Dead Men's s Boots

I didn’t scream, exactly, but my bellow of pain was on a rising pitch: I think we’re probably just talking semantics.

This time, all the doors along the corridor opened and everyone on the whole floor came out to see what all the noise was about. Well, all except two. My neighbours stayed behind their own closed front door and went right on calling each other obscene names at the tops of their voices. They probably had a quota to fill.

And as I sat there staring into the darkness of the lift shaft, the asinine, obvious thought echoed in my head: well, fuck, that was close.

But it was followed by another thought in a different register.

All right, you bastards, you called it.

Let’s dance.

5

I took the stairs three at a time, limping only slightly, until the last flight which I cleared in a couple of frenzied bunny hops.

In the block’s front lobby, just to the right of the door, there was a full-sized red fire extinguisher. Red means water, so the damn thing weighed a good forty pounds. I hefted it in both hands, kicked the door open and walked out onto the street.

The blue van was still there. I trudged around to the front of it and peered in. The light from a street lamp overhead shone full on the glass, so all I could see was a couple of dim, more or less human shapes inside. But one of them, the one in the driver’s seat, gave a visible start of surprise as he saw me hefting the fire extinguisher. Maybe in the dark he mistook it for a bright red field mortar.

That’s wha Fextt it became a second later when I flung it at the van’s windscreen.

It didn’t go through – not quite – but it made a noise like a roc’s egg hitting a concrete floor, and the entire windscreen became instantly opaque as the shatter-proof glass gave up the ghost and sagged inwards, transformed into a lattice of a million fingertip-sized fragments.

The driver and passenger doors slammed open simultaneously, and the two men leaped out onto the street, howling with rage. They were young and they were fast.

When it came to handling themselves in a fight, though, their education had been sadly neglected. The first guy to reach me, the one coming from the passenger side, threw a punch that he might as well have put in the post with a second-class stamp on it. I sidestepped and kicked him in the crotch. He folded in on his pain, his universe shrinking to a few cubic inches of intimate agony.

By that time the gent from the driver’s side had come to join us.