The Meridians(80)

The noises next door grew louder; more insistent.

"What did you write?" asked Lynette.

"I told him that everything he wrote proves that Witten was wrong. Apparently he really disagrees with that statement."

Lynette smiled at him, but the smile was thin and drawn tightly over a face that had been steeped in fear too many times in the past twenty four hours.

Scott turned to Kevin and said, "Explain to me why Witten was right." Then he handed him the keyboard and waited. Kevin immediately began typing, his nimble fingers a blur across the keypad of his notebook computer.

"Now what?"

"Now we leave."

But instead of moving to the front of the office, Scott began moving toward the back.

"What's back there? A bazooka, I hope?" asked Lynette.

Next door, the thumping suddenly stopped. Silence.

" Lynette, come here," whispered Scott from where he was standing. "Bring Kevin."

He watched as Lynette carefully maneuvered Kevin into moving toward Scott by picking up his laptop and, as he continued typing, leading him to where Scott was standing.

There was a sudden slam at the door. Lynette looked back toward the doorway, fear clouding her features. "He's here," she said.

"We've got a little time," said Scott. "The door is steel reinforced, so he's going to have to hit it pretty damn hard for it to get knocked down. And until then...." He gestured behind him, where there was a ladder attached to the wall. It led up to a trapdoor in the roof. "We go up," he said.

Scott led the way, going to the trapdoor and -

(Slam! went the door)

- unlocking it with one of the keys on his keyring.

Getting Kevin to move through the trapdoor was harder than it sounded, for it involved moving his computer slowly along, so that Kevin could continue typing while moving with it, like the computer was a carrot on a string in front of the proverbial donkey cart. Luckily, he was willing to climb the ladder once it became clear that his laptop was going up the ladder, with or without him.

Slam! The door was hit again, this time with more ferocity, as though Mr. Gray knew that his quarry lay behind the door and, sensing its proximity, was going into some kind of a frenzy, like a shark that had scented blood in the water.

Soon the three of them were on the roof of the office building, moving as quietly as possible over the crushed rock that covered the roof, listening to the doorway from the outside now as it slowly began to splinter beneath the not-so-tender ministrations of Mr. Gray. Scott would have commented on the old man's strength if they had not been in such dire straits.

"What about that?" whispered Lynette, pointing at the open door.

Scott slowly removed the padlock from the interior of the trapdoor, then swung it silently closed. The hinges screeched as he did so, and he could feel Lynette and even Kevin freeze at the noise. Had Mr. Gray heard it? Would he abandon his attack on the office door and come looking for some way to get up onto the roof?

For a long moment, no one moved a muscle. Then....

Slam! Mr. Gray pounded at the door again, apparently having either missed the hinges' noise completely or decided to disregard them. Scott tried to time his movements to the next hit by Mr. Gray, and when the door was hit again - sounding like it was going to tear off its hinges at any moment - he slid the padlock through a hasp on the outside of the trapdoor, effectively locking it from their side.

"What now?" asked Lynette in a whisper.

Before Scott could answer, the doorway below finally gave with a noisy splintering sound, crashing inward with more ruckus that Scott would have thought possible. The sound rent the otherwise silent night air like a pair of shears across thick fabric, heavy and final.

"We get off the roof," he whispered back to her.

"Are you crazy?" she asked.

They could hear the sounds of Mr. Gray, slamming through the cluttered office below them. Scott calculated the assassin would need about thirty seconds to make sure that the office was empty. He was sure to see the trapdoor, though whether he would make anything of it or would try to come through it was anyone's guess.

"Would you rather wait here for him to find us?"

As though in reply to his query, there was a thud on the nearby trapdoor.

Then another. Scott groaned internally. It looked like Mr. Gray, a trained killer, had been able to verify the absence of anyone in the office.

So why would he have focused on the trapdoor so quickly?

Then Scott cursed. The bed, of course. When they had come into the office, it had been made up and covered in a thin layer of dust. Even though they had taken care to shake off the bedding before allowing Kevin to crawl in, there would surely be tell-tale signs that the bed had not been used for a long period of time...until tonight, which use would be revealed by the fact that the bedding had been tousled and unmade by the small body of a boy. Surely Mr. Gray would have noticed the fact that the bed was unmade, that there was dust nearby the bed, but none on the bed itself, and have drawn the obvious conclusion, like the three bears in the story of Goldilocks: "Someone's been sleeping in my bed."

"Come on," whispered Scott through clenched teeth, and this time Lynette moved, quickly bringing Kevin with the lure of his computer before him.

Scott led them to the far edge of the roof. It ended in a lip that overhung the office behind his: the office of Mr. Randall, the other P.E. teacher at Meridian High. He quickly pantomimed to Lynette what he wanted to do, then grabbed her hands and lowered her down over the lip of the roof.