Quinn didn’t want to look, didn’t want to, but Brianna’s ashen face made looking the less terrifying option. He rose just enough to get a view of the alleyway.
Swaggering along behind the coyotes came Drake Merwin.
He held in his hand a long, thick red whip.
Only he wasn’t holding it in his hand. The whip was his hand.
“Shoot him,” Brianna urged. “Do it.”
Quinn unlimbered the gun. He laid the short barrel on the Spanish tile and aimed. Drake wasn’t running, he wasn’t moving furtively, he was right in the middle of the alleyway in plain view.
“I can’t get a shot at him,” Quinn said.
“You’re lying,” Brianna accused.
Quinn licked his lips. He aimed. He wrapped his finger around the trigger.
Impossible to miss from here. Drake was no more than thirty feet away. Quinn had practiced firing the machine pistol. He had fired it at a tree trunk and seen the way it chewed through wood.
Squeeze the trigger, and the bullets would chew through Drake the same way.
Squeeze the trigger.
Drake passed directly below.
“He’s gone,” Quinn whispered.
“I couldn’t…,” he said.
From the day care below there came the screams of terrified children.
Mary Terrafino had had a very bad day. That morning she’d had a major pig-out, a real gorge-a-thon, as she called it. She had found a carton of snack-sized Doritos. She’d sat and torn through twenty-four snack packs.
Then she had vomited it all back up. But even that didn’t seem like enough to cleanse her of the offending food, so she had taken a strong laxative. The laxative kept her running back and forth to the bathroom all day.
Now she was sick to her stomach, wrung out, seething with anger at herself, ashamed.
Mary usually popped her pills in the morning, her Prozac and vitamins. But she was so frazzled as the day wore on that she had also popped a Diazepam she had found in her mother’s bathroom medicine cabinet. The Diazepam spread a gentle mellowness over her mind, like molasses poured into gears. On the drug everything was slow, frustrating, fuzzy. To counteract the Diazepam she poured herself a cup of coffee in a covered safety cup, stirred in sugar, and carried it with her into the classroom.
That’s when Quinn had walked through carrying a machine gun. She had shielded the kids from seeing him, but there was something deeply disturbing about the sight of a machine gun in the real world, not on TV or in a video game, but right there in front of her.
Now she sat cross-legged in circle time. A dozen kids paid varying degrees of attention as she read Mama Cat Has Three Kittens and The Buffalo Storm. She had read all the books so many times she could do them by heart.
Other kids were in various other corners playing with dress-up costumes, or painting, or stacking blocks.
Her brother, John, was doing diaper check on “the tinies,” as they now called the prees who were still in diapers.
One of Mary’s helpers, a girl named Manuela, was bouncing a little boy on her knee while trying to get a marker stain out of her blouse. She muttered under her breath as she worked.
Isabella, who had become Mary’s shadow since being brought to the day care, sat cross-legged and looked over her shoulder. Mary followed the words with her finger, word by word, thinking maybe she was teaching Isabella to read a little and feeling vaguely good about that.
She heard the sound of the back door opening. Probably Quinn wandering back through.
A scream.
Mary twisted around to see.
Screams, and a torrent of dirty yellow shapes piled into the room.