Off Season - Jack Ketchum [56]
“Now hurry,” he said. She stood away from the dresser, and Nick felt the sharp impact as outside they rammed the door again.
“One more thing,” he said. She turned and he saw that she was close to tears. As it dawned on him what he was going to say to her, so was he. “You’re all that’s left now,” he said, “and I love the hell out of you. Always have. You and Carla together. Be safe, Marjie.” He felt her lips brush his own and then she was at the window.
He watched her edge her head and then her right arm out the window and then the left arm and shoulder, then reach up for the roof. He saw the thin arms strain as she pulled herself outward inch by inch, resting first on her buttocks, then her thighs and then, agonizingly, on her calves—until her knees cleared the top of the window and finally she had one foot on the windowsill and then the other. She stood poised there a moment and he saw her ease her weight down over the ball of her foot to her toes, scraping them slowly and carefully along the sill and then down the side of the house. He essayed a grim smile. She was handling this sensibly and cool-headedly. She was a damn fine smart woman. If any of them deserved to get out of this alive, she did.
He saw her swing free of the window and heard her gasp with the sheer effort of hanging on. In a moment her body was steady. Then suddenly she was gone.
For Marjie the fall seemed to last forever. She tried to breathe but it was impossible—it was as if she’d forgotten how. Her lungs seemed to want to expel air even though she’d commanded them to draw it in. She knew she was not falling right, that her balance was slightly off somehow. Images slammed home through her mind with a physical force. Falling on her back; the sickening snap. Falling face down, arms ludicrously, uselessly splayed in front of her. Falling headfirst onto macadam she knew was not there, bleeding in a crumpled heap.
The house seemed to move closer and closer to her, as if it were the old house falling and not she, or as if it toppled along with her and would fall directly over her where she landed, crushing her. She saw those grubby little children standing over her broken, crippled body.
Were her knees bent as Nick had said they should be? It was hard to tell. She felt that any voluntary movement on her part now would destroy her precarious balance and send her tumbling head over heels to the ground. She had bent her legs as she let go of the roof: she knew that. She would have to trust to luck that they’d stayed that way. In her imagination she saw Nick following her down, falling into a slippery pile of gore that had once been her body. All this she saw in less than a second before she hit the ground.
Then there was a jarring in her ankles and a sudden sharp pain in both feet and her knees slammed hard against her chin, drawing blood from somewhere inside her mouth. At the same time her buttocks came down with shuddering force, her lungs yielded their contents in an audible rush, leaving her gasping for breath, and small dancing lights in a wall of solid darkness fell like a sudden screen before her eyes. She had the beginnings of a tremendous headache. But she was down. She was alive and knew she was unbroken. She felt a moment of wild elation.
Then just as her vision cleared, she sensed the children around her.
Nick had seen them seconds earlier, and he was nearly on the roof by now. The roof was his option. The hard part had been getting out the window. For a terrible instant it had seemed that his right shoulder would never fit through. He brought his elbow down across his stomach and forced the shoulder downward and in as far as possible, and then found the widest angle to the window and slipped the shoulder through. His wounded leg was throbbing miserably. Ignoring it, he reached up for the shingle roof and heaved