Close Encounters 30

Beckett froze. Her ears picked up the sounds of trucks pulling into the lot on the other side of the chain link fence, the roar of engines as the heavy machines were turned on.

Demolition day.

"It's only a wrecking ball," Salome inserted. She was standing again, her hands gripping the metal railing of the catwalk for balance. "We have some time. They'll smash it in, but the infrastructure will hold longer than you think."

"I didn't see a wrecking ball out there," Kate said, urgency rising up in her. "There was no wrecking ball outside."

"A rental, something," Salome shrugged. "Doesn't matter. I have to get that pixel." She began to lurch down the catwalk.

Castle growled at her stop and turned back to Kate. "I'll take a look outside and see how far along they are in the process. We can gauge our time."

But she was still frozen, her heart unwilling to catch. "Pitch and clay," she husked. She'd been smelling it since they'd forced their way inside. "Not a wrecking ball, Castle. It's C4," Kate gasped. "Oh, fuck, they're doing a controlled demolition."

Salome's face went white. "No. No, it was slated for-"

Castle, who was farthest from Kate on the catwalk so that he could see out the one, high window at the top of the roofline, began to backpedal. "Oh, fuck. It's not a wrecking ball. We have to go!"

Salome took off at a run, darting around the corner of the t-junction and flying towards the offices. Much more able than she'd let on, and now yards away from them and disappearing fast.

Horrified, Kate darted off after her, taking that same corner at a good clip and gaining despite the throbbing in her skull and the shaking sway of the unstable catwalk.

She could not let Salome escape here with that pixel.

"Beckett!" Castle roared behind her. She could hear him making chase. But his heavier tread and the combined weight of all three of them rattling the catwalk made it groan ominously, the screech of screws losing their grip.

Salome was rushing for the farthest set of offices, two junctions down from where Beckett was, but when Kate heard the steel beginning to buckle, she halted, half-turned back to check on Castle. The metal frame of the catwalk that connected the center stairs to the main section had already pitched steeply forward. Even as she watched, steel bolts ripped free of the overhead concrete and crashed to the metal at his feet before bouncing and falling to the ground below.

Far, far below.

And the catwalk was going down with it.

"Castle!" she yelled, jerking back to him.

"No!" He held up both hands to stop her, but he had to clutch the railing. "Don't you fucking dare. Move, Beckett. Forward. Get off this thing."

Her heart stopped. "Castle-"

"Go." One end of the catwalk came loose from the t-junction, yawing, and it created an ever-widening seam between her and him.

"Go back down the stairs," she yelled, backing up slowly, moving for the next set of offices so she could get off the catwalk. The door was only about four yards from her location, while Castle was suspended on the t-section of metal that led to the spiral staircase - cut off. "Castle, get back down the stairs-"

"Would you just go?" he bellowed. The catwalk groaned in response and broke free of the t-junction, pitching so sharply that he stumbled.

As a direct result, her own section of catwalk shuddered, and she felt it under her feet, how the metal was bowing, how gravity was dragging down the end near the staircase, ready to bring her down with it.

She had to go. Oh, God, she had to leave him here.

Castle was making his way to the spiral staircase, maneuvering around the collapsed section of steps, but he kept looking back at her, checking on her, and she realized they were going to die like this - both unwilling to move away before the other one reached safety.

So Kate turned her back on her husband and jogged for the offices a few yards away, her heart plummeting as fast as the catwalk around her.

Once she got into the relative safety of those offices though, how the fuck was she supposed to get down again?

Castle watched as Beckett disappeared inside the glass-fronted office space, and then he got a move on it.

His only priority right now was his wife, and she would not be okay if he didn't make it down from here in one piece.

Amend that. His only priority right now was to extract his partner in the field, to get them out of an imminent fatality situation. It was textbook procedure. The pixel disc was only second to that one hard and fast rule: live to fight another day.

Problem was, as he maneuvered back down the spiral staircase as fucking fast as possible, he wasn't sure he himself was going to live to fight another day. And once he made it to the ground floor, the danger didn't stop. There was the catwalk itself about to come crashing down on his head, and then the demolition which could go off at any fucking moment. Probably the crew did safety checks, but it might not be anything more rigid than eye-spotting all the entrances and being certain the padlock remained.

And he'd told Beckett to make it look good.

Fucking hell.

Salome was fucking dead; he was going to throttle her for this.

Castle felt the stairs shudder under his weight and he glanced back up. He was halfway down, still suspended some two stories in the air, and above him the catwalk was popping from its joists and listing at crazy angles. The staircase had the center pole running up through the spiral, but the damn pole was, of course, only attached as far as the main metal catwalk went - not to the concrete ceiling.

When the catwalk went, so did the staircase, in short order.

The faster he went, the worse the shaking got, and the more brittle the individual steps. Each metal piece was affixed to the center pole, welded, but the outside step was only screwed into the spiral railing. The whole thing was unsteady, and he had to keep placing his feet as close to the center pole as possible.

Not to even think about how damn rusted it all was, how one wrong shift of his weight could put his foot through it.

Which, going down in a tight spiral, meant he was missing steps more often than not, stumbling hard and going down to one knee before he could catch himself. There wasn't anything to catch him really, there was only the swaying railing and every time he grabbed for it, pieces of gave way under the force of his grip.

And Kate. Kate alone up there with Salome, who must have an alternate route, must have some way to get down. Beckett wasn't stupid; she wasn't one to leave things half done either. He could trust that Beckett would chase after Lo in order to keep the woman from getting the pixel, and in doing so, she would find her way back down again.

Had to be soon.

And if she didn't, well, he was damn well going to find a way back up.

So long as he could get off this fucking funhouse of a staircase.

Beckett dodged rusted bare furniture, file cabinets and massive desks for the most part, moving deeper into darkness of unlit offices. She had so far seen two strategically-placed C4 packs, and she'd gone ahead and pulled the wires from the clay - so fucking carefully - but she knew it was pointless.

Outside walls would collapse inward in a controlled demolition. If they survived the initial foundational blasts, which she doubted, the walls crush them.

Her only shot was to follow Salome to her hiding spot and then out the woman's escape route. She was too clever not to have one.

All three sets of spiral staircases she could see from the windows, and all three had detached from the catwalk. Pieces of it were swaying back and forth like surreal swings. As Beckett moved further inside the dark-shrouded section of offices, the morning light spilling in from the main floor was eclipsed, her sight cut off.

Now it was only the unrelenting black.

She wouldn't call out, wouldn't give Salome the warning so she could lay a trap. But the woman was making enough noise moving in a direct line for her stash that Beckett wasn't too afraid. Not to mention Lo had seemed genuinely shocked when Kate had mentioned the explosives, and Lo must have seen it with her own eyes by now.

They were all three of them rats scurrying for high ground on a sinking ship.

Castle. He would be fine; she had to trust in his abilities, his intelligence, and his fucking insightful problem solving skills. All there was to it. Trust that Castle would do what was necessary, and more, that Castle loved their son and wanted him to have at least one damn parent-

Actually-?

No, she didn't trust that. Castle wanted her, moved for her, gravitated towards her in the same way and intensity that she gravitated towards him. She knew him too well, and he'd come back for her, and so she absolutely could not fail.

She had to find Salome and get them down from here.

Ahead of her, the maze of hallways led to the final grouping of offices, and she had to shove her shoulder into the rusted-out door to get it open. She hurtled forward and tripped over a scattered pile of desk drawers. She went down hard to her hands and knees, wind knocked out of her and head pounding. When she got back on her feet again, she saw Salome through the open glass windows, the woman crouched over what looked to be a file cabinet.

Kate made a run for it, knowing they didn't have time for this, knowing that she was being led astray by concussion and exhaustion. She felt like shit, like she had - literally - run into an unforgiving metal dumpster. She couldn't rely on her sense of timing, or her own reactions, because sometimes opening a door felt like forever, and sometimes she was in another section of these offices without knowing how she got there.

Salome turned at her approach, the flare of her shredded black jeans as she moved. And then she scurried away. She'd gotten it, the pixel; she'd already found her stash.

"Lo!" she called out.

But Salome was running away from her.

Kate followed. It was all she had left, her only hope.

He was ten feet off the ground when the spiral staircase collapsed.

A terrific groan of crashing metal and suddenly the bottom dropped out. Castle went down with it, trapped by bars and metal supports, the steps taken out from under him.

He must have tried to brace himself somehow. He must have put his hands out to break his fall, unable to drop and roll like he'd been trained. He couldn't understand it any other way - couldn't explain how else it happened.

Because when the dust had cleared, Castle was on his knees inside a cage made of the spiral staircase, one shoulder wedged into the narrow end of two steps, his ears ringing, and his back supporting the weight of the formerly-center pole.

He was trapped.

And something - something was very wrong.

Metal railing was twisted against his right leg, as if warped to the form of his body, and the left was buried under a section of stairs that had fallen in altogether. The cage made of this section had penned him in, but he wasn't stuck by debris, wasn't pinned. He could shift things and get free of the bars - that was entirely possible.

But when Castle lifted up to put his back against the pole and push, agony burned up his forearm and ravaged the nerves inside his elbow, raced straight into his shoulder. He cried out, shocked more than anything, but he had no support there, no sensation of his hand, and he fell face first into the metal steps.

His heart was pounding too hard when he could move again. He could hear - strangely distorted, overloud - the sounds from outside, the demolition crew calling back and forth over the roar of engines.

He rolled to his shoulder, suddenly afraid of what he would see when he did.

But he still had his hand. A length of rebar had not gone through his palm. It was only - mangled looking.

Castle groaned and shifted back in the tight confines of the staircase trap, easing his arm towards his chest. Pain lanced through him at just that minute a movement, and he had to fight hard to push past it.

He used his non-injured hand to push against the center pole, decided against it when it wouldn't budge. He moved carefully on his ass, twisting around until he could get his legs up, braced himself on one hand, and shoved with his feet against the metal railings.

The whole structure groaned and began to collapse - onto him.

Castle gasped when the railing landed on his chest, jarring his arm, his fucking mangled hand, and he fought it, he fucking fought it hard, but stars popped over his vision and his body was shutting down - pain and regimen combined - shutting down to heal him, couldn't heal broken fucking bones, oh fuck, but he couldn't make himself stay.

Darkness collapsed on top of him as surely as the spiral staircase.

It wasn't an escape plan so much as a desperate bid for survival.

It was a straight drop down the wall if she put one move wrong, if one foothold fell through.

Beckett followed as closely in Salome's footsteps as she could, putting her feet in the same spots where Lo had found purchase, all while keeping as close to the woman as she dared. Too far away and Kate would miss that crucial next step, too near and Salome was apt to shove her off the wall.

And down to the concrete below.

The offices had backed up onto a fourth and final staircase, but this one was nothing more than a fire escape. Metal brackets fit it into the wall like those rolling library ladders, only so much of the catwalk on this side was already destroyed or collapsed that it was more like a controlled descent. Place her foot in a nook of warped metal and hope it held.

But after only five or six steps down, the way grew steeply more difficult. And with Salome's leg injury, Beckett could see that the woman didn't have the strength to get down. The pixel bulged in the back pocket of her jeans on her good side, and past the rise of the woman's ass was the sheer drop off to the warehouse floor below.

The nearest shelving unit was woefully too far away to even factor in, and the fire escape ladder would have to be abandoned for the pock-marked wall itself. Debris mountain for fucking serious this time.

The only problem was - Salome was between Kate and the nearest next handhold. She would have to crawl down over Salome in order to keep going down.

Right.

"Salome," she gritted out. Her hands were sweat-soaked and slippery on the metal. "Listen to me-"

"No. Don't come near me," Lo shouted back.

"There's no time. If you want to live, you'll have to let me help you. We'll have to do it together."

"Why should I even trust-"

"Just look at where we are. I can't get past you. And you can't get down on that damn leg. We are both fucked if you don't move."

Lo set her jaw and gripped the last rung of the fire escape ladder, shifted slightly to her right as if to test her leg out anyway. When her weight settled on it, she groaned and pressed her forehead to the metal wall, sweat making her skin shine.

The sound of the catwalk shifting and groaning, falling here and there from damaged joists, was so loud that it blocked whatever noises might be coming from outside.

"Salome, there's no time for this," she called. "You saw the charges. We have got to get out of here."

She felt that dark, deep terror in her guts, the voice inside her screaming for Castle, Castle, but he wasn't here.

And that had her infinitely more terrified.

Because if Castle had survived that long descent down the stairs, he'd be right here. With her. He wouldn't leave her. He would not go home alone.

Castle.

"Fine," Salome snapped. "Fine. Fuck. I fucking hate you all, you fucking CIA ghosts with your high and mighty attitudes. Just once I want to fucking get out ahead-"

"Can you save the speech?" Beckett snapped. "We'll work better together if you're not talking. Bitch."

Salome flashed her a dark look, but there was - she thought - a certain morbid humor in it. "Who are you calling bitch, bitch?"

Beckett grinned back, feral and dangerous as she knew she could be - as she was when Castle was in danger (and he was, oh God, where the fuck was Castle?), and then she began to move sideways along the bracket-studded concrete wall, going as fast as she dared.

"I'm going to climb - over you," she told the woman. "So don't fucking move."

Salome offered her a crude gesture in return, but had to slap her hand back to the metal rung in a panicked lunge as she began to fall.

It was worse than Beckett had assumed. Salome was putting zero weight on her leg now, and her uninjured leg was unable to support her. As Beckett eased her own foot just below Salome's hand, her ankle practically in the woman's armpit, she could see why.

Salome wasn't standing on an actual rung. It was only one of the short, twisted brackets screwed into the concrete wall. It gave her no leverage and no support to stand.

"Oh, fuck," Beckett whispered. "You could have warned me there was no damn foothold."

"There's no damn foothold."

Kate actually laughed, a terrible sound, but she wouldn't be deterred. She was getting down; she was going home to her son with her husband. She didn't fucking care if it was a bracket screwed into the wall, there were others. There would be others.

Beckett queried with her other foot and stepped onto the rung just below Salome's hands, her thighs now straddling the woman's neck. Lo's dark hair was flecked with concrete dust, her teeth gritted as she tried to hang on.

"This is the worst part," Beckett warned her. "I have to go over you and press you up against the wall to keep my balance."

"I know. I know. Just fucking move."

Beckett reached down with her right hand, her strong hand, and gripped the rung near Salome's face, for a moment perched there awkwardly, knees bent and arm taking her weight, letting her ass sink down until she was crouched over the woman. And then she had to adjust her hold, carefully, so fucking carefully, to cling to the rung with one arm and search out a foothold with her shortened leg.

It put her body flush to Lo's and the woman groaned in pain, cursing in Spanish as Kate put too much weight against her.

But it couldn't be helped.

And she couldn't find a foothold below Salome's.

"Fuck, fuck," Kate panted.

Lo grunted back. "This is not how I pictured you breathless in my ear."

"Oh, no?" Kate lobbed back. "Maybe I did."

"Masochist."

"Sometimes," she breathed, probing with the tip of one foot- "Oh, God, yes."

"Becks?"

"I found it," she croaked, straining with one foot in the smallest toehold yet. A dip in the concrete, but it took her weight. It would work for a moment. "I found something anyway."

"This is turning entirely too erotic," Salome groaned. "Would you hurry up and move?"

"Yes, yes," Beckett panted. "Moving. I think. I hope. Hang on."

And then she had to do it all over again with the other foot, her body pressed intimately to Salome's, the sweat making her hands shake.

But she was damn well getting down.