Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

“Please, someone! Hello? Is there anyone here?” he yelled up at the glass ceiling as he began to jog.

Odd structures began to appear in the underbrush beyond the pond as he kept going. It was a wicker world New York City. A wicker St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a wicker Grand Central Terminal, little wicker skaters holding hands on an ice rink before a towering wicker 30 Rock.

Around a little bend in the path, beyond this frivolous insanity, he spotted another door, marked EXIT.

“Hey! What are you doing here? The garden’s closed today. You’re not supposed to be in here.”

Brian shot a look up to his left. There was a little white-bearded man in maintenance blues atop a high ladder. There was a set of Christmas lights in his little hands, a bunch of twist ties between his little white teeth. He was in the process of stringing the lights around the trunk of an enormous palm tree.

Garden gnome, Brian thought, opening his mouth to ask for help.

Then a pistol cracked behind him, and he was past the ladder and out the exit door in a panicked bolt, running and zigzagging again in the cold.

Chapter 84

Less than a minute later, Brian crashed through a thick hedge that put him outside the botanical garden, back onto Southern Boulevard. Its four lanes were empty this time as he ran across them and ducked behind a parked car, gasping and gulping for breath.

Not fair, he thought, down on his knees, dripping sweat, his hands shaking. His hands were actually bleeding now, he could see, scratched all to hell from tearing a hole for himself through the hedge.

Where were the cops? he thought, wiping blood on his khakis. On strike? Would no one help him? Did everyone actually want Flicka to kill him?

He swiped his drenched face with his shirtsleeve and desperately looked around. Down at the bottom of the little descending grass embankment, something caught his eye. It was a gleam, a thin flash of light off metal, coming through the underbrush. And then Brian jumped up as he remembered.

Crashing through the bushes at the incline’s bottom a split second later, Brian looked south down the long straight lines of the train tracks and raised third rail. He could see it was only a hundred or so yards down the tracks to the platform of the Fordham Road Metro-North station.

Having used the train plenty of times, he knew that the long open-air platform abutted the fence for the Fordham campus. He also knew that there was actually a hole in its fence that all the Fordham Prep kids used to avoid going all the way around to the campus’s main gate.

Brian sprinted over the trestles and had just pulled himself up onto the Westchester-bound concrete platform when he saw that the train was coming in at its far end. It had slowed to a stop by the time he was about to cut through the hole in the fence.

That’s when he remembered. The Metro-North trains had conductors. They could call the cops!

When he hopped through the opening doors of the train car and moved left down the car’s aisle, he saw that the seats were more than half empty. He passed a middle-aged white woman. Then an old Hispanic-looking man.

Since both were glued to their phones, they were completely and utterly oblivious to the apparition that walked past. The world’s most panicked Catholic school white boy, dripping sweat and blood like a lost young medieval saint sent running through the countryside after being visited with the stigmata.

He was all the way down the car, about to head into the next, when he heard the woman scream.

Brian turned.

And froze.

Flicka, sweat dripping off his terrible face, stepped into the car in his big black parka.

The huge dude had to actually duck a little to clear the opening. Brian’s eyes darted immediately to the gun the big man held. It was a little silver-and-black semiauto.

This was it, Brian thought as he helplessly watched the gun rise toward him in slo-mo. He’d tried with all his might for it not to be it, but he had failed. He was going to die now. He couldn’t believe it. After all that.

He glanced around helplessly. A sunset on an ad placard promising cheap flights to Miami. An abandoned newspaper on a pleather seat.

He wiped at his nose with the back of his bloody hand.

Before he even graduated from high school, he was actually going to violently die on some stupid damned commuter train.

Chapter 85

Just as he thought this, from beyond the still-open train door to Flicka’s right, there was a sound and movement.

Brian watched, immobilized, as Marvin bounded into the car, already off his feet, Superman-style, as if shot out of a cannon. He hit Big Flicka high, blindsiding him, actually taking him off his big feet sid