Jodie watches my face. She hears the collective gasp from everybody else. She twists her head to see what’s happening. A woman screams.
The six men are all wearing balaclavas. They’re all wearing black jerseys and black jeans and could all have just come from a heavy metal concert. They move calmly but forcefully forward, surrounded by an air of confidence the six shotguns provide. They look like they own the bank. They look like never in their lives have they been said no to. The police station is a five-minute walk from here, which means the clock is ticking. Jodie reaches out and I take her hand.
“Next person to move gets their head taken off,” one of them yells, and most people come to a dead stop, a few more keep running, others are hiding behind anything that remotely covers their bodies. The security guard’s face turns about as white as his shirt. He’s absolutely motionless. He’s armed with a radio and the knowledge he’s not earning anything more than minimum wage to be here, and he’s trying to figure out what good either of those things are going to do against six men with shotguns. He doesn’t get far in his figuring, unless he was figuring on inaction, which he does down to perfection. He raises his hands in the air but doesn’t manage to do anything else, including duck, before one of the two men that went in his direction turns the stock of the shotgun and smashes it hard into his jaw. The guard’s head snaps back with a sick crack. He hits the floor, his body slumping in a heap, limbs twisted everywhere. All this and only fifteen seconds have passed. A silent alarm may have been tripped, or maybe the bank cut back on a few of those features so they could offer the competitive interest rates the posters are going on about. The bank staff have open mouths and wide eyes and any training they’ve been given is all shot to hell, a snapshot in a moment of time, like somebody pressed the pause button on life.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say, and I squeeze Jodie’s hand tight. She gives me a look that suggests she doesn’t think things are going to be okay. She’s pale and scared and I’m the same way and I wish we’d ordered something for lunch that would have taken longer to prepare.
The same guy who yelled moves closer to the bank tellers. “Everybody on this side of the counter move over there,” he says, and he points to the far left of the line of counters. Nobody moves. “Now! And get down on the ground!”
We all move as one, footsteps shuffling on the floor, everybody hunched over and moving awkwardly, like old folks in a retirement home running from the Reaper. I don’t let go of Jodie’s hand. We sit on the ground, maybe twenty-five of us, all scared, all thinking the same thing—that we should have made more of Christmas last year.
The six men, in three teams of two, spread further out to the sides. One of them turns and points his gun at the door, ready for more customers to wander on in, even though the whole front of the bank is made up of glass and everybody outside is staring at us. The man barking the instructions reaches the counter.
“You,” he yells, and he points his shotgun at a woman behind the counter. All the makeup in the world couldn’t hide the tightening of her features. “Take these back to the vault and fill them.” He throws some bags at her. They hit her counter and she doesn’t move. “Now!” he says.
“What?”
“Fill them or die. The choice is yours.”
She gets it. She picks up the bags.
“Help her,” he says, pointing at another of the bank tellers. “You as well,” he says, glaring at a third. “And you too,” he adds, waving the gun at a fourth. “And if all four of you aren’t back here in two minutes we open fire on everybody else. Get that?”
As soon as the four disappear, an office door opens. We all turn toward it. A man with a pink tie and his shirtsleeves rolled up stands there with his hands raised in the air, and his head tilted and hunched down slightly, as if trying to avoid sniper fire.
“P . . . p . . . please, I’m the manager, please don’t hurt anybody and—”
He doesn’t get to say any more. The shotgun barks and people cry out. The manager isn’t thrown backward like in movies. He just stands where he was shot. His head hangs down so he seems to study the angry wound in his chest, seems to notice his shirt has blossomed red, and gravity pulls at the features on his face, making him appear sad. Then he folds at the waist, his ass going backwards, his feet staying in the same place, so when he hits the ground he’s folded in half, his legs out straight, his face against his knees, and he stays in that position with his arms by his side. The wall behind where he stood is streaked in blood, the window next to the door is shattered, other small pellets are buried into the wall. The manager looks like he’s stretching, warming up for yoga.
“Jesus,” I whisper, and I can see other people mouthing the same word but can’t hear it because my ears are still ringing. People are raising their hands to their faces. Others are crying. A man in his late sixties or early seventies has wet himself. A woman has passed out, her face pressing into the floor, looking far more relaxed than anybody else here.
Jodie’s grip is almost breaking my fingers.
“Stay calm,” I say, “just stay calm.”
“Everybody shut up!” one of the men yells, then he fires another shot, this one into the ceiling. Plaster dust rains down, it settles on his shoulders like dandruff.
The four people return from the vault. The bags are bulging with cash and obviously heavy. They manage to lift them up onto the counter.
“Too slow,” the man says, talking to the bank teller he first singled out. He pumps the shotgun and levels it at her chest. “You’re coming with us,” he says.
“No, no,” she says.
“Wait!”
Everybody turns to the voice. It takes a moment to realize that they’ve all turned toward me, and a longer moment to figure out the reason for that—I’m the one who spoke. The man holding the shotgun on the bank teller turns his head toward me.
“What?” he says.
“Eddie,” Jodie says, “what are you doing?”
I have no idea. People are staring at me like I’m an anomaly, like they haven’t seen a twenty-nine-year-old white guy speaking in a bank before. I get onto my knees, then onto my feet, swaying slightly, with still no idea what I’m doing or why I called out. “I said wait,” I say, and my voice is firm.
“We all heard what you said,” he says, “and I think we’re all curious now as to what you’re planning on doing next.”
“You’ve got what you came for,” I say, and the girl with the gun pointed at her takes the distraction to duck down behind the counter. Everybody back there does.
The man turns back to where she just was. “Hey, get back up here.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Please. You don’t have to hurt anybody else,” I say.
“I didn’t realize you were giving the orders here,” he says, looking over the counter for the woman. He can’t get an angle on her.
“Eddie,” Jodie says.
“It’s okay, Jodie.”
“We have to go,” another of them says, his finger pressed against his ear, listening to something small. “The police are only two minutes away.”
“Shit,” the first guy says, and he’s staring at me now. “Okay, buddy, you’re volunteering.”
“I’ll do what you want as long as you don’t hurt anybody else,” I say.
He offers a short, cold laugh. “No, you got it all wrong. You didn’t volunteer yourself, you went ahead and volunteered that pretty little thing next to you.”
“Don’t,” I say, and I step toward the man coming toward me and put my hand out in a stopping gesture. He doesn’t even slow down. He comes in around my arm and hits me with the gun in the side of my face, hard enough to knock me down.
“Eddie . . .” Jodie is pulled to her feet.
Things are out of focus. I’ve fallen onto my side. I get my hands onto the ground and push up. There are two Jodies. Twelve gunmen. They pick up the bags of cash and head for the door. Nobody else is moving. Nobody else is helping. The twelve men turn back into six, they’re at the door and they have Jodie with them. I figure if the police are only two minutes away they’re probably driving and the Friday lunchtime traffic has brought them to a crawl.