Brian Freeman - Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

Howard didn’t answer, because that was his worst fear. He didn’t want to go back to his old life. He didn’t want to be normal again. He hated the idea of things being exactly the way they were.

‘Wow,’ Carol said.

‘What?’

She lowered the window. ‘Don’t you hear it? Listen to all those sirens. Something big’s going on.’

From her hiding place inside a leather goods store, Cindy could see bodies in the corridor of the mall, dead where they’d fallen. The tiled floor and columns bore wild streaks of blood. Smears. Handprints. She smelled the discharge that comes with death, mixing like spoiled roses with the sugary aroma of the food court and the leather jackets dangling in front of her. Just as incongruously, the overhead music continued to play happy pop songs. Britney Spears. ‘Oops!... I Did It Again’. The crowd noise that typically drowned out the music had emptied into a muffled chorus of people crying and praying.

Shopping bags spilled their contents onto the floor where they’d been dropped. Swimsuits. Strappy heels. Bottles of lotion. Stuffed animals. She saw cell phones, too, abandoned in the melee. One by one, they began to ring, forlornly, before going to voice mail. Word had spread instantaneously around the city.

Those who could reach exterior exits had escaped, but there were dozens more, like her, trapped in stores. At least ten people huddled near her, hiding behind clothes racks, their arms wrapped tightly around their knees, their faces buried in the crook of their legs. It was as if, by not looking up, they could make themselves invisible. As if the shark eyes of the gunman would pass over them. Or maybe they just couldn’t bear to see the end when it came.

She didn’t think five minutes had passed, but their imprisonment felt like hours.

He hunted them methodically from store to store. She couldn’t see him, but he wasn’t far. He fired and moved, fired and moved, fired and moved, like a soldier occupying a beachhead. Seconds of silence stretched out between assaults, giving her faint hope, but then a new hailstorm rained down not fifty feet away — gunfire, store windows shattering, victims screaming, individual bullets that could only be kill shots directed at those who had nowhere to run. And then his boots making new footfalls. Tap knock tap knock.

He worked his way toward them. They didn’t have much time. Each assault was a little closer, a little louder.

Cindy saw a fifty-something woman pressed against the wall of the leather store, like a prisoner lined up for a firing squad. The woman’s sanity had flecked away, scattering into confetti. Her jaw was slack. Cindy tried to catch the woman’s eye and give her a smile of encouragement, but there was nothing but faraway panic in the woman’s face. She was a rabbit facing the open jaws of a fox.

And then she began to talk to herself. The noise was jarring.

‘Nicky, come in from the rain,’ the woman murmured. ‘Are you cold, Nicky? Come in from the rain.’

What she said made no sense. Her words came out as a whisper, but then she spoke more, and each time, her volume got louder. ‘Hide in the barn, Nicky... don’t be afraid of the spiders... hide in the barn.’

Her voice sounded like a child, far younger than she was.

‘I smell apples. Isn’t that funny? Apples!’

Cindy gestured urgently with her hands to make the woman stop. Others in the store hissed for silence. The woman didn’t hear them; she simply stood at the wall, shaking uncontrollably, retreating into some long-ago memory.

‘Climb up here with me, Nicky. Be careful! Don’t fall!’

Another voice murmured from a hiding place: ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’

And then another whisper, in rage and fear: ‘Shut up, you stupid bitch, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.’

But the woman was nearly shouting now. Turning them into targets.

‘Crows. I hear crows, Nicky. LISTEN TO ALL THE CROWS.’

Cindy felt around her pockets, but she knew she’d dropped her phone. Even so, she had to do something; she couldn’t wait. She spotted a lost phone just outside the doorway of the store, maybe three feet into the mall corridor. She leaned beyond the rack of coats where she was hiding, far enough to see through the store window. The gunman, wherever he was, wasn’t in view. She broke cover, crawling for the doorway, and stopped in its shelter.

‘NICKY, COME IN FROM THE RAIN.’

The phone was just out of Cindy’s reach. She listened for the warning alarm of the killer’s boots but heard nothing to give away his location. Maybe he’d fled. Maybe he’d gone down another corridor of the mall, hunting for new victims.

Or maybe he was waiting for her outside the store.

Cindy took a breath and dove. She scooped up the phone and rolled back into the protection of the doorway. It took no more than two seconds. Her body tensed, waiting for gunfire, waiting for the window to shatter into popcorn above her. Nothing happened, but the silence almost felt more ominous than the noise of bullets. Her chest hammered as if she’d just done her morning run.

She punched the numbers for Jonny’s cell phone. It rang, but he didn’t answer, and she realized he wouldn’t recognize the caller ID on the phone. When the call went to voice mail, she left a hushed one-sentence message — ‘It’s me, answer the next call’ — and then she tried again, hoping he’d pick up.

Finally, on the fourth try, he did. His words tumbled in a rush.

‘This is Jonathan Stride, who is this?’

‘It’s me,’ Cindy whispered, keeping the phone close to her mouth and her eyes on the store window. The mall filled her senses. She could hear water gurgling somewhere — a fountain. Britney was done singing; now it was Bono and U2. ‘With Or Without You’. She felt cold tile under her knees, and her arms were sticky with someone else’s blood she’d dragged into the store. She smelled leather and death.

‘ Cindy! Where are you? What’s going on?’

‘I’m hiding at Wilson’s. You need to get in here right now. He’s killing everybody he comes across.’

‘Can you see him? Do you know where he is?’

‘No, but he’s close. He was firing inside one of the stores near us just a couple minutes ago. People are dying, Jonny.’

‘HIDE IN THE BARN, NICKY.’

‘What the hell is that?’ he asked.

‘There’s a woman freaking out in here. You need to hurry.’

‘Get in the back of the store and hide. We’re moving on all of the entrances right now. We’ll be there in less than sixty seconds.’

‘NICKY, LISTEN TO THE CROWS.’

Cindy waited desperately for the clatter of doors and guns as the police stormed the mall, but instead, like the rattle of bones in a cemetery, she heard the solitary march of boots again. His boots, clapping the floor in a sing-song rhythm. Tap knock tap knock. He was heading for the leather store.

He was almost here.

‘We don’t have sixty seconds, Jonny,’ she said calmly.

‘Hide! We’re coming!’

She shut off the phone. There was no panic now for her and no terror. If he loomed over her, if he fired, she would be dead in seconds; she knew that. It didn’t matter. Calmness ruled. Calmness became her. Sixty seconds became fifty. She glanced at the store, draped in jackets and purses, and saw the frozen shapes of the others sheltered there. At the back, behind the sales counter, she could buy time for herself. A few seconds, but that was all she needed.

Jonny was coming.

Fifty seconds became forty.

She willed herself to move and save herself, but then everything changed for her. On the opposite side of the mall, she saw the doorway of a Victoria’s Secret store. Models of crazy perfection wore almost nothing in the window posters, but the spatter on the glass made them look as if they were covered in blood. In the doorway of the store, standing up, terrified, was a teenage girl.