The Blackbird

Twenty

Grofield awoke thinking he was an astronaut. Tendrils of confused dreams ran mistlike through his mind, an image of himself as an astronaut floating in his bulky suit outside the ship, and when he opened his eyes he saw he was really flying. A concrete floor was way below him, he was flying just under the ceiling, flying along...

He started, recoiled, slapped the back of his head against the floorboards above his head. That concrete was real down there! For one awful second he felt himself failing, and he struggled his hands free from his coat, shoving them out ahead of him, splay-fingered, in the instinctive movement of breaking one’s fall.

But then he saw the concrete was getting no closer, and he felt the ache of something pressing against his chest, something else digging into the front of his thighs. He kicked his feet loose from where they’d been wedged, and the knees complained at the movement, shooting pains up and down his legs.

Good God, what a mess. Comprehension was returning to him, coming in with the awareness of his various aches and pains, and a great black feeling of hopelessness washed over him, leaving him bitter and pessimistic.

Look where he was. Hanging from the goddamn ceiling, stuck up here like a butterfly on a drying board. And if he were to try to lower himself to the ground he’d be right in plain view of those two bastards in the hallway.

Could he stay here? No, dammit. In the morning they’d be searching for him, they’d probably be coming in and out of this garage. There were a couple of skimobiles down there, little open scooters with skis in front and treads in back, and they’d probably use them to look for him tomorrow. Sooner or later someone would look up and see him.

But what else could he do? He’d bought himself an extra few hours of life by getting in here, but he’d slept them away. He was warm now, but even more stiff than before. And just as hopeless.

He shifted position, trying to find some fairly bearable way to lie here, but there wasn’t any. In moving around, though, he banged his elbow against the motor, adding one more pain to the catalog. He gave the motor a dirty look, and then gave it a more careful look.

An electric motor. If he could cause a short-circuit in that and blow the fuse, maybe the lights in here would go out, and give him a shot at dropping unseen to the floor. Then he could hide in with the equipment down there and see what happened next.

It was better than just hanging around, so what the hell. He hunched himself a little closer to the motor, till he was nearly wrapped around it, and gave it some close scrutiny.

That should be it, right there, a pair of wires that emerged from a box in the ceiling and attached to screws on the top rear of the motor. If he could cross those wires — without electrocuting himself — the motor and some fuse somewhere should both go blooey.

So what he needed was metal. Any on his person? None, naturally. He looked around on the motor for anything that looked both loose and unessential, but there wasn’t anything. The framework he was sharing with the motor also had no usable spare parts. He looked up, mostly to give God a long-suffering look, and saw nails sticking out of the floorboards above his head. Here and there throughout the room nails had been driven in from above, maybe something to do with partitions up there, and some of them stuck down more than an inch on the underside.

One of the nice long ones was just within reach. Grofield took off his right glove and reached out and up, grasping the nail between thumb and forefinger. He pulled, slowly bending the nail this way. It didn’t want to come, but he was insistent, and when he had it at about a forty-five-degree angle he pushed it away again. Then pulled it back, pushed it away, pulled it back. The longer he did it the easier it got, and the nail became warm against his finger and thumb, and then hot, and then just about too hot to touch, and then at long long last it snapped, and he was left holding a piece of nail about one and one-quarter inch long.

Now was the tricky part. He didn’t want to go through all this clever stuff and then zap himself. Being extremely careful, he rested the sharp point of the nail against one of the two screws holding the wire on the top of the motor. He had the point nested in the groove of the screw, and angled the screw so it would, with any luck, fall over onto the other screw. He bit his lower lip, held his breath, moved his feet up so they were against the iron strip down there and he was ready to drop the instant darkness fell, he licked his lips, swallowed, let the nail go, it fell on the other screw, and the door began to open.

Would nothing work right? He was so exasperated he almost asked the question aloud. First he’d tried to ride the garage door to the second floor and wound up hanging from the first-floor ceiling. Now all he’d wanted to do was blow one stinking fuse, and here came the door again.

Also one of the guards. Grofield heard him running down the corridor in this direction.

It was irritation more than anything else that guided what he did next. He grabbed his chest-support iron strip in both hands, kicked loose from the other strip, swung down like Tarzan out of a tree, and as the guard came running in Grofield kicked him in the face with both feet.

The guard did a very interesting thing. While his feet proceeded to run up an imaginary hill, his head fell backward, so that for one insane instant he was lying horizontal in midair, a good four feet off the floor, as though he’d been left there by an absentminded magician. But then Grofield’s tired hands lost their grip on the length of iron, he sat on the guard’s stomach, and the two of them fell to the floor, the guard breaking Grofield’s fall.

The machine gun, the machine gun, the machine gun. The guard had come in toting the thing at port arms, and it had gone flying somewhere when Grofield had turned violent. Now Grofield scrambled around in a frantic circle on the unconscious guard’s stomach, looking for it, and saw it just hitting the floor a little past the guard’s feet. He lunged for it, got it in both hands, rolled over onto his back, stared down past his feet at the doorway and the corridor, and saw the guard down there just spinning around to see what the racket was.

Grofield showed the machine gun but didn’t fire it, hoping to avoid unnecessary noise and bloodshed — he might want that mackinaw — but the guard didn’t feel the same way. He fired a quick burst, but he made the mistake most people make when firing at something below them, and the bullets zipped over Grofield’s head, skinned the concrete behind him, and bounced out into the snow.

Oh, all right. Grofield squeezed the trigger, the gun in his hands chattered, and the guard down there jolted backward over the two chairs and crumpled up on the floor.

Grofield rolled to his right, got to knees and elbows, and was stuck there for a while. He couldn’t go any farther until he let go of the machine gun. Then he could push his torso upward so that he was kneeling on the concrete beside the unconscious guard, facing the open doorway. The door was just snicking into place in the open position.

Grofield looked out at the cold darkness. He could see two of the other buildings, with fewer lights lit now. Both of them were a good distance away. Had the firing been heard? Two short bursts, both indoors, they probably hadn’t been. In any case it was a chance he would have to take.

And here came the door. It had opened all the way, stopped briefly, made clicking and grinding noises, and now it was closing again. That was nice.

Grofield leaned carefully forward and picked up the machine gun and used it as a crutch to get himself to his feet, getting all the way up at about the same time the door was getting all the way down. He stood there leaning against the machine gun and watched the door shut. It made clicking and grinding noises. It started to open again.

Oh, damn it to hell. Grofield looked around in exasperation, and an A ladder was leaning against the wall to the right. He went around a skimobile and a small dozer, wrapped his arms around the ladder, and staggered back with it. He had a great deal of trouble opening it, and a great deal of reluctance climbing it, and during that time the door just kept opening and closing, being on its fourth round trip when he finally started up the ladder.

Talk about signals. Anybody glancing casually out a window in any of those other buildings would see the yellow doorway constantly contracting and expanding, contracting and expanding, and sooner or later it would occur to somebody to send an army over here and find out how come.

He got up the ladder just as the door was coming up again, but then he didn’t want to touch the nail with his hand so he hurried back down again and found a crumpled cigarette pack in the unconscious guard’s mackinaw pocket. He carried them up the ladder as the door was starting down again and used the pack to push the nail off the screws. It rolled off the motor entirely and plinked onto the concrete.

Grofield stayed on the ladder, watching the door mistrustfully. It scooped out and down, it closed, it clicked, it stopped. Grofield smiled.

He climbed down the ladder and went over to check the guard he’d kicked and sat on, and he was completely out, though breathing. And he was wearing fine-looking leather boots, knee-high.

It was the first time in his criminal career that Grofield had stolen the shoes from an unconscious man. It made him feel like a Skid Row mugger, but this was no time for professional snobbery. He removed the boots and the socks underneath them, and then took off his own cold wet shoes and socks. Sitting on the concrete floor, he used the guy’s shirt to dry his feet, then put on the long woolen socks and slipped his feet into the boots, smiling in almost drunken delight at the discovery that they were fur-lined.

They fit. A little big, maybe, but that was better than the shoes he’d been wearing, which had been a little too small to begin with and hadn’t improved by being soaked. The guard’s mackinaw was more practical than Grofield’s overcoat, so he made that switch too, then picked up the machine gun and walked down the corridor to see what the other one looked like.

He was dead. Grofield took his machine gun, but kept away from the body. On the floor near the overturned chairs, though, he found fur-lined caps and gloves and four more clips of ammunition for the machine guns. He carried these back to the garage and put them on the floor there, then took the guard under the armpits and dragged him into the corridor and into an empty storage cubicle to the right. He went back and got the laces out of his shoes and used them to tie the guard’s ankles and wrists together. Then he shut and locked the door and went on to investigate the rest of the building.

It was beautiful. All the supplies were stored in here, food and drink, cleaning supplies, cans of gasoline and oil, light bulbs, everything. He found a can opener, opened a can of beef stew, and ate it cold, with his fingers.

For the half hour after that he was very busy, searching in room after room, picking out the things he thought he might want, carrying them to the garage and leaving them on the floor there. When he was finished he had assembled canned food, waterproofed matches, gasoline, blankets, and a flashlight. He then pulled one of the skimobiles over and began loading it up. It had two seats, one behind the other, and he loaded the equipment onto the rear seat and the floor, lashing it all on with rope, everything but one machine gun and the flashlight. He checked the skimobile’s gas tank, and it was full. He pulled on his gloves and was ready.

There was another button on the inside wall, beside the door. Grofield pushed it and the door slid up and he rolled the skimobile out into the snow. He pushed the outside button to shut the door again, then started the skimobile’s engine, shifted into forward, and the little snow scooter obediently snicked off, gliding over the snow he’d had so much trouble with before.

He took a long curve around to the right, away from the cluster of buildings, and then just went straight. From time to time he’d look over his shoulder to be sure he was still headed away from the lodge, but otherwise he squinted into the faint starlit darkness ahead, traveling over rolling snow hills, all alone, without even trees around to keep him company.

If only he knew what the North Star looked like, he could do his purposeful traveling right now, but he was no navigator. He’d have to wait until the beginning of dawn. As soon as he saw where on the horizon the light first appeared he would have a good approximation of which way was south. Until then, travel would be pointless.

Except to keep clear of the people at the lodge, of course. That’s why he was headed outward now. He could be going due north for all he knew — he hoped not — but the important thing was that he was going away. It would be morning before they could really begin to track him, and by then he’d be on his way south, clear of that crazy bunch forever.

Ken would still be a problem, of course, but a problem that would keep for a while. Sufficient unto the night, etc.

After a while he stopped. The last couple of times he’d looked back he hadn’t seen their lights at all, there were too many intervening snow dunes. He should be far enough away now to be safe until dawn.

He’d stopped in a low spot, protected from the slight icy breeze. He got two of the blankets, lay them down on top of one another in the snow, stretched out on top of them, and rolled himself in them, covering himself completely from the bottom of his feet up to his nose. His fur cap was pulled down low, covering ears and forehead, and he lay on his side, curled up slightly, and waited for morning.