A brick struck the metal bars, cracked in two, and one half spun through the air and grazed Alice’s shoulder. The pain woke her. She stumbled backward, a fiery urgency pumping through her veins and into every limb.
The wall made a grinding sound as it leaned toward her, crushing the top of the scaffolding. The metal structure came apart. Bars and braces snapped off each other. Some tumbled down—there was a thundering din as they hit the floor—even as the remaining scaffolding tipped toward Alice.
She spun around and ran. Something hard and sharp knocked into her back. A metal bar clattered down by her feet, catching her right foot. She jumped, untangling from it.
Then she was running through the aisle between two bookshelves, and as she glanced back over her shoulder, she saw the scaffolding fall toward her. She screamed. It would hit her. It would bury her.
The metal bars struck the tops of the shelves with a crack. Bricks broke against the scaffolding, sending splinters of rock at her, but the metal bars held back the worst of the wall.
She stumbled away just in time.
An enormous boom filled her ears. The noise drowned out everything else as bookshelves collapsed in on themselves, metal bars came loose, and bricks and mortar came crashing down in a huge pileup.
Then hands wrapped around her, and Alice looked down, seeing a pair of ruffled sleeves grasping her. Ona. Pulling her back, away from the giant cloud of dust that was billowing toward them.
Sunlight…the safety of the sidewalk…Alice on her hands and knees, coughing, and coughing, and coughing, feeling as if she might spit up her lungs.
“My God,” she heard Becca say, her voice far away, “are you all right?”
A sharp thing dug into the palm of her right hand. She opened it and saw the heart pendant, the gold glinting in the sunlight.
Tears streamed down her face, and through blurry vision, she could see a forest of legs around her. Ona, crouched down next to her, had an arm around her.
She pulled Alice into a hug.
“You’re safe now,” she said.
Alice wanted to speak, drew in fresh air, but her voice failed her, and she had another coughing fit.
“Everyone back,” Chief Jimbo was telling the crowd. “Everyone away from the store—it’s not safe, it’s not safe!”
Another crash, boom, and bang made the crowd cry out with surprise, and then a wave of dust rolled across the sidewalk.
“No…” she croaked, thinking of the bookstore she loved, the red door, and the memories of her mom. “No…”