Joe

by H. D. Gordon

  But she didn’t have time for a relationship right now, and there was that whole jaded-by-the-world thing. She almost laughed at this thought. Cry me a river and break out the violins. And just when she was about to spill one of her excuses and turn Russ down, a feeling struck her. It was a tiny, almost unnoticeable feeling that seemed to do one lap around the base of her stomach and then disappear from existence, leaving only the ghost of its purpose behind. Mina knew what it was, what it meant. It had saved her hide on a few memorable occasions, taught her a lesson or two, and unlike most of us, she had learned how to acknowledge and trust it. It was a simple, powerful thing, a borderline gift that we, as civilized human beings, do our best to brush off and ignore, usually to our own peril. We don’t want to cause a scene, oh Lord, no, not a scene. We don’t want to seem panicked, overreacted, and definitely not, absolutely not, paranoid. What would others say? What if we pissed them off? That small feeling that sweeps stealthily through your gut doesn’t mean a thing. It’s an irrational effect of emotions. Intuition.

  Mina put her faith in it wholly. She hadn’t always taken notice of it so carefully. She’d had to learn things the hard way first, but Mina was a fast study, and her interest in this disregarded gift had intensified after she’d had children. And it had been a damn good thing it had, because there had been a few times that following her intuition had saved her from bad happenings, real bad happenings.

  So while her head screamed at her to reject Russ’s offer, her gut whispered that that would not be the best idea. Somehow Russ was important. Somehow, though the path that paralleled his appeared to slant uphill–and it scared her because she had been left high and dry in the past–she knew that it was one she should follow at the moment. She may not end up marrying Russ and growing old with him. He may even break her heart. Hell, she may only see him for a few weeks and then break it off herself. But somehow she knew that he was going to save her from even worse heartache by just having been a portion, no matter how large, of her life. And I always trust my intuition, because that bitch knows what she’s talking about.

  “That sounds like fun,” she said, and gave a genuine smile.

  Russ grinned. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll pick y’all up at ten an’ we can ride out there. Sound good?”

  “Sounds good.”

  More students were filing out of the four buildings now, clogging up the walkways and taking spots on the lawn and zipping by on skateboards and bicycles. Mina looked down and checked her watch. “Oh, it’s noon,” she said. She turned to Russ. “I gotta go. Davis has a dentist appointment at one all the way out in Blue Springs. Do you have my number?”

  Russ shook his head. “Nope.”

  She pulled a piece of scrap paper and a pencil from her bag and wrote it down. She handed it to him. “Um, I guess I’ll see you on Saturday, then,” she said.

  Her cheeks heated up again. She was out of practice in the dating world, and Russ would definitely be the best-looking man she had ever dated. He was built well, handsome in a masculine way, short spoken. He was the type of man who knew better how to listen and think than to talk and sound foolish. She was beautiful, yes, but he was too, and he made her nervous.

  “Most certainly,” he replied, wrapping his strong arms around her in a sweet hug. He smiled down at her. “You go on and get your boy to the dentist before you lose him in this crowd.”

  He released her, and she waved Davis over to join her. There was a huge grin on his face.

  “That was awesome, Mom,” Davis said as they were walking back to the parking garage to Mina’s car.

  She wrapped an arm around his shoulder and gave him a little squeeze, suddenly realizing that she felt good. She felt good and happy. She felt like everything was going to be okay. It had been a long time since she’d felt this way; she couldn’t remember the last. “I’m glad, honey. I’m glad you liked it.”

  Davis was still beaming. “What’s not to like?” he asked. “There’s so many people and everyone gets along and everyone is friendly. I didn’t realize college was so big. I mean, there’s got to be five hundred people in the Quad right now.”

  Mina smiled at his use of the name Quad. This is what he wants, she thought. He wants to feel like a big boy. No, he wants to feel like a man. “I was really proud of you today, Davey,” she said. “You behaved like a grownup. Thank you.”

  Davey had behaved well, but he was wrong about one little thing. There were not five hundred students passing through the Quad at this particular time of the day, there were fifteen hundred. And this was only Friday. On Mondays, the average number of people in the Quad doubles at this time.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Joe

  Christ, there are a lot of people here.

  I was sitting on a bench that was half-shaded by a maple tree, my sketch of the impending disaster tucked firmly under the flap of my notebook, folded in half. I couldn’t risk someone walking by and seeing it, and though it would have been nice to take out the drawing and hold it up to the scene in front of me, I didn’t really need to. I’d stayed up until four in the morning last night staring at the picture I’d drawn, trying to concoct some sort of ingenious, James-Bond-type plan, and succeeding in only losing sleep and staring at a horrible possibility. Nice work, Joey, ole girl.

  It was noonday, and the sun overhead was strong but gentle. The wide circles of shade that the old oaks and maples threw across the soft green lawn made for perfect resting places. The temperature was just right there, surrounded by the heat of the day counteracted by the cool place that lives under the hoods of all trees. The sound that filled the place was of bird callings and human interactions. I sighed as I stared out at them all. There were just so many. Too many

  (sitting ducks)

  people here. This was where it was going to happen. My drawing had at least shown me that. The Quad, its four buildings to the north, east, south and west, was always stunning to see, but it occurred to me now that the architect that had thought this place up had made the perfect box with sturdy buildings as its sides, the hard earth as its bottom, and the endless sky as its lid. And boxes were meant to store

  (bodies)

  things, to keep things in. I felt the moisture round up in my eyes as I stared out at all of them. What would happen when the shooting started? What would these poor, unsuspecting people do when those first shots rang out across the Quad? I thought I knew. The blasts would rebound off of the stone buildings, bouncing up and down on their eardrums, and they would flinch right before the horror dawned on them. And then they would run, and they would scream, they would clog up the narrow walkways that led between the buildings, they would run into the buildings and bar the doors, and some of them wouldn’t make it. If my premonition had its play, a lot of them wouldn’t make it. Why? Because there were too many damn people put in one fairly large box. Yeah, dude, let’s go check out the Quad. Hey, meet me at the Quad. Where you at? The Quad. Hi-ho. Hi-ho.

  Unless I could find a way to stop it.

  But, can I? Haven’t done much good in the past. Can I?

  I wiped my watery eyes. My thoughts were just too awful and depressing. And yes, I was scared. I let my hair fall over my face for a moment, not that anyone was paying attention to me.

  A chill ran up my spine as a thought occurred to me: the killer could very well be here now. Watching. At this very moment he could be sitting somewhere amongst the people, the prey, as I was sitting here watching them. There had to be over a thousand students passing through the Quad at this particular moment, and I felt like a shepherd that senses a wolf creeping over the hill, a shepherd with no means of defending the flock. I rubbed my arms; goose bumps had hatched there.

  The image of my grim sketch flashed in front of my eyes and I had to shut them, blink hard and take a deep breath. The problem was that although I had memorized the scene in my drawing down to the pencil strokes, the only thing I could focus on, the only thing I kept seeing and remembering, was all of the bo
dies. All of the bodies, and all of the blood.

  And that shadowed figure.

  Yes, that shadowed figure. My adversary. I let out a humorless laugh. Thank you foresight, for painting that problem so clearly. From the drawing I couldn’t even be entirely sure if the shooter was a male or a female with a hood and loose clothes. I didn’t have anything to narrow down the candidates. So I sat and sat under the tree for almost two hours waiting to pick something up, waiting for my Sherlock muse to make an appearance. It didn’t show up.

  I would have to come back when no one was around so I could hold up my sketch and wander around with it open in my hand. I had some studying to do, too. Just a little research on what I was up against. One of the only good pieces of advice that my mother ever gave me was know thy enemy, and if I was going to keep drawing blanks at the pre-scene of the crime, I might as well go home and study the case. There was a lot of disturbing reading ahead of me this evening, but it beat sitting here. I was going to burst into tears or throw up or something if I didn’t get out of the Quad. And I would figure something out. I would just have to.

  Because if I didn’t. If I didn’t dig deep down in my thinker and pull the magic stop-the-shit-from-happening key out of it, God, or Whoever is in charge, would dangle the solution in front of me, as clear and cold as first light on a winter morning. The winter morning after the fire was gone. And there’s nothing cold as ashes…

  I stood up, shrugged my backpack over my shoulders and double-checked that my sketch was still neatly folded in my notebook. I would go home and study, and maybe, just maybe, find that key and lock the door good and tight against disaster. The biggest question on my non-hero mind was whether or not I would get out of the building on time before the door trapped me on the inside, where the key would do me no good.

  What’s that old saying?

  God takes care of drunks and fools.

  Well, I certainly had the latter going for me.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The Decider

  It was foolish of him to have stayed up so late the night before. Once he had finally fallen asleep–he figured it must have been sometime around four-thirty in the morning–he had had a terrible dream about a raven. In the dream–or he supposed nightmare would have been a more appropriate word–he was standing in the area known as the Quad on the main campus of UMMS, the place he was currently. But unlike now, there had been no people around. Not a single person. The birds that frequented the area had been absent as well, as if they all had gotten their internal migration clocks messed up and decided to take wing at once. Except for the raven, Danny had been utterly alone in this dream-Quad. Alone and surrounded by such silence that only could be experienced in a dead world.

  The raven sat watching him from atop the statue of a giant jaguar, the school’s mascot and the proud centerpiece of the Quad. Underneath the bird’s yellow claws the jaguar glistened silver in the sun’s light, gleaming and fierce, its head bent low between its shoulder blades and its deadly metal teeth flashing behind its eternally pulled-back lips. Whoever had built the statue had taken time with his task. Every detail was visible (at least in his dream, but as Danny sat looking at it now–awake–he saw that his dream had been oddly accurate). The muscles in the jaguar’s back were as well defined as a Roman god’s abdomen. The whiskers on its face were fine and delicate. There was even a gleam in its eyes. Danny wasn’t sure how he knew it, or how the artist had accomplished it, but there was a certain…trait that was captured in the jaguar’s eyes. It was one Danny knew well and had come to respect. It was the look of a true predator, an indifferent killer.

  He just didn’t like it so much when it was directed at him.

  That hadn’t bothered him so much. That part, the jaguar statue directing its frozen fury at Daniel, hadn’t been the part of the dream that had unsettled Danny’s mind since he woke from it at seven o’clock this morning. It had been that raven perched on the jaguar’s head. He couldn’t seem to rationalize it–it was just a senseless dream–but that fucking raven had freaked him out a little bit.

  He’d had dreams in the past that had left him a little shaken. Everyone has those dreams, he assured himself, over and over. But this one had been different somehow, more…real. Too fucking real, if you asked him, and it didn’t help that he could remember the details so clearly. Especially that disgusting raven.

  The bird was large, more the size of an eagle than a raven. Its feathers were such a deep black, so shiny and deep, that if you looked close enough into them Danny figured you might be able to see your own reflection. Its beak was sharp and curved and black. It’s eyes round and sharp and black and…something else, too. In the dream, Danny couldn’t help approaching the raven, even though he was admittedly frightened of it, unable to stop his curiosity about what else he thought he’d glimpsed in the bird’s beady eyes. His feet trudged forward nonetheless, the soles of his sneakers making a scuff-scuff noise as they slid across the concrete. Scuff- scuff. Scuff-scuff. And silence. Not even a breeze. Just deep, dead silence.

  And it had been looking at him. Yes, that’s the part he remembered so hideously clearly. That freaky fuck of a raven had been looking at him.

  This morning, in the cold, soft light of the new day, sitting in his tiny apartment kitchen, clutching a mug of steaming coffee between his numb hands, staring blankly at the clean white wall above his stove, Danny had tried to convince himself that no, no, even though it was dream, no, the raven had not been looking at him.

  He could almost convince himself that that was true, but he could not deny the worst part of the nightmare—to call a spade a spade—though Danny kept referring to it as a dream. The worst part of it had been when dream-Danny had stopped walking—the world becoming silent without the scuff-scuff of his shuffling shoes because he had reached the base of the great jaguar statue that was elevated on a stone platform. The platform stood as high as Danny’s head. He looked up. The jaguar stood atop that stone perch, and the raven at perch on its head, staring down at him. Both of them. One hunter and one scavenger, Danny thought, quite the team.

  Then the raven’s head titled down at him in the abrupt way that birds have, just a half-snap, half-jerk, and one of its black eyes had settled on him. It seemed to be smiling at him, as if uncaring of the fact that beaks did not hold the ability of lips to move and mold. And, Danny felt a hateful, ugly fear settle over him then.

  Even in his dream, and even though he was scared–Had the panther’s tail been positioned that low just a moment ago?–he puffed out his chest in defiance. A scavenger and a hunter, eh? Well, fuck you.

  “Do you know who I am, you numb-fuck bird?” he’d asked it. “I’m the goddam Decider!”

  And at this, the raven’s beak-smile had grown. A grin. That stupid, mindless, fucking raven had grinned at him, as if to say, I know something you don’t know!

  Real fear, then. Danny, who used most of his mojo to concentrate on his hatred, had felt his emotional needle swing from the hot-red hate, deep into the ugly black of fear.

  Warmth and wetness had spread down his legs, seemingly streams of it that moved swiftly from his thighs down to his shins. And then he’d screamed, “I’m the Decider! You don’t know shit! You hear me you fucking ugly bird? I DECIDE!”

  That was when he’d come awake, sitting bolt upright on his twin bed, his hands clenched at his temples into hard fists. Salty sweat rolled down to his jawline. When he’d ripped off his covers, he had discovered that he’d pissed his bed.

  His heartbeat slowed eventually; soon the fact that it had only been a dream had worked its way into his disturbed mind. He’d climbed out of bed and tossed his sheets and his nightclothes into the washer, holding them away from his body in angry disgust.

  Just a dream, he told himself, a wet dream. And this made him laugh hard, until his eyes were watering and his breath ran out. And then he had sat at his kitchen table, both hands wrapped too tightly around a steaming cup of joe, until it had been ti
me to leave for school.

  Now, it was noonday, and he was once again in the Quad—for real this time—on a bench drenched in an old oak’s shadows. The statue of the jaguar stood on its stone platform twenty feet directly in front of him, silently growling down at anyone who passed by. And a lot of people were passing by. Danny sat there unnoticed by all of them, staring intently at the jaguar’s shiny metal head, as if the raven from his dream would swoop down at any minute and land there. And grin.

  After a while—while the thought was striking a raven-haired girl named Joe that the person of interest might be in the Quad at this very moment—Danny turned his attention back to the people going about their day. He watched them as a—jaguar?—might watch his unsuspecting prey from the shadows of the jungle.

  Would you just look at all these worthless fools, he thought. They have no idea. They don’t know shit.

  So, why then had the bird been grinning at him, taunting him?

  I know something you don’t know.

  Because it was just a dream, that’s why.