Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

He fires off the last three rounds in the 11–87’s magazine, listening to the shells clink to the asphalt to his right between shots, and then allows himself to sink to the ground behind the car, out of breath and in pain. Every shot sent a terrible force through his right shoulder and his wounds are now screaming. Sweat runs down his face and drips from the end of his nose. He blinks several times, and then looks for Diego.

He does not see him, nor does he hear him.

The air is silent and still but for the sound of his own breathing.

And then he does hear him. He hears the rapid rhythm of his boots. He hears running. He is far away and getting farther.

Ian nods. Good.

He grabs the box of deer slugs and starts reloading.

Maggie slides the handcuffs down the length of the arm of the desk, being careful they don’t rattle too much. She slides them beneath the wooden desktop, now detached from the frame, and then she is loose. The cuff slides off and dangles from her wrist. It is strange: a tightness in her chest seems to uncoil with the simple knowledge that her arm is free.

Her arm is free.

She looks up at Beatrice.

Beatrice does not look back.

The gun sits on the floor next to a pile of chips and candy bars.

Maggie slides out of the desk, eyes on Beatrice, and makes her way silently across the room. She is barefoot, so it is not difficult to be silent. But Beatrice must see her movements out of the corner of her eye, in her periphery, because she turns to look at her and says, ‘Sarah, what are you doing? Henry said to stay here.’

Maggie runs to the gun and picks it up.

Beatrice walks toward her, but stops when Maggie points the gun at her.

‘I don’t want to shoot you,’ she says with a shaky voice. ‘But I will.’

Beatrice is silent. She simply stares at Maggie with her wide, glistening eyes. Tears once more roll down her round face. Her chin trembles. Her shoulders sag with defeat.

‘We’re never gonna be a family again, are we?’

‘We never were,’ Maggie says.

Beatrice leans back against the wall and slides down it to a sitting position, with her knees up and her arms on her knees. She looks down at her lap. Maggie can see her cotton panties. Somehow that makes her seem very much like a little girl. Tears drip off her face and splash against her dress.

‘We never were,’ Beatrice says, eyes focused on nothing, and it seems as if she is speaking a foreign phrase for the first time. A foreign phrase whose meaning she does not quite understand.

She looks up at Maggie as Maggie backs her way out of the room.

‘We never were,’ Beatrice says again. Then: ‘But I loved you.’

‘I didn’t love you,’ Maggie says.

Then she turns around and runs out into the corridor, looking for a way out.

The first shot from above thwacks into the roof just to the left of Henry’s legs. He can feel the displaced air ripple outward and press itself against his body and he hears the bullet connect with the roof, an almost wet crack like a bone breaking open and spilling its marrow, and several splinters are thrown against his Levis.

‘Where the fuck did that come from?’

Ron behind him scanning the surrounding buildings, looking for the source of the gunshot whose bang still echoes through the empty streets of the town.

‘I don’t know,’ Henry says. ‘It had to come from above. The angle is wrong for-’

The second shot hits less than a foot shy of the place where Ron is crouched, and splinters fly from the roof and into his face. He falls backwards with a curse, blinking as tears stream down his face, about a dozen bleeding pin-prick holes in his cheeks.

Henry looks back toward the street. The shooter, which has to be Peña because Hunt is still trapped behind his now bullet-riddled car, has to be in the Jackrabbit Inn, it’s the only building taller than the schoolhouse, but Henry can’t see him anywhere. He doesn’t see him on the roof, and while several of the windows on the third floor are open, all he can see behind those windows is darkness. The sun is setting behind the building, lighting Henry and his brother while keeping the east side of the Jackrabbit Inn in shadows. And it’s the east side of the hotel he and Ron are facing.

‘We have to get off the roof,’ he says. ‘Ron, we gotta get off the-’

Ron is sitting up, rubbing his eyes, when a third shot is fired. A red dot presses itself into the center of Ron’s left hand. He pulls it away from his face and looks at it.

But the bullet continued through the hand, and there is another dot in his left cheekbone and his left eye is filling with blood and a slow trickle runs from his right nostril, down onto his lip, and then along the top of his lip, drawing a red mustache there before dripping from his face.

‘Ron?’

Ron looks up from his hand to Henry.

‘Something happened to my. . hand.’

He holds it up for Henry to see, blinks several times, and falls over sideways.

‘Ron?’

Henry gets to his feet and turns in a full circle, confused somehow-this isn’t how it was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be easy and quick, a few shots and finished. He glances toward the Jackrabbit Inn and again sees only darkness in the windows there. He turns and runs toward the hatch in the roof as the fourth shot cuts through the air. He drops down the ladder and lands in the janitor’s closet and falls backwards against a shelf full of cleaning supplies.

What the fuck just happened?

He tries to accept what he saw, but his mind keeps rejecting it. He cannot have just seen his brother get killed. That’s impossible. It’s impossible.

It happened.

First his younger brother, then his older brother.

Hunt has to pay for that if for nothing else. He knows Donald would never give him up unless he was forced to. He knows he would never-

He closes his eyes and tries to get his mind right.

He has to finish this.

He opens his eyes and walks out of the janitor’s closet and down a wide flight of stairs to the first floor. He walks down the corridor, and is about to pass the classroom that Beatrice and Sarah are waiting in when Sarah runs out of it, into the corridor. A gun hangs from her right hand, the handcuffs still wrapped around her wrist clinking against its barrel.

She looks left and sees him, and there is a moment of terror in her eyes, but only a moment of it. Then she lifts the pistol in her hand and points it at him.

‘Don’t move,’ she says.

He stops and puts his arms up, still holding his dad’s.30–06 in his right hand. First his younger brother, then his older brother. Now the one in the middle.

‘What are you doing, Sarah? How’d you get out?’

‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘Shut up and put down that gun.’

‘You don’t even know how to use that gun, Sarah. You’re not gonna shoot me.’

‘It’s a semiautomatic and the safety’s off,’ Sarah says. ‘You told Beatrice. All I have to do is aim and pull the trigger.’

He takes a slow step toward her.

‘I said stop!’

He does.

‘Put down your gun.’

‘You’re not gonna shoot me.’

Sarah licks her lips and raises the barrel of the pistol so it’s pointed at his face. He stares into it, and then past it to Sarah, and he sees that she will shoot him. If he isn’t careful she will shoot him. He thinks of Beatrice’s ankle. He never did find out exactly how that happened, but looking into Sarah’s face he thinks he knows. Her eyes tell him that she is very much her father’s daughter. At least in one respect she is: once she begins something, she does not quit.

‘Put down your gun,’ she says again. ‘Right now.’ Her voice trembles with rage.