by Marc Cameron
Cunningham gave a final click of his mouse and the office fell dark. Mukhtar peeked out through the mini-blinds to watch as the main lighting all over the park flicked off, leaving the concrete pathways, the concessions, and the water attractions bathed in the eerie yellow glow of the small number of emergency bulbs. It would indeed be much easier now for people to hide in the shadows. This simple act had saved countless lives. His mission complete, Mr. Cunningham slid out of the chair and pitched face-first onto the carpet. Mukhtar had been around death often enough to know it when he saw it, and this man was dead.
Now completely unhinged, Ms. Tiffany threw her jowly face back toward the ceiling and let go a burbling howl. Her head bobbed in time with the intermittent rattle of gunfire outside, as if she were absorbing the bullets with her body and not just her ears.
“Be quiet!” the Iraqi boy hissed. “You’ll bring them down on top of us!”
The woman leaped over her dead boss and ran to the corner as if she thought she’d find a door there. She bounced when she hit the wall and collapsed there in a heap, screaming as if she’d been set on fire. Mukhtar had seen such a thing and she sounded exactly like that. Some people went catatonic at the death of a friend—or the prospect of dying themselves—others went immediately and completely crazy, as if their last shred of sanity had been whisked away in the awful cyclone of violence.
Mukhtar had no idea where to go, but he knew that to stay here in this place with this babbling woman meant eventual and certain death. He pressed the little child to his chest and then ducked out the door into the vague and inky blackness of the water park—and ran.
Chapter 4
8:04 P.M.
“Contact right!” Quinn hissed. The lights blinked out and the music fell silent over the entire park, leaving nothing but gunfire and screams to fill the sudden void. Still twenty meters from the restrooms, Quinn ducked as he ran, digging in to gain more speed to get him to cover before the approaching gunman spotted him. His stomach rose into his throat at the thought of his missing daughter, but his instinct fell to immediate action over hand-wringing worry. His loose deck shoes slapped the pavement as he ran, and he chided himself for not wearing something more secure. It was hard enough to run, let alone fight, when you were worried about shoes flying off your feet.
Both he and Thibodaux slowed, cutting around a group of oak trees and ducking behind the wooden hut for the high-striker carnival game. A Middle Eastern man, probably in his late teens, worked his way down the adjacent pathway, firing an automatic shotgun randomly at fleeing patrons, cutting some down as they ran, letting others pass unharmed. He wore the black polo shirt and khaki shorts of a park employee. Quinn scanned left while Thibodaux, who was closer, focused on the oncoming threat.
Seemingly oblivious that anyone might actually fight him back, the young shooter focused only on whoever happened to be in front of his shotgun. He laughed when he blasted an older couple in their tracks before turning to stalk directly toward the children’s wading pool—and the pirate ship where Thibodaux’s family was hiding.
The Cajun’s huge fists opened and closed, clenching until his knuckles turned white. A quiet roar welled up from his barrel chest. Rather than drawing the .380 pistol, the furious Marine grabbed the huge wooden mallet from the high-striker machine, gripping it at his side like a war hammer.
“You get the kids out of the outhouse, l’ami,” he whispered. “I’m about to go all Gallagher on this guy’s brain housing group before he gets to my family.”
Thibodaux ghosted into the trees without another word. Incessant gunfire peppered the terrified screams of children, flooding Quinn’s brain with horrific images of his little girl. He shook his head in a futile effort to clear it, forcing himself to look past the falling bodies and focus on a second gunman who worked his way toward the long wooden building that housed the restrooms. Tongues of flame burst from the muzzle of what looked like a large-caliber handgun, periodically illuminating the man’s park uniform as he stalked along the sidewalk between the cotton candy shop and arcade games. An elderly couple shielded three small boys, giving them time to run, and then fell, mortally wounded.
Naturally wired to run toward the sound of gunfire, Quinn moved obliquely, staying out of the man’s line of sight, while he worked his way closer. For all his years of training and actual downrange experience, thoughts of his daughter out there among these killers made it nearly impossible to control his breath and keep from getting tunnel vision himself.
Using the faded plywood of a mini-doughnut stand as cover, he came up perpendicular to the pistol-wielding gunman and crouched, waiting for him to approach. The shooter was close enough that Quinn could hear the clatter of an empty magazine as it hit the pavement.
A young family struggling with a baby stroller and dragging a toddler tried to make a run toward the emergency exit. The gunman scoffed, and swung the pistol at the same moment he reached the edge of the doughnut stand. Quinn sprang up behind him, close enough now to smell gun smoke and the stench of the man’s body odor.
Still crouching, Quinn swept the back of the shooter’s right leg with his forearm, bending the knee and causing him to fall backward. The pistol shot went wild, missing the young family and zinging off the concrete walk. Quinn’s hand closed around the startled jihadi’s hand, turning his wrist and the pistol back on itself. The young man’s momentum worked with the odd angle to snap the small bones in his wrist, allowing Quinn to snatch the handgun away before the man hit the ground. Wasting no time on negotiation, Quinn put two quick rounds into the jihadi’s chest and a third in his forehead, just in case he was wearing a vest. Quinn groaned inside when the slide locked back on the last round, signifying the gun was empty. It was an FN Five-seveN, a gun that Quinn was familiar with but had never carried. Quinn stooped to search for another magazine but found the kid had run dry—and with the relatively uncommon cartridge, Quinn wasn’t likely to trip over any more unless one of the other shooters carried a similar weapon. It seemed odd that anyone would mount a terrorist attack armed with only a pistol and a handful of magazines, but Quinn had seen people try to kill him with nothing more than a broken broom handle. Cursing that he still lacked a functioning weapon beyond his pocketknife, he stuffed the empty pistol in the waistband of his shorts and then took a quick moment to snap a photo of the dead shooter with his cell phone. He tried to call 911 but got nothing but a fast busy signal.
Expecting he’d be shot at any moment amid near constant gunfire, Quinn sprinted across the open ground. He met Ronnie Garcia as she stumbled out of the women’s restroom. She’d lost her gauzy cover-up, and the strap of her yellow swimsuit hung off her left shoulder. Even in the feeble amber light of the emergency bulbs, Quinn could clearly see her knees and knuckles were badly skinned as if she’d had an up-close-and-personal meeting with the concrete. A streak of blood across the swell of her breasts stood out in stark contrast to her caffè-latte complexion and the yellow swimsuit. She held what looked like a STEN submachine gun, straight from a British World War II movie.
“Where’s Mattie?” Garcia asked, scanning.
“What?” Quinn clutched her arm, as much to steady himself at the news as to check on Garcia. “She was with you.”
“Oh, Jericho,” she whispered. Her eyes met Quinn’s, and then flicked away toward the trees. “People ran in right after the first explosion,” she said. “You know, trying to hide anywhere they could. I’d just grabbed Mattie to get out of there when this guy walked in and started shooting through the stall doors, executing everyone. He was a big kid, like a football player, but he had a knife on his belt and he didn’t expect me. I was able to use it on him from behind . . .”
“Mattie?” Quinn took Garcia by both shoulders and stopped just short of shaking her. “Tell me the truth! What happened to Mattie?” His knees threatened to buckle at any moment.
“I . . . don’t know,” Garcia said slowly, looking at the ground. “She must have gotten away.” The
guilt of losing Quinn’s daughter was bright in the timbre of her voice. “She had to have run right past you.” Garcia held up the STEN gun. Well worn and gray, it looked like a piece of pipe. The magazine jutted out the side instead of the bottom.
“I thought we might be able to use the bastard’s gun, but I tried to shoot him with it and it’s in-op.”
“Broken spring or a jam?” Quinn asked.
“I’m not sure,” Garcia said, tugging at the bolt on the side of the metal tube. It didn’t budge. “I’ll bring it with and see if I can get it to work.”
Quinn cursed under his breath. A working firearm would have come in awfully handy. “What about Dan Thibodaux?”
“I never saw him.” Ronnie bit her lip.
More gunfire sent Quinn and Garcia diving for the shadows behind a doughnut shack. They stopped, back to back, peering through the thick foliage before going any farther. Quinn could feel the heat of Garcia’s torso against him as she heaved with each deep breath. He worked to control his own breathing, centering his thoughts. Images of Mattie’s tearful face, the imagined sound of her plaintive cries, threatened to flood his mind and undo him completely. Bits of his soul felt as if they were being ripped away like shingles off a shaky building in a terrible wind.
He nodded at the STEN gun in Ronnie’s hand. “The guy you took that from is dead?”
“Oh yeah,” Garcia said. “Very dead.”
More shots stitched the night—flashes in the trees, whirring ricochets—sending them deeper into the shadows. Quinn put his arm around Garcia’s bare shoulder as they ran. The acrid smell of gun smoke carried on the back of screams. Families and hastily formed groups of complete strangers darted this way and that in the darkness. They moved with no real destination in mind, only running away from the last shot they’d heard. With gunmen closing in from every direction, running, hiding, anything at all seemed a futile game. Some were lucky and spilled around the shooters. Others were cut down as they ran.
“We have to get to the kids’ pool,” Quinn said, taking Garcia by the hand.
She looked up at him with stricken eyes. “Jericho, I’m so sorry.”
Quinn gave her hand a pat, hoping to offer more comfort than he felt himself. He gritted his teeth in an effort to block out the screams of the wounded and dying.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “Jacques told his boys to meet back there at the pirate ship if they got separated. If Mattie and Dan got past us we should find them back there.”
8:10 P.M.
Quinn’s heart sank when he ducked back into the dark belly of the ship with Garcia and found over thirty terrified people crammed inside—but no Mattie.
In the daylight the place was a playground, a place for families. Now, in the scant yellow glow of emergency lights, with the shadowed tables and hidden ladders, it was a hulking black monstrosity. The smell of urine and fear hung heavy in the air, thick enough to cut. Terrified parents clutched their children close, struggling to keep them quiet. Chattering teeth and ragged breathing seemed loud enough to alert any passing shooter. Camille worked her way through the trembling mass of bodies, stopping in her tracks when she saw Quinn.
“Where is my Daniel?” she asked, sniffing back tears. It did not matter that six of her children were safe if one was still out there.
“I’m sure he’s hiding out somewhere safe,” Quinn said, before the poor woman could jump to the same awful conclusions that already filled his mind. “I’m hoping he and Mattie are together.”
Quinn was certain the strain on his face did little to console the Thibodauxs. His mind racing, he glanced at the glowing dial of the TAG Heuer Aquaracer on his wrist—eight minutes since the initial explosion. Time sped by at an alarming rate—and wasn’t likely to slow down anytime soon. A lot of terrible things could happen in eight minutes. He fought the natural urge of a father to run into the darkness, screaming Mattie’s name. It would do her no good if he were dead—assuming she was even still alive.
Both Quinn and Garcia maneuvered through a knot of sweating and terrified bodies until they stood next to Thibodaux, who stood by a small porthole in the ship’s hull, keeping a lookout with a shotgun.
Quinn eyed the gun. Thibodaux had obviously been successful with the high-striker mallet.
“Hell of a thing, Chair Force” his friend muttered, still gazing out the porthole with his good eye. “Having to decide whether your kids would be slightly less screwed up if they saw some dude get beat to smithereens with a wooden hammer instead of getting his skull blown across the concrete with this blunderbuss . . .”
Quinn knew it was a dangerous endeavor to engage in his friend’s battlefield philosophy. Everyone dealt with the vagaries and meanness of mankind differently. Quinn threw himself into the conflict, expecting some shrink would untie his war knots at some later date—if he survived. Jacques Thibodaux philosophized, often while the bullets were still flying.
“I have an empty FN,” Quinn said, nodding toward the submachine gun in Ronnie’s hands. “She took out a shooter in the ladies’ room but he was armed with a vintage STEN that looked like it hasn’t been cleaned since the Korean War. As far as working guns, we have the Remington and your .380 pistol.” Quinn looked back and forth between his two friends, seeking refuge from his thoughts in the formulation of a strategy. “Anybody have a best guess on the number of bandits?”
Camille Thibodaux stepped up, full lips set white in a grim line. She held baby Henry tight to her chest with one hand and grabbed her husband by the shirt collar with the other. Her grip was none too gentle. “Jacques,” she said, squeezing the baby hard enough to make him whimper. “You better go and bring back my Daniel right damn now. You hear?”
The Cajun put a monstrous arm around his wife and gathered her and the baby in close. She looked like a child against his barrel chest. “You can count on us, Boo.” He kissed the top of her head, his chin beginning to quiver. “I guarantee it. But we gotta make us a plan first or we can’t do Dan nor Mattie any good at all.”
Camille closed her eyes, pressing tears from clenched lashes, but said nothing.
“How many?” Thibodaux mused, turning back to Quinn, gulping back his emotions. “Hard to say for certain, but I’d guess at least six more. There’s gunfire and screamin’ all over the damn place, l’ami. Could even be double that.”
“Our cell phones aren’t working,” a man in a pirate hat and lacy white shirt said. He held his iPhone out in a trembling hand as if to offer proof.
“What’s your name?” Quinn asked, checking his phone again. He too found it impossible to get through.
“Larue,” the man said.
“Well, Mr. Larue,” Quinn said. “It could be that everyone is trying to call out at once. Or there’s a chance these terrorists are using some kind of swamper to jam our signal.”
“Do you think the police even know we’re in trouble?” a voice from the shadows said.
Quinn glanced up at Larue. The man looked ridiculous in his frilly shirt and pirate hat but he seemed squared away enough under the circumstances. “You work here?”
The man nodded.
“Does the park have security?” Quinn asked.
“Just two,” Larue said.
“Armed?”
“Yes.” Larue nodded. “But they’re only here to call the police . . . and to stand by when the armored car guys come for the daily deposit. My guess is they both ran off to save their own skins at the first sign of danger.”
“Fair enough,” Quinn said. “How many visitors come through the park each day?”
“Fifteen thousand, maybe, if we have a good day.”
“Okay, we’ll go with that,” Quinn said. “Let’s say a quarter of those were in the park this evening . . .”
Thibodaux gave a low whistle. “Hard to contain three or four thousand people. A shitload of ’em had to have gotten out.”
“Then where are the police?” a woman from the back said. “The people who got out
must surely be talking to police, telling them what we’re up against. I mean, people are dying . . .”
“I’m sure they’re passing that information on,” Quinn said, trying to ignore the nervous banter. “Sometimes law enforcement will jump and run toward the sound of gunfire as soon as they arrive if they think it might stop an active shooter. But with so much gunfire and hundreds of potential witnesses pouring out toward them . . .” Quinn shook his head, imagining what he’d do. “Some of the departments around here use drones with remote cameras—but they’ll take time to get into the air and, frankly, it’s time we don’t have.” He looked at Garcia. “Let’s hear your best guess on numbers. How many do you think we’re dealing with?”
Garcia ran a hand through thick hair, pushing it out of her eyes. Though she was dressed in nothing but the yellow one-piece, the blood of the man she’d recently killed smeared across her front said she was all business. “I’m thinking at least eight or nine shooters from the various directions of the shots—but that’s not counting the three we’ve already taken down.” She paused. “And, of course, any sleepers.”
Quinn nodded at that. His mantra of “see one, think two” reminded him to take into account the unseen threats. There was the very real possibility that some terrorists had yet to identify themselves, but hid among the park visitors, waiting for the right time to step into the light and assist with the killing spree.
Nervous coughs and the scrape of shuffling feet suddenly ran through the belly of the pirate ship like a wave of some contagion. The group of people huddled near the door shrank back from a shadowed figure that stepped into view, backlit by the feeble emergency bulbs along the concrete pathway outside. He stepped forward, as if to highlight the particular worry over an unidentified killer.
