by Anna Zaires, Pepper Winters, Skye Warren, Lynda Chance, Pam Godwin, Amber Lin
Was it?
I closed my eyes again, and various visions of high school shootings and gunmen from rooftops invaded my head. Despite the carnage of the scenes played for everyone’s viewing in the media, my mind found peace with the idea. There was always the same ending to the instigator of that kind of violence.
End being the focus.
“Tired.”
Tired of playing this role, tired of just moving through the city like I was some kind of god or demon here to bring Rinaldo Moretti’s version of justice to those who crossed my path. None of it even mattered to me – all I got out of it was a wad of cash and a twisted idea of loyalty to someone who told me I did a good job and occasionally called me “son.”
When I opened my eyes, the Muslim woman was looking at me. My already tense body coiled, and my hand slipped down to the end of the seat – closer to my weapon. I had seven rounds loaded and two more clips on me. My mind counted how many people I could take out with what I had. I could easily build a barrier of bodies around myself.
How would that look to the woman who was eyeing me? Would she try to come at me? Would she throw herself in front of her husband or he in front of her?
It wouldn’t make any difference. They would both die. So would the guy wearing that stupid camo coat and the plethora of oblivious teens with their earbuds shoved into their ears and their electronic devices shoved in their faces. They had no idea what was going on around them, and it was about time for someone to wake them all up.
I couldn’t save those in my unit – couldn’t protect them. There was nothing I could do now – no one to save, no one to protect. The deaths would be meaningless and senseless – every last one of them.
All deaths were.
My fingers reached behind my back and touched the warm handle of my Beretta. It felt good. I maneuvered the weapon around to my front, though still underneath my jacket.
My mind continued to swim around me, but there wasn’t any war going on inside. Even when I tried to come up with shit I might regret not knowing or not doing, I couldn’t come up with much. I wished I had a pizza for lunch instead of the damn hotdog I’d grabbed from a cart. I wished I’d seen that new GI Joe movie that was supposed to come out soon – the previews looked good, and I had always liked GI Joe.
My head moved up slowly, and I opened my eyes.
There really wasn’t any reason to delay.
“It’s decided.”
This was how it was going to end.
I looked around from right to left, starting with the Muslim couple. My eyes traversed the teens, the camo-coated guy, a woman with a Macy’s shopping bag, and the guy holding his little girl.
The little girl’s eyes left her father and focused on me. Our gazes locked on each other, and the fuzz of the pink hat blew around in the wind from the bus doors as they opened and closed at the next stop. My heart beat louder in my chest, and I could feel the blood flowing rapidly through my veins. I didn’t know how long she and I just looked at each other. I only knew that she would be collateral damage in my half-assed plan.
The doors of the bus opened, and the fuzzy hat blew around in the cool breeze again. I shoved off the seat, pushed my gun into the front waistband of my pants, and got the fuck off the bus.
I was far past my own stop – up north on Michigan Avenue near the John Hancock Observatory. I crossed the street but didn’t bother to get on another bus – it seemed risky. My feet carried me past the Water Works and the Columbia sportswear store. I went by Tiffany’s and Co and tried not to think of my date with Bridgett.
The smell of tomato sauce and cheese dragged me into a nearby pizzeria, where I ordered a cheese stuffed pizza with extra sauce, ate half of it, and then leaned back and wondered if my stomach was going to explode.
I walked back home and dropped down to the floor as Odin came up to me and whined. He sniffed at my hands, and I swear he knew what I had done.
“I shouldn’t have done it. I don’t even know why I did it.”
My throat tightened, choking off my words.
“I could have taken a piss on the other side of the building where I might have seen them coming up. If I had, I could have taken them out from there – lots of cover.”
Dizziness tried to knock me further to the ground, but I fought my way back to my feet. Maybe I was dehydrated – my throat was certainly dry. After guzzling a bottle of water, I decided to take Odin outside. He wagged his tail at me, and I felt like a total schmuck for not even thinking about what would happen to him if I was gone. I rubbed his shaggy head and attached the leash to his collar.
The weather was about the perfect temperature for his coat, and he seemed pretty thrilled when I didn’t steer us towards the park but headed out down Wacker and towards Navy Pier. It was a good distance, but Odin loved to walk out by the lake.
He moved towards a group of seagulls, and I ran with him so he could chase them. My feet pounded the ground, and my head filled with memories.
Heavy artillery fire and an explosion. I can barely lift my head at this point, but I want to know what’s going on outside. Something big. Something noisy.
I can only hope whatever it is will finally end me.
There is shouting, the sound of feet running, and the added sound of a helicopter way too close to the ground.
More explosions, more shouting – this time in English, but I assume that is nothing more than a dream – another hallucination.
I can’t even pretend I still have hope.
Tired from the run, we walked back to the apartment. I fed Odin and sat down at my computer to check email.
Maybe if I just kept myself occupied with the mundane, I could manage to pull out of this.
“You killed her. She fucking trusted you – depended on you.”
“Shut up.”
Email never changed.
Some attorney in the UK was sure I was the long lost relative of some Irish land baron and would like to send me a lot of money.
The Art Institute had free admission to Chicago residents to the Picasso exhibit on Monday.
The place where I just had dinner wants me to save ten bucks on my next visit.
Nothing interesting, so I closed it and sat on the couch for a while, flipping through channels. It didn’t work, of course. I even tried some pay-per-view-porn, but it did nothing for me. My head was pounding too much.
“Better off with a hooker; they’re just not better off with you.”
“Shut up.”
I had to do something to clear my head, so I grabbed Odin’s leash and led him back outside and over to the dog run.
The sun was beginning to fade behind the buildings, but there was still plenty of daylight and lots of people around. The kids on the playground were loud, but all seemed to be having fun. The damn parking garage door sang out to all around that a car was about to exit, and I tensed at the blaring noise. Shaking my head to clear it, I sat numbly on the bench and let Odin do his thing.
My head was still throbbing, and I rubbed my fingers over my temples. When I brought them back down again, I saw a spatter of blood on my thumb.
“Is it hers? His?”
I rubbed at it and then laughed at myself.
“Out, out, damn spot!”
“Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!”
My arms tightened around my body, and I doubled over a bit. I hadn’t realized it before, but the sound was just a little too close to the perimeter alarm that blared in the middle of the night, signifying that someone had breached the exterior of our base. It was usually a false alarm, but it still woke everyone up.
“Too tired. Need sleep.”
Odin ran up and slobbered on my leg.
“Disgusting,” I told him, but I rubbed his head anyway. With our connection reaffirmed, he ran over to a yippie terrier and chased it around a tree with funky orange bark.
The damn garage door behind me went up again, accompanied by the detestable and continuous warning sounds. My back and
shoulders tensed, and my heart rate increased.
My mind continued to flash back and forth – the Iraqi desert, Bridgett’s body on the floor of my boss’s office building, Lia’s moans as I slid inside of her, and the taste of sand.
It was too much…just too much.
“Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!”
“Motherfucker!” I growled low as the sound from behind me made my teeth clench. My right index finger gripped back against my palm, letting me know what my body wanted.
The woman who apparently owned the yippie terrier glanced over at me dubiously. My eyes met hers, and I held her gaze until she looked away. She quickly moved herself and her dog to the other side of the small park.
“Like that’s gonna help you.”
Thirty seconds after it stopped, the blaring, beeping sound began again.
I capitulated to the growing need inside of me.
Whistling for Odin, I snapped his leash back on his collar and marched across the park to my apartment building. Odin whined at me and actually pulled back a bit at his leash, which he never did. I glanced back at him, and he nearly cowered.
I didn’t have time for that, though. I had other things to do, so I hauled him to the building against his will.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I muttered as the elevator took forever to get to my floor. I pressed the button several dozen times, but it didn’t seem to help. As soon as the doors opened, I hauled Odin down the hallway and into my apartment. I released his leash, filled his water dish, and then turned to something far more desirable.
In my bedroom closet, way in the back, were my desert fatigues. I hadn’t worn them since my forced retirement, but they still fit pretty well. I pulled the dog tags that sat at the bottom of the ceramic dish on my dresser over my head, and then I turned back to the closet.
Odin whined from the doorway.
I pulled my Barrett rifle out of its duffle bag, assembled it, and opened up my balcony door. I knelt down on the ground and opened up the bipod to stabilize the weapon and then lay down behind it. With my feet sticking out through the balcony rails on one side, I took careful aim across the park through the scope. I placed the cross hairs right at the light next to the door and waited.
It was only a minute or two before the light started to blink, the door started to open, and the bleep bleep bleep warning signal screeched across the area.
“You are going to crack someday, aren’t you, Lieutenant?”
“Sure am.”
I fired.
The light exploded, but the noise continued. In a smooth arch, I moved my aim and fired at a box to the left of the door, which sent shrapnel around the sidewalk but still didn’t end the noise. There was another small electric box up near the corner of the garage door, and my third shot destroyed it and left the park in blessed electronic silence.
The people noise, however, increased significantly.
There was screaming from around the park, people rushing out of the Mexican restaurant at the end of the strip mall, and barking dogs from the dog run. There was a row of windows in the red brick building that housed the offending garage, and I blew them out one by one. The glass fell to the sidewalk and shattered further as spent cases began to cover my balcony.
The parents of children on the playground wrapped their arms around their offspring and ducked under slides and swings. Owners tried to leash their dogs and get out of the open.
I switched to a new magazine and then kept firing.
My ears were ringing, and I could hear Odin barking from the room behind me, but I shut out everything I could. The remaining windows in the building shattered as I fired repeatedly. It was just me, the trigger, and the recoil of the weapon against my shoulder.
I wanted more, though.
The crosshairs found one of the restaurant patrons, and I focused right above her eye.
“You don’t even know her.”
I shook my head, closed my eyes tightly, and tried to catch my breath.
“And you’re fucking talking to yourself!” I spat back. I looked down the scope again, but the woman had disappeared inside. Refocusing, the crosshairs found the woman with the terrier. She had scooped up the small dog and was running across the park with a couple other screamers. I was pretty sure I could take them both out in one shot.
“Why? What’s the fucking purpose?”
“Shut up!”
My hands started to shake, and sweat poured from my forehead into my eyes. I hadn’t put on a bandana to keep it away, and my accuracy was going to suffer. The shaking was totally fucking me up when it came to placing the crosshair over my target, and when I fired, I missed completely.
Sirens.
“Waited too fucking long.”
I let go for a moment, wiped sweat and whatever out of my eyes, shook my hands, and took a deep breath.
“You can do this shit. You’re good at this shit.”
As I glanced away from the scope and down the side of the building, I could see multiple people in flak jackets and helmets beginning to evacuate the park and surround my apartment building. I could have gone over and down the side of the building at that point, but figured it was probably too late, so I went back to firing.
Seven cars lost tires, but nothing was as satisfying as the parking garage door. I switched to my last magazine and shifted my aim to the right. The SWAT team hadn’t surrounded that area yet, and there were lots of bystanders around. If I killed one of them, they were probably going to locate their own sniper to take me out. I could hear a helicopter in the distance and figured that’s where he’d be. It was either that or open up fire on the SWAT guys, but the helmets made it more difficult.
I blew out the windows of the residential building on the right side of the park and then focused on someone standing half way down the stairs leading to North Columbia Drive. The crosshairs found where an ear was hidden underneath dark, silken hair.
Beautiful hair.
She turned, and the fading sun glittered off the necklace around her throat. It was a simple, silver chain with a large, round pendant of some sort. No wait, not a pendant – it was a…a…
“A quarter.”
My finger stopped moving. My breath stopped. Hell, my heart might have stopped beating at that point.
“No fucking way.”
Odin barked, yelped, and then went silent.
The noise from the screaming people below was overshadowed by the noise from behind me. Their words meant little, even though I knew they were likely screaming at me to let go of the weapon and stop trying to blow up the fucking neighborhood.
Whatever.
I couldn’t take my eyes from the shining quarter necklace and the familiar face above it.
“Lia.”
“Release the weapon now!”
It had to be a hallucination.
There was no way – no way she could possibly be here.
Absolutely impossible.
“Release your weapon now, or I will be forced to fire!”
Fatigue covered me. I couldn’t fight it anymore. My hands moved to the ground below the gun, and I pushed back away from it even as I kept my eye on the scope. I had already dropped my hand from the trigger, but nothing was making any sense to me in the slow motion events to follow.
I didn’t want to be there, and I didn’t want to be doing what I was doing. I never wanted any of it to come to this. Rinaldo wouldn’t like it – this wasn’t something he would approve of at all, and I couldn’t take it back now.
The figure in the crosshairs turned, held her hand up to shade her eyes, and looked up towards me. The same eyes, the same swishing motion of her hair as she turned, and the same curve of her bottom lip as her teeth sank into it.
Then she was gone.
My hands were wrenched behind me, and I was abruptly facedown on the balcony floor, my cheek scraping on the concrete. Immediately, I could hear the muffled, distant-memory sound of gunfire and explosions. I could taste the sand and
feel it in my lungs.
“Please…no – please don’t kill me! I have a wife! Her name’s Marie, and my daughters, Evelyn and Jennie…”
A muffled click, and when I turn towards the sound, someone grabs my head and pushes it down again.
“Kill me! I don’t even have a fucking family! Just kill me!”
I didn’t move, didn’t resist. I barely felt their hands on me.
“Kill me,” I whispered. “Kill me, please…just kill me.”
More voices joined the conglomerate around me. There was a new set of hands holding one of my shoulders down. Radios crackled, and the sound of a helicopter overhead made me try to lift my head to see what kind. Police? Traffic? Military? Was there a sniper inside, as I suspected, ready to end me?
The gunfire in my head continued, occasionally causing me to flinch. Whenever I did that, the two people holding my body to the ground leaned harder against me, though I wasn’t resisting. My head dropped back to the ground, and I could see out over the edge of the balcony towards the park, which was now devoid of people. There was no one there at all now – not a woman, a man, or even a dog.
“Odin?”
I tried to get my head up enough to look into the apartment, but I was shoved back down.
“Odin!”
I heard nothing in response.
My chest started to seize up, and I couldn’t breathe. He had been barking, something he almost never did, but was now silent. Where was he? What did they do to him? Did he go after them in order to protect me?
“No…no…”
Odin…God, no…Odin…
I squeezed my eyes shut. Someone was holding the back of my neck, and I could taste sand in my mouth. I could feel the wire wrapped around my wrists as it cut into my skin, and I could hear desert winds blowing around me.
“Not real.”
Forcing air into my lungs, I traded not breathing for hyperventilating. I glanced over my shoulder and saw four men around me, holding me to the ground as cuffs were placed around my wrists. Another man near the sliding glass door held a shotgun at my head.
“Where’s my…where’s my dog? Odin!”
No one replied. No one said a word.
The dizziness in my head threatened to end my consciousness as they hauled me to my feet. I stumbled as I stared towards the stairs where the figure with the quarter-themed necklace had been, but there was no one there now except a man with a rifle and a SWAT uniform.
