Confirmation

by Barna William Donovan

  “The hell is that?” Knight asked, trying to peer up and toward the standoff at Rawley Heiser’s—the unregistered sex-offender’s—house. “Are the cops storming the house?”

  Rick tried to figure that out, tried to get a glimpse around the police cars some one-hundred feet away as more shots rang out. They had to have been Heiser’s shots, he reasoned. Rick couldn’t see any of the patrol cops with automatic rifles. He wondered if Heiser had been planning for such an assault one day, and gotten ahold of a high-powered rifle like an AR-15 or M-16.

  “No, I think he’s coming out,” the man in the A’s T-shirt, who had also taken cover at the rear of the SUV, said.

  Rick noticed him glancing around the rear of the vehicle and over Matt’s shoulder. “Watch yourself!” Rick warned. “Get down.”

  The local did as suggested, crouching and dodging back toward the sidewalk.

  “What’s he got in there?” Lacy said. “An arsenal?”

  “Naw!” the local replied. “All he had was a pistol.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a—,” Lacy started replying, but got cut off by another shot and the sound of cracking glass overhead.

  “Shit!” Rick gasped, and crouched down. A round must have passed through the SUV’s windshield and exited out its rear window.

  “Watch your heads!” Dan Knight growled. “Get down! Forget the camera!” he yelled at Tony, who was still shooting over the hood of the vehicle.

  “Jerry’s gonna be pissed,” Tony replied with a wild, weird, elated inflection.

  His adrenaline kicking into overdrive, Rick guessed.

  “Another messed up SUV,” Matt said. “Jerry’s not gonna be a happy camper.”

  “And that ding-dong up there’s got more than a pop-gun,” Lacy added.

  “No,” called the local in the A’s T-shirt. “That was Manny Sifuentes’ assault rifle.” Rick and his group glanced at the man. “One of our neighbors,” the guy said as more rifle fire erupted.

  Then they all heard return fire from the cops. And more rifle shots answered in kind, dinging metal and breaking glass on the cars all around.

  “Manny tried to rush the house,” the A’s fan explained, now almost flat against the sidewalk.

  “Rush the house?” Cornelia said as more shots rang out.

  Rick was sure he heard at least two rounds slice the air overhead. “Get down on the ground!” he yelled. “Everybody! Matt, goddamn it, get down before you get your head blown off.”

  Matt lowered to his knees, but kept his camera pointed toward Heiser’s house.

  “What in the hell was going on here?” Knight asked, looking at the guy in the A’s shirt. “Why’d Manny…uh…what the hell his name, rush the house?”

  “To take the son of a bitch out,” the local said very matter-of-factly.

  Two rounds broke some glass somewhere very close.

  “Sick fucker,” the local gasped. “The sick bastard had a pistol in there. He was waving it around. Threatening to start shooting people. Then he did. Just shot at the crowd—”

  What sounded like the deep bellow of a police shotgun blasted to life somewhere close to Heiser’s house.

  “The crowd…right,” Rick heard Knight say with something of an ironic, deflated realization to his tone. “This all started,” Knight added, “because the vigilante mob went to get some justice, huh?”

  “Someone had to,” A’s T-shirt replied, that same matter-of-factness in his words. “Sick son of a bitch’s been living here and no one’s done a damned thing. But then we found out all about it. Thanks to that globe. Thank God for that globe—”

  His words were cut off by an ear-drum-punishing blast of sound. Then the shock and heat waves followed. Glass was shattering, flying, spearing, tearing all around.

  5.

  As Rick started discerning individual sounds beyond the ringing in his ears, he was sure he heard the sounds of popping gunshots again. And they might have been getting closer.

  “Holy Christ!” he thought he heard Knight saying. “They blew up the house.”

  As a matter of fact, aside from the noise of screams, cries, and car alarms blaring everywhere, they were all being assaulted by the acrid tang of smoke.

  As Rick raised his head from the ground and glanced straight up, the blue, sunny skies were mottled by shape-shifting patches of black smoke. He wanted to get up, get his bearings and figure out what had happened, except the blasts of gunfire worried him.

  “Is everyone OK?” he yelled at length. “Anyone hurt?”

  He thought he heard random male and female voices calling “OK,” “no,” and “yeah,” but couldn’t be sure of who said what.

  Someone screaming “Watch out!” cut through the rest of the din. Then he noticed Melinda beside him, slapping a strong hand on his left shoulder and pulling him back down to the pavement before he could stand up.

  Once again, rapid-fire rounds struck their SUV. Then two more shots sailed overhead and hammered the wood and plaster of the brownstone behind them.

  “He’s making a run for it,” Melinda said.

  “Coming this way!” Matt gasped from his hiding place, still at the rear of the SUV. “Oh, shit! He’s still got a gun….”

  Rick pulled free of Melinda’s grasp and glanced through the shattered remains of the Ford. What he saw in the direction of Rawley Heiser’s house—or, rather, as they had found out from Cornelia’s and Ian’s in-transit research, his rented apartment on the second floor of a duplex—made little sense. The street up there looked as if it had been bombed. The far side of Heiser’s building was charred black, its windows shattered, siding ripped off and strewn across the street, flames shooting out the windows. The police cruisers surrounding the area had been showered by debris, the cops dazed and either crouching or sitting on the ground.

  Except one man up there still had his bearings, and he was still putting up a fight.

  Rawley Heiser, I presume, Rick thought, seeing a short, blocky man in a pair of khakis and a blue T-shirt rushing away from the scene, approaching the Confirmation team’s side of the street and clutching what indeed looked like an AR-15 assault rifle.

  The words “gas explosion” trilled over the chaos.

  Then a running woman on the other side of the street shrieked and tried to sprint away. Her movement, Rick noticed, caught Heiser’s attention, spurring him to spin around and take three random shots at her. The woman disappeared behind one of the parked cars. She had ducked, Rick guessed, rather than been hit by Heiser’s fire.

  And then what felt like a body blow, followed by a searing wash of heat and near-deafening noise, came from up the street again. Debris sailed all around. What people Rick could still see standing, or in some form of a semi-crouch, must have been screaming or crying. He couldn’t quite discern the sounds from the shock of noise.

  But this time he did remain upright—or in a crouch beside the SUV, precisely—to see a debris-outlined blob of yellow and black fire roil across the street on his left. The house next to Heiser’s duplex had exploded. As it did so, it picked up two cars parked in front of it and flung them across the street. One of the vehicles, after spiraling through the air, slammed into a police cruiser.

  Rick felt hands tugging on his shoulder again, urging him back down into a defensive position behind the F-150. It was either Melinda or Cornelia, he guessed, but didn’t really pay attention. He tried to see what was going on in the middle of the street. What was Heiser up to? Could he, too, have been knocked down the by explosion.?

  Gas explosions! Christ! The thoughts rushed through Rick’s mind. The gas piping into Heiser’s house must have been ruptured in the shootout. The first explosion probably spread the fire and the damage along the gas lines. Will this spread? Is the whole block going up house by house?

  “We have to get out of here,” he said, s
uspecting that no one would hear him. Everyone else next to him must likewise have had their hearing shot by the gas blasts. He had to communicate with the rest of his crew, Rick told himself, but he couldn’t help but look for Rawley Heiser again. And he saw the lunatic rising to his feet in the middle of the street. Heiser still had his rifle in his right hand, but now it swung at his side.

  “Get in the car!” Rick heard a shout that sounded like it came from the bottom of a pool of oil. Then a hand was tugging on his shirt. “The car!” Knight yelled.

  Before thinking of doing so, Rick looked for Heiser again. What he saw sickened him.

  The nutcase with the gun had rushed up to a man in a car parked on the other side of the street. Apparently others had the same fears about the gas Rick did. They were attempting to flee as quickly as possible. While most went on foot, though, this one man tried to escape in his car. Rawley Heiser, to the man’s bad fortune, had other plans for him. Leveling the automatic weapon in both hands, Heiser shot his quarry in the face. Through the shattered glass on the driver’s door, Rick could see the hapless man’s blood and liquefied brain matter paint the inside of the car a grotesque crimson. Heiser then proceeded to drag his lifeless victim from the car.

  “Get in!” This time Rick shouted as loud as he could, looking to make eye contact with each member of his team. Then he decided to lead by example and lunged toward the driver’s door and got behind the wheel. “Move it!”

  As he noted the rest of the Confirmation crew getting on the same page, he also saw Rawley Heiser swing his commandeered car out of its parking slot and send it speeding down the steep street.

  “Is that the…?” Tony Griffin started to ask after jumping into the front passenger seat and buckling himself in.

  “Yeah,” Rick shot back. “The asshole that started all this.”

  But in the meantime, he, too, was firing up the SUV’s engine and yanking the transmission into DRIVE. After throwing a glance over his shoulder to see that the whole team had piled into the vehicle, he urged the Ford out of its parking spot, swung it around to face the descent of the street, and took off after Rawley Heiser.

  “Full-on reality TV!” Tony gasped as he aimed his camera out the front window.

  From the right edge of his peripheral vision, Rick noticed Matt doing the same from the second row of seats.

  “Yeah, and maybe we can stop that psycho before he gets anyone else killed while we’re at it,” Rick mumbled under his breath as he watched Heiser’s stolen car reach the intersection at the bottom of the hill and slide into a sharp left turn.

  As Rick threw the SUV into the same maneuver, he noticed that the fleeing crowd’s worst fears were unfolding near the top of the block. Yet another fireball, propelling more wood, glass, metal, and aluminum-siding shrapnel into the air, across the street, and into parked cars, was bubbling skyward.

  “Unbelievable!” Someone’s voice, maybe Lacy’s, Rick guessed, sounded out from the back of the F-150.

  “What’s unbelievable is that guy’s gonna get away,” Tony gasped as Rick sped through an intersection, dodging around the rear of a car that had just barely cleared their path a moment ago.

  What prompted their cameraman’s pessimism, Rick noted, was the way Heiser managed to throw an inadvertent obstacle in their way about a half a block away. Overtaking a slower moving sedan, Heiser had veered too far into the oncoming traffic. Although he managed to correct his position quickly, dodging back into his lane, Heiser spooked an oncoming driver enough to urge him to swerve hard right…hard and far enough to plow into a parked minivan. Then, upon returning to his own lane, Heiser managed to clip the sedan he was overtaking, prompting it to spin out and block Rick’s path.

  “Oh, God!” Tony gasped this time, bracing both his legs as Rick took evasive measures, swerving around the sedan in front of them.

  “Relax,” Rick found himself hissing as he successfully cleared the obstacle. “Relax, we’re good—”

  “But he’s not….” Dan Knight’s voice sounded off from the back, assessing Heiser’s situation up ahead.

  Just as Knight concluded, Rick watched the fugitive’s wild ride come to a sudden end at the next intersection. Heiser sped into the intersection which one moment was clear and the next blocked by a crossing vehicle. Heiser’s car slammed into its nose, reshaping its right side into a crumpled mass of plastic and scrap metal. Unfortunately for Heiser’s escape attempt, the collision also radically changed his car’s forward momentum. Heiser’s car also spun out, sharply enough to tip it over and send it into a corkscrewing roll through the air. Then the fact that the street dipped into a sharp descent past the intersection helped give the car more momentum, more airtime, and several more revolutions through the air before impacting into the pavement. The misshapen, disintegrating hulk of metal managed to bounce and slide as far away as the middle of the block.

  6

  ITALIAN GLOBE CONTINUES TO POLARIZE

  By Arthur Kenneth Ashmore, U.S.News and World Report

  For those who see a threat in the world-wide globe phenomenon, no steps seem too drastic in protecting themselves or attempting to warn the world. The town of Aquileia in Northern Italy found that out during the middle of the night on September 10th, when five sticks of dynamite were used to blow its globe apart.

  A granite globe, exactly the same size and weight as all of the ones appearing around the world, made its entrance onto a small side street four days ago. But today it lies reduced to shattered, jagged slabs and rubble.

  Three local men, Giuseppe Parlante, Francesco Bonucci, and Roberto Della Corte, have been taken into custody for the bombing. None of the men deny their role in the attack. In fact, they hope their act will inspire others around the world to do the same.

  “These unholy things are an obvious threat to the world,” Parlante told the local press. “Just look at how many people have been hurt as a result of them. Now we have this one in our town. How many more are coming? How many more people will be hurt or killed?”

  “We were protecting our town, protecting our neighbors, our families,” added Bonucci. “Everyone better wake up and start doing the same.”

  The three men also explained that they were hoping the world’s military forces would start making plans for the systematic destruction of the globes.

  But the only serious damage to property and threat to personal safety in Aquileia came as a result of Parlante, Bonucci, and Della Corte’s attack on the globe. While the explosion broke the globe apart, enough of the blast was also diverted onto a nearby building, a small bakery, to cause damage totaling upwards of 3,700 Euros (or close to $5,000).

  Ceasario Agostini, the owner of the bakery, who lives in an apartment above his business with his wife and two sons, suffered a ruptured eardrum as a result of the explosion. His wife, Teresina, had to be hospitalized briefly from a severe panic attack. Their son, Pietro, was cut by flying glass.

  The Agostini family vows to file civil suits against the three bombers.

  According to local police chief Giacomo Gagliardi, Parlante, Bonucci, and Della Corte were aided in stealing the dynamite from a local construction company by Bonucci’s brother-in-law, Pascual Lazzari. Lazzari has also been arrested.

  The bombing brought more turmoil to a town that had already been splintered into factions around the globe.

  Some people, like Sylvia Balboni, support the bombers and their accomplice. “I’m sorry for the people who got hurt in that store, but I’m glad [the globe] is gone.” she said emphatically. “I hope they remove its pieces and get them as far away from our town as possible. I know a lot of people will laugh at me [for saying this], but I think those things are evil. They’re of the devil.”

  Others, like Maurizio Passerini, who came all the way from Rome to see the globe, couldn’t disagree more. “Crazy people are the real threat. They should all be locked away
for as long as possible. This place was special because of the globe.”

  Passerini represents a sort of pilgrimage movement across Europe, people flocking to the globes because they feel the objects have transformative powers.

  “I could feel it when I got to Aquileia,” Donatella Neri, who had traveled from Sardinia to see the globe, explained. “Even before I saw the globe. Like I was just ten years younger. I could feel a vibration of pure energy everywhere. Like this whole town was full of energy.”

  “Something important was going to happen here,” Gabriella Fiore, Maurizio Passerini’s girlfriend added. “Now the only thing that has happened is a tragedy. The moment I heard of the bombing, I thought I would just cry for days. Like a piece of me had been torn out.”

  Marco Sebastiani, an Aquileia taxi driver who is also glad the globe is gone, could, nevertheless, not support the bombing. “Whatever powers, whatever dark forces put that abomination in our town…well, who knows what they might do now? This is not good for us. This is going to hurt all of us.”

  Afraid of some form of otherworldly retaliation for the bombing, Sebastiani is planning to move his family far away from Aquileia as fast as possible.

  While the bombers await their day in court, debates about whether the globes truly have any physical effect on people and what the destruction of one of the objects will bring continue.

  “These reported transformative powers of the globes are a form of mass hypnosis,” claims Dr. Enrico Ungaretti, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Bologna. “People who want to believe in the power of these objects will experience these powerful reactions of well being, feelings of power, as they get closer to the globes.”

  Dr. Bonnie Whitcomb, professor of psychiatric medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine, agrees. “It’s similar to the feelings of euphoria, possessions even, by divine forces, the kinds of things true believers experience at religious ceremonies.”

  Whitcomb, just like Ungaretti, points out that many people living close to the globes have never reported feeling any effects.