The fourth is the older man, who struggles in his anger to rise and fight, so we get a double jolt, the first from Maahir tomahawking him with the gun barrel to drive him back to his knees in pain, and then the flash, jump, blur, and haze of the shot itself, a disappointment because it hits him above the ear, disappearing again in hair.
The last is better, the teen, actually closer to a child. Small, frail skull. Thirteen-, fourteen-year-old boy, he thinks. Flash, jump, blur, haze, but the head detonates, becoming in an instant too swift to even record something called not-head, or unhead, a kind of broken, empty vessel, departed entirely from assumptions of human anatomy. It’s deflated, emptied, eviscerated, but the boy’s bones are so light and his musculature so unimposing that he falls to earth almost insignificantly.
Maahir steps back from his work and casually sweeps the carnage he has unleashed. Five bodies shorn of dignity on the floor in the cruel black/white videography of the guncam. Maahir walks around them, muzzle on them in case he needs to fire another shot, but all are quite dead in their loose-knit positions, and beyond them, on the pavement, a kind of communal blood pool has formed, fed by five tributaries.
In the screen room, Andrew toggles a button on his keyboard and restores the live-feed guncam data, which has, he has to admit, turned out to be rather useless except in special conditions, such as the one he’s just witnessed. It’s mostly blurs of floors, as the boys sweep this way and that, and occasionally you get a view of the cowed hostages sitting in misery and terror or a look down some deserted corridor as the boys are sent out on various errands.
He looks at his watch. It’s almost time.
5:48 P. M-5:55 P.M
It was like being hit in the head by a snow shovel. The shock was more disconcerting than the pain, as the world went to crazed fractionality, his memory purged, the eternal sensation best described as What the fuck? commandeered his entire mind, and it seemed to take minutes before clarity finally restored itself, to the effect that I’ve just been shot in the head. The next logical question, Why am I not dead? somehow didn’t follow. Instead, his knees gone all Jell-O-y, Ray threw himself back in primal panic and slipped into some kind of notch in the wall, where he shared a few square feet with a water fountain.
He fought for cognizance. First he remembered who he was, then he remembered squeezing Lisa Fong’s left tit thirty-one years ago in the cloakroom of the Subic Bay Naval Base Elementary School No. 2, then he remembered that he was in a shopping mall taken over by the Huns, and only then did it occur to him that a sniper was shooting at him! At him! The nerve of some people! He sucked in his chest, just in case an inch or so of it extended beyond the edge of his little water fountain niche and invited another shot. But he also realized he was trapped.
He could risk a run but even now the guy was on him from wherever, his reticle greedily massaging the edge of wall that shielded Ray from death. He tried to think: Can these guys have brought snipers along and salted them all over the mall in case there’s some movement from the people hiding in the stores on the upper floors? But that seemed a little far-fetched. Yes, possible, but… also insane and therefore unlikely.
So, who the fuck was shooting at him? And why did he miss?
It didn’t take a genius to make the next leap. Sure, it was a law enforcement sniper, maybe directly across the atrium, on the other second-floor expanse of balcony, maybe a part of a team the cops had somehow gotten into the mall who were even now moving into position for the assault. He’s on his scope, he sees a guy with an AK and a head scarf and he figures he’s got a target, he gets his authorization (or maybe not?). And then he puts a bullet in Ray’s head, only for some reason, he misses.
Fuck you, Jack, Ray thought.
But telling Jack to fuck himself did nothing to solve his immediate problem. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized the guy probably wasn’t across the way or even higher, on the third or fourth levels, but even higher than that. He had to be firing through or from the skylight. If he’d been right on Ray, he couldn’t have missed, but the higher he was, the more extreme the angle was. If you’re shooting downhill, the rule was you always hold low because the bullet’s point of impact will be higher. He’d forgotten while putting the hairs on Ray’s forehead, and the bullet had instead hit high, blitzing Ray’s head right through the scarf and the crew cut, spilling red but not gray stuff. But fuck, it hurt.
Ray could feel blood sliding down through his hair. His ears rang still and he couldn’t stop shaking. Man, that was a close sucker, that was as close as close gets without death being involved.
He tried to work out a move. Hmm, maybe a feint, to draw a shot, then a quick dash during the cocking sequence. But suppose Jack isn’t shooting a bolt gun but is on some state-of-the-art semiauto rig, so the gun reloads itself in a one-hundredth of a second, and after his feint Ray steps out and catches the spine breaker.
The bastard has me dead-zero, he thought.
“Sniper Five, Sniper Five, come in,” McElroy heard through his earphones.
Shit!
“Sniper Five, have you engaged, Sniper Five? Goddammit, McElroy, what the fuck is going on?”
McElroy recognized the voice of his immediate supervisor. He couldn’t hide anymore.
“I have engaged,” he said. “One shot.”
“Can you confirm a kill?”
“Uh-”
“Oh, fuck, McElroy, you missed? Jesus Christ, I am going to have your ass for sure.”
“No, I hit him, I saw his scarf blow up as the bullet impacted in the rear quadrant of the head, but he didn’t prone out. I think I damaged him badly, but he slipped back in this niche in the wall. That’s where he is now.”
“You have him zeroed.”
Did he ever, even if the weight was racking him. He’d now been in this awkward half-hunch offhand standing for a good seven minutes, sweat was everywhere on him despite the forty-degree temp, the small of his back felt like it had taken the bullet, his arms and wrists were fighting those oncoming yips, and he kept squirming a little this way and that to find a more comfortable position even as the crosshairs had begun to widen in their tremble circle. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold it and still have the confidence to squeeze one off if the guy made a sudden move.
On the other hand, he did not want to lose this. I will not let up. I am strong enough. I will stay on this guy no matter what.
“I have him zeroed,” he said.
“Sitrep?”
“He’s stuck in there. He’s out of the fight. I’m guessing he’s bleeding out. He’ll be gone soon. You know, brain shots aren’t always instantaneous, sometimes not even fatal. But he’s not going to do much more today, that I guarantee you.”
“Yeah, but while you’re on him, who’s on your window, sending us dope?”
“There is no dope, nothing’s happening.”
“You stay on him for a little while longer, but if I have to, I’m pulling you off and sending you back to general intelligence reporting.”
“I will get him for you,” said McElroy, thinking, I will get him for me.
The phone vibrated. Great. Trapped by a sniper, shot in the head, men with guns all over the joint, and the phone vibes.
Somehow Ray got the little rectangle of plastic genius out of his pocket, careful not to extend an elbow past the edge of the niche and invite a bullet into it, slid the answer icon to the right, and saw Molly’s name announced as the caller.