by Mark Morris
The cops charged through the terminal, guns drawn, shouting at everybody to get down. I’d heard once on TV that there was a reason they did this during an active shooter incident. The theory was that a gunman would remain standing, while innocent civilians would immediately comply with the order. That seemed to be the case now. I certainly complied, dropping quickly to my knees, and then lying flat on the floor, almost on top of a dead businessman. I knew he was a businessman because of how he was dressed, and the expensive watch around his wrist—the face of which was now shattered—and the briefcase he still clutched in one hand. I knew he was dead because the back of his bald head was missing. I lay there on the floor, his blood still warm on the tiles beneath me, and stared into the wound. I was close enough to see his brains. To smell them. They looked like pinkish-white cottage cheese covered in bits of red jelly.
“Everybody get down! Down, down, down!”
The ringing in my ears faded. The screams and cries grew louder. I raised my head cautiously. Then, three new gunshots rang out. This time, it was one of the cops shooting. I turned my head to the right, and saw a man slam back into the wall. He slumped down, leaving a smear of blood, and then collapsed.
Someone whimpered behind me. “Was that the shooter? Did they get him?”
The police continued bellowing. From my vantage point, it was hard to tell if everyone in the baggage claim area had complied. I did my best to stay still and remain calm. I didn’t want to be the next one to get shot. I lay there, staring into the back of the bald businessman’s head, and suddenly I had to pee very badly. I wriggled, pressing my groin against the floor, trying to alleviate the pressure. The dead man’s blood seeped through the fabric of my pants and shirt.
“Everyone just stay down,” another officer ordered. “Shelter in place. No sudden movements. Don’t stand up. If you are injured, just hang on. Help is on the way.”
I wondered if the cops were local airport police or TSA or Homeland Security. Probably the former, judging by their uniforms. In hindsight, their response had been impressive. How long had it taken, between the time the first shot was fired and the moment they arrived? It had seemed like minutes, but in reality… maybe forty-five seconds? Maybe a minute, at most? How many more people would have been killed had they not gotten to the scene so quickly? Indeed, how many were dead? It was hard to say, given the smoke and the chaos.
The gunshots had faded now, and the screams had stopped. New sounds emerged. More crying, of course, but also prayers, and whispers, and one small child calling for “Mommy”. I couldn’t tell if the kid was a boy or a girl, and wasn’t about to stand up and see. A lot of people were coughing; I guess because of the smoke. Someone else retched, followed by the unmistakable sound of vomiting. I heard English and Spanish, and what may have been Swiss French. Somebody muttered in a language I didn’t recognize at all, other than it was Asian. I know that’s not very politically correct, but again, I wasn’t going to risk getting shot by a cop just to determine the nationality of a fellow airport commuter. Many people moaned in obvious pain. One person—it sounded like a woman—kept urging someone named John to “Breathe, just breathe.”
I tilted my head carefully to the left and spotted another dead person. A young woman, dressed in pink yoga pants and a black hoodie. One foot was clad in a sandal. The other foot was bare. She’d been shot in the throat, and the ends of her long blonde hair, tied up in a ponytail, had turned strawberry-colored from the blood. Another man was sprawled next to her, unmoving, eyes staring sightlessly. One of his arms was thrown across her. I wondered if they knew each other. Then I wondered how he had died. He hadn’t been shot. I didn’t see any obvious wounds. Heart attack, maybe? Shock?
The baggage carousel still turned. The wheels and pulleys squeaked. Suitcases and duffel bags rotated past on the conveyor belt, stuck in a seemingly endless loop. I wondered why someone didn’t turn it off.
“Did anyone see the shooter?”
The speaker was directly in front of me. I raised my head just a bit, and saw a guy in a Hawaiian-print shirt. I remembered seeing him before, from across the baggage claim area. I wondered dimly how he’d ended up on this side of the carousel.
“I didn’t see shit,” somebody answered.
“I’ll bet it was a fucking terrorist,” Hawaiian shirt muttered. “Fucking Muzzies.”
“I think it was that guy the police just shot,” a woman volunteered.
“Nah,” someone else piped up. “That guy wasn’t a Muslim.”
“Who says the shooter had to be Muslim?” The woman’s tone had grown angry.
“Quiet down,” a cop ordered. “Everyone just remain calm. Help is on the way.”
I heard an electronic squawk and then a burst of static from one of the officers’ radios. A dispatcher mumbled something, but she said it so quickly and her voice was distorted, and I couldn’t tell what it was. A recorded announcement came over the airport loudspeakers, reminding us to keep our luggage with us at all times, and to not accept any strange packages from strangers, and to report any suspicious activity to airport security. Oddly enough, this caused some giggles from a few people in the crowd.
Cell phones began to ring and ding and beep. The first reports of the shooting were probably exploding across social media and the news outlets—going viral, they call it. Concerned loved ones were probably trying to contact friends and family. I imagined there were a lot of people parked outside of the airport, unable to get inside. Surely the authorities had put up a security cordon by now.
“Nobody move,” a cop reminded us. His voice sounded shrill, like a guitar that’s been strung too tight. “Just let them ring. We need to secure this area first.”
“My husband has been shot,” a woman yelled. “Won’t you please help him?”
“Just hang in there, ma’am. We’re doing all we can. We—”
“You’re not doing shit,” she shrieked. “He’s over here dying!”
I heard people around me gasp. I raised my head and saw a young officer pointing his weapon. His arms trembled.
“Ma’am, get back down! Get down on the floor!”
“My husband—”
“Get on the fucking floor, goddamn it!”
Other people started telling her to get down. Others cursed the police. The woman began sobbing, but she must have complied, because the cop lowered his weapon again.
The businessman with the hole in his head started to vibrate. The floor rattled around him. It was his phone, set to mute. For one bizarre second, I had the urge to answer it. It buzzed for another twenty seconds or so and then went silent. The police radios squawked again. I still couldn’t make out what was being said.
It occurred to me that my fear had subsided. The nervous ball of tension that had been sitting in my stomach like a bag of cement since this whole thing began was gone. Just dissipated. These mass shootings—they seem to happen all the time now. Once a month, sometimes more than that, you see the breaking news. Another mass shooting. Schools, train stations, college campuses, movie theaters, nightclubs… airports. I remember the first time I heard the term “shelter in place”. It was after the Boston marathon bombing, when the cops basically imposed martial law and went door to door, searching for the bombers. The media said residents were being told to shelter in place.
I used to always wonder what the people in those situations were going through. What were they thinking? How did they feel? Now, I knew. I didn’t feel anything.
I still had to pee, though.
The pool of blood I was lying in began to cool. It stuck to my palms and in between my fingers like maple syrup. Amazingly, the dead businessman was still leaking. Blood trickled steadily from that hole in his head, like a spigot that hadn’t been turned off all the way. I guess I should have been repulsed by it, but I wasn’t. It was sort of fascinating really.
Paramedics arrived on the scene. The cops huddled with them for a moment, and then turned to us. All of them still had
their weapons drawn and at the ready.
“Okay, people, listen up. We’re going to clear this room. One by one, you’re going to be frisked, stand up, and then go through these doors over here. You will follow all orders and keep your hands over your head at all times.”
I glanced at where he was pointing. The sun shone brightly through the glass. It looked like a nice day outside.
“Don’t stand or move until we tell you to. If everyone complies, this will be over a lot quicker. We know you’re scared. Some of you are injured. But we can’t take any chances until we’ve confirmed that none of you are the shooter.”
He didn’t ask us if we understood, but several people murmured their consent and understanding. Several more moaned in pain, growing frantic at the sight of the paramedics—so close, and yet still so far.
The cops fanned out in pairs, going through the crowd. One by one, they frisked us where we lay. One of them did the deed while the other kept a gun pointed at us. When they were satisfied that we weren’t the shooter, they had us stand. The people that couldn’t stand were helped to their feet. Then they pointed us toward the door, where more law enforcement officers were waiting. Each of us had to leave the baggage claim area with our hands held high over our head, as ordered.
Soon enough, it was my turn. I lay still while the officer patted me down. He was close enough to me that I could feel the heat wafting off him, and smell his cologne. His partner kept her weapon trained on me. That urge to pee grew almost unbearable. Then, they were done. They told me to stand, put my hands over my head, and walk out the doors to where the other officers were waiting. That’s what I did.
They never noticed my pistol, shoved underneath the still bleeding corpse of the bald businessman.
Nor did they notice the burn the smoke bomb left on my finger when I set it off.
I made it home, and just finished typing this up. I don’t know how long it will take, but I suppose they’ll figure it out soon enough. They’ll learn that I was the shooter. Maybe they’ll find security camera footage of me, or maybe someone with a cell phone snapped a picture of me when I opened fire, before the smoke obscured everything. Or maybe they’ll find my fingerprints on the handgun.
I’m sitting here, trying to decide what to do next.
Go out in the streets and pick up where I left off.
Or I can wait for them to come to me, while I sit here, sheltered in place.
THE FOLD IN THE HEART
by Chaz Brenchley
“I don’t understand,” she said, gazing discontentedly around the churchyard, “why we always want to hold on to everything, regardless. We don’t even let our dead go, for God’s sake.”
I said nothing. I who had spent a long year trying to hold on to the living, and failing badly. I had an urn full of ashes in my wardrobe, and no idea, none, what to do with them; only that I couldn’t let them go.
Rowan was—well, sometimes I called her my favourite niece, sometimes my god-daughter. Neither was actually true, but she was the first child of old friends and she mattered to me more than blood, far more than belief.
She said, “I want a woodland burial, a woven wicker coffin, no marker. Just stick a tree on top of me and forget which one it was.”
“I could bury you at sea,” I said cheerfully. “Sewn into a hammock, with cannonballs at your feet to hold you down.”
“Hey. Can you actually do that?”
“Sure. I’d need a licence, and I was joking about the hammock; you have to have a coffin weighted with steel and concrete, but it’s doable if you want it.”
She thought about it as we clambered over the stile into the ninety-acre field; then she shook her head. “Nah. I never did like boats that much. Or fish. Sorry, I know I’m a disappointment.”
“You are that. Trees it is, then. I can’t promise to forget where we plant you, but I’ll make sure your parents don’t put in a rowan.”
“That would be tacky,” she agreed. “Something to grow old and bent and hoary, please. No good for building boats. I don’t want you cutting me down for timber.”
“Pity. You’d make excellent planking: long and straight and lissom.”
I stuck my elbow out, as I used to do. Obligingly, she slipped her arm through mine as we plodged through heavy wet turf in pat-proof wellies. There was no beaten path between the stile and the sea cliff. This was cow pasture; we took a different route every time, veering around new pats and high-stepping over old ones. Even in wellingtons. Even so, there was a midpoint, a waymarker that was hard to avoid. From the stile to the sheepfold, from the fold to the sea; it was native, inherent, absolute. A given.
When she was little, the fold meant a break in our journey, a necessary pause while she clambered over drystone walls and played King of the Castle on top of it, hide-and-seek within it, while we made up stories about wizards snared in lonely towers and the brave princesses who came to rescue them. In later years she’d join local kids and visitors in rowdy games of tag or kiss chase, where the fold was always home, safe ground.
Now that she was grown, now that I was far beyond rescuing and she wouldn’t dream of running from a kiss, she laid a hand on the upper coursework and said, “Someone’s been working on this.” Almost accusatory, as though it should properly have been left in the state of half-collapse that she remembered.
A sheepfold in a cow pasture has no obvious purpose, and other enemies than time; but even so. “People do,” I said mildly. “Every now and then a lad gets interested, wants to know how to wall. There’s always a farmer willing to teach him. This is where they learn. Cows are always rubbing their arses on it, knocking stones off. Sometimes they bring down a whole corner, over time. Well, you know; you’ve seen it at its worst. Then it’s a job of work to put it back up again. But it does get done.” There hadn’t been sheep on this land for a hundred years or more, but the fold was here yet, blunt grey walls in a green field.
She grunted, a little sceptical, and leaned her own trim arse against a hip-high wall as if tempted to give it a nudge, see if she could knock off a coping stone.
Her eyes on the horizon, she said,“Tell me about Bruce.”
“Tell you what about Bruce? You knew him all your life.”
She said, “Yeah, but I was a kid and he was an old man, and—well, you know. Not at all grandfatherly. He really didn’t want me in the yard, where I had to be watched all the time because of the tools, and—”
“And that took my eye off him and my mind off the work, and he didn’t like either of those, no. And he didn’t want you in the cottage either, because you were too loud and again, my eye off him. It wasn’t you as such, just kids in general. Just anyone in general; he didn’t much like me having friends around either.”
“Right. I didn’t really get that when I was little, but later I did. When I was a teen, I mean, and he still didn’t want me there.”
“And you still came, so bless you for that.”
She came to his funeral too, by herself, which might almost have been her first truly adult act; and I might have seized the moment now to say so, except that she pre-empted me. “It was toxic, though, wasn’t it? He was just controlling your life, and I don’t see how you could let him do that.”
Of course she didn’t. She was twenty, and free in ways that I had never been; his being dead didn’t change a thing. I said,“Toxic maybe—but people say that about tomatoes and potatoes, just because they’re the same family as nightshade. Poison is as poison does; whole civilisations have been built on potatoes. Bruce was never easy, but he took a feral kid at risk of growing into pond scum, and he made something decent out of me. By his lights, and my own.” Which in fairness were entirely of his making, indistinguishable. He’d trained me in more than joinery and sailcraft.
“Oh, you’re better than decent. You are. But even so. You shouldn’t ever have let him dominate you that way.”
“Sweetheart, I’m not even going to pretend I had a choice. That’s how dom
inance works; you don’t elect it, you don’t get to vote it down. And I remain grateful. Best thing that ever happened to me.”
“The only thing that ever happened to you, more like. You lived the life he chose, and you still do. His boatyard, his business. His cottage.”
“Mine, now. He took over my life, sure—when it wasn’t worth anything, except to him. He gave it value. He gave me everything; which is fair trade, it seems to me, for everything he took.”
She sniffed. “I still think he groomed you.”
“Of course he did. I was fifteen when he took me in. Nothing but clay, ready to be made into whatever he wanted. He was forty.” I could shudder yet, just at the memory of the strength in his hands, in his will. “Twenty-five years, love, it’s a lethal distance. I never stood a chance.”
“That’s the distance between you and Josh,” she said, eyeing me a little sideways.
“It is—and between you and me, too. But you were never clay. We took care of that. By the time you were fifteen you were sharpened steel. As for Josh, well. I didn’t know him at fifteen. He came to me fully formed.” All of twenty, like herself, which was why she’d swallow the lie, because she believed it wholeheartedly of herself.
She nodded and stood up, ready to go on. Holding her hand out, not ready to go on without me.
“Not yet,” I said, smiling. Leaning on the wall of the fold. “Dusk is coming. Things are about to get noisy.”
She blinked, looking up a little wildly into the empty sky. “Oh—are they still here?”
