A face appeared in the opening. Ruhi felt like the easiest target in all of D.C. The guy’s gaze followed Candace rounding the top of the stairs. Ruhi was glad the man wasn’t the shooter.
“Go back inside,” Ruhi screamed at the older woman as he resumed his sprint up the stairs. But she had figured out the threat on her own and was hobbling into her apartment.
Ruhi was sure he was dead if the mob broke down the door. This was much more anger than the worst animosity that he had experienced after 9/11. And the guy who had his face in the opening had glimpsed where he was headed.
“This way,” Candace yelled as he reached the top of the stairs.
He ran into her apartment. She threw a bolt lock into place in less than a second. Then she raced to what looked like a jewelry box and pulled out a 9-millimeter Beretta, matte black and wholly menacing. While he watched, she popped the clip, checked the load, and jammed it back in. Then she shocked him further by pulling two spare clips from the “jewelry” box.
“Over here,” she said, setting up behind an antique oak armoire.
She was rapidly turning Ruhi’s gallant notions of rescuing her on their head. He couldn’t have been more grateful. Guns? He wasn’t raised with guns. But he was fortunate, he realized, to have ended up next to a farm girl who appeared more than competent with semiautomatic weaponry. Maybe that’s what they did on dates out there in farm country — went shooting. Who knows? Rural America could have been Pluto, as far as he was concerned.
“The first time someone touches that door,” Candace vowed, “I’m putting a bullet through the top of it. They do it again, I’m lowering my aim. These babies penetrate.”
She reminded him of those Korean grocers in Los Angeles, back in the ’92 riots, who had saved their stores by fighting off mobs of looters with carbines. Ruhi had been a kid, but he remembered the video like it was yesterday.
“I thought you just got here from Indiana,” he said. She looked and sounded like she’d been running a crew where times were tough and gunplay plentiful. Which, as it turned out, was true:
“From Indiana via guard duty at the embassy in Kabul.”
“No kidding?”
She nodded, but her eyes were on the door because someone was smashing the hallway fire extinguisher through the top panel, and gunshots plowed into the lock. But you needed more than a couple of bullets to knock out a strong bolt.
As soon as the red canister reappeared, she fired, as promised, into the lintel. But a half second later, someone bashed an even bigger hole with the extinguisher, and a hand came through the opening, searching blindly for the handle. They heard hellacious shouting and swearing in the hallway and pounding on the door.
Candace shook her head and rested her shooting hand on the edge of the armoire.
What?
Ruhi was sure she’d lost her nerve. He reached for the gun, figuring one of them needed to pull the trigger.
“No!” Candace snapped.
“Sorry.” He backed off.
“Stop,” she yelled toward the door, “or I’ll shoot you.”
The threat didn’t discourage the guy — or he failed to hear her amid the pandemonium. He tried the handle, and then groped blindly for the lock. A second later, he found it.
Candace squinted and fired twice. The first bullet grazed his arm; the second tore through the back of his hand and buried itself in a thick horizontal board in the middle of the door.
The guy’s screams and profanities filled the room. He tried to jerk his arm out of the opening, catching his sleeve on a jagged edge of shattered panel long enough for Ruhi and Candace to get a good look at the wound. It was a couple of inches below his wrist. Then his hand disappeared and they heard the mob thundering down the stairs, shouts and threats receding as they raced away.
Candace immediately rushed to the side of the door, holding her pistol in both hands with the muzzle pointed to the ceiling. She wheeled and aimed through the opening. Ruhi braced himself for the worst. She held her fire.
“You’re not going out there, are you?” he asked.
Candace shook her head. “Not right now.” She never moved her eyes from the opening when she spoke. Her soft countenance had vanished, replaced by a rigid, determined look. Now Ruhi had no difficulty imaging her performing guard duty in Kabul. Or leading a platoon in Afghanistan’s notorious Korangel Valley, for that matter.
Who is she?
“Is there any way I can help?” he asked.
She shook her head. “But I can’t spend the night in this place. Look at that.”
Candace nodded at the ruined door. Blood splatters darkened the area near the handle. Big drips spotted the hardwood floor.
“You’re more than welcome to stay in my place.”
She gave Ruhi a skeptical look that he had seen on the faces of other women.
“I don’t mean that,” he protested. “I’ll sleep on my couch.”
“I’ll consider it,” she replied.
But she was still staring at the hallway, as if she didn’t believe it was actually empty.
“Get off me,” Emma mumbled. “Get off me.”
It felt like Payton’s mouth was pressing down on her — again. On the sidewalk! And there were sirens, but when she opened her eyes it wasn’t Payton at all. It was blurry, but she was pretty sure an African American guy was giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Except he wasn’t using his lips, not directly. He had some plastic thing over them.
Whoa. What’s going on?
“What are you doing?” she managed as the plastic thingy fell away.
“You’re going to be all right, young lady.” Now the guy was picking her up and moving quickly with her in his arms.
All right?
That’s when the pain returned — with a vengeance. Her eyes and the insides of her nose and mouth felt burned. So did her lungs.
Just as she took inventory of her agony, she was flopped onto a gurney with folding legs and shoved like a pizza into the oven of the ambulance.
A sweaty white guy dripped on her as he placed an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose, and offered the same solace as the African American: “You’re going to be all right.” Drip-drip. Except he added, “Hang in there.”
Hang in there? Emma’s thoughts were a muddle, but Hang in there? Didn’t that really mean that you might not hang in there? You might frickin’ die?
She didn’t want to die, but passing out right about now would be really nice because her throat and nose and eyes hurt like hell.
Emma glanced to her left and saw that she wasn’t the only injured one in the ambulance. Sitting strapped onto a jump seat was a skateboarder from her homeroom. He was holding his arm, which was bent kind of funny, and looked like he was in grievous pain. He’d wrapped his other arm around his board, as if worried that one of the paramedics would make off with it. His good hand held a phone. He tried it, shook his head, then turned his gaze to Emma. His eyes skipped down her body quickly, growing big as Dunkin’ Donuts.
Why? she wondered.
Tentatively, she reached down and found her short skirt hiked up to her hips.
Oh, no. My panties.
And not just any underpants; that was the really embarrassing part. She’d been in such a rush that she’d worn some funky old ones she’d found under the corner of the bed: Dora the Explorer. They were a joke. A joke! Last Christmas her mom had given them to her as a stocking stuffer.
The humiliation. The scandal. Dora the Explorer underwear — in high school! Emma could have screamed, but it hurt too much. She tried to wriggle her skirt down. Couldn’t manage it. But a female EMT, whom she hadn’t noticed, leaned into view and gave her hem a businesslike tug. The guy from homeroom looked away.