The Yellowstone Conundrum (57 page)

 
The last of the scumbags who had been tricked into going to the escalators had been thoroughly beaten around the head and shoulders by the volunteers standing on either side of the top of the escalator; one critically. There were broken Molotov cocktails on two of them; however one gangster had two remaining in his oversized trench coat that were intact.
Muy buen.

 
“Move all this back to the entrance door, except for these two,” Ray instructed. The FriendsShop was back on rolling canisters. “Diane, you OK?”

  
“OK, boss; like I tell you, we have a job for you,” she smiled.

 
“John, can you get these scumbags up and out of here?  Maybe into the auditorium; tie ‘em, gag ‘em; hit ‘em hard if they wake up and try to talk. I mean, hit them hard!   They were here to kill us and burn the building. And, we’re not out of the woods yet. I have to get down and help the second floor. Diane, here’s what I want you to do.”

  Although they weren’t out of the woods, they were definitely out of the panties. Naked went the 22-year old again; pants and thong down to her ankles, shirt ripped, undershirt torn, no bra because there wasn’t much to cover. 

 
The stairwell door opened and out rushed as motley a crew as you’d ever put together in one place; Susan the Soccer Mom from Lynnwood, James (42) and Charlotte (40) Smith from West Bend who were starting a five-day vacation that morning with plans to circle the Olympic Peninsula, all ready to take the ferry Wenatchee back to Bainbridge Island; fortunately were late and got stuck in downtown traffic when the earthquake hit. If they’d been on time they would have been at the ferry terminal along with the sixty or so cars ready to go west across the Puget Sound; and would have seen the tsunami up close and personal; they would also have been very, very dead. Jim and Charlotte were fifth generation “benders” and had no truck with asshole punks. The fourth member was Gerri Greeley, 56, semi-homeless from the Cherry Hill neighborhood on the east side of I-5 near Swedish Medical Center. She managed to keep clean and didn’t beg; the library was her home during the day, a God-send if ever there was one. Like Ray, Gerri treated the library as her building. Although rumpled, she made sure she didn’t offend by cleaning herself in the bathrooms on her “route”.

 
The four of them burst out of the door yelling at the top of their lungs;
GET OUT OF HERE! THIS IS OUR BUILDING!  STOP THAT! GET OUT OF HERE!

  The one punk who was just standing around picking his nose while the big dog tried to amputate Hard-On’s arm, stood there slack-jawed as four middle-aged strangers came roaring out the stairwell in an attempt to rescue Molly, not knowing if there were ten thugs on the other side of the door or not. Jim and Charlotte went after Mycah Jarimyah Jackson, whose mother, an obvious schoolteacher candidate in Bible Studies, had won the fifth grade spelling bee before she started dropping babies, including Clunkhead Dickhead.  

 
The four plus Molly plus Marmaduke then were face-to-face. Marmaduke let go of Hard-on, aka Wayne Clark, and went after Second Groper just as Susan barreled into him, knocking him back on his ass; the thick-legged Mom started thrashing him with her tiny fists while Marmaduke chomped his left leg at the knee and began to do the Bite and Shake.

 
“Run!” Susan shouted to Molly, pointing to the stairwell.  Small, nearly naked women hold little value in a fight; Molly stumbled toward the stairwell and shouted “It’s me!” as she opened the door; as in don’t hit me with a computer monitor.

  On the third floor, Ray sprinted toward the Fifth Avenue staircase which was on the north side of the auditorium over where the Friends of the Library cube and coffee shop used to be; old-time library folk would sometimes give directions to the third-floor Fiction as being next to where the Friends cube used to be; which, if you’ve ever been to Costa Rica, is the way all directions are given; where do you live? Fifty meters north, two hundred meters west of the white church that burned down six years ago.  Oh, OK.

 
Opening the stairwell door Ray could hear nothing but chaos below; shouts and curses, noise from banging things.  He was also now in a new level of darkness. Looking down the stairwell there was a pinpoint of light somewhere up ahead. He wanted to go faster but was limited by his cargo; pad-pad-pad-pad-pad-pad his steps made sounds as he hurried down the stairwell, getting to the second floor landing just in time to hear Mandingo threaten to stick his pole so far up that it would poke out somebody’s nose.

 
Yeah, well—good luck on that one
.
See how you like this one, bozo
.

 
Out of breath, Ray gently pulled out one of two remaining firebombs that were intact.
Oh, shit
.  His heart pounded in his chest.

 
“I hope one of you ladies smoke.” No matches, no Zippo, no Bic. “I need a light.”

 
Silence.

 
“I’m trying to quit,” said one, her voice quivering, handing Ray a simple lighter from AM/PM.

 
It never hurts to be lucky.

 
“Thanks, give ‘em everything you’ve got.”

 
The Fifth Avenue Stairwell Protection Agency began to throw everything they’d accumulated down the steps, aiming for around the corner for maximum wall effect of the shattering glass.

 
“OK, now inside,” he ordered softly.

 
Ray took three steps down the stairwell, to the point where he could see the light from Mandigo’s Bic as he slowly made their way up the steps; he could hear their breathing. Ray lit the rag fuse, damp with kerosene, amazingly intact considering what had happened, and arched it downward, it clanked against a wall, and shattered.

 
No sense staying for the parade. Ray ducked into the 2
nd
floor.

 
The noise of the explosion in the enclosed stairwell startled him.

 
Ray started to shake “No, no, no!  No! God-damn it--no!” He could feel the PTSD symptoms returning—current time and Fallujah time melding together. The screams in the stairwell were terrifying as the four West Side Mobb members were roasted. The screams, people burning and dying—just like when an IUD hit a supply truck

  In the stairwell Mandingo saw the bottle out of the corner of his eye; saw it shatter against the outside wall, and before he could turn around was engulfed in kerosene.  The bottle exploded, sending a billion shards of hot glass in the small area; by instinct, they found the door, and came crashing back into first floor;
get it off me get it off me get it off me
as black skin was roasted like a hotdogs left on a grill too long.

 
The four men, seconds from death, went screaming through the lobby, skin and clothes on fire; human torches. They managed to make it near the ESL area before collapsing: one-two-three-four on the floor. The smell was--unique.  Behind them, the stairwell was filled with acrid, black smoke; making it virtually unusable. 

  Back on the second floor, Ray and The Tiger Ladies started across the second floor to the Fourth Avenue stairwell and ran into Molly, butt naked but for shoes and socks who was hustling back to see if she could help the Fifth Avenue stairwell.

 
“Well, you don’t see that every day,” Ray shook his head.

 
“They’re in trouble!” Molly blurted, out of breath.

 
In the stairwell the noise from below reverberated; the stairwell was littered with PC and office junk; Ray carefully made a path through the junk to the door, and was inside, the other ladies following.

 
The fight was getting intense as the four West Side Mobbsters, all strong men, were rapidly getting the upper hand from the initial surprise. Barking angrily, Marmaduke seemed to be in every individual fight, which had started to walk itself backwards about ten feet. The screams from Mandingo and his buds added to the chaos; the black smoke from their burning bodies clearly identifiable in the huge lobby.

 
Ray went after Hard-on; cut ‘em off at the nuts and the rest will follow. The dude was strong; this time resisting some of his military moves.

  “Aaaaaiiiieeee!
Get out of our building!” The yell was piercing and came from afar.

  At the top of the escalator on the third floor, Diane and John had followed Ray’s instructions, pulling the dead weight out of the escalator pit, smacking the crap out of them to keep them out, then cleaning up afterwards and then back down the escalator to disconnect the Ethernet cables still left as traps. There was no sense going all the way down; either the plan was going to work or it wasn’t; but, they managed to disconnect the second set of cables Ray had booby-trapped half-way down; then slugged their way back to the top of the escalator.

 
“He said we’d know,” said Diane. My gut says ‘yes’, how about you?” she asked John. 

 
“Yeah, do it.”

  From down below all that could be heard was a clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk sound, then more rapidly clunkclunkclunkclunk. All was darkness. The escalator could hardly be seen.

 
PHOOOFFF!

 
The escalator between the third and first floors became a fire-breathing dragon as an eight-foot section of FriendsShop (on casters) came bouncing down the steps—on fire—with ShitHead Number 5, shot twice through the body and dead before he hit the escalator, his arms and legs flailing in all directions. Although tied down to the top of the portable unit, he looked like a monster from hell; his broken bombs still inside his jacket, but now set on fire as the Third Floor Demolition Derby did its J-O-B.

 
Bounce, bounce, bounce; the flame from hell slowly descended from the third floor.

 
“
GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT OF OUR BUILDING
!” They shouted from above.

 
Step by step the cart kept rolling downhill until it hit the last of the booby-trapped steps and was stopped by the blue cord. The cart was blazing on fire.

  And then it exploded.
And when it exploded, the cart, the body, everything was shredded.

 
It was clear that the bad guys hadn’t won Fifth Avenue.

 
Everyone below had stopped what they were doing, basically enthralled with the spectacle; like 4
th
of July on steroids.

  Ray turned around.
The West Side Mobb had disengaged.

  “Wayne,
dude,” said Mycah Jarimyah Jackson. Wayne Clark, Mr. Hard-on, aka the Third Dude, aka Mr. Clunkhead Dickhead, had a knife to Gerri Greeley’s throat.

 
“I want that pussy,” he insisted.

 
Man
thought Mycah Jarimyah Jackson.
No pussy is that good
.

 
“Don’t give in to him, Mr. Ray. The library is my life.  I love this building. You can’t let them win,” Gerri’s face was angry. “They don’t deserve it. They’re scum! I’d rather die right here than give this asshole an inch.”

 
Clark, his face steely, cut her throat an inch on the surface, enough to spurt blood.

 
“Dude, we need to leave”, urged Mycah. 

 
From their right came a steady beat of
OUT-OUT-OUT-OUT-OUT
as the Third Floor group slowly came down the escalators toward the burning FriendShop cart.

 
Ray walked back toward the stairwell door, picked up his jacket, and extracted the last of the hand-made bombs and the revolver he’d used to shoot #6 at the top of the escalator.

  “Here’s the deal,
“ Ray started.

  But his body jerked, spazed.
Fallujah was returning. Current time and Fallujah time were melding together. He hadn’t taken any of his meds today. 

 
“You don’t deserve to live,” Ray shouted, his left hand flicking over his eyes. The room was spinning. “I light this,” he shouted, “toss it over your head to the entrance.  It explodes. You and your buttlick friends are first in line; but this good lady, she doesn’t deserve to die,” Ray slowly walked toward the group, who had pulled back. He walked to his left and set the bomb down on the floor. It was now the Big Fart in the Room. It was impossible not to look at the wine bottle filled with kerosene, with a ratty wick hanging down.

 
Fallujah was coming back heavy.
God let me get through this.
Ray had been off his meds for the entire day; the first day in nearly six years.  His meds were somewhere in Elliott Bay. Was that only today?

 
With the gang members all looking at the last Molotov Cocktail, sitting up pretty on the floor, Ray dropped to his knees, concentrated, and in rapid succession sent a single shot through the forehead of the two other gang members, then a bullet to the heart of Mycah Jarimiah Jackson; then a dead aim on a wide-eyed Wayne Clark. Fire.  The bullet went through Hard-on’s right eye, severing any thought of further cutting Miss Gerri’s throat, the knife falling out of his lifeless hand.