Break You

The woman’s radius snapped and the knife clattered to the metal walkway and Vi drilled her chestplate with a palm-heel strike.
From Jennifer’s charge to this moment had taken the blink of an eye, Vi running on instinct and muscle memory. Vi lunged to grab the woman, her fingertips just missing the tracksuit as the backs of Jennifer’s thighs hit the railing, her momentum carrying her torso over the edge.
Vi caught a glimpse of the heels of her tennis shoes and then the woman was gone but for her fading scream—three and a half seconds of pure, vocalized terror.
She’d never heard anything to rival the sound of a human body slamming into a concrete slab from a hundred and seventy-five feet.
A thousand things breaking in the space of a millisecond.
Then silence.
Violet gripped the wet railing, staring down at Jennifer, sprawled far below.
She’d killed before, but they’d been monsters.
That woman was an innocent.
This felt...wrong.
She backpedaled into the water tank and sank down onto the walkway.
“Please don’t hurt her baby,” she said. “Please.”
“You are good,” he said. “You are very good.”
“Will you spare her child?”
“For no reason?”
“I’ll earn it.”
Vi could feel herself coming unhinged, a psychotic refusal to acknowledge what had just happened.
“That could be interesting.”
“Promise me.”
“Head back down. We’ll talk when you reach the ground.”
For several minutes, Vi sat there, unmoving.
The drizzle had become rain and it beat down on her head, a bitter cold beginning to fester someplace deep inside of her.
  Andy  
ON the screen, I watched Violet slowly working her way down the water tower’s ladder. The camera shot came from over a hundred yards away—handheld and constantly zooming in and pulling back to correct the focus. Condensation on the lens lent a foggy overlay to the picture.
I’d heard everything Luther had said. Watched the fight. Seen Violet throw the woman over the railing.
Now the screen went black.
Again, I sat in darkness, the thought crossing my mind that I had just dreamed all of this.
Sleeping was sight and picture and color.
Waking this unending night.
His voice convinced me otherwise.
“She’s amazing, isn’t she?” Luther said. “It must be something to know her. I mean, really know her. Do you really know her, Andy?”
“Whatever you want with Violet, use me,” I said. “I’ll go along with anything you want, but please, let Violet and her son go. They don’t need to be a part—”
“You love her, huh?”
The question more painful than anything I’d experienced sitting in this chair.
Emotion swelling in my throat.
“I owe her,” Luther said, “and still...”
His voice trailed off, and for a moment I could only hear him breathing, and the patter of rainfall on plastic.
  Violet  
HER feet touched the concrete slab, and despite the horror of the last fifteen minutes, the relief of being off that tower was palpable.
She stared over at Jennifer, fought off a surge of nausea.
Such destruction.
Pointless.
Vi climbed back over the barbed wire fence.
So tired. So cold.
 Think, Violet. Think. 
She scanned the houses and buildings in the distance.
Nothing moved in the gray, steady rain.
She had Jennifer’s knife hidden up the right sleeve of her tracksuit, the butt of the handle resting in her palm. It had made descending the slippery ladder more difficult, but now she had it, and she prayed he hadn’t noticed.
He was watching her, she was sure of it. Had to figure on surveillance cameras everywhere. Maybe someone helping him.
She could make a run for it, try to reach civilization, but he had her son. Had Andy.
Vi jogged across the road toward a brick building with a fifty-foot chimney on the far end.
Time to get out of this freezing rain.
“Turn left,” Luther said.
 Or not. 
She veered away from the abandoned factory.
“Now run,” he said.
She accelerated, the shuddering footfalls driving pain through her right ear, where she was beginning to suspect that Luther had stitched the earpiece into her skin.
Otherwise, it felt good to run, the exertion warming her against the chill.
She ran down the street for several minutes before he spoke again, passing ruined automobiles and more rotting houses.
“The housing project. See it?”
“I see it.”
“That’s your destination.”
The building loomed fifty yards away, rising above the oaks whose brown leaves had fallen and become rain-plastered to the pavement.
“What’s in there, Luther?”
Violet crossed the street and stopped out-of-breath where the sidewalk entered the courtyard of a six-story structure that resembled a crumbling L.
“Did I tell you to stop?”
She went on past a collapsed swingset and an overgrown sandbox, its only remnants the two-by-six board frame. A few toys had been left behind—a front-loader, a big-wheel missing its big wheel, plastic green army men scattered in the grass, casualties from some long-forgotten war.
She approached the double-doored entrance which had been leveled years ago, the building’s windows glaring down like a hundred black eyes.
Over the threshold into a darkness that reeked of mildew and decay.
Her wet shoes tracked over the peeling linoleum, and the farther away she moved from the entrance, the darker, more claustrophobic it grew.
Where the lobby intersected with the first-floor corridor, she stopped.
Up and down the hall—pockets of black offset by pockets of dismal light that filtered in from outside.
“Where am I going?” she asked, but no answer came.
She let the hunting bowie slide out of her sleeve and into her hand.
The fear paralyzing, all-consuming.
For a long time, she stood listening.
Water dripped.
The soft moan of wind pushing through one of the upper corridors.
And then...snapping. Cracking.
Woodsmoke.
Violet followed the smell into darkness and then out again.
Daylight passed through the open door of what had been an apartment and struck a wall covered in graffiti.
Clothes and toys and all manner of garbage littered the corridor.
The scent of woodsmoke was getting stronger and now she could see firelight flickering across the wall at the end of the corridor.
“Hello?” she said, and then softer, “Luther, is that you down there?”
Violet came to the end.
In an alcove, she saw the source of the firelight—an oil drum filled with scrap wood burning next to a busted window. Most of the smoke escaped outside, though enough had become trapped to lay down a foggy veil in the room. As she drew near, she could feel the warmth of the fire, and had just noticed the bedroll in the corner under a cardboard box when she heard the crunch of glass directly behind her.
Violet spun around and the first thing she noticed was the smell—rancid body odor laced with booze. She stumbled back, her heart in her throat, couldn’t see anything in the semidark but the shadow of this foul-smelling person advancing toward her.
“I have a knife,” she said.
Her back touched the wall. Nowhere else to go.
Stood there clutching the knife and watching as a filthy man in layer upon layer of tattered clothes stepped into the gray light that filtered in through the window behind her.
He stopped when he saw the knife.
Vi could hear the rain striking the pavement outside and the fire hissing in the oil drum and nothing else.
The man’s face was all but hidden under a wild beard, but his stark blue eyes shone through the tangle, staring her down.
“What are you doing in my house?” he said.
“Your house?”
“My house.”