Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  It was a comforting thought, the idea full of power, the power to end all of this madness. Maybe he could get past all of this and all of the history of his dad, maybe getting on with his real life, a life with Bethany and a future.

  But if any of that was going to happen, he had to win.

  There was a sporting goods store on the other side of the theaters, down in the opposite direction from where he had come in. David had been in there a hundred times. Maybe Jack had gotten his gun there, or maybe he’d had it all along. Either way, if it was open, maybe David could get a gun there, too. He started towards it when he heard shouting from inside the theater.

  “Hey boy! What are you doing out there? Aren’t you gonna come in here and get me? She’ll die soon without medical attention - don’t you know that? Those stomach wounds won’t heal – they just bleed and bleed. I know – I’ve seen a lot of them. She’s in a lot of pain. I’ll tell you, I didn’t think a pretty little girl like that could bleed so much!” Jack laughed a little, and the voice was loud and strong, and David suddenly envied him. The guy wasn’t injured, wasn’t hurt in any way. He had a gun or two and lots of experience doing this kind of thing, stalking and taunting and killing. David didn’t envy that part, but it was obvious who was more prepared going into this fight.

  David summoned his strength, not wanting to sound hurt. “How am I supposed to face you? You’ve got a gun, and me, I’ve got nothing but...”

  Pain suddenly shot though his leg, muddling his words and twisting his face into a grimace of pain. The words trailed off in a painful gasp.

  Jack laughed, the sound carrying easily out to David. “Not doing so good, huh, kid? I think you’re going to need a cast just like your old man! I’ll tell you what. Let me kill you now, quick and painless, and I’ll let the girl go. Oh, she’ll die, too, without a doctor, but at least she’ll die with you. Or I could just kill you and take her with me. She is awful pretty.”

  No, David didn’t want that - and he didn’t want to think about that, either. But David knew what Jack was doing - he was just baiting him, trying to make him madder. Trying to get him to do something stupid.

  Jack could kill him - he didn’t really care anymore. The pain was like a wall he had been pushed up against, a boiling wall of lava, and when the pain went away it would be all better. But he had to get her out, get her away from this madman. This was between David and this wacko in there - and his father, the always-present silent partner in this crazy dance that had lasted so many years. Bethany was an innocent victim, in every meaning of the words.

  “No,” David answered. “I don’t think so. Is that what you want? You want me dead?” A shiver raced though him - another person out there really wanted him dead. It was a strange feeling.

  “Yeah, kid. Sorry, nothing personal. Your dad was clever and it got him killed, and now you should be dead too, blown up in that school. But no, you had to be clever too, and figure a couple little things out, poking around in things that didn’t concern you, and now you’re going to have to die. I am the Angel of Death, and I have come for you. Don’t you know that?”

  Great. A killer and crazy as a loon, too. What did this Angel of Death crap have to do with that maniac inside the theater?

  “Jack, why don’t you just leave? Why all the killing? You beat my father, killed him and a lot of other people. Why did you come back?” David cursed himself for slipping - as far as Jack knew, David only knew about the three killings in 1978 and the three most recent ones. Did Jack pick up on the slip?

  It was quiet for a few minutes, enough to think that maybe no answer was coming, or maybe Jack was thinking about David’s slip. Or that maybe the guy was moving out of position, trying to circle around him or something. But he was still in the theater, as far as David could tell, so there was no way he could get behind him. David slid over towards the railing, getting ready to head for the sporting goods store, when a voice came back.

  “I don’t know, kid. You’re dad was good, and he came real close to getting me. Too close. And all these years, it’s bugged me. I guess I just needed to relive it, to see what might’ve happened. And it’s pretty obvious to me that I win. I killed a lot of people in this pissy little town of yours tonight, and pretty soon I’m going to kill you and your girl. And then I can get past all of this and get on with my life.”

  It sounded like what he had been thinking for the past few months, waiting to get his money so he could leave and forget all about Liberty. It was like they were both at some kind of turning point.

  David didn’t have much time to reflect on the similarities between them. Sharp gunshots rang out in quick succession, shattering glass and tearing holes in the walls just outside the theater. One of them zinged off something metal inside the theater lobby and smacked into the wall next to David, punching a good sized hole in the fiberboard.

  It was at that point when he decided to make himself scarce.

  He hobbled away from the theater’s entrance, off towards the other end of the mall. The bullets continued haphazardly for a few more minutes and then they faded off, though whether it was from Jack stopping firing or he had been forced to reload, David didn’t know. He could hear Jack talking again but he was too far away to hear what the guy was saying, and to tell the truth, he really didn’t care anymore.

  David worked his way slowly down the mall. He tried to hurry, but the leg was killing him, and by the time he made it to the entrance of the Dan’s Sporting Goods Store, he was gasping in pain. The leg felt like it was on fire, and David wondered how long it would be before secondary symptoms started to set in. He was feeling tired and feverish, and his mouth felt thick and cottony, like he was dehydrated or something. Not a good sign.

  The sporting goods store was open, its gate pulled up like most of the other stores in the mall – Jack had been busy getting ready. All the lights inside were on, and that reminded David of his original plan to find a phone and call for help. He saw a phone on the store’s counter and walked over to it. There was a dial tone, and he dialed the police.

  “Liberty Police Department.”

  “Yes, I need to report a murder.” David said, hoping to get their attention.

  It worked. “Hold on, sir. Let me get my supervisor.” There was a momentary silence as the phone was handed over, and then someone else came on. “Okay, sir. I’m Deputy Stewart. Are you reporting a homicide?”

  “Yes,” David answered. “My name is David Beaumont, and I am calling from the Dan’s Sporting Goods Store in Liberty Place Mall. The security guard has been killed, and a man named Jack Terrington did it. He’s stabbed my girlfriend and now he’s holed up inside the theater, shooting at me.”

  There was nothing but silence on the other end.

  “Can you hear me? You have to get some people out here, now!” David had a bad feeling about this, but what else could he do? He needed help, ‘backup’ like they called it in the movies. On “Cops”, they just grabbed their radios and called in the backup when they were in a dangerous situation or needed some more firepower or someone to watch their backs. The cops were supposed to be there to help, right? You called, and then they showed up to save the day, right?

  The man’s voice came back on, and the tone of his voice told David that the guy didn’t believe him. This was some kind of joke or something - life wasn’t supposed to be like this!

  “Look, kid, we’re very busy here tonight, and we don’t have time for pranks or practical jokes, okay? I can tell that you’re upset, and you need to calm down. Now, you said your name was David Beaumont, right?”

  “Dammit, man! Just send some cops out to the mall, and make sure they’re armed, okay?” David yelled into the mouthpiece before he slammed it down. They might show and they might not - he couldn’t count on them for help.

  He was going to have to do this himself.

  David went around behind the counter, back where the guns were stored. There were several rifles and larger guns hanging from unlo
cked racks behind the counter, along with stacks and stacks of ammunition boxes filled with bullets of all different shapes and sizes. David knew nothing about guns, only what he had seen in the movies and on TV, but he did know that for his situation, he needed one or two small guns, hopefully ones that held a good number of bullets, maybe clips of 10 or 12 shots each. He didn’t think it would be a big gun battle, one way or the other, but he didn’t want to have to reload or anything, not leaning on his crutch - he simply didn’t have enough hands. No, he needed something smaller than these big guns. He needed little guns, like something James Bond would carry.

  He looked down into the gun case that doubled as a counter and saw guns that were more to his liking. There were small, snub nosed pistols, larger revolvers and small automatics that would accept clips in the hand grip - that was what he needed.

  The sliding metal doors on the back of the cabinet were locked and he looked around for the keys for a moment, but didn’t see them. Screw it. He pulled one of the larger rifles down from the unlocked gun rack behind the counter and, using the butt, shattered the glass top of the case. Well, if there were any silent alarms in this store that hadn’t already been tripped, they were going off now. Maybe the cops would take him seriously now.

  He reached in and selected two guns that looked about the same size. They were black and silver and of the same make and model, and after he popped the clips out of the handles of both of them, he realized they weren’t loaded. That made sense - the gun shop owner would not want to take them out to show them to customers and have one of them go off.

  David knew nothing about selecting ammunition, so he looked at the gun until he found the markings that identified it as a 9 millimeter. He grabbed two boxes of matching cartridges off of the wall behind the counter and set them down, feeding the small bullets into the empty magazines. He also found several empty magazines that were designed to fit the guns and filled them with bullets too, keeping careful count of how many rounds he had, total. He’d seen enough movies where the good guy runs out of bullets right at the worst possible moment.

  After he finished, David decided to do the same thing with a third gun, a smaller one that took the same size ammunition. He loaded it and after a few seconds of pondering, leaned over and rolled up the bloody pant leg of his injured leg and stuck the little gun in his sock. It hurt like hell to roll the pant leg up and back down, but he would move that leg less than the other one and maybe stashing a gun there could turn his injury into a slight advantage.

  Suddenly, it occurred to him how crazy this whole thing was. Here he was, a normal guy, loading guns with ammo so that he could go out there and face a madman down and save his girlfriend. He knew nothing about guns or ammo, and had just about put the bullets into the magazines backwards in his rush to load the guns. And the funny thing was he didn’t even know how bad that would be, putting them in backwards. Would they shoot out the back, or just fire like duds, or what? He had no idea. He knew on a revolver a little pin came down and struck the back of the bullet, igniting it. Was it the same with these little automatics and their chambered rounds? He had no idea. Too bad he couldn’t practice shooting a little before - David had never even held a gun, much less fired one. And he was supposed to kill an expert, shoot and kill him and get the keys and free his girlfriend? It all sounded so crazy to him - if someone had explained it to him as the plot of a new movie coming out soon, he would’ve laughed it off as being far too cheesy and kept his seven dollars safely in his pocket. Probably Jack was getting a kick out of this, too, waiting for David to come back so they could...

  Wait a second. This is exactly what Jack Terrington wanted David to be doing, wasn’t it? He’d left the gate up, knowing that David would go for a gun. He’d probably unlocked the shotgun racks, too. That’s why Jack had shot at him willy-nilly back there at the theaters - he’d hadn’t been shooting at him, he had really been trying to scare him. And now David was here, getting loaded up, doing exactly what Jack wanted.

  But what else could he do? If Jack wanted a gunfight like the one that had wounded David’s father in the leg (ironic, his mind added suddenly, that he was injured in the same leg too) or a gunfight like the one on that dark highway, David had to oblige, didn’t he? What good would it do to go out there with anything less? Jack probably had a gun and probably more, and was probably reloaded by now, waiting for David to come back. Jack probably knew he had to be far better than David with a gun, but in his sick mind he wanted this whole thing to be something of a fair fight, like a gunfight in one of those old westerns. Never mind that David was hurt and Jack was a cold-blooded killer by choice and experience - Jack still wanted this to all come down to a melodramatic showdown, the last ten minutes of a bad movie where the killer faces his oldest enemy reincarnated in the form of the enemy’s offspring. Cheesy, too cheesy to believe, but Jack seemed sick enough to buy into it. And now David was stuck in the middle.

  Stuck in the middle with you...

  He heard the song start up in his head crazily, and wondered what it meant. Why was he thinking about that song - did it mean something, or was his head just skipping off on its own, leaving him along?

  It was a song he knew, from that movie “Reservoir Dogs.” That Quentin Tarantino movie with the jewelry heist that goes really wrong and all the characters are named after colors. And the one really bad guy who had cut that cop’s ear off and poured gasoline on him...

  He remembered a really big puddle of blood in that movie. The big puddle under Bethany had reminded him of that movie, but he hadn’t even realized it until now. So, what would they do in the movies, faced with a situation like this?

  Depends, his mind offered. Some people, like Arnold or John McClain or Jean Claude Van Damme, they would walk back up there, ignoring the pain in their legs, and shoot it out with the guy. And they would win.

  Yeah, but I’m not an action hero.

  Then they would use their heads and think their way out of the situation. Like MacGyver or Jack Ryan from one of those Clancy books. They weren’t butch or could bench press a Volkswagen - they used their heads to get out of sticky situations.

  Yeah, but that’s the movies. This is real life.

  So what?, the voice asked. Do you want to do exactly what Jack was expecting and go down in a hail of gunfire? Or do you want to mix it up a little, throwing Jack’s stale script out the window?

  Yeah, that sounded good. But how?

  David figured that Jack was coming for him by now. David was supposed to come out, and Jack would say something cute, and they’d both draw and David would die. No good. David glanced out the front door of the store, but saw nothing. How long would Jack wait before he came for David? Not long, probably, but maybe long enough. He didn’t strike David as the most patient of men, but he would want his little plan to work out perfectly.

  David put the two guns into the pockets of his jacket and hopped out from behind the counter. They couldn’t hurt, but they also couldn’t be the whole plan - he needed something else, something more.

  Something that Jack would never expect.

  David used his wooden walking stick as his crutch and moved painfully down the first aisle of merchandise, looking.

  Jack was getting impatient. The kid had gone off in the direction of the gun store, most likely going for a gun or two. So why hadn’t he come back yet, looking for Jack? He had to be mad and fired up and ready for a fight. That was the beauty part of Jack’s plan - the kid would feel the power of a gun or two

  gunfight

  in his hands from that sporting goods store. He would come for Jack, searching him out in a futile attempt to get the keys and free his girl.

  But Jack was fine with that - he was a pretty damn good shot, and he knew that he could take the kid in a straight-out gunfight. And it wasn’t like the kid could walk away, not with his girl dying back there. Even if walking away was standard operating procedure for this kid, he was trapped this time. No, the kid had no other
choices, no options.

  Jack was still in the lobby of the theater, expecting the kid to come back, looking for him. He wanted to draw the kid into one of the theaters and shoot it out there, or draw him up into one of the projection rooms. Before the kid had gotten here Jack had gone up to each of the rooms and started the movies running, remembering how from a summer when he’d worked in a theater. The movies were huge reels set on big metal platters and ran in and out of the big projectors horizontally, so all Jack had had to do was feed the leaders in and start the projector, winding the outcoming film onto the empty take-up platter. He started four different movies going, and they were all short movies of two hours or less, meaning they only required one platter of film that wound through the projector and sound box and out onto the take-up platter. Longer movies required more than one platter and more than one projector, but by the time these movies were finished running, it would all be over.

  And it would all be confusing to the kid, wandering in here and seeing the movies going like that. Throw the kid off, and maybe make him screw up

  he's not that smart he's just a kid

  or something cool like that. And wasn’t that the way epics were supposed to end, anyway? With a really cool scene at the end where the two powers face off and the stronger wins? And what better place to stage the end of an epic than in a movie theater?

  But after a while Jack grew tired of waiting and cautiously made his way across the lobby and out of the theater. There was a slim chance that the kid was trying to get one up on him, waiting for him to come out so he could take a pot shot, but Jack wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

  He moved slowly and carefully, trying to ignore the dull pain in his ribs, and started down the mall towards the gun store.

  David had found a few things he could use and a backpack to carry them in, and he carefully left the gun store, watching. He didn’t see Jack yet, and he needed to get further down the mall towards J.C. Penney’s if his rudimentary plan was going to work. The gun shop was about half-way between the theaters and J.C. Penney’s. He crossed to the closest trash receptacle and lifted the top off. It was metal and half-filled with trash - evidently the storm had kept the mall closed today, or at least the trash hadn’t been collected.