Reamde - Страница 65

But now those chemicals were dribbling down into their apartment through bullet holes, and the dribbles were on fire.

Marlon stared in fascination at a puddle of burning acetone that was forming on a pile of magazines. Then it penetrated his awareness that the other guys, the younger ones, were looking at him wondering what to do.

“Zombies,” he announced, and turned toward the nearest window.

The windows along the front of the building had shallow balconies projecting no more than a meter from the wall; these were fully caged in iron grids as a security measure, but some of the grids had swing-out hatches. These they kept padlocked. But one of the outcomes of their zombie-attack planning sessions had been a decision that the keys to those padlocks should be hung on nails, far enough inside the grids that no burglar could reach them, but close enough to be easily found in the event of a panicky departure (a little more realistically, they were worried about being trapped inside the building in the event of fire). There were three hatches, three padlocks, and three keys. Marlon noted that one was already in use by a member of the group, so he grabbed his closest roommate by the arm and pushed him over to another and made sure he understood what to do. Then Marlon proceeded to the third, which was in the kitchen, and took the key and unlocked the padlock and swung the hatch open.

He stuck his head out the window. It seemed a long way down to the street. A van was parked down there — the gangsters’ ride? Never mind. Incredibly bad things were happening upstairs — fragments of glass and plaster were raining down right in front of him — and his apartment was on fire. Younger da G shou, boys he felt responsible for, were queuing up behind him. He debated whether he should be the last one to depart, like a captain on a sinking ship, or should lead them forth like a sergeant going into battle. He decided on the latter approach. Turning his back to the grid he leaned back, stuck his head out, reached up, got a grip on the bars, and swung out into the open. Then he got his feet on the bars beneath him and crab-walked out of the way, making room for the next guy.

EVEN DOWN IN the basement, the gun battle had been shockingly loud from the get-go; but it actually kept getting louder. Zula, relegated to infuriating uselessness by the handcuff and her inability to pick it, could only stand there and wait for something to change.

Think, Zula.

Did skinny teenaged Chinese hackers have a lot of automatic weapons lying around their apartments?

If so, were they so skilled at using them that they could actually put up that much of a battle against a crew like Sokolov’s?

Peter had gotten himself free. Seeing this, Zula turned toward him, expecting that his first move would be to cross the floor and begin work on her handcuff. She even rotated her wrist into a more convenient position for him.

He did not approach.

“I’d better see what’s going on,” he said, after a silence. A silence that had gone on for too long. He’d had too much time to think during that silence.

“Peter?” she said. Standing there with her wrist poised in what she’d hoped would be an inviting position, she felt like a girl in a prom dress, being stood up by her date.

“Just going to scope it out,” he assured her.

He had that same look about him, the same tone of voice, as the night they had driven back from B.C. He was in full dodging mode.

“Whatever is going on up there,” Zula said, “it has nothing to do with hackers. This is something bigger than that.”

“Back in a sec,” Peter said, and walked to the base of the stairs. He hesitated for a few moments, unable to meet her eye. “Whatever,” he muttered. He hunched his shoulders and began walking up the stairs.

MARLON COULD SEE four other da G shou clinging to various grids like spiders, looking for ways down. There were only three left in the apartment.

Moving around this way was not difficult. At least 50 percent of the building’s frontage consisted of grids just like the one Marlon was hanging from. The only aspect of this that was remotely problematic was finding ways to make the transition from one grid to the next. In many cases, this was made considerably easier by other features that had been attached to the outside of the building: awnings, brackets for external airconditioning units, bundles of cables, plumbing, downspouts, and quasi-European architectural bric-a-brac, cast in concrete.

Looking straight up, Marlon could see the bundle of wires that ran above the street to the building across the way. He could clearly make out the blue cat-5 cable that he and his partners had added to it when they had moved in. If he could climb up to it, he could shinny across the bundle to the opposite building. That seemed unnecessarily risky, though, when he could just climb down.

The window above him, on the fifth floor, exploded and showered him with glass. Marlon closed his eyes and bowed his head and let it rain down all over him. Then he began moving sideways as fast as he could, because the glass breaking was not just a one-time event: someone was up there systematically demolishing the window with a hard, heavy object. Risking a quick look up, he glimpsed that object and recognized it as a rifle butt. He moved sideways as rapidly as he could. His roommates were emerging from the same hatch he had used and looking his way; their instinct was to follow the leader. Marlon waved them furiously in the other direction, making significant glances up at the flailing rifle butt, and they quickly took his meaning.

People were screaming down on the street. He ignored them.

A shot sounded directly above him, then another, each one threatening to knock him loose with its shock wave. Metal flew, and he understood that the lock on a window grille had been shot out from the inside. Not knowing what this might portend, he began moving faster, more recklessly, and in a few moments reached the building’s corner. Below him, a narrow side street plugged into the large one that ran along the front. One floor below, an awning had been constructed sufficiently far in the past that the corrugated metal was thoroughly rusted and holed. Which was a good thing; he’d have slid off a new roof. This one would afford plenty of friction and numerous handholds. Marlon used the window grids to descend to that level and then used an airconditioner bracket and a downspout as handholds to make the move around the corner and get onto that awning. Following that horizontally for about ten meters he came to the midline of the building’s side wall, which was marked by a vertical column of small windows that shed light onto an internal stairway. Running parallel to that was a vertical cable bundle, very thick and dense, with many handholds. Marlon sank his fingers into it, got a solid grip, and then planted his shoes against the brick and began to walk down the side of the building like a human fly.

As he was passing the window on the second floor, he nearly lost his grip. A face had appeared briefly in the window, so close that he could have reached out and touched it had a dirty pane of glass not been in the way. It was the face of a white man, round, heavy, dark hair slicked back, the skin flushed with excitement. It was only there for a second. Then it disappeared as the man proceeded down the steps to the floor below.

But even through the glass and above the noise, Marlon could hear the man bellowing a single English word: “YOU!”

Curiosity, for Marlon, had now become a more powerful force than self-preservation. He’d been planted in one location for a few moments and now turned his attention back to the wire bundle, looking for his next set of handholds. He wanted to get down to the level below and see who YOU was.

But his attention was drawn by renewed movement in the window: another face, dimly seen through the dirt on the window, descending the stairs, rounding the turn at the landing. But this one was different in several ways. To begin with it was a dark-skinned face, something rarely seen in these parts. A couple of the other da G shou had mentioned seeing a black man in the building’s upper hallway, and Marlon had made fun of them for watching too much hoops on television. But there was no denying that Marlon was now seeing a black man, and a fairly tall one at that. He was carrying a rifle that Marlon recognized, from video games, as an AK-47. But unlike the first man, he was moving carefully, even furtively.

Rounding the turn on the landing, the black man turned his back to Marlon, descended a couple of steps, and crept to a halt.

Marlon had remained frozen through all of this, not wanting to draw notice by making any sudden movements, but now he let himself down so hastily that he lost his grip and found himself briefly dangling by one hand before he was able to regain his grip and plant his feet again.

Coming in view of the first-story window, he saw the first man, the big white fellow, standing with his back to Marlon, confronting another white man who had apparently been coming up the stairs from the basement. This second man was young, slender, with longish hair and a heavy beard-shadow. His facial features were difficult to make out, but it was obvious from his body language that he was in a state of terror so advanced that he had become physically unstrung. He was leaning back against the wall of the stairwell as if getting that extra inch of distance from the big man would somehow improve his situation. He had turned his head down and to one side and was holding his hands up in front of him.