Abigail thought she’d broken her back, but then she managed to lift her head and suck in a breath of air, realized she’d only had the wind knocked out of her. She lay on the stairs on her back, wood creaking all around her, threatening to give. Somewhere above, a man groaned. Dust and snow clouded her headlamp’s triangle of light. Someone said her name. She looked down at her father sprawled a few steps below.
“You okay?” he whispered. She nodded. June wept above them, and Abigail couldn’t determine if the source was grief or pain. She glanced up, saw she’d landed just below the cupola, her headlamp shining into the library, spotlighting the pale, terrified face of June, the woman clutching a bookshelf and standing on the only ribbon of flooring still attached to the struts. With the sky exposed, snow fell into the stairwell column of Emerald House. Abigail lay midway down the third flight of steps. There was a sudden crack, and she watched something break through the ceiling, her light catching on a flash of blue ski jacket streaking past, realized it was Emmett, his body dropping through darkness, crashing into the second flight of stairs, nearly hitting Jerrod, punching a hole through the steps, the second floor, finally slamming into the ground level as June screamed out from the library.
Stu yelled, “Quit moving! You’re gonna break this section of floor, too.”
Abigail shone her light down and across to the next flight of stairs, where Jerrod and Isaiah clung to the middle section, the top half having been severed from the third floor by Emmett’s fall.
Lawrence snapped his fingers. Abigail saw him motioning for her to climb down to him.
She descended carefully, and as she neared him, he reached up, turned off her headlamp.
His mouth pressed against her ear, he whispered, “We’re leaving. Step where I step and keep quiet.” Lawrence stood slowly. The step he occupied creaked. As he and Abigail moved down toward the third floor, Isaiah’s voice rose up from below.
“Stu, where you at?”
“Up here in the library.”
“You hurt?”
“Fuckin ribs are killing me. You?”
“Me and Jerrod’re scraped up, but we’ll live. The other two with you?”
“No.”
“Laaarry?” Isaiah purred his name as a beam of light swung through the debris onto the stretch of stairs where Abigail and her father had landed. “I’m not seeing you and the cute bitch.” A red dot appeared on the third flight of steps. “Sound off, motherfucker.”
Abigail could see the bright bulb of Isaiah’s headlamp a few feet away. With the upper portion of the second flight of stairs destroyed, there was no way that he or Jerrod could reach the third floor, but they could sure as hell see them and shoot. He had only to turn around. Lawrence grabbed his daughter’s hand, whispered in her ear, “Follow me.”
They crept around the stairwell toward the west wing, just a narrow corridor of gray rotting wood that seemed to joggle with the motion of Lawrence’s headlamp, the hall lined with doors, some closed, some ajar, most having rusted out of their hinges and toppled over onto the floor. Fifteen feet in, Lawrence stepped on a floorboard that squeaked. They froze, as if to retract the sound, Lawrence switching off his headlamp.
“That you, Lar?” Abigail felt blind, thought of all the scary movies she’d seen, horror novels she’d read, realized nothing even approached this level of fear. She could have dreamed no better nightmare.
“Tell you what,” Isaiah continued. “You do the smart thing, come on back, all’ll be forgiven. But you run? Better not ever let me catch your ass.”
Movement on the second flight of stairs.
“He’s coming,” Abigail whispered.
“But he can’t reach us from those steps.”
She heard a noise, glanced back. It sounded like quiet microexplosions shredding the floor and the ceiling. “What is that?” she asked. “Is this wing about to collapse?” The little explosions moved closer: one here, two there. When Lawrence flicked on his headlamp and shone it on the floor, they both saw it pockmarked with tiny holes.
“Shit,” he whispered. “He’s underneath us, shooting up through the floor.”
They ran, surrounded by the muffled thunk of rounds passing through the floor and ceiling, decayed wood raining down, the jingle of shell casings dropping on the second floor like handfuls of pocket change, then a pause, followed by an intense thirty-round burst just ahead. Lawrence pulled Abigail through a doorless doorway, pushed her against the wall, the room small, part of the servants’ quarters, boasting only a ruined bed and a wardrobe.
“There’s a stairwell at the end of this wing,” Lawrence said. “We’re gonna take it—”
“But they’re right underneath us.”
“And getting ready to find out that the end of the second floor’s west wing is rotted out. They’ll have to go back to the main stairwell. That’s the only way down for them.”
After another fury of machine-pistol fire, Lawrence said, “He’s reloading. Let’s go.” Abigail followed him back into the corridor, their footfalls noisy on the old wood. She heard someone yell “Fuck!” and wondered if Isaiah had reached the caved-in portion of the second floor. Up ahead, the wing terminated into a sitting area—crumbling furniture and overturned bookshelves grouped around a hearth. Above it all, a chandelier drooped from the ceiling, and through the broken windows, snow streamed in sideways.
Four strides from the sitting area, Abigail’s right foot went through.
“Lawrence!” she screamed, up to her elbows, both legs sticking out of the second-floor ceiling. He sprinted back as the wood under her elbows broke. She dropped, but he had a solid grip around her wrists. Abigail looked down past her dangling feet, her headlamp jolted on, shining through a giant hole. The floor cracked under Lawrence’s knees.
“I’m about to go through,” he grunted, straining to lift her, the machine pistol at work again, ripping through the wood behind Abigail.
“Hurry,” she whispered. During a brief reloading silence, Lawrence pulled her up, and they rolled into the sitting area as a slew of bullets eviscerated the spot where Abigail had punched through. They scrambled to their feet, tracking through blown-in snow.
“It’s over here,” Lawrence whispered, leading her to the northeast corner of the sitting area. “I don’t think he can get a clear shot at us in the stairwell.”