The Triggermen - Chapter Three

A new and exciting way to waste time at work...continued...!

Chapter Three

The bedroom is empty, but the computer’s switched on, the monitor showing a cartoon clip of a man in a long black coat firing a high powered rifle, good old John Bard, the man who doesn’t count to ten. Boone has just enough time to register that the whining sound Andy complained about earlier is back, only this time it sounds as loud as a power drill over the low thunder of the fire outside.

“Andy!” Boone runs down the upstairs hallway to his own bedroom but it too is empty and the bathroom as well. At the last minute he stops and goes back into Andy’s bedroom to his closet and opens the door.

It takes a moment for his vision to adjust. Then he sees his brother crouched in the far corner, hands wrapped around his knees, eyes shut.

“Andy, thank God.” Boone crawls in and pulls him up in his arms, lugging his bulk out of the bedroom and down the stairs. By now the fire’s distant roar has become a steady, shapeless booming that makes the walls shake around them and he can feel the heat pressing against his face, filling his lungs as he breathes. He jumps off the last step and runs through the living room and out the back door, into the yard. The area behind the porch has been cleared—he can see people and firemen on the far side of the stream—and he keeps running, running.

“Are you okay?”

Andy doesn’t move, doesn’t nod, just stares blankly over Boone’s shoulder at their row of condos. The flames are halfway across now, engulfing the first three units, leaving only Boone’s and the one next to it. In another five minutes, the entire block will be on fire. If he hadn’t gone in when he did—

Boone makes himself stop thinking about it. Around him, firemen start spraying the blaze with big feathery blasts of water along with nearby condos that haven’t yet caught fire, in attempt to keep them from burning too. In the opposite direction, the fire in the jet’s ruined fuselage has gone down and he gets his first glimpse of the bodies of the passengers, black rows of burnt corn kernels still strapped in their seats. The reek of cooked flesh mixes with jet fuel and a veil of gagging smoke. Boone feels his stomach flip over. Hand plastered over his lips, he turns away but the vision clings to the inside of his lids like a nightmare he already senses will never truly fade from view.

Across the commons, beyond the burning trees and the boiling stream, his neighbors are out singly and in clusters, a masquerade ball of familiar faces glazed into unrecognizable fright-masks. Here is stolid, flat-assed, fifty-something Lois Crane, recently elected to the condo association board and a neighbor from three doors down, who routinely comes knocking on Boone’s door telling him when he needs to take down his holiday lights and bring in his recyclable containers. Now Lois stands alone like the totem pole of frigidity that she is, defrocked of all power, gazing at her burning home with the immigrant eyes of a woman without the right naturalization papers. Behind her, Amy Tatsumi and her husband Roy stand side-by-side with identical expressions of glazed disbelief. Amy is clutching a stack of scrapbooks while Roy holds their daughter Emily in his arms. He gives Boone a dull how-ya-doin’ nod.

Boone is worried about Andy. His brother’s breathing and doesn’t look hurt, his color is good and his heartbeat steady, but he hasn’t spoken or even moved his head since Boone rescued him from the closet. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Andy. It’s me, man, it’s Boone. Can you hear me?”

Still nothing, not even a nod. Off to the side of the common area Boone sees Mara Wilson, standing by herself with her arms crossed, cupping her elbows.
He puts his arm around Andy, leading him through the crowd to Mara. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Her voice is tight and scared, but she’s trying really hard to hide it. “Is Andy—”

“I think he’s all right. He’s not really talking.”

“Boone, do you have your cell phone? I want to call my mom.”

Boone shakes his head. “I don’t, but one of those guys could help us.” He nods at an EMT talking into a radio. “I’ll ask.”

Looking back on that particular moment, Boone thinks it’s probably the first time he noticed the black vans coming. They’re still off in the distance, on the far side of the cornfield that abutted Stone Cliff, traveling down High Meadow Road in a long convoy of shining black steel. It doesn’t necessarily strike him as out of the ordinary, compared to what was going on in front of him, though the detail does stick in his mind, and he will think of it later with a prophetic little chill.
“Hey, excuse me,” he says, approaching the EMT, the guy looking up at him with a distracted frown. He puts his hand on Mara’s shoulder. “Do you think somebody could have a look at my brother? I got him out of there but he’s in shock.”

“Ambulances are on their way.” The EMT isn’t even looking at him anymore. “Gonna need you to move all the way back to the far side of the development.”

Boone glances at Mara, standing there next to him scared out of her mind. “Is it possible for her to call her mother? She’s still at work.”

“Gotta keep the frequency clear. Emergency traffic only. Move on back.”

“But—”

The EMT shakes his head and walks away, bellowing something to one of his coworkers across the green. Boone kneels down and puts his arm around Mara. He hopes he sounds better than he feels. “It’s okay. We’ll find somebody with a cell phone.” He turns to Andy and squeezes his arm hard. “Andy, you need to talk to me here, all right?”

Andy doesn’t look at him, and doesn’t reply.

“Andy?”

His brother raises one hand and points up into the sky. Following his finger, Boone sees a commercial jetliner, blue and silver, descending with a stately, implacable massiveness over the eastern horizon in the direction of Hershey. Its shadow passes over all of them for just a moment, a flash of darkness like a bird across the sun.

“Oh my God,” Boone says.

The jet disappears behind the low hills and a moment later there comes a thunderclap that sends fresh fire into the high morning clouds.