Jake Needham - Killing Plato

And in that silence I knew with absolute certainty the other shooter would be coming. He was in no hurry. He would not leave until he had examined each body to make certain we were all dead.

From near the rear of the car I heard the characteristic clack-clack of a magazine being replaced and I went prone as silently as I could, my arms extended out in front of me.

Twisting my hand to examine the pistol in it, I saw the safety was off and it was cocked. I said a silent thank you to whichever of the security men had been quick enough to get me at least that far before he died. The rest was up to me.

I took a deep breath, willed my fingers of my right hand to relax on the grip, and nestled the butt into the palm of my left hand for stability.

There was a sudden movement just in front of me followed by a crash. I almost fired, but I didn’t. The shooter had thrown a hubcap out from behind the car and it had caught the rear tire and ricocheted off some rocks before rolling into the drainage ditch. Whoever he was, he was a professional and he was cautiously probing for any sign of survivors before he ventured closer to the wreckage.

A few moments later there was another sudden explosion of noise and a dozen jets of dirt shot into the air from the bank of the ditch behind me. The gunman was firing over the top of the car, still probing around for survivors.

I held my fire. I didn’t move.

Move? I could barely breathe. I was damned near petrified with terror. I probably couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to.

Then, all at once, there was a sudden flash of black right in front of me, like a dark curtain closing across the landscape.

It was the gunman, diving out from behind the car, tumbling toward the cover of the ditch.

Time seemed to slow for me. I always thought time slowing was just something that happened in the movies; but it isn’t, and it did.

Somewhere inside my head I heard my old instructor speaking to me in calm, clear voice and I followed his directions. With the front sight of the.45, I tracked just ahead of the black mass. I raised the back sight until the blade nestled perfectly into the notch in the front sight. I squeezed the trigger, twice, in rapid succession.

The noise of the big.45 exploded all around me. I had no idea it would be so loud. The sound reached right down deep into my chest, grabbed me by the heart, and squeezed until I thought it would stop beating.

The gunman hit the ground with a thud that vibrated through the earth all the way to where I lay a dozen feet away. For several long minutes after that he did not move. Nor did I.

When finally I started to crawl cautiously toward him, his black helmet lifted all at once and he twisted toward me.

I fired twice more.

The man’s body shuddered with the impacts. The helmet bent unnaturally to one side and then fell back against the ground. He did not move again.

Keeping the.45 centered on the man’s helmet, I reached out slowly with my free hand. When my fingers touched the curving magazine of his rifle, I wrapped them around it and jerked the gun away. His limp hand gave it up without a struggle and flopped against the ground.

Pulling myself around until I was huntil I alf sitting and half leaning on my left hand, I put down the.45 and unsnapped the strap of the man’s helmet. Then I slipped my hand underneath the visor and wrenched it off his head.

Blood was coming from the man’s nose and one of his ears, but his eyes were frozen and open. The hard black pupils stared at me in death with the same emptiness they had stared at me in life.

I examined Marcus York’s bloody face for a moment or two.

Then I passed out.

When I opened my eyes the world looked dim and watery. It was as if I were diving and a long, long way beneath the surface.

I tried to move my head, but my neck muscles ignored me and nothing happened. Before long, I gave up. Using only my eyes, I scouted my surroundings as well as I could.

Everywhere I seemed to be looking through water. Down at the far edge of my vision I could see bits of what appeared to be yellow seaweed streaming upward from the sea bottom, long slender tentacles of plant life waved gracefully in the unseen currents like those Nebraska wheat fields they show on television when they play “America the Beautiful” before a football game. I could hear nothing at all except for a slight rushing in my ears. That seemed more or less consistent with being underwater, too, so cautiously I focused my consciousness on my chest and took stock of how the breathing process was going for me.

My lungs seemed to be working just fine. I could feel my chest rising and falling as they went about their work of pumping the air reliably in and out with what seemed to be their usual efficiency. Still, I thought they might be doing it somewhat more slowly than they had before…

Before ?

Before what ?

I couldn’t remember.

All of a sudden a face loomed in front of mine, a woman’s face, watery and wavering, but still real and so close I could touch her. I tried to touch her, but my arm muscles were working no better than my neck muscles had been and I couldn’t.

Anita? I called out to the face. Is that you, Anita? But the face didn’t answer.

Of course, it had to be Anita, but…

I fought my hazy memory, skirmishing with it in slow motion, and I felt myself moving toward something. I willed my eyes to focus on the face. I struggled to capture a clear image of it, one that I could lay next to the picture of Anita’s face that I carried always in my mind.

I could not do it. The face started to move away.

Wait! I shouted. Come back!

But the face slid beyond the edge of my vision and disappeared.

I thought about it for a moment and then I realized that I should hardly be surprised.

She couldn’t hear you, I told myself. You can’t shout underwater.

Underwater?

There it was again. The only idea I seemed to be able to grasp clearly. The only thought I could hold onto. I was underwater and yet I was still breathing just as if I were on dry land.

Abruptly there was a flash of motion off in the corner of my vision and I had a sensation of a brilliant golden light being born. Emergent and intensifying, it seemed to be pushing straight toward me. Frantically, I twisted my eyes as far as I could, searching desperately for the source. I found it and focused on it, and saw a fish coming directly toward me. A giant goldfish.

A fish? A goldfish?

Ah, shit, I thought, you’re not underwater.

You’re dead, man.

You’re dead and you’ve gone to the place where people go when they die, and this is it.

But I was so tired, I could only hold a single thought clearly. And it was this.

If that were true, if I was dead, then there was nothing I could do about it anyway.

So I closed my eyes and waited for whatever came next.

The next time I woke up and opened my eyes, the world looked different. A lot different.

I was in a darkened hospital room and in the gray dimness a faint glow of artificial light came from somewhere. This time when I tried to move, I found my neck muscles worked pretty well. I rolled my head in the direction of the light, then waited for my eyes to focus.

When they did I found myself looking into a softly lighted aquarium with tiny plantings of yellow sea grass lining its sandy bottom. I could hear the aquarium’s air pump humming in the background and a goldfish that seemed to me to be the size of a housecat was bumping against the glass side of the tank.

“Are you awake, Jack?” The woman’s voice came from the other side of my bed, the one opposite the aquarium. “Can you hear me?”