The Survivor (2 page)

The manager’s screams continued. The big man turned to look helplessly at the crew leader, who said with quiet authority, “She is near the duress alarm. Put her down.”

“Look, Six, how many we gonna kill?”

Crew leader,
Nate thought.
Number Six.

The leader’s boots tapped as he crossed the room. Sheetrock dust flecked his back. He raised his arms, and the automatic rifle coughed, tapping a line of holes through the woman’s stiff suit, the percussion and horror nearly knocking Nate off the ledge. The woman remained grotesquely standing, propped against the open vault door, until Six placed two fingers on her shoulder and tipped her over. She slapped the floor, one arm unfurling, her rings clacking tile. A pearl earring skittered away, pinwheeling off a desk leg.

Several people yelped on the main floor, and a child began to wail, a single wavering note. A middle-aged man choked out a series of sobs, blurred against the floor into something feral.

“One dead or twenty—it carries the same sentence.” The crew leader’s voice remained exceedingly even, almost peaceful. He brushed white powder from his shoulder. “I’ll handle the vault. Empty the teller drawers.” He handed off the automatic rifle and stepped toward the safe-deposit boxes, pointing. “Here next. Then here.”

The big man moved obediently toward the teller line, Nate jerking his head back from the gap. As the footsteps neared, he pressed his face into his straining biceps. His wet shirt had gone to ice against his lower back, the wind riffling the hem. He realized he was biting into his own flesh to keep quiet.

The man passed by the window, shoving aside the teller’s lifeless leg with his boot. He set his Beretta on a low file cabinet, looped the rifle over his shoulder, and began emptying teller drawers into a black trash bag.

A scream knifed through the bank, pronounced even out on the ledge. Nate risked another peek across the room, his face grinding the concrete to give himself a one-eyed vantage. A customer was bucking on her stomach, both masked men across the main floor oriented toward her. Nate wondered what the hell she was doing until a pigtailed girl, maybe four years old, popped out from beneath her and ran toward the exit. Two handgun barrels traced the girl’s movement. The mother screamed again, lunging to a knee and grabbing her daughter’s flailing arm. The man nearest kicked the woman in the face, blood erupting from her lip, and she fell limply, dragging the girl to the floor with her. The girl scooted away, hands and feet scrabbling for purchase, a streak of her mother’s blood darkening the lobe of one ear. She struck a pillar, her feet still trying to propel her back until she realized she had nowhere to go. Shivering violently, she hugged her legs, buried her face in the bumps of her knees, and shut off like an unplugged TV.

The other man—Number Two?—walked over and stared down at her. “Get back over there with the others. Go on. Move it.”

The girl remained motionless. He aimed the gun loosely at her head.

At the sight Nate pressed forward into the window gap, long-buried paternal instincts firing. The pane notched farther open against the pressure of his elbow. A few feet in front of Nate, the big man watched the scene unfolding on the main floor. He made a soft noise of deference in his throat and returned his focus to the next teller drawer, shoulder blades shifting beneath the charcoal flight suit.

Number Two firmed both hands on a Beretta, sighting on the girl. “You’re gonna want to listen now, girlie.”

The saw revved back to life over in the vault, a metallic grinding, and the ski mask pulsed again where Number Two’s mouth would be—a final warning to the girl.

One dead or twenty—it carries the same sentence.

Nate looked down at the pretty green dead eyes aimed up at him. Across to the clip-on pearl earring resting on the dappled tile. Then over at the Beretta, sitting on the low file cabinet next to the big man’s turned back, less than two steps from the windowsill.

Nate strained against the casement window, and it gave another few inches, enough for him to worm his torso through. Headfirst, he cascaded down over the dead teller. Her body softened his landing, though the circular saw’s teeth-rattling reverberation in the concrete walls obscured all sound. Three of the robbers were out of sight in the vault. The big man was a few feet away, his back still turned, rummaging in a cash drawer. The two across on the main floor stayed focused on the girl. Both pistols were now raised, their boots shuffling in at her. Still she didn’t move, her head bowed, arms fastened around her bent legs.

Rising, Nate felt the complaint of his thirty-six-year-old knees. The listlessness of the past several months fell away, and for the first time in a long damn time he sensed himself moving without hesitation. With something like purpose.

Stepping forward, he reached for the Beretta on the file cabinet.

Chapter 3

Nate lifted the Beretta, swung the barrel to the back of the big man’s head, and fired. The trigger hitched, a quarter-second delay, and somewhere between recoil and the flare of scarlet against the teller glass he registered that the first trigger pull had been double-action. From here on out, the Beretta would be single-action.

The gunshot was all but silent compared to the amplified screech of the saw within the vault. The big man’s knees struck the ground as he collapsed, shuddering his shoulders and clearing Nate’s view to the masked men on the main floor.

And theirs to him.

Both masks swiveled in puzzlement to take him in, the stillness of the moment stretching out in painful slow motion. The heads cocked slightly, an instinctive attack-dog tilt, sending an icy ripple up Nate’s spine. He realized what looked off about the faces: There were no eyes. Mesh had been stitched over the holes so that no flesh was visible, an insectoid effect that smoothed the heads to disturbing perfection.

With detached tranquillity, Nate watched their gloved hands rise, blued steel glinting inside curled fingers. A bullet lasered past his face, close enough to trail heat across his cheek. He was, it struck him, utterly unafraid. In his indifference he felt a weight lift from his shoulders, felt a smile curve his lips, felt imaginary manacles release. And then his hands, too, were lifting. He reminded himself with alarming calmness that he had to keep his wrists steady as he’d learned in basic, that he should not anticipate recoil, that he was, if not an ace, a decent shot. The air around his head took form as more bullets rocketed past, and he aimed across the teller partition at the first man and squeezed, and half the masked head went to red mist. The man toppled out of sight. His companion was shooting, the muzzle flashing but still inaudible beneath the earsplitting action of the saw. Nate was firing, too, the far wall giving off little puffs of drywall, spent cartridges cartwheeling across his field of vision. He stepped forward through the laid-open teller gate into the incoming bullets, to his death, his senses alive with the thrill of freedom—no, more than that. The thrill of
liberation.

Number Two’s mask was stretched at the mouth—he was screaming—and his arms were trembling. Nate watched the bore winking into view like a black eye, and he stared back, his thoughts pounding a suicide urge:

Steady your hand
.
Hit me.

But the barrel jerked left, right, bullets framing Nate’s silhouette. Nate replayed the man’s growled threat—
You’re gonna want to listen now, girlie
—and anger sharpened his focus. He felt the Beretta kick and kick in his hands until the flight suit’s fabric did a little dance above the man’s chest and he fell down and away.

Sometime in the past second or two, the saw had paused, leaving the pop of the bullets suddenly naked, and Nate turned quickly to face the vault door. A man emerged carrying the circular saw, hood pushed up atop his head, wearing an expression of mild surprise. Nate shot off his ear in a spray of black blood. The man swung his head back, and Nate put a bullet through the puzzled furrow between his eyes.

Really? That’s the best you assholes can do?

The back-strap checkering on the grip had bitten into the web of his thumb. The scent of cordite spiced the air, dragging him almost a decade into the past, to burning sand and blood in his eyes.

He blinked himself to the present. Four down, two to go.

Moving again behind the teller line, he looked down at the automatic rifle on the floor, contemplating an upgrade. But he couldn’t spare the time untangling the sling from the body, so he walked swiftly toward the vault door, stepping across workers’ quivering bodies. “Sorry, ’scuse me, sorry.”

Sobs and gasps answered him. A wail of sirens grew audible, faint enough to be imaginary.

A pistol reached around the vault jamb, firing blindly. Nate drew a careful bead on the gun hand and kept on, swift and steady, not because of courage or heroism but because he hadn’t a thing to lose. He fired once, the round clanging off the vault door, and then he adjusted and fired twice more, a whirl of muscle memory, reaction, and instinct. The pistol flipped back, the fingers spreading comically wide, as if waving, and the hand vanished intact.

Five more steps brought Nate to the vault door, and he strolled through without hesitation. A man sat in the far corner, aiming at the doorway, locked elbows resting on the shelf of his knees. He took a clear-as-day shot at Nate’s head, but the wind of the bullet kissed the side of Nate’s neck, the slug bouncing around the vault more times than seemed plausible. Nate swung the pistol, figuring he was too close to bother with the sights, and unloaded two shots into the guy’s gut. Simultaneously he heard the scuff of a boot in the blind spot behind him. He sidestepped, the coolness of metal brushing his neck and turning to a dagger of flame in his trapezius. Twisting, he shot, but the hammer clicked dryly—marking the fastest fifteen rounds he’d ever spent.

The blade tweaked the muscle down the length of his arm, barbed wire tugged through a vein. Heat poured into his little finger. A half turn of his neck brought the handle of a sleek metal letter opener visible, sticking up out of him like an Indian brave’s feather.

He said, “Ouch.”

His eyes tracked to the man who had stabbed him. The ski mask was still on, the mesh patches of the eyes shiny under the fluorescent glow of the vault lights, but from the man’s bearing Nate recognized him.

Number Six.

Up close the crew leader seemed slight—slender-hipped and wiry, built for maximum efficiency. He couldn’t have been more than five foot nine, shorter than his associates. Nate’s eyes were drawn to a band of exposed flesh, the white skin striking against the comprehensive black getup. The man had peeled back the glove of his right hand, the meat at the base of the thumb pink from where Nate had shot the pistol from his grip. He held the palm up and at an angle, babying it, which gave Nate a flush of schoolyard pride.

They faced each other from a few paces, the masked man bare-handed, Nate holding a bulletless gun, Nate realizing with some disappointment that no one would be killing anyone else at the moment. He lifted his good shoulder in a half shrug, then drew back the Beretta and threw it at the guy’s face. Number Six barely flinched, the gun clipping his forehead. He touched a hand to the black fabric at the point of impact, then rolled his fingertips together, a man accustomed to checking for his own blood. He gave off nothing resembling emotion.

The sirens, now louder.

That dead-calm voice again, the faint accent. “He will be greatly angered by you.”

Nate said, “Tell whoever
he
is to take a number.”

The man pointed at him. “You have no idea what you have done.”

These words—even more, the gravity behind them—cut through Nate’s exhilaration, an arctic chill. For the first time since climbing in off that ledge, he felt fear, cold and pure.

The man took a step back and then another, those patches of mesh trained on Nate. “He will make you pay,” he said, “in ways you can’t imagine.” Then he slid past the vault door, his footsteps pattering off.

Dazed, Nate looked around, getting his bearings. Aside from the imposing wall of safe-deposit boxes, the vault was disappointingly ordinary. Concrete walls, file cabinets, the few freestanding Diebold safes no more impressive than airport lockers. A cardboard legal box on the floor held overflow holiday envelopes and stray staplers; Nate figured it to be the home of the letter opener protruding from his shoulder. One safe was cracked open, and the deposit boxes had been attacked. Thick metal hinges protruded in V-shaped ridges, bordering each column of boxes. Most of the hinges had been sheared off by the saw, leaving the metal door of each individual box embedded, its dead bolt still thrown. Red rectangular handle magnets, the kind used to lift sheet metal from a stack, remained adhered to the closest set of boxes, floating. Nate could see where someone had used them to pry off some of the little doors. A few freed boxes lay open on the tiles, foreign currency, jewelry, and legal documents scattered by the dead man’s boots. A neat little scheme—attack the hinges, yank off the doors, and voilà—unearned wealth.

Muffled cries from the bank floor jarred Nate from his reluctant admiration. He thought of the kill order—
Put her down
—and his stomach roiled.
One dead or twenty—it carries the same sentence.
Human lives weighed against a cold efficiency. The terror that those people must have felt.

He walked back out to the bank floor. All of them still lying on their stomachs. Quiet sobbing. A few heads beginning to stir. The squeal of tires carried up from the street.

He cleared his throat. “It’s okay now, everyone. Those guys are gone. Or dead, I guess. You’re all safe. You can get up.”

But they all stayed on the floor.

Nate wondered briefly if this was actually real and not some bizarre dream. “I promise you,” he said, “no one’ll hurt you now. Please don’t be scared anymore.” He took a pleading step forward, a lightning bolt of pain electrifying his left side. Wincing, he tried to reach back to grip the handle of the letter opener, but the movement just made it bob away from his fingertips.