“Gates . . . ?”
“Yeah, they pull down from the ceiling.” Tobey tipped his head upward, then down. “Then they lock into the floor.”
“I . . . I never noticed such things.”
“No reason you would. Keep your eyes open. I’ll find somebody who works here who knows what to do and can help us.”
Tobey turned away from the opening. He was glad to see that the front part of the store was empty of people except for him and Charles Lockhart. A buzz of nervous conversation came from the back where everybody was bunched up around the gun counters. Tobey hoped Calvin was handing out weapons back there. He started in that direction.
He hadn’t gone very far when Lockhart yelped, “Somebody’s coming!” A second later he added in amazement, “It’s a train!”
* * *
Aaron held on tightly to Jennie’s hand as he led her and Holly away from the chaos. The sporting goods store where he had taken the Browning away from the old man wasn’t far away. That was where Aaron wanted to go. It would be safer there than anywhere else in the mall, his instincts told him.
Sporadic bursts of gunfire were still coming from other places in here. People shouted and screamed. A terrible stink—a mixture of smoke and something else, something Aaron didn’t want to think about—hung in the air.
Aaron wasn’t sure if he believed in hell, but if such a place really existed, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it looked a lot like the American Way Mall on this Friday in November.
They came to the miniature train that normally traveled up and down the mall, six cars just big enough for a few kids to ride in, pulled by an undersized “locomotive” that was actually battery powered. It sat empty, surrounded by a short wooden fence with a couple of gates in it.
From the looks of things, the train hadn’t been operating today, probably because the people who ran the mall figured it would be too crowded. They wouldn’t want anything getting in the way of the hordes of shoppers and distracting them from spending money.
But they had gotten a distraction, all right—a bloody one.
As Aaron, Jennie, and Holly were passing the train, two men carrying guns came out of a store on the far side of the mall behind them and spotted them. Aaron heard the shouts of discovery, then told the girls, “Get down!” as the terrorists opened fire.
All three of them ducked behind the train cars. Bullets spanged off the metal frameworks and chewed splinters from the wooden seats and sides. The mock locomotive looked fairly substantial, so Aaron motioned for Jennie and Holly to crawl up behind it.
He straightened up long enough to snap a shot at the men and saw to his dismay that they were splitting up to circle the train from both sides. Aaron swung the Browning toward the man heading to his left, the front of the train, and fired again.
Blood flew as the 9mm round tore through the terrorist’s torso, entering under his left arm as he ran. He spun off his feet, went down, and stayed down.
But that left the other man, and he was still shooting.
Even worse, the slide on the Browning had locked back after that last shot, meaning it was empty.
“Get in the first car!” Aaron yelled at his sister and her friend. “Get down in the floor!”
From that angle, there would be five cars between the girls and the terrorist coming up behind them. That might be enough to protect them.
But they couldn’t stay here, Aaron knew, because the shooting would draw more of the bastards, just like rotten meat draws flies, and with the BHP empty, he couldn’t fight back.
As bullets whined through the air, he threw himself into the locomotive’s seat and hunkered down to make himself as small a target as possible. He looked at the controls and the switches and frowned in frustration. He could hotwire a car, no problem, but he couldn’t figure out how to drive a damn toy train!
Then he spotted a switch below a gauge that was marked BATTERY and threw it. He felt as much as heard the hum of the electric motor. There was only one pedal on the floor, so his foot stabbed at it and shoved it all the way down.
The train rolled forward, knocking aside the wooden gate in the short railing that surrounded it.
“Aaron, he’s coming!” Jennie wailed.
A frantic glance over his shoulder told Aaron the killer was almost on them, in fact. He had stopped shooting, though. Maybe the magazine in his gun had run dry.
Or maybe he had something else in mind. The vicious grin on his face said that he did. He had the gun in his left hand. He reached behind his back with his right, under the short jacket he wore, and came out with a knife.
Sucker was going to slaughter these infidels up close and personal, he had to be thinking.
As Aaron steered around bodies and debris littering the floor of the mall, he slammed his left hand against the train’s control panel and exclaimed in sheer frustration, “Come on!” The thing just wasn’t building up any speed.
He and the girls could get out and run faster than the train was going, Aaron thought. But if they did that, and the guy chasing them had any bullets left, he would just shoot them.
“Jennie! Get up here!”
She lifted her head and stared at him in confusion. He yelled her name again, and she started clambering over the front of the open car.
He twisted in the seat, reached back, and grabbed her hand to help her. As she climbed into the locomotive’s “cab,” he told her, “Get your foot on the pedal and push it down as hard as you can!”
The train lurched and slowed as his foot came off the pedal, but then an instant later Jennie rammed her foot down on it and the train moved forward again. Aaron twisted around to face the back and jumped into the first car, where Holly was still huddled on the floorboard.
The terrorist had reached the sixth and final car. He leaped, grabbed it, and hauled himself on board.
The guy had shoved his gun back in his waistband. Maybe he really was out of bullets. He still had that knife, though, and he brandished it as he climbed from the last car to the next one.
Aaron went to meet him. He wasn’t going to let the son of a bitch get any closer to the girls.
They came together at the third car back. The terrorist, tall and skinny with a shock of black hair, swung the knife at Aaron’s face. Aaron might not have been able to avoid it, but at that moment Jennie jerked the wheel and sent the locomotive angling to the side. That threw the guy off balance just enough for Aaron to duck under the blade. He hammered a punch to the man’s midsection and then jerked back to avoid a second strike.
A guy had come after him with a shank once, while he was in prison, so he had a little experience fighting unarmed against a man with a knife. He jerked his hoodie off and wrapped it around his left forearm. It wouldn’t stop the blade, but it might slow it down.
The man lunged at Aaron. The knife darted back and forth like the tongue of a snake. Aaron leaned to one side, then the other, and most of the jabs missed. The ones that didn’t, he turned aside with his forearm. As expected, he felt the blade bite into his flesh, but it didn’t go deep.
Jennie weaved the train again, and this time the terrorist almost toppled out. He had to grab the side of the car with his free hand to keep from falling, and as he did, the hand holding the knife stuck far out to the right as he tried to balance himself.
That left him wide open for a second, and Aaron seized the opportunity. He sprang forward and shot three punches to the man’s face, a right, a left, and another right. The blows rocked the guy’s head back. Aaron bent, grabbed the man around the knees, and heaved upward as hard as he could.
The terrorist went over backward, headfirst into the gap between the third car and the fourth.
It wasn’t like falling under a real train, of course. But the cars were pretty heavy and as the man tangled up among their wheels and was dragged along, he bellowed in pain. Aaron hoped some of his bones were broken.
“Hey, kid! Kid!”
The shout made Aaron’s head j
erk around. They had actually made it most of the way to the sporting goods store. Aaron spotted the big guy he had seen earlier, waving them on.
Now was the time to abandon the train and run. Aaron jumped out and yelled, “Jennie! Holly! Let’s go!”
The train shuddered to a halt as the girls leaped from it and joined him. As they approached the entrance to the sporting goods store, Aaron glanced back and saw that the terrorist had managed to crawl free of the train. He stood up just as a shot boomed somewhere close by. A black hole appeared in the center of his forehead, and the back of his skull exploded outward as the 9mm round emerged.
The big guy had fired that shot with a small black semi-automatic. He also had one of the terrorists’ machine pistols stuck behind his belt.
As Aaron, Jennie, and Holly ran into the store, staggering and breathless now, the big guy shouted orders, telling somebody, “Let’s get this gate down and locked now!”
That sounded like a good idea to Aaron.
* * *
Tobey had seen some pretty bizarre things in his life, but the sight of a miniature train barreling along through a mall littered with corpses, with streamers of smoke from a deadly explosion still hanging in the air, while a life-and-death struggle took place on one of the brightly painted cars, had to be one of the strangest.
At least it had ended all right, for the moment. He had stuck the Steyr behind his belt and yanked out the Smith & Wesson Shield, figuring the semi-automatic would be better if he had to make a fancy shot to save the kid who had been wearing the hoodie. The kid had done all right for himself, though, and by the time the terrorist got loose from the train, Tobey didn’t know if there was any fight left in him or not.
A slug through the brain settled that question quickly and efficiently, though.
Now one of the store employees held down the switch that lowered the barred gate across the entrance, and as soon as it was down Tobey and another employee started dogging the toggles that locked it in place.
Charles Lockhart let out another strident warning.
“There are more of them!”
Tobey looked up from what he was doing, saw half a dozen of the terrorists running toward the store, and yanked the machine pistol from his belt. He stuck the muzzle through one of the openings in the bars and sent a stream of bullets heading toward the guys at full-auto speed.
They scattered and returned the fire. He didn’t think he had hit any of them, but he couldn’t be sure.
Bullets struck the glass walls on either side of the entrance and spiderwebbed it, but the glass didn’t shatter. Tobey glanced over at one of the store employees and asked, “Bulletproof glass?”
“That’s right,” the man said. “All the glass walls in the mall are like that. The company that built it is very security-conscious.” He paused. “They were trying to make it hard for thieves, though, not crazy terrorists.”
Tobey knew what the man meant. The glass might stand up to the gunfire for now, but eventually it would weaken and collapse. That probably wouldn’t take long, either.
If the terrorists wanted to speed things up even more, they could just lob a bomb down here.
Bullets sparked and ricocheted off the thick metal grating that now closed off the front of the store. Tobey jerked a thumb toward the back and told the men who had come to help him to withdraw. They had done all they could for the moment.
Behind a stacked-high display of ice chests, the kid had unwrapped the bloody hoodie from his left arm and was looking at the slashes on it. Both girls with him were fussing over the injuries, which didn’t look too bad to Tobey.
“Is that a Browning Hi-Power?” Tobey asked him, nodding to the gun stuck in the kid’s waistband.
“Yeah.”
“Plenty of 9mm ammo back there.” Tobey pointed with a thumb toward the back of the store. “You’d better reload and stock up.”
“Is there a, uh, an old man in a wheelchair back there?”
“Yeah,” Tobey said, a little surprised by the question.
“Well, I’m gonna stay as far away from him as I can. Crazy old coot’s got a grudge against me.”
Tobey could believe that. Pete McCracken had struck him as an irascible sort, but also a good man to have on your side.
“We’ve got to forget about grudges,” he said. “Nobody in here is as much of an enemy as those guys out there.”
“This is where we’re gonna make our stand, eh?” the kid asked as he looked around the store.
“Some are.”
“Only some?”
“The rest of us are going to take the fight to those sons of bitches,” Tobey said.
Chapter 26
The first call that came in to 911 was a Shots Fired report, but less than a minute later the lines really lit up with civilians calling to say that something had just blown up inside the American Way Mall.
Within seconds, those reports were echoed by a radio call from the police car that had been cruising the mall parking lots to deter auto burglaries. The officers in that car had heard the explosion and saw smoke rising from the mall. They requested backup and were going to respond to the situation and try to find out what had happened.
The officers who were supposed to be inside the mall hadn’t reported anything. Their silence was one of the most ominous signs of all.
Moments later, however, there were frantic, terrified calls from people actually inside the mall, reporting that men with automatic weapons were killing everybody in sight, and the chief of police was notified immediately that the thing people had dreaded for years had come to pass.
Terrorism had come to the heartland.
The chief of police said a fervent prayer under his breath and then reached for the phone to call Homeland Security, the FBI, and everybody else he could think of who might be able to help with this catastrophe.
* * *
Adele Connelly was tired, which was nothing unusual these days, but she missed her husband and found that not having him with her made her feel even worse.
She had thought that Jake would be back before now. He was probably having a hard time finding the curtains she wanted, or else the mall was just so crowded that it was taking him longer than she had expected.
The poor dear. Adele couldn’t help but smile when she thought about her gruff ex-cop trying to deal with those throngs of bargain-hunters.
She had been watching an old situation comedy on one of the cable channels running an all-day marathon of the program. Adele enjoyed it—watching shows like that took her back to the early days of her marriage to Jake—but she had grown bored with it and pushed the button on the remote to turn off the TV.
Just before the image blacked out, she caught a glimpse of what looked like some sort of special report, but she didn’t turn the TV back on to see what it was about.
Given her circumstances, there wasn’t much that could happen in the news to affect her. Anyway, she thought she might nap a little. She leaned her head back against the chair’s comfortable cushion and closed her eyes.
* * *
Business had been nice and steady all morning, but it would have been a stretch to say that it was brisk, Mitch Hamilton thought as he looked around the hardware store.
There were twenty or thirty customers in the place, maybe more, but the store was big enough that that many people didn’t fill it up, by any means. He had two cash registers open, and the girls working them weren’t having any trouble keeping up with the flow of customers. The line at each register was never longer than two or three people.
Yeah, if this was what Black Friday was like, Mitch thought, maybe it really was time to just pack it in. He’d hang on until after Christmas and then have a big going-out-of-business sale.
Of course, with three kids to put through college, he couldn’t afford to actually retire, no matter how appealing the idea might be. He had a standing offer from the manager of one of the big box stores to go to work there. The manager was a guy who’
d worked at Hamilton’s Hardware for a couple of years while he was in high school. A good guy, really, but the idea of working for somebody who used to work for him kind of rubbed Mitch the wrong way, plus the wages and benefits weren’t that good.
But they were better than nothing. Better than losing money keeping his own store afloat.
Sometimes you had to just bite the bullet and move on.
One of the customers came up to him and said excitedly, “Hey, Mitch.”
That was one of the nice things about having a small business like this. You actually knew some of the people who shopped there. Mitch said, “Yeah, hey, Phil, happy holidays.”
“You heard the news?” the man asked.
“What news?” Mitch grinned and spread his hands to take in their surroundings. “That we’re having some great sales here at Hamilton’s Hardware?”
“No. There was an explosion out at the mall, and a bunch of shooting, too. From what I heard, sounds like the shit’s really hit the fan.”
Mitch’s eyes widened. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. Vanessa and Kaitlyn had been going to the mall this morning. They had promised to come by the store when they finished shopping. So far he hadn’t seen any sign of them, though.
Suddenly, Mitch felt cold and sick. He turned and dashed toward his office and the TV in there, dreading what he was going to see and hear when he turned it on.
* * *
Eddie Marshall had taken the day off. The garage was closed until Monday. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to do any mechanic work until then. The oil in his wife’s car hadn’t been changed recently.
Wasn’t that always the way? The doctor neglected his own health, and the accountant’s books were in a mess.
So around the middle of the morning, after sleeping later than usual, then getting up and having a leisurely breakfast, Eddie went out to the garage, ran the floor jack under Christina’s car, and lifted it so he could slide under on a creeper and get to work.
He had the oil pan draining when the door into the garage flew open and Christina rushed out.
Black Friday Page 16