“It’s okay, Lea, we probably wouldn’t have recognised a warning even if you tried,” Jack replied.
“We waited to see what would happen as I knew you might be at the other end. I heard a shot then a long blast of a car horn. We sprinted back to the apartment and I still didn’t know if you had survived or were even genuine.”
“Well, here we are. What did you do after that?” I asked.
“Back at the apartment, I started to feel really desperate, and sent another tweet without much hope of reply. Chris had become manic, saying that we were going to die and that our last hope had gone. He wouldn’t eat and seriously considered just wandering the streets to find Mike. We agreed to stay in the apartment, purely because it seemed safer than any alternative.”
“What alternatives did you consider?” Bernie said.
“Not that many really, we were thinking about getting a boat and anchoring in the harbour, or heading to the end of Long Island. But once you replied on twitter, I wanted to hook up in Elmhurst regardless of what Chris wanted to do. I had a map that covered the area and was just about to send you another tweet confirming I was on my way, when the power died. Chris refused to leave at first. I ended up slapping him and shouting that he was risking both our lives by wanting to stay. If he wanted to do something stupid, I told him, he could do it after we had found other people.”
“So he went along with it?” Bernie asked.
“When I asked him what Mike would have wanted, he agreed to leave with me and head to Elmhurst. We didn’t come across anyone while making our way over the Queensboro Bridge, although we did manage to get an automatic each from a crowd of corpses.”
“You know how to use one?” Jack said.
“I have used guns before. An ex-partner had a weird obsession with them and used to take me to a range.”
“And when you crossed the bridge?” Bernie replied.
“We crept along following the directions on my map. When we turned towards the heart of Elmhurst and walked a couple hundred yards, the music started a few blocks away. Chris decided that it must have been you letting us know your location, and that you were guiding us in. Just in case, we checked our guns. I let off a shot by accident.”
“I think we heard that.” I said, it was probably the shot that caused Bernie and me to start running from the scene of the trap.
“We crept up to the parking lot, you know the rest.”
We all sat in silence. While telling us her story, Lea showed she obviously had strength, otherwise, she wouldn’t have made it this far, and the incident in the parking lot when she shot the killer had proved that. Lea had shown no hesitation when the danger became clear.
“So why didn’t you leave the parking lot after the killer shot Chris?” Jack asked. “From what I saw, you just knelt in the same place until Harry arrived.”
“I thought I was on my own. Also, I figured that I’d been fooled on twitter by a killer, and Chris’ death was my fault. I didn’t know what to do next.”
“You know now it wasn’t your fault, and you’re not on your own either. You’re welcome to stay with us,” Bernie said.
We waited for Lea’s response, but she didn’t give one, perhaps she still didn’t trust us. I could understand that. But her options were limited, leaving our group and making her own way would be a lot more dangerous than staying with numbers.
The four of us finished off the bottle of vodka while we decided what we should do in the morning. Bernie wanted to find a camping stove so we could make some hot food. Jack and I were happy to go along with his suggestion, but were a little wary of heading anywhere that would take us around the parking lot. Lea was mostly quiet, but didn’t seem all that eager to revisit the parking lot either. Bernie played the gracious host and offered Lea his bedroom, which she gladly accepted and disappeared, closing the door. Relegated to the living room with us, he took a pillow and blanket and settled on the floor between the couches.
“What do you think about Lea?” I whispered.
“She seems a bit of a loose cannon, we just need to make sure she’s strapped to the deck,” Jack replied.
“I like her,” Bernie said, “if we have Lea with us, then it’s a bit more cover when we are in the open.”
“I agree, let’s sleep on our next moves,” I said.
As the room filled with Bernie and Jack’s snoring, I lay awake and started to think about our future options. Between the four of us, we had a reasonable mobile team capable of getting somewhere safe with readily available supplies. I wrestled with the problem of where to go as I fell asleep.
Early the next morning, I awoke to see dawn through the gaps in the blinds. Bernie was snoring on the floor, and Jack was curled up in a foetal position on the other couch.
I stood up and stretched, feeling a tightness in my thighs from the running yesterday, and then nudged Jack, whispering, “Get up. Let’s go up to the roof for a chat.”
Jack nodded his head and stretched quietly before getting up. Once he was awake, we grabbed our weapons, falling back into habits learned in the army. . We silently left the apartment and started climbing the stairs. We hadn’t had the chance for much of a chat recently, and I wanted to get his thoughts on Bernie, Lea, and our current situation.
As we neared the door to the roof, Jack noticed it was slightly ajar and grabbed my shoulder.
“Stop,” he whispered into my ear, “I closed that door last night when we came down. There’s no way it could have opened by itself.”
“Could it be Lea? We didn’t check the bedroom,” I replied.
“Maybe. Or it could be a killer.”
“If there is somebody up here, they will have heard us coming upstairs.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” he said before he called out, “Lea… Lea?”
There was no reply…
We couldn’t just turn around and go back down the stairs. If our apartment haven wasn’t safe anymore, we needed to know. Jack and I had to find out what was behind that door. If it was a threat, it had to be removed.
I could see through the gap between the doorframe and the door that it was starting to get brighter outside.
“You kick the door open quickly, and cover me with your rifle. I’ll crouch in front of you and go in low so we can both have a shot if needed,” I said.
“Okay, ready?”
I nodded, “Let’s do it.”
Jack kicked the door open and we heard a cry of pain from a male voice as the door bounced back towards us. Bernie was definitely still sleeping downstairs, so the man on the roof must have been behind the door, waiting for us to walk out so he could attack us from behind.
“Come out in front of the door with your hands up, there’s two of us here and we’re both armed,” I shouted.
“I’m armed as well. I promise I won’t hurt you. Throw down your weapons and show yourselves,” a voice shouted back.
“Bullshit,” Jack shouted, then said to me, “let’s just bolt the door and leave the prick locked up here.”
That would mean losing our observation post, but would solve the immediate problem. The door had swung back half way after hitting the man, so I kept low and slowly stretched out my arm to grab the handle. As I did, I looked down at the gap underneath the door and saw the edge of a shoe. The man was standing right up against the door on the other side.
I shifted the Glock into my right hand quickly, dropped onto the floor, and fired through the door. There was a scream of pain and frustration and the sound of a body hitting the ground, as the man immediately sank. I could now see the top of his head around the edge of the door and fired twice again. The first round hit the top left side of his forehead and sent it spinning back. The next round hit him straight under the chin, and I saw red spray appear behind him as the bullet exited the top of his head.