Five survive, p.11
Five Survive, page 11
“Can’t believe we didn’t think of that sooner.” Simon sat forward. “That’s a plan I can get on board with.”
It didn’t work like that. None of it worked like that.
“How would we…” Oliver trailed off, studying the LCD display.
“What’s wrong, Red?” Arthur had been watching her, he must have read it in her eyes. She thought she was better at keeping a straight face; she’d had enough practice.
“I’m sorry,” she began, looking at Maddy instead of Oliver, the softer of the Lavoys. “Two-way radios don’t work like that. Radio frequencies are regulated. Emergency services, like the police, have their own frequencies specifically so they don’t get interference from other signals, like you’re suggesting.”
“Right, I know,” Oliver said. Had he, though? “But, in an emergency, can’t we make it do that?”
There was a simple answer to that, the one Oliver didn’t want to hear. But he was asking, so: “No,” she said, looking away from him as she did, so his eyes didn’t bully a different response out of her. “No, it’s not physically possible to make this radio transmit on the emergency frequencies that police use.”
“Fuck” was Oliver’s simple answer in return.
“How do you know?” Reyna turned to Red, but Oliver answered for her:
“Her mom was a cop.”
And that was still hurt. It always did. But that wasn’t why she knew so much about walkie-talkies. Well, not directly. Her mom was a cop, but so was Red when they played that game together. And that was how she knew. Four days after the funeral, Red found a box in the attic, a box of her mom’s old stuff. And there, nestled between old jackets and shoes, were the walkie-talkies. A piece of masking tape across the back of each, one with MOM, one with RED. She hadn’t been looking for them, not really, just looking to look, to preserve her mom for another day, and then another. Red left her own walkie-talkie there, took the one labeled MOM down to her room. She stole a screwdriver from her dad—he was already mostly lost by then, but he could still pretend to function, still went to work—and, in the quiet of her room past midnight, she took apart the walkie-talkie. Piece by piece, wire by wire, but she never did find her mom’s voice hiding inside.
“It’s probably an FRS radio,” she said, approaching Oliver, holding her hand out, waiting for him to let it go. He placed it in her hand, and she felt the familiar weight of the device. She knew it, inside and out.
“FRS?” Oliver said, not stepping back, like he couldn’t be too far from the walkie-talkie, couldn’t trust her to even hold it.
“Family Radio Service,” she said. “It’s the radio frequencies most amateur devices like this use. If I remember right”—and she did remember right, how could she ever forget this—“it has twenty-two channels.” She knew more than that, that those twenty-two channels were found somewhere between 462 and 467 megahertz, and that the speaker also functioned as the microphone, built from the same bones: a magnet, a coil of wire, a cone made of plastic. She’d learned all that, putting Mom’s walkie-talkie back together again, until it turned on and hissed at her. For days that was all she did, took it apart, rebuilt it, did it again on her mom’s birthday the year after, and the one after that. You couldn’t do that with dead moms, though, rebuild them. They stayed gone.
“So, we can’t use it to contact anyone else?” Oliver asked, still standing too close.
Red stepped back if he wasn’t going to. “Yes, we could,” she said, and the light returned to Oliver’s eyes. “In theory, if someone else is using another two-way radio on the same frequency channel within range, we would be able to talk to them. The sniper is using channel three.”
Red and her mom always used number six, for some reason. It was lucky, at least until it wasn’t anymore.
“What’s the range?” Reyna asked, studying Red as though she couldn’t wait for the answer.
Red sighed, unable to give them what they wanted. “It’s not great with something like this,” she said. “It depends on the terrain, the weather, how many trees and buildings are in the way, but…” She thought about it. “A couple of miles, maybe. A few at most.”
Red and her mom once picked up interference from a wedding planner barking orders down her end. Must have been someplace close. The groom had been late, apparently, but Red pretended it was a surveillance mission and they took notes. Laughing. The kind of laugh that hurt during and after.
“Oh,” Reyna said in response. No, it wasn’t good news, not for them. They were in the middle of nowhere, a range of three miles still left them pretty much in nowhere. But there were houses and farms within all that nowhere.
Reyna pulled out her phone to check the time. “It’s almost one a.m.,” she said, deflating. “I guess it’s unlikely anyone will be out using a walkie-talkie.”
Silent agreement from the rest of them, the walkie-talkie laughing at them from Red’s hands.
“Unlikely, but they might?” Red said. “Or someone might have a baby monitor on in range. We could keep cycling through the channels, see if we pick up any interference?”
Red hadn’t found her mom’s voice on channel six, or any of the others she’d tried. But it was harder when the person you were looking for wasn’t alive.
“Yes.” Oliver snapped his fingers at her, a smile cracking his face. “This is what I’m talking about! Some initiative. Okay, Red, you’re in charge of the walkie-talkie. You cycle through the channels, but make sure you always return to three, every couple of minutes or so. In case we miss the sniper trying to talk to us. We don’t want him to know what we’re up to.”
Red glowed, despite herself, nodding as she accepted the order from Oliver. Was she useful? What a plot twist that was. A smile from Maddy too, full house. Red bet Arthur was secretly impressed as well; look at her, knowing stuff.
Right, focus. There was a man with a rifle outside, and Red was trying to be useful. She wouldn’t want to die, not like that. Although she supposed it wouldn’t take two shots to the back of the head this time. Just the one, just anywhere. Red pressed the menu button and then the + on the right, switching to channel four instead and the empty static there. She could pretend the tone of the static changed each time, a different swirl of sound, like a new song. But it didn’t, it sounded the same. An empty hiss. Up to five now, then six. Red waited longer there, just in case.
“Okay,” Oliver said, looking around at the group. He stepped over to the sofa and, in one quick motion, removed the beer bottle from Simon’s hand, walking it over to the kitchen counter. “So Red is on part one of the plan; trying to get outside help. But we need part two. An escape plan.”
ÊŚĊĄPË.
Stop that. Up to channel eight now. Should she go back to three and make sure the sniper wasn’t trying to talk to them?
“Like our mom always says.” Oliver turned to Maddy. “A plan must have two parts, and you have to make sure either way plays out in your favor.”
“That’s win-win,” Maddy said, completing it for him.
Yes, Catherine Lavoy always had a plan, Red knew that. Birthday presents and reserves. Two different flavors of ice cream. Red herself preferred the lose-lose system: no plan at all and no backups. She pressed the down button back to three to check for the sniper’s voice. Nothing. Back up to eleven. Click, static, click.
“And what is the plan?” Simon said, his words more slurred now, but Red couldn’t tell if he was putting it on to irritate Oliver. “You’re the leader, the most high-value person here. What is your brilliant plan to escape the active shooter out there in the pitch-black who can see us but we can’t see him?”
Oliver’s jaw snapped open, hanging ajar as his eyes spooled in his head again, working loose.
“That’s it,” he laughed, slapping one hand against his hip. “That’s his only advantage, that we don’t know where he is.”
“I’d say his advantage is the giant fucking rifle with the laser sight,” Simon muttered.
Oliver didn’t hear him, or didn’t listen. “That’s the plan, that’s all we have to do. Work out exactly where he is out there. Find the sniper.”
1:00 a.m.
“Find him?” Arthur said, at the same time as Reyna, voices clashing, each leaning on a different word.
Finding a sniper in the pitch-black wide-open nothing. Something about needles and haystacks, Red thought, or a shot in the dark. Literally. She scrolled up through the channels on the walkie-talkie, the flickering of the static not quiet enough to be just background noise. Nothing. More nothing.
“Yes,” Oliver said, his eyes too wide and his voice too loud. “Don’t you see, if we work out exactly where he is, we can use the RV to cover us while we run the other way. He’ll never even know.”
Oliver turned his wide shoulders, head following a moment later. He looked up at the mattress covering the broken window as though imagining the bullet, bringing it back to life in his head.
“From the positioning of the shots through both windows, and the first tire he shot out, he was definitely on this side.” He gestured beyond the front door. “I guess at an angle, though, if he was able to shoot out the tires on the other side, most likely aiming underneath the RV. So he must have been somewhere over there, low to the ground, hiding in the long grass.”
Oliver held out his arm at a diagonal, pointing his finger between the right side and back end of the RV.
“Okay.” Reyna swallowed, letting her hand skim Oliver’s as she came to stand beside him. “That narrows it down.”
Oliver moved his hand away, shaking his head. “No, he was there. But then he came up to the RV to plant the walkie-talkie on the driver’s-side mirror. He could have moved position after that, knowing we’d think about this.” He sighed. “Realistically, he could now be anywhere, on either side.”
Arthur nodded, eyes darting to the corners of the RV, like it was starting to shrink around him. At least it had that extra foot, thirty-one feet instead of thirty. “So how would we find him now?” he asked.
Oliver scrunched his face, thinking. And if that wasn’t enough, he said: “I’m thinking.”
How to find a shooter in the dark? Red should make another joke to cheer Maddy up, talk about the night-vision goggles she’d packed in her suitcase.
“Is now a good time to mention I packed my thermal imaging goggles?” Simon said, rising from the sofa. Hey, that was her line. A bit better, actually. Simon could have it.
“Shh,” Oliver hissed, pressing his fingers to his temples to think even harder. “Red?” he said suddenly, turning his attention to her.
The static fizzed as she looked up.
“When someone shoots a rifle, is there something other than the noise? Does it give off any light, a flash?”
Red shrugged. Why was he asking her that? Oh, right, because her mom was a police captain and she would have known the answer. Oliver seemed like he was waiting for more.
“I don’t—” she began.
“—Yeah, there’s a muzzle flash,” Simon said, his arm knocking into Red’s as he rejoined the group. Arthur was right; it was too small in here, and it was getting warm now too.
Everyone turned to look at Simon.
“It’s like that little explosion of light when you fire,” he said, finally looking up, noticing their eyes. “Why are youse all staring at me? What, you don’t watch movies? I mean the muzzle flash is not really there, it’s normally added in postproduction. But yeah: gun goes off, there’s a flash.”
Turned out Simon was useful too. Who would have thought, the two of them, Red and Simon? Certainly not Oliver, it seemed, judging by the stunned look in his eyes, pupils sitting too large among all that golden brown.
He stepped forward, clapping Simon hard on the back, twice. That must be the best well done you could get, beyond words.
“Right, okay,” Oliver said, talking it through with himself. “Gun goes off, there’s a flash. That’s it, there’s our plan.”
“How?” Maddy asked, and to which part, Red wasn’t sure. Didn’t sound like a full plan, not one up to Catherine Lavoy’s standards at least.
“We position ourselves at every window in the RV. Someone watching the front, back, both sides. Every angle. We watch, and then we bait a shot from the sniper—”
“—Sounds safe,” Simon commented.
“—and one of us will see it, see the flash. Then we’ll know exactly where he is. And then”—Oliver’s eyes glinted—“we run, in the opposite direction, using the RV as cover. We’re going to get out of here.”
That sounded more like a full plan, except there was one part missing.
“How do we bait a shot from him?” Arthur asked, spotting it too. “Without one of us getting killed?”
Red cycled through channel one, then two, back to three. Empty static, all of them.
“We—”
“—Hello?” The voice crackled into life in her hands. The sniper. “Hello. Are we all still alive in there?” he asked.
Red sniffed, breath stalling, heart kicking up in her chest. She scanned the faces of the others quickly. What should she do?
Oliver was there before she could ask him. He grabbed the walkie-talkie out of her hand and pressed the button.
“We’re here,” he said, trying to disguise the tremor in his voice. “We’re working on that secret you want.”
Static.
“Good,” the voice answered. “Keep working. Time’s running out.”
Static.
“Can we just ask him to take a shot?” Reyna suggested.
Oliver rounded on her. “Why would we ask him to take a shot, Reyna? Come on, think. We can’t give away that we’re trying to escape.”
He dropped the walkie-talkie back into Red’s hands.
“Sorry, I’m just trying to help.” Reyna shrank back, sliding into the booth at the dining table.
“Why has he taken shots before?” Oliver said, not really speaking to the others. “He shot at the tires and the gas tank to trap us here. Then at the window, maybe to scare us. Then—”
“The horn!” Maddy said, eyes lighting up. She pointed to the steering wheel. “He shot at us when I was beeping.”
Oliver snapped his fingers. “Bingo.”
They were really doing this, were they? Asking to be shot at. Inviting the red dot in.
Red pressed the button, clicking up through the channels on the walkie-talkie, swapping one static for another while she waited, eyes on Oliver.
“Okay, let’s think about our angles, then,” he said.
Yes, let’s.
“Windows. We’ve got a big one at the back of the RV. Then on the left we have the small one by the bunks, two windows at the dining table.” He nodded his head at them, Red’s eyes catching on the curtains. “The two side windows at the front and the windshield.” The windshield was the only window they hadn’t covered, their only view out into the total darkness of outside. “Then on the right we have the big one behind the sofa, and the small one in the front door. And that’s it, isn’t it? There isn’t one in the bathroom.”
“There’s the rearview camera, too,” Reyna said quietly from the table, picking at her thumb. “Should come up if we put the RV in reverse. I think.”
“Yes, okay, great,” Oliver said, turning to shoot her a smile. Reyna didn’t return it. “That means we might not need someone to cover the back. The person pressing the horn can use the camera to get that angle. Okay.”
He studied them all and they waited to be assigned their windows, Red skipping back to channel three.
“I’ll take the rearview camera and I’ll press the horn.” He swallowed, like his was the hardest job, but he didn’t have to put his face up to a window with a sniper watching outside. “Reyna, you’ll be with me, you watch out the front, through the windshield. Maddy, you take the front left side, watching out the dining table window. Simon, back left, through the bunk window. Arthur, you’re front right, through the window behind the sofa. And Red, you’re back right, the window in the door.”
Red nodded. At least her window still had glass in it. She glanced at Arthur, a knot forming in her gut. He’d pulled the short straw here; the last two times the sniper shot at them, it had come through that window. He looked okay, though. Nervous, not scared. Not yet, at least. He glanced at her, and she gave him a quick half smile. He caught it from her, stretching onto the other side of his face. Together they made one whole smile, tight and tense.
“I’m taking the riskiest job,” Oliver said. Was he? “He’ll shoot toward whoever is at the steering wheel, like with Maddy. So I’m going to need some protection.”
“You’re not going to ask one of us to be your human shield, are you?” Simon said, backing away with his hands raised.
Red snorted, though none of this was really funny, was it? They might die tonight, all of them, some of them, her. A bullet could come anytime, anywhere. Was that what made these smaller moments funnier, because they might not get any more? Last chances to smile, to laugh, to tell Arthur she liked him and it was okay that he didn’t like her back because she was unlikable at times, she knew that. To tell Simon that, yes, his cheekbones were amazing and it would be a damn shame if he didn’t end up onstage or in front of a camera. To thank Maddy for always being there by her side, to share all those big moments, and small, some so small that Red had probably forgotten them by now. To tell Reyna that maybe she could do better. To tell Oliver, well, Red wasn’t sure what she would tell Oliver. And that didn’t matter because she wasn’t going to say any of that anyway. Red wasn’t good at last chances, at final moments, was she? I hate you.
