SIXTY

THE BIRTHDAY GIRL, LEVANNA, AND HER PINK-INFATUATED little sister, Nicolina, were not at their mother's side. I scanned the crowd of shoppers, but didn't see the girls.

When I hurried to Viola and seized her by the shoulder from behind, she reacted with a start and dropped her shopping bag.

"What're you doing here?" I demanded.

"Odd! You scared the salt off my crackers."

"Where are the girls?"

"With Sharlene."

"Why aren't you with them?"

Picking up the shopping bag, she said, "Hadn't done birthday shopping yet. Got to have a gift. Came here just quick for these Roller-blades."

"Your dream," I reminded her urgently. "This is your dream."

Her eyes widened. "But I'm just in and out quick, and I'm not at the movies."

"It's not going to be at the theater. It's happening here."

For an instant her breath caught in her throat as terror cocked the hammers of her heart.

"Get out of here," I said. "Get out of here now."

She exhaled explosively, looked wildly around as if any shopper might be a killer, or all of them, and she started toward the exit to the promenade.

"No!" I pulled her close to me. People were looking at us. What did it matter? "It's not safe that way."

"Where?" she asked.

I turned her around. "Go to the back of this floor, through the athletic shoes, through sporting goods. There's a stockroom not far from where you bought Rollerblades. Go to the stockroom. Hide there."

She started away, stopped, looked at me. 'Aren't you coming?"

"No."

"Where are you going?"

"Into it."

"Don't," she pleaded.

"Go now!"

As she moved toward the back of the department store, I hurried out into the mall promenade.

Here at the north end of the Green Moon Mall, the forty-foot waterfall tumbled over a cliff of man-made rocks, feeding the stream that ran the length of the public concourse. As I passed the base of the falls, the rumble and splash sounded uncannily like the roar of a crowd.

Patterns of darkness and light. Darkness and light as in Viola's dream. The shadows were cast by palm trees that rose alongside the stream.

Looking up into the queen palms, up toward the second floor of the promenade, I saw hundreds upon hundreds of bodachs gathered along the balustrade above, peering down into the open atrium.

Pressed one against the other, excited, eager, twitching and swaying, squirming like agitated spiders.

A throng of bargain-hunting shoppers filled the first floor of the promenade, browsing from store to store, unaware of the audience of malevolent spirits that was watching them with such anticipation.

My wonderful gift, my hateful gift, my terrifying gift led me along the promenade, farther south, faster, following the splash and tumble of the stream, in a frantic search for Simon Varner.

Not hundreds of bodachs. Thousands. I'd never seen such a horde as this, never imagined I ever would. They were like a celebratory Roman mob in the Colosseum, watching with delight as the Christians made unanswered prayers, waiting for the lions, for blood on the sand.

I had wondered why they had vanished from the streets. Here was the answer. Their hour had come.

As I passed a bed-and-bath store, the hard chatter of automatic gunfire erupted from the promenade ahead of me.

The first burst proved brief. For two seconds, three, after it ended, an impossible hush fell across the mall.

Hundreds of shoppers appeared to freeze as one. Although surely the water in the stream continued to move, it seemed to spill along its course without sound. I would not have been surprised if my watch had confirmed a miraculous stoppage of time.

One scream tore the silence, and at once a multitude answered it. The gun replied to the screamers with a longer death rattle than the first.

Recklessly, I pushed southward along the promenade. Progress wasn't easy because the panicked shoppers were running north away from the gunfire. People ricocheted off me, but I stayed on my feet, pressing toward a third burst of gunfire.

SIXTY-ONE

I WILL NOT TELL EVERYTHING I SAW. I WILL NOT. CANNOT. The dead deserve their dignity. The wounded, their privacy. Their loved ones, a little peace.

More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

The panicked throng surged past me, and I found myself among a scattering of victims, all on the ground, dead and wounded, fewer than I expected, but too many. I saw the blond bartender from Green Moon Lanes in her work uniform… and three others. Maybe they had come to the mall for lunch before work.

Whatever I am, I am not superhuman. I bleed. I suffer. This was more than I could handle. This was Malo Suerte Lake times ten.

Cruelty has a human heart… terror the human form divine.

Not Shakespeare. William Blake. Himself a piece of work.

Scores 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 amp; 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.