Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  David tossed seven or eight small cardboard boxes into the small pile of trash and they fell with solid ‘thunks’. He pulled a long piece of string out and laid it over the edge of the trash can, leaving half of it dangling from the outside of the can.

  He zipped up his backpack and, leaning on his new light-weight metal walking stick, pulled a Zippo lighter from his pocket and lit the fuse.

  The string caught and slowly began burning as he replaced the lid, leaving it at an angle as he limped quickly away.

  Beyond the sporting goods store there were at least another twenty stores on either side of the mall before it widened out into a large, open area. The entrance to J.C. Penney’s took up the entire western wall of the open area, and smaller stores angled out from both sides, circling a tall fountain that cascaded water down over a tall pile of stones, creating the effect of an indoor waterfall. The water was sprayed up into the air and ran down the faces of the large stones, collecting at the bottom. From there the water ran down a stream and a short series of rapids for about twenty or thirty yards before emptying into a large collection pond a good distance from the waterfall. On either side of stream and the rapids, a grassy area was designed to look like an outdoor park or something, with fake green grass, a number of bushes and several trees, one of which was large enough to scrape the glass ceiling thirty feet above the water. Further down from the waterfall, a small white gazebo stood on one of the flat areas next to the wide stream, and the bubbling brook made for a romantic setting, or at least as romantic as one could find inside a mall. David had even heard of one or two couples getting married here, cheesy as it sounded. He might not know a lot about what was romantic or not, but getting married in a mall didn’t sound like something you would want to tell your grandkids about.

  Near where David stood, the stream dropped into a shallow pond, where pumps re-circulated the water back up to the waterfall. The pond at this end, furthest away from J.C.Penny’s, was about twelve or fifteen feet across and maybe two feet deep, and the bottom of it was covered with dark stones, making it appear much deeper than it really was. Plants and shrubs surrounded the pond and water lilies and other aquatic plants grew from within the pond, dotting the surface with green. Above it all was an expansive glass ceiling crossed with metal struts painted dark green, and through the glass he could see the rain and the wind sweeping it against the ceiling. The storm still raged outside, but in here it was quiet, and for a moment, peaceful.

  All in all, the whole affect was pleasant.

  David hobbled up onto the grass and followed the short trail of flat stones to the gazebo.

  The sporting goods store was empty. Jack walked down the last aisle, expecting to find the kid cowering in a hole or maybe concealed inside a sleeping bag or in one of the tents they had set up in there, waiting to take a potshot at him, but Jack found nothing. No, the kid wasn’t in here or back towards the theater, which meant he had to be in the direction of...

  Gunshots clattered out in the mall, firing off in quick succession, a deafening hail of bullets. Jack dove behind a stack of boxes to get out of the way of the gunfire, and it continued for a couple more minutes. A lot of bullets, more than Jack would’ve expected. Sounded like the kid had loaded at least four guns and was firing them all now, trying to catch him on a ricochet. Or the kid was hoping to pin him in the store and make him surrender the keys. But that wasn’t going to happen.

  Jack peered out from behind the boxes, but didn’t see the kid.

  “Hey, David! What are you going to do, shoot me!?” Jack yelled as he pulled the revolvers from his coat. He had three, the old one from the Liberty Police Department and two newer models, a total of 18 shots without reloading. He could’ve picked up a smaller automatic earlier that could carry more rounds and would be lighter and faster, but he was used to these guns, liked the way they felt in his hands. They had traveled with him, crossing a hundred rivers and thousand counties, always his faithful companions.

  They would see him through.

  Nothing came back, and Jack edged out from behind the stack of boxes, expecting the gunfire to erupt again.

  He was right. A couple of seconds later the bullets came again, another long burst of them, and Jack dove back behind his cover, feeling the ribs in his chest hurt as he landed on his stomach. The ribs hurt with a low, dull ache. He answered the bullets with a few of his own, hoping to maybe catch the kid gawking.

  this is stupid it's taking too long

  Jack waited another few minutes, calling to the kid and baiting him while he reloaded, but nothing came back. Finally, he slipped towards the front of the store, peeking around the boxes and displayed merchandise and expecting to see the kid come down one of the aisles, looking for him.

  Instead, he saw a pall of smoke rising up from one of the trashcans out in the mall. A wispy layer of smoke covered the whole area, and as he slowly stood and carefully walked towards it, he saw several dozen holes in the sides of the metal trashcan. The floor and the benches and planters around the trashcan were pitted and fragmented, and there was one big ragged hole in the plastic bench next to the trash container.

  He tipped the lip off and peered down inside, finally understanding. It had been a fire

  that's funny he got you good with that one

  with several boxes of ammo thrown in. The kid had wanted Jack to think that the kid was firing at him.

  This kid was smart. Or maybe had just seen a lot of TV.

  Some small part of Jack’s mind suddenly wondered if this had all been a good idea. He had come back to this little town to face his ghosts, to face the memory of the one man who had come the closest to catching him in all his years on the road. Beaumont had been good

  better than you and smarter

  and that had always bothered him. Jack had accepted the fact that the good sheriff was long dead, but Jack had been able to get his revenge on the town and its people.

  But now, there was a new enemy. This kid was Beaumont’s son. While still no match for Jack Terrington, the Angel of Death, he kid was still posing Jack with several interesting problems. Chief among them was how to kill the kid quickly and painfully, while still making the whole thing interesting.

  But it was good to see that the kid had a little spunk left in him. Jack had been worried that the kid would just roll over and die.

  Jack left, heading off towards J.C. Penney’s.

  David was ready, or at least as ready as he was ever going to get. Jack was coming, he was sure, and when the gunshots had gone off, David had thought he had heard a few in there that had sounded different, a different type of ammo. Or maybe that had just been wishful thinking on his part. David had been surprised that the fuse had burned so long, but then the packaging he had taken it from had promised it would burn slow.

  He had set up his stuff in the gazebo and now he was waiting by the big tree, waiting for Jack to show. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice the long wire cord stretching across the concourse and ending in the large water collection pond below the rapids. Hopefully. The end of the wire stretched across the floor and was plugged into an electrical outlet, and when David had thrown the bare ends of the wire into the pond, he had been amazed to see the bluish-white sheet of electricity skitter across the surface of the pond. He didn’t think it would work, or if it would all short out the system, but the blue haze remained, and he could smell the odor of ozone burning, like there was something going on in the water, some kind of chemical reaction to the electricity.

  As he made the last of his arrangements and checked the guns to make sure they were fully loaded, he saw movement on the far eastern end of the open space, past another group of trees and bushes and the big collection pond. He ducked back behind the largest tree next to the rock waterfall and waited, peeking carefully around the trunk, his guns ready. Part of him felt like Rambo, but the rest of him still wanted to run. Run and hide.

  Jack came out, slowly crossing the concourse and edging along the store fr
onts, trying to not expose too much of himself. He had two guns out, one in each hand, and he looked ready for action. But David had picked out a good spot and had a good view of Jack. David wondered what would happen. Would there be taunts and words exchanged, maybe a good laughing session like at the end of Die Hard? Or would there just be a quick exchange of lead, one of them falling? He had no idea. This was all so new to him, and it felt nothing like he had imagined it would.

  Above, the rain fell heavily on the glass ceiling above the gazebo and the stone waterfall.

  Jack rounded the tree-lined pond and spotted the gazebo. To David, it didn’t look like he had been down to this end of the mall yet - Jack was looking around at everything cautiously, carefully. That might give David a much needed advantage - he had been here a hundred times since the mall had opened.

  Jack carefully crept up to where he had a good view of the gazebo and spotted what he was looking for. He pointed his gun. Two quick THUMPS coughed out of the gun, and David saw the heavy winter coat he had propped up in the gazebo shred in two places and fall over, making almost no sound.

  That wouldn’t fool anyone.

  But Jack was curious, and he slowly approached the gazebo. He had to cross the little stream to get to it, and as he put his guns out to each side to balance as he crossed on the little rocks in the middle of the stream, David opened fire.

  The sound was impossibly loud, much louder than David had expected.

  Jack slipped off the rocks and fell. David didn’t know if the man had been hit or surprised or was just trying to hide; David was far more concerned with the guns in his hands. He aimed and fired with each, alternating, and by the time he’d fired four or five times with each, he was better able to judge the recoil and aim. The first few shots had bucked the guns in his hands and gone almost straight up in the air, shattering some of the large panes of the glass ceiling. The guns coughed loudly and kicked each time he pulled the triggers, and he fired six or eight shots from each in the direction of the gazebo and the stream’s rock crossing. He was too far away to really worry about hitting his mark - he was just trying to shake Jack up. And he desperately needed practice, or at least a chance to fire the guns and get an idea of what to do.

  David dropped down behind the tree and started to pull the magazines from the butt of each gun and reload. The barrels were very hot and he yelped from surprise when he’d grabbed the first one, burning himself. It was the same hand where he’d burned his palm on the hot pipes of the High School boiler, and now it looked like the skin on that palm really was going to scar.

  It only took a couple of seconds to reload, something that he had guessed would take a lot longer. He did it without looking as much as possible, trying to keep an eye on what was going on out there by the gazebo.

  It was raining inside the mall now. Several large panes of glass he had shattered had fallen in, the large sheets of glass crashing inside and falling to the grass below. Sheets of rain had followed, the rain heavy and cold. The fierce wind raging outside tugged and pulled at the metal fasteners and strips that had held the glass, and tore at the other panes of glass. Some moved, pieces of them breaking away, the wind lifting them up and away into the dark storm, and the hole in the glass roof widened with each moment. The rain was falling hard now, contributing to the area’s artificial outdoor appearance.

  Rain fell on the grass and on the waterfall and on the gazebo, sluicing off its wooden roof and pattering to the grass below, running through the grass and swelling the little fake stream that had suddenly become quite real.

  And with the rain, several birds flapped into the mall, probably to escape the torrent outside. David glanced at the birds as he reloaded and saw that several of them landed on the gazebo, while others flitted off into the rest of the mall.

  In the time it had taken David to reload, Jack had climbed out of the stream. David had seen the man creep out of the water and, easily guessing which direction the bullets had come from, he’d backed away from David and circled around to the gazebo. He had climbed up inside it, getting out of the rain, and was starting to stomp his wet boots on the wooden floor of the gazebo when he’d stopped. Now the man was just standing there, staring at the floor between his boots.

  David watched as the guy stared at the wooden floor, and then using the metal walking stick, he pinioned himself up onto his feet and moved off, circling around toward the pile of big rocks and the fountain that sprung from the middle of it.

  Jack was looking at his resume.

  A thousand questions raced through his mind as his eyes tried to grasp the enormity of what he was looking at. It was all there, and he remembered it all. But how could anyone know any of this, least of all this stupid kid? How could anyone have figured all of this out, when Jack had been so careful, so quiet and cunning, always sure to move on to the next one before it got too close or too dangerous. And even if someone had figured some of it out, how did this kid, the son of some small-town Sheriff, how did he know? But there it all was, right there at his feet, in black and white and red.

  And it was almost too much for Jack to believe.

  On the white-washed wooden floor of the gazebo, the kid had painted a rough outline of the United States. The interior of the painting was dotted with dozens, scores of small red dots of paint. The outline had been done in black paint, a very rough drawing, but the red dots were more carefully placed, with almost meticulous accurateness.

  There were six red dots in what had to be Liberty, Virginia, plus a big splotch of paint, probably to represent the conflagration at the school.

  There was a smattering of other dots up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

  There was a thick concentration of the blood-colored paint in the Seattle Area, a tight grouping of something like twenty dots, and a few more running down the coast to San Francisco.

  Los Angeles was a constellation of red pinpricks, another dozen or two dots packed tightly together in southern California.

  There were smatterings in St. Louis and Austin, and scattered all over the rest of the crudely drawn map were a few dozen more dots, seemingly sprinkled randomly.

  But Jack knew better - he remembered them all.

  He remembered the little blonde girl in Minneapolis.

  she cried the whole time

  He remembered those twins just north of Albuquerque.

  remember how they had each begged him to let the other go each willing to die to spare the other

  He remembered the years in Seattle when the cops and the FBI had chased the Black Diamond Killer until Jack had grown tired of the whole game and walked away. He remembered that some lunatic had started them up again after he’d left, following in his footsteps.

  Jack remembered the happy years in Los Angeles, when he did whatever he wanted and nobody questioned him, when he had taken and taken until it felt, for a short time anyway, like he would never need to kill again.

  He remembered the little boy here in Liberty.

  you dropped the kid in that lonely, muddy field

  raining, raining

  He remembered the mother in Casper, Wyoming who had pleaded with him to let her little boy go, to just kill her and let the cute little kid go.

  you made her watch while the boy had died and then you killed her too

  Jack stood in the small white gazebo, the rain falling around him, and remembered them all.

  They were all here, like some kind of grisly family reunion. And he had thought that they were the only ones who knew. He had kept them in his van even after he had left the rest of their bodies behind. But now this map was here, a glaring reminder of his past. No, not a reminder of his past - his ENTIRE past, laid out naked, there on the floor of this gazebo, the rain falling down around him as if the very gods were weeping at what he had done.

  I don’t understand. There is just no way.

  there is just no way for this kid to know everything that has happened

  Forcing himself to turn away from th
e map, he roughly grabbed the thick coat he had shot up. There were big holes in it, and he tossed it out of the gazebo. His eyes caught something. Out of the corner of his eyes he had seen something, and when he looked back, it only took a moment to recognize.

  The stream he had fallen into before had gone a horrendous color of blackish red. His eyes tracked up the stream to the waterfall, and it looked like a huge cauldron of blood, spewing up

  a fountain

  into the air and crashing to the rocks below. It was crazy. It looked like when you cut someone’s carotid artery, and the blood sprayed eagerly out into the open air. The fountain pumped blood up into the air

  a volcano of blood

  where it hung like scarlet diamonds for a moment, glittering in the lights before crashing back down, joining the clear rain falling from the sky. A river of blood, washing out of this fountain and washing down past the gazebo and washing into the pond

  collection pond

  at the end.

  blood a whole river of it spraying up into the air splashing down what a waste

  It was crazy.

  Jack stepped down from the gazebo and over to the water, his mind temporarily not in control of his legs.

  A river of blood, a river of the life-force he had spent a lifetime spilling. It all made sense somehow, the map on the floor and the river of blood. It was like this really was the ending, and he would be free of everything that had come before, and he could start again. This...coming back here had been a good idea.

  He was thinking about walking over to the blood and dipping his hand in it and never saw the boy step from behind the tree.