Saving a Superhero

8: Statistics+Fire Escapes

I didn't have time to defend myself. I probably wouldn't have been able to. The round of angry knocking and shouting from the from the from door saved me from gaping like a fish out of water.

It didn't mean it was appreciated though.

Flashbacks from that night started. Hopefully this person was more patient than Rory had been with her ceaseless knocking. Whoever was on the other side was yelling too. He kept calling for Grace and threatening that if she didn't open up he was letting himself in.

That wasn't good news.

"We're going to get arrested," Kennedy whispered. "If I go to jail I lose my scholarship. They made that very clear."

"We aren't going to get arrested," Harper lied. Being found in the middle of a house with overturned furniture having never actually met the person living there would be difficult to explain to the landlord. Even harder to explain in front of a court while we four were tried for kidnapping or breaking and entering at the very least. It didn't count as breaking if the door was already unlocked, right?

"Getting arrested isn't bad," I shushed them. I wasn't going to explain that the cop didn't put the cuffs on too tight because I was only sixteen. For the same reason, I got my own holding cell and didn't get charged for disturbing the peace.

After a heartbeat of processing the information that I knew what it was like to be arrested, it was Harper who approached the door and leaned down to squint through the hole. Without a glance back she shook her head, which didn't help us much. It could have meant there was no one there and we were being punk'd by a ghost or she didn't like what she was looking at.

When she returned to our huddle in the kitchen, a safe distance from the door, she explained that, no, there was no ghost standing outside the door. Just a stout, bald man with a broad, sweaty forehead.

I paused at the idea of him being bald, but stout and sweaty didn't exactly match the man who had held me hostage. Not to mention that he was in custody. I had seen them put him in the back of a cop car myself.

"Her landlord," Kennedy suggested. That explained how he was going to let himself in.

"Or her evil, vampire overlord," I countered.

"That's ridiculous,' Harper criticized. "He looked more like a mafia member than a vampire."

My mouth twitched up in a smile at that. So lawyer school hadn't sucked all the fun out of Harper after all.

At the end of the day, it didn't matter who he was. Whether he was her landlord, a vampire, mafia, or a cop, it wouldn't look good if we were caught in the middle of a crime scene after having walked into Grace's unlocked apartment sans Grace.

"The fire escape."

I wasn't sure who had the idea, but it was good enough for all of us to rush to the bedroom with the least amount of noise we could manage. The window to the fire escape had been painted shut. But it was our only way out and we were resourceful. Kennedy worked on one side and Harper on the other with a pencil and pair of fingernail clippers, forcing away the paint until the window jiggled.

Rory had been uncharacteristically silent since her outburst and busied herself with rummaging through Grace's sparse closet. In a drawer full of scarves that were so bright they nearly blinded me, she pulled out a pair of sunshine yellow overalls. Not exactly the hard evidence she had been searching for, but she chucked them at me nonetheless.

"Why would she even own these?" I asked. It was my metaphorical olive branch. The ball was in her court to shut it down or counter with a joke. As the knocking crescendo, she responded.

"She probably bought them because they're super rad, but she hid them because they are so wicked that the whole world would want to steal her thunder." I cracked a smile. Olive branch accepted. For now, at least.

I tossed the overalls to Harper for her to inspect while I took over with the nail clippers. The base of the window was chipped away leaving just the sides before we could escape.

She started laughing almost immediately. "In your professional opinion as a polka dot nerd, how ew are these?" In a game of hot potato Rory took over her position and she was left with the overalls in her arms.

This window was loosening and we managed to pry it an inch up before it got caught. Rory and I continued chiseling.

Kennedy found time to scold us. "I'm a fashion design major. And while I appreciate that you three are trying to lighten the mood, but this is not the time for witty banter. We are about to be sent to jail."

With a last jab through the paint from Rory I was able to pull the window wide open so we could access the rusted fire escape.

Rory scurried down first, Harper following in the angled shadows of sunset. I was already a quarter of the way down when I noticed that Kennedy hadn't moved. She was halfway out the window and paralyzed as the banging on the front door faded off into threats to retrieve his key.

Grace must have really pissed off that vampire.

"Hurry yourself up or you're going to jail for robbery and kidnapping."

She shook her head slightly. At least she wasn't completely paralyzed.

"It's perfectly safe," I tried to persuade her, but she wasn't buying into any of my lies. To prove my point I gave a little bounce on the drop down ladder. In response, the structure groaned and sway. There was no way the thing was up to code. Harper yelled for me to stop as she dismounted below me. I scaled the far from perfectly safe ladder so I was back up to the window with a sigh. The mafia boss's voice was so clear that I doubted it was muffled by the door anymore. We had maybe a minute, two tops before we became fugitives on the run.

"There's a sixty-five percent chance of my death if I get on that thing," she stammered. Before I could tell her how ridiculous that statistic was she clarified for me. "I added in all chances of death, plus the fire escape. Earthquake, spontaneous combustions, stroke, heart attack."

"There's a hundred percent chance I'll kill you if you don't get off that window sill and get down this rusty ladder."

"Tetanus." As I heard the other hallway door swing open and bang against the wall I did the last thing I could think of. I grabbed Kennedy's wrist and yanked her over the edge. As I had planned--and hoped--she grabbed onto the ladder to prevent herself from falling. To hurry her along I stepped down a rung, doing my best to avoid her fingers before she moved them down a rung.

"You've got two stories," I told her. "The faster you get down, the less likely you are to die."

With a glance down I saw her speeding down the ladder towards the empty pavement. Rory and Harper must have been hiding behind a dumpster with a hobo because they were nowhere to be found. Or they had booked it to let us fend for ourselves. Either way, better two of us free to save Grace than all four in jail.

Not that I was planning on getting arrested that day.

Even with Kennedy's quickened pace, we weren't going to make it to a hiding place before the vampire landlord found the window opened and assumed the obvious. Then it would only take a quick look down the fire escape to make us wanted women.

"We're going to have to jump," I whisper-shouted to Kennedy as loud as I dared.

"If we jump there's a thirty-five percent chance we die and a seventy-three percent chance that one of us breaks a bone."

"I have no clue how or why you know that, but those are good enough odds for me."

And I jumped.

I swear, writing the dialogue between these four is my favorite thing! Sorry if you don't understand my weird humor 

Remember: Don't jump out of buildings.

-m burton