Joe

by H. D. Gordon

  There was Nostradamus, of course. The great and powerful seer. The supposed poster-boy for my kind. There were people who claimed to be able to reach the dead. There were people who claimed to be able to speak to God. Hell, there even people who claimed that they were psychic. Surely they were not all liars, right?

  The problem was, all of the ones I have talked to, were. When I turned seventeen and moved out of my parents’ house, I began to search for people who claimed to have such powers. For my first stop I went downtown to the Westport area (an area of Kansas City that is known for housing strange things) and visited a woman by the name of Momma Bobarn. She had been in business since the early thirties, telling people their fortunes and reading their palms for five bucks a pop. When I got there, after I coughed up the money, she took me to a small back room that was decorated from floor to ceiling in deep reds and purples. A low, round table sat in the middle of the windowless chamber, and fluffy pillows were scattered about the crimson floor.

  Momma Bobarn took my money and told me what my future held. Which, according to her, were kids, a middle-class job, and a hard-headed but loving husband. She tossed in a few mystical words, prescribed a little wheat oil for some common ailment I don’t have, and sent me on my way. The psychic looked into my eyes, held my hands, and said not a word about how I may be different from the other folks that wandered through her door. I had been nervous and hopeful before that encounter. I left discouraged, but not completely.

  Most of my research was done on the internet, as I have not the funds, nor the desire, to physically search the world. Everything I have found has been as encouraging as The Great Momma Bobarn. I still wonder, during times of bad weather especially, but I don’t expect to ever really find the answers I’m looking for. And the worst part is, if I don’t, my knack for seeing dismal futures may eventually drive me insane. Some days I feel not too far from it.

  Control. That is what I was searching for. I got it in my head that if I could find other people like me, or even other people with extraordinary gifts, I could figure out if there was a way to work on controlling the ability. Perhaps, find out how to extinguish it all together. Now there was a dream.

  I stepped back inside my apartment and slid the balcony door shut. The storm outside unnerved me, but not enough to make me seek out a storm shelter. Perhaps I had become too comfortable with the threat of tornados over the years, which is certainly a deadly way to feel. But, I felt like the coming twister was not going to touch down right here. We were going to get some hellish winds, the electricity may even go out for a while, but I thought I would probably be just fine in my apartment. Then again, people always seem to think that they will be just fine.

  It wasn’t just familiarity and stupidity that kept me from running for cover, though. If the time came, I wouldn’t hesitate to do just that. It was because I have called it before. Just once, when I was seven years old, but I called it before.

  That day the sky had looked the same as the one currently outside my door. A tornado watch had been in effect. My mother—despite having grown up in Tornado Alley—was deathly afraid of being sucked up and spit out by the sky, as she so eloquently loved to put it. She would sit in front of the television, the remote clutched between her sweaty hands, and watch all of the newscasts tracking the storms. There are two reasons I remember that day so clearly, even though it was now fourteen years gone. One was because it was the only time a tornado had ever come close to doing me real harm, and two was because it was the only time my mother made a comment about my gift. Before that day, I thought that both of my parents had no idea. I still believe my father doesn’t. Since she has never since mentioned it again, I am suspicious, but not positive, that my mother knows about my ability.

  We were sitting in her parlor (please remove your shoes and wash your hands before entering thank you) watching the meteorologist inform us about the coming storm. At this point only a watch had been in effect. The warning for my area would not be issued until thirty minutes after the damage was done.

  Whenever a warning was issued, my mother would rush my father and me down into our basement, and we would sit there for hours, my mother telling us both about how God’s hand was coming down. God’s hand was coming down and it meant business, and me sitting in the corner with a flashlight and an old paperback. My father and I never had much in common, but we both hated when there was a tornado watch, and the potentially deadly tornado had nothing to do with it.

  So, my mother sat, eyes glued to the television screen and waiting for it to announce that the watch was now a warning so that she could rush us down to the basement and spout her paranoia for endless hours. Meanwhile, I crept into my room to pick out the book I would bring with me when she made us go down there. I was scanning my bookcase, trying to decide between a collection of Poe’s poems and stories and Great Expectations, when a potent sense of dread rushed through me. I turned from the bookshelf with wooden stiffness and crossed my room to look out of my windows. I took no time to wonder why I did this, I just did.

  The sky was dark and gray and ugly, but no more so than when I had seen it on what seemed like hundreds of occasions before. Except, that day, as I looked out at it from the false and flimsy protection that was my bedroom window, my heart was nearly leaping out of my chest. Nothing beyond that simple glass window was moving. Nothing at all. Except for that angry gray mass that was hovering above.

  Standing at the window that day, looking out at that dark, still world, was the first time that I ever wanted to have a vision, a sliver of the future. I had nothing to support my feeling that the tornado was coming, and that it was coming here (a watch had been issued in twelve separate counties. Odds were we’d get spared, and watch also meant no one had spotted a twister, anyhow), but somehow I was terrified that a tornado was coming, and that our house was on its menu. I stood there and shut my eyes, my body suddenly cold all over and my heart pounding war drums in my ears, and I hoped with all my heart to see if it was coming. I wished with all my heart to see if it was coming before it came.

  My wish was granted. I saw what was going to happen. And it was coming.

  I had rushed back into my mother’s parlor, my face dripping cold sweat, my fists clenching and unclenching, and struggling worse than ever to get the words I needed to say through my lips. “Uh-uh-uh-uh st-st-st—”

  My mother noticed me then, and her face lit up with angry alarm. She came over to me and gripped me hard by the shoulders. “Spit it out,” she said, shaking me now, as if that would help the words come. “Spit it out, you crazy little shit! You’re scarin’ me!”

  “T-t-t-t—”

  She shook me harder, her pale, terrified face only inches from my own. “Spit it out, godamnit! If you know something, spit it out!”

  “TORNADO!” I screamed at her, the word ripping flawlessly up my throat and through my lips.

  Her face had changed then. Whereas before there was just fear and anger, now there was also a little disgust. She released me, shoving my shoulders with such force that I stumbled back a few steps. Staring down me, she said, “I knew it.” Whether she was referring to the storm or to my gift, I still do not know.

  We’d only been in the basement for fifteen minutes when it happened, and despite all of the things I have endured since, that experience remains to be the single most terrifying of my entire life. The single light bulb hanging from the concrete basement ceiling flickered, moving shadows against the walls and floor and our shocked faces. Then the light went out completely, and my parents and I sat in utter darkness, all of us too scared to speak or move. And just before the “hand of God” came down, the world went unnaturally silent, as if all of its sounds had been sucked into some enormous black hole, leaving only a void for the ears. Nothing seemed to be stirring. I remember thinking one thing: It’s the calm before the storm. That’s what they mean when they say—

  And my mother screamed then, filling the void with such hard, high-pitched terror tha
t I slapped my hands over my ears and tucked my knees close to my chest as I sat on the cold, hard floor. I bent my head down between my knees and listened, and waited.

  Then, all hell broke loose.

  The entire house above our heads let out a guttural, anguished groan, followed by a crack of thunder so colossal that I found myself shaking and muttering into the darkness. My father cursed. My mother fell silent. More groans, more angry thunder. And then we heard it.

  And it was not a force of sound which could be compared with anything. It was the sound of the world rushing by outside of your open car windows. It was the sound of high winds in the dead of night, slapping tree branches against your window. It was the sound of a hair dryer pressed right against your ear. It was all of those things, but it was not. It was the ungodly sound of Mother Nature herself, in all of her enormous, unstoppable glory.

  Next came the sound of breaking things; boards snapping and ripping like weak bones and soft muscles, shattering glass, tree branches splitting, objects flying, landing, crashing. The moment seemed to go on for an eternity, the dark, the cold basement and the sounds of it drowning the world. I would find out later that it had only lasted for a handful of minutes, but in that moment I felt sure that it was eternal, that I would be trapped in this black hole for the rest of forever.

  We finally found the nerve to crawl out of the basement, my father going up the stairs first, followed by me and my mother behind me. We got to see firsthand just how big and bad Ms. Mother Nature really could be. Almost every window on the second floor of our house had been shattered, and more on the first floor. The privacy fence around our backyard had been ripped from the ground and tossed carelessly aside like a child’s plaything. Several houses on the block had been reduced to heaps of boards and furniture and rubble. Power lines lay across the road in deceptive, dangerous silence. Trash was strewn everywhere, the streets and lawns resembling the sight of some unruly party. An old, gigantic oak had been torn up by its ancient roots and tossed straight down onto my mother’s parlor room. The chair she had been sitting in when I came in to warn her about the tornado had been crushed under the oak’s massive trunk. When she saw it, she flashed me a look of hatred so deep that I fell back a step, turned on my heel and wandered around the destroyed neighborhood in shock and hurt.

  And that is the only time I can recall that my gift has ever saved me from heartache. My mother has her issues, but I’m glad that that tree hadn’t crushed her underneath it.

  There were other things I needed to be concentrating on at the moment, however. I turned away from the sliding glass doors of my apartment balcony and returned to my desk in the corner. I was just firing up my laptop when a knock sounded on my door. My heart skipped a beat. I left my bedroom, crossed my small living room and opened the door.

  “Joe,” Mr. Landry said.

  I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Yes, sir?” I asked.

  Mr. Landry stared at me for a moment, and a look I couldn’t interpret came over his face. It was gone a second later, and he shook his head a little, as if shoving unwanted thoughts away. “Should we be headed underground?” he asked, shooting an uneasy glance at the gray sky.

  For a moment, I didn’t know how to answer this. “Uh…no. No, I th-think it’ll muh-miss us this time, sir,” I said, and as if to call me a liar, the warning sirens went off in the streets, loud and smug and obnoxious.

  Mr. Landry glanced around at the sound and then settled his gaze back on me, raising an eyebrow and smirking a little at the timing of the sirens. I gave a slanted smile and shrugged once.

  “Good enough for me,” he said, and headed back into his apartment.

  I shut my door and sat back down in front of my computer, trying to think of where to start, but instead thinking of Mr. Landry. He was certainly a strange old man, if the pot can call the kettle black. Thinking of Mr. Landry reminded me of Michael. I wondered if he was going to actually show up on Sunday morning to help unload Mr. Landry’s shipment at his store. I decided it didn’t matter, as long as he kept up his end of the bargain and skipped school on Monday. If he did, I may have saved someone from the gunman already. Now there were just fifteen thousand other students and a couple thousand UMMS employees to save. Piece of cake.

  Luckily, the power didn’t go out, so I searched the Internet for the next six hours. By the time my eyes were watering with exhaustion and my back cramping from staying seated for so long, I thought I was beginning to understand my adversary, and I didn’t like what I was learning.

  I’d started with the school shooting that was the most prominent in my mind: Columbine High School. The abundance of information on this topic was staggering. There were interviews with friends of victims, psychiatric reports profiling the two shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. There were police reports and journals and poetry and lists and dedications and videos—videos straight from the school’s security cameras of the shooting that took place in the high school cafeteria. Aside from the Eric Harris’s personal diary, the videos of the event were the hardest to take.

  I made myself read every word and watch every moment. When I came across collected excerpts from Eric Harris’s diary, I began to feel nauseated. He had written down all of his plans, made lists of the things he had to do to carry those plans out. One particularly long list was titled “Things I hate”, and everything under the sun was on this disturbing list. The hate and anger poured from the pages with such force that I began to feel cold, despite the stagnant, warm air of my apartment, and it didn’t help that it was literally a dark and stormy night.

  But, I was learning. Oh, yes, I was learning a great deal, and doing something, no matter how unpleasant, was better than doing nothing at all.

  It was probably safe to assume that the gunman I would be facing was a man, based on statistics that I found showing that the vast majority of school shooters were male. So, eliminate the half of the student population that were females at UMMS, and I was down to somewhere between seven thousand and eight thousand potential suspects. Next—and this was a leap, but I was grasping at straws anyhow—I figured that the shooter was more than likely a white male. I made this deduction based on the fact that the majority of the cases I came across (there were several websites listing every school shooting in the history of the country) involved white male shooters. I wasn’t counting the inner city school statistics that claimed gang violence the reason for the shootings. That brought the suspect pool down to about five thousand.

  Then I put what I knew from my sketch together with what I’d learned from the Internet, and I came back to two cases that seemed to apply to my current predicament. The first one was the Columbine shootings. The second was the Virginia Tech shootings. And then I began to dig deeper and find out just how impossible my task really was.

  These two incidents stood out for both similar and different reasons. The Virginia tech shooting was the worst school shooting massacre in the history of America, ending with over thirty people shot dead. Also, Virginia Tech was a college shooting, so it bore even more relevance. Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman, was of Asian descent. There went my white male theory. With Columbine, the second largest school shooting massacre, there were two gunman, both white males by the names of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The body count here totaled thirteen. I removed my sketch from the pocket of my notebook and counted the bodies I could see lying at the gunman’s feet. There were at least fifteen definite dead. In the background, the lawn and sidewalks of the Quad were littered with nondescript granite-colored humps. There was no way to be sure, but I had a feeling these gray humps were also victims. Worse yet, I had a feeling that there were many more beyond the scope of my clairvoyant camera. I rubbed my head, a headache touching my temples. I certainly had my work cut out for me.

  And here was the point: In these two cases the shooters had surely gone through extensive planning. The shooters had not been small thinkers. No, they had wanted to take out as many as
possible. They wanted recognition and infamy. They were some kind of psychopaths. Big dreamers. The Shadow Man in my sketch, with the shadow guns clutched in his hands, was also a big dreamer. He was planning for a large body count.

  Harris, Klebold and Cho all left things behind as well: diaries, journals, poetry. The Columbine shooters even left notes about the plans they were making. They talked about the bombs they had built using the library and the Internet as a resource. They talked about whom they would kill, which amounted to just about anyone who crossed their path. And then there was Harris’s list of things he hated from his disturbing diary.

  I hate the god damn world, too much god damn fuckers in it….

  My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law, if you don’t like it, you die…

  I can’t wait till I can kill you people. I’ll just go to some downtown area in some big ass city and blow up and shoot everything I can. Feel no remorse. No sense of shame…

  From now on I don’t give a fuck about what any of you mutha fuckas have to say…You all better hide in your houses because I am coming for everyone soon, and I WILL be armed to the fuckin’ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill and I WILL fucking KILL EVERYTHING! No, I am not crazy, crazy is just a word. To me it has no meaning…I say fuck you and die. If you got a problem with my thoughts, come and tell me and I’ll kill you, because…godamnit, DEAD PEOPLE DON’T ARGUE!

  Yes, wonderful thing, this research. Very encouraging. This was the kind of guy I was planning to go after? Well, if crazy is just a word, I thought it would probably apply to me, too.

  Seung-Hui Cho sent video diaries to the press prior to his shooting. They basically said things like: “You backed me into a corner,” “You didn’t have to do this,” “You thought it was just one boy’s heart you were destroying,” and on and on and on. If he was going for sympathy, I don’t think he got it.