Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

Schroder spends two seconds taking it all in. The way everybody is hiding tells him the direction the gunfire is coming from. There’s an office building across the road. He looks up and sees an open window with a curtain behind it. He stays low and moves over to his car and squats down next to Kent.

“What the-” he says.

“One shot,” she says, holding a pistol in her hands. “Office building over the road. I saw muzzle fire. Middleton is down.”

“Why was he back out-”

“Doesn’t matter right now,” she says. “All that matters is some fucker is shooting at us.”

“At us? Or at him?” he asks.

“Why don’t you put your head up and find out?”

“If it’s only the one shot then it suggests it’s not us being shot at,” he says, but even so, rather than putting his head up, he leans down and looks under the car. The paramedic is still dragging Joe toward the ambulance. She’s the only one in the open. He can see her feet and legs and her arms and he has a view of the top of her head as she angles down to pull Joe along. He doesn’t know why the hell she would risk her life for Joe, then decides she can’t know who it is she’s trying to save. Or perhaps she’s running on instinct. It’s her nature to save people. Either way, she’s making a huge mistake.

“She’s going to get herself killed,” Schroder says.

“Who?” Kent asks. “The paramedic?”

“Yeah.”

Kent lifts her head and looks through the windows of the car. “What the fuck is she doing?”

“I’ll get her,” Schroder says.

“The hell you will,” Kent says, and grabs his tie and pulls him back down. “You’re a sitting duck if you go out there. I’ll go. At least I’m wearing a vest.”

She starts to get up. Just then Jack runs across the parking lot. He puts his arm around the paramedic to pull her into cover, but she doesn’t let go of Joe, and Jack ends up dragging them both toward the ambulance.

“We need to get into that building,” Schroder says.

“No,” Kent says. “You stay here. Backup is-” The ambulance starts up. The sirens come on. “That’s one fearless paramedic,” Kent says, without looking up. It speeds toward the gate, which is still closed, but doesn’t slow down.

Schroder pokes his head up. Sees the paramedic through the side window. Sees her face. Sees the ambulance heading for the fence. Sees that the people on the street can see what’s about to happen and are diving out of the way.

“Oh fuck,” he says.

“What is it?”

He stands up, but nobody takes a shot at him. That’s because the shooting has stopped.

“That was Melissa,” he says. “The driver, it was Melissa. Come on,” he says, climbing into his car, “let’s go.”

The ambulance crashes through the fence and the impact jars through my body. It’s been a few days of hell, with vomiting and shitting and getting banged-up knees, and now I’ve been shot and now I’m in an ambulance that’s probably going to tip over or crash into a truck.

I roll toward the left wall as Melissa turns right. The pain is the second worst pain I’ve ever felt. It feels like somebody has punched their fist into my chest and clutched their fingers around whatever they could find and yanked it out, then set fire to what was left. The ambulance is swerving all over the road. Stuff is falling off the shelves. I’m lying on the floor in blood and surrounded by all the things that can help me, but I don’t know how to use any of them. There’s a dead woman by my feet. She’s half covered by a sheet, and the half exposed shows she’s wearing the same uniform Melissa is wearing, and the dead woman is actually covering what appears to be another dead person-this one a man, and the man is mostly naked. The woman has one arm and one leg flopping against the floor.

The ambulance straightens and there are thuds as it bounces into people. There’s lots of screaming and yelling and it feels like I’m slap-bang in the middle of an action movie. Melissa is talking to herself, telling people to get the hell out of the way, people who can’t hear her, and she has to keep swerving and tapping her foot on the brake. She has the sirens on, but we’re not traveling that fast.

When I try to sit up I can’t. I know I’ve been shot, but it’s a hard concept to grab hold of. Shot? I’ve never been shot before-but of course that’s not true. I shot myself a year ago, though that wasn’t really being shot-that was having my face plowed by a bullet. Shot? Not compared to this.

I give sitting up another go, and this attempt is better than the first, and I can see out the front window. I put my hand over the wound, then study the blood on the palm of my hand, then press it back to my shoulder. I want to say something to Melissa, but I don’t know what. Plus she’s focusing on driving. Focusing hard. Some people have dropped their signs and some of those signs she runs over, they crunch under the wheels like bones in a dog. A leprechaun bounces off the side of the ambulance, so do two zombies and one Marilyn Monroe. They fall into the distance, dazed and confused-all of them targets for whoever is going to follow us. I have no idea why people are dressed the way they are. I glance to our right as we go through the intersection, and I can see the front of the courthouse and the decoy cars from this morning. They’re locked in by the swarming people, angry people rocking the cars and banging their fists on the windows because word hasn’t gotten to them that I’m not in there. Only these people are dressed like normal people, they’re in jeans and shirts and dresses and jackets-none of them with masks or Hollywood outfits, but many of them carrying signs. The armed officers can’t move. They can’t open fire. No doubt they want to climb onto the roofs of their cars and spray bullets into the air-or perhaps they’re even angry enough to spray them into the crowd so they can part it like the Red Sea so they can follow us. In which case they ought to ask the guy dressed as Moses who is carrying two large old-model iPads made out of cardboard, each the size of a torso. On each tablet are the commandments, only they’ve been modified and I have time to read just Thou shall rock out with thy cock out before a guy dressed in a cowboy outfit complete with gorilla mask appears from the sea of people, jumps onto him, and they both disappear below the tide line.

I sink back down to the floor. I grab some padding and press it into my wound. Thank God my stomach is still feeling okay, but I’m concerned that it’s not, that my body has other issues to deal with right now and is giving me a break on that one for a moment.

“My bag,” Melissa shouts, and she glances over her shoulder at me.

“What?”

“My bag. Hand me my bag.”

“What bag?”

She glances back over her shoulder, and this time her eyes move around the floor. “There,” she says, “next to the woman’s foot. The black bag.”

There’s a small black bag right where she said it’d be.

“Hand it to me,” she says.

“What’s in it?”

“Hurry up, Joe,” she says. “Schroder is going to be right behind us.”

I reach out and grab the bag. I hand it to her. She opens it up with one hand while keeping the other hand on the wheel. She pulls out a small box with a plastic top on it, and she lifts the top to reveal a trigger. It’s a remote. She puts it between her legs so it doesn’t fall on the floor, and then she puts both hands back onto the wheel. She keeps looking into her mirrors.

“It’s all about timing,” she says.

“I’ve missed you,” I tell her.

“This confusion and chaos,” she says, “it’s just how I saw it. This is about to get easy for us, Joe, and about a hundred different types of messy for everybody else,” she says, and she keeps watching her mirrors and then hovers one hand over the remote.