She had to get him upstairs. She didn’t know exactly why, not yet, but she did not doubt at all that when she needed to know, the knowing would come. But he didn’t move. He only leaned on his hands, coughing and making those gagging noises.
“Come on, goddammit!” she whispered in a harsh peremptory voice . . . and she had come so close to saying you, as in Come on, goddam you! And she knew who she sounded like, oh yes indeed, even in these desperate circumstances, she knew very well.
He got moving, though, and for now that was all that mattered. Rosie led him across the vestibule with the confidence of a seeing-eye dog. He was still coughing and half-retching, but he was able to walk.
“Halt!” Norman shouted from his part of the darkness. He sounded both official and desperate. “Halt, or I’ll shoot!”
No you won’t, that would spoil all your fun, she thought, but he did shoot, the dead cop’s .45 slanted up at the ceiling, the sound terrific in the enclosed space of the vestibule, the smell of burnt cordite sharp enough to make the eyes water. There was also a momentary shutterflash of reddish-yellow light, so bright it printed afterimages on her eyes like tattoos, and she supposed that was why he’d done it: to get a look at the landscape, and a look at where she and Bill were in that landscape. At the foot of the stairs, in fact.
Bill made a choked vomiting sound and staggered against her, sending her into the wall of the staircase. As she struggled to keep from going to her knees, she heard a rush of footsteps in the dark as Norman came for them.
12
She lunged up the first two steps, hauling Bill with her. He paddled with his feet, trying to help; perhaps he even did, a little. As Rosie gained the second step, she flung her left hand out behind her and swept the coat-tree across the foot of the stairs like a roadblock. As Norman crashed into it and began cursing, she let go of Bill, who slumped but did not fall. He was still gagging and she sensed him bending over again, trying to get his breath back, trying to get his windpipe to work again.
“Hang in,” she murmured. “Just hang in there, Bill.”
She went up two stairs, then came back down on the other side of him, so she could use her left arm. If she was going to get him to the top of the stairs, she’d need all the power the gold armlet was putting out. She slipped her arm around his waist, and suddenly it was easy. She started to go up with him, breathing hard and canted over to the right, like a woman counterbalancing a heavy weight, but not gasping or buckling in the knees. She had an idea she could have hauled him up a high ladder like this, if that had been required. Every now and then he’d put a foot down and push, trying to help, but mostly his toes just dragged up the risers and across the carpeted stair-levels. Then, as they reached the tenth step—the halfway point, by her count—he started to help a little more. That was good, because there was a splintering sound from behind and below them as the coat-tree snapped beneath Norman’s two hundred and twenty pounds. Now she could hear him coming again, not on his feet—at least it didn’t sound that way—but crawling on his hands and knees.
“You don’t want to play with me, Rose,” he panted. How far behind? She couldn’t tell. And while the coat-tree had slowed him down, Norman wasn’t dragging a man who was hurt and only three-quarters conscious. “Stop right where you are. Quit trying to run. I only want to talk to y—”
“Stay away!” Sixteen ... seventeen ... eighteen. The light was off up here, too, and with no windows it was as dark as a mineshaft. Then she was staggering forward, the foot that had been searching for the nineteenth step finding only more level going. Apparently there were only eighteen stairs in the flight, not twenty. How marvellous. They had made it to the top ahead of him; at least they had managed to do that much. “Stay away from me, Nor—”
A thought struck her then, one so terrible that it froze her where she was. She sucked the last syllable of her husband’s name