“Couldn’t believe it, twenty minutes from the school if the traffic held, sure as shit ain’t holding now, shut down and backed up behind me, so I got off lucky, whump, ‘bus starts to shake, what the fuck, get it to this exit and wrestle it down over there, at least get the kids where they can pee, but my tires got four little black steel like…like stars or some other pointy things, and with three flats, we barely made it here.”
Malati felt Vin drift her away from her waiting car, into the front parking lot.
“Listen!” he said. Made them stop and stand still, absolutely still.
“To what?”
“There’s no whooshing.”
He faced the unseen empty lanes of the expressway going south, turned to look past the hulk of the rest stop facility to the unseen empty expressway lanes going north.
Heard that silence.
Felt his own thundering heart.
From deep inside Malati came the whisper: “We’ve got to go now.”
They looked across rows of parked vehicles toward her distant red car.
Saw ordinary human beings, everyday people strolling to and fro, the guy in black walking toward the facility from the hearse. A honeymoon couple laughed.
The new husband aimed his cell phone camera.
The happy bride raised her face to the open sky.
Like a red mist flowered her skull as she flipped to the parking lot pavement.
The husband almost dropped his cell phone before a crimson fountain from his spine burst out of his blue-shirted chest.
Time became a child’s clear marble dropped into a swimming pool…
…to slowly sink.
Not seeing what I’m seeing! Malati’s mind registered her package, her responsibility, her…Condor call him Vin: he lunged before the second shot’s Crack!
What she saw over rows of parked cars at an ordinary New Jersey Turnpike rest stop on an ordinary autumn Halloween was the not-so-far-away guy in black.
What she saw was that ordinary American boy face behind an assault rifle.
A gorilla roared from where the bus driver and the salesman were smoking.
The gunman sprayed bullets at what he heard.
The salesman and bus driver dropped twitching, bleeding, moaning, dying near the concrete ramp to where the children were.
Condor pulled the young fed’ down between two parked cars.
Yelled: “Can you get a good shot?”
“I don’t have a gun! I’m not that kind of spy! And you’re a crazy old man!”
Machinegun fire. Screams.
“Fucking Brooklyn.” Condor waved her between two cars, stayed low as he scrambled two more cars over, eased his head above the hood of steel shelter.
The shooter looked like the robot of death. Padding under his black shirt and pants: Had to be ballistic armor. Working the assault rifle, thumbing the release to drop the spent magazine to the parking lot pavement, reaching in a pouch to pull out an expanded capacity mag’ and slap it home: that movie star reload let Condor see a combat pump shotgun strapped across the robot’s chest.
The robot stalked toward where Condor and Malati hid.
Gotchya! whirled the other way to rat-a-tat-tat a line of bullet holes through the food court’s wall of windows. Condor spotted a pistol SWAT-style strapped to the shooter’s right leg, a combat knife sheathed on his left ankle, strapped-on pouches. Is that a computer tablet dangling from his belt?
Condor dropped between the cars.
Malati said: “What’s he doing?”
“Killing people.”
“Why?”
“Because he can.”
The machinegun buzzed like a monster’s vibrating tongue.
“Did you see his hearse?” said Condor.
Malati started to rise—
Got jerked down. “You don’t know where he’s looking! You got no diversion!”
She shuddered in his grasp.
Condor said: “Shiny metal where the coffin should ride. ‘Think they’re bins.”
“Bins?”
“The bus driver pulled black steel stars out of his tires. Caltrops. Tactical steel road tire spikes. State troopers and Army ambushers scatter them on the highway.”
Somewhere in the parking lot a woman screamed like a fleeing banshee.
Malati shook her head. “What does that have to do with bins and where would—”
The machinegun roared.
No more banshee screaming.
“Maybe he got the spikes on Amazon,” said Condor. “Get lots, rig metal bins in the coffin space. Cut holes in the back of the hearse, driver-controllable lids on the bins. He drove every stretch of road every direction out of here, probably weaving lane to lane to cover all drivable asphalt, picking his release spots just past or just before the rest stop exits and entrances, dropping, what, couple thousand of those things. A few flat tires, cars crashing into each other, stopped, and it’s the mother of all backups every way in or out of here, walls of steel. He’s isolated his kill zone. Stalled any rescue or escape.”
BOOM! The robot switched to his shotgun.
Malati waved her arm: “When he’s shooting the other way we can make it across the parking lot toward the Turnpike! Short fence, hop it, run, hide—”
She saw where Condor was looking.
The empty school bus.
She said: “All those kids.”
He said: “All us everybody.”
Machinegun bullets cut a line over their heads like the contrail of a jet on its way across this cool blue sky.
Her spine tensed. Her mind pushed against her forehead.
He said: “Cell phone!”
Pressed against her ear. “911 is…Due to a high volume—”
“Half the people here. Unless he’s got a jammer.”
“You can buy those?”
“You tell me, you’re the one from the real world.”
Car windows shatter. Bullets whine.
Why now? Why here? Why me?
Why not.
Her eyes were welded wide. “Where is he? Is he coming — Wait!”
Malati swooped the screen of her cell phone. Eased her cell above the car.
Camera app, the phone like a periscope lens scanning the sounds of gunfire.
Like a movie.
“He’s moving toward the main doors!”
Standing tall, man, striding toward the funnel for the fools—Whoops: fat guy in parking lot, where’d he pop up from, pulling at the passenger door on that green car bullets’ burst and he’s dancing and spraying red and sliding down to dead, motherfucker.
The side fire door of the rest stop facility flies open.
Half a dozen people charge out.
Crying tires as a silver SUV lunges out of its parking lot space.
Malati’s cell phone showed the shooter drop flat on the pavement.
He fumbled with the book-sized computer thing lashed to his belt.
Silver SUV slows for six people running to its—
FLASH! by the green dumpsters then came the BOOM! of garage-mixed explosive gel shelled by ball bearings and old nails as the paper sack bomb exploded.
Take that, Columbine motherfuckers! The shooter keyboarded the tablet lashed to his waist so it was re-primed to send a wireless signal to any of his other planted bombs.