Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  “So, this boy,” her father said. “This Steve. Do you like him too?”

  Her head zipped around, her jaw agape.

  “Your brother told me,” he clarified. With a gentle smile, he added, “You would be wise not to trust him with many secrets.”

  “I don’t believe he did that.”

  “Oh, don’t be hard on him. He’s young, and he loves you. He watches you closely. What’s important to you is also important to him. You should feel complimented.”

  Maybe he’ll feel complimented when I kick his butt later, she didn’t say.

  “So, this Steve,” her father pressed. “Tell me about him.”

  Heat rose in Aafia’s cheeks. Was this a new form of punishment? Embarrassing questions for five whole miles? “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Have I met him?”

  If she just said no, then maybe the conversation would end. But that would be a lie, and Aafia was not good with lies. “You’ve seen him in my orchestra,” she said. “He plays the bass.”

  Her father scowled as he searched his memory. “The tall black boy or the shorter white boy?”

  Her jaw dropped again. She had no idea that he paid attention to such things. “He’s the white boy.”

  “With the long brown hair. The dreamy, thick long brown hair.” He laid on that last part with exaggerated passion.

  “Father!”

  “Handsome boy.”

  “Father!”

  He laughed. Truly, this was a far more effective punishment than any lecture on bad behavior. “And what about his new kissing partner. Merilee, is it? Do I know her?”

  “No.” She could say that definitively. “She’s a cheerleader.” She hoped her tone conveyed her level of disapproval.

  “And what is wrong with being a cheerleader? Do you not like to cheer?”

  Oh, please let this ride end.

  “Who would not like to cheer?” he goaded. “Rah, rah, sis-boom-bah.”

  She laughed in spite of herself. “What was that?”

  “Isn’t that how one cheers?” He took his hands off the wheel and shook a pair of imaginary pompoms. He repeated his stupid rhyme. “That’s it, is it not?”

  “Maybe a hundred years ago.”

  “Then I must have it wrong. I am old, but I am not a hundred. So, what is wrong with Marilee being a cheerleader?”

  He wasn’t going to let this go, was he? At least they’d breezed through the long traffic light. Getting stopped there could have added five whole minutes to the torture. “There’s nothing wrong with it exactly. It’s just that those girls can be really mean.”

  “Is Merilee mean to you?”

  The question startled her, made her feel bad. “No,” she said.

  “So she’s a nice cheerleader. That must mean that some cheerleaders are nice, right?”

  Aafia rolled her eyes. He was such a parent. Clueless.

  “And if she’s nice, and she’s friends with other cheerleaders, then it only makes sense that the other cheerleaders can be nice, too.”

  She looked out the side window. If he was going to be this dense, she had nothing else to say to him.

  “Aafia, look at me, please.” It sounded like a real request, not a demand.

  She turned and faced him.

  “It’s wrong to treat people as if they are a group instead of as an individual. As my daughter, you must know that better than most.”

  Her face grew hotter as shame nudged embarrassment out of the way. “Yes, Father.”

  “You’re a beautiful girl, Aafia. The handsome boys will kiss you, too.”

  She rolled her eyes. He didn’t really just say that, did he?

  He went on, “You have to trust me when I tell you that these issues with your friends-the gossip and the giggling and all the rest-will seem so unimportant ten years from now. Crises come and go. But the only thing that lasts forever is education. It is the only important thing, and everything good that happens in your life will flow from your education. Do you understand this?”

  Finally, the lecture had arrived. And finally, they were in sight of the school. “I understand, Father. I’ll try harder.”

  They’d arrived with the buses, it turned out. The U-shaped driveway in front of the school was packed with hundreds of students streaming from dozens of buses. That meant her father would be stranded here even longer.

  “I’m so sorry, Father.”

  He made a gentle waving motion with his hand. “You go on inside,” he said. “Have a nice day, and try to think of all the gifts that God has given you. Now, give this old man a kiss.”

  This was the father she’d known before-the one who laughed and teased. He seemed to be trying not to be so angry, and his effort pleased her. She unclasped her seat belt, leaned across the center console and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  “I love you, Father,” she said, and the words felt strange. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him; it was just that they rarely talked of such things in their house.

  The bitter Michigan air assaulted her cheeks and hands as she hurriedly shrugged into her coat and closed the door behind her. As she joined the stream of classmates making the way to the front door, she cast a look back over her shoulder to see her father inching the minivan through the sea of children as he disappeared between the two ranks of yellow buses.

  She was just turning back to face the school when the explosion split the air.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By morning, Christyne had grown jealous of her son’s ability to sleep anywhere and anytime. Within seconds of crashing on the bed, his breath had become rhythmic and even, and as far as she could tell in her hours of wakefulness, he’d never so much as stirred.

  Between the unrelenting cold, though, and her crushing sense of guilt for having gotten them into this, sleep was nowhere in her future.

  In those quiet hours, she’d reasoned that if their captors had meant them harm, they’d have done them harm. Clearly, they had a plan, and while she had no idea what it might be, it only made sense that if she and Ryan made every effort to get along-to do as they were told, just as they’d been instructed-then their captors would have cause only to treat them well.

  Jesus, it was cold. Even with her coat on, and the blankets pulled all the way to her nose, it seemed impossible to get warm. It had to be warmer than freezing, she figured, because the bottled water they’d found was still liquid, but it had to be close.

  Until about an hour ago.

  The rising sun had just begun to lighten the darkness beyond the tiny windows at ground level, near the ceiling, when she heard the sound of a shovel scraping concrete, a sound that propelled her back to her childhood visits to her grandparents’ house on Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia, where coal fueled everything that produced heat, from the stove to the furnace. It wasn’t just the timbre and pitch of the scraping that made her think coal; there’s a rhythm to coal shoveling that is unique.

  The shoveling continued for about twenty minutes, she guessed, and by the time the noise had ceased, the temperature in their little room had risen dramatically. Now, as the sky beyond the windows glowed pink, the heat had driven her out of her covers and caused her to shed her coat, and she was still sweating. She pegged the temperature at maybe eighty degrees now, and rising-high enough to cause Ryan to stir.

  He bolted upright with a loud gasp. “Jesus!” he proclaimed. “Why is it so hot?” He stood and shrugged out of his coat. “I’m soaked.” His sweater came next, leaving him bare chested. He brought it to his nose and sniffed. “I stink.”

  “I already knew that,” Christyne teased.

  Noise outside their cell distracted them both, the unmistakable sound of the lock being removed and the bolt sliding open. An instant later, the door crashed open with enough violence to slam it into the perpendicular wall and a team of men, all wearing black with masks covering everything but their eyes streamed into the room. There were four of them, and they all carried machine guns locked
against their shoulders and ready to fire.

  Ryan yelled and darted over to his mom.

  “Up, up, up!” they yelled, followed by a stream of orders yelled by all of the gunman, some of them contradictory. “Up! On the floor! On your feet! Hands up! Hands on your heads!”

  The effect was utterly terrifying. The contradicting orders froze them in place. As the men yelled louder, Ryan stood with his hands out, as if warding off an angry dog.

  Christyne yelled, “Ryan! Put your hands up, for God’s sake.” She demonstrated by raising her own.

  Finally, the message got through and he raised his hands.

  The gunman settled down, too, to the extent that only one man now shouted orders. “Both of you step away from your beds.”

  The gunmen never broke their aim as the Nasbes did as they were told.

  The man in charge pointed at Ryan. “You,” he said. “Step away from the woman.”

  The woman? Christyne thought. What an odd way to refer to her.

  “Now turn around and face the beds.”

  As Ryan complied with the order, he shot a look of pure terror to his mother.

  “Please don’t hurt him,” Christyne begged.

  The gunman closest to her shouted, “Silence!” and tightened his grip on the gun that was leveled at her forehead.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  “Boy,” the boss commanded. “Put your hands behind your back and cross your wrists.”

  Again he complied, and Christyne started to cry when she saw how badly his hands were shaking. While three gunman held their aim steady, the one doing the talking stepped forward and slipped a loop of plastic over Ryan’s wrists and pulled it tight enough to dimple the skin. That done, the gunman produced a three-foot strip of black cloth which he wove elaborately and expertly around the boy’s arms, and then pulled tight. Ryan choked back a sob as the man drew his elbows together until they nearly touched behind his back.

  “Does that hurt?” the man asked.

  “Yes.” The pain was obvious in his voice.

  “Good. Remember this. Remember the pain.” The gunman drove the sole of his black combat boot into the back of Ryan’s knees, unlocking them and causing him to drop to a kneeling position.

  Ryan struggled for balance, to keep from toppling over onto his face. “What did-”

  “SILENCE!” This time, the gunman’s voice reverberated in the tiny room.

  Ryan fell silent.

  “Do not beg,” the man warned. “Do not cry, do not say a word or I will hurt you.”

  The man reached out his hand, and one of the other masked invaders handed him what looked to be a black pillowcase. He shook it open and slipped it over Ryan’s head. The edge drooped below the points of his shoulders.

  Something broke inside Christyne as she watched them abuse her son. Bound and kneeling, he was so helpless, so vulnerable, even as he kept his posture straight while clearly trying to control his fear through deep, sometimes shaky breaths.

  If only she hadn’t been so The gunman turned to Christyne. He allowed his rifle to hang limply from the strap that attached it to his neck as he walked closer. The other guns remained pointed at Ryan’s head.

  As he closed to within a few inches of her face-well inside her personal space-she could see even in the dim light that the eyes behind his mask were hooded and creased. This gunman was much older than those they’d dealt with the night before.

  “Woman,” he said. “Are you frightened of me?”

  “Yes.”

  “As you should be. The whole world should be frightened of me. Do you believe that I am capable of killing your boy?”

  Christyne’s heart skipped. What did he want to hear? What was the answer that would save her son, and which was the one that would harm him?

  “I would like to think that no one is capable of killing a child,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. His eyes darkened. “A non-answer. Would you care to try again?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think you are capable of killing my boy.”

  “So you must think me to be some kind of monster.”

  He was building a box for her, a logical trap for which there could never be a correct answer. She nearly begged him to stop, but then she remembered the warning against begging.

  “Is that what you think?” the man pressed. “Do you think I am some kind of monster?”

  She looked at her feet. “I think the willingness to kill a child is as good a definition of monster as any.”

  The man chuckled, releasing a blast of cigarette breath. “What would you be willing to do to save his life?”

  Something icy formed in her stomach. “Anything,” she said. It was simply the truth.

  He lightly brushed his gloved hand across her breast. “I want you to think more about that over the next couple of hours.”

  He turned abruptly. “Take the boy,” he said.

  Time stopped for Aafia, the events slowing to a crawl that allowed her brain to record the details in exquisite, horrifying detail. She caught the flash out of the corner of her left eye, and it synched perfectly with the bright shadow she saw thrown onto the front wall of the school, far on her right. A giant invisible fist punched the ground under her feet hard enough to make her fall.

  Even as her knees were collapsing under her, the closest school bus-still fifty yards distant-seemed to bend for a fraction of a heartbeat before all of the glass exploded in a glittering rain and a fireball consumed everything. The bus itself, now on fire, left the ground, tumbled once in the air along its own axis, and then landed on its side.

  She had just fallen to her hands and knees when she saw what could only be their minivan reduced to a fiery ball in the midst of hundreds of pounds of twisted, erupted metal. She knew that her father was dead.

  Burning, white-hot shards of steel and aluminum whistled through the air, one of them passing over her head. Three feet ahead of her, and a little to the right, Mr. McMillan, the English teacher, made a terrible coughing sound as something sliced through his belly and spilled his insides out. His face looked blank as he fell nose-first onto the sidewalk.

  Aafia pressed herself into the damp grass and curled into a ball, her arms concealing her head, as more pieces of things landed heavily around her.

  Ten, fifteen seconds later, when the violence was over, the real nightmare began, driven by a dissonant chorus of moans and screams, combined with the whining roar of fires. When she forced herself to raise her eyes above her forearms, her first thought was that she had been killed after all, and that she had so angered Allah that he’d sent her to hell. So much fire, and so much misery.

  All caused by the people who’d murdered her father. Was that even possible?

  But she remained very much alive.

  Soon, people stopped running away in panic, and started running around in a frenzy. Mostly, they were adults, but there were children among them, too. They ran, and then stopped to kneel, and then they would run again.

  When Aafia rose to her feet, she understood. There were many wounded, too many to count. Some sat, dazed looks on their faces, while others lay writhing and still others lay horribly still. And the blood. So, so much blood. Everyone seemed to be covered with it. What spilled from the injured seemed almost magically to transfer itself to the people who came to lend aid.

  For the longest time-she had no idea how long-Aafia just stood there on the lawn, watching dumbly as the activity swirled bigger and bigger. Teachers and students continued to flood from the school out into the drive, plus some people she didn’t even recognize. As if tugged by the current in a river, Aafia found herself being drawn along, moving closer to the carnage. Somehow, she’d lost her right shoe, one of her favorites-pink with white stripes. Her mother called them her pixie shoes.

  Oh, Mama, she thought. “Oh, Father,” she said aloud. Who would do such a terrible, horrible thing to him? To all of them?

  Of all the terrifying sights, the one she re
fused to look at was the burning hulk of their little van. She wished she couldn’t see the torn bodies and the blood splashes and the scattered body parts.

  She needed to do something. She needed to help. Maybe she just needed to cry. She really didn’t know. All of it seemed so make-believe, as if she’d stepped into the middle of the worst video-game nightmare imaginable. Why couldn’t she do anything? Why, suddenly, did everything around her look to be such an odd color?

  A teacher’s aide from one of Aafia’s classes-she couldn’t remember which one now-raced past, but then stopped very abruptly and reached out to her. One hand supported Aafia’s arm at the elbow, while the other hand cupped her chin gently at the jawline.

  “Oh, honey, you need to sit down,” the aide said. “You’ll be all right.”

  And just like that, Aafia was on the ground, staring up into the flawless sky, even though she couldn’t remember doing that. Just as she couldn’t remember what she had done to cut the inside of her mouth. But sure enough, she tasted blood.

  An instant later, the sky was gone, replaced by what looked to be a white plastic ceiling with hardware. The world was filled with a new sound. Could it be a siren? And then a stranger was staring down at her. It was a man, a young one.

  He smiled at her. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said with a smile that made some of the cold go away. “Can you tell me your name?”

  She told him.

  “Sweetheart, please stay with me,” he said. “I need to know your name.”

  “Aafia,” she said, only this time, she could hear her real voice over the one in her head.

  “Can you spell that for me?”

  She thought. “I don’t think so,” she said. But she was such a good speller. Why not now?

  “What’s your last name, sweetie?” the nice man asked.

  “Janwari,” she said.

  The face turned confused. “Excuse me?”

  “That’s my name,” she said. At least she thought she did. “Aafia Janwari.”

  The man said, “Oh, shit,” and then he went away. Aafia went away, too.

  CHAPTER SEVEN