Marathon

by Brian Freeman

  “You can’t stop now!” someone said, and he realized it was his own voice. He’d come too far to quit now. He staggered to his feet and took another step toward the end of the race.

  He was almost there.

  Almost there.

  It was 12:32 p.m.

  @runnerbae81 tweeted:

  Oh, shit.

  @edbrown_cpa tweeted:

  Saw it on the finish line feed. OMG.

  @mrrdevlin tweeted:

  Something happened at the Duluth Marathon a few seconds ago. Anybody got details?

  @talkischeap_mn tweeted:

  Got this screenshot before the feed went down. Bad.

  126 people retweeted @talkischeap_mn

  @sallybrl tweeted:

  Bomb.

  @luvicecaves tweeted:

  My sister lives up there. She says bomb.

  @duluthnative55 tweeted:

  Sirens going crazy. #marathon

  @shirleyctate tweeted:

  Still nothing on the news? WTF?

  #marathon

  @mndude_msp retweeted The Associated Press:

  Explosive device detonated near finish line of the Duluth Marathon. Multiple injuries reported. Details to follow.

  @kimberlyandjohn_fl tweeted:

  Prayers.

  #marathon

  @asweetsole tweeted:

  Anyone killed? Prayers.

  #marathon

  @duluthcity tweeted:

  All residents/visitors asked to remain indoors and away from Canal Park to allow access for emergency responders.

  @zenithcityguy tweeted:

  Runner friend was picking up her sweat bag when it went off. She thinks several dead. #marathon

  @marythechurchlady tweeted:

  Lord, when will this madness stop?

  #marathon

  #prayers

  @peteclay_noex tweeted:

  Now we get to hear “Don’t leap to conclusions” for a week. Yeah, right.

  #marathon

  #islamismurder

  84 people favorited @peteclay_noex

  @dawnbasch tweeted:

  Tragedy is no time for political correctness. We all know what this is and who did this.

  #marathon

  #terrorism

  #islamismurder

  #noexceptions

  1604 people retweeted @dawnbasch

  3

  Stride sprinted down Lake Avenue against a wave of hundreds of people pushing back in the opposite direction. As he headed toward the clock tower at the threshold of Canal Park, smoke grew like a giant spider against the dark sky. The stench of sulfur hung in the air. Emergency chatter exploded over the radio. He heard shouts for triage and trauma units at the finish line.

  Multiple victims down.

  “Everybody out! Everybody out! Clear the area!”

  Parents carried children on their backs. Runners pushed seniors in wheelchairs. Some of the crowd headed east toward the lakeshore, some toward the convention center to the west, some toward the streets downtown. A few gawkers lingered, taking photos and video. Stride jerked a hand toward the nearest officers to herd those stragglers away. Where there was one bomb, there could be two. Or more.

  Glass crunched under his shoes as he ran the last block, the way thousands of runners had already done today. The entire street was a field of glass. Ahead of him, people tore at the metal barricades lining the street and heaved them into a pile to clear space for the victims. Fallen balloon arches draped across the pavement like multicolored snakes. All the joy of the day had popped like the balloons and morphed into fear.

  Stride stopped where it had happened. The blast site. He was outside the Duluth Outdoor Company shop, yards from the finish line. He looked down. The mottled cobblestones were soaked with blood that the light rain couldn’t wash away. Bricks had been torn up and scattered. He saw severed body parts and torn flesh. Dozens of victims lay on the street and sidewalk, some with clean white bones protruding from their limbs. He counted five people who appeared to be fatalities. Others, the lucky ones, sat against the walls of the shops, their faces cut, their clothes shredded, their legs bleeding.

  He didn’t have time for emotion, but he couldn’t completely swallow down his anger and sadness. The marathon was a day of oneness for everyone in Duluth, and to have it violated like this made him furious to his core.

  Overlapping sirens wailed, drawing closer from the downtown hospitals. Everyone had trained for the worst-case scenario, and with the worst case in front of them, the emergency responders went about their business with dead-serious determination. Police. Marathon workers and volunteers. Firefighters. EMTs who’d been on hand to treat exhausted runners but now were pressed into service as battlefield medics.

  Stride grabbed one of his men by the shoulder. The man’s face was dotted like a constellation with pinpoint shrapnel wounds.

  “Are you all right? Get yourself bandaged up.”

  “I’m fine, sir. Others are worse.”

  “Where were you when it went off?” Stride asked.

  “Across the street on the hotel side. The force knocked me to the ground.”

  “Suicide bomber?”

  “I don’t know, sir. With the rain, so many people had bulky coats and slickers. Somebody could have been hiding something, but we didn’t get any warning from the dogs.”

  “Okay. Have someone tend to your face.”

  “I will.”

  Stride added, “Have you seen Serena? My wife?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I haven’t.”

  Stride’s eyes swept the street. The shop windows for half a block were shattered, and the dark interior of the Duluth Outdoor Company revealed a smoking ruin. Across the street, all the windows in the nearest hotel had been blown out, and he grabbed an EMT to make sure emergency personnel were going door to door inside to check for guests in need of medical attention. He was sure people had been standing at those windows when the bomb went off.

  The trees on the street had been sheared of leaves and stripped of bark. They looked naked. Most of the nearby cars in the hotel parking lot had been damaged by the impact of the blast. Car alarms blared through the still air, like wailing puppies who’d been left alone. Six feet away from him, Stride saw an EMT crouched over a tattooed blonde in the street. The woman wasn’t moving; her blue eyes were fixed. The EMT looked up at Stride, and the man shook his head.

  Dead.

  Not far away, another woman awakened from the blast and screamed as the pain caught up to her brain. Her legs were a mess of blood, bone, and tissue. Stride felt a wave of anger again, hard and deep.

  He heard Maggie on the radio over his headset.

  “We’re evacuating the entire route,” she told him, “but nearly everyone bolted as word spread through the crowd. Buses are en route to pick up the runners. I’ve got people driving the course to make sure we don’t have any other devices left behind.”

  “Make sure the schools and the mall are cleared before we take runners inside,” Stride told her. “I don’t want anyone walking into a trap.”

  “On it. How bad is the situation there?”

  “We’ve got dead and injured on the ground. Trauma teams are on the way.”

  “You need me down there?”

  “Not yet. Secure the rest of the route.”

  “Okay. Have you found Serena and Cat? Are they safe?”

  “I’m still looking.”

  He grabbed his phone and dialed Serena’s number, but the call failed. He tried again with Cat’s number and got the same result. Bad news traveled instantly on social media; cellular bandwidth was already overloaded in the wake of the explosion. Across the country, thousands of people were dialing friends and family in Minnesota. Across Duluth, nearly everyone was calling everyone else.

  Stride pocketed his phone. He stepped out among the dead and dying, most of whom were in a semicircle outside the Duluth Outdoor Company shop. Nails and ball bearings littered the street, along with p
opcorn fragments of glass. The silver thermal blankets that typically kept runners warm after the marathon now covered the victims. He checked each face, afraid that he would recognize one of them, but he didn’t see his wife or the girl he loved like a daughter among the injured.

  Then he saw a man lying on his back on the street, away from the immediate blast zone. A female marathon runner bent over to tend to him. The man’s eyes opened; his limbs moved; he was alive. As Stride watched, the runner who was helping the man stood up and flagged an emergency medical worker for assistance.

  When the runner turned toward him, Stride saw her face.

  It was Serena.

  * * *

  Wade Ralston opened his eyes. He stared up at a gray sky, and individual raindrops streaked toward his face. The world was absolutely silent. No voices. No wind. No waves on the lake. He opened his dry mouth to speak—“Where am I?”—but he didn’t know if he’d said anything at all. He didn’t hear anything except a hollow rushing sound, as if he were holding a seashell up to his ear.

  He blinked and shook his head.

  Then, with a roar, noise rushed back. His hearing returned, overwhelming him with its shattering volume. Men and women shouted. Sirens screamed. Footsteps ran. He squirmed, trying to get up, but his brain spun, and he sank back in confusion. Everything was a blank; nothing made sense. He had no memory. He remembered only the coolness of a lake breeze and the deep green of the trees and the sound of his breathing, and then—

  Nothing.

  “What happened?” he asked aloud.

  Wade heard his voice, but it sounded far away.

  “Don’t try to move,” someone said.

  A woman knelt over him. He tried to get up again, but her hands pressed his shoulders back onto a hard, uncomfortable surface. He stared at her, not understanding. She was a stranger, but she could have been an angel. Her black hair was tied behind her head, emphasizing the angles of her face. She wasn’t young, but she looked ageless. Her warm eyes were as green as emeralds, and her lips were pale. She was statuesque, with tanned, muscular arms and legs. A medal dangled from her neck.

  A runner’s medal.

  He remembered now: the marathon.

  He remembered everything. The miles from Two Harbors. The pain and exhaustion. The finish line, so close. Joni, Travis, Shelly, all cheering for him. Then time stopped.

  “Where am I?” he murmured.

  The angel spoke. “We’re in Canal Park. Don’t worry, you’ll be okay. We’ll get you to a hospital very soon. Just lie still.”

  She stood up. From the ground, Wade saw that she was tall. Her legs were sleek, but on her calves, which were near his face, he saw scars. He watched her gesture to someone, and moments later, a medic knelt at his side. He was dressed in an orange T-shirt, with an orange baseball cap, and he draped a thermal blanket over Wade’s body. The medic studied his eyes.

  “Are you in pain, sir?”

  “I don’t know,” Wade said. “I’m not feeling anything.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  Wade saw two fingers, and he said so.

  “That’s good. Try not to move. There’s blood behind your head. You may have banged it when the blast knocked you over. You have shrapnel wounds, too.”

  “Blast?”

  “Somebody set off a bomb,” the man told him.

  Wade said the first thing that came into his brain, along with the image of his wife. “Where’s Joni? Is she okay?”

  * * *

  Stride and Serena crossed the distance between them and embraced on the street. He held her tightly, and relief poured from both of them. He’d already dealt with the death of his first wife, Cindy, nine years earlier, but when the bomb went off, he’d felt a wave of certainty that Serena was dead, too. He’d felt darkness stalking him like a serial killer.

  But the darkness hadn’t come for him. Not this time.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.” Serena knew how to read his mind, and she could guess what he’d been thinking. “Really, Jonny, I wasn’t even there. I was in the runner recovery area when it went off.”

  “I was afraid that you—”

  “I know. I was worried about you, too.”

  He held her again, but they didn’t have time to say anything else. The clock was already ticking on the investigation. Once the victims were transported to St. Mary’s and St. Luke’s, he and his team needed to secure the crime scene for the FBI. Rain was now washing away evidence. As cops liked to say, blood got cold fast.

  He knew this would be a federal investigation. Any hint of terrorism moved the case up the food chain and out of the hands of the locals. In another hour, maybe two, Stride and his team would be playing supporting roles. The FBI would be in charge.

  “Where’s Cat?” Serena asked. “Did you send her over to Maggie’s place to wait for us?”

  Stride stared at Serena. The chill of fear returned to his body. So did the anticipation of loss.

  “I thought she was with you. Weren’t the two of you together?”

  “No, I never saw her. I told you, I was still in the recovery area after the race. They don’t let anybody but runners in there.”

  “Cat came down here to find you,” Stride said. His voice was hollow.

  Serena grabbed his arm like a vise. “Oh, my God, Jonny, where is she?”

  4

  “What are you doing, Dad?” Evan asked.

  Michael Malville opened his eyes. “I’m trying to remember somebody’s face,” he said.

  He and Evan stood in front of Sammy’s Pizza, a block from the marathon route. The street was deserted, as if they’d taken refuge in a ghost town. They’d heard the bomb blast from the corner of Lake and Superior and seen the smoke rising out of Canal Park. People had begun to run. He’d dragged Evan away from the danger zone and made an immediate call to Alison to let her know they were safe, but he wasn’t ready to go home yet.

  He used his phone to scroll through his Twitter time line. The top trending hashtag was #marathon. Below it, the next hashtag on the list was #noexceptions. He read through the speculation about who was behind the bombing, and he wanted to put out a tweet to say: I saw him.

  “Whose face are you trying to remember?” Evan asked.

  “That man who bumped into me on the sidewalk,” Michael told his son. “Did you see him?”

  “No. Why do you want to remember him?” Then Evan whispered, as if they were part of a conspiracy, “You think he was the bomber, don’t you? You think it was him!”

  “I don’t know, Evan. I have no idea who the man was. I just want to be clear in my own mind about what I saw, in case anyone asks me.”

  “Why do you think he did it?” Evan asked, as if Michael had already put the man in a police lineup.

  Why?

  Because of the look on his face. Because of the backpack he was carrying. Because he was heading for Canal Park.

  Because—Michael had no trouble admitting to himself—the man reeked of Islam.

  “I told you, I don’t know whether he did it,” Michael said. “He was probably just watching the marathon like us.”

  “Okay,” Evan replied. “Can we bring home pizza?”

  Michael glanced at the restaurant behind them. “Sorry, bud, it’s closed.”

  All the shops were closed. The city was shut down. A handful of parked cars lingered on the street, and the police had stopped to check each one. Everyone was nervous about more bombs.

  Two separate police officers had already checked his identification and suggested he take his son and go home. He’d seen another cop pass by ten minutes earlier, and this time, he saw the man grab a radio as he eyed Michael from inside the squad car. Michael could imagine the report: That man on the corner of First, the one with the kid, is still there. On any other day, no one would have cared, but this wasn’t any other day.

  Five more minutes passed.

  A yellow Avalanche swung wide aroun
d the corner and stopped in front of Sammy’s, halfway over the curb. When a tiny Chinese woman hopped down from the dented truck, Michael realized that he knew her. Her black hair fell in bangs across her forehead, and her eyes were hidden behind honey-colored sunglasses. She wore a red leather jacket, tapered black pants, and burgundy boots with block heels. She was a Duluth police detective, and their paths had crossed before.

  He could see that she recognized him, too.

  “You’re Michael Malville, aren’t you?” she said. “I’m Maggie Bei with the Duluth Police. We met two years ago during the Spitting Devil investigation.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Michael replied coolly.

  He strained to be polite. He didn’t have fond memories of Maggie Bei or her boss, Jonathan Stride. Two years earlier, a serial killer had terrorized Duluth, targeting victims who all bore an uncanny resemblance to his wife, Alison. When a cloud of suspicion fell over Michael, the investigation had nearly cost him his marriage, and Alison barely escaped with her life. Michael blamed the police.

  “You’re Evan, aren’t you?” the detective continued, eyeing Michael’s son. “You were quite the hero back then.”

  Evan beamed at being remembered. “I got a badge from the police chief!”

  “I know you did. You earned it. So you’re a Walking Dead fan, huh?” She pointed at the boy’s T-shirt.

  “You bet!”

  “Me, too,” the detective told him. Then she said to Michael, “What are you doing out here, Mr. Malville? My colleagues tell me you’ve been hanging out on this corner for quite a while. We’re encouraging residents to go home and stay home. Just until we’re sure the city is safe.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been watching all the police activity. It’s interesting.”

  “Were the two of you in the marathon crowd when the bomb went off?”

  “Yeah, and my Dad saw the guy who did it!” Evan shouted.

  Michael winced. “Evan, don’t exaggerate. I told you, that’s not true.”

  The detective cocked her head. “What exactly did you see, Mr. Malville?”