Paul Cleave - Blood Men

The six men, in three teams of two, spread further out to the sides. One of them turns and points his gun at the door, ready for more customers to wander on in, even though the whole front of the bank is made up of glass and everybody outside is staring at us. The man barking the instructions reaches the counter.

“You,” he yells, and he points his shotgun at a woman behind the counter. All the makeup in the world couldn’t hide the tightening of her features. “Take these back to the vault and fill them.” He throws some bags at her. They hit her counter and she doesn’t move. “Now!” he says.

“What?”

“Fill them or die. The choice is yours.”

She gets it. She picks up the bags.

“Help her,” he says, pointing at another of the bank tellers. “You as well,” he says, glaring at a third. “And you too,” he adds, waving the gun at a fourth. “And if all four of you aren’t back here in two minutes we open fire on everybody else. Get that?”

As soon as the four disappear, an office door opens. We all turn toward it. A man with a pink tie and his shirtsleeves rolled up stands there with his hands raised in the air, and his head tilted and hunched down slightly, as if trying to avoid sniper fire.

“P. . p. . please, I’m the manager, please don’t hurt anybody and-”

He doesn’t get to say any more. The shotgun barks and people cry out. The manager isn’t thrown backward like in movies. He just stands where he was shot. His head hangs down so he seems to study the angry wound in his chest, seems to notice his shirt has blossomed red, and gravity pulls at the features on his face, making him appear sad. Then he folds at the waist, his ass going backwards, his feet staying in the same place, so when he hits the ground he’s folded in half, his legs out straight, his face against his knees, and he stays in that position with his arms by his side. The wall behind where he stood is streaked in blood, the window next to the door is shattered, other small pellets are buried into the wall. The manager looks like he’s stretching, warming up for yoga.

“Jesus,” I whisper, and I can see other people mouthing the same word but can’t hear it because my ears are still ringing. People are raising their hands to their faces. Others are crying. A man in his late sixties or early seventies has wet himself. A woman has passed out, her face pressing into the floor, looking far more relaxed than anybody else here.

Jodie’s grip is almost breaking my fingers.

“Stay calm,” I say, “just stay calm.”

“Everybody shut up!” one of the men yells, then he fires another shot, this one into the ceiling. Plaster dust rains down, it settles on his shoulders like dandruff.

The four people return from the vault. The bags are bulging with cash and obviously heavy. They manage to lift them up onto the counter.

“Too slow,” the man says, talking to the bank teller he first singled out. He pumps the shotgun and levels it at her chest. “You’re coming with us,” he says.

“No, no,” she says.

“Wait!”

Everybody turns to the voice. It takes a moment to realize that they’ve all turned toward me, and a longer moment to figure out the reason for that-I’m the one who spoke. The man holding the shotgun on the bank teller turns his head toward me.

“What?” he says.

“Eddie,” Jodie says, “what are you doing?”

I have no idea. People are staring at me like I’m an anomaly, like they haven’t seen a twenty-nine-year-old white guy speaking in a bank before. I get onto my knees, then onto my feet, swaying slightly, with still no idea what I’m doing or why I called out. “I said wait,” I say, and my voice is firm.

“We all heard what you said,” he says, “and I think we’re all curious now as to what you’re planning on doing next.”

“You’ve got what you came for,” I say, and the girl with the gun pointed at her takes the distraction to duck down behind the counter. Everybody back there does.

The man turns back to where she just was. “Hey, get back up here.”

She doesn’t answer.

“Please. You don’t have to hurt anybody else,” I say.

“I didn’t realize you were giving the orders here,” he says, looking over the counter for the woman. He can’t get an angle on her.

“Eddie,” Jodie says.

“It’s okay, Jodie.”

“We have to go,” another of them says, his finger pressed against his ear, listening to something small. “The police are only two minutes away.”

“Shit,” the first guy says, and he’s staring at me now. “Okay, buddy, you’re volunteering.”

“I’ll do what you want as long as you don’t hurt anybody else,” I say.

He offers a short, cold laugh. “No, you got it all wrong. You didn’t volunteer yourself, you went ahead and volunteered that pretty little thing next to you.”

“Don’t,” I say, and I step toward the man coming toward me and put my hand out in a stopping gesture. He doesn’t even slow down. He comes in around my arm and hits me with the gun in the side of my face, hard enough to knock me down.

“Eddie. .” Jodie is pulled to her feet.

Things are out of focus. I’ve fallen onto my side. I get my hands onto the ground and push up. There are two Jodies. Twelve gunmen. They pick up the bags of cash and head for the door. Nobody else is moving. Nobody else is helping. The twelve men turn back into six, they’re at the door and they have Jodie with them. I figure if the police are only two minutes away they’re probably driving and the Friday lunchtime traffic has brought them to a crawl.

“Eddie,” Jodie screams, reaching toward me, and it takes two of them to drag her through the door. I get to my feet, wobbling left and right somewhat. I stumble over my feet and trip myself up, hitting the floor hard with my palms. They toss the bags of money inside a van and five of them climb in right alongside it. The sixth guy keeps holding my wife.

I get outside. Nobody follows me. There are people on the street, but they’re all ducked down behind parked cars and huddling in shop doorways. Shopwindows painted over with Christmas scenes have faces pressed against the glass. The kids in the hoodies are popping their heads up from behind a row of motorbikes and pointing cell phones at us. I can’t hear any sirens or see any police. Cars have stopped about twenty meters away in both directions. The guy pushes Jodie toward me. She cries out and stumbles. She reaches out for balance and I can tell she’s going down, she’s going to hit the sidewalk.

He raises the shotgun. He points it right at her. He doesn’t even hesitate, just pulls the trigger. Shoot her in the back, Jack.

“No,” I scream, but the word is lost over the explosion. My wife hits the road. The shooter jumps into the back of the van and closes the door. The driver accelerates hard, the engine revs loudly and smoke drifts up off the tires. I reach my wife as the van turns the corner, running a red light and leaving us alone.

Keep her alive, Clive.

I have no idea why I keep thinking of the song Jodie sang this morning, perhaps the last song she’ll ever get to sing, steam from the shower thick in the air, the penguin radio launching out classic songs from a classic hits station. The words are in my head but they don’t even feel like mine, as though somebody put them there, an English teacher or a bad comedian having reached out somehow and implanted them.

She’s dead, Fred-and don’t worry, you’ll be hearing from me soon.

I scream for help but the only thing people are brave enough to do is step out from whatever hole they hid in and point cell phone cameras at me while others make calls. I try to hold the blood inside her, but it keeps flowing.