But it wasn’t Aiden. It was Paige.
“Your wife and kids are safe,” she said as she roared past. “They’re waiting on you. I’m going outside to take care of Larry.”
“Thomas and Skylar are still out front,” Seth said to Anthony and Tim. “I can’t leave them. I should help Paige.”
“She doesn’t need your help,” Anthony replied. “You should go to your family.”
While Seth stood there, deliberating, a gunshot erupted. It was barely yards away, just outside the warehouse door. Then Paige appeared near the dock. She was gesturing to someone, imploring them to run. The roar of the crowd swelled enormously.
And then from above, on the roof, more gunshots.
Bitter bursts of gunshots.
People began to scream. Everyone began to scream. And still the industrial battering of gunfire, like something Seth would expect to hear on a battlefield. So many shots. So much screaming.
Coming this way.
“Natalie!” he yelled into the darkness. “Take the kids and go. Run back to Tim’s house as fast as you can! Go now!”
He hoped she could hear him. He hoped she was already headed for the exit.
While he stood there, watching for the silhouettes of his family, Seth heard Paige climb into the warehouse from the dock. Anthony hurried over and reached for Skylar. Seth helped Thomas inside.
“You guys need to run,” Paige said. “I’ll hold them off as long as I can.”
But Seth knew now what he was meant to do. This was how he would save his family. Not by crawling into a car and going to sleep. Not by deserting them.
No, he would stand here and fight for them.
“Please take care of my boys,” Seth said to Paige. “Help Natalie get them away from here. That’s all I ask.”
Thomas and Skylar were already running toward the rear of the warehouse. Tim followed, struggling with his case of peanut butter.
“Many people are coming,” Anthony said. “I will stay and try to negotiate with them.”
“Please,” said Seth to Paige. In her smoky blue eyes he saw empathy. Ferocity. Admiration.
“Natalie will know what you did for them,” she finally said. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Then she turned and sprinted away. Seth watched her go, running past Tim and into the darkness of the DC, where Thomas and Skylar had already disappeared.
The shooting above them stopped. Seth remembered Aiden’s declaration, how he had “work” to do. The nature of that work seemed clear now. Seth imagined Aiden climbing to the roof with all the ammunition he could carry, standing above the crowd, firing into them, another mass murderer, only this time there would be no television coverage, no breaking news banner, no active shooter alerts.
Just a man with a ruined mind killing innocent, starving people for no reason other than he could. A crowd fleeing in fear, hungry, desperate to survive.
Now, the first faces of the crowd reached the docks. Hands appeared, reaching for purchase on the warehouse floor. Seth pointed his weapon toward the door, but there was no reason to kill anyone who didn’t deserve it. These people were hungry and wanted to eat, just as Seth and his family had wanted to eat.
The first man finally hauled himself up and stood in front of the dock door. He held a handgun. Now another man with a shotgun. They crept forward with their weapons ready to fire, and Seth wondered what the impact of a bullet might feel like. The worst injury he’d ever sustained was a broken finger. There hadn’t even been pain at first. Just an anxious sense of something terribly wrong.
More people on the dock were climbing up.
“You’re the one who wouldn’t feed us,” said the man with the shotgun, looking at Anthony. “We stood out there for three days. Then you ordered your man on the roof to open fire on us. Why?”
“That man on the roof acted alone.”
Anthony held a weapon. He could have pulled the trigger at any time.
“I was just doing my job,” he explained.
“And I’m just doing mine,” said the man with the shotgun as he fired.
The image of Anthony being hit at close range was something Seth refused to see. He looked down at his leg. Something had stung him in the thigh, the ankle. Something like a bee or a wasp. He reached down to swat his leg, to scare the bug away, and fell over.
Something was terribly wrong. He was on the ground. Fireworks were going off above him. Blood was spilling out of him.
That couldn’t be right. Blood was supposed to be on the inside. He wanted to scoop it up and save it because there was no way to get it back. But he couldn’t move his arms. They were bound to his sides.
Someone maybe stepped on him, crushing his bones together. He was rolling the bones. Standing at the head of a crowded craps table. A suited man on his right swallowed the rest of his whiskey and dropped $500 on hard eight. An Asian kid barely out of college explained to his three buddies how to bet. The boxman was bulky but observant, nothing distracted him, not even the famous actress who stood at the far end of the table holding Seth captive with her sea green eyes. She was speaking to him. The sound of her words was swallowed by cheers but he knew what she wanted. He threw bones at her. Tossed them against the interior wall of the craps table, little red cubes spinning in slow motion before settling near each other, four white eyes on each surface staring upward, and the suited man roared, the college friends cheered, and Natalie’s words finally resolved themselves as if they’d traveled a great distance across post-apocalyptic plains to reach him.
Thank you, Seth.
HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN
THIRTY-NINE
Though she couldn’t see any reason to live, Skylar was nonetheless afraid of death. It was all she could think about now, the moment when she would stop being aware of the world around her, when Skylar Stover would cease to be while the universe cruelly continued to exist. What a spiteful joke to be given something as lovely as life when the only point of the gift was to take it away.
In her mind the Walmart warehouse had always been more fantasy than reality, and during the journey she had bobbed like a fishing cork, sometimes floating on the allure of an alternate film reality and other times submerged into the dark truth of her imminent demise.
But watching two men be killed in front of her—first Blaise and then Larry—had condensed these possibilities into one. She wasn’t going to survive this, none of them were, so now she was adrift.
As they wandered through the woods, as Tim told pointless stories about Billy and Miguel, Skylar thought she saw a moving form in the trees. She considered telling Thomas but didn’t. If someone was hunting them, why bother to fight? Why not just get it over with?
When they were back at Tim’s, a long discussion ensued about whether it made sense to go back to the warehouse. Even if every person in the crowd had grabbed an armful of food, Tim argued, there would still be more. But Thomas didn’t believe it was safe, especially not for Skylar and him. Everyone had seen them. They would forever be associated with Aiden, who had opened fire on innocent people. The mood of the survivors would be dark. Savage. Power struggles were sure to develop, and eventually someone would seize control of the warehouse. Probably someone awful.
Eventually Thomas led Skylar into one of the empty bedrooms and announced his final plan to carry on with the charade.
“There’s a lake east of here where I almost bought a cabin. It will take us a day or two to walk that far, but maybe one of those cabins will be empty. Maybe the air will be cleaner and we can, I don’t know, hunt and fish.”