The guy dropped his gun and doubled over as the slugs punched into his guts. They went a little low and left, Aaron saw, but they did the job. The terrorist folded up and went down.
“Scatter!” Aaron yelled at the people from the gift shop as he ran past them. “Find some cover!”
He didn’t wait to see if they did what he said. He raced on toward the kiosk where Jennie’s friend worked.
It was close by, right around a slight bend in the mall. Aaron skidded to a halt as he saw maybe a hundred people stretched out on the floor, being covered by two more guys with guns.
He had fired four rounds. He couldn’t remember how many shots the Browning held. He lined the sights on one of the terrorists and fired a single shot. The man twisted as the bullet tore through his right shoulder and spun him halfway around. He dropped his gun, fell to his knees, grabbed the wounded shoulder, and howled in pain.
The other man laced bullets through the air at Aaron.
A desperate dive was all that saved him. The slugs went over him. He landed on his belly, slid up against a fat guy who was so afraid he was crying. Aaron fired over him, which made the guy yell as the sound of the shot pounded against his ears. Couldn’t be helped.
Aaron knew he had missed. The guy with the machine pistol ran behind the kiosk. Aaron fired again but hit a cheese ball, splattering it all over the place. The terrorist raised up and sprayed more shots. Flame spewed from the weapon’s muzzle. People screamed.
Aaron aimed and fired again.
The man lurched against a display of summer sausages and sent them flying. He flopped loosely onto his face among them. Aaron hoped the limp way he fell meant he was dead.
“Jennie!” he yelled as he stood up. “Jennie!”
“Aaron!”
Her scream came from his left. He wheeled in that direction and saw her scrambling to her feet. She reached out to help the girl who’d been lying beside her. That was probably her friend, he thought. He ran over to them, leaping over people who were still on the floor.
“The doors!” he cried. “Head for the doors! We gotta get outta here!”
That idea spread rapidly among the other people, now that the two gunmen were down. People jumped up and got in Aaron’s way. He shouldered them aside and cursed as he struggled to reach Jennie and her friend. A stampede started toward the exit.
Suddenly, just as Aaron finally made it to Jennie’s side and grasped her arm, two more gunmen appeared from outside, charging into the mall with machine pistols blazing. They must have been posted at the doors to watch for trouble outside, Aaron realized, and now they were retreating to cut off this potential escape.
Aaron didn’t know how many bullets he had left, but not enough for a shoot-out with those killers. He hauled Jennie around, and since she still had hold of her friend’s hand, that girl came along, too. Aaron fought against the crowd, which was now being hosed with lead from the two new shooters, and tried to get to the only place he knew that might offer shelter—that sporting goods store.
There would be ammo there, too, and he really wanted to reload so he could kill as many of the bastards as possible.
* * *
Charles Lockhart had never been this frightened in his life. Although he wouldn’t have wanted to admit it, he had been scared in his classroom. High school kids had no respect for authority, and some of them were flat-out dangerous. There had been a few confrontations over disruptive behavior when Charles had believed that a student might attack him.
That was nothing, though, compared to all those gunshots and things blowing up and people screaming and dying right in front of him.
He hoped he had found a safe haven here in the sporting goods store, but that probably wouldn’t last.
“That damn . . . punk . . . took my gun!” the old man in the wheelchair complained to the priest. “You didn’t even . . . try to stop him!”
“I couldn’t have stopped him, Mr. McCracken,” the priest said. “I didn’t have time, anyway.”
“Well, find me . . . another one . . . and a box . . . of ammo.”
“I don’t think I can—”
The old man interrupted the priest’s tentativeness. He glared at Charles and said, “You there . . . Slats . . . we need . . . guns and ammo.”
Baffled, Charles asked, “Are you talking to me?”
“Don’t see . . . anybody else around here . . . skinny enough . . . to be called Slats. We need . . . pistols . . . shotguns . . .”
At that moment, screams erupted elsewhere in the store. Charles’s head jerked around toward the source of the disturbance.
His heart leaped into his throat at the sight of two men with guns herding frightened shoppers ahead of them toward the front of the store. Obviously they intended to force everyone in here out into the mall proper.
Back into that violent madhouse.
Charles didn’t think he could stand that.
He looked around for anything he could use as a weapon. The concept of fighting back seemed utterly alien to him, but at the same time, he wasn’t going to be herded out there into the mall and slaughtered. That was what this was like. Those horrible men were turning the mall into a slaughterhouse.
He didn’t know anything about guns. He wouldn’t even be able to load one.
But there was a display of bow-hunting equipment nearby. The crossbows, which he had seen pictures of so he knew what they were, looked too complicated for him to master.
Charles saw a regular, old-fashioned bow sitting there, however, although it appeared to be made of plastic instead of wood. Whatever. It was simple. Put an arrow on the string—“nock,” that’s what it was called, he remembered from somewhere—just nock an arrow, pull it back, and let fly.
Doing that would probably get him killed, he thought, but he was too scared not to fight back. It seemed he had some survival instincts after all.
He grabbed one of the bows, as well as a box of arrows, and ducked behind the display. When he risked a glance around it, he saw that the old man in the wheelchair was watching him, as was the priest. The old man’s face, one side of it sagging because of a stroke, was twisted in a grimace, and it took Charles a second to realize the man was grinning at him. The old man raised his right arm slightly and gave him a thumbs-up.
The priest just looked aghast. Charles frowned and made a slashing motion, hoping the priest would understand he was telling him to cut it out. He didn’t want the gunmen warned that resistance was developing.
Charles fumbled one of the arrows from the box and managed to fit it onto the bowstring. He had never used a bow and arrow before—his parents hadn’t believed in violent toys—but the procedure was simple enough. Charles drew the string back a little, testing its strength. It was hard to pull. He would need to put a lot of effort in it.
He couldn’t hope for much accuracy, since he was a complete novice, so he needed to wait until his targets were as close as possible. Would he have time to shoot one of the men, fit another arrow to the bowstring, and fire again before the second man shot him? Not likely, Charles realized, but the slight chance was better than waiting to be killed.
Of course, the most probable outcome of this insanity was that Charles would miss with the first arrow and then both men would shoot him. He knew his life was nearly over and could be numbered in minutes, perhaps only seconds.
But the madness was on him, he supposed, because he found to his utter shock that he wanted to do this. No, he had to do this.
He heard one of the men ordering prisoners along, threatening to kill them if they didn’t cooperate. The terrorist was only a few feet away now. Charles took a deep breath, pulled the bowstring back more, and suddenly wheeled around the end of the display. He shouted wildly as he put all of his strength into holding the bow as tight as he could with his left hand and pulled back on the arrow with his right.
The string and the arrow slipped from his grasp without him really meaning for it to happen. The shaft flew so fast t
hat Charles’s eyes couldn’t really follow it.
He saw where it ended up, however.
The point struck the terrorist in the hollow of the throat with such force that it went right on through and emerged bloodily from the back of his neck. He staggered and dropped his gun as both hands went to his transfixed throat. He clutched at the arrow. Blood welled out over his fingers in a crimson flood.
Charles was so shocked by what he’d done—and he knew it was almost entirely pure luck—that he stood there staring for a couple of heartbeats before he remembered the second terrorist.
The curses that the other man screamed jolted Charles back to awareness of his perilous situation. He turned and saw the second terrorist lunging toward him, gun outstretched to end his life. All the noise around Charles receded into an echoing silence as he watched his doom about to overtake him.
Chapter 23
The big guy—Tobey, Calvin recalled—had told him to gather people in the sporting goods store, arm them with the guns and ammunition that were there, and organize a defense.
That was all well and good, in fact it was a great idea, but Tobey had entrusted the task to a kid less than a year out of high school, a rent-a-cop who wasn’t carrying a gun himself and didn’t exactly command a lot of respect.
Calvin wished he’d been able to find Dave Dixon. He had a feeling the older guard would have known what to do.
But he hadn’t found Dixon, still had no idea what had happened to him, and now it was up to him to try to forestall this catastrophe in the making, Calvin thought as he hurried around the store. He wasn’t sure what to do first . . .
Any plans he might have started making evaporated abruptly as he found himself face to face with a black-bearded man holding an ugly, boxy pistol with a stubby barrel. The long magazine extending down from the gun’s grip told Calvin it had plenty of firepower.
“Go into hall!” the man screamed at him. “Everybody go into hall! Now!”
Eyes bulging in surprise and fear, Calvin backpedaled. He held his hands up in front of him, palms out. The gunman stalked after him and swung the gun from side to side to gather up more of the people who’d either been in the store when the trouble started or retreated there hoping it would be safer.
Clearly, the terrorists had made sure that it wouldn’t be safe here or anywhere else in the mall.
Calvin was certain now that the men behind all the bloody chaos were Islamic terrorists. He didn’t like the idea of racial profiling, but really, what else could you think when there were a bunch of swarthy, bearded guys waving guns around and screaming orders in foreign accents?
Calvin supposed he was lucky this man hadn’t shot him on sight, since he was dressed in a guard’s uniform. Maybe the terrorist had seen that he wasn’t armed, not even with a Taser or a baton.
Partway across the store, another man with a gun herded shoppers toward the mall proper. Calvin glanced out there, saw people cowering on the floor and knew that they were being threatened, too.
That was what these guys intended for the people in the store. Herd them out like sheep, force them to lie down with the other prisoners, and then wait . . . for what?
Nothing good, Calvin knew. When an attack went on as long as this one already had, it usually turned into a hostage situation. The terrorists hadn’t been content just to smuggle bombs into the mall and set them off. That would have been bad enough.
The fact that they were taking prisoners told Calvin they wanted to make some sort of statement by doing so. They knew they would be getting a ton of media attention very shortly.
He and all the other people being rounded up were pawns in a game, Calvin thought. He didn’t like being a pawn.
He was still pretty close to one of the men. Close enough to jump him, maybe take the gun away without getting killed? It would be a risk, but if he could do that, maybe he could accomplish the task the big guy out in the mall had given him.
Maybe he could get people to start fighting back.
All he had to do was overcome his fear, move faster than he had ever moved in his life, and outfight a crazed, ruthless terrorist like the hero in a movie or a video game. And not get killed in the process.
Calvin was working up the courage to give it a try when across the store, a tall, skinny guy jumped out from behind a display, gave a crazy yell, and shot an arrow through the throat of the other terrorist.
That was such a shocking development, for a second Calvin couldn’t believe what he had just seen. Evidently, neither could the other terrorist, because he just stared as his comrade fell to the floor to bleed out.
Then the man yelled furiously and charged the guy with the bow, who still stood there looking as shocked as everybody else at what he’d done.
Something about him was vaguely familiar to Calvin, but he didn’t take the time to try to figure out what it was. He just ran after the terrorist and left his feet in a diving tackle as the man raised his gun.
This was his second tackle in a matter of minutes, which was one more than he’d ever managed to make in a game, and it was a good one, too. His arms wrapped around the man’s thighs from behind and his shoulder drove against them. The man pitched forward as he pressed the gun’s trigger, but instead of shredding flesh, the bullets just shattered floor tile in front of him because everybody had leaped out of his way when he started his murderous charge.
The man didn’t drop the gun, but the weapon fell silent. Calvin hoped that meant it was out of bullets. He started punching at the back of the man’s head.
The terrorist drove an elbow up into Calvin’s guts. Calvin gasped and felt sick. The man bucked out from under him, spilling him off to the side. Calvin rolled away and clutched his belly. His eyes watered from the pain, but his vision was clear enough for him to see the man surge to his feet and grab a big knife from a sheath that must have been hidden under his coat.
He snarled and took a step toward Calvin as he raised the shining blade.
Two shots boomed. The terrorist stopped short and did a little jittering dance. Calvin saw a pair of bloodstains bloom like crimson flowers on the man’s shirtfront. The knife slipped from his fingers and dropped point down, piercing the top of his shoe and probably the foot inside it. The guy didn’t even seem to feel that, probably because he was practically dead on his feet already from being shot twice in the chest.
Then there was no more practically about it. His eyes rolled up in their sockets and he fell like a puppet with its strings cut.
Calvin, still hurting from that elbow in the breadbasket, pushed himself up on one hand and looked toward the front of the store.
Tobey Lanning stood there, both arms outstretched as he held the black semi-automatic pistol in a two-handed grip.
* * *
It had taken Tobey a little while to work his way back to the sporting goods store, staying low and using all the cover he could find so the terrorists wouldn’t be as likely to notice him. Once he was there, though, he had to abandon that discretion because one of the bastards was about to go after the security guard kid with a knife.
He squeezed off two swift rounds and was rewarded by the sight of the bastard dropping the knife and falling in a limp sprawl that signified death.
The body of another terrorist lay a few feet away, an arrow through his throat and a pool of blood slowly spreading around his body.
To Tobey’s right stood the tall, skinny guy he had shoved toward the store earlier. The man held a bow in his left hand. “You got . . . the son of a bitch!” the old man in the wheelchair exclaimed. He was there, too, leaning forward avidly. The priest stood behind the chair. He hung on to it tightly as if it were the only thing holding him up. His face was pale and drawn, and he kept swallowing hard.
“Any more of them in here?” Tobey addressed his brisk question to the skinny guy with the bow.
“I . . . I don’t think so,” the man replied.
Tobey looked around, saw the security guard getting up. The k
id had told him his name, but Tobey didn’t remember it. He pointed and said, “Kid, get his gun.”
The young guard picked up the Steyr and said, “I think it’s empty.”
“Check his pockets for more magazines.”
The kid looked down at the corpse. Seeing his hesitation, Tobey added, “He’s dead, he can’t hurt anybody now.”
“Yeah,” the kid said. He swallowed, and bent to search the dead man’s pockets.
Tobey turned back to the skinny guy. “You’re good with that bow.”
The man shook his head.
“It was luck, pure luck. I never fired an arrow before.”
“Well, for your first time, you did good. Can you handle a gun?”
Again a shake of the head as the man said, “I never shot one of them, either.”
Tobey pointed and said, “Go up there to the front of the store, then, and stand behind that pillar. Keep an eye out. If you see any of those bastards with the machine pistols heading this way, let out a yell and get back here as fast as you can.”
“Should I . . . should I take this with me?”
The guy held up the bow.
Tobey shrugged and said, “Couldn’t hurt.”
The man grabbed a quiver from the bow-hunting display, spilled some of the arrows out of the box they came in, and crammed them into the quiver. He slung it over his shoulder and started toward the lookout spot Tobey had pointed out to him. His movements were awkward and nervous, but he didn’t hesitate to do what Tobey had told him.
The kid came up and showed Tobey the three full thirty-round magazines he held in his left hand. The Steyr was clutched in his right.
“I found these,” he said.
Tobey slipped the S&W Shield back into his pocket and took the machine pistol and magazines from the kid. He figured he could put them to better use.
“Round everybody up and get them to the back of the store, behind the gun counter. Anybody who knows how to shoot needs to grab a gun and some ammo for it. What was your name again?”
Black Friday Page 14