Stagger Bay (6 page)

The only things existing now were the door to that classroom and the children’s sobs leaking from it. I was drenched in sweat as if I’d taken a shower with my clothes on, I was breathing like a bellows as I left the cover of the doorframe and started slowly across the wide open kill-zone of that hallway, stepping gingerly so as not to slip and fall on Wayne’s entrails, the .38 extended stiff-armed to my front.

The skinhead lay face down atop his M-16, kicking rapidly at the floor with both steel toe boots alternately like he was trying to scamper horizontally through the linoleum and away from this whole fiasco. The entrance wound in his back wasn’t spurting or welling with blood – instead a red splotch slowly, quietly spread on his denim vest.

That meant his heart had stopped, and his horizontal shit-kicking two-step was no more than his cortical ganglia firing reflexively in denial of his own end. He wasn’t a threat so I put him from my mind as irrelevant – ‘No time, no time,’ a voice in the back of my throat wanted to moan.

Through the door I saw the weasel leaning heavily against the teacher’s desk. His right arm hung down limp from his smashed and bloody shoulder. The canvas bag and his .45 lay on the desk but his other hand was out of sight. I kept my pistol pointed at him as I passed through the doorway and stepped over the skinhead’s spasming corpse.

The children were crowded against the wall, sitting or on their knees, many of them with their hands behind their heads like they were under arrest. They squirmed and cried; snot and tears streaked most of their faces.

The school janitor, a small man with wavy black hair, lay on the floor in front of them. His mop was still clutched in his outstretched hand as he sprawled there, shot dead trying to defend them with it.

The teacher gaped at my mauled remnant of a face, and several of the children whimpered even harder when they saw me. Hell, I looked worse than the Bad Guy here, with half my head a gory ruin. But at least I was becoming numb now.

I held up my left hand to shield the bloody crater in my face from the children’s horrified view. I wrenched my single-eyed gaze away from all those staring little faces and turned toward the Weasel. Behind me, the dead skinhead’s steel toes stopped drumming against the floor.

The Weasel was a barely contained bundle of nervous energy, bandy-muscled and intense; fully alive – as alive as me or any of these children. His previously hidden hand was now revealed, holding up a grenade rigidly akimbo. The pin was pulled – only the pressure of his hand kept the spoon from flying away and the fuse from igniting.

He glared wildly at me, the bridge of his nose wrinkled rock hard like a marble bust. "Think you're bad, motherfucker? You back off, right now, or all these kids get splashed." He appeared on the edge of hysteria.

Someone outside was barking something into a megaphone – the cops, of course. But they were out there. It was a whole different world in here.

I limped robotic and stiff-legged toward this last threat, aiming dead-on at Weasel.

"Stop. Stop right there or I’ll do it, man, I’ll do it,” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth as he clutched the grenade like some sort of talisman guarding him from the reality of consequence.

I did stop, the muzzle of the .38 about a foot from his sweating face. I was wobbling badly on my feet now, and I had to finish this before I fell down for good. Weasel would honor his threat and drop the grenade or throw it any second now.

Without turning I mumbled to Teacher. "Down, get them down." My croaking voice didn’t sound human, even to me.

At first she made no reply. Then realization must have dawned in her distracted mind: “Lie down children, lie down now,” she said.

I could barely hear her voice through the growing roar in my ears. I sensed rather than heard all the kids stirring as they obeyed her.

“What --?” Weasel began, staring at me in incomprehension as I carefully shot him, right between the eyes.

Blood and brains squirted out the back of his head, his eyeballs bulged onto his cheeks from over-pressure, and he dropped like the sack of shit he was. His grip loosened as he fell brain dead, and the spoon flew off his grenade with a tinkle.

I toppled forward atop him, fumbling for the grenade as if it were a loose inflated ovoid in some kind of team sport championship game. I grabbed it with my numb fingers and pulled it in tight to my stomach and landed heavily on my side, body curved to maybe shape the blast a little bit away from the children.

Time slowed way down as I lay there and waited forever. When I finally realized the main charge wasn’t going to detonate, an epiphany sputtered and fizzled through my sodden brain: This is what it comes down to, I thought – a freaking hang fire, that’s all it was.

I lay there for a moment on my side, stunned for the second time since the start of this whole thing by the mere fact of my continued survival. Then the last scraps of my strength gave way, and I lost my grip on the grenade and rolled onto my back.

The cops were coming into the building now, baying at each other like hounds as they cleared the rooms in turn and by the numbers. Outside, ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ finally ended and the DJ began spieling an excited monolog about the hostage situation at the school. This whole fracas had lasted less than three or four minutes from beginning to end.

Despite the growing cold seeping into my bones, I was mentally spry enough to wonder if they’d get an ambulance to me in time. To tell the truth I was getting pretty tuckered, and a dirt nap didn’t sound like that unpleasant of a prospect. I looked up at the darkening ceiling for a while and then I managed to peer around at the hysterical children, all of them unharmed as far as I could see.

My eye lit on the wall clock, and I tracked the second hand as it swept round the dial. I seemed to be riding an eternal present here. How strange to lie here counting each new ‘now’ as it came into existence with every second ticked off by that ratcheting clock hand, surprised each time that I was still there to see it.

I was still wondering what was going to happen next even as everything faded to black.

Chapter 12

I died on the way to the hospital but they weren’t willing to let me go, they insisted on bringing me back with their drugs and machines. I remember a dream wherein I bobbled balloon-like around the ceiling of the ambulance, looking down at my torn bloody body from outside as latex-gloved hands scuttling over me like crabs on a drowned corpse; hands doing hateful things to me. But the hallucination ended when I ectoplasmically burrowed back into that meat puppet shell.

I remember frantic voices and bright lights, and the acrid medicinal stench of the E.R. I knew so well from my misbegotten youth. They’d successfully jump-started me back into the land of the living but I was living in pulses by then, fading in and out until it all went completely black again as they wheeled me into the O.R.

I went away, for how long I couldn’t tell you. There was just enough consciousness flickering through me that I had a dim somatic self-awareness – but not enough to know my name or care about my situation.

My ego was on hold. ‘I’ no longer existed. ‘I’ was a plant, a vegetable enjoying my unconsciousness.

There was none of the pain of being a human, none of the burden of identity. Just sweet dreamless oblivion. It would have been nice to stay in that nirvana forever, but it wasn’t to be: my eye opened and I stared up at the plump pretty blonde nurse hovering over me.

She was adjusting some piece of equipment out of my field of vision. Wires and tubes were stuck all over me, their coordinated beeps chorusing throughout the room. Half my head was cocooned in bandages, and there was an agony where my left eye had been.

The nurse sensed me looking, and our gazes locked. She had beautiful hazel eyes that widened as she gasped; but she got her game face back on fast, gifting me with a smile.

“The children,” I groaned.

She shook her head, not understanding my gargling attempt at speech. I growled in frustration and heaved up off the bed. The nurse pressed my call button over and over and doctors, interns and RNs ran in like they had nothing better to do.

“Relax, Markus,” the oldest doctor said, pressing my shoulders back down. “You need to rest.”

I was too weak to fight the pin. And besides, the look he gave me wasn’t hostile. He was probably a pretty nice guy, a gray haired old veteran of the medical wars.

“The children,” I whispered, all energy fading fast.

He finally understood: “The children are all just fine, Markus. Not one has a scratch on them.”

“Okay then,” I muttered, and sank into blackness again.

Chapter 13

“It’s a miracle, really,” Doctor told me, shaking his distinguished gray head; residents and nurses flanked him as if adding moral support to his expertise by their numbers. “A few millimeters to the right and you’d be dead, or a vegetable.

“The bullet passed completely through the orbital bones of the left socket and out. The brain was physically untouched except for hydrostatic shock, but I’m afraid the eye is completely gone.”

I reached up to touch the bandages swathing the left side of my head and face. Even through the excellent dope they had me pumped up with, I could still feel throbbing pain in the hole where my eye had been.

“How’s about bringing me a mirror?” I said.

Dorcas, the same blonde nurse I’d first woken to, went and fetched one. I held it up to take a gander at myself. They’d done a good job; the bandages were wrapped pretty neatly.

The right side of my face looked completely normal. I plucked at the clean white gauze concealing the left half, lifting the bandages away.

Doctor raised a hand as if to stop me. “I don’t think this is a good idea, Markus.”

I looked at him, and his hand dropped. Even though I was a convalescent Cyclops, I was still twice as wide as him and fully conscious this time.

“Let’s just call it a self-diagnostic, Doc,” I said as I finished pulling the bandages off. “I’ll be my own second opinion.”

I raised the mirror and studied my reflection: the angry red pit where my left eye had been; the stitches radiating outward from the weeping hole like the cracks you’d see fanning out around a bullet hole in a windshield after someone got shot helpless and terrified in their car.

Slash had popped me at point-blank range so the muzzle gases had left a grayish stain surrounding the wound; the packing and un-ignited cordite had peppered into my skin. I’d be wearing that facial tattoo for the rest of my life as a sweet little additional embellishment.

The empty eye socket and the gunpowder stain looked fake somehow, like something out of a horror movie. It wasn’t me, couldn’t be.

But it was. My jaw clenched so tight the muscles thrummed a drum roll in my temples that wouldn’t stop; my teeth squeaked and ground together.

Someone fumbled at me, holding me down as a needle slid into my arm and everything started feeling right again. As I slipped back home into darkness I opened my eye and spoke to the faces surrounding me.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all good. I wasn’t much to look at before, so no harm done, eh?” I rolled my head on my pillow, closing my eye to shut them all out. After a short while I got to go to sleep again.

Chapter 14

When I came to the next time I was surrounded by cops; they filled my hospital room to overflowing. I cringed inside, flashing back to the day they took me from my family. I recognized a few of the veterans, seven years older now. But most of the cops in the room looked like rookies, their faces unfamiliar. There’d been a lot of turnover in the SBPD while I was away.

A lot of these Badges were smiling at me, which wasn’t reassuring at all. The only times I could remember members of law enforcement being happy around me had been when they were about to put me in a major hurt locker.

“Hello, Markus,” the cop with the most insignia said from a folding chair next to my bed.

He appeared extremely young to be chief; he also looked somehow familiar. He had a bear-like girth; he could probably use a little cardio work. He was wearing makeup, which was none of my business of course.

“I am Chief Jansen,” he said, palms together and fingers steepled. “How are we feeling today?”

His eyes roved my maimed face boldly, paying close attention to the bandages concealing my wounds. I looked away toward the corner of the hospital room where a lanky horse-faced woman perched on the edge of another folding chair, typing on a court recorder machine.

One cop aimed the mike of a tape recorder at me; another officer discretely clicked away with a digital camera, alternating his shots between me and the Chief. A third pointed a camcorder my way, making sure to include Chief Jansen in the frame as much as possible. I flashed then that Jansen was wearing the make-up so he wouldn’t appear as corpse-like as I was going to on the deposition video.

“We will have your statement,” the Chief said. “We have many questions. We are very interested in hearing what you have to say.”

“I want a lawyer,” I said.

Jansen pursed his meaty lips, and then smiled. “We can supply representation if that makes you feel more comfortable. But why do you even think you need a lawyer, Markus?”

My one remaining eye commenced with a nervous tic. Did he think I’d gotten a sudden case of amnesia? Did he think I’d forgotten that the last time I talked to the cops I’d done seven years for a crime I didn’t commit?

But keeping my mouth shut would’ve been chicken-shit and useless. I was in the fish bowl just like inside, I couldn’t make this a safe place just by playing possum.

“I’m ain’t copping to nothing, but obviously I was at the scene,” I said, as if grudgingly.

“Yes, you were. Forensics has put most of it together. That was an incredible fight you fought, a true work of art. We just need you to fill in a few of the blanks for us.”