The Descent of Shadows
311 Words
The red laser dot on Leo’s chest was a steady, unblinking eye.
"Drop it," the man on the fire escape repeated. His voice was modulated, a flat, robotic drone.
Leo didn't drop the folder. Instead, he grabbed the heavy cast-iron skillet and hurled it—not at the man, but at the oxygen concentrator beside his mother’s chair. The heavy iron smashed into the machine’s intake valve.
With a deafening c***k-HISS, the pressurized oxygen ignited against the spark of the machine’s short-circuiting motor. A brief, blinding flash of white fire filled the kitchen.
"Go! Out the back!" Leo roared, grabbing his mother’s arm.
The explosion gave them five seconds of confusion. Leo hoisted Elena into her walker, practically carrying her and the metal frame down the narrow, rotting back stairs of the building. Behind them, the heavy boots of the "Fixers" thundered on the wood.
The stairwell was a vertical tunnel of peeling paint and the smell of boiled cabbage. Every flight they descended felt like an eternity.
"Leo... I can't..." Elena gasped, her face turning a terrifying shade of gray.
"You have to, Ma. Just one more."
They burst out of the basement door into the alleyway. The rain was coming down in sheets now, turning the South End into a world of melting charcoal. Leo looked left—a black SUV was already blocking the mouth of the alley. He looked right—a dead end.
"Over the fence," Leo commanded.
He didn't wait for her protest. He lifted his mother bodily, ignoring the scream of his own strained back muscles, and hoisted her over the chain-link fence into the neighboring yard of a closed-down auto shop. He scrambled over just as a silenced bullet "phutted" into the brickwork where his head had been a second before.
- Writer
