It was that brief moment of uncertainty which saved my life.
A scream, shockingly loud even above the swell of the music, was followed by the noise of several balloons popping. Before I had a chance to clamber back into my seat, I was knocked onto my face, the breath slammed out of me, my cheek squashed against the floor. I tried to lift up a little to shift the heavy weight off my back, but I was pinned, my hipbone grinding against hard plastic and glass. If my camera was broken...
I swore under my breath, thinking firstly of my precious camera, then wondering what on earth had landed on me, and wishing the whatever-it-was would move, because until it did, I was kind of stuck. I was also finding it hard to catch my breath.
A faint flicker of panic fluttered at the edge of my mind, a guttering candle flame of unease.
More balloons popping, louder, closer. More screams. Yelling. Crying.
Voices, pleading. The thunder of feet, things falling, glass breaking.
Each noise seemed separate and distinct, and time slowed, although my thoughts raced, skittering and sliding, and my pulse throbbed in my temples. If I didn’t get this thing off me soon, I was going to pass out.
I took a tiny, shallow breath and pushed up again. The weight on top of me moved slightly. I tried to straighten my arms. My fingers felt as though they belonged to someone else. They tingled and throbbed as the blood flowed more freely, but it wasn’t enough. I was still trapped. Feeling a little panicky, I pushed my one arm ahead of me, sliding past my nose to reach out into the aisle with dead man’s fingers, vaguely feeling the unpleasant grimy stickiness of the plastic flooring under their tips as life seeped back into them.
An impact a few inches from my nose made me jump, and splinters of rubberised tile flew into my face. I froze, the pins and needles in my hand forgotten.
Abruptly, I knew what was happening.
‘No, no, no.’ The voice belonged to a woman nearby, maybe the lady in the seat behind mine. She sounded panicked, terrified, disbelieving—
Another shot, so loud it made me wince. Too close, far too close. I screwed my eyes shut, fighting my own panic. Then something heavy thudded against the back of the seat I’d just been sitting in, and a sharp tang of urine and the heavier stink of faeces assaulted my nose. It was followed by another chemical smell I couldn’t quite identify, and underneath it all was a strange animal scent. Was it fear?
My ears rang as if I’d been sitting next to a loudspeaker in a club, and my head buzzed. My fingers had lost nearly all feeling, my legs were going numb, and I fought the urge to scream. The shallow, frantic breaths I took were as much from terror as from the body lying on top of me, pinning me to the floor.
The body. I groaned, sick with dread and awful knowledge.
The man was warm, heavy, and inert. His blood was soaking into the flimsy fabric of my blouse, hotter than I would have imagined, and sticky, like melting tar on the edge of a sun-heated road. A trickle trailed its way down my ribs, in a hideous, slow tickle, a devil’s soft caress.
I needed to get out. I had to move. Now. Before my mind began to gibber, and my sanity fled.
Without thinking, I moaned, ‘No, no, no,’ then I closed my mouth abruptly when I realised what I was saying. The woman behind me had uttered those very same words, and I hadn’t heard her say anything since. I suspected she may never say anything else again.
Another scream was building, and I pushed it back down, like half-risen vomit. To me, it tasted the same, acrid and burning, and I knew it would fight its way out, sooner or later. I prayed it would be later; much, much later, and not when the shooter could hear me and make my final words echo those of the poor woman who’d been sitting behind me.
She’d been enjoying the music, clapping, maybe thinking about taking a taxi home, or having a late supper, or whether the kids were in bed, or—
I knew nothing about her. I hadn’t even seen her face. She could be in her twenties or fifties for all I knew; she could be married, out with her lover, or she could be watching the performance with a friend. Could have been, I amended, because for the woman who’d been sitting in the aisle seat on Row 26, nothing would be in the present tense ever again. She was too silent to still be alive.
Silent? I realised the screaming had stopped. Mostly.
So had the gunfire.
Sirens, faint but growing louder, replaced those popping balloons. The screams and terrified cries had become groans and moans. For a second, probably no more, although it felt like long, long minutes, everyone seemed to hold their collective breath, waiting for the next horror to shatter this false peace with piercing shards of hot, pitiless metal.
Then the world began to shriek its anguish and agony, and the cacophony reverberated around the auditorium, bouncing off the walls to crash into my head and fill me with horror.
It would haunt me in the hours, days, and weeks to come. I would hear balloons bursting and the cries of the injured, the shocked, and the grieving. It wouldn’t be the dead I would hear, for they were appallingly, thankfully, silent. The woman in the seat behind me, and the man slowly crushing the life out of me, were both totally and utterly quiet. I guessed there were many more silent people all around the theatre. I had a terrible feeling their quietness would echo louder than any visceral scream, in the deep, dark, depths of the nights to follow.
I wanted to add my own voice to the choir of the living, but I didn’t have enough air in my lungs. The inert weight on my back made certain of that.
I wiggled my almost-numb fingers, clawing at the smooth slope of the aisle floor, desperate for some purchase, any leverage to help me squeeze out from underneath this warm, motionless prison.
Voices, crying out, shouting; the words were indistinct but at least they were words and not just the screech and shout of the agonised and the terrified. Those few words were enough to keep my own horror locked in my chest – for the moment. There would be time enough to let it loose later. I hoped – if the shooting really had ended and I survived being crushed to death.
There was movement all around, heard and sensed, rather than saw; weeping, moaning, footsteps, things being moved and shifted, chair seats banging against their backs. But I was in my own bubble of stillness, and all I could do was wait for it to burst and hope it would be in time to save me from slow suffocation.
I hitched in another tiny breath, every exhalation making it increasingly more difficult to force my chest to rise for the next shallow intake.
How large was this man anyway? I tried to recall the guy who’d been sitting next to me, and failed. The only thing I could remember was a predominance of yellow, and his whispered criticism about everything, from the width of the seat to the lack of a lime slice in his glass of tequila. For a while, I’d been able to smell the alcohol on his breath. When the music had started, at least it had shut him up, and my closed eyes meant I didn’t have to see him; it had been as if he wasn’t there.
I felt his presence now all right.
Searing guilt overwhelmed me at the mean thought – the poor man would never complain again and here I was, bemoaning his attitude. I screwed my eyes shut as hard as I could to hold the tears inside.
As far as I remembered, the yellow man who’d been sitting on my left hadn’t been a particularly big guy. The woman who’d been sitting next to him had been though, I remembered, from the swift glance I’d had of her.
Some of the weight lifted and I whimpered with relief, taking a deeper breath with gratitude. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do.
A vibration from behind, the dull thud of a foot, and abruptly my unwelcome companion was no longer draped over my back. The yellow man was turned and lifted, and I heaved in a shuddering gasp of air.
‘Nope. He’s gone,’ a male voice said. The words were matter-of-fact, and I wondered how many people he’d checked for signs of life for him to sound so unmoved.
Without warning, the yellow man descended on me once again, and I scrambled to move b
ut my numb legs refused to work. I flopped weakly and let out a thin cry.
‘Wait! This one’s alive,’ the same voice called. The yellow man was lifted once more, and hands slid under my armpits to drag me clear.
‘Oh, God, look at her,’ someone else said, a woman this time. ‘So much blood.’ She sounded close to hysteria. I didn’t blame her – I was near to it, too.
‘Not mine,’ I muttered, as I was carefully deposited in the aisle and my blouse was gently tugged out of my trousers.
‘I can’t see an entry wound,’ the man who had noticed I was alive stated. ‘Turn her over. Gently,’ he added, as several hands grabbed at me.
I wanted to see, I needed to see, but I was frightened, so I kept my eyes tightly shut, gathering my courage to open them.
‘Can you hear me?’ The man spoke softly, but there was steel beneath the velvet voice. ‘I’m going to check you over. Is that okay?’
He didn’t wait for my consent, but proceeded to undo the buttons of my blouse, starting from the bottom. The fabric was heavy, sticky, and nastily cool, the yellow man’s blood having seeped and trickled over my ribs, soaking into the fabric.
My saviour patted me from my collar bone to the waistband of my trousers, his hands warm on my exposed skin. The air con was still working, I noticed absurdly, the chilled breeze raising goosebumps on my forearms.
‘She doesn’t appear to have been shot,’ he said, running his hands over the back of my head, my arms, my legs.
‘I could have told you that!’ Another man, this one middle-aged by the sound of him, cut-glass accent, unfazed. Self-important, used to being in charge?
‘Could you?’ The first man’s voice was quiet, flat. ‘Can you hear me?’ he asked, speaking to me again.
I nodded, a tiny movement.
‘I need to know where you’re injured.’ His hands had stopped roving over my body.
I risked a swift squint. His overwhelming colour was red. The colours of blood; scarlet, crimson, rust.
‘I’m not hurt,’ I croaked. ‘His blood, not mine.’
Scarlet man nodded once, as if I’d confirmed what he already knew. ‘Anything broken?’ he asked.
‘No.’ At least, I didn’t think so. My legs, my feet especially, were an exquisite agony of tiny, savage, stabbing needles, but I’d recover once fresh blood had saturated each oxygen-depleted cell.
I needed to sit up, not liking being prone and useless. Besides, I wanted to open my eyes, and I preferred to be able to do that when I had the option of keeping my gaze downcast.
My rescuer helped me sit, and I shuffled around until my back was against the side of the aisle I’d been sitting in. I stole a glance at the body which had been crushing me. Thankfully I couldn’t see his face, but I did see my camera strap, and I gave it a gentle tug. The camera came free without much resistance, and I sat with it on my lap, my head bowed as I cradled it.
I understood that only a few minutes had gone by from the firing of the first shots to the arrival of armed police and the paramedics, but it seemed like hours. I couldn’t have been trapped for more than five to ten minutes, and my rescuer had spent no more than a minute or two checking me for injuries, yet it seemed the terrible event had already lasted a lifetime.
For some people, it would... So many dead. So many injured. My heart lurched with the senselessness of it.
Unable to sit there any longer, I staggered to my feet, cradling my camera, and saw my bag and jacket on the floor. They’d been pulled clear of the yellow man’s body, and seeing the items gave me a tiny shred of comfort. I bent to retrieve them, keeping my gaze firmly on the floor, sensing people lurching and staggering around me as they headed for the exit.
When I finally found the courage to look at my saviour, to really look at him, scarlet man was nowhere in sight, and the only real colour of the evening was black, despite the fancy, glittering dresses, the ornate, gold columns, and the blood.
Some people had other colours swirling around them, brief flashes of muted, muddied shades, shock and horror darkening their auras to grey, black, and putrid brown. It would be a while before many of them recovered, and none of them would ever truly revert totally to their former hues. Everyone would carry a tint of this night in their souls.
Except for one man.
Of average height, slim, pale-faced, with dark, curly hair which was receding a little at the temples, he looked disengaged from the pandemonium around him. He was oddly expressionless, motionless, observant. I might have put it down to shock and let my gaze move on, but he stood out from the chaos for one reason and one reason alone, drawing my attention as surely as if he’d let off a siren. I stared at him, my mouth open, my eyes wide, drinking him in. I’d never seen anyone like him before.
The man had no aura.
Chapter 2
Crow
Crow narrowed his eyes. Fuck me, he thought, but this is as bad as it gets. He’d seen worse, a lot worse, but somehow the civility of his surroundings, the sheer middle-classness of the opera theatre and the gentility of the people in the audience, made it all the more horrific. Blood and violence were as out of place here as a ball gown would be in the middle of the desert. Ironic, really, considering the nature of this particular opera. He knew the sodding thing better than the performers.
It was also ironic to think that the atrocity happened tonight of all nights, just when he’d finally spotted Rochdale.
He scanned the fallen, the dead, and the soon-to-be-dead, hoping to see another poor soul he could give a modicum of help to before the medics arrived. The girl he’d just freed from underneath a pile of bodies had been one of the lucky ones. Not a scratch on her. She’d been traumatised though, which wasn’t surprising. Crow knew from experience that she’d be seeing flashes of the terrible scene for weeks, even months to come. On the particularly bad nights, he still saw that old Syrian woman and what had been done to her, and probably would continue to do so until the day he died.
‘Press here, hard,’ he said, dropping to his knees, grabbing the hand of a man with a hole in his stomach, blood oozing out of it. It was undoubtedly too late for the poor bloke, but Crow had to try. Maybe if he could stop the bleeding for long enough—? He glanced over the casualty, a swift assessing scan to check for injuries, and winced when he noticed the man’s arm was shredded from the elbow down. It was a wonder the guy had any blood left in him, and if someone didn’t get here soon...
Despite knowing the poor man’s death was inevitable, Crow undid his bow tie, tying it around the injured upper arm. He pushed the man’s other hand to one side and applied pressure to the stomach wound himself, while checking for a pulse. It was thready and weak, but at least it was there. For the moment.
The man’s eyelids fluttered.
‘Stay with me, mate,’ he urged. He knew if the blood loss didn’t kill the guy, the shock probably would, but Crow persevered regardless. What else was he supposed to do?
‘Over here,’ he called, spotting a high-viz jacket, and he relinquished his patient gladly when the medic reached him.
Straightening up, he searched the theatre again. The opera-crowd had thinned considerably, replaced by paramedics, police (both armed-response and normal coppers) and hard-eyed men in suits. He recognised the look. They’d certainly got here quickly.
There was nothing left for him to do. It was time to leave it to the experts. Besides, he had a reason for being here which had nothing to do with opera, and that reason had disappeared as soon as the shooting began.
Crow had spotted Rochdale in the stalls earlier, down and dirty with the humbler folk, sitting in an aisle seat like him, towards the front and to the right. The elderly man in the seat next to Crow had spent most of the evening’s performance quietly tutting at the fact that Crow was more interested in the audience than in the opera itself, but Crow had ignored the old fella. He’d only stopped gazing around him when he’d finally found what he was searching for.
About time. If he�
��d had to sit through another night like this, he might shoot himself.
And then someone had actually tried, although Crow now realised he hadn’t actually been the intended target as such, just one of many people in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He’d reacted quicker than anyone else, hitting the deck before the second bullet was fired. But then, he understood what was happening immediately; he’d recognised the sound of an MS-47 and his dive for the floor had been instinctive and instant. It was one of the reasons he’d come out of the attack unscathed.
He wondered if Rochdale had been so fortunate.
Crow looked down the auditorium towards the row where Rochdale had been sitting. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t there. A few lost souls mulled around, their faces waxy and grey, their expressions anguished, the trickle of medics having not quite reached the seats nearest the pit, although armed-response police strode among the victims, sending shockwaves of renewed fear through the living when they noticed the guns.
There was one man, though, who appeared unaffected, a rock in the middle of a sea of suffering. His stance was relaxed, his expression... was that amusement on his face?
Crow narrowed his eyes, seeing a hint of a smile twist those full lips.
It was Rochdale all right, and he was staring intently at something. No, not something, someone.
Crow craned his neck, standing on tiptoe, and his attention was caught by a woman drenched in blood, none of it hers; the woman he himself had rescued from near-suffocation.
His own blood ran cold and he bunched his hands into fists. He wanted to punch that supercilious, haughty look off Rochdale’s face, to smash those curling lips into his teeth and pummel him into oblivion. But not without Rochdale telling Crow where Meadow was first.
Crow watched as Rochdale indolently cocked his head at the girl, in some kind of acknowledgement.
He glanced at her. She was staring back at Rochdale so intently and with such naked incredulity on her face, that a flash of shock shot through Crow.
Rochdale continued to return her scrutiny for long, long seconds.
The Colour of Death Page 2