by L T Vargus
Waves slapped against the concrete nearby, a strangely peaceful sound in all this carnage. There was something wrong about that. The odd religious hush that he usually only experienced inside houses of victims combining with the white noise of nature, the hushed whispers of Lake Michigan, creating a soundtrack for the horror laying around his feet.
Loshak listened to the roaring grow louder and louder before realizing that his footsteps were becoming muffled and far away. Dark red-tinged curtains were creeping into the edges of his vision.
He’d stopped breathing. Maybe he was experiencing a little shock himself. It was a lot to take in, even for a hardened agent with decades of experience. The scale of the shooting made it hard to fathom. He forced himself to inhale and exhale slowly until the darkness receded and the sound sharpened again.
His phone gave that two-beat buzz again, almost like a heartbeat. It would be Jan. She was the only one who ever texted him. He didn’t take the phone out of his pocket. It was stupid, but he didn’t want to read it here. Felt too numb to see her name on the screen. Better if it waited until later. Kept any emotion from crowding in just then.
One by one, the ambulances started rolling out, more of them empty than carrying survivors.
In time, the first techs from Forensic Services started to filter in. Processing this scene was going to be a multi-hour job. So many bodies. So many shells littering the ground. It would take forever to photograph and bag it all, even with everyone from the unit working at it.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 45
He hunched in the car now. Fingers flexing and unflexing on the steering wheel. Flying to the next stop, the next party.
His jaw contracted in little spasms. Teeth gritted inside his face. Not out of frustration. Out of overstimulation. Elation. The ecstasy of victory and the thrill of battle all rolled into one feeling that clenched his jaw for him, made little froths of foam appear in the corners of his mouth.
Almost no one else in the world would ever experience this feeling. To let the fierce feelings inside come unblocked. Unglued. A kind of rapture overtaking his limbs along with the violence, thrumming through his hands as he squeezed the trigger, flushing his face with heat. He was detached in some way in these moments, yes. Intoxicated. Invulnerable. Entering some religious state.
Alive. All the way alive.
Society had drawn lines in the sand. Made up rules and customs to keep the rabble in line. Tried to etch some kind of order onto the animal chaos spiraling in every brain, to still the darkness beating in every heart. And only when you stepped over these invisible barriers were you truly alive, truly yourself, truly real. All else was mass delusion. Weak. Tame.
To cross that line, to embrace the shadow side of himself was to clasp his fingers around the power they told him he could never have.
When soldiers crossed these same lines, opened fire on people from some other country, laid waste to the huddled masses in a desert village somewhere, they were lauded as heroes. Given medals. Their killing was righteous, moral, necessary, courageous. Their wielding of automatic weapons made them champions. Tie a fucking yellow ribbon around the old oak tree, my friend.
Funny how thin the line between hero and villain truly was. Two sides of the same coin.
Neither had anything in common with the sheep. All those herd animals living lives of quiet desperation, finding escape in lies like money and possessions instead of facing reality, changing it, bending it to their fucking will. Content to write Yelp reviews and fight over whether an IPA was superior to a lager rather than exercising real power, trying to do something fucking real.
The society they’d built had castrated them, and they’d lined up for the operation. It was safer that way.
That was the message they sent out to the poor, the tired, the huddled masses: Keep your head down, keep eating out of the trough, keep living in this little cage. You’ll be safe for as long as we can use you. We promise.
And what awaits at the end of this kill chute we’re funneling you down? Don’t you worry about that. You’ll be happy in heaven, little lamb. Eternal bliss and shit. When the bolt of death comes, you won’t feel a thing.
Police lights flickered in his peripheral vision. He wheeled his head to look, snapped back to the present in the process. The tangle of dreams receding, streetlights and slushy streets arising to replace them.
The lights blinked. Flashed red then blue. He felt his eyes go wide, knuckles going white on the steering wheel as his grip tightened.
Had they found him? No. It wasn’t possible. He’d cleared out long before the sirens started screaming toward the pier. He’d shot down their man on the scene and slipped away into the dark, into the shadows that had always protected him.
Then the lights flashed green, then orange, and he realized that it wasn’t the cops after all. Just Christmas lights, the kind that blinked through a series of colors.
Still, the moment of shock had touched off something in his stomach. Not quite fear. More like a premonition.
What if it ended tonight? The twisted face of that woman charging him surfaced in his mind, followed by that too-slow cop groping for his gun. They’d both been gunning for him, trying to take him out. What if some hero in the next crowd got lucky and finished the job? Third time was the charm, right?
He shook his head. He didn’t think it would happen, but he had to keep the possibility in mind. Stay sharp. Keep on his toes.
Life balanced on the edge of a razor. It wasn’t a matter of if you’d fall but when.
He pictured the cop again, blood spouting out of his throat and face like a hose bib, a red puddle spreading over the concrete, catching snowflakes trying to blow past on the icy lake wind.
That made him feel better. Reassured him of his strength and power. The herd had already taken their best shots at him, and he’d survived. Fortune favored the bold, rewarded the aggressor.
No matter what, he would survive.
Chapter 46
Within about ten minutes, Loshak’s feet and fingers were going numb. One of the EMTs stopped by before her ambulance pulled out, checking to make sure he had warm enough clothes and knew the signs of frostbite.
“I don’t envy you guys tonight,” she said, giving him a package of HotHands. “They’re calling for gusts of up to thirty-five miles per hour. Even worse tomorrow when the real weather hits.”
Loshak tore open the hand warmers and dumped the packets into his palm. They felt like papery little sandbags.
“Just another night in beautiful, sunny Chicago,” Loshak joked, because it seemed like the EMT was waiting for him to say something that would distract from the death surrounding them in every direction.
Her eyes crinkled briefly. “Florida’s got nothing on us. You stay warm.”
“You, too.”
She gave him a little wave as she headed for the next closest tech to distribute more of the little packets.
Loshak shook up the hand warmers like the package instructed, then slipped them down into his shoes and gloves. Heat spread from the tiny sandbags, fighting back the numbness, and his fingers and toes crawled with needles as they warmed up, like a limb that had gone to sleep and was finally waking up.
From the periphery, he watched as the forensic teams combed through the wreckage of flesh and casings and glass. Working against the wind, against the snow that was starting to stick to the scene and cover up evidence. Something about the motion of the techs and the snap of the cameras made him think of that time-lapse video of nanotechnology eating through an oil spill. They all wore the same Chicago Police windbreakers over their heavy winter coats, but he could distinguish them by the hand and head coverings.
One, a guy wearing the incongruous combination of a White Sox hat and scarf and Cubs gloves, finished photographing the space surrounding the planter where the shooter had started the shooting and took a step forward to start working on the next little square of scene. He got
so close to one of the bodies that the black rubber toes of his Muck Boots touched the halo of blood surrounding the victim’s head and torso. By then, most of the congealing pools on the concrete had turned to a darkling shimmer, almost more black than red. But when it touched the black of the tech’s boots, that was when Loshak could really see the deep scarlet of the freezing liquid.
When the tech’s boot scraped back, the blood clung to it, a sticky, gummy viscosity sort of like maple syrup. How fast would the blood go from 98.6 degrees to frozen solid out here, pooled on the asphalt and concrete? Probably less than a half-hour, Loshak thought.
Squeezing his fists tighter around the hand warmers, Loshak ran back through the case, retracing what they knew so far. White male, around six-foot-tall based on the proportions in the security footage. Owner of at least one Uzi and what would likely prove to be some kind of semi-automatic rifle according to the number and caliber of casings on the pier. Intelligent enough to use a car that couldn’t be traced to him and exploit the dead spot in the mall security cameras. His earliest attack showed planning, whereas the shooting on the road almost seemed to have been an impromptu victory celebration. Back to the planning with the movie theater, parking at an unconnected garage. No victory celebration following that one. Was that because of the girl? Because he hadn’t killed everyone he set out to? Or was it because the drugs that had dilated his pupils were making him erratic? Prone to wanton slaughter one day, careful the next.
Loshak’s mind turned down the pharmacist path again. He hoped like hell that they weren’t wasting their time on that line of inquiry. It happened with every investigation, you hit some dead ends before you got lucky. But with the number of victims this shooter was capable of producing with every rampage, every day they didn’t catch him was another mass grave full of bodies.
A harsh gust of wind brought the sound of shouting to him. Loshak’s eyes darted around the scene until he found the source — back by the barricade, uniforms and detectives were rushing around. A siren cut through the night, and the SRT carrier’s lights flashed back to life. It honked a few times to get the gathered crowd out of the way, then crept toward the street and disappeared into the urban sprawl.
The words victory celebration rang in Loshak’s head.
He hustled back up the pier, careful to stick to the railing, away from the evidence. Ahead, he could see Spinks’ tall, bundled form arguing with Millhouse next to a squad car, the reporter’s long arms gesturing toward Loshak or the crime scene behind him.
Loshak sidestepped between blue sawhorses and stopped beside the reporter and Chief Deputy of Deceives.
“What’s going on?”
“Our guy just shot up another New Year’s Eve party about twenty blocks from here,” Spinks said.
Chapter 47
The crowd swarming the hotel ballroom wore tuxes and formal prom-looking dresses. Most toted martinis and fruity looking drinks in their hands. Awful music throbbed, bass and kick thumping in unison on every quarter note like a heartbeat, everyone’s movements seeming to fall in time with the beat. A kind of hypnotism taking hold of their bodies. The pulse of the strobe light heightened the effect, made it look they lurched with every motion, puppet strings moving all of them at once, everything a little off like stop-motion animation. Uncanny.
He stood in the doorway, faced the big open floor where the idiot mob writhed and jerked and wriggled. And another surge of adrenaline shot ice through his limbs, the iciness seeming to collect in his hands, so cold his palms and fingers almost burned.
Behold death. The destroyer of worlds.
He lifted his weapon. Arms shaking just a little. He swallowed and squeezed the trigger.
The gun bucked in his hands. Flame thrusting from the muzzle. That first bullet piercing the crowd.
A man dropped a couple rows deep in the mob. Waist and knees folding him up into a ball. He clutched at his belly, fingers curved like claws.
He squeezed the trigger over and over. He did not slow.
More bodies dropped. Tumbled. Teetered out from the thicket of human torsos like felled tree trunks.
The initial moan of the crowd somehow rose over the mind-numbing bass line as the panic gripped them. A collective intake of breath, a mournful sound coming out with the next exhale.
The mob stampeded. Thrashing. Colliding. Tangling themselves up in each other’s limbs. Mindless. Terrified.
The ballroom’s exits turned into chokepoints in a crowd this big. Especially with him blocking one doorway, spraying tiny projectiles of death at them.
And that fever burned in his cheeks, his top lip, his forehead. The sweat beading and falling all over his face.
Still, he squeezed and squeezed. His mind blank of all but that urge to kill, to maim, to destroy. No thoughts. No words. Just that primal feeling. The red tide of aggression flooding his skull.
He fired into the terrified mass of humanity writhing around the bottleneck of the back door, trying to force its way through. The tightly packed bodies went down in clusters now like bowling pins.
Strobe lights still thrummed over the careening mob, the awful music still rumbled and chirped. So fucking loud. Somehow shrill and thunderous at the same time.
The rifle grew hot in his hands. Heat to match that of his face.
And it felt, for that moment, like he was underwater. Submerged. Hot liquid enveloping him, surrounding him. Ready to boil him.
He licked his lips. Tasted salt.
A spent casing dropped into his collar, burning his neck. He grimaced at the sensation of crisping flesh, but he didn’t stop the extermination to dig the casing out.
Let it burn.
He was there to destroy. Devastate. He lived only for that now. To feel the little tremor as each bullet exited the muzzle, to smell the acrid scent of the gunpowder, to feel the heat of the barrel spread to the grip, enter the meat of his palms.
To bring death. Total annihilation.
The panic in the ballroom reached another level, cow-eyed idiots realizing they were never getting out of here alive. Through the screaming, another moan arose, different than the first. Cows lowing in fear.
He had one more trick left to unleash. The grand finale, so to speak.
With one hand, he reached into his side pocket and pulled out a grenade. He had to stop shooting for a second to pull the pin, but he felt sure that the damage would be worth the trade-off.
He let go of the spoon and tossed the little ball of death into the congestion.
Some of them saw it, flinging themselves away, but most were too caught up in the futile struggle to fight their way out the door to notice. Even the people right next to it.
One of those closest to the grenade froze, a man with stooped shoulders stared down at the oblong object at his feet, the only motionless figure in that seething horde. For a split-second, Ben thought the guy was going to get away. Knife deeper into the crowd. Cut and run, like the self-preservation instinct would be screaming at anybody with half a brain to do.
But he didn’t.
Instead, the man elbowed some pregnant woman out of the way and jumped. Hurled himself onto the grenade. Hugged his body against it.
It blew the second the guy landed on it, like it had just been waiting for the weight of a body so it could detonate.
Bits of his torso exited his back. Whole pieces of him vented. Flying everywhere. Wet and stringy.
A shiver ran down Ben’s spine.
It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t like he had stopped the shooter or saved the day.
He’d just died. Died for no good reason. Exploded into human confetti.
Crazy what some people were capable of.
He turned the rifle back on the crowd, looking for that pregnant chick the hero had shoved, shooting as he searched. Before he could find her, though, the alarm on his phone started chirping.
His nostrils flared, a single hot heave exiting those holes in his face. He wanted to keep going, take a few
more of them out. He’d never felt the urge so strongly.
But no. Stick to the plan. Six minutes. In and out.
Anyway, the party was over, he thought. This place was dead.
Chapter 48
The techs and detectives bustled around the ballroom, cameras flashing, latex gloves snapping, paper booties rustling on the floor. A few techs wandered the scene with camcorders, filming everything. A pair of detectives Loshak had seen in the task force meetings worked out the killer’s positioning based on the angle of the shots. Over by the door, near the highest concentration of bodies, Brunhauser and another tech tried to make sense of the tissue splatter surrounding a charred and splintered epicenter.
Bomb, Loshak’s mind spit out. But the blast radius was too small, concentrated. He revised the thought. No, a grenade.
Spinks hadn’t even put up a façade of protest when Millhouse banned him from this scene, and Loshak could understand why. The weight of these massacres was increasing exponentially. Not because of the number of victims, but just by viewing the raw savagery. Exposure to that kind of evil left a mark. The more exposure, the deeper the mark. Loshak could feel it dragging him down, a weight in the pit of his stomach and a stabbing at the back of his throat. A prickling hotness behind his eyes like he was going to burst into tears.
But the impulse was only physical. In an odd way, the shock kept his actual emotions distant. Kept him numb on the surface.
Probably just like the shooter in a sense. Their guy was angry, definitely. Hateful and homicidal, so full of rage that he had to pour it out where he could see it in blood and death. But the footage they had gathered from the scenes so far showed a coldness to his actions. A level of detachment.