Richard Cox - House of the Rising Sun

The footsteps stopped.

“Paige, it’s me, Natalie. My sons are here.”

Now the footsteps crept forward and turned into the row where Natalie and the boys stood. Paige was a silhouette. Her heartbeat was fast but not frantic. She was a woman in control of her emotions. A woman of unusual strength. She held her gun as if it were a part of her body.

“What happened?” asked Paige. “Are you guys okay?”

“For now we are. But I’m afraid to take my boys outside unless I know that awful man is gone.”

“Aiden is on the roof,” Paige said. “You should run for the trees. He’s watching the crowd out front and probably won’t see you.”

Natalie felt a rush of relief, but also guilt. Now that Paige was here, maybe there was something to be done about Seth. About Skylar and Thomas.

“Larry took my friends out front,” Natalie explained. “He thinks the pulse is Thomas’ fault.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story. But we walked all day under the sun to get here. I can’t just leave them behind.”

As Natalie said this, the crowd grew suddenly quiet, as if taking a breath.

“Listen,” said Paige. “Give me two minutes. I might be able to help. If I see your husband, I’ll tell him where you are. He can help you get away.”

“Thank you,” Natalie said. “Thank you so much.”

“But if one of us doesn’t return in two minutes, run out of here and head for the trees. Understand?”

“I understand. Please be careful.”

It was too dark to tell, but Natalie thought maybe Paige had smiled.

“I can take care of myself,” she said.

Larry stood at the fence with Thomas and Skylar. He felt like a king. All eyes in the crowd were on him.

He had walked across the lawn with his arm around Skylar’s neck, her back to the crowd all the way, her identity a secret. Her skin was like silk. Her hair tickled his cheek. His hands wanted to roam across her chest, fondle her heavy breasts, but Larry was afraid Skylar would fight back if he broke concentration. She was a formidable kickboxer, after all. Anyone who followed her on Instagram knew that. Larry himself had downloaded every one of her videos, had fiddled with their brightness and contrast to add dimension to the contours of her Lululemon ass. How he longed to please her. To own her.

“By the way,” he whispered to Thomas. “I’m the one who sent Matt to your house. You should have let me have some of that curry.”

“You hate yourself,” said Thomas. “So of course you hate everyone else.”

“I should never have gone outside,” Skylar lamented.

“It’s not your fault,” Thomas said. “It’s my fault. I never took any of this seriously enough.”

Rather than listen to the lovebirds coo in each other’s ears, Larry puffed out his chest and motioned to the crowd.

“Are you people ready to eat?”

The crowd roared, an organism poised to pounce. Larry absorbed their power, exalted.

“Before I let you in,” he said, “I want to know how you think the world came to be this way. Who here knows what happened?”

“An alien attack!”

“It’s God’s retribution for all our sin!”

“The Federal government did this to us! Oppressors!”

“No!” yelled Larry. “It’s all this man’s fault! This rich and famous screenwriter! He wrote this world and now you’re stuck in his movie!”

Larry waited for the crowd to cheer louder, or at the very least jeer and boo Thomas. But they didn’t.

“Come on, sir!” yelled a woman. “Just let us in! My baby is starving!”

“We don’t even know who that guy is!” shouted someone else.

“But you know this woman!” bellowed Larry. He twisted Skylar around to face the crowd, the gun now pressed against the back of her neck. “Why would she be here except to make a movie?”

Surely, when these anonymous nobodies identified his dazzling princess, they would finally be convinced. Larry would accept the recognition he deserved after languishing in obscurity for so many years.

“Oh, my God!” yelled a woman. “That’s Skylar Stover! What are you doing to her?”

“Yeah, man,” said another. “What is this shit? Let the lady go!”

“Why are we even listening to this?” yelled a beautiful mother of three children standing not thirty feet away. “Who the hell are you?”

And that’s when Larry decided Skylar had been right, even if she no longer believed it. There was no way this scene could be real, not when he was forced to listen while a lovely young woman hurled insults at him. Larry wondered how long this temptress had been there, though it seemed as though she had always been there, that he would forever see her face, those big, lovely eyes and that tiny nose and those perfect pink lips. Of course a woman like this loathed him. She had always loathed him. She would always be there with him, waiting to cut him at the knees with her haughty smile and biting wit, her note handwritten in beautiful script, My boyfriend says you are a FUCKFACE, and suddenly the ringing in Larry’s ears rose up and clobbered him in the head. He seemed to fall to his knees, or the world turned sideways, and still the woman was there, hating him, looking at him as if he weren’t human, as if he were a bug she could squash with the step of her foot.

P.S. Don’t write back!

You probably didn’t know human screams sound just like the screeching in my ears. Until then, I didn’t either. It made me wonder if the sound I’d been hearing all this time had been a literary device meant to foreshadow my defining moment.

Dirty humans in the crowd went down by the row. It would have been nice to savor each kill, like the bittersweet flavor of lemonade, but the mass of them lost density as they fled from their fallen comrades. They spread in all directions the way a drop of liquid soap repels a film of greasy water.

The gun was a live thing in my arms, growing warm, punishing me. In moments I was through the first clip and was forced to replace it with another.

My targets were children, mothers, teenagers in football jerseys. A man in a flannel shirt and jeans was pointing a rifle at me when he fell backward, two beautiful maroon blooms spreading into the brown pattern across his chest. No good guy with a gun was going to stop me! And I get it, most of you think I’m a monster, but that’s only because you accept the idea of meaning in the world, that our puny decisions matter. They don’t matter. Nothing does. Whether or not this world is a movie is irrelevant. The important thing is I am not simply allowed to behave in absurd ways. I am obligated to.

Something whisked by me. A whip crack of a sound. A bullet.

As much as I enjoyed the carnage, the last thing I wanted was to be killed by one of my targets. By then the mass of them had pushed down the fence, and they were streaming toward the building, which meant my retreat would have to be careful.

When I reached the ladder, my path to freedom was still clear. But in the distance, running for the trees, I saw a woman and two children. The clip was nearly empty, so I switched the rifle to single-fire and allowed myself three shots. One for each of them.

Remember my dance in the rain, days ago, as I dodged bullets fired by Paige? This was the same scene except I had become the sniper.

I shouldered my weapon and fired. Fired again. And a third time. Finally, the woman went sprawling and dragged the children with her.

I climbed quickly down the ladder. On the ground, I crept toward the employee entrance and listened carefully. I could hear screaming. Gunshots. I darted away from the open door just in time for a bullet to scream past me.