Call Dawson, he told himself.
He didn’t move.
He looked at the blizzard-swept night outside.
He shuddered.
Breathless, Jack and Rebecca and the kids reached the fourth-floor
landing in the brownstone apartment house.
Jack looked down the stairs they’d just climbed. So far, nothing was
after them.
Of course, something could pop out of one of the walls at any moment.
The whole damned world had become a carnival funhouse.
Four apartments opened off the hall. Jack led the others past all four
of them without knocking, without ringing any doorbells.
There was no help to be found here. These people could do nothing for
them. They were on their own.
At the end of the hall was an unmarked door. Jack hoped to God it was
what he thought it was. He tried the knob. From this side, the door
was unlocked. He opened it hesitantly, afraid that the goblins might be
waiting on the other side. Darkness. Nothing rushed at him. He felt
for a light switch, half expecting to put his hand on something hideous.
But he didn’t. No goblins.
Just the switch. Click. And, yes, it was what he hoped: a final flight
of steps, considerably steeper and narrower than the eight flights they
had already conquered, leading up to a barred door.
“Come on,” he said.
Following him without question, Davey and Penny and Rebecca clumped
noisily up the stairs, weary but still too driven by fear to slacken
their pace.
At the top of the steps, the door was equipped with two deadbolt locks,
and it was braced by an iron bar.
No burglar was going to get into this place by way of the roof. Jack
snapped open both deadbolts and lifted the bar out of its braces, stood
it to one side.
The wind tried to hold the door shut. Jack shouldered it open, and then
the wind caught it and pulled on it instead of pushing, tore it away
from him, flung it outward with such tremendous force that it banged
against the outside wall. He stepped across the threshold, onto the
flat roof.
Up here, the storm was a living thing. With a lion’s ferocity, it leapt
out of the night, across the parapet, roaring and sniffing and snorting.
It tugged at Jack’s coat. It stood his hair on end, then plastered it
to his head, then stood it on end again. It expelled its frigid breath
in his face and slipped cold fingers under the collar of his coat.
He crossed to that edge of the roof which was nearest the next
brownstone. The crenelated parapet was waisthigh. He leaned against
it, looked out and down. As he had expected, the gap between the
buildings was only about four feet wide.
Rebecca and the kids joined him, and Jack said, “We’ll cross over.”
“How do we bridge it?” Rebecca asked.
“Must be something around that’ll do the job.”
He turned and surveyed the roof, which wasn’t entirely cast in darkness;
in fact, it possessed a moon-pale luminescence, thanks to the sparkling
blanket of snow that covered it. As far as he could see, there were no
loose pieces of lumber or anything else that could be used to make a
bridge between the two buildings. He ran to the elevator housing and
looked on the other side of it, and he looked on the far side of the
exit box that contained the door at the head of the stairs, but he found
nothing. Perhaps something useful lay underneath the snow, but there
was no way he could locate it without first shoveling off the entire
roof.
He returned to Rebecca and the kids. Penny and Davey remained hunkered
down by the parapet, sheltering against it, keeping out of the biting
wind, but Rebecca rose to meet him.
He said, “We’ll have to jump.”
“What?”
“Across. We’ll have to jump across.”
“We can’t,” she said.
“It’s less than four feet.”
“But we can’t get a running start.”
“Don’t need it. Just a small gap.”
“We’ll have to stand on this wall,” she said, touching the parapet, “and
jump from there.”
“Yeah.”
“In this wind, at least one of us is sure as hell going to lose his