by Brett Abell
“Bullshit,” Riker said at once.
Not sold on the story, but wanting to see the building behind the reporter, Tara set the remote on the coffee table. She ran her hands through her dark hair, pinning it behind her ears, rose, and approached the 32-inch flat screen.
“If there were an active shooter, the dumbass reporters would have a chopper up and giving the SWAT team’s positions away for all to see … the shooter included.” Her brother tsked in disgust.
“Look here. And here.” Tara pointed to the walk in front of the building. She put a finger on the front glass and tapped. “Here’s my kiosk pushed into the windows”—she traced her finger down the screen, zigzagging between little splashes of yellow—”and these are bodies draped over the planters. These are too … the ones sprawled on the walk here and here.” When the camera pulled out, she counted them and ended up with nearly two dozen tarp-covered bodies, quite a few of them leaking blood, the shiny black trails meandering across the cement squares.
“All of that shooting and none of the glass is starred or blown out,” Riker said. He finally lowered his frame to the low-slung second-hand sofa.
“Still think I’m on drugs?”
Shaking his head, he said, “Not at all, Tara. And I’m sorry I even went there.”
“Then what do you think happened there?”
“My gut is saying something happened in the microbiology part of the school. Where is it located?”
Tara gave him a quick verbal tour of MU.
“He could have come from there.”
“I think so,” said Tara agreeably. “What do you think we should do now?”
“Wait until dark and go anywhere but here,” he opined. “But we stay inside until then just in case whatever affected the kid is airborne.”
“If it is,” Tara said, grimacing, “then we’re both already dead. I was so close I could smell the blood … it was like, like … metallic, or something.”
Recalling the sight and stench of his own blood and soiled pants from the day he’d died the first time, Riker crinkled his nose and said, “We are alive now. So we gather as much information as we can before dark and then we get out of Dodge.”
“Let’s see what the mayor says.”
“That’s a problem right there. He should have been on already … with a prepared speech, calming the community. What time is it?”
Tara poked her head in the kitchen and glanced at the green numbers on the microwave. A little after noon.
“So it’s been ninety minutes and still there’s been no mention of any measures being taken by the higher ups. No chief of police. No mayor. No governor. That school shooting in Dover … the bodies weren’t even cold yet and the entire anti-gun crowd and the President were on in record time and blaming everything but the crazy fucking kid who’d been pumped full of God-knows-how-many drugs all his life. Why the silence now?”
Tara said nothing. She thought: You’re ranting now, bro. So to spare him—and her ears—the anguish, she muted the news lady and made her way to the tiny galley-style kitchen.
“Got any coffee?” Riker called.
“Hardy har har.”
“Oh,” he called sheepishly. “I’ll take what you’re pouring. Whatever fell off the truck.”
“My moral compass doesn’t swing that way, bro. This coffee is paid for.”
Chapter 15
Tara spent some time out of sight and came back with two mugs full of steaming, inky-black Arabica. “Why don’t you answer your phone, Lee? Why the eff do you even lug one around with you?”
He shrugged, took the mug from her, and sniffed the steam. “Good brew.”
“Phone?”
“Check yours, smarty. I called you.”
She dug hers from her bag and checked the screen, seeing the missed call. She noted the time, did the math in her head, and then stuck her tongue out.
Riker arched a brow and shot her a look as if saying, I told you so.
“My bag was behind my seat. Phone was in the bag. Twenty minute drive home took forty-five minutes because the police were setting up a cordon.” She feigned a smile. “So bugger off, bro.”
“Cordon? Were they checking cars for the shooter? They check yours?”
She snickered. “My car has no back seat.”
He said, “It used to. And why didn’t you park it in your space?”
Tara opened a bag of Double Stuf Oreos, which were her favorite and up until now, had had no ill effect on her athletic figure. She took two and passed the bag.
“My car is out there,” she answered, taking a bite. “My new car”—crumbs rained on the coffee table as she spoke—”named her Tee.”
The Type A personality in him coming out, Riker brushed the black crumbs into his hand. “You got a new car?”
She smiled and said, “You’ll see when we leave.” She cast a glance at the gym bag that looked like a lunch sack in proportion to him. “Good thing you packed light.”
Riker wolfed down an Oreo, wiping the crumbs on his Levis. When he looked over at Tara, she was fiddling with her phone. Then he felt his eyes, heavy from lack of sleep, begin to flutter. He glanced at his half-empty cup and decided to stop fighting it. So he rolled his pants leg up and removed his prosthetic and the damp cotton sleeve covering his stump. He stuffed the sleeve in the prosthetic and set the aluminum-and-carbon-fiber number on the floor by the table. He massaged the aching nub of fibula, pressing the thick slab of pink scar tissue for a couple of minutes then, without a word, stretched out across the sofa and closed his eyes.
***
Thinking the thick comforter draping his body was a piece of flaming wreckage from the destroyed Humvee he’d just been thrown from, Riker came to swinging. He sat up straight, breathing hard, swung his good leg off the couch and with his stub following, knocked the mug over, sending the cold coffee cascading off the tabletop and onto the carpet.
“You okay, bro?” Tara looked up, the soft glow from her phone lighting her face.
Groggily, Riker asked, “What time is it?”
“You’ve been out for hours.”
He pointed at his bare wrist. “Time?”
“Quarter to seven.”
“PM?”
Tara nodded. “Looked like you needed the sleep. So I let you.”
“Was I …?”
She nodded. “Yep. Fighting a whole army in your sleep.” Her chair clattered as she rose from the kitchen table. Her tennis shoes chirped on the linoleum as she approached the couch, phone in hand.
“Take a look,” she said. “Told you I knew what I saw.”
“What is it?” Riker asked, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He looked up to take the phone and saw Tara’s eyes locked onto what was left of his left leg.
“Sorry,” she said, looking away. “It’s just that … I’ve never really seen it.”
“Just a hunk of tough skin, that’s all.” He patted the pink nub then plucked his fake lower leg from the floor and deftly strapped it on. Looking up and smiling, he smoothed out his pant leg and added, “Besides, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”
Changing the subject, Tara pointed at the phone, saying, “While you were out I was going over what I saw in my head. Walking myself through it like Matlock was grilling me.”
Riker thought: She likes Matlock. In that moment, he realized he didn’t know his grown little sister as well as he’d thought he did. He said, “And?”
“At first, not one of the arriving students or teachers stepped forward to help the guy I told you about.”
Finished lacing his boot, Riker hinged up and asked, “What did they do?”
“They watched … gawked is more like it. But so did I. However …” She pointed a finger at Riker. “I didn’t stoop so low as to record the guy as he was dying”—she tapped her chest—”and it didn’t even cross my mind when he started to come back.”
“But everyone else was?”
“Some of them. Most … actually.�
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Riker looked toward the door where his bag was sitting next to a daypack bulging with who knew what. “Human nature sucks,” he said, nodding. He cast his gaze back to Tara. “Did it make the news yet?”
She shook her head side-to-side and extended her arm, phone in hand. “And that’s the weird thing. Just hit the play button. It’s the opaque arrow.”
Taking the phone from her, he said, “This isn’t my first rodeo, Sis.”
Chapter 16
Riker swiped the iPhone’s glass screen, cradled the thing in his palm, and watched through a few different clips, the audio especially chilling. The screams started a skin crawl near his scrotum that worked its way up his back until his chest was going tight. “How did this get on your phone?”
“It’s YouTube. People load … never mind. That footage was what some of those people were recording. The news channels are just now dropping the shooter story and running with a rabies or released virus hypothesis. The Number 9 bus I saw from a distance when I was getting away—” She went quiet.
“Yes,” said, Riker, standing and cupping Tara’s shoulder. “Go on.”
“It was full of kids and chaperones on their way to a play. That much Channel Six did report. No mention of a shooter whatsoever. However, they did show the blood on the windows and the little bodies under the tarps and then they let the driver blabber on and when he started saying something about a drunken cannibal …”
Riker finished it for her. “They cut him off.”
Wringing her hands, Tara nodded and grabbed the remote from the table. She pointed it at the television, saying, “We have a decision to make.”
Riker watched the screen light up and saw a man in a navy Brooks Brothers type of suit speaking straight into the camera. And as the frazzled, middle-aged guy gesticulated with his arms, making the official-looking badge on a lanyard around his neck bob up and down in front of his loosened tie, Riker stopped listening to the words and keyed in on the body language. The man was scared. Petrified, actually. Something was keeping him from bolting from the camera, of that Riker was certain.
The feed featuring the overly dressed and less-than-convincing man ended, and the gray screen Tara had mentioned was back. Frozen in place and loaded with all kinds of information fully endorsed by FEMA, it stayed unchanged while a crawl moved slowly along the bottom of the screen. And on the crawl were the addresses of ten locations in Middletown where the man in the suit recommended the population relocate to.
Riker shook his head. “Run right into the lion’s den. Seems pretty smart to me.”
Suddenly the windows rattled and a bass-heavy chopping sound filled the room. The noise increased and then its source moved off to the north, taking the cacophony with it.
Riker snugged his cap down tight. Shrugging into his parka he said, “Black Hawk.”
“A what?”
“A helicopter. Probably National Guard—” Riker’s voice trailed off.
“What makes you think that?”
Riker told Tara about the Ohio Guard convoy that passed the bus on 75. The sight of which took him back to his last day in the Sandbox. Then he detailed how the roadside IED stole his leg. He talked about lying on his back on the ochre sand, the remains of his shattered leg taped to his chest during that fifteen-minute wait for the Dustoff bird to arrive. He stressed how his life was saved that day by a crew of Air Force aviators and a trio of Air Force Pararescue men who worked on him and another fellow soldier all the way to the field hospital. “So that others may live,” he said solemnly.
“Their motto?” she asked, her voice low.
“Yep. And that sound you just heard. To me … that sound represents survival.”
On cue, another chopper passed overhead. Much louder, and more than one, judging by how long it took before the aluminum sliders stopped banging around in their channels.
“Chinooks,” he said, “followed by more Black Hawks. Let’s go.”
“I packed.”
“I saw.”
In no time, they were in the lot standing in front of a tiny red car that barely made it up to Riker’s breadbasket.
“What is this?” he asked.
“This is Tee. Short for Thumbelina,” Tara said.
Riker heard the door locks pop. “What is it?”
“It’s a Smart Car.”
“Hardly,” Riker said. “On both accounts.” He stooped and sized up the interior—or lack thereof.
Tara loaded her pack onto the shelf behind her seat. Riker did the same with his, then pulled the lever and put his seat all the way back. It stopped after traveling less than six inches.
Starting the motor, Tara said, “Lease is ninety-nine bucks a month. Mom’s old Impala sucked that down in unleaded every two weeks.”
Riker winced because he hadn’t thought about their mom in a long time, on account of her long, drawn out battle with cancer. Not that he didn’t love her. Far from it. After Dad died in a farming accident, still a teen, he’d become the man of the house. Protector. Muscle when things needed moving or fixing. The truth was, less than a year removed from putting her in the ground, he was still numb from the ups and downs of her valiant struggle. The whole ordeal still resonated in his bones like he’d just stepped off an unseen curb.
Tara closed her door. “Get in,” she said, revving the near-silent motor.
Chapter 17
Somehow, Riker wedged his six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-pound frame—two-twenty-five before the bomb stole his leg—into the car presumably designed with Keebler Elves in mind. With his seat at maximum extension and his shins pressing the horizontal padding below the glove compartment, Riker imagined the car’s designers trolling the dolly department at Toys R Us in search of Lilliputian-sized crash test dummies. And as he reached back for his belt, his gaze settled on the sliver of dash and he tried to visualize where the airbag that would be kneecapping him would deploy from should Sis pile them up.
Tara reversed while Riker clicked his seatbelt. “Which site do you want to … what’d you call it … recon?” she asked.
His answer came with no hesitation. “The one closest to the freeway.”
After making the left turn at the end of her street and nosing Tee north, Tara looked over and said exactly what her brother was thinking: “So we can make a quick getaway if it’s a shitshow.”
“Bingo,” he said.
“I was thinking the high school would be the best bet anyway. It’s an open campus and the entrance to 75 is pretty close.”
“Take us in the back way. Slow and easy.” Though he doubted they could win a pink slip in a race against a moped, he said, “And don’t get us in a wreck. I don’t want to have to explain to the ER doctor how my prosthetic ended up lodged in my ass.”
Tara turned left off of Manitee Street and, eschewing the Parkway, onto Main Street, planning on riding it all the way to Central and following it east—almost a straight shot to Middletown High. Straightening the wheel, she said, “Thanks for the stunning visual.”
Judging by how deserted Main Street was, it looked like someone with pull had ordered Middletown to roll up its sidewalks and turn the sign to closed. All along the blink-and-you-miss-it town center, the windows were dark and nothing moved. Riker expected to at least see a couple of bars open with seats full and people lamenting the sad state of the world. But he was sadly mistaken.
As they left the downtown core, the thin purple band of dusk was giving way to night, and a full moon was rising to the east, a reddish orange orb looking much bigger without competing skyscrapers, they came across two tangled vehicles blocking most of both lanes. If one of the two could have been declared a winner, thought Riker as he felt the car slow, the westbound SUV was it. Churned under its high-clearance front end was a Volvo station wagon, the driver and passenger definitely goners—or at least they should have been. As Tara maneuvered Thumbelina through a narrow gap between the Tahoe’s rear bumper and the light pole on the Smart Car’s passenge
r side, the little car scraped something on the passenger side and stopped abruptly.
Riker shrugged and clicked out of his shoulder belt. His door opened fine but when he finally extricated himself from the car and stood up, he saw the rear end was pressing up against the cement light standard. Tara felt the car jerk and then saw her brother, face screwed up with exertion, start rocking it side-to-side and front-to-back. She shifted her gaze left and got a good look at the Volvo’s driver, whose head was moving around in a lazy circle, all herky-jerky like some kind of a parade float automaton gone haywire. In the illumination of the overhead streetlight, Tara caught a fleeting glimpse of his lifeless eyes, glassy and reflecting the dull orange from the halide bulb. Partially severed and cratered with bite wounds, the man’s left arm dangled out the driver’s window, most of the pale dermis crisscrossed with a road map’s worth of cuts likely from having gone through the shattered window glass. And as Tara swept her eyes around, she saw movement in the rearview, but too late.
Outside the car, Riker had his hands full. Though the car was small, it was wedged tight. Just as he was about to ask Tara to try putting it in reverse and giving it some gas, something cold and clammy brushed his neck, and the Volvo’s bloodied passenger jerked to life and moaned mournfully through a mouthful of jagged teeth.
Instantly, the hairs on Tara’s neck sprang to attention and she yelled a warning to Riker.
