Run

He peered over the back of the seat, saw people running through the square, twenty feet beyond the front bumper of the van. Dressed like civilians, he thought, in shabby clothes so tattered they all appeared to be molting. The three men bringing up the rear held shotguns at waist-level. They were backpedaling and firing and Jack could see the abject fear in their faces laced with the mad rush of adrenaline, something screaming at him to get the f**k down, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away. The shotguns thundered and one of the men collapsed and then the small platoon streamed into the Davidson building.

For fifteen seconds, nothing. No sound. No movement.

Then a company of black-clad men swarmed the square, some of them taking position behind the planters, a handful charging into the building.

Jack got down into the floorboard and flattened himself against the carpet, pulling the blanket on top of him as machineguns erupted all around him, men yelling over the mayhem, the shotguns booming down out of the building several floors above, pellets and rounds chinking into the side of the minivan, and then a window exploded, glass everywhere, and the van sank to one side, a tire punctured.

A man began to scream nearby, and Jack covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut and he was saying her name. He could feel his lips moving, though he couldn’t hear the words, not even inside his head, over the terrible noise.

An explosion blew out every window in the van and then came a lull.

Numerous footsteps pounded the concrete. Someone shouted, and the next time Jack heard gunshots, they sounded distant, muffled.

He waited for another minute, then slowly sat up. Brighter in the van with the tinted windowglass shot out. A half-dozen men lay scattered across the plaza, one of them still crawling.

On the fourth floor of the Davidson building a black crater smoked, ragged flames cutting through.

Jack made his way up into the driver seat and eased the door open.

Gunshots inside the Davidson building.

He stared at the bank. Twenty yards tops. Get inside. Find an office, crawl under a desk. Wait for silence.

He glanced back toward the Davidson building. A man stepped out of the lobby and walked into the square. He was looking at the minivan. Jack ducked as far as he could under the steering wheel. More voices. Orders being shouted. Fading away now. He eased up into the seat again and peered through the shattered windshield. The black-clad men had lined the civilian platoon up in the middle of the street. They were making them get down on their knees at gunpoint.

A man in a red bandana stood in front of the POWs. Jack could just hear his voice from the front seat of the van, telling them he would be pleased to shoot them each in the head, felt sure they would in turn be pleased with this outcome. However, if even one of them resisted, his unit would spend the rest of the day torturing them to death.

A handful of the civilians wept. He could see their shoulders bobbing. But no one moved.

The man in the red bandana went to the first civilian, pulled a handgun from his holster, and shot him between the eyes.

He went on down the line, stopping midway to reload, Jack watching the heads of the condemned snapping back, bodies toppling, found himself drawn to study the unimaginable bracing of the next one to die.

Ultimate tension, then emptiness, then ten people lay dead on the snow-dusted street where ten had knelt living thirty seconds before. The soldiers left them there, drifting on down Central Avenue toward the river, in a formation that made Jack certain they were military.

When the last man had slipped out of view, Jack breathed again, leaning forward, his forehead touching the steering wheel.

Staying here, in this plaza, wasn’t going to work. Not with the city under siege.

Meant pushing on.

As he lifted his head, the man in the red bandana reappeared around the corner of the Davidson building. He was walking back into the square, straight toward the van. Jack’s heart jumped from zero to afterburn, a hot spike of panic flooding in.

He slammed his shoulder into the door and barreled out of the minivan at a dead sprint toward the bank, waiting for the gunshots, waiting, the shattered windows rushing toward him, waiting. Just as he reached them, he heard three shots squeezed off faster than he could have imagined, and he was inside, untouched he thought, turning left now, bolting up a set of stairs into the mortgage department, dark save for where crumbs of daylight filtered in through the offices that overlooked the plaza.

Jack stopped.

He could hear the man’s footfalls in the lobby down below.

Now running up the stairs.

Jack moved into a large, open maze of cubicles and desks, his world getting darker every step he took away from those windows.

He got down on his hands and knees and crawled under a desk. Couldn’t see a thing. Panting. The noise deafening. He shut his eyes, tried to calm himself, and when his heart finally slowed, he heard the footsteps—soft as mice—moving into the mortgage department toward him.

He took long, slow inhalations through his nose, and even in the dark chill of the bank, lines of sweat were running down out of his hair into his eyes.

The man let out a sharp breath. Couldn’t have been more than four or five feet away.

His footsteps trailed off into the black, only audible when the boot tread caught on the carpet—an imperceptible scratch.

Jack’s legs burned. He’d crammed himself up underneath a desk, the wood digging into his backbone.

Five minutes passed without a sound.

Ten minutes.

Twenty.

Then an hour was gone, maybe longer. Impossible to know.

He leaned forward, rocking slowly back onto his hands and knees, his feet tingling with an excruciating numbness. Crawled several feet into the dark and stood, knees popping.

He glanced back over his shoulder, saw the barest thread of light sliding around a corner. Wondering, should I crawl back under the desk and wait a few more hours? Maybe the man with the red bandana had gone to get a flashlight. Maybe he’d left with no intention of returning. Maybe he was waiting out there just around the corner.

Jack moved forward between the cubicles, back into the light.

He stepped into the hallway.

Back down the stairs, through the lobby. He stood in that glassless window frame looking out across the plaza.

Snowing again. Nothing moving. The minivan riddled with bulletholes. Some of the dead lay beside their weapons, and he felt a subtle charge at the prospect of getting his hands on a gun again.

Ten steps into the plaza, Jack bent down to unwind the strap of a machinegun that had tangled around the arm of a dead man.

Froze as his finger touched the strap. An icy prickle down the center of his back. A door to the minivan was creaking open.