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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 197: Takano 145
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 62
There were certainly taller buildings in the heart of the city, and in larger cities elsewhere in the country, but after climbing the twelve stories mostly by rope and grapple she sat on the top step to rest a moment. All that practice back in the woods had made a difference, but it was still a lot of work.
Of course, by now most of the people on the upper floors had crowded down the stairs. She made a cursory examination of those upper offices, but fire had broken out in several places, and it wasn t safe for anyone up here. She returned to a stairwell and went down to the eleventh floor, making a similar check before descending to the tenth.
As she was about to descend to the ninth, she heard sounds she shouldn't hear. There was a distant banging punctuated by an occasional muffled shout which was consistent with someone calling for help.
Someone was trapped in the elevator between the floors.
She rushed over to the elevators and using the hook end of her kawanaga pried open the doors. It was a double shaft, and she had opened the wrong door--the car on her side was some distance below, and the sounds were coming from the car above in the other half of the shaft.
"Help is coming," she called, but as yet she was not certain how. It took only a moment, though, for her to realize that it had to come down from the floor above, so she returned to the stairs and rushed up.
She saw a fire station, a glass door behind which were an extinguisher and a fire axe. She grabbed the axe and used it to pry open the elevator door. She then laid the tool in the track to keep the door from closing and examined the situation. The roof of the elevator car was only about five feet below her--about as far down as she was tall--and there was a visible trap door. She could easily jump down, but she was going to need to get back up. On the other hand, she was going to have to lift whoever was in the elevator out of it, so the kawanaga was going to have to go with her.
She dropped from the door to the elevator below, landing as Lauren had taught her. The car shuddered and rocked as she hit it, and the person inside--woman, she thought--screamed, a short startled scream. "I m coming," Tommy called, hoping that would calm her.
It was darker in the shaft than she had anticipated, but her eyes were adjusting and she quickly found the latch to release the trap door. It opened upward, but the car below was darker than the shaft. "Can you see me?" she called.
"No--wait, yes. You re Truth, aren t you?"
"Yes. Let s see if we can lift you out of there. Can you climb a rope?"
"I--I don t know. Maybe."
Yes, there are a lot of things we might be able to do if our lives depended on it--eat ants, for example.
"All right, I m going to lower a rope to you." Hooking the grapple to the frame of the elevator, she dropped the weight into the darkness. "If you can see it, try to climb it."
She felt the rope go taut, and heard the sound of someone struggling and panting. In a moment a woman's face came into view. Stretching out across the roof of the elevator, Tommy reached down and took hold of the back of the woman's blouse, and lifted. She couldn t hoist the woman herself from that position, but she could take enough of the weight that the woman could make the rest of the climb more easily, and together they helped her scramble out to join Tommy on top of the car.
"Halfway there," Tommy said to the panting woman as she coiled up her rope. "Now for our next trick," and she tossed the grapple up into the framing around the door, and pulled. "I ll go first, I think, to be sure it s secure. Then we ll pull you up."
Her arms were getting tired, but she d done this often enough that this short climb was simple. Indeed, she wondered if she could simply have jumped that high, but didn t try. She released the hook, and this time she lowered the hook end.
"Run the rope around your back and under your armpits, and hook the hooks over the rope, then hold on to the rope above that point. Let me know when you're ready."
In a moment, the voice said, "Ready," and Tommy braced herself against the elevator door frame and pulled, lifting the woman up to the edge where once again between the two of them they brought her out onto the floor.
"Are you all right?" Tommy asked.
"I think so."
"Then let's get downstairs and out of the building. Why were you in the elevator anyway? Surely you've been told not to use elevators during a fire."
"I thought it was a drill."
"Oh. Well, it isn t. It's a real fire." She coiled up her kawanaga and hung it back on her belt, and followed the woman to the stairwell. She was going to have to check the other floors, but she was running out of time.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
