The Rooftop
‘Drop the trigger!’ Chris’s words to the bomber were forceful, but spoken in even tones without jolting command. The last thing he wanted to do was spook the man – a man whose torso was wrapped in enough toxic chemicals to kill the whole crowd below – into setting off the explosive that would deliver them into the air they breathed.
Chris kept his eyes steady on him. The man was breathing erratically, his eyes like orbs. He looked enraged, entranced. Despite the fact of the weapon he wore and his intention to kill so many, he seemed feeble. Sad. Pitiful.
Behind Chris, crouched on either side, Emily and Michael trained their sidearms on the bomber. Laura side-stepped out onto the platform.
‘It’s time to put a stop to this,’ Chris continued, taking a cautious step forward, his gun still raised and supported now by both his hands. ‘It’s over.’
The man caught sight of Emily and Michael behind Chris, and tensed. His opponents were not two, they were four. His eyes darted wildly between them, his thumb bobbing over the trigger. He started to sway nervously, his breathing more shallow and rushed.
‘Nothing is over!’ he cried, the words coming out with a spurt of nervous, defiant laughter. ‘Haven’t you heard the words? The glorious words?’ He signalled towards the air around him. Sounds of the Liberation Incantation continued to waft skyward from the crowd below, the masses having taken up their captured leader’s charge. The tones reached up to the decorated spike of the Water Tower’s summit in ominous unison. As if spellbound by the rhythmic phrases, the man’s eyes fluttered in a trance-like rapture.
Emily’s boldness flared. They couldn’t allow him to get fully caught up in the chant and its meaning. Frantic, she stepped through the door, walked to the edge of the platform and looked down from the tower’s height to the crowd below.
There, towards the centre of the plaza, was an opportunity. Break the spell, her mind commanded. Don’t let the trance run its course.
‘Your words have come too late,’ she suddenly announced. The man was startled by the woman’s voice and his eyes snapped back open.
‘Look closely,’ Emily continued, ‘your leader is taken.’ She removed a hand from her gun and pointed downwards, over the edge of the spire. Her other hand kept his head in her sights.
The man hesitated, but followed the line of Emily’s gesture. Far below, he saw a circle of bystanders, newly formed at the heart of the plaza. At its epicentre was the Great Leader, shackled in the hands of law enforcement officers and FBI. Beside him, the body of Governor Wilson lay dead on the pavement.
Fallen.
He swallowed hard. ‘Marcianus falls,’ he whispered to himself, as if narrating a story playing out in front of him. His expression betrayed thoughts that seemed to struggle to accept the next act. Then, he spoke a little more firmly. ‘Marcianus falls, but Cerinthus rises.’
When his gaze returned to Emily, it had gained resolve.
‘Even this cannot stop us now. The sacred words have been spoken. The incantation is complete. What comes next is release.’ He began to raise his right arm, the vest’s trigger grasped tightly in hand.
Emily took another step forward, willing the man to meet her gaze. His eyes were so wild now, almost inhuman. But there, just in the instant before he blinked, the confusion of a child caught up in something too vast for him.
‘Please, think of what you’re doing,’ Emily implored. ‘You don’t need escape. The world may be suffering, but you won’t help it like this. It needs repair. Do this and you’ll only be adding more despair, more pain.’ She waved her gun towards his vest. ‘Your life can still amount to so much more than this!’
Emily stopped. She was out of words. The force of human compassion was the only hope against the grip the sect’s message had over this man’s mind.
There was a long, lingering pause in which Cerinthus seemed to reflect on her words. Time seemed to slow, the roar of the crowd softening into an indeterminate swell of noise. The wind that normally howled over the tower’s height seemed to go absent and the world reduced itself to the gravity of this man and his choice.
And in a flickering moment, it came.
Cerinthus slowly closed his eyes, his trigger arm descending lower. His head began to sag forward. He took a deep breath. Then, with a sudden gaze of unworldly intensity, he bored his terrorized eyes directly into Emily’s. With bestial force he cried out at the top of his lungs the only word that mattered.
‘LIBERATION!’
An explosion of sound followed a millisecond later. Emily felt it, rather than heard it; and then the concussion wave slammed into the right side of her face, burning with a fiery heat.
The wave did not, however, come from Cerinthus’s vest. Chris sprang forward and fired a single shot squarely into the man’s shoulder. The movement brought his gun to within inches of Emily’s ear, and with almost instantaneous effect it began to bleed from the unexpected burst of sound and heat.
Cerinthus spun backward, the round shattering his right shoulder and thrusting his body against the low stone ledge. He immediately lost muscle control in the injured arm, the vest’s firing trigger falling from his grasp and dangling six inches below it from a single electrical wire.
Refusing to lose his focus, Cerinthus reclaimed his balance and lunged for the controller with his left hand. Another gunshot broke the silence, this time from Laura’s weapon. The bullet entered Cerinthus’s left arm, high above the elbow. His body pushed back again.
He looked up, his eyes wild, as if all humanity had left him and only a raging beast remained. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to reach the trigger without more bullets stopping every attempt, he could think of only one way to proceed. Mustering his strength against the rapidly increasing dizziness of shock, he pushed his weight backwards against the waist-high wall.
‘He’s going over the side!’ Laura cried out from her post. ‘For God’s sake, don’t let him jump! With or without an explosion, if those vials around his chest are crushed, hundreds of people are going to die!’
Cerinthus marshalled all his remaining strength into his legs and thrust his body up and back. He could feel the upper rim of the stone ledge collide with his calves, flipping him backwards and over the edge of the 154-foot precipice. It was not how he had intended the end to come, but the woman was right. Crushing the vials on impact would still have an effect. The brethren were gathered close together, in range of his fall. He could offer them their exit.
Liberation could still be accomplished.
Emily threw her gun aside and leapt forward. As Cerinthus toppled headlong over the wall, she lurched at him, wrapped her arms around his legs and dropped her own out from under her, using every pound of her bodyweight to counter his fall. But his substantial body mass had already gained momentum and she felt her own body being tugged into his descent. Her knees slammed into the ledge, her footing starting to slip.
Chris dived forward. Keeping his pistol clenched in one hand, he wrapped his muscular arms around Emily’s waist from behind, anchoring her in place.
Locked in Chris’s grasp, Emily’s forward plunge came to a sudden halt.
Cerinthus hung upside-down from the edge of Old Water Tower’s spire. The symphony of sound from the crowds far below had converted into terrified screams as the gunshots had pierced the revelry, and as the flurry of activity atop the tower came into public view.
‘Don’t let him go, Wess,’ Laura repeated, holding her voice steady. ‘Whatever you do, hold tight!’
Michael rushed to Chris’s side and took over the role of anchoring Emily in place. He concentrated as much weight as he could in his right arm, his left shooting fire through his body from the injuries he had sustained the day before – but his will, coupled with a heady dose of adrenaline, steadied him against the pain.
Freed from providing support, Chris moved to the edge of the platform and reached over to Cerinthus’s dangling form. Together, he and Emily pulled him upward and towards the ledge.
The man squirmed violently, and Emily quickly realized that if he made his sudden jerks and movements in contact with the stone, the vials could still shatter. They wouldn’t be able to risk bringing him over the angular, stone wall.
It’s time to end this once and for all, her thoughts suddenly commanded. Ensuring that Chris had him firmly in his grasp, Emily removed her hands from Cerinthus’s legs and held them out towards her husband.
‘Mike, give me your gun,’ she ordered.
‘Emily, think before you—’
Before he could complete his sentence, Emily wrested his gun from him. Spinning on her heels, she looked down on the man dangling in Chris’s grasp. She would put a stop to this.
She clutched the Glock tightly in her fist. The nylon polymer grip was warm, and as her fingers wrapped around it, every emotion from the past days pulsed through her vision. She saw Andrew’s face, she heard his laugh. She heard the cold, disinterested words of his killers. She saw Marcianus’s deluded, unyielding features. She felt the pulse of so much life, far below them. But most of all she saw her cousin’s eyes, joyful and bright, trimmed in the smile she had seen so often during their childhood summers together. Eyes now closed forever.
The vision took only a fraction of a second. When it was over, Emily raised her gun arm.
‘Emily, this isn’t the way.’ Michael’s voice called out, but her hands were already in motion.
Spinning the gun in her palm and grasping it by the barrel, Emily reached down and swung. The grip slammed squarely into Cerinthus’s skull. In an instant the man dangled motionless, unconscious.
In that instant, the world paused. The man swayed in Chris’s grasp. The breeze started to blow.
It’s over. The words resonated in Emily’s mind.
Motion returned a moment later. Carefully avoiding any contact between the stone ledge and the vials on his vest, Emily and Chris pulled the limp Cerinthus fully back onto the tower’s landing. Beneath them, the sounds of terror were replaced by cheers, and a moment later by the sirens of police cruisers speeding onto the scene.
Laying his unconscious, limp body gently on the stonework balcony, Emily gazed down on his fallen form. Here, the man behind the worst that Bell’s plot was to have offered – the evil fruit to be gained from Andrew’s murder – was finally stopped. Emily’s heart pulsed with more than merely the adrenaline of the act.
She stared at the vest that Cerinthus had fastened around him. The man who had thought he would stage the way to freedom was now shackled in the device that would ensure he remained a captive the rest of his life.
It took less than a minute for the scene in the plaza to change dramatically. Hundreds of confused members of the Brotherhood, still sporting their velvet robes, found themselves the object of a very different kind of attention than they had anticipated. Officers swept in, targeting everyone in the ceremonial attire, eager to arrest anyone who had been a part of what amounted to the largest single act of attempted terrorism in the city’s history – an act that had claimed the life of the Governor, even as it seemed to involve him. The television cameras and reporters that the brethren had hoped would broadcast their final act abroad, sharing with the masses their message of condemnation to the fallen world, instead rushed to report on the overthrow of yet another extremist sect, one amidst the hordes of madness that inundated the modern world.
His wrists still shackled behind him, his face still bleeding from the unexpected clerical intervention, Marcianus/Arthur Bell was pushed towards a squad car by the police. Nearby, the cuffed form of FBI Deputy Director Angela Dawson was shoved into the back of a black sedan. Marcianus would be taken in by the authorities, but Dawson had betrayed her own, and her own had no intention of letting the privilege of recompense go to anyone else. The black sedan was moving even before the door was slammed shut behind her.
Marcianus’s eyes wouldn’t leave the rooftop as the officers pushed him forward. He was trapped in disbelief. It was over. Their cause, their mission. Their hope for good.
Their deliverance.
Cerinthus’s fruitless cry of ‘Liberation’ still echoed in his ears, but the hope of millennia was now lost.
This world, he realized, was one he could not escape.