They stepped into the shadowy interior, lit with a couple of streams of light coming from chinks in the warped plywood panels that were supposed to seal the glassless windows. Matt shut the door, peering out through the chopped hole. It gave him enough of a view of the street to show gang members in their green and black Buzzard colors running down the street the escaped prisoners had just left.
“Now they’ll have people ahead of us,” Luc said. “And they have enough people left to begin a house-to-house search.”
Matt turned from the doorway. “We’ll barricade the door to slow them down. While they fool with that, we’ll get out the back.”
They were in the front hallway of the old house. Obviously, a long time ago it had been cut up into apartments. To the right, a flight of stairs rose to the second floor. On the left was an apartment entrance, its door hanging at a drunken angle from broken hinges.
Matt went inside. Once this had been the front parlor, but it had been turned into a studio apartment. A soggy foam mattress squished with rainwater as Matt pulled it aside. The furniture in here had apparently been left as junk, and Matt had to agree with that assessment. Everything was cheap and shoddy. Still, enough of it held together to be potentially useful now. He wedged the rusty metal bed frame against the door. “See what’s in the next apartment,” he ordered as he started pulling a warped chipboard bookcase forward to add to the barricade.
Luc called out, “There’s an old trunk in here that must have been too heavy to carry.”
Matt had joined him, and they dragged the big, moldy leather trunk toward the door. That was when they heard Caitlin gasp. “We’ve got to get out of here — and quick!” She ran back toward them, and Matt and Luc abandoned the trunk.
Caitlin led them up the hallway. This was a larger apartment, and they could see daylight coming from the doorway of a room in the distance. Light also came from a wrecked window on the air shaft, where rainwater had lapped like a miniature lake. The leakage had also done a job on the hallway floor. Part of it had crumbled away, falling into the cellar below. A six-foot hole stood between them and the rear of the house!
Matt stepped toward the hole. The floor gave way sickeningly under his feet. “We might make it with a running jump,” he said.
“Or the impact of landing might take us through the floor and down there.” Luc peered into the shadowy cellar.
What they needed was a bridge, and fast.
“The door to the front apartment!” Matt said. The three of them rushed back to the front of the house, twisting and pulling at the door to free it from its bent hinges.
Maybe the noise carried. Maybe it was just bad luck that Buzzards came to check the house. When the outside door didn’t give immediately, a yell went up. Fists crashed on the old oak panel, and Matt heard more voices outside — the search party must be gathering at the doorstep.
He heaved desperately, and the door came free. “Let’s go!” he hissed, and the three of them stumbled down the hallway with the heavy door.
At the same moment, one of the gangbangers outside decided to try and shoot his way in. Pistol shots echoed down the hall, and a bullet whined off the bed frame in the hastily assembled barricade.
He’s seen too many holos, Matt thought. There’s no lock for him to break.
Even so, other Buzzards followed their gang-brother’s example. Bullets tore through the outer door and the plywood panels covering the windows. Matt, Luc, and Caitlin piled through the entrance to the rear apartment, glad to put a couple of walls between them and the firing line. Then the firing stopped.
“Your barrier won’t last very long against that,” Luc panted as they dragged the door past the abandoned trunk.
“What if they go through the houses on either side?” Caitlin asked. “They could be waiting for us out back.”
“Let’s hope they don’t think of that right away,” Matt said. “One problem at a time.”
Matt and Luc stood on either side of the door. They boosted it forward to cover the hole. Would it work?
Luc turned to Caitlin. “You’re the lightest. Why don’t you go first?”
She simply shook her head.
Luc’s lips went tight. “We don’t have time to argue.” Moving slowly and carefully, as if he were walking a tightrope, he stepped onto the makeshift bridge.
Breath hissed in between Matt’s teeth. He could see the floor sagging at either end of the panel. But Luc reached the far side and continued on. “It’s solid here,” he reported.
“C’mon, Caitlin,” Matt said. “You saw that it held.”
“It sank,” she said in a choked voice.
There was no time for fooling around. Matt stepped onto the door-bridge. He could think of a couple of hundred things that were more fun than that simple seven-foot stroll. Every step seemed to affect the balance of the improvised bridge and its unsteady underpinnings.
He let go of a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding when he reached the far side. Luc had already gone ahead, exploring the rear rooms. Now he came back, dragging a stinking wooden box. “They were books, I think,” he said. “Before the mildew got them.”
Matt’s attention was on Caitlin, who still stood frozen on the wrong end of their bridge.
“Come on — now!” Matt called. “If we made it over, you’ll be okay.”
“I–I can’t,” she choked.
Luc set his burden down. “Cat, come to us,” he said. “We cannot carry you. The floor can’t take the weight.”
She took a baby step forward, then another.
Off toward the front of the house, they heard a splintering crash. “Here they come,” Matt said.
It was as if he’d said the magic words. Caitlin suddenly scooted forward, her arms outstretched as if to balance herself. Although she was lighter than the boys, her sudden, jerky movements put more stress on the bridge.
Matt’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached as he listened to the creaks and moans of rotten wood.
Cat had almost reached the far end — but the bridge was dipping!
“Anchor me,” Luc said to Matt.
Bracing himself on a solid section of flooring, Matt clamped a strong grip onto the back of Luc’s belt. The French boy leaned forward, reaching out to grab the tottering Caitlin’s frantically fluttering hands.
He caught her! Matt pulled backward, dragging all three of them from the soft spot. Their bridge dangled crookedly, just a hair away from collapsing. If they hadn’t managed to get Caitlin off in time…
They heard voices coming down the front hallway. Luc whirled round, grabbed the box of mildewed books, and swept it on to the bridge. The extra weight sent the door panel crashing down into the basement.
Matt was already pulling Caitlin into the rear room, toward the windows.
There was actually glass in the frames. Matt wrestled the window open, then helped Caitlin through.
The building didn’t have much of a backyard. Matt realized that the back rooms had been tacked onto the original structure. There was just a yard or two of muddy, graveled ground and a five-foot-tall wooden fence.
Matt quickly swarmed over, then reached down to help Caitlin up. Luc had caught up with them and was already scaling the boards.
There was a yard beyond the fence, ten yards of weedy, grassy, empty space before they could reach the shelter of the frame house in the distance. Someone had tried to take care of the old building. It had been painted white, with green trim around the windows.