Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

I can’t, I thought. I’m blind.

Open your eyes and get the fuck up. There’s no time.

To my surprise, I could see. I lay on my side, wedged in between my coffee table and the beige sectional that once dominated the living room of the first apartment that Allie and I lived in after we got married. Too large for the apartment, it fit just fine in my man-cave, down here with the flat screen television and all my other fantasy furnishings. I felt the hard footrest, retracted inside the frame, pressing against my skin through my Carolina tee shirt. My ass felt it through my jogging pants.

Despite what it had witnessed, the television kept playing.

“SCORE! Another three-pointer by Harrison Barnes, the freshman from Ames, Iowa!”

The game. The one I was watching right before…

The ceiling creaked above my head with the pressure of feet on the floor upstairs. I blinked at the acoustic tile I had paid a man to install last year in order to hide the unsightly ductwork and utility lines. The speckled pattern came into focus as my brain continued reassembling itself.

There are men in my house, I thought.

Oh, yeah , Bobby said through the thunder in my skull. Dangerous ones. Move your ass, Swanson.

I blinked, closed my eyes and felt my skull. Right there at the back, where my father used to slap me for one insolent comment or another, a baseball-sized lump rose from bone and skin. It screamed when I touched it, a shout so powerful that it stole my breath and dropped my jaw in search for more air. When I opened my eyes again, they fixated on the foot of the stairs, where someone had haphazardly dropped the aluminum softball bat that had smashed into my skull. It didn’t belong there; it belonged in the back, with the pool table, resting against the wall by the short staircase that led up to the backyard, where I’d leaned it after my last softball game a year, year and a half ago. They’d cracked me over the head with it. They’d left me for dead.

But you’re not dead. Game on, motherfucker, you need to move your ass right now.

I forgot the door, I thought. I didn’t lock the…

Fuck the door; doesn’t matter now how they got in. It only matters how they get out.

I got up, staggered three steps, and collapsed on the far end of the sectional. My balance. They’d knocked the balance clean out of my ears.

I said get up , you sorry sack of shit, get the fuck up and handle this!

So I got up again. On the wall, the 2010-2011 University of North Carolina men’s basketball squad stared at me in their coats and ties above a calendar showing the month of February. Smiling, happy, excited. They’d had a full view of the back door but hadn’t said a word to me. My eyes zeroed in on Harrison Barnes, he of the recent three-pointer.

Why didn’t you warn me?

Barnes didn’t answer.

I almost touched my head again but caught myself. My stomach balled up around the beer and summer sausage I’d been eating when I turned around and saw the two men I didn’t know standing right behind my goddamned sofa in the moment before the one on the left swung the bat.

The police. I have to call the police.

My heart pumped white-hot adrenaline into my legs. They quivered and almost dumped me again, but they held. Instinctively, I looked down at the coffee table in search of my phone. I didn’t find it there, or on the entertainment center, either, or on the pool table or the bar or any of the other places I usually chucked it without giving the first thought to the possibility that it might become vital to my survival. I’d left it…

Upstairs on the kitchen counter, in its charger. Up there with them .

You’re on your own, Devil Dog, Bobby said. You’ll have time to dial the 9 and maybe a 1 before they realize you’re not dead yet and they come to finish the job. It’s all you, Swanson.

“And it’s a foul by Virginia Tech! Tyler Zeller goes to the line!”

On the wall, the junior from Washington, Indiana took to the free throw line in the Dean Dome in Chapel Hill. His stadium. His court. His home.

I took to the line. I rounded the edge of the sectional and headed for the bar, where the gun safe stood beside the glass-fronted liquor cabinet.

Move your ass, Bobby hissed again. Move it fast. You don’t have much time.

I blinked at the combination dial on the safe’s narrow rectangular door. The combination itself leapt to the front of my mind easily enough-05-24-77, Allie’s date of birth—but the numbers themselves presented a challenge. The dial divided in two, three, two before my eyes, their focusing mechanisms knocked loose by the impact of bat on bone.

Hurry!

I reached for the dial. My hand held it still. “I’m trying,” I whispered aloud.

Try harder. Maybe they’ll look around your living room for a few minutes or poke around in the office, sack your drawers and grab the laptop. But then they’ll go upstairs. And they’ll look in the bedrooms.

Zero. Five. Two.

These motherfuckers have overrun your perimeter. What do you think’s going to happen when they find your wife sleeping in her underwear?

Four. Seven.

MOVE YOUR ASS!

“I am!” I whimpered now, tears streaming down my cheeks as my trembling hands worked the dial. On the final seven, the tumblers clicked and I twisted the handle, pulling open the fireproof door. On the top shelf, my and Allie’s life insurance papers shared a file folder with our wills. Documentation of Abby’s college fund, the deed to our house. Account numbers, passwords, the entirety of our financial lives on paper. Two boxes of Russian surplus 7.62mm cartridges. Standing on its stock against the green velvet interior, the Kalashnikov.

Come on! Man up!

I took the thirty-round banana clip from its resting place beside the box of bullets. The cartridges, copper-coated stingers crimped into the rocket of the brass casing, gleamed in the dim light over the bar. The magazine contained ten rounds; Bobby had said to always keep a loaded magazine, always, because you won’t have time to prepare one when the shit hits the fan. Load ten so you don’t stress the spring. Change to a different magazine every month, two months. Leave any magazine loaded too long, the spring will weaken and your weapon will jam.

I hadn’t changed the magazine in two years.

Too late now. Lock and load!

I tapped the magazine on my thigh to align the rounds, as Bobby had shown me. Holding the rifle by the pistol grip, I slipped the mag home just fore of the trigger guard, feeling it slide into place. I pulled the charging handle and released it. It slammed forward with a metallic click , pulling a round from the magazine and seating it in the firing chamber.

“Locked and loaded,” I whispered.

Safety off .

My right thumb reached up and flicked the switch.

Game on, bitch .

“Game on,” I repeated.

The door stood partially open at the top of the stairs. They hadn’t thought enough of me to even close the door on my body. The light over the stove peeked through the foot-wide space as I mounted the stairs and began my slow climb. I kept the AK-47 trained on that light. The wooden stock rested in the pocket of my shoulder, my trigger finger extended and ready beside the trigger guard No prisoners , Bobby said.

“No prisoners,” I murmured.

My stairs were wood, plain pine board, but I had paid to carpet them in the basement renovation. The carpet and the pad beneath it muted the creaks from the wood as I moved my weight over it. The men would not hear me. They couldn’t have heard me, not over the creaking of the floorboards. Not over their furtive whispers, which grew in volume as I neared the top of the staircase.