by Jeremy Bates
In her haste, however, she lost her balance and tumbled down the leeward side of the roof until it broke horizontally.
Charlotte felt herself falling through air and couldn’t fathom that she was about to die. When she struck the ground a couple seconds later, she couldn’t believe the fall had been so short. She also couldn’t believe she was alive. But then she realized she hadn’t fallen forty feet the ground, only ten or so, to the flat roof of the auditorium.
A moment later Luke landed beside her. She started kicking him with all her strength, shrieking at him to leave her alone. For a wild moment she thought she might overpower him when he backhanded her across the face, then clawed on top of her. Her cheek smarting, her eyes watering, she tried to crawl free, but he was too heavy. He wrapped his arms around her upper body and hissed in her ear, “It’s over, Char. It’s fucking over.”
Grunting, favoring one leg, he lurched to his feet, lifting her with him, and carried her toward the edge of the roof.
She twisted and squirmed, but he was impossibly strong. “Luke! Don’t!”
“Where did the dickhead go?” he rasped.
“Luke! Please! Don’t do this! I can help you! I’ll get you the best doctors!”
“Too late for that now, Char.”
They passed a bank of air conditioners and were less than ten feet from the edge of the roof.
Charlotte kept twisting and kicking futilely and felt something hard press into the small of her back.
The gun!
She slipped her hand behind her, fit it over the gun’s cold metal grip, and pulled the trigger. The gunshot was deafening. Luke cried out and released her. She stumbled away, still gripping the gun.
Doubled over, holding either his groin or his inner thigh, he lurched toward her, a monster that wouldn’t die.
Screaming, Charlotte pulled the trigger over and over and over, and she kept pulling it even when the gun had ceased firing bullets and Luke was lying on his chest, unmoving, bleeding out.
Epilogue
It was December 13, the last day of finals before the Christmas break. Charlotte was walking home from the university along North Lexington, her head down against the icy mountain wind.
She’d spotted the guy following her two blocks back, when she randomly glanced over her shoulder, something she’d been doing a lot lately.
She’d crossed the street. He’d crossed it too.
Now she came to a red traffic light at Walnut Street. She glanced over her shoulder again.
He was twenty feet back.
It wasn’t Luke, of course. Luke was dead. It wasn’t a nameless stalker either. It was just some guy walking home from the university, who’d happened to cross the street shortly after she did.
Nevertheless, it was easier to tell herself this than believe it.
He stopped next to her. He wore an olive bomber jacket and a knit hat. His eyes were a frosty blue, his cheeks red from the cold.
“Charlotte, right?” he said, grinning crookedly at her. “I’m in your marketing class.”
“Hi,” she said. The light changed to green. She began walking.
He kept pace beside her. “I’m Bill.”
She smiled.
“I, uh, I know about what happened,” he said. “You know, a couple months ago. Well, everyone does, right? But I’m sorry. That’s sucks, you know. That guy…”
“I don’t like talking about it.”
“Yeah, I know, of course. So, you live up this way?”
“No,” she said, which was true. She’d already passed the turnoff to her house a ways back.
“So where you going?”
She pointed to the Lexington Avenue Brewery a little ways ahead.
“The LAB?”
“Yup.”
“Good beer there.”
“It’s a brewery.”
“You, uh, meeting someone?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Ah, okay,” he said awkwardly. “Well, see you in class, right?”
He cut across Lexington while she continued to the brewery. Inside, she didn’t see Tony anywhere and sat by herself at a two-person table.
She checked her phone. Tony hadn’t messaged her. She turned the phone over in her hands a couple times distractedly. She hadn’t planned on getting a drink, but now she waved the waitress over and ordered a margarita.
She frowned to herself. She’d been doing pretty good today not thinking about Luke and Charleston. Now, thanks to Bill, it was all fresh in her mind’s eye.
Fourteen people had died at the Dock Street Theater. The massacre made headlines all over the country, but what gave the story legs and kept it in circulation to this day was Luke himself, and the slow fuse that led to the powder keg, namely his mental health. This was due in part to the suicide note found in his pocket, which had been addressed to his commanding officer, the medical examiner who’d failed to diagnose his PTSD, and “all you other shitheads (you know who you are).” The message was short, only six words: “You break it, you fix it.”
Inevitably questions were raised. Why had someone as psychologically traumatized as Luke been released back into the public? Had he been purposely misdiagnosed? If so, were such misdiagnoses standard practice? Was there a massive cover up going on, a way for a cash-strapped military to save billions of dollars in disability pay?
It’s been a PR nightmare for the Pentagon, and a number of top military hawks had been forced to resign, including the head of the Department of Veteran Affairs.
Currently there was an ongoing Congressional investigation into the matter.
Gooseflesh marbled Charlotte’s skin as she pictured Luke in his coffin six-feet underground, a big dead grin on his face.
The front door to the bar opened and Tony entered. She waved him over.
“Hey,” he said, kissing her on the cheek with ice cube lips. “Feels like the end of days out there.”
The waitress delivered her margarita, and he ordered a pint of beer.
“Any media requests today?” he said, and she knew he was only half joking.
“Just some guy in my marketing class telling me about how what happened in Charleston sucked.”
“Sucked?”
“His word.”
“You need a disguise. Maybe those glasses with the mustache attached.”
Charlotte felt an abrupt burst of affection toward Tony. Although he had lost Ben and Amy and Jenny, he had been a rock these past couple months, and she didn’t know what she would have done had she lost him—and she almost had. An MRI scan revealed that Luke’s bullet had skated the base of Tony’s temporal fossa, a shallow depression along the side of the skull, and a neurosurgeon needed to perform a procedure called debridement to remove the bullet, bone fragments, and scalp tissue. That Tony didn’t end up blind, paralyzed, or a vegetable was a miracle. If fact, his only observable side effects were a skewed sense of balance for a couple days and a small scar.
“Listen, Tony,” she said, taking his hand. “I think I need to get out of here.”
“Sure,” he said. “We can go to my place, watch a movie.”
“I mean Asheville.”
He stared at her, surprised.
She said, “It’s too close to Charleston, too many memories.”
“Where would you go? Back to New York?”
“No, I’m done with winters. I’m thinking maybe LA.”
“What about your degree?”
“I’ll finish it at UCLA or somewhere.”
“Oh,” he said, and he looked devastated.
She squeezed his hand. “I don’t mean just me, Tony. Us. I want you to come with me.”
He brightened, but seemed far from enthusiastic. “I don’t know how easy all that will be, Char. I have student loans and—”
“I have money.”
He frowned. “You have money?”
She nodded.
“Did you just knock over a bank?”
“My parents were well of
f,” she told him. “My dad owned some factories in China. They left me a trust fund in their will. I received it last year when I turned twenty-one.”
“What kind of trust fund?”
“One with a lot of money in it.”
“How much?”
“Enough,” she said simply.
He looked skeptical. “You use coupons at the supermarket, Char.”
“My grandparents were thrifty. It’s how they raised me.”
Tony sat back. “So if you have this big trust fund,” he said, apparently still not convinced she wasn’t having him on, “why the hell are you doing a degree in hospitality management?”
“You don’t remember, do you?”
“Remember what?”
“I told you I’m going to open my own restaurant.” Grinning, she produced from her handbag a real estate listing of a Sunset Boulevard restaurant she’d printed off the internet. “I’ve been talking to the agent, and I’m thinking of submitting an offer. I’ll hire someone to run it while we finish our degrees and get the hang of the whole management side of things. So—what do you think?”
Tony shook his head silently for a few seconds, then said, “Wow, Char, I mean, Christ. Wow.”
“Wow in a good way?”
His grin matched hers. “In the best way. Only thing is,” he added, “you got to change the joint’s name. I mean, Sunset Pizzeria and Pasta? It sounds like a retirement village.”
“I’ll leave that to you then—something with an Italian feel.”
“I got one already.” He paused dramatically. “Tony’s Pizza.”
“Heck no,” she said, laughing.
“Charlotte’s Pies?”
She groaned. “That’s not even Italian. Maybe we’ll stick with Sunset Pizzeria and Pasta after all.”
“You’re the boss, Char,” he said, leaning across the table to kiss her on the lips. “Whatever you want.”
#
Standing at the bathroom urinal Tony shook, zipped, then went to the sink. While washing his hands he caught his reflection in the mirror and gasped. His skin was gray and peeling. His eyes were bloodshot and sightless. Clumps of his hair were missing in places. Where the bullet had struck him in the left side of the head, and where there should only have been a small scar, was a hole oozing blood and maggots.
Tony closed his eyes, counted to three, and opened them again.
His regular reflection, albeit scared white, stared back.
“Goddamn,” he mumbled. He bent over the basin, cupped cold water into his hands, and splashed his face repeatedly.
He’d been having hallucinations ever since he’d been released from the hospital in Charleston. They were usually like this most recent one, a ghastly image of him dead and rotting, but sometimes they were of Charlotte in an equal state of decay, or Ben, or Jenny, or Amy.
He’d been having nightmares too, bad ones. They always involved Luke coming after Charlotte and himself—and sometimes his parents in Florida—and they would always end with Luke killing everyone and Tony jerking awake a moment before he was killed too.
Nevertheless, the hallucinations and nightmares he could deal with. It was the anxiety that was eating him alive. It churned in his gut nonstop, from the moment he woke in the morning to the moment he went to sleep at night.
He’d seen a doctor a few weeks back, who’d prescribed him Zoloft. That was doing jack all. Booze, it turned out, worked better. Tony wasn’t getting shit-faced every day, but he’d begun taking nips from a flask morning, noon, and night.
Charlotte didn’t know about any of this. He hadn’t told her, and he wasn’t planning to. She had her own demons to deal with.
Besides, he thought, turning off the tap and taking a deep breath, we’re going to LA. It’s a new environment, a fresh start. I’m not Luke. I’ll get better.
Tony dried his hands and face with paper towel and returned to the table, giving Charlotte a carefree smile as he sat down across from her. Then he waved over the waiter to order something stronger than a beer.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Thank you for taking the time to read Run. If you enjoyed the story, it would be wonderful if you could leave a review on Amazon. Reviews might not matter much to the big-name authors, but they can really help the small guys to grow their readership.
Also, check out www.jeremybatesbooks.com for info on my other novels, including The Catacombs, which was released in February, 2015.
Here’s the blurb:
Paris, France, is known as the City of Lights, a metropolis renowned for romance and beauty. Beneath the bustling streets and cafés, however, exists The Catacombs, a labyrinth of crumbling tunnels filled with six million dead.
When a video camera containing mysterious footage is discovered deep within their depths, a group of friends venture into the tunnels to investigate. But what starts out as a lighthearted adventure takes a turn for the worse when they reach their destination—and stumble upon the evil lurking there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeremy Bates is the author of the number #1 Amazon bestseller White Lies, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Foreword Book of the Year Award. He is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario with a degree in English literature and philosophy.
For a limited time, visit www.jeremybatesbooks.com to receive a free copy of The Taste of Fear.