Chapter 20
A
aron didn't know what was going on, but when the madness started, his first thought was for his sister Jennie.
He was turning to look toward the kiosk where her friend worked, but before he could locate her, some sort of explosion rocked the mall. Then some big guy grabbed another man, shoved him into Aaron's face, and yelled at them to get in the store. He seemed to be used to giving orders, so Aaron figured he was a cop.
Aaron got all tangled up with the skinny nerd who stumbled into him. For several long, maddening seconds, they both struggled to stay on their feet as each tried to disengage from the other. Aaron finally shoved the guy away and caught his balance.
The air was full of smoke from the blast. The mall's ventilation system was still working, circulating smoke that stung the eyes and nose. People ran everywhere, and Aaron couldn't take a step without somebody bumping into him.
He was about to start trying to fight his way toward the place he had last seen his sister when the skinny guy clutched at his arm and babbled, “We've got to hide, we've got to hide! They're killing everybody!”
Frustrated and angryâand scared, really scared, no point in denying itâAaron pushed the guy away and said, “Leave me alone, dude!”
“They're shooting!” the guy wailed.
Something about the man was vaguely familiar, but Aaron couldn't place him and didn't care.
“Hide if you want,” he snapped. “I gotta find Jennie!”
Then the mob surged against Aaron and pushed him in the opposite direction from the way he wanted to go. The skinny guy grabbed his arm and dragged him toward the sporting goods store. It was like trying to fight an ocean of panic. The wave pushed him into the store.
Feet tangled with his and he started to fall. He reached out for whatever he could grab, suddenly afraid that if he fell, these crazy people would trample him to death. That was a very real danger in situations like this. Aaron had been at rock concerts where people had almost been killed that way.
The thing he grabbed to hold himself up as he half-fell was the arm of a wheelchair. As Aaron braced himself, he was shocked to find himself looking into the buzzard-like face of the old man who had nearly shot him the day before.
* * *
Pete wanted to yell at the crazy priest to stop, but he couldn't find the breath. Maddened shoppers banged into them as Father Steve pushed the wheelchair toward the sporting goods store. Pete was afraid the chair was going to turn over, and if it did he would spill out of it and be dead meat. The mob would stomp the life out of him.
Father Steve somehow kept the wheelchair upright and moving, though. It was like riding the bumper cars at an old-fashioned state fair midway.
Pete didn't know what was going on, but obviously it was bad. He hadn't heard shooting like that since the Battle of the Bulge, and when the explosion went off, it was like an artillery shell landing nearby. For a second Pete felt like he was back in France or Germany, fighting the Nazis.
Then he snapped back to the present. It sounded like there was a war going on, all right, but it wasn't
his
war. That one had been over for more than seventy years.
Father Steve pushed the wheelchair into the sporting goods store. The craziness still swirled around them, but Father Steve stopped behind a display of camping equipment just inside the entrance.
That stuff won't stop a bullet, Pete thought. He didn't know if the priest would be able to hear him over all the yelling and shooting, but he opened his mouth to say, “You need to . . . find some betterâ”
Before he could finish the warning, somebody bumped into the chair and grabbed its arm to steady himself. The guy almost fell into Pete's lap. Pete looked at him.
The punk!
With all the hell breaking loose in the mall, Pete had almost forgotten about spotting the kid who'd busted down his door a day earlier. Pete's outrage boiled up until he couldn't contain it. The world might be going mad around them, but fate had provided him with an opportunity to see that this punk got what was coming to him.
He clawed at the pocket on the side of the wheelchair and dragged out the Browning Hi-Power. As he brought it up, he gasped, “Don't . . . move! Father . . . This guy . . . is a thief!”
The punk's eyes bulged out at the sight of the 9mm. He reacted with the speed of youth, reaching down and clamping his hand around the BHP's barrel. That kept the slide from working. Pete tried to pull the trigger anyway, but the punk easily wrenched the gun out of his hand.
“Are you crazy, old man?” the punk yelled. “Try to shoot me again, will you?”
“Stop it!” Father Steve shouted. “I don't know what's going on here, but just stop it, both of you! The mall is under attack!”
The punk straightened and took a step back, still holding the Browning. He said to the priest, “Are you with this crazy old coot?”
“Yes, but there's no need toâ”
“Push him back farther into the store,” the punk went on. “Somebody's shootin' out there. You need to get him out of the line of fire.”
Pete said, “He's . . . a thief!” but Father Steve ignored him.
Instead the priest asked the punk, “What about you?”
The kid turned the gun around so he was holding the grip. He said, “I gotta find my sister,” and turned toward the store's entrance.
“Hey!” Pete yelped. “He's stealin' . . . my gun!”
The protest was too late. Father Steve was already turning the wheelchair away from the entrance and pushing it toward the rear of the store.
* * *
Jennie's brother Aaron had been right. Holly Stevens looked embarrassed when she caught sight of Jennie coming toward her. But then Holly laughed and shook her head.
“I was hoping nobody who knew me would see me in this outfit,” she said as Jennie came up to her. “I should have known better.”
“Surely I'm not the first one from our school to come by.”
“Well, no,” Holly admitted. “I've seen quite a few people I know, but well . . . you know how it is. Just because I know who they are doesn't mean they know who I am.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Jennie said. She was well aware that to the kids who were even borderline popular in their school, the outsiders and the misfits might as well not even exist. She went on, “You really don't have to worry, though. You look fine.”
“In this?” Holly waved her hand to indicate the German milkmaid's costume she wore. “I look like a lunatic!”
“No, you don't. It's sort of . . . cute?”
Holly rolled her eyes so hard they threatened to come out of their sockets. She changed the subject of her appearance by asking, “What are you doing here today?”
“Shopping, of course. Why else would somebody be at the mall on Black Friday?”
“In my case . . . trying to earn money.” Holly paused. “You know, I'll bet they could use a couple more girls part-time through Christmas, if you want me to put in a word for you.”
That actually wasn't a bad idea. If Jennie was going to make it to college next year, she would need quite a bit more money than her scholarships would provide, unless she was lucky and happened to get a full ride from one of the schools she'd applied to. She didn't expect that to happen, though. Her grades were very good, but not at the absolute top. And her extracurriculars . . .
Well, it was hard to come up with impressive extracurriculars when your father was a drunk, your brother was an ex-con, and your family was struggling just to barely get by.
Jennie wasn't going to say that to anybody, though, even her best friend, so she just nodded and told Holly, “Yeah, that'd be greâ”
The sudden, unexpected sound of gunshots interrupted her, followed instantly by screaming and yelling.
Holly let out a startled cry and looked around, wide-eyed with fear. So did Jennie. She searched for Aaron in the crowd, which began to swell back and forth in panic. Sure, he was a petty criminal and stayed high way too much of the time, but he was her big brother. Instinctively, she looked to him for protection.
She didn't see him, though, and then Holly grabbed her hand and jerked her away from the kiosk.
“Let's get out of here!” she said. “We'll be safer outside!”
Jennie didn't know about that. In school, they'd had it drilled into their heads that if there was ever a shooting, it was best to lock the door and stay right where they were.
That idea had never fully made sense to Jennie. It seemed logical to her that if somebody was shooting
inside
the school, it would be safer
outside.
Maybe the same thing was true of a mall.
And there was a
lot
of shooting going on. She could hear the swift reports hammering above the tumult of the panicked crowd. She really wanted to know where Aaron was, but as Holly tugged at her, Jennie gave up and let her friend pull her away from the kiosk.
Just then, something blew up. Both girls stumbled and went to their knees. The jeans Jennie wore protected her, but Holly's legs were bare under the milkmaid's skirt and she cried out in pain as the floor scraped her knees.
Jennie helped her up. There was an exit not far from there, and they joined the shoppers headed in that direction.
Before they could get there, a couple of men moved to block the doors. Both of them held guns of some sort. The weapons looked odd to Jennie, but dangerous at the same time.
One of the men yelled, “Stay back! Stay back!” while the other ordered, “Everyone down on the floor!”
The second man punctuated his order with a burst of gunfire over the heads of the crazed shoppers. Most of them stopped in their tracks, but a few continued charging toward the doors.
The two gunmen opened fire for real. No more warning shots.
Jennie was horrified as she saw men and women jerked to a sudden stop by the impact of the bullets pounding into them. Skin burst and crimson sprays of blood flew around them. It was like something from a movie, just special effects, Jennie thought, but at the same time, she knew it was real. Hideously real.
The people who'd been shot began to crumple. The men kept firing, and slugs zipped past the first targets to smash into the people who had been behind them. More screams added to the chaos. Even as the gunmen continued firing, they shouted, “Get down! Get down!”
Jennie practically tackled Holly and dragged her off her feet. Both girls sprawled on the floor. Staying on their feet was asking to be killed.
She kept an arm around Holly as they huddled there with terrified people pressed against them all around. Her heart slugged so hard in her chest that it felt like it was going to burst right through her ribs and out of her body.
She expected the killers to start moving through the crowd and shooting them one by one. That was what mass murderers did, wasn't it? Like everybody else, she had read about those bloody incidents and seen the news reports on TV.
This didn't seem to be the usual spree killing, though. Shots were coming from all over the mall, on both levels. That bomb had gone off. This was something different. This was . . . an attack.
A terrorist attack.
Jennie knew she was right as soon as that phrase went through her head. She had gotten a good enough look at the gunmen wielding the automatic weapons before she and Holly dived for the floor to know that they were both men in their twenties, with dark skin, dark hair, and beard stubble. Young men from the Middle East.
They stopped shooting. One of them dropped the empty magazine from his weapon and replaced it with a full one, then the second man did likewise. Jennie recognized what they were doing from action movies she'd seen.
“Stay down!” one of them called to the shoppers who had stretched out on the floor. “Stay down and no one else will be hurt!”
Jennie looked at the bloody shapes sprawled on the floor closer to the doors, the figures that had been chopped up so much by bullets that they barely looked human anymore, and she knew the men were lying.
The killing wasn't over.
It had barely gotten started.
Jennie wept silently for herself and her brother and hoped that Aaron was all right and then wished that he was here to hold her hand, the same way he had when they were little and she was scared.
But he wasn't, so she clung to her friend instead and waited to see what was going to happen and how long they were going to live.
Chapter 21
A
ll the department stores that anchored the mall had wide entrances into the mall itself, plus at least two entrances/exits that opened onto the parking lot.
When the shooting started, Jamie heard gunfire from enough different directions at once, including the store's second floor, that she knew instantly this was a coordinated attack. She'd heard enough talk about Taliban ambushes to recognize what was going on. Those were insurgents doing the firing.
No. They were insurgents in their own country.
Here in America they were terrorists, plain and simple.
She dropped the pair of driving gloves she'd been considering buying for Tom and turned swiftly toward the nearest doors that opened onto the parking lot. She didn't want to be trapped in there. The terrorists would have posted guards at the exits to keep everybody inside, but Jamie thought if there was only one man she might be able to get past him.
If she could put him down, then maybe some of the other shoppers and mall employees could escape, too.
Everybody in the place was panicked in one way or another. Some people ran around aimlessly, shouting questions. Others huddled behind store displays as if that would save them. Some just stood and stared, apparently frozen by fear.
Jamie moved through them like a shark through a school of smaller fish, cutting a path toward the doors. She wished she was armed. She'd always carried a sidearm when she was flying, but since coming home she'd gotten out of the habit.
Those guys doing the shooting had guns, she thought. Maybe she could take one away from them. That would help even the odds.
As she neared the exit she heard a man shouting for everyone to get down on the floor. More shots blasted. People screamed. Jamie saw several of the terrified shoppers dropping to the floor. More and more followed their example.
Jamie knelt behind a rack of dresses. She couldn't stay at her full height without being noticed. Moving at an awkward gait between a crouch and a crawl, she began to work her way toward the yelling gunmen.
She hadn't gone very far when a loud blast shook the floor under her. She stopped where she was and wondered for a frightening few seconds if the entire mall was going to collapse, or if more explosions were imminent.
After a moment, though, as the echoes died away, it appeared that there weren't going to be any more blasts, at least for now. The stench of smoke drifted through the store, along with another smell that Jamie, unfortunately, recognized.
The smell of burned human flesh.
She swallowed the impulse to gag at the grisly odor and forced herself to start moving again.
She reached a glass-topped and -fronted jewelry counter laid out in the shape of a square with an opening at one corner so a clerk could get inside it to work. A dozen people were lying on the floor nearby. Jamie gestured to get their attention, then pointed to the opening in the counter and motioned for them to crawl into the square. The wood and plastic and glass display case wouldn't offer much protection from high-powered bullets, but it was better than nothing.
Several people started moving in that direction, including a middle-aged woman and a teenage girl who looked enough like her that Jamie knew they were mother and daughter. The sight made her think of her own daughters, and her breath caught in her throat at the idea she might never see them again. She knew Tom would do a good job of raising the kids if anything happened to her, but she should have made sure that they all knew she loved them.
If she got the chance to tell them again . . .
Jamie pushed that thought out of her head. Her best chance of ever seeing her family again lay in concentrating on the situation in which she found herself now.
Not everyone tried to crawl into the scant cover of the jewelry counter. Some of the shoppers continued hugging the floor. Jamie couldn't do anything about that. She eased on past, staying low.
The shooting had stopped now, at least in this part of the store. Jamie could hear gunfire in the distance. Men were still shouting orders to stay down, though. They had their cowed victims on the floor and wanted to keep them there.
Jamie risked a glance around a rack of men's coats and saw that there were two gunmen standing near the exit doors. Both appeared to be Middle Eastern, looking a lot like members of the Taliban she had seen in Afghanistan.
That came as no surprise. The Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS, the names might change, but in the end they were all the same.
Barbarians. Killers that had no place in a civilized world.
Too bad there were two of them. One would have been easier to deal with. Jamie knew she would just have to do the best she could, though.
A sudden throb of pain from her leg reminded her that she was no longer whole. She asked herself what she was thinking about doing. She couldn't attack two ruthless terrorists armed with automatic weapons. Those guns would chop her to pieces as soon as she made a move toward the men.
Then a possible answer to her dilemma presented itself as one of the men strode forward, stalking past the bloody corpses of the luckless shoppers who had been killed in the first moments of the attack.
“Everyone stay on the floor,” this man said as the other one swung his weapon back and forth, covering the crowd near the doors. “If you stay down and do as you are told, you will not be hurt.”
Jamie didn't believe that. She knew all too well the bloodlust that men such as these directed at people they considered godless infidels. To them, nonbelievers were less than human, and slaughtering them was the same as stepping on bugs . . . or possibly even better, since spilling the blood of infidels would buy them rewards in their deranged version of paradise.
She had seen the behavior with her own eyes, again and again, but she still couldn't wrap her mind around the concept of having such sick brains. You couldn't negotiate with Islamic terrorists, you couldn't reason with them . . .
All you could do was wipe them off the face of the earth.
Jamie edged to her left, keeping one of the clothes racks between her and the first man as he approached. She had gotten a better look at their weapons by now and knew the killers carried Steyr TMPs, German-made machine pistols. The long magazines extending below the grips probably held thirty rounds, fully loaded. The men had fired quite a bit already, though, and Jamie didn't know how recently they had switched magazines.
The terrorist was only about fifteen feet from her now, stepping carefully among the huddled, trembling shoppers. Jamie couldn't see him, but she could track his movements easily enough by the sounds he made.
The two killers were outnumbered, maybe as much as fifty to one. Why didn't the people rise up against them and overwhelm them by sheer force of numbers?
Jamie knew the answer to that. These were civilians, and they were scared, and you couldn't fault them for that. When they woke up this morning, they had thought they were just going to the mall. They'd had no idea they were going into battle, despite all the jokes people made about how crowded the stores were on this day after Thanksgiving.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, Jamie thought wryly.
For all Jamie knew, she was the only veteran here, the only one who'd seen combat. So it was up to her to do something, and the time was almost here. The guy was right on the other side of the clothes rack that concealed her . . .
She surged upright and shoved the rack into him as hard as she could.
The move seemed to take the terrorist completely by surprise. He staggered under the impact and tried to bring up the machine pistol he held, but his arms tangled in the clothes on the rack. Behind him, people on the floor screamed and yelled and tried to get out of the way as Jamie kept pushing the man back.
Over by the doors, the second terrorist shouted angrily in a foreign language but held his fire, probably because he didn't want to take a chance on hitting his friend.
That restraint wouldn't last long, though, Jamie knew. Their so-called holy cause took precedence over everything, including friendship.
Anyway, the other guy probably figured this one would be happy to die for Allah.
Not all the people on the floor could scramble out of the way in time. The terrorist finally tripped over some of them and went down. As he did, Jamie vaulted over the clothes rack and landed on top of him. She drove the heel of her right hand up under his chin with all the strength she could muster, which slammed the back of his head on the floor and stunned him.
As she lunged toward the machine pistol now gripped loosely in his hand, the other man opened fire. Bullets ripped through the air above her head. In his killing frenzy, the terrorist was letting the Steyr ride up.
Jamie yanked the weapon loose from the senseless man underneath her and raised it. She didn't know how many bullets were left in the magazine, but at full auto, it wouldn't take long to burn through them. She pressed the trigger and fired a short burst.
The terrorist probably didn't expect a woman to fight back like that. He was just standing there out in the open, not trying to take any evasive action. He looked shocked when the three rounds slammed into his chest and knocked him back a step. His eyes opened impossibly wide as blood began to well from the wounds.
The Steyr slipped from his fingers and thudded to the floor. A second later, the dying terrorist followed the machine pistol as his knees folded up.
The man Jamie had knocked down chose that moment to regain his senses, roar something incoherent but obviously furious, and buck madly beneath her. He swung his left arm and crashed it into the side of her head, knocking her off of him.
She lost her hold on the machine pistol at the same time. It slid across the floor in the open space where everybody had tried to get out of the way of the fight.
The man rolled after Jamie, punching at her. His fists smacked into her body. She tried to fend him off, but he was caught up in the twisted emotions that fueled him and was fighting like a berserker. A wild, looping punch crashed into her jaw, jerked her head to the side, and threatened to knock her out.
Jamie struggled to hang on to consciousness. That was all she could do. She couldn't muster up enough strength to keep fighting. She struck out feebly as both of his hands closed around her neck. He dug a knee into her belly and leaned into her with his stranglehold.
He was going to crush her larynx, cut off her air, and suffocate her. She would die in a matter of minutes, she knew.
And there didn't seem to be anything she could do about it except stare up helplessly into his cruel, hate-distorted face. He hated her because she was an American, a woman, and an unbeliever. Any one of those things was enough to enrage him. Taken all together . . .
He was going to enjoy killing her. She could read that unholy glee in his eyes.
That was the last emotion he ever felt, because the next instant his head seemed to explode as bullets slammed into it from behind. A gruesome rain of blood, gray matter, and bone fragments pelted Jamie in the face. It sickened her, but the need for air was much more overpowering than her revulsion. She grabbed his hands, ripped them away from her throat, and hauled him to the side. He toppled off of her.
She rolled away from the corpse and lay there for a moment gasping for breath. A trembling hand pawed gore away from her mouth, nose, and eyes. She pushed herself up on her other elbow and looked around to see who had saved her.
A few yards away, the teenage girl Jamie had noticed earlier, the one in the University of Illinois sweatshirt who'd been with a woman who was obviously her mom, was on her knees with the Steyr TMP cradled in both hands. Her eyes were wide with awe.
“Son of a
bitch
!” she exclaimed. “This thing can really shoot!”
Jamie sat up, still a little breathless, and said, “Give it to me.”
Jamie reached over, tore the gun out of the girl's hands, and then twisted back toward the dead terrorist. She started slapping the man's pockets, searching for extra magazines.
The two terrorists charged with blocking this exit were dead, Jamie thought, but that didn't mean the battle was over.