Stephen Hunter: Soft target

But in all this motion, there was one figure of motionlessness. He was a gangly young man of an age perhaps between eighteen and twenty-five, more or less lounging against the fourth-floor railing of the balcony overlooking the amusement park area from the terminus of the corridor called Colorado.

He wore jeans over New Balance hiking boots, a hoodie that actually said HARVA-D, the R having flaked off after numerous washings, and an old Vikings cap backward on his head. From his coloring and the perfect shape of his nose, most would have assumed a shock of blond hair lay under his cap, and they would have assumed rightly. His legs were crossed and he slouched against the railing, his arms crossed as he supported himself upon it. He looked like he was watching a baseball game or a parade or something. No tension showed in the muscles of his body under the clothes, no shock, no fear, nothing except the utmost in relaxed viewing.

He was recognizing patterns. It was interesting to him that the Rio Grande team had been the most aggressive, and so they forced their flock into the center of the mall the soonest; meanwhile, the Colorado and Hudson driven reached almost simultaneously, and both mobs crushed together with much bumping and shoving. Finally, the laggards at Mississippi produced, and those folks were the most unfortunate, as all the prime real estate had been seized and they were left to the margins, which put them closest to the gunmen, the most apt to incur the whimsical displeasure and hair-trigger temper of the shooters, and therefore most at risk.

Then he switched his attention to the throne in the center, where Santa had been whacked. From four stories, he could just barely make out the man’s ruined face and the pattern of blood spray across the satin plush of the throne. He was struck, nonetheless, by the considerable if de trop amusement factor in seeing the familiar icon so completely, comprehensively dead. It seemed to make up for a lot. He hoped someone got a good picture of it, because as an image of his ambition, it seemed to say it all. It was one of those casual artifacts that nonetheless are freighted with communication, a piece of spontaneous art.

He saw the image on the cover of a box: “ Dead Santa, the Christmas Mall Carnage Game, for Microsoft Xbox Only.” It was pretty damn funny.

The game had begun.

The shooting had stopped. Ray lay with Molly and several other women in the rear of a Frederick’s of Hollywood store on the second floor. Generic women’s bodies, truncated at neck and thigh, stood around in bikinis, leather corsets, underpants, pasties, but nobody thought there was anything remotely funny about it. Outside, the pedestrian traffic had disappeared.

“Oh God,” said a girl, “Oh God, oh God, oh God, I can’t believe this is happening.”

“I don’t want to die,” said another woman. “I have children. I can’t die. It’s not right.”

“Please, ladies,” Ray said, “I’m no expert but you’ll be better off if you hold it down and get a grip. You can worry about how unfair it is later.”

“He’s right, Phyllis,” someone said. “Shut up. Just be glad Milt and the kids aren’t here.”

“I’m here to buy something to wear for his goddamn birthday! He should be here.”

“It’s probably some freak with a gun,” said another. “The cops will get him. Don’t you think they’ll get him, mister?”

“I heard more than one gun,” said Ray. “That’s what bothers me.”

“I can’t get through. I have to call my husband. The phones are-”

“It’s all jammed up,” Ray said. “Everyone in this mall who isn’t dead is trying to call home. Please, you’d be much better off not to worry about making contact now. Just try and stay calm and relax. I didn’t hear any firing on the upper floors. I think this is restricted to downstairs, so if you’ll just try and stay calm and still, in the long run that’s the best course.”

“We just lie here and they come kill us.”

“If they were into slaughter, they’d still be shooting. Now I’m going to slip out and see what I can see. Stay here, stay down. Don’t get curious.”

Molly pulled him close.

“My mother and sister are downstairs,” she said.

“Let me see what’s going on,” he said. Then, louder, “Is there a manager or a clerk here?”

A young woman crawled over to him.

“Mrs. Renfels is the manager, but she’s in pretty bad shape. My name is Rose. I work here.”

“Listen, Rose, I need to know about the security cameras here in the mall. Are they everywhere? If I sneak out, will someone watching them in the security headquarters see me? Maybe they’ve taken that over. That would be their logical first step.”

“I don’t think there are any in the corridors, you know, I mean, what I mean is-”

“Settle down, Rose. Take a deep breath. No rush. You’re doing fine.”

“Okay. Mostly they’re at the intersections and they look down the corridors. They don’t have them every twenty-five feet or anything, that’s what I mean. They make you take a tour when you start working here and I was in that room. The views don’t have a lot of details, you know. It’s a long look down the corridor, there’s a lot of shadows. I wouldn’t stand up. If you stand up and someone’s looking at that camera, they’ll know you’re there.”

“Good, very good.” He considered. “Okay,” he said, “I’m going to crawl out and try and get a feel for what’s happening. Ladies, please stay here. Like Rose said, if you try and get out by running, they may see you.”

“What are you going to do, Ray?” Molly asked.

“Well, I guess I ought to scout around. I can’t just sit here.”

“Ray, you can just sit here. Follow your own advice. Just sit here. Wait. Help will come.”

“I heard that one about a thousand times in the suck. It never did. I’m just going to slide out and see what’s what. You ladies, you just stay still.”

Slowly, Ray snaked forward. He eased his head around the threshold of the doorway. The corridor was empty, though signs of rapid abandonment were everywhere, dropped purses and bags of goods, upturned baby carts, some of the windows of the stores broken. He saw no bodies and no shell casings on the floor. But he heard moans, din, the sound of many people shifting in place. That noise came from the space of the atrium, seventy-five feet away, its openness and height guarded by railings. Incomprehensibly, Christmas music still filled the air and the lights from the amusement park still blinked remorselessly on. No, it wasn’t a silent night; it was a loud afternoon.

He looked up and down the hallway for a sign of gunmen, saw nothing. Everything told him get in the back of the store. Block the doors. Wait it out. There can’t be that many, even now law enforcement is responding in a big way, there will be an assault, and you do not want to be running around in the middle of that kind of shitstorm.

Fuck, he thought. I thought I was done with this stuff. He had been shot at a whole lot in his life, and for the most part, he was fine by that. It went with the territory, it was the avenue by which he expressed his odd, powerful, even self-defining gift to put a bullet where he wanted no matter the position, the distance, the angle, the firearm, to be the dark figure known as the Sniper. Someone wanted him to enjoy that talent, and it was the centerpiece of his life that he not blow the mission, whatever the mission was, whoever gave it to him, and now he knew that it tracked back over generations to an odd family of men with similar gifts, some greater, some smaller, but who had always gone beyond the edge with their possibly autistic (how else to explain it?) coordination of front sight and target and sometimes not even front sight.