of bodachs had descended from the upper level of the mall. They were crawling among the dead and wounded.
Whether I could handle this or not, I had no choice but to make the effort. If I walked away, I might as well kill myself right here.
The koi pond lay not far ahead. The man-made jungle surrounded it. I saw the bench on which Stormy and I had sat to eat cones of coconut cherry chocolate chunk.
A man in a black jumpsuit, black ski mask. Big enough to be Simon Varner. Holding an assault rifle apparently modified for full—and illegal—automatic fire.
A few people were hiding among the palm trees, huddled in the koi pond; but most had fled the open promenade for the specialty shops, desperately taking cover there, perhaps hoping to escape by the back doors. Through the windows—jewelry store, gift shop, art gallery, culinary shop—I could see them crowding after one another, still too visible.
In this blood-jaded age that is as violent as video games, the cruel machine language increasingly in common use would refer to this as a target-rich environment.
His back to me, Varner sprayed the fronts of those businesses with bullets. The windows of Burke & Bailey’s dissolved, cascaded into the shop in a glittering deluge.
We are destined to be together forever. We have a card that says so. We have matching birthmarks.
Sixty feet from the crazy bastard, then fifty feet and closing, I discovered that I was gripping the pistol. I didn’t recall drawing it from my waistband.
My gun hand was shaking, so I held it with both hands.
I’d never used a firearm. I hated guns.
You might as well pull the trigger yourself, you little shit.
I’m trying, Mother. I’m trying.
Varner exhausted the assault rifle’s extended magazine. Maybe it was already the second magazine. Like Eckles, he carried spares on a utility belt.
From forty feet, I fired a round. Missed.
Alerted by the crack of the shot, he turned toward me and ejected the depleted magazine.
I fired again, missed again. In the movies they never miss from this distance. Unless it’s the hero being shot at, in which case they miss from five feet. Simon Varner was no hero. I didn’t know what I was doing.
He did. He plucked a fresh magazine from the utility belt. He was practiced, swift, and calm.
With the pistol I had taken from him, Eckles had used six rounds on the security guards. I had expended two. Only two left.
From about thirty feet, I squeezed off a third shot.
Varner took the hit in his left shoulder, but it didn’t drop him. He rocked, he recovered, he jammed the fresh magazine into the rifle.
Jittering, thrashing with excitement, scores of bodachs swarmed around me, around Varner. They were solid to me, invisible to him; they obstructed my view of him but not his view of me.
Earlier in the day, I had wondered if maybe I might be crazy. Issue settled. I am totally bugshit.
Running straight at him, through bodachs as opaque as black satin but as insubstantial as shadows, pistol held out stiff-armed in front of me, determined not to waste my final round, I saw the muzzle of the assault rifle coming up, and I knew that he would cut me down, but I waited one more step, and then one more, before I squeezed the trigger point-blank.
Whatever grotesque transformation occurred in his face, the ski mask concealed it, but the mask couldn’t entirely contain the spray. He went down as hard as the Prince of Darkness himself had been cast out of Heaven, into Hell. The weapon clattered out of his hand.
I kicked the assault rifle a few feet away from him, out of his reach. When I stooped to examine him, there was no question that he was carrion. POD was DOA.
Nevertheless, I returned to the rifle and kicked it even farther from him. Then I followed it and kicked it farther still, and again.
The pistol in my hand was useless. I threw it aside.
As if I were suddenly standing on high ground, as if they were black water, the bodachs flowed away from me, seeking the spectacle of dead and dying victims.
I felt as if I might throw up. I went to the edge of the koi pond and dropped to my knees.
Although the motion of the colorful fish ought to have turned me inside out, the nausea passed in a moment. I didn’t purge, but as I got to my feet, I started to cry.
Inside the stores, beyond the shot-out windows, people dared to raise their heads.
We are destined to be together forever. We have a card that says so. Gypsy Mummy is never wrong.
Trembling, sweating, wiping tears from my eyes with the backs of my hands, half sick with an expectation of unbearable loss, I started toward Burke & Bailey’s.
People had risen to their feet from the ruination in the ice-cream shop. Some began to make their way cautiously across the broken glass, returning to the promenade.
I didn’t see Stormy among them. She might have fled back to the storeroom, to her office, when the shooting started.
Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the need to move, move, move. I turned away from Burke & Bailey’s and took several steps toward the department store at the south end of the mall. I stopped, confused. For a moment, I thought I must be in denial, that I was trying to run from what I might find in the ice-cream shop.
No. I felt the subtle but unmistakable pull. Psychic magnetism. Drawing me. I’d assumed that I had finished the job. Evidently not.
THIS DEPARTMENT STORE STYLED ITSELF more upscale than the one in which Viola had bought the Rollerblades. The crap they sold here was of a more refined quality than the crap they sold in the store at the north end of the mall.
I passed through a perfume and makeup department with beveled-glass cabinets and glamorous displays that not so subtly implied the merchandise was as valuable as diamonds.
The jewelry department dazzled with black granite, stainless steel, and Starfire glass, as if it offered not common diamonds but baubles from God’s own collection.
Although the gunfire had fallen silent, shoppers and employees still sheltered behind counters, behind marble-clad columns. They dared to peek at me as I strode among them, but many flinched and ducked out of sight again.
Even though I didn’t have a gun, I must have appeared to be dangerous. Or maybe I only seemed to be in a state of shock. They weren’t taking any chances. I didn’t blame them for hiding from me.
Still crying, blotting my eyes with my hands, I was also talking aloud to myself. I couldn’t stop talking to myself, and I wasn’t even saying anything coherent.
