Funeral for a Friend

by Brian Freeman

  It was the look she’d wanted to see from Devin Card. The look of truth. The admission of guilt.

  Ned Baer remembered her.

  “Oh, my God,” she said aloud, her hand flying to cover her mouth.

  She didn’t have time to say anything more.

  Behind her, the screaming began.

  37

  Cat pushed through the people that filled the corridor. She made it into the chaos of the ballroom, but when she looked over her shoulder, she saw Colleen not far behind. The girl emerged from the bathroom with a ribbon of blood dripping through her hair and down her pale cheek. Her gaze traveled with the coldness of a robot from person to person until it landed on Cat, and their eyes met across the crowd. The tiny smile on Colleen’s face lusted after her, but her stare had the sharpness of a hawk’s talons, ready to cut into prey.

  The densely packed men and women formed a wall in front of Cat. She shoved against it, trying to get through, but she felt mired in quicksand as she fought her way deeper into the ballroom. She looked for Brayden, she looked for a police officer, a security guard—someone, anyone—but all the people blurred into a single mass in front of her eyes, and she could barely see who was around her.

  “Cat.”

  The other girl’s voice trailed her like the sultry whisper of a lover. Cat looked back again, and Colleen was barely even six feet behind her now, calmly threading the maze and catching up with her.

  “Cat, don’t run from this,” Colleen told her. “Don’t run from me. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Other voices bubbled up around them. They saw the blood on Colleen’s face, and fear spread from body to body. That girl. Look at her. What’s going on? Find the police! In their confusion, they squeezed together, tightening the web around Cat and giving her nowhere to go. She beat her fists to get them to separate, but the crowd drew in like a claustrophobic mass of strange faces and eyes that made her dizzy.

  “Cat.”

  She tried to scream and couldn’t even muster the sound. The bodies around her held her in place. Colleen floated toward her; one moment, she was a few steps away, and the next, she was in front of her, pulling Cat to her with a hand around her neck. Colleen’s blood smeared on Cat’s cheek as their faces came together. The girl’s other hand came up, and Cat felt the gun press into her chest below the swell of her breasts, hidden from view. The barrel pointed upward, where the bullet would sever bones and arteries on its way through her. Colleen spoke into her ear.

  “Cat, why are you running from me?”

  “Let me go. You’re crazy!”

  “Cat, I don’t blame you. You’ve been poisoned against me. Curt, Brayden, Wyatt, Stride, everyone, they all want to keep us apart. They don’t realize that we’re meant to be together. I wanted us to run away. You and me. I wanted us to be ghosts. Mysteries. Legends, remembered forever. It would have been amazing. But I guess we’ll have to jump to the very end. We’ll die in each other’s arms. Your blood and my blood, mingled together.”

  “Colleen, don’t do this. Please, stop, don’t do this.”

  Cat tried to wriggle away, but the girl held her tightly and pressed against her. The gun pushed harder into her chest. Cat stared into Colleen’s eyes and saw there was no hope. No escape and no way out. Those frozen, dark brown eyes came from another world.

  “This will be quick. No pain. Then I’ll join you. Don’t worry, you won’t be alone, my love.”

  This was the last moment. Colleen’s eyes drifted shut. Cat knew the next thing that happened would be Colleen squeezing the trigger and the bullet ripping through her body.

  Then, out of nowhere, a man in the crowd stumbled heavily into Colleen. Like a miracle, the gun swung away from Cat’s chest. Cat grabbed Colleen’s wrist and hung on, and a woman near them looked over and saw the two girls struggling over the pistol.

  “Gun!” she screamed.

  Someone else shouted it, too. “Gun!”

  “Police!”

  With Colleen’s arm swinging back and forth and Cat desperately trying to hang on, the girl squeezed the trigger. A man in the crowd lurched back, a bullet searing through his shoulder. The explosion echoed against the ceiling, and screams and wails rose out of a thousand throats. Panic seized the ballroom, and a stampede began. Running bodies spilled against them, driving the two of them apart. Cat had an instant of freedom where she could see the steps to the stage right in front of her, and she ran. She bolted up the stairs, knowing Colleen was behind her, knowing she had only seconds to save herself. She didn’t look back.

  Cat burst onto the stage, where she saw a long stretch of empty space ahead of her and three people standing apart from all the others, bathed under the hot glow of lights.

  One of them was the man who had saved her life over and over and over.

  Stride.

  Cat sprinted for him.

  * * * * *

  Stride looked up as the gun went off, as pandemonium set in, and had the strangest experience of his life. He didn’t know whether it was a vision, or a hallucination, or a waking dream. He looked across the empty stage, and there was Ned Baer, soaking wet the way he’d been at the Deeps, with a bullet wound oozing blood from the center of his forehead.

  Ned’s lips pulled back into a skeletal grin. The smile on the man’s face widened and turned into a mocking, cruel laugh. Ned raised his arm and extended a bony, brittle finger at Stride’s chest, and he shouted across the stage.

  “You’re the one who’s dead!”

  Then the hallucination vanished.

  Ned disappeared from Stride’s sight, and where he’d been, Stride saw Cat running across the stage, her hair flying, her face twisted with terror. Stride ran, too, meeting the girl halfway and gathering her up in his arms. Her heart beat wildly against his chest as he held her, and she clung to him as if he could save her from everything.

  “Cat, what’s going on?” he heard himself say. The words seemed to come from someone else, sounds that were disconnected from his body.

  Stride looked around the stage. The world slowed down, and every tick of the clock took forever. He heard a roaring in his ears, as if his body had crashed underwater. Everything seemed so crisp, so clear, a film moving a single frame at a time. He saw it all in slow motion, saw everything happening around him in the span of a few heartbeats.

  There was Andrea, paralyzed in the middle of the stage with a look of confusion and fear. He could hear himself shouting at her to duck, to get down, but she stayed where she was, as if rooted to the ground.

  There was Devin Card bolting to the front of the stage with the microphone in his hand, his voice booming through the ballroom, telling everyone to stay calm, not to panic.

  There was Serena leaping up the steps on the east end of the stage, her arms and legs pumping as she ran. And yet every step she made happened at a glacial pace in Stride’s mind. She hardly moved at all; she was still so far away. She had a gun in her hand, and as he watched, she sank to one knee and aimed.

  She screamed.

  “Stop! Drop it! Drop it!”

  There was Brayden, the young cop, on the ballroom floor below the stage. Sweat poured down the man’s face. He had his gun in hand, too, pointed where Serena was pointing, and he screamed just as she did.

  “Colleen, put the gun down! Put it down!”

  Slow, slow, slow.

  The world hardly moved at all.

  Stride felt his head rotating ever so slowly like the wheel of an overturned car. He followed Serena’s eyes, followed Brayden’s eyes, followed the direction of their guns, and they all led him to a girl walking calmly across the stage. No one else was around her. Everyone else had jumped from the stage or dived to the floor. She was a pretty blond girl, not even twenty years old, with brown eyes and a cryptic smile and blood on her face.

  She had a pistol at the end o
f her outstretched arms.

  Pointed at Cat. Pointed at Stride.

  Stride heard the muffled noise of his own voice from deep in that ocean inside his mind. “No!”

  Slow oh so slow, the world hardly moved at all.

  His body had the thickness of honey as he tried to react. He felt himself pushing Cat down, throwing her to the ground, felt himself stepping over her, kneeling, and blocking her with his body.

  Then it was just the two of them, the girl with the gun and Stride acting as a shield between her and Cat.

  The world sped up again.

  Everyone began to fire.

  38

  Brayden steadied his gun arm and fired once, twice, three times, four times, five times. So did Serena, from her higher angle on the stage. It happened so fast that his head spun; it happened as everyone else ran, ducked down, fell, and jumped to get free. Brayden tried to quash his adrenaline and aim, to focus every shot on the girl and not the people that interrupted his line of sight. Bodies came and went like flashes of light; people screamed. He couldn’t tell whose bullets hit home, but he saw gunfire riddle Colleen, striking her in the chest, stomach, and legs, drawing blood and making her limbs jump like a marionette.

  But Colleen fired, too.

  She squeezed off multiple shots as her arm went wild, as bullets flew up, down, and sideways. A deadly crossfire laced the stage. Then one shot in the middle of her forehead ended the battle in an instant. Brayden didn’t know whose gun caused her death. Their fire overlapped, as if timed with the thunder of the storm. Colleen’s gun dropped from her hand to the floor. Her body pitched straight forward, like a pencil falling.

  Even with the gunfire over, panic gripped the ballroom. The crowd flooded for the doors, trampling over abandoned political signs. Police and security fought past them in the opposite direction, heading for the stage. Screams lingered, and peopled huddled near the walls, crying.

  Brayden holstered his gun and boosted himself onto the stage platform. He walked toward Colleen’s prone body, first securing the gun that lay near her hand, and then squatting next to the body to confirm that the girl was dead. Her face was sideways on the floor, her frozen eyes still wide open, the same tiny smile lingering on her lips. Blood made a widening pool beneath her and red stripes down her forehead.

  He got to his feet and studied the rest of the stage. Not far away, he saw Serena Stride kneeling over a body, touching her fingers to someone’s neck, trying to get a pulse.

  Who was it?

  It was a woman’s body, and he thought: Cat.

  Brayden ran over there, his breath leaving his chest. He stared down, shaking his head, not believing what he saw. The woman at his feet wasn’t Cat. It was Andrea Forseth. She lay on her back, eyes closed, her face at peace. A bullet had penetrated the side of her skull, and her blond hair was crimson with blood.

  He opened his mouth to ask if she was dead, but he didn’t need to ask. She was gone.

  Serena looked up. “You’re Brayden, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He watched her mouth tighten as she held back the things she wanted to say. To throw blame at him for not protecting Cat, for letting everything spin out of control. He wanted her to scream at him, but she looked away and focused on the body.

  “The girl didn’t shoot her,” Serena said.

  “What?”

  “The angle’s wrong. I’m pretty sure it was one of us.”

  “What?”

  “I’m afraid we killed her, Brayden. Either you or me.”

  “No. No, that can’t be true.”

  Her voice had the dead dullness of someone forcing down her emotions. “That’s what it looks like. When we run ballistics, we’ll know for sure.”

  Brayden blinked over and over. “I killed her?”

  “She strayed into the line of fire. It was an accident. We had an active shooter, Brayden. People panic. They lurch one way or another. Sometimes terrible things happen.”

  Tears leached down his face. “I killed her.”

  “We don’t know that yet. It might have been me. No matter who it was, it wasn’t your fault.”

  Brayden looked down at Andrea, and then he looked at the position of Colleen’s body. He stared down at the ballroom floor, where he’d aimed his gun across the stage. Those seconds of gunfire had felt like hours. People had run, blocked him, forced him to stutter his shots. Even so, he knew. In the whirl of adrenaline, he knew. He could see it happen.

  He’d been pulling the trigger as Andrea awakened from her trance and tried to flee the stage.

  “I did it,” he said. “I tried to hold back the shot, but I was too late.”

  Serena stood up and squeezed his shoulder. “Find a place to sit down for a while. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Brayden felt dazed. His brain began to spin, and acid bubbled into his mouth, making him want to vomit. He tried to walk, but he nearly lost his footing, and Serena had to hold him up.

  “What about Cat?” he asked, trying to make sense of what was happening to him. “Is she okay? Where’s Cat?”

  * * * * *

  Cat lay on her stomach, her hands over her head, not daring to move. She waited for the gunfire to stop, but then she realized it already had, and she wasn’t hearing bullets anymore. The crack she heard was thunder, rattling the building like ice calving from a glacier. A downpour of rain tapped on the windows. The smell of smoke tainted the air, bitter and sharp. She heard voices talking; she heard the thump of footsteps on the stage. The screams of the crowd had quieted.

  It was over.

  She opened her eyes. Stride was next to her, but the first thing she saw was Colleen’s face. The girl lay on the stage twenty feet away, eyes fixed, staring back at her even though she was dead. That image, that look, was going to linger in her dreams. She could still taste Colleen on her lips and smell her on her clothes. She still expected the girl’s mouth to open and for her to start talking from the grave.

  I love you, Cat.

  We’ll be ghosts together.

  Cat stood up slowly, her legs wobbling. She tried to take a step and had to steady herself. She saw Brayden, his face stricken, his eyes full of tears, but he didn’t see her. When she tried to call his name, she found that her voice was missing, unable to form words. She saw Serena kneeling by a body, and she realized that people had been shot. People had died.

  Then someone pointed at her. Some stranger. Shouts and screams traveled across the room at her, and people began to run her way. She didn’t know why until she looked down at her clothes and saw that she was covered in blood. When she glanced at her feet, there was more blood there. Blood was on the stage; she was standing in it. She patted herself all over, certain she’d been shot, but she felt no pain, no injury; she saw no wounds or bullet holes, and when she peeled up her shirt, her skin was unharmed.

  And yet she was covered in blood.

  “Am I hit, Stride?” Cat murmured. “Did Colleen shoot me?”

  Stride didn’t answer.

  She noticed him, as if for the first time. He still lay on the stage, where he’d been when she opened her eyes. He wasn’t moving.

  “Stride?”

  Cat’s whole body began to shake uncontrollably, like a young tree bending in a wind storm. She saw blood on the stage, saw blood where she was standing, and she realized it was coming from beneath Stride. From his body. Her hands tore at her hair, and she sank down to the ground in disbelief. She knelt in the blood and grabbed Stride’s shoulder, and with a fierce energy, she pushed him over, so that he lay on his back. His eyes were closed, his face pale.

  His chest was covered in blood. Fresh, cherry-red blood, growing and spreading into a misshapen stain. A mass of blood, the kind of loss no one should survive. And amid all the blood, there was a scorched bullet hole in his chest, ripped throu
gh the fabric, right where his heart was.

  “Stride? Stride? Oh, my God, no! No, no, no!”

  Tears spilled from her eyes like a flood. Her fists squeezed open and closed. She cupped her hands under his head, shook him, and tried to wake him up, but he wouldn’t move. Her body twisted around, and her voice filled the room with her scream.

  “Serena!”

  39

  “He’s in emergency surgery,” Serena told Maggie, her voice drained of all inflexion. “They said even if it goes well, it’s likely to be a while until we know anything. If it doesn’t go well, I guess we’ll know quickly.”

  She stood by the hospital windows and stared with dead eyes at the blackness of the night, which was interrupted by lightning over the lake. The storm refused to move off, and heavy rain beat against the glass. The waiting room was warm and hushed.

  Maggie slung an arm around Serena’s waist and held on tight. Serena hardly even felt it. She didn’t feel anything.

  “Where was he hit?” Maggie asked softly.

  “The heart.”

  She heard Maggie suck in a long, ragged breath.

  “They say it’s a single chamber injury, which apparently is a good thing,” Serena went on, mouthing the words and barely hearing them. “If multiple chambers were affected, he’d have almost no chance. They also said he wasn’t in cardiac arrest when they took him into surgery, and that’s a good thing, too.”

  “Okay.”

  Serena’s lower lip trembled. “I asked the surgeon to give me odds. She didn’t want to, but I pushed her.”

  “What did she say?”

  “One in four.”

  “That he dies?”

  “That he lives.”

  Beside her, Maggie began to cry, and tears crept down Serena’s face, too, as if all the emotion she was keeping inside had to find a way to get out. The two of them stood like that for a long time, in silence, in tears. Serena had always heard about people in near-death experiences seeing their lives pass before their eyes, but she found that her own life passed in front of her now.