Michael Marshall: The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels

At 12.53 a woman shouted in the middle of the restaurant.

It was a brief, emphatic utterance, conveying nothing except urgency. People moved unconsciously out of the way, creating a clearing in the central aisle. It became evident that two men – one in his late teens, the other mid-twenties, both wearing long coats – were the focus of the woman’s concern. The older man had short fair hair, the younger’s was darker and rather longer. It was soon also clear that they were carrying semi-automatic rifles.

The light in the room seemed suddenly very bright, sounds abnormally clear and dry, as if some cushioning ether had been swept away. When you’re sitting in a McDonald’s on a weekday lunchtime with your coffee just approaching a drinkable temperature, and you realize that night has fallen out of a clear blue sky, time slips into a slow moment of lucidity. Like the long second before the impact of a car crash, this hiatus is not there to help you. It’s not an escape route, or a gift from God, and it is not enough to do anything in except take the chance to greet death and wonder what took it so long.

One of Trent’s crew of slackers had just time to say ‘Billy?’ in a tone of goofy bafflement, and then the two men started shooting.

They stood in the central aisle and fired calmly and quickly, the stocks of the rifles securely anchored in their shoulders. As the first casualty jerked backward, an expression of wordless surprise on her face, the gunmen moved on: intently, earnestly, as if seeking to demonstrate to some higher authority that they were worthy of this task, and carrying it out to the best of their ability.

After about another second, and two more deaths, everyone in the restaurant suddenly fought their way up out of bewilderment. Time hit the ground running, and the screaming started. They tried to flee, or hide, or to pull other people in front of them. Some made a break for the doors, but the guns turned as one and took down the deserters efficiently. Their line of fire swept past the out-of-towners, and Mark Campbell took a direct shot in the back of the head at about the same instant his wife’s face was spread over a spiderweb of cracks in the plate-glass window that halted both of the bullets’ progress. Trent died furiously soon afterwards, halfway to his feet on a doomed mission to throw himself at the gunmen. Few were sufficiently self-possessed to even consider such positive action, and those that did died quickly. The two guns swivelled as if pulled on the same string, and the action heroes discovered that while passive smoking may be bad for you, passive bullet use will take you down quicker.

Most people just tried to run. To get away. The vice-president of Bedloe Insurance tried, as did his exasperatingly inefficient assistant. Twelve schoolchildren tried. They all tried together, and got in one another’s way. Many found that their feet were tangled amidst the bodies of the injured, and died awkwardly, dislocating knees and hips as they fell. Those whose way was unobstructed were shot down as they fled, crashing into tables and walls and the serving counter, behind which the remaining living server was curled in a tight ball, all too aware that she lay in a pool of her own urine. From where she lay she could see the twitching feet of Duane Hillman, the young man with whom she’d most recently walked the line of the railroad. He had been sweet, and offered to use a condom. As she knew that he’d not only been shot but had fallen while holding a tray of hot oil, she wasn’t inclined to look at him. She was hoping instead that if she looked at nothing at all, and made herself small, maybe everything would be all right. A stray bullet later cut directly through the counter and into her spine.

There were those who didn’t even try to escape, but held their positions, eyes wide, souls already departed before shells tumbled through their lungs, groins and stomachs. At least one of them, recently diagnosed with the same cancer that had slowly killed her father, did not view this turn of events in an entirely negative light: although the fact of the matter is that the young doctor at the hospital, whom she did not trust largely because he looked a little like the villain on her favourite TV show, would have been able to save her had she lived and taken his advice.

The other statue people had no such reason for equanimity. They were simply unable to move until the choice was no longer theirs to make.

In a room full of victims, murderers look like gods. The men kept shooting, with occasional changes of direction, rifles turning together to rain fire on an unexpected corner of the room. They reloaded a number of times, though never at the same moment. They were very efficient. Neither said anything throughout the entire incident.

Of the fifty-nine people in the McDonald’s that lunchtime, only thirty-one heard the deadened report of the final shot. Twelve of those were dead before dark, bringing the toll to forty. Among those who lived was the girl behind the counter, who never walked again and became an alcoholic before finding God and then losing him once more. One of the little girls also survived. She was fostered out to an aunt in Iowa, and went on to live a life of relative peace. One of Trent’s friends made it, and four years later was a coast guard on Laguna Beach.

Pete Harris also survived. By rights he should have died early, in the first sweep of gunfire down the left side of the restaurant, but Suzy Campbell’s body had crashed on top of him just as he tried to slip under his table. Her weight caused him to slew off his seat and crunch headfirst to the ground. They were joined moments later by Suzy’s husband, who was already dead. Neither of the Campbells’ faces would have been recognizable from their passports (both carefully stowed in their jacket pockets, in case somebody broke into the car while they ate), but the clothes the couple were wearing – some carefully packed back in England, others frugally acquired at a Gap sale in Boston’s Back Bay area – were virtually unblemished. Barely a brush-down would have been needed and they could have walked out the door, climbed back in their hire car, and driven on up the road. Perhaps in some better reality that was allowed to happen, and Mark found the Goldberg Variations by happy chance at a town up the way, and they drove the rest of the day along a long straight road between trees with leaves that seemed lit from within: riding the crests and dips of the highway as it took them into afternoon and then evening, never noticing that they rode alone.

In this world they merely saved the life of another human being, as Pete Harris lay frozen beneath them, stunned into immobility by the contact of his head with the tiled floor. All around him were limbs, and all he could see was chaos and death: all he could feel was the whistling of his cuts and a cold ache in his head that developed into a concussion so severe that some days he felt as if it never went away. A young staff nurse, who seemed to regard him with superstitious awe because he had survived when almost everyone else had died, spent the night in the hospital in Pipersville keeping him awake, when he would have much preferred to have slept.

But that was later, as was the heart attack in 1995 that achieved what the bullets had not. He never tried to find out if the Victorian house was for sale. He just worked until he dropped.

Above the measured snap of gunfire and the coughs and screams of the dying, the distant sound of approaching sirens became evident. The gunmen fired for perhaps another twenty seconds, clearing a small pocket by the counter where the mother and her girls had found temporary respite. Then they stopped.

They looked around the room, faces betraying no reaction to what they’d done. The younger of the two – the boy called Billy – took a step back, and shut his eyes. The other man shot him point-blank in the face. While Billy’s body still languidly spasmed on the floor, the man squatted to wash his hands in the blood. He stood again to write something on the glass door, working calmly, in big dripping letters, then surveyed the room once more, calmly, at his ease. He didn’t even glance at the cop cars hurtling up Main, far too late to influence an event that would finally put Palmerston back on the map.