by Schow, Ryan
“Where’s it coming from?” Bailey asks, standing closer to me.
I take her hand, move away from the decorative wall, which is just a partition between two very large event halls.
“It sounds like it’s coming from next door.”
As the ruckus drones on, it starts to sound like it’s coming from everywhere. The noise levels that have fallen in our conference room are rising again, as is the panic setting in around us. Pretty soon it’s going to be all out chaos. I set down my coffee, grab hers and set it down, too. It tips over and spills, but I don’t care. We have to get out of here.
“Let’s go!” I say over the noise.
I look at her and she looks at me, and that’s when I grab her hand once more and pull her toward the door. A righteous explosion rocks the floor beneath our feet, stopping us.
“What the hell?” Bailey says. The wild look in her eyes stills me. Makes me wonder the very same thing.
“Was that a bomb?” she screeches.
Just then automatic gunfire tears a hole in the wall between our conference room and the hall next door splintering wood and particle board in a horrific display. Bodies begin to drop. The sudden explosion of terror has everyone screaming and sprinting for the exits.
“We need to go!” I shout at Bailey.
The second we pull open the conference room’s double doors, we see it. We see everything. Bailey and I pull to a stop, mortified. Across the main hallway, the convention center’s huge glass walls show us the outside world.
“Nick?” Bailey asks.
I don’t even have the words.
Outside, on the other side of the enormous glass walls, the skies are buzzing with drones. There’s fire and destruction everywhere. At ground level, people are screaming, running and dying. Cars smash into everything. The barrage of gunfire turns everything into Swiss cheese, and small missiles create fiery, earth-shaking explosions.
The jarring, punching, hitting rush of people blow past us, hammering us, almost like we’re boulders in a stream being battered by the steady pounding of water. I reach out for Bailey, grab the sleeve of her sweater, drag her back into the conference room, out of the path of the frantic, departing rush.
The eruption of fire and concussive power that hits happens too fast to do anything at all. The glass front of the building explodes. It’s like being swallowed and smashed apart by a tidal wave of both heat and a righteous, rolling energy. We are thrown into a heap of tumbling bodies. When I finally come to, I barely even realize I’ve been out cold. My body feels run over, my heart sucker-punched, my abdominals a knotted twist of nausea.
Curling into a fetal ball among dozens of bodies, my eyes bulging as I gasp for breath, I can barely comprehend what’s happening.
The darkness all around me is smoke and scattered bodies. Something is dripping blood on me. Pushing my way up out of the pile, I find her: Bailey. Her face is smoked, her clothes burnt, her face nicked and red in several places.
I say her name, lightly smack her cheek. Her eyelids flutter open. It takes a moment for her to focus in on me, but she does it.
“I think a bomb went off outside the building,” I tell her.
Through the near blackness of blown out lights, Bailey looks like a woman who just crawled out of the flaming bowels of hell and can no longer lift a limb. The room is clouds of smoke and pulverized dust. The gunfire sounds of an assault next door persist. Clumsily, I drag her free of the bodies.
“If you want to live,” I tell her, “I’m going to need you to help me out here.”
She manages to shake off my grip and pull her legs free of the mass of now moving bodies. When she’s free, she looks around and that’s when it hits her: a lot of these people are maimed, or dead. But a lot of them aren’t. In the dim lighting, the pile continues to move, to shift, to rise and stagger towards somewhere, anywhere.
Pulling her shirt over her mouth, we get to our feet and somehow make our way through the smoldering ruins, wobbling and stumbling toward the blown out wall leading to a hallway full of shattered glass and bent steel. Outside the convention center, the pandemonium looks a thousand times worse than when I first laid eyes on it. Buildings have become towering infernos, people are on fire and burning in the street, the dead are strewn out everywhere.
Bailey grabs my arm for support as we teeter past bodies and body parts, through the rubble of walls and chairs and what started out as this afternoon’s refreshments.
In the hallway full of exploded glass, we head left because to the right, the building is burning. A door opens up and more bodies pour out, but those bodies shake and dance to the sounds of gunfire. People that had the looks on their faces like they were running for their lives are now being pumped full of holes and dropping in heaps with glassed over eyes and stilled expressions.
Bailey sucks in a breath; I can’t even breathe.
It’s mass slaughter.
We turn and hobble down the hallway toward a bathroom door not fifty yards up. Another explosion behind us blows out another wall of glass. The concussion burst hits us in the back, kicks us off our feet.
Dazed, willing my body to move, gasping for breath but finding none, I look around, try to assess the situation with a brain that’s been socked so hard it’s trying to come back online. I see Bailey. She’s like a fish that flopped out of the sea and landed on the shore and is now fighting for her life. The terror in her eyes is somehow worse than the destruction all around us.
It promises me worse things to come.
Those terrified eyes tell me we will not be escaping this, that I will not live, that I’ll never see my daughter again.
Then the squeeze around my lungs lets up, slowly, and I start to breathe again. The same thing is happening in Bailey, who at that moment looks so beautiful and so crushed I can’t decide if I should leave her or do everything I can to protect her.
I struggle to my feet along with Bailey.
There’s a shrill ringing in my ears that concerns me, and my lungs are lined with the gritty residue of mass destruction. My arms and legs are still working, and my will to live is still intact, but in the screaming silence, something deep inside me is telling me to get up, to move, to hide.
Back down the hall, from the other room, people are tripping and stepping and jumping over the dead, scrambling to get away from whatever’s shooting at them. To my absolute horror, this hulking, terrifying looking robot smashes its way through the wall, stomping on the piles of bodies, firing on those trying to flee.
If the Terminator was rudimentary and cruel looking, less refined but somehow more lethal, this would be exactly what I’m looking at.
You know when those people in the movies see something so frightening, so horrifying they can’t move and you yell at them to run, but they’re so stupid they just sit there staring? For a second that’s me, and in these elongated seconds I understand the disconnect between your brain and your legs.
This robotic beast scares me so bad it makes me think there’s no point in running. This thing is armed to the teeth and slaughtering everything. The signals from my frantic brain hit my legs and arms, causing me to grab Bailey and go. Instead of running, though, I drag her through the bathroom door and we duck into the nearest stall.
“Nick,” Bailey practically squeals, “what the hell was that?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, shaken.
My mind is a cacophony of fear, mortal anxiety and absolute, unbounded dread. Bailey falls to her knees, yanks open the toilet and starts throwing up.
I know exactly how she feels.
The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire continues from multiple sources now. More explosions send shockwaves rippling through the floor, stress fracturing the tiles around us. Just beyond the stall walls, a mirror breaks, the glass falling forward where it shatters on the countertops and sinks before raining down and shattering on the floor.
Bailey is still retching beside me, the quarters cramped, the air around us warmin
g up to an uncomfortable heat.
Or is that me?
I abandon the first stall, looking at three more beside it, the last being the handicapped stall. There’s a long streak of red leading into the stall. Cautiously I open the door to find a woman face first on the floor, dead. There are red blooms in her blouse at the small of her back. Bullet holes. She’s not a thin woman, but she’s not fat either. Kicking aside a few squares of toilet tissue and some plaster that’s fallen from the ceiling, it takes a concentrated surge of strength to drag her into another stall.
Outside the bathroom, the sounds of gunfire are closing in. Another round of bombing shakes several sections of drywall loose and springs a leak in the faucet. I move inside the handicap stall, call to Bailey, who staggers in here with me, then close the door and move to the deepest corner between the toilet and the back wall.
Seconds later, the door opens up but does not close. Ever so carefully, using the sprung leak as audible cover, I lay down on the cold tile and that’s when my eyes fall upon the pair of feet.
That’s about the time my heart stops.
Chapter Nine
With bomb dust in his eyes and that freshly punched feeling of agony sitting deep in his bones, Marcus Torrino crawled out of the pile of bodies. He couldn’t see anything, and his ears were ringing to all hell, but he had his wits enough to know he was still alive and that they’d been attacked.
He pulled an arm loose of the pack of corpses, dragged a leg free, then tried to stand only to step wrong on someone’s flopped down-wrist. Rolling his ankle, he went down hard, his knee smashing down on a face pressed flat on the floor. Marcus rolled off one body into another set of bodies, but the head he’d hit wasn’t alive enough to mind.
Scrambling to his feet, shoving a sprawled out arm out of the way with his foot (an arm that wasn’t attached to a body), he managed to walk on wobbly knees. Twice he nearly slipped in someone’s blood, but at least he couldn’t see much.
The overhead lights were blown out by the concussion burst. He was in a sea of darkness. Between the disorientation and the ringing in his ears, Marcus moved on shaky legs. He’d been to war before. He told himself this so he wouldn’t panic. He’d even survived a pair of IED’s, but they were nothing like this. This was madness! Pawing at his eyes, trying to wipe away the grime, he had the split second thought that maybe he’d died.
He wasn’t dead, though. That was ludicrous!
But was it?
More than once, he told himself he was alive, that he was going to make it out of there, that he’d survived two tours of duty and he’d survive a sales conference in San Diego, if only by the grace of God.
His eyes were running now. Dutifully trying to clear away the gunk all over his eyeballs. He was also struggling to adjust to the lightless haze. Through the pall of annihilation, long spears of light cut through the settling darkness showing Marcus a horrifying sight: the still shadows of the dead and the stumbling shadows of those like him: survivors trying to get to safety.
The sounds of crying and disorientation filtered into his ears now and bodies bumped past him, saying nothing, sometimes mumbling incoherently. He took a mental inventory of his body, his skin, his face. He was trying to see if he had cuts, gashes, lacerations.
After better assessing himself, he started to calm down. So far, so good, he told himself. Even though what qualified as “good” was that Marcus had his sight, his senses and all his limbs. If he didn’t bleed out and die in the next few minutes, well, that would be just swell.
Then again, under these circumstances—the trauma of war—one didn’t always know if they were alright. They only hoped, assumed and sometimes begged.
In Fallujah, his best friend from basic training, Dante Reed, had been struck by sniper fire. Dante realized it, but at the same time he didn’t. He glanced down, touched a red blossom on his chest with two fingers, then held the blood-stained digits up and studied them. Looking at Marcus, he said, “I don’t think it’s mine.”
Of course it was his. Within two minutes, Dante Reed was dead.
As Marcus was telling the young Mrs. Reed what had happened to her husband, he’d tried to make sense of his friend’s last words: I don’t think it’s mine. What was he referring to? The blood? Even then, and especially now, Marcus was thinking, if you’ve been shot, you’d know it, right? I mean, how could you not?
Marcus felt a stickiness on his face, on his hands. He smelled his fingers and he smelled smoke, dust, and the coppery tinge of fresh blood. He began patting himself down, hysterical almost, but he felt nothing immediate. He hurt, but that was deeper in his body. It was pain from the explosion. Pain that made his individual organs ache. Pain that burned deep in his bones. He was thinking, maybe this is my blood. He was thinking, maybe any minute I’m going to drop dead, just like Dante.
Just. Like. Dante.
As he stood there, shell-shocked and dazed, people continued to move past him, nudging against him, bumping him, feeling their way with outstretched hands toward the slivers of light. Through the clearing brume, the front of the conference center began to appear. The gorgeous glass front of the building was no more. All the glass was blown out. Like a pack of zombies, the departing masses were heading into the light and going left.
Herd mentality. Groan, put your hands out, head into the light.
He started to move.
As he made his way toward the exit, thoughts of flocks of sheep—or cattle being herded on a cattle run—ran through his mind. Then for some reason he thought of pigs being led to slaughter, and maybe this is why, when he stepped into the hallway, instead of moving left with the masses he went right.
He couldn’t fall in with everyone else. It wasn’t his personality.
In the fog of delirium, though, he somehow rationalized that he would not be that one little piggy, the one who ran headlong into a bolt pistol, or that killing shot from a .22 round.
He’d always done better on his own anyway.
Breaking free of the departing majority, he coughed and blinked away the acrid sting of smoke as he staggered into the marbled daylight. A cacophony of noise rose up over the ringing in his ears: car alarms, fire alarms, screaming and sobbing and exploding armaments.
Blinking back the tears, he caught sight of the main road just outside the conference center, E. Harbor Drive.
It was a war zone.
The streets were bad, but across E. Harbor, the thirty-something story twin towers known as One Hundred and Two Hundred Harbor were much worse. Both buildings were engulfed in flames, and both buildings were being struck repeatedly by projectiles being launched from dozens upon dozens of drones. Why were they trying to take the towers down?
Who was doing this anyway?
Marcus stopped under a shot of dizziness. Two people shoulder-checked him on accident, knocking him forward, pushing him out of the departing flock. That syrupy feeling of losing equilibrium caused his world to swim once more. He took two stuttering missteps, barely even registering the acres of broken glass crunching underfoot. Hit with a wave of vertigo, he tilted left then right, causing his mind to roll, but only for a second. He slapped his face, once, then twice. He needed his senses. His instincts.
Looking across the main hall, he realized with all the glass blown out, inside was now outside, too.
Barely able to attune to the moment, he told himself he had to go, to move, to find cover. Everything was happening lightening fast, yet super slow at the same time. This was the fog of war. Like taking uppers and downers in a single swallow, then suffering the conflicting highs and lows while knowing he had to be on point, regardless.
He remembered his first surge into a hot zone. This was Afghanistan. One minute he was standing still, the next minute he was racing down corridors in his mind, out of breath, his heart hammering in his chest before he’d even taken his first step into hell.
It was like that.
Outside, the screech of some speeding car’s brakes sta
rtled him, followed an instant later by the brutal mêlée of one vehicle smashing into another. Marcus forced himself to move.
His legs weren’t working so well. Everywhere he looked, chaos supervened. The violence enveloped him, like stuffiness and claustrophobia, pulling at him, dragging him down into old memories. Malicious memories.
Sick memories.
As he stumbled forward at the behest of the departing horde, he tried to stamp these memories down, bury them once more in the fields of denial. But they were persistent. The horrors of days gone by were just there, roaring back, swallowing him into a past chock-full of the savagery of warfare.
Marcus knew combat.
But this wasn’t combat as much as it was a coordinated attack. The kind of attack he hadn’t seen before. Not this side of it, anyway.
Outside, drones zipped through the air like swarming flies, firing on anything and everything. They were hunters, mercilessly eliminating anything dense with human life. But to what outcome? And who did America piss off this time?
That’s when he realized he went right when he should have gone left with everyone else. Right was a wanton massacre. Dozens of people were bursting into the hallway from the next door conference hall. They were blood soaked and squawking, pushing and shoving and stumbling away from something inside the hall. The main attack?
This was where the first sounds of gunfire had emanated from.
More weapons-fire exploded through the walls, cutting through flesh as easy as if it were ripened fruit. This was why everyone was heading left. This was why he’d been foolish to have gone right.
Seeing the throng of survivors running right at him, his eyes flashed wide and all he could do was turn and brace himself for the imminent clash. He was quickly hammered by a force of bodies who didn’t care that he was standing, falling, being trampled upon, his face and beard stained with blood, his beaten body still reeling from the bomb blast he barely survived.
The screaming people started dropping, landing on him, pressing broken glass further into his arms, his side, his legs, his face. His instincts kicked in but it was too late. He was pinned to the floor, booted, stepped on, fallen upon.