Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  There was more branches and deep water for David to get around and through, and just before he got to the mall there was a fallen tree blocking one whole lane of Highway 132. All the speeding up and slowing down to dodge all the branches was aggravating his leg. Blood matted his right pant leg, sticking like thick glue to his skin and the fabric of his jeans and the seat. The leg might or might not be broken, but it certainly felt broken as he tried to push the gas pedal. He tried to push with the ankle instead of pushing down with the leg, but that hurt too, and he wondered if his ankle was messed up. There was a good-sized wound on the outside of his thigh where he had struck the water-covered street and skidded, but with the blood-soaked pants covering it, the wound had stopped bleeding. At least, he hoped it had stopped.

  David hadn’t had time to tell Julie, or have a paramedic look at his leg. He’d hobbled to his car and driven off, and now nobody knew what was going on. The Killer was loose and roaming the town again, circling like a shark in dark waters, and David was the only one who knew it for sure. And what did they say about sharks and the smell of blood in the water?

  Every time he pushed down on the gas, the bones in his leg ground together, wracking his entire right side with spasms of pain.

  In the mass confusion of the school’s explosion, no one would wonder where he or Bethany was for several hours, if that. Even Julie had had her hands full, trying to coordinate the town’s rescue and clean-up efforts. Chances were she would not come looking for them. She knew Jack was here but probably assumed he would leave after the explosion - she had no idea it was coming down to a one-on-one confrontation.

  No, it was up to him.

  The pain was a dull roar in his head, and visions of sleep, long and quiet and restful, beckoned at him. A fog threatened to settle around the edges of his vision, a thick, welcoming blanket of relaxing sleep. It would feel so good to sleep right now, to just stretch out on the front seat of his car. He was so tired from the long drive back and all the talking and thinking and just wanted to lay down and relax and let the pain wash him away...

  David jerked upright, cursing loudly at himself.

  No, no sleep for him, not for a while. And he certainly didn’t need to pass out and drive his car off into a ditch.

  He cranked down the window a little and a blast of cold air and stinging rain struck him, rejuvenating his mind. He held a hand out the window and slapped at his face with it, the cold water helping a little. He couldn’t pass out, not driving. Not like last night, almost passing out as he tried to get to Bethany’s house. He had to at least get to the mall and see if that was where it would happen. If Jasper wasn’t at the mall, he’d be at the bridge.

  David guessed that Jasper would want to recreate the whole shoot-out thing, and if given his choice, would’ve staged it again in the same place, there at the intersection of I-95 and Highway 132, where it had happened before so many years ago. But the County Line Bridge was washed out - Jasper probably knew that. So it had to be at the Bridge or the mall, built on ground over which the man had fled long ago, chased by Deputy Jes Brown and his dogs.

  Jasper had to be staying somewhere in town, but it didn’t make sense to take her back to his hotel room. Someone might see him dragging the girl around, and as on-edge as this town was, someone was bound to try and interfere.

  No, Jasper would want some quiet, out of the way place for them. Surely he was planning on killing them both, and with a penchant for torture and long, lingering deaths, Jasper would want his privacy.

  And the mall made sense, on some level - it had been built on some of the ground that Jasper had run over on his way to gunning down Sheriff Beaumont. Could there be some kind of connection, even if the connection was only in this crazy man’s head? Jasper had probably figured that David had heard the story a hundred times, and maybe the connection wasn’t as tenuous as it first appeared - the mall was east of town, out towards the freeway. The County Line Bridge was out and that would delay his escape, but Jasper probably wasn’t thinking about that - he was planning this epic confrontation, and wanted everything to be just right. And the mall was a large enclosed space, in out of the weather.

  After what seemed like an eternity of pain, David finally pulled into the Liberty Mall parking lot and almost passed out from the pain. As it was, after he coasted the car to a stop near one of the entrances to the mall, he used the parking brake to stop the car because it hurt way too much to use the real brakes. He laid his head back, trying to ignore the waves of pain washing through his body. It had been impossible to imagine at the time, but the pain had gotten worse, much worse, than back at the school - pushing down on the gas had felt like pushing a bloody, exposed wound into a bed of hot nails. The pain had been huge and red and blinding, like a bubbling volcano, the lava streaking down his leg and pooling around him.

  But no one could help him. He had no way to contact the cops, and he didn’t remember passing any on the way out here. They would all be at the school, trying to help. The explosion at the High School was the biggest thing to ever happen in Liberty, and with half of the cops in town probably killed in the blast, the others were confused and angry and disorganized. He couldn’t count on them for help, not for a while.

  He sat up, painfully, and looked at his leg. Blood soaked the pant leg all the way down his thigh and calf, and when he moved, the blood stuck to the vinyl seat and pulled away only with a sickening sucking sound. The leg screamed at him, very loud in his mind, and for some reason he thought of that movie “Backdraft” and the way the fire had looked like it was alive, breathing and moving on its own.

  The pain felt like that, like a living thing, and it itched and scraped and demanded that he let it out. It ran up and down his leg in hot waves like it was trying to escape, and everything from his chest to his toes felt like it was burning.

  He tipped his head back and screamed at the ceiling of his car.

  The pain didn’t go away, not by any means, but it did seem to back off a little, like a monster retreating back into the shadows of a dream.

  It was still there, though, and it would be back.

  He couldn’t think about Bethany in pain, but thinking about her in trouble helped him get past his own pain, helped him to clear his head a little bit and try and think.

  The parking lot around him was a lake, covered with water and so utterly empty that the Liberty Place Mall and its sibling parking lots could’ve been built on another planet. There was not a sign of life in any direction except for the hazy glow of the yellow halogen lamps as they fought to illuminate the parking lot even as buckets of rain fell through their pale cones of projected light. There were no cars or vans anywhere to be seen. The wind buffeted the side of his car, and he saw the empty branches of the trees whip furiously back and forth.

  The entrance to the mall was lit up also, a hazy square of light in the darkness of the rest of the mall. It occurred to David that there might be a night watchman or something like that who patrolled the mall at night - it wasn’t a huge mall like Potomac Mills or Springfield Mall, two malls up north in the suburbs of D.C., but it was the biggest mall in the area and probably needed to be looked after twenty-four hours a day. And the guard had to have a car or something.

  As much as he dreaded the idea, David started up the car again and tried to press down on the clutch with his left foot and quickly move it to the gas, but the Mazda shuddered and died before he could give it any gas. Nope, he would have to use both legs. He started the car again, gingerly pushing down on the gas with his right leg, and runners of heat and fire shot up his leg and torso and into his brain. The engine caught and turned over, and he quickly popped it into first and slowly began coasting around the mall’s parking lot, letting the foot remained propped on the gas so that he could give the engine a little gas and the car would not die.

  The mall had something like twelve entrances, all of which he had been in a dozen times, but tonight, in the darkness and the rain and the confusion in his
mind as the pain gnawed and worked at him, the Liberty Mall looked alien, strange and foreign. He saw things he had never seen before, noticed things that he would’ve sworn were never there before. David’s wandering, clouded mind could easily imagine that he was no longer on Earth, but that somehow Jasper had lured him into a strange, parallel dimension, where Jasper was a god, planning and scheming and killing. A dimension where David was simply an outsider, and an injured one at that.

  Home-field advantage for a psycho.

  The Mazda slowly worked its way around the drive that encircled the mall. David didn’t want to shift the car into second, so the car moved with maddening slowness across the parking lot as he searched for signs of life. He prayed that Jasper was here - David couldn’t imagine driving back out there on 132 again. Too much shifting, too much pain.

  And finally, he saw something.

  Hecht’s, one of the main anchor stores for the Liberty Mall, was located on the West end of the mall, closest to town. The large clothing and household goods store had three entrances, and one of them was covered by a wide overhang.

  And parked next the curb in front of the entrance was a white van.

  It looked like the van. There were no markings of any kind on it, and it was longer than a normal van, two things that he had noticed in the short time he had seen it, laying back there in the rain in the middle of the street. Watching it drive away. The back windows of the van were covered with some type of black fabric or maybe little black curtains. David coasted to a stop behind it and looked at the double doors that led into the mall.

  So now what? Go inside? Walking seemed impossible - the pain from sitting and driving had been terrible, so how would it feel to walk on it? Would he even be able to, or would he pass out?

  He had no idea, but it wasn’t helping, just sitting here in the car. He had to get out and do something - this wasn’t the kind of problem you could just walk away from. If you could walk, that is.

  Up until a few days ago, that had been his way of dealing with anything that went wrong in his life. It used to be he could just bail, turn around and walk away from whatever was bothering him. His Aunt had driven him crazy, and he’d moved out. His grades in the one semester of college had been bad and the classes too challenging, so he’d dropped out. He had been frightened that his girlfriend would leave him, so he’d walked away, leaving her first. And when things didn’t look like they were going to get any better around this little town, he’d packed up his stuff and quit his job and ran, ran away from everything and everybody he had ever known to chase a far-away dream in a place he had never even seen before.

  But not this time. This time, he was here and he was going to finish this, one way or another.

  David popped open his door and climbed out.

  The first hesitant steps felt like fiery brands. The broken bone and torn muscle above his knee screamed, and when he put any weight on the leg, it seemed to bend awkwardly, strangely, just above the knee, an experience that would’ve left him a little queasy were he not already. The bone itself was probably not broken badly or it would have pierced the skin and bled profusely, but the femur or whatever they called it was probably fractured. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt enough to be broken - no, it hurt enough, but there were no bones sticking out from his jeans. No, it could’ve been a lot worse, but right now, David thought it was plenty.

  But he gingerly put his weight on the leg and, amazingly, it held. The pain was like the sea washing over him, a red tide of agony. He leaned back onto his good leg and took another step, slamming his door behind him. Each step was a concert of agony, but with each step he was better able to ignore the pain, and by the time he made his way over the curb and into the sheltered area out of the pouring rain, he was doing better.

  He glanced back at the van and saw the front right side of it was dented in. One of the headlights was broken and useless, and dark dents and scrapes ran almost all the way to the back of the van. From the looks of his van, Jasper had run that car off the road, and maybe a couple others.

  The double glass doors that led into the mall opened outward and near the doors he saw footprints: two sets, one made by a set of small shoes and the others made by a pair of heavy boots like the kind Jasper had been wearing when he’d stepped on David’s chest - he couldn’t help but remember the odd rattlesnake design on them. The footprints were staggered and confusing, and David had absolutely no experience reading tracks. No Cherokee in his blood or anything like that. But he could tell that they had not just walked right up to the door and walked right in.

  Fear welled up inside him. Jasper Fines was luring him into a trap and was going to kill him, just as surely as he had killed David’s father. The man knew all the angles, had everything all figured out. And now, he was waiting somewhere inside, using Bethany to draw him in, waiting for David to come hobbling in.

  Waiting to kill him.

  But David was determined to get her out. Even if it meant giving his own life up to the monster, he would get Bethany out. She was the only important thing in his life, and she had nothing to do with this.

  For a moment, he wished he was someone else’s kid. If he had grown up in a normal family with normal parents, everything would be different. But he was David Beaumont, and his father had been killed by the man inside the walls of this building. Nothing could ever change that.

  David Beaumont reached up and slowly pulled the doors open, and a warm blast of air greeted him as he stepped painfully inside.

  He didn’t turn around again, and did not see the first of the birds arrive, flapping in from the darkness of the storm to land on the concrete and on the van and on the hood of David’s car. A few pecked at the windows of the van, trying to get in. They landed on the wet concrete and on the shiny pavement outside the overhanging. A flash of lightning illuminated the birds as they landed around the doors and on the cars and above the entrance to the mall. As their numbers grew, the blackbirds and gulls and ravens and crows and other birds nipped and squawked at each other nervously.

  And they waited.

  The Liberty Place Mall was not a large mall, but it was the biggest mall in the county. Hecht’s and J.C. Penney’s, the two main anchor stores, were located on either end of the “L”-shaped mall, providing the town with two of its largest departments stores. In the middle of the mall, at the conjunction of the two bars that made up the “L”, was a six-screen theater complex, the first multi-screen theater in the area. It showed the latest movies and on Saturday mornings showed older movies and classics, drawing even more people into the mall. The movie theaters at the junction of the two wings of the mall were on the main floor above a sunken food court, the only area of the mall that had two floors. Hanging above the food court was a huge, oversized American Flag to go along with the patriotic theme of the mall.

  The rest of the mall was taken up by the usual assortment of shops, mostly leaning towards the tastes and preferences of the many women who shopped there. There were many women’s clothing and shoe stores, each with witty names like “Gene’s Jeans” or “Fun Two Go”. There were Hallmark stores and men’s clothing stores and a drugstore, a couple of sporting goods stores, video and music stores, and book stores, each selling their particular wares and turning a profit - almost every single lease was signed and there were only two vacancies in the 56-store mall. There were many things to see and do in the Liberty Place Mall, and the builders of the mall were very pleased to see that the mall was a success, both financially and as a thriving boost to the economy of Liberty.

  David stepped into Hecht’s and the first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. When he had visited the mall before, it would be ringing with life, the shouts of people and the sounds of registers and machines and equipment running. All he could hear now was a low buzzing from the lights above, and he looked up. They were all on - was that right? He guessed it made sense - the night guards would need to be able to see if anyone was in here messing around. But all of
the lights? Wouldn’t it be just as good to leave a few on and save some money on electricity?

  He hobbled on, the pain a constant roar in his head, like he was standing under a waterfall of pain, feeling it cascade over him. He passed a rack of umbrellas near the door and saw that in among them was a wooden walking stick carved from dark wood and shaped like a cane with a curve at the end. He grabbed it and tried putting some of his weight on it, and it worked better than he had hoped - the umbrellas and other canes in the rack were too short, but this stick curled right up under his arm like a crutch, and he was able to hobble along much better. He didn’t have to put nearly as much pressure on his leg, and the pain backed off a bit.

  He started off towards the main part of the mall. He made it to the Hecht’s entrance leading out into the mall proper when he saw the body.

  It was lying in a massive pool of blood, face down, and for one horrible moment he thought it was Bethany.

  But it was too big. It seemed to be wearing a uniform or some sort.

  The man was laying face down, his arms and legs splayed out, and David hobbled over to him, leaning down to roll him over. It was an older man wearing a security guard’s uniform, and David could see the massive hole in his chest. Next to the body was a large "201" drawn in blood on the tile floor of the mall.

  Was he keeping count, too? It made sense. It was a bigger number than Julie had estimated, but it made sense. He was a collector, so he'd be obsessed with tracking his kills.

  And Jasper was armed. But how had he gotten in here in the first place, and dragging Bethany, too? Or maybe he’d used her to lure the guard outside or something, or gotten him to unlock the doors...