by L T Vargus
His ears rang. Shrill wails inside muting the world around him. Echoes of gunfire reverberating in his skull.
Somewhere far off, sirens screamed as if they were answering the howling in his head. Closing.
Not soon enough. He’d be long gone by the time they got here.
He stopped at an overflowing trash can and stripped off the glasses and outer layers of his clothing. He jammed them down into the can, just out of sight, the jagged plastic lip of the lid scraping the inside of his wrist like a row of teeth.
Without a coat and sweater, the chill reached right through his t-shirt and smeared itself against his sweaty body. The wet skin thrummed at the cold’s touch. Felt like ice was forming instantly in the hollow of his back and along his pits, but it couldn’t touch the fire inside.
He jogged across the little strip of grass to the adjacent parking lot and unlocked the getaway vehicle. Climbed in.
The hush inside the car moved him. Made him shudder a little.
Shelter. Warmth.
He started the car. Backed out of the parking spot. Fell in with the mob of cars streaming out of the lot. Already indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd.
The memories flashed in his head. Dark dreams. A string of sensory details that made his skin contract.
The popping thunder of the Uzi, rounds pumping in time with his heart. Wild. Concussive.
Blood spilled. Tile shattered. The exploding glass as the panes screening off the tops of the food court dividers came apart and flung their shards everywhere.
All of those people scrambling in cinematic slow motion. The writhing mass of humanity, bodies all crashing into each other like an angry sea.
Some of the shoppers flopped to the ground. Inert. Lifeless. Staring up at nothing like the gutted fish behind the glass case in the meat department. Others escaped mysteriously unscathed.
And the sound of them. A weird moan rose from the crowd as their shock and terror found a voice, a sound that reminded him somehow of a frightened cat — a whole choir of them singing out of key.
Red and blue lights flashed in his rearview, shooting past toward the mall. The first responders. Faster than he’d expected them.
Time to get a move on. He’d take a left at the intersection. Head for the highway. Head for freedom. Just needed to wait his turn in the line of cars exiting the parking lot.
He drummed his hands on the wheel a few times as the cars before him cleared. Almost gone. Almost out of here.
Finally, he was up. The tires juddered over hardened slush as the car ducked down the ramp. And his skin contracted once again. He half expected something to block his path.
Some police barricade.
Some convoy of law enforcement rolling up.
Some chopper deployed to take out the latest mass shooter, shining down a spotlight so bright.
Something. Anything.
Instead he pulled out into the traffic, out into the open. Unobstructed. Unblocked. Anonymous. Another face in the endless, pointless crowd of them.
Nothing. Nothing.
A new wash of adrenaline surged through his limbs and into his fingers and toes. He did it. He got away with it.
A whisper of guilt slithered into his consciousness, asking how he could do this, why he would do this. The bullets. The blood. The loss of life. The magnitude of the tragedy stark and striking against the utter pointlessness of it, the meaninglessness in the random nature of the deaths.
The bullets pierced the crowd without specific intent. Picked some strangers out of the mob. Some lived. Some died. No reason.
And yet it somehow felt more real than anything else in his life. Violence. Bloodshed. Crossing that line from life to death. Those were real. Those made him feel alive.
He could have done more damage. A lot more. The Uzi had jammed, as they were prone to. He’d considered clearing the jam — something that would have taken just a few seconds — but the string of digital beeps from his phone stopped him.
All told, the fuck-up cost him maybe 20 seconds, but he wondered how many lives that would work out to. Licked his lips at the thought.
He turned south, heading out of the suburbs and into the real Chicago. More cops whipped past going the opposite direction, their sirens doing that elongated Doppler Effect scream, moans shortening and then lengthening as they passed.
Locking down the area. Finally. Way too late.
Six minutes from the start of shooting until his departure, that was the plan. Just like a smash and grab burglary.
These days, burglars didn’t give a shit about alarms or dogs. If they knew you weren’t home, they’d just kick in the front door in broad daylight, grab whatever they could in three to five minutes, then hit the road. So long as they got in and out fast enough, the odds of getting caught approached zero.
With his six minutes, though, he left things instead of taking them. Hot nails spit out of his gun. Cold bodies bleeding on the floor. Chaos.
Violence was the primal truth of existence. It sliced right through all the shallow bullshit. Peeled back the skin and laid the meat bare. Cut out all the little stories people told themselves, extracted all the ways they ignored the emptiness all around them. Surgery performed with a chainsaw.
Yes. All the social rules disappeared in the face of savagery. Torn away. Lopped off. The line between life and death suddenly made small and razor-sharp.
All those people at the mall, all their lives? Empty. Positively brimming with nothing. It poured out of them. They talked about nothing. Dreamed about nothing. Stuffed their faces with empty calories. Shopped for junk, the objects themselves inconsequential. What they really shopped for was a feeling to fill up the hollowness inside, meaning to block out their empty lives.
Vapid. Shallow. Meaningless. That was the life of a domesticated ape, stuck in its pen all day until it forgot how to even dream about life outside the fence.
All that fluff magically disappeared when you were staring down the business end of a gun. Real fuckin’ quick.
Nothing was more real than a human body opened up by hot flecks of metal. In those final moments, while your life drained out of the brand new holes in your abdomen, you could see once and for all that the world didn’t work the way you thought it did. Never had. You’d just been too fucking dumb to see the truth all along.
That was the reason war raged somewhere on the globe at all times. Because real power was up for grabs. Truth born of aggression, boldness, ferocity. Forged in conflict. Honed by killing, dominating, destroying. Taking lives.
The fierce ones maimed the tame ones and ate them. Just like in the animal kingdom. The circle of life and all that shit.
He leaned forward, watching out the window as he merged onto I-90. Finding a gap among the headlights streaking past.
Where would his story end? It seemed like most shooters these days killed themselves or waited around so long at the scene that cops ended up doing the job for them. Suicide by cop. Not him. He wouldn’t go out like that. He had so much more to do, so much more left in him.
By now all the cops for miles would have converged on the mall. He could picture them. Barricades in the lot. Lights twirling everywhere. The SWAT team storming in the big front doors like soldiers.
Too late.
He tore ass down the interstate, headed into the heart of the city. Tons of steel and glass and vulcanized rubber sped alongside him, driven by an army of unsuspecting apes going about their lives of petty delusion.
With all the cops converging on the mall, the herd was unprotected.
He rolled down his window, icy wind whipping his hair at his eyes and burning his cheeks with the cold. He fumbled with the Uzi, cleared the jam, then inserted a full clip. Stepped on the gas until he pulled even with a red Kia.
He peered through the driver’s side window. Wanted to see who drove the little red car. Some woman talking on her phone.
Ready. Aim. Fire.
The Uzi barked. Snorted flame.
Her window shattered, the tempered glass raining down like spray from a waterfall. It sounded strange with the wind howling all around them.
The Kia veered hard right as her dying spasm jerked the wheel.
Metal crunched. Horns honked. Tires squealed.
But he was already pulling up on his next target, a tired-faced guy in a pickup loaded down with ladders and tools. The guy peered over his shoulder at the pileup. Never saw it coming.
Another Uzi bark. Another muzzle flash.
This time he saw the blood. Saw the skull come apart. A jagged shard of bone peeled up from the top, bringing a flap of scalp up with it. Looked like a hairy puzzle piece coming lose.
The killer laid on the gas. Pressed deeper into the throng of traffic. Picking off apes one by one as he went.
Chapter 3
Loshak rubbed his eyes as the television flashed through images from the two crime scenes: black and whites and ambulances surrounding the mall, drone shots of the carnage on the interstate, interviews with panicked witnesses. Whatever alcohol he’d had in his system when they walked into the diner felt like it was long gone now. The pleasant little jaunt into a carefree night was over. He’d moved over to Jan’s side of the booth, and they both sat silently staring at the screen, the greasy basket of fried appetizers and dipping sauces forgotten. Thirteen confirmed dead and eight injured at the mall. Interstate closed after a second shooting, possibly connected. Suspect or suspects at large.
Bits and pieces of the cases with the DC and Georgia shooters echoed in his head. Here they had a mall as the first target, an interstate the second. Could it be two shooters in what was supposed to be a coordinated attack or one trying to take out as many people as possible before the cops shot him down?
For a brief second, he toyed with the possibility that their suspects were teenagers. But no, teenagers didn’t even go to malls anymore. The statistics on mall closings across the nation tried to surface, but he couldn’t remember the specifics, just that the demographics had shifted to favor wealthy, middle-aged women and young suburban parents with children under five. Something about teenagers doing all their hanging out online nowadays. In any case, a kid would target the place where they felt the most hostility and aggression, and nine times out of ten that was going to be school or home.
So, who would attack a mall? Someone with an anti-consumerism manifesto. A disgruntled employee. His mind ran through the encyclopedia of profiling statistics stored in his skull. Some college education probable. Perhaps a pseudo-intellectual type who fancied himself a bit of an anarchist. Some guy who figured the holiday season was the best time to bring his nihilistic philosophy into reality.
If that was the case, then the interstate would symbolize something, too. Travel, interconnectedness, the way you could be surrounded by other commuters for hours in traffic but completely alone, everyone stuck in their own little world of steel and glass. Someone lonely, who couldn’t connect even when they were surrounded by people. Maybe he’d thought the holiday would connect him to someone, and when it didn’t, this was his response.
Loshak took a breath to say something and turned to Jan, but when he saw her face, the words died in his mouth. She stared straight ahead at the television, her lips pressed together as if she were biting them closed. Her head angled down a touch, with her chin toward her chest, and she was breathing in shallow little breaths.
Shit.
Grab her hand or stay back? He wasn’t sure which would make the situation worse. He settled on covering her hand with his, giving it a small squeeze.
“They won’t need me,” he said. “Guys like this get taken down in a matter of minutes. Hours at the most.”
Unless they were like the Georgia shooters and managed to evade the police for days, slaughtering their way across the city.
“It’s fine,” Jan said.
She didn’t look at him.
“Most of these are open and shut. They’re trying to get caught. Nobody’s going to—”
“Really. It’s fine.” She forced a smile and finally met his eyes. “So. Who are they looking for?”
Loshak let out a huff of a laugh.
“Right now, my money’s on late twenties to early thirties current or former mall employees.”
“Not a postal worker?” Jan asked.
“What is this, the nineties?”
That made her laugh again, and this time it was sincere. A little of the tension bled from Loshak’s shoulders.
Then his pager went off. For a split-second, he wished he’d left the damn thing at the house. He fished it out and checked the burner number Spinks had sent him.
Beside him, Jan raised an eyebrow.
“Speaking of the nineties,” she said. “Since when did you go back to carrying a pager?”
Loshak shook his head. “You know how Spinks is. I’m going to go outside and call him. See what he wants. I’ll be right back.”
Instead of going outside, though, Loshak hunted down their waitress and asked if he could use the diner’s landline. Usually, when Spinks paged him, he was supposed to get an unused burner phone, call Spinks’ burner, then immediately destroy his burner afterward. The reporter had really gone down the rabbit hole on this conspiracy ever since Kansas City, insisting on all sorts of outlandish security measures. Only recently had his paranoia been proven right when an ASAC in D.C. had confronted Loshak about his and Spinks’ investigation.
“We’re not supposed to let customers use the phone,” the waitress said. “But there’s a payphone at the bodega next door. Probably the last one on Earth. When people ask to use our phone, I’m supposed to say to go over there.”
“Thanks.”
Loshak stopped with his hand on the door and glanced back at Jan. She was still watching the screen, the channel rolling through the same five or six clips of law enforcement personnel, the front of the mall, smashed cars on an interstate, and yellow tape cordons over and over again. Fried foods congealed on the table in front of her, and her date was about to walk out of the restaurant. It didn’t matter that he would be right back. This was still a shitty way for her to have to spend her birthday.
He pushed the door open and headed out into the cold.
* * *
Like most bodegas, the place across the street was crammed ceiling to floor with junk food, alcohol, prepaid phones, chargers, pet food, and other convenience items. The payphone the waitress had promised was out of order, so Loshak bought one of the burner phones and brought it back to the foyer of the Denny’s. At least Jan wouldn’t think he’d abandoned her completely if she tried to look for him.
Spinks answered on the first ring.
“Have you seen anything about the active shooter situation in Chicago?” He was talking in that breathy voice he got whenever he was excited. Halfway between a guy who just finished sprinting and a kid about to open Christmas presents.
“We were just watching the report,” Loshak said.
“We who?”
“Jan and me. Did you want something?”
“Don’t think for a second that we’re not going to talk about that when we’ve got the time, partner. For now, though, hold onto your butt.” Spinks did one of his dramatic pauses. “I think we may have a connection to our Kansas City case.”
Loshak blinked. “How?”
“Well, the police are still IDing victims at the scenes, and they probably won’t be releasing names for hours yet, but I’ve got some friends in the press there, and they’ve got pretty solid connections with the Chicago PD. Totally off the record, a couple names have already come out.”
Loshak frowned but didn’t say anything. This was the kind of leak that let the press get ahold of names of victims before the next of kin did. It almost always resulted in a devastated family member finding out second-hand either via the news or a pushy reporter rather than from the local police — sometimes they even found out from social media. How’s that for a trending topic? Your loved one is de
ad. #thoughtsandprayers
“I can hear your disapproval,” Spinks said. “Just listen to this. One of the names is George Whitley.”
Against his will, Loshak’s ears perked up. So far, their under-the-table investigator had linked a list of twelve names to the human trafficking conspiracy in Kansas City, and George Whitley was one of them.
Before he could ask, Spinks went on.
“We don’t know if it’s our George Whitley yet,” the reporter said. “He’s still trying to make the connection, but…”
“But if it is our guy, what do you think it means?” Loshak asked.
“I don’t know!” Spinks sounded like he was on the verge of exploding with exhilaration. “What if this means the whole shooting, this whole elaborate killing spree, was really about taking one guy out? Kill a bunch of folks, make it look random. Whoops, one less loose end.”
In a way, it wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded. A lot of the deaths in Kansas City had been made to look like suicides, some of them practically in front of witnesses. Hell, Spinks had been in an adjacent room when one of their leads had been taken out.
But as he thought through it, Loshak shook his head.
“It’s too elaborate, putting on a mass shooting to cover up murdering one guy. It would contradict everything they did in Kansas City. They didn’t care who knew; they were taking out people left and right, not trying to hide anything. Why go to all this trouble and make national news when you could stage a suicide that’ll get buried in the middle pages of the local paper?”
“OK, well, yeah,” Spinks said, and Loshak could picture the reporter nodding along as he spoke. “You could be right. It definitely sounds crazy. But then, so would everything about Kansas City if I hadn’t been right smack in the middle of it. I still think you should offer to help out, see if they need a profiler.”
Loshak opened his mouth to protest, but Spinks went on before he could get a word out.
“Connected or not, this’ll give us a chance to dig up some dirt on George Whitley without having to sneak around about it,” the reporter said. “Maybe we’ll find a link, or maybe we’ll find out that this isn’t our George Whitley. Even that would be something. What do you say, partner?”
