Constant Fear

by Daniel Palmer

  CHAPTER 28

  Andy was in trouble when his vision blurred. It was a sign, and he knew them all. The effects of low blood sugar could be sudden and disastrous.

  A moment earlier, Efren had been in sharp focus. Andy could see the huge man’s many tattoos clearly. Then the bull of a man went fuzzy, and it became an effort for Andy to refocus. Andy needed his backpack. Efren had left it within Andy’s view on the large oval table that took up much of what he thought was a history classroom. Andy begged Efren to give him his glucose tablets. In response, Efren tightened Andy’s rope restraints and held up the backpack as a taunt.

  At some point, Efren left the room and a different monster came to guard Andy. This one had a hint of a mustache over mocha-colored skin, short, coarse hair, and dark, nervous eyes that darted about like a ferret’s. One moment, the Latin Thor was here; the next, Andy had this whippet of a man watching over him. When did that happen? Andy had known he was losing his concentration, but the extent was alarming.

  Sign number three happened a few minutes later, when Andy’s mouth went cottony dry. It was only a matter of time before these symptoms got worse and new ones arose.

  Andy watched “Whippet” pace anxiously in front of the classroom. The thin man said nothing. Did nothing. He just paced, armed with an assault rifle, an AR-15, a gun Andy knew well. Fired one at the range with his dad. Dad. The thought of his father ripped Andy’s heart and brought tears to his eyes.

  Whippet made frequent checks of the hallway. He seemed eager for a changing of the guard. Inevitably, nobody would be outside, and Whippet would resume his pacing. Whippet’s dark eyes would occasionally fall on Andy, which sent shivers of fear through his body. Andy still wore his school uniform, but the button-down shirt was soaked with sweat and his tie hung askew. The sweat gave off a musty, somewhat rancid odor. Who knew terror had its unique scent?

  Andy’s vision blurred once more, in and out of focus, like the camera in his phone.

  He thought of his father. Tough as things had been between them lately, Andy was more grateful than ever for the long hours of prepping that gave him skills to survive and had toughened his exterior. But no amount of training could keep his body from shutting down.

  Again, Andy’s eyes went to the backpack on the Harkness table. He never had a class that used the Harkness method, but it was part of Pepperell Academy’s teaching philosophy. The large oval table replaced traditional desks, and was thought to encourage a more open and informal exchange of ideas with instructors. Andy suspected there would be no free-flowing exchange of ideas with Whippet.

  “Do you speak English?” Andy asked. His voice came at him like an echo scattered in the darkness. His body thrummed out a warning: not enough sugar. He needed food. Or his tablets. If things got really bad, he’d need the injection. How long did he have? Andy couldn’t say. But a storm was brewing inside him.

  “English?” Andy asked again. He tried to control the tremor in his voice, but it was no use. He was more afraid of his body than these men.

  Whippet approached, eyes blazing. A snarl creased his top lip, showcasing yellowing teeth that looked like fangs. “¡Cállate!” the man ordered. His voice was as coarse as sandpaper.

  Up close, Andy could smell the cigarettes, and he saw the nicotine stains marking Whippet’s fingers.

  “Please,” Andy said, croaking out the word. The moisture in his mouth had retreated like water in the desert heat.

  He wanted to reach for the man, grab hold and fight the way his dad had taught him, but his arms were wrenched behind his back, and his hands lashed together with rope. Andy’s legs had gone numb from sitting. Or was something else causing him to lose the feeling in his feet, in his limbs?

  The man got close and knelt before Andy. His penetrating gaze forced Andy to shut his eyes and look away. The smell of cigarettes overpowered his senses.

  “Cállate,” the man said again, drawing out the command. It was clear he took pleasure in Andy’s suffering. Whippet stood and clamped a strong hand around Andy’s shoulder. Andy braced himself for the blow—a strike to the face, perhaps.

  Instead, the classroom door swung open and two men entered: the one who called himself Fausto and the bull of a man who had guarded Andy before. Seeing Fausto, Whippet removed his hand from Andy’s shoulder. Fausto gave Whippet a displeased, hard stare. The look said that nobody was supposed to lay a hand on the hostages without his direct order.

  Fausto came around behind Andy and undid the rope restraints. The relief was instant. Andy rubbed at his sore and aching wrists.

  A second later, Andy had the oddest thought. Who undid the rope? Fausto? Efren? Whippet? When did it happen? One minute he was bound, and the next he was free. It all took place in blackout time. The gale forming inside him had blossomed into a hurricane and was moving past Category 1. Soon it would strengthen, and it would rage on until it swallowed him whole.

  “I need food,” Andy said. “I’m diabetic and my blood sugar is getting low.”

  “I need two hundred million dollars,” Fausto replied matter-of-factly. “We trade. Money for food. Deal?”

  Andy recoiled at the sight of the man’s metal mouth, his bloodstained shirt, and the dried blood knotting his dark hair. Rippled with sinewy muscle and crowned with long, flowing hair, Fausto looked to Andy like a stallion that had trotted through a slaughterhouse.

  “I told you, I don’t have your money.”

  Fausto shook his head in exasperation and eyed Andy contemptuously. “Now I show you something.”

  Andy expected to see a gun, but instead Fausto produced a Galaxy smartphone with a large screen display. Next, Andy heard the distinct sound of a video chat request. Fausto was calling somebody, but who? Andy rubbed at his sore wrists and peeled his sweat-soaked shirt from his skin. He loosened his tie. Efren stared coldly at Andy. He was imagining doing things—terrible things, Andy suspected.

  The next sound Andy heard was the audio cue indicating somebody had answered Fausto’s call. A pleased expression overtook Fausto’s face. The killer’s smile could freeze the sun. Fausto pulled up a chair and sat facing Andy. Instead of cigarettes, Andy smelled cologne mixed with the coppery scent of blood. From the phone’s small speaker Andy heard indistinguishable noises.

  “Ponte frente al teléfono. Quiero que el niño te vea la cara,” Fausto said.

  Andy did not know what that meant, but Fausto repositioned his chair so they could both look at the phone’s display. A man’s face filled much of the screen. He had a broad forehead, wide and flat nose, and disturbed, deeply set eyes.

  “This is my friend. I call him Odio. That means ‘hate’ in your language,” Fausto explained. “Odio, muéstrale al niño que están allí.”

  The phone panned away from Odio’s face. The movement turned everything into a blur. But as the motion settled, Andy could make out the shape of a person—no, persons—tied to chairs, with gags in their mouths.

  Andy recognized the boy right away, even with the blindfold that the boy wore. Gus. A classmate. A chum. The woman he didn’t know, but he assumed she was Gus’s mother. The man he’d never seen, though Andy knew he and his friends had robbed him of millions.

  Javier Martinez.

  Oh, God, what have we done? Andy thought. What have we done? It was supposed to be thrills mixed with a message. The Shire never meant to hurt anybody. It was a statement about society, about income inequality. Yes, they all enjoyed the rush of hacking—it was addicting, for sure—but they were also taking a stand for something important, much like the group Anonymous, which used the Internet for justice. Andy founded The Shire on those very principles. He had wanted to send a message, but not this one.

  A choice, a terrible misbegotten choice, a break in protocol. Stealing more than the paltry sums the group’s charter allowed had spawned a nightmare that stretched far beyond the boundaries of the school. One woman might have been killed. Who she was, Andy couldn’t say. A cop? A teacher? He had seen a man blu
dgeoned to death before his eyes. Two others shot. Andy had no doubt more death was to come.

  “Odio, muéstrales a Javier.”

  The camera went to the man who could move only his head and see only darkness.

  “Quítate la venda.”

  The camera spun erratically, distorting the view until it eventually came to a stop. When it did, the blindfold had come off. Andy could see panic in Javier Martinez’s wide eyes. That seemed to please Fausto to no end.

  “Busca un taladro.”

  The camera jiggled again. A few seconds later, Odio held the camera out at arm’s length to show that he had in his possession a power drill.

  “Good,” Fausto said, now directing his attention to Andy. “Let me explain something. I want to hurt you to get my money. But I’m afraid.” Fausto chuckled. “Let me explain—I’m not afraid of hurting you. My English, what can I do? I’m afraid you would die, and maybe it’s you who has the key.”

  Andy’s ragged breathing made it hard to speak. “Don’t you think I’d give it to you if I had it?”

  Fausto shrugged. “I do not know. Until I get the money, I must assume any of you could have it. So you have a chance right now to prevent this man—this man who you robbed—from suffering greatly. I don’t think you want to hear a man screaming. Do you?”

  What did he just say? Andy’s world had slipped into the black again. He tried to recall the last few seconds, but they had been erased from time. His blood buzzed. Bit by bit, he felt himself weakening. It came in waves, and would keep lapping against him, until like a sand castle, the whole structure would collapse.

  “Here’s the deal,” Fausto said. “Give me the money. And I don’t have Odio drill this man’s legs.”

  Tears gathered in Andy’s lower eyelids, distorting his vision even more. “I don’t have it. Please don’t hurt anyone. Please. We didn’t mean for this to happen. We’d give it back to you if we could. Honest.”

  Fausto shrugged again and looked somewhat annoyed. “‘Honest, ’” he said, chuckling. “We are all thieves, my friend.”

  Fausto turned the phone so Odio could see him. He nodded. Then Fausto put the phone up to Andy’s face. Efren came around behind Andy. He grabbed the sides of Andy’s head and forced him to look at the phone. Whippet also came over and made sure Andy wouldn’t try to stand. Andy closed his eyes.

  “Open your eyes,” Fausto said. “Or I will kill them all.”

  Andy did as he was ordered.

  The sound of the drill whirring to life rattled the phone’s speaker, distorting the audio.

  “One last chance. My money.”

  “I don’t have it,” Andy said, whimpering.

  The hurricane inside him surged and roiled to Category 2. His arms felt too heavy to lift. His heartbeat came fast. The room slipped in and out of focus. Still, he heard the scream. It was visceral, animal-like—nothing like the scary movies Andy and his friends liked to watch. This sound was also human. It was honest. Andy’s blurred world sharpened.

  “Open your eyes!” Fausto shouted. “Open them and see what you have done!”

  Andy did as he was told.

  And he saw.

  CHAPTER 29

  Jake stopped at the door of the stairwell and listened. Anybody near the door—or on the opposite side—would hear it open. Patience was key. Slower was better. Excruciatingly slow.

  As the head custodian, Jake had made it a point to keep door hinges well oiled and frequently treated them with WD-40. A carry-over from his pitching days, where a millimeter adjustment on the laces could mean a strike, Jake paid attention to the little things, the minutiae as well as the big picture.

  Satisfied nobody was near, he moved the knob slowly, turning it only as much as necessary. He pried the door open with a gentle tug, holding the knob in place, knowing that the release might make a sound. With the AK-47 in his left hand, Jake only let go of the knob when the door was back in its original position.

  He paused. Listened again. Had he given himself away? Hard to be sure. Dim light at this end of the hallway filtered in through a series of windows that overlooked the main quad. Farther down, shadows loomed to create excellent hiding places. Jake was exposed out here, a deer standing in a field of short grass.

  The floor above was a mirror of the one below, minus the windows. Classrooms lined both sides of this long corridor. Jake glanced out the window. The grounds were quiet, the campus deserted. But that was misleading. The enemy was here, somewhere in the school, but hidden.

  Jake moved out. He entered the classroom closest to him, using the stealth techniques he had practiced into muscle memory. From down the hall came a whistling sound, low tones haunting in the stillness. The whistling morphed into singing. The voice was tuneless, almost drunken. It sounded to Jake like Spanish. He wasn’t sure. Hard to tell with the echo. The sound took an irregular route, bouncing off the floor, walls, and ceiling. It was foreign, no doubt. And it was only one person. Good for Jake, bad for the other guy.

  Jake poked his head out of the classroom far enough to get a visual. A lone figure, tall and lanky, with short hair, canvas sneakers, dressed in jeans and a green golf shirt, which was sliced with white horizontal stripes, strolled the hallway with his back to Jake. He kept his rifle, an AR-15, slung over his right shoulder as he poked his head in and out of a couple classrooms. He gave each room a cursory inspection at most. Jake got the sense he was here on orders to check out the different floors. Maybe he was looking for stragglers, students who hadn’t taken the evacuation order seriously. He probably started at the top and was working his way down. Didn’t seem like he was taking the job too seriously. He ambled from classroom to classroom, opening doors without caution, poking his head inside, and moving on to the next room. He never raised his weapon. He didn’t expect to encounter any threats.

  The pattern of movement changed. The man went into one room smack in the middle of the hallway and stayed there. Jake knew exactly which room the guy had gone into, and what he was going to do in there. The time to strike was now.

  Hugging the wall, Jake sidled down the hallway. He kept his AK-47 trained on a spot where the man would appear. A lot depended on how long this guy took to go to the bathroom. Jake tried to recall the Spanish words for “drop your weapon.” He thought it might be “baja la pistola,” but that could be meaningless if the guy spoke Portuguese or Italian.

  At the bathroom door, Jake paused. He heard whistling coming from inside, and the sound of a toilet flushing. A surprise attack would give Jake the edge, but should he charge in or ambush the guy in the hallway when he came out? The bathroom might muffle sounds of struggle. Others could be nearby.

  Weapon versus weapon—the other guy held the edge. Jake’s AK-47 might have been the most common rifle in the world, but the AR-15, best selling in the States, was no slouch. It was longer, weighed less, and could fire off more rounds in a minute than Jake’s assault rifle; it came at a cost about double what Jake had paid for his. It was easily 30 percent more accurate at a distance, too, but the advantage was negligible inside a building. It was the kind of weapon used by the ATF in Fast and Furious, the infamous “gun-walking” operation to Mexican drug cartels.

  Jake made a couple quick associations. The man’s coloring could make him Latino, and the gun was the weapon of choice with Mexican drug gangs. This guy could be from some cartel. What business a drug cartel could have with a prep school in the middle of nowhere Massachusetts was a question for another time.

  Jake put his shoulder to the door and gave it a push. No backing out now. A smart man would have left, given up the mission, retreated, and let the pros do the job. But this was not a question of smarts. It was about living and dying. It was about his son. On the mound, Jake had to be dominant, an alpha male fueled by confidence. Commit to the pitch. The door swung open. As it did, Jake, more or less, fell into the second-floor boys’ bathroom.

  Jake aimed his gun at the first blur of movement he saw. It was the man. He
stood at the sink with the water running. Nice. Jake had wanted him occupied. The man whirled in Jake’s direction; and as he pivoted, the strap of his AR-15 functioned as a slingshot to propel the weapon right into his waiting hands. He wasn’t going to aim. He was going to fire. Spray the walls with bullets. If the AR was converted to fully automatic, it would fire more than nine hundred rounds per minute. He’d hit something, all right—5.56x45 NATO-caliber bullets could shred concrete at this range.

  Jake forgot all his Spanish as he squeezed the trigger of his rifle. He exchanged no words, no “Freeze” command or “Drop the weapon” in any language. No demand to put hands in the air. It was either act or die.

  Jake had not converted his AK-47 to fully automatic. He had to pull the trigger separately to get off each round. Long ago, he’d learned not to bump fire; that was for the movies. While he could leverage the recoil of his semiautomatic to fire multiple shots in rapid succession, accuracy would suffer.

  Jake squeezed the trigger. The bang made that characteristic whip-cracking sound, dampened by his earmuffs. Anything traveling faster than 1,100 feet per second at sea level breaks the sound barrier, and the AK-47 fired its bullets at 2,330 fps.

  The first bullet from Jake’s gun struck the man in the neck, and the second entered the skull through the forehead. Pink mist sprayed out the back of his head. A thick gush of arterial blood spurted sideways from the neck wound like a horizontal geyser.

  The man got off a shot, all right—one bullet that smacked into the wall to Jake’s right. Poor guy had no brain function to pull the trigger again. Bits of gray matter and bone, mixed with blood, speckled the bathroom floor, which Jake had personally mopped countless times. Somebody else would do this cleanup job.

  The man fell backward to the floor. With nothing to brace his fall, the crack when his head hit the floor was profound.

  Jake got clear of the door and spun around to engage other threats. Nobody came in. Nobody fired. He backed up a few steps, managing to avoid contact with the dead man, but his feet slipped a little on all the blood. He waited a minute, breathing heavily. Either nobody had heard the shots, or this guy came here alone. Jake relaxed some, and that was when his stomach gave it up. He managed to get to the toilet before all the contents emptied out.