by Josh Lanyon
The usual terse nod from him, and I admit I rather liked that about him, and he did look fine to me. His cheek had stopped bleeding. He squeezed my hand, I squeezed back—we were boyfriends now—and he let go, attention pinned on the door again. He had rules to follow, and keeping watch for danger ranked high on the list.
I felt slightly more settled. Although I had a million questions for the Xani kid.
And, I was pretty sure Jonah had saved my life when he’d heroically shoved me to safety in a scene taken straight from a Bruce Willis film. Be still my heart. I wanted to dwell on that. I opted to chill for a second and enjoy the miracle of breathing and being upright and uninjured and together. I let calm, positive thoughts prevail and took an appreciative breath.
He was fucking hot. No lie.
In the absence of direct gunfire, I listed our advantages.
First, as stated, no one had been shot. Go team. At least, no one in our coffin room had. I couldn’t speak for the safety of Piper, Dougie, Vinnie, or Chris, which did worry me. They’d definitely heard the shots, unless they were far away in a forbidden anchor store, which they weren’t because none of us cheats.
Second, there was a door against my back, the handle digging into my spine. We had an exit should we need one, a fact both useful and problematic.
What I could remember from Dougie’s Pinterest map was that a group of midsized and micro stores in the central area of the mall accessed a long, skinny service hallway. The door behind me should lead to management and security offices. I couldn’t quite recall. I was fairly certain the hall eventually filtered into a delivery area on one end and back to a corridor near restrooms and the food court on the other. Or it dumped us into a dead end. Which would be bad.
The file Dougie sent showed Parkway’s basic floor plan, not an evacuation route, so the majority of exits weren’t even labeled. Those were locked, boarded up, barred with gates, and impassable anyway. No new information.
I knew the only open exit from the mall to the parking lot was the one we’d entered earlier, through the sticky door requiring a crowbar, and that was far away. We’d either have to backtrack and cross the line of fire, or risk the pitch-black hallway. No way would Dougie have wasted lights back there. Those hallways were out of play, I bet because he’d blown his lighting budget to hell.
We could go through the roof.
I put that idea on the back burner because opportunity would have to present itself.
While my mind raced and I rode the roller coaster of both clearheaded and irrational thought, we waited for the next catastrophe to unveil itself. We were obviously straining to hear the telltale sound of oncoming danger. The kid breathed heavily beside me, huffing and puffing through his mouth. He smelled sweetly of sweat and fear, and either that cloying David Beckham cologne, or Axe Body Spray, or piss. Maybe all three. He hadn’t moved, just stared venomously at Jonah, like he considered Jonah a threat.
We couldn’t stay. We were sitting ducks, and no one would look for us for a long, long time. Eventually, someone would track our group’s phones hidden in the parking garage and decide to search the mall, but not until tomorrow at the earliest. Or Sunday. Or Monday when none of us showed for work.
My mind careened out of control, but one thing stuck. Chris had been one hundred percent correct, and we should have bent a little and agreed to carry our phones. Why didn’t we listen?
I leaned close to the new guy, spoke softly, and even so, the words hung large inside our tiny hiding hole. “Okay. Very quietly. Everyone okay?”
Jonah nodded. The kid nodded. “Good. I have zero skills in first aid.”
I ventured another hushed question to the kid. “What the hell is going on?”
Thin and edged, he whispered back, “I can’t tell if you arrived at the best or worst possible time, dude.”
“That’s not helpful.” Jesus. Dude. We were being shot at, and he called me dude and answered cryptically. “Who’s shooting at us?” Who seemed the most relevant question. At least, I thought so. Also, not so much as a thanks.
“He’s a fucking psycho, who do you think?”
“I mean, do you know him? Is he the guy who tied you up? Did he hurt you?” Maybe this kid was a missing person, or a runaway. He’d been bound, so a kidnapping for sure. That didn’t necessarily mean the perpetrator was a stranger. I kept my tone open, friendly. “We want to help. Who are you?”
“Me? Who the fuck are you guys? How do I know you’re not part of his thing? What are you even doing here?”
I answered honestly. “We’re a group of friends who came here to play a game.”
“What the hell? You’re cops or something, right?” I realized he assumed this of Jonah, with the buzzed haircut, the bloody cheek, the silent stare, and the broad shoulders, not me. I didn’t take offense. Teenagers usually lumped me in with the cool teachers. They rarely confused me with an authority figure. I assumed he’d ask for help. Instead? “I haven’t done nothin’.”
My teeth clicked together. Unlike Jonah’s students, mine chose to be in my class and we had a repartee. They liked me. So I had limited patience for attitude when I wasn’t on the clock. Especially now, when bullets were flying and lives were at stake.
Jonah swiftly took up the gauntlet. “Do we look like cops?”
To this guy? Good cop/bad cop. I bit my tongue.
Jonah continued, “Tommy told you. We’re here playing a game with friends.”
As the information seeped into his brain, I stayed vigilant. No sight or sound of the shooter coming from the mall’s center, only the torturous drip, drip, drip, drip of water and the soft glow of LEDs spilling through the gate. On the positive side, no hint of violence. On the negative? No sign of life either.
A couple of seconds passed, and the goat-bearded boy scrubbed at his crusty face with the back of his hand. “What kind of game? I don’t really like games anymore.”
Jonah explained, “Capture the Flag. There are six of us. We have absolutely no idea what’s going on here. We’re not part of whatever you’re involved in. Our friends are in danger. It would help if we knew who we’re dealing with. So we can get everyone out.”
“Wait. What? Like that game they played at camp?” His tone implied his feelings; his words defined his privilege. Yes, we were definitely lame, but despite his situation, he was acting a bit like a shithead. Maybe that was okay and he’d earned it, but the devil eye he’d previously sent Jonah turned into a massive eye roll.
“Aren’t you guys a little old for kid stuff? Just text your friends. Why don’t you just text them? Call 911. That fucking psycho smashed my phone with a hammer. Like an actual hammer. And then he chucked my cell somewhere. I can’t do anything. I have nothing. I just want to get out of here and go home. Get me out of here.”
I had to tell him, “None of us has a phone. And that’s the pla—”
“What do you mean none of you?” The kid cocked his head as if I’d spoken in tongues.
Man, apologizing to Chris would take a lifetime. A long, long lifetime. “Exactly what I said. We left our phones in the car. Who brought you here?”
“Who leaves their phone in the car? I don’t know who he is!”
“Shh. Shh. Calm down,” Jonah soothed. “Let’s help each other. If we wanted to hurt you, we have the opportunity right now, and we don’t want to hurt you. We need to work together. We’re on the same team.”
The kid’s panting eased; he nodded, and his lips unzipped. “Okay. You’re right. I’m Carl.” His eyes squeezed shut for a brief second. “I don’t even know how this happened. My friend Ricky hit me up, I guess yesterday. Did I want to go with him to the 76 and pick up a package—something, but I didn’t ask—and bring it back to his friend’s house? No trouble and there’s some money involved and it’ll take a couple hours. Everything’s cool, just ride along. So we go out there, and we smoke with this guy, and vibes are good, we’re all mellow, and that fat fucker doesn’t give us anything. No.”
Drug deal. Great. Just what I expected. I freaking hated to be right.
Carl swallowed. “So Ricky’s like, ‘Hey, man, you have something for me, right? We’ve been in your car a while and thanks for the weed, but we need to get back.’ And this fucking guy…” Carl winced. “This dead-eyed motherfucker says, yeah, he has something for Ricky, and takes out a piece and shoots. Just caps him. Like right next to me, and Ricky falls over and I have blood on my clothes. One minute he’s asking about the thing, where’s the stuff, nice guy, and the next he’s dead.”
Through the telling, the kid kept his volume low.
“I freak. Try to get out of the car, clawing at the handle, but the door’s locked and there’s blood and he has the gun on me. I thought he’d kill me, but no. He snags my phone and forces me into the trunk of this shitty fucking Neon, and then he drives. Not far. You’d think he would hide or go to another state or cross a border or something because he just offed a kid, but we went like a couple miles. I tried to get out, but he had the trunk rigged tight.”
I would have asked a question, or said something, but Carl’s story had spun into terrifying new territory. The situation much worse than I suspected. Although, what had I thought was happening?
Jonah tapped into words the kid needed to hear. “Hey. We’re really sorry about your friend. That’s rough.”
The kid swiped at his nose again. “I didn’t even know where I was. Or where Ricky is. Like, where that guy put him. Or his car. The seat was covered in—” He grimaced and shut his eyes.
How Carl kept his act together as long as he did, I didn’t know. I curbed my opinion of him because he showed grit.
Jonah prodded, “What day did this happen?”
“Wednesday. No clue how long I’ve been here. Must be a full day, because it was after dark when he took me here.”
I didn’t have the heart to correct him. He’d been inside two full days. Wasn’t anyone looking for him? And how had Dougie missed this?
How had the guy not seen Dougie?
Carl rested against the wall, and his guard dropped. “I didn’t know where I was until you took that bag off my head. Parkway Mall, right?” He shuddered. “He made me climb through a bunch of stuff and go up some stairs. I think he’s here a lot. And like…he takes people here. Like, I’m definitely not the first. He carried me partway. He’s set up. He had a place for me to piss. He didn’t try to kill me. He whacked me around to get me into a room, and he locked me in. He gave me water and a sandwich. He gave me some kind of drug, left me tied up in the dark, and was gone a long time. When he came back, he said we’re gonna have some fun, play a game, and I thought I was going to throw up. But then we heard people out in the mall, and he got super excited. He put that bag over my head and bolted. I tried to get out. I knew it was my only chance.”
The shooter must have heard Team Red innocently crossing the neutral zone to hide their ridiculous flag. Laughing and planning and scrambling over obstacles just for the fun of it.
I imagined the gun with the silencer, a rabbit warren of shops and corridors, dead ends and collapsed ceilings, and a psychopath on the loose. He could be a vagrant who lived here full time and flew under the radar. I bet he knew the layout of the mall better than any of us.
Carl said faintly, “I called out, but no one answered, and then I was pretty sure he would come back for me because he probably heard me. That was stupid of me.”
“No,” I said. “You did what you had to do.”
So the voice I had hoped was Chris had actually been Carl.
Since disappearing into the dark when we first arrived—thirty-five, forty minutes ago—not one of our friends had made a peep. Not one. That was a long time.
I met Jonah’s worried stare as he read my mind. “They’re here, and we’ll find them.”
I nodded, and the kid’s gaze seesawed between us. “Find? What do you mean? We need to leave, right? You’re getting me out of here.” That last a statement, not a request.
Jonah didn’t sugarcoat anything. Just stated the facts. “We can’t leave our friends.”
A light winked out in the corridor, and shadows crept closer.
Something clattered on the tile, like a top wobbling, or a hub cab spinning, or a portable LED light rolling to a stop as it died.
Time froze.
We leveled up.
Hide
Like everyone else in America, I’m familiar with active-shooter scenarios and not simply from my news feed and Twitter. My work practiced how to respond. Every school ran drills with students and staff and for parents and other caregivers.
There was “preparedness training” at my parents’ church, and the local community offered programs at the park and in the supermarket and at the town hall. I mean, we lived under the weight of an unpalatable reality, and because we were human, we thought we could be ready.
Well, nothing prepared a person for the worst. Not during and not after. We have tough choices to make, and we don’t know which way we’ll go until the time comes.
The gist of what we were taught, and the best Homeland Security had to offer? Run, hide, fight. Specifically in that order.
That’s just instinct. And we all know that self-defense is the last option, unless you’re playing a game.
We weren’t in a true, modern, horrifying mass-shooter situation, and thank God. And this wasn’t a game. This was a drug deal gone wrong—or possibly gone exactly as any law-abiding citizen would expect—with a side of kidnapping and an added helping of fucking freak-show reject set on torturing a dumb teenager.
Basically stated, a goat fuck. Still, the run-hide-fight rule applied. I’d passed the required course on what to do, made my list of who to save, Jonah and I both, plus I had plenty of gaming experience under my belt.
With the sweat-soaked Carl kid hyperventilating passively next to me, and my date’s eagle eye pinned on the door, I knew we needed a real strategy to get the hell out of the mall, with all our friends, and with no injuries or worse.
Then they could burn this deathtrap to the ground for all I cared.
That was where my mind lived as shapes formed and dissolved in the low light in front of the shop, and we waited. It became harder and harder to differentiate between what was real and what was illusion as minute after minute schlepped past in strained silence. A dreadful anticipation filled the air, and my mind ticked through a list of very limited possibilities.
Truth: I didn’t like standing around, especially with my back to the wall and my head much clearer. I was programmed to be proactive, not wait for the inevitable.
When the squeak finally came, it was almost a relief to think of something else.
Almost.
Shoes tapped in the corridor, heading undeniably closer, the sound wholly audible, and not because there was no other noise to contend with. This person didn’t bother to hide their approach. I guess they felt they didn’t have to.
A splish-splash hit the small lake we’d crossed, and the loose shapes at the front of the store transformed into a hulking, Alfred Hitchcock-esque silhouette. He halted at the gate, a fraction of a foot from the crack we’d recently slithered through, and our options were clear. Hunker down and barricade ourselves in with…absolutely no materials to do so because the only thing inside these four close walls were three soft people and whatever we had in our pockets…or, I don’t know, collect loose shit from the store to lob, which amounted to a lot of broken glass, a heap of rotted insulation, and a jungle of wires. And we’d expose ourselves to potential gunfire if we left the security of the coffin-shaped room.
Zero-sum game.
The door handle dug into my spine, reminding me we had another, and better, alternative. We would run, again. But we couldn’t move. Not yet.
As stated previously, I had in my possession the bag from the kid’s head, a key fob with a Nano Light, a titanium whistle, the world’s smallest Leatherman, ChapStick, and a mini Bic lighter. Essential nonessen
tials.
The figure hovered near the rift in the gate, muttering unintelligibly.
Carl began to shake, poor bastard.
I shoved fear to the back of my mind and took a page from Jonah’s book.
Think clearly. Logically. Stay cool and calm.
The shooter’s size worked to our advantage. He was ungainly, and we had physical strength and endurance on our side. Of course, his firearm, his persistence, his knowledge of the mall, and his sheer crazy outmatched us. I was spitballing about that knowledge-of-the-mall part, yet the rest made sense.
A light flared—sharp and thin—and the three of us plastered ourselves against the wall, thankful a tangle of wires and insulation partially obscured the doorway. Nobody moved. We hardly breathed. A razor beam crisscrossed the inner reaches of the store, illuminating a sea of faux diamonds.
“Where’s my little mouse?” a high voice crooned, sticky with sap, making my skin crawl. “Did you find a hole to hide in?”
Christ. I wanted to grip Carl’s shoulder or something to steady him, the only thing holding me back being concern I’d startle the kid and he’d give us away.
The shooter probed for secrets with his flashlight and found the most important one: the narrow break in the gate, which he immediately wedged a shoulder into.
Fate smiled on us because the guy was a dozen tacos too wide to fit. He tried, believe me; he tried as the gate shook and creaked and protested.
He slammed full body into the metal, and the noise rang through the empty store. Then that fucker hacked the bent bars with the heavy end of his flashlight, hammering to widen the gap, humming jauntily. Humming.
We pressed the back wall like taunted, caged animals.
Eventually, he’d remember he had a weapon and start blasting at us. Maybe he’d blown through his ammo—that would be awesome—or maybe he was smart enough to conserve bullets for a better shot. I didn’t know. I couldn’t begin to guess. He had his own agenda.
He sang, “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” and honestly, he was an asshole. Like, okay, yes, you’re a fucking psycho killer with a gun, and we’re scared and hiding and you have the upper hand, but in real life, you’re also just an asshole. Which could explain why he was a killer.