you to leave. Don’t worry about me. Don’t you think I know how close I am already to the end? Amy, do as I say!”
Amy ignored both words and expression. She hooked her arm under Gran’s armpit and tried to ease her to her feet. Gran screamed in pain and Amy put her back on the bed. “I’m sorry, Gran, I’m sorry! But I have to carry you—”
“You can’t. The elevators won’t work in a fire, either. I told you to go and I mean it!”
“No!”
A sound behind her made Amy turn. Waverly was pushing a room-service cart into the bedroom. On it were dishes of half-eaten food: steak, salad, juice. With a single swipe of her arm Waverly sent it all crashing to the floor. “I didn’t feel like seeing anybody for dinner last night. Come on, let’s get her onto this.”
Amy stared. Waverly repeated, “Come on!”
With two of them, they were able to lift Gran from both sides and lay the shrunken, light body on her side on top of the service cart. Amy had recovered her wits after the shock that Waverly—
Waverly!
—was thinking of someone besides herself. Amy said swiftly, “I’m going to make phone calls. Go in the bathroom and soak the towels in cold water, all of them, and put them on the bottom of the cart just . . . just in case.”
“Got it,” Waverly said.
Amy found her cell and punched in 911. A voice said, “Nine-one-one. State your emergency, please.”
“I’m in the Fairwood Hotel and three of us are trapped on the seventeenth floor.”
A tiny gasp on the other end of the line—were operators supposed to do that? The operator said something to someone at her end, and a different voice, male and authoritative, came on the cell. “You’re on the seventeenth floor of the Fairwood?”
“Yes! We’re going to go down the stairs to—”
“You can’t. Protestors are occupying the first four floors, at least according to our latest information, and they’re holding some hotel personnel hostage. They’re threatening them with death if their demands aren’t met. Listen to me carefully: There is a room on the sixth floor, where three armed men have barricaded some hotel guests and are prepared to defend them if necessary. Room 654. The fire is only on the top floors, and all guests were evacuated from there—why the hell weren’t you?”
“We were asleep.”
The man swore, and Amy didn’t think that 911 operators were allowed to do
that
, either. He said, “The elevators won’t work in a fire. Go down the stairwell and get to Room 654 as fast as you can. The—”
Amy hung up, put the cell on the cart beside Gran, turned to Waverly, and told her what 911 had said. “Ready?”
Waverly, pale under her sunlamp tan, nodded. Gran had stopped arguing, from exhaustion or futility. Amy pushed the service cart into the deserted hall, Waverly steadying Gran’s body on top of it. Even out here the fire alarm didn’t sound very loud to Amy.
Waverly made a face. “They need a new alarm system. It can’t—”
Amy said, “What was that?” A noise even more muffled than the alarm but distinct:
pop pop pop
.
Waverly said, “Gunfire. We shoot—my family shoots—and it’s gunfire.”
We shoot
. Amy pictured a genteel party of skeet shooters aiming at clay birds, but the next minute came a harsher rattle she recognized from too many movies: automatic weapon fire. The silly, genteel picture vanished. Why was her mind throwing up this stuff now?
The girls reached the stairs. Waverly yanked the door open and Amy pushed the service cart through. The stairwell seemed to be free of smoke. “I’m going to take the bottom half, and you take the top. We have to hold it as level as we can, OK?”
“Wouldn’t it be simpler if we just carried her between us?”
“It hurts her. And we’re not going down all eleven floors,” Amy said, panting. “There’s an old unused freight elevator, with a locked door at the bottom, that Rafe showed me, but it only goes up as far as the fifteenth floor because they added on to the building and modernized the elevators. We can—”
Amy’s cell rang. They had reached a turn in the stairwell where the cart was once more level, and Amy peered at Gran. Her eyes were closed, her body still. Frantically Amy felt for a pulse. Still there, and it seemed strong. Maybe Gran had just passed out from pain. The cell rang again and Amy grabbed it. Maybe 911 had something more to suggest—
It was Violet. “Amy, where
are
you?” Amy could hear shouting somewhere around Violet but muffled, as if through a door.
“Waverly and I are bringing Gran down to Room 654.Nine-one-one said it was safer because some cops were guarding hotel guests in there and—”
“The protestors took Room 654. A man just told me. Everybody there is dead.”
Amy drew a sharp breath. Panic surged toward her, but then the coldly rational part of her brain was back in control. “OK,” she told Violet. “Yes. Where are you?”
“Outside. We—”
“OK. Yes. Gotta go.”
Waverly said, “Amy!”
“All right, Waverly, we have to keep moving. Change of plan to—”
“Amy! Down there! It’s Rafe!”
Amy squeezed around the cart to see the bottom of the flight of stairs. Rafe lay on his side, arms outstretched to claw at the steps above him. Blood streamed from his head.
She darted down the stairs. He was breathing. “Rafe! Rafe!” She slapped his face, because it was what she’d seen done in the movies and because she couldn’t think what else to do. He didn’t respond.
A phantom leaped into Amy’s mind, only it wasn’t a phantom but a memory: Rafe and she laughing at a café on Fenton Street. She seemed to see the picture from a great height, the way she’d seen the protestors attacking the building. She felt in his pockets and another picture sprang into her mind: Lynn in the alley scenario, stealing the wallet of the supposedly homeless man.
This was no scenario. This was Gran’s flash point.
Waverly called, “Is he alive?”
“Yes. Unconscious.”
“He was coming
up
. Trying to get to you, I’ll bet. What are we—”
Trying to get to you
. “We’re going to take them both with us.”
“With us
where
?” There was a hint of Waverly’s haughty, I-know-the-world-and-you-don’t superiority in the question, but only a hint.
Amy hooked her hands under Rafe’s armpits and dragged him down the steps to the sixteenth-floor landing. He was surprisingly light; she would have had trouble moving Cai or Tommy. Amy raced back to the landing. “I’m taking this end of the cart. Ready?”
She and Waverly got Gran’s cart to the landing. The bottom of the stairwell door, which Amy did not open, felt hot. Was the fire on this floor? If it was on the fifteenth . . .
Don’t think about that until you have to
.
On the way down the next landing—
carry the cart, try not to jostle Gran, go back for Rafe, try to not jostle him
—Waverly started to cry. “Amy, I don’t want to die!”
The sight of tears on that usually cold face was so startling that Amy momentarily stopped dragging Rafe. She said fiercely, “We’re not going to die!”
“There’s smoke coming under that stairway door! Not much, but smoke!”
“Then we’ll go down to the fourteenth floor. We can do this!”
Waverly didn’t answer. But her tears disappeared and she lifted Gran’s cart with as much straining care as if her own grandmother lay on it. A question flashed into Amy’s mind: Would Kaylie have done as much?
Her cell rang. She ignored it.
The stairwell door to the fifteenth floor was indeed hot. The fourteenth was not, but when Amy cautiously opened it, wisps of smoke drifted through. She was going to close the door when more automatic gunfire sounded below them, terrifyingly close.
Waverly said, “I think they’re on the next floor down!”
“Quick, get Gran and Rafe through!”
They got both the cart and Rafe’s limp body onto the carpeted hallway of the fourteenth floor. “This way!” Amy said. She dragged Rafe.
Waverly followed with the cart. When they started choking with smoke, they draped wet towels over their faces, Gran’s, and Rafe’s. Sweat poured off Amy; the corridor was hot. Waverly’s satin robe clung to her body in wet patches. Both their hair straggled limply into their eyes.
Waverly stopped. “Tell me where we’re going or this is it for me!”
“Next door,” Amy panted. “Linen room. The elevator is in the back and—”
The linen room door was locked.
Finally panicked, Amy rattled the door. The smoke was becoming thicker now, and the gunfire below them resumed. An old childhood game came back to Amy, one she and Kaylie had played:
Would you rather eat a worm or a spider? Would you rather kiss a boy’s thing or a dog’s ass? Would you rather fall off a cliff or a building?
Would you rather be shot to death or roasted to death?
She rattled the door again. Waverly said, “Stand back.”
“It—”
“I said stand back!” Waverly shoved Amy out of the way. Then she poised herself by the door, drew back one foot in the combat boot, and kicked the door handle. The door flew open.
Amy gaped. “You can—”
“Karate. I’m a brown belt.”
“Then in the alley scenario—”
“I was wearing
heels
, Amy. And a Vera Wang! Come on, let’s go.”
There was less smoke in the small linen room. Shelves along three walls held sheets, towels, blankets, duvets, and an immense rolling vat of dirty bedclothes. The fourth wall consisted mostly of the iron grate of an ancient service elevator.
Amy said rapidly, “Get Gran into it. Rafe explained that this elevator isn’t even on the electrical system—it’s so old it uses counterweights. If it’s not locked—”
It wasn’t. Amy tugged at the grate and it creaked open like something from a horror movie. When they had crowded in, Amy pushed the Down button and squeezed her eyes shut. What if the mechanism was so old that the cables were rusted through or something—but no, in that case the thing would have been locked. The hotel didn’t want lawsuits from its cleaning staff. The maids must still use this elevator.