Chapter 11:My Kids!
945 Words
Andrew led the three brothers back to the mouth of the alley and told them to hold position. Danny had barely stopped shaking since the reunion and Joel was pressing his torn sleeve against the scrape on his forearm more out of nervous habit than medical necessity. Marcus was the quietest of the three, which in Andrew's experience meant he was either the most composed or the closest to the edge. He kept watch on him peripherally.
"Stay here. Stay silent. I'll be back inside ten minutes." He held up a hand before any of them could object. "Don't move. Don't engage anything. If something comes around that corner and it isn't me, get back to the station steps and wait."
He didn't give them time to argue.
He moved deeper into the network of alleys running behind the precinct block, the M4 up and ready, stepping around debris and overturned bins with practiced quiet. The darkness thickened as the streetlight influence faded entirely, and Andrew clicked on the penlight he'd pocketed at the pharmacy, holding it alongside the barrel of the carbine the way he'd been trained.
The beam cut through the fog in a narrow white column.
He heard it before he saw anything. A dull, irregular banging — not frantic, not rhythmic, but the kind of desperate intermittent noise made by someone who had been making noise for a long time and was running low on the energy to keep doing it. Metal on metal. Somewhere ahead and left.
He followed it to a recessed service door set into the back wall of what looked like a shuttered restaurant. The door was steel, heavy, secured from the inside. And arranged in a loose, mindless semicircle in front of it were three zombies, drawn to the noise the way moths find light, pressing and pawing at the door's surface with that horrible patient persistence.
As Andrew's footsteps reached them the nearest one turned first. Then the other two, heads rotating in that slow, wrong way that he was beginning to recognise as the moment before they committed.
All three started toward him simultaneously.
He gave them no room to close the distance.
Three shots. Measured, unhurried, deliberate. The M4 handled it cleanly and the alley returned to stillness in under five seconds. Andrew stepped over the nearest body without breaking stride and approached the steel door.
He knocked twice. Firm but not aggressive.
"Hello." He kept his voice low and level. "My name is Andrew Callahan. I'm a police officer with the fourth precinct." He paused, letting that land. "The three that were outside your door — they're down. All of them. It's clear out here. You can come out."
Silence from behind the door.
Then the sound of something being shifted — furniture, by the weight of the scraping — and a latch being worked open with hands that weren't entirely steady.
The door opened three inches and stopped, held by a security chain. A pair of eyes appeared in the gap, red-rimmed and hollow with exhaustion, scanning the alley beyond Andrew with rapid desperate sweeps before finally settling on his face. On his badge. On the M4 slung at his side.
The chain came off.
The door swung open.
The woman came out first and she was already crying before she'd fully crossed the threshold, hands pressed against her mouth, shoulders caved inward with a grief that had clearly been building pressure for hours. She was small, maybe fifty, still in what looked like a work uniform beneath a man's jacket that had been thrown over her shoulders in a hurry. Behind her came her husband — taller, silver at his temples, the particular grey pallor of someone who had been running on pure controlled terror and was only now allowing his face to reflect any of it.
The woman's eyes swept the empty alley and the tears came harder.
"My kids," she said. The words came out fractured, barely holding their shape. "I couldn't — we couldn't get to them. We heard the screaming and we ran and I couldn't —" She stopped, pressing her hands harder against her mouth. "I couldn't save my kids."
The father put a hand on her shoulder but his own jaw was working silently, eyes bright. "We've been in there for hours," he said, voice stripped of everything except the bare facts. "We thought we were going to die in there. We thought —" He stopped. Recalibrated. "We thought the children were gone."
Andrew stepped toward them and kept his voice calm and deliberate, the same tone he'd used a hundred times at a hundred different crisis scenes, because some things translated regardless of how unprecedented the surrounding circumstances were.
"Mr and Mrs Crews." He waited for their eyes to find his and hold. "Danny, Marcus and Joel are alive. All three of them. Not a scratch between them." He paused, letting that information travel from their ears to somewhere deeper. "They're waiting outside the fourth precinct station house right now. Two blocks from here. I left them there myself less than ten minutes ago."
The mother's legs nearly went.
Her husband caught her with both arms and held on, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all. The silence in the alley was total and the woman's crying shifted register — losing the jagged desperate quality it had carried before and becoming something softer, something that was almost relief finding its shape for the first time.
"All three," the father said quietly, looking at Andrew over his wife's head.
"All three," Andrew confirmed. "Let's get you to them."
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