Emergency Hammer

"Again," said Devon.

He was beside me. I don't know when he had crossed the van. He had one hand clamped over my wrist and the other pressed flat against the glass, as if the pane were a living thing he was trying to hold still, and his face, a foot from mine, was white to the lips.

"I can't feel my hands."

"You don't need to feel them. Same place. Hit the same place."

I looked down at the star. It was so small. It was pale and neat and perfect, a tiny diamond in a black pond, and I thought of every movie I had ever seen in which a person breaks a window with one swing, and I hated every one of them.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The sound under the floor was coming faster. It had changed pitch, too, climbing from a dry patter to a thin quick chatter, like a sewing machine run by a child. The sweet smell was thicker. It lay at the back of my throat like a lozenge.

I lifted the hammer.

…

The second blow did it.

I put everything I had into it, and some of what I didn't. I screamed, I think. I know my mouth was open. The steel point came down on the little star, and the glass made a sound I had never heard before, a flat dry crack, like a frozen pond giving under a skater, and from the point of the star a hundred silver lines shot out across the pane, in every direction, in a single instant, until the whole window was a web.

"Yes," said Devon. "Yes. Again."

The third blow went through.

It didn't shatter. Safety glass doesn't. It sagged, a sheet of white crumbs held together by its film, and the cold air of the cemetery came pushing against it from the other side, smelling of wet leaves and pine. A corner bellied inward. Devon yanked off his jacket and wound it round his forearm, three turns, quick as a bandage, and drove his arm into the web with the whole weight of his shoulder.

It went out like a curtain.

The night came in. I had never been so glad of anything as of that rush of cold on my face.

"Go," said Devon. "Out. Now."

"You first—"

"Out, June!"

He took me under the arms and lifted me bodily, as you would lift a child to a high shelf, and I went through the hole headfirst, over the sill, over the crumbs of glass. I felt something bite the back of my left hand, a quick hot line, but I didn't look. I put out my arms. The ground was farther down than I thought, and I hit it on my palms and shoulder and rolled.

…

It was a slope.

I hadn't known. The van had been parked at the edge of the verge, nose to the road, and behind it the land fell away in a long steep bank of dead grass, wet with the first of the frost. I rolled down it the way you roll down a hill in summer, helplessly, with the sky and the ground changing places, until a clump of sumac stopped me, and I lay there on my back with my breath knocked out of me, staring up at the stars.

There was a crash above. A heavy thud and a grunt. Then Devon was coming down the bank, half falling, half sliding, with his jacket in ribbons and his flashlight bouncing on its strap, and he caught me by the collar and hauled me to my knees.

"Run."

"Where—"

"Away."

I don't know how far we went. Ten yards. Fifteen. I ran with my hand clutched to my chest and the grass whipping at my shins, and Devon ran behind me with his hand on my back, pushing, and I heard the tick behind us go from a chatter to a whine, from a whine to a single flat unbroken note, like the tone on a telephone left off the hook.

Then there was no sound at all.

I turned my head.

…

The van was a white box on a black road. It stood in the lamplight with its door shut and its windows dark, as peaceful as a parked car.

Then a thread of white came out from underneath it.

It was thin. It curled along the gravel like a lazy snake, spread, thickened, rose. Another came out beside it. Another. And then, with a muffled whump, as of a pillow struck against a wall, the whole underside of the van erupted in a column of dense white smoke. It boiled up past the doors and the roof, and swallowed the van, and rolled out across the road in a great slow cloud, filling the ditch, the verge, the bank, the sumac, rising toward the lamp until the light itself went out in it.

I put my sleeve over my face.

It wasn't fire. I knew that at once. It didn't crackle, and it gave no heat. It had no smell of burning. It had only that sweet cloying note, burnt sugar, hot and sticky, and when the first breath of it reached me I coughed, and my eyes streamed, and my throat closed down like a fist.

"Down," Devon croaked. "Get down. Stay low. It sinks."

We dropped. I lay on my face in the frozen grass with my mouth against my elbow and my eyes shut, breathing the smell of dirt, and the smoke rolled over us, white and thick and hot, a ghost of a blanket. It went on and on.

I counted. I always count. One, two, three. I counted to ninety before the first thin edge of it began to drift past.

If we'd stayed another half minute, I thought.

I did not finish the thought.

…

It did not kill.

That was the strange thing. I lay there and I thought about it, with my cheek on the cold ground and my heart pounding, and it came to me slowly, as the smoke thinned, that it had not been made to kill. I had seen what killing looked like. I had died in a bathroom with a pillow of black smoke on my face. That smoke had been heavy and oily and had clawed. This was a trick, a toy, a kind of cheap magician's cloud. It was thick enough to blind a man and sour enough to choke him, and it would have laid us out coughing on the van's floor, and left us there for an hour or two, sick, blind, useless, alive.

He doesn't want me dead, I thought.

Not yet. He wants me off the screen.

I turned it over. It was a cold small idea, and it fit. He had no use for a girl on a monitor. He had no use for a girl in a van with a radio, watching a clearing with a pair of sharp eyes, and counting the pines. For four hours I had been in his way. So he had pulled me out of the picture, as you pull a plug.

He has to take me out of the game before he takes the board.

I put my cheek against the ground, and felt, for the first time in all those hours, something I could only call a savage joy.

But I'm out, I thought. And I'm still here.

…

"June."

Devon's hand was on my shoulder. His voice was a cracked whisper. "June, can you hear me? Are you hurt?"

"My hand."

He turned it over under the glow of his flashlight, which he held cupped in his palm to hide the beam. A long thin cut ran across the back of my hand from the knuckle of my first finger to the wrist, and it was bleeding quite freely, a bright dark thread that ran down between my fingers and dripped off the tips. I had not felt it at all. It looked like someone else's.

"It's not deep," he said, after a moment. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wound it round, very tight. "You'll want stitches."

"I want my mother."

"I know."

"He's got her, Devon. He's got her."

"I know." His voice cracked. He bent over the knot, and I saw his hands were shaking. He was twenty-four years old. He had been a policeman for ten months. He had sat in a van for two hours beside a murderer, and handed him a thermos. "I should've seen. I should've—"

"You didn't."

"I shook his hand."

"So did I."

He stopped. He looked at me, and for a moment neither of us said anything, two people sitting in the frozen grass in a cloud of white smoke.

"Dunleavy," he said. "We have to reach Dunleavy."

"There's no radio."

"The car. The horn." He swallowed. "He gave us a signal. In the annex, before we left. He made everybody learn it. You remember?"

I remembered.

…

It had been in the loading bay, with the hearse idling in the lamp. He had stood in front of us, all of us, the two women and Devon and Pruitt, and he had held up three thick fingers like a man swearing an oath. One long. Two short. He said it twice. If any one of you hears that, anywhere, you don't ask. You don't think. It means one thing. It means somebody on this detail is not who they say they are. It means the plan is dead. You drop everything and you go to ground.

One long. Two short.

Pruitt had nodded gravely, with the others. He had said, Understood, Captain. He had smiled at me, over the rest, and said, What a sensible man.

I had a sudden terrible vision of the long bright eyes behind the rimless glasses, listening to the code, putting it away carefully, as you put away a key.

"He knows it," I said.

"What?"

"The signal. He was there when it was given. He'll know when it's sounded. He'll be waiting."

Devon's mouth tightened. "Then it's the one thing he can't take away."

"Why?"

"Because Dunleavy's the only one who can send it. And it's Dunleavy who's going to hear us."

I looked at him. He was right, I thought. It was a very small thing, but it was true. A code you cannot unlearn is still a code. It can be used by the one who made it, against the one who knows it, at an hour of his own choosing. It was only a matter of getting the horn into Dunleavy's hand.

Then I thought of something else.

…

My own pocket was heavy.

I had forgotten it. I'd forgotten it for four hours, through the chase and the fear and the glass. I put my good hand into the pocket of my coat, and my fingers met a small hard shape, plastic, with a rubbery button.

I took it out.

It was a cheap gray flip phone, the kind they sell at the checkout of a drugstore, with a cracked screen and a strip of white tape on the back. Dunleavy had bought two of them that afternoon. He had given one to me and one to my mother, in a paper bag, out of the trunk of his car, and he'd said it in the plain unhurried voice he used for things that mattered. You don't call anyone on these. You don't text. They're a pair. They've been set to the same line, and the line's been left open. It's a string between two tin cans. If she's in trouble, you hear it. If you're in trouble, she hears it. That's all.

Keep it in your coat, he'd said. And don't hang up.

I flipped it open.

The little screen lit blue. A single line of white digits stood on it, a number I didn't know, and beneath it, in tiny black letters, a clock that counted upward.

00:57:46. 00:57:47. 00:57:48.

The call was still running.

I put it to my ear. I held my breath.

At first there was nothing. A crackle, a hush, like wind in a long pipe. Then, small and far and horribly distinct, came the sounds of a place I knew. The creak of a branch. The thin whistle of the wind in pines. The scrape of someone's shoe on stone. And a man's breathing, slow, heavy, relaxed, so close to the microphone that I could hear the soft wet catch of it in his throat.

The other end was still open.

"Devon," I whispered.

He leaned in close. I tilted the phone, and we listened together, cheek to cheek, in the dark.

"Don't talk," I said, so low that it was hardly a breath. "Whatever happens. Don't make a sound."

And I pressed the button for the speaker, and I waited for the world to say my mother's name.