Five survive, p.12
Five Survive, page 12
She’d never said it since.
A swarm of guilt in her gut as she came back to the room, cooling to shame as she watched Oliver studying the pile of resources on the table. Nothing big enough to protect him there.
“Oh, I know,” he said, darting forward to grab the screwdriver. “Excuse me.” He pushed past Red and Simon, elbow butting hers, walking over to the small closet beside the front door. He pulled it open.
“There’s only a mop and a dustpan and brush in there,” Simon told him.
“I know,” Oliver replied, bending down to look at the hinges on the inside of the door. “Arthur, will you help me here? Hold the door while I remove the hinges?”
“Sure.” Arthur nodded, rolling up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. He walked between Red and Simon, gently resting his hand on her back as he guided himself through. Fingers warm, then gone, leaving something behind. That stupid, pathetic firework again, at the back of her eyes. Didn’t it know there was a man outside with a gun?
Arthur curled his hands around the top corners of the closet door while Oliver guided the screwdriver, slotting it into the first screw.
Red’s eyes returned to the walkie-talkie. Her job. Her responsibility. Her plan. Partly, anyway. She clicked up again, shaping the static with her ears, making it say whatever she wanted it to. You could do that with memories too, sometimes. Lie to yourself, think fake thoughts to cover the ones you didn’t want. Like that time Catherine Lavoy took Red to the mall, because she’d finally outgrown her last pair of jeans, and it was Red’s first good day since everything happened. She’d even smiled. But sometimes Red changed it, and it was her mom instead, not dead anymore, not angry anymore. A lie. Impossible. But it was nicer than the truth.
“So before we get into position, everyone,” Oliver said, one screw removed, turning his attention to the next. “We will have to turn off all the lights in the RV, so we can see out the windows better. Turn off the headlights too, so Reyna can see out front. So grab one of the flashlights or use your phone’s light to get yourselves into position.”
Simon waded forward, snatching the headlamp from the dining table with a whispered “Yes.” He pulled the elastic over his head, wearing the light over his eye like an eye patch.
Red shook her head at him. She thought the adrenaline would have sobered him up by now. She thought wrong, clearly. She crossed to the kitchen and turned on the faucet, filling Simon another glass of water, pushing it into his chest.
“All right, Mom.” Simon swayed, taking a sip.
“Simon,” Maddy hissed at him, angry lines crisscrossing her forehead. He’d said the forbidden word.
Oliver grunted as he removed one of the hinges, the muscles in Arthur’s arms stretching as they took the weight of the door. Oliver bent low to remove the hinge at the bottom.
Turning the screwdriver, he said, “You are all responsible for your angle. So you have to be ready when I say I’m about to beep. No blinking, no sneezing, no nothing. We cannot miss the muzzle flash. Simon?”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
No, Red had already worked out it wasn’t anyone from SpongeBob in the curtains. She was going to die before she figured it out, wasn’t she? Her eyes tripped up on Reyna’s face on their way back from the curtains, sitting there, staring straight ahead. Chewing on her tongue and some silent thought, a strange faraway look in her dark eyes. Was she thinking about the plan, about what they were about to do, or something else?
Simon noticed too. He sidled over and whispered in Red’s ear, “You see the way she looked at Oliver when this secret was mentioned? Something going on there.”
Red didn’t respond, but she blinked, and Simon seemed to think that was the same thing. He nodded, too hard, and now Red couldn’t help but think he was trying to deflect somehow.
“Okay.” Oliver placed the second hinge inside the closet and straightened up, his knees clicking. He took the freed closet door from Arthur and swung it sideways, tucking it under one arm. “Let’s do this. Reyna, look alive.”
She got to her feet, wiping her hand across her face, taking the look in her eyes away with it.
“Flashlights on, everyone.”
Red placed the walkie-talkie down on the dining table, leaving it on channel three, ready for the sniper. She reached into her pocket for her phone. No service of course but, hey, 51% battery, still pretty good for her. She knew that Maddy panicked whenever her own was below 50%, wouldn’t even leave the house.
She swiped down and clicked on the flashlight.
“Arthur, hit the lights. Reyna, headlights.”
Reyna leaned across the steering wheel and out went the headlights. Arthur reached up to the control panel by the refrigerator and twisted the lights all the way off. The darkness from outside found its way into the RV, disappearing them all, broken up only by the white swinging beams of their flashlights. A yellow glow from Simon’s headlamp as he readjusted it onto his forehead. Red lit up Maddy as she came to stand next to her, ready to take her position at her window. Her face was ghostly pale, almost blue, white dots in the pools of her eyes.
“Into your positions.”
“That’s what she said,” Simon whispered, walking past Red toward the window by the lower bunk.
Red turned, bumping into Arthur.
“Sorry, after you,” she said.
Arthur approached his window, resting one knee up on the sofa. Red took her place at the front door, waiting behind the closed shade. She watched over her shoulder as Oliver awkwardly spun the closet door to stand end up and he crouched beside the steering wheel. He shifted the gear into reverse, and the image from the rearview camera flickered into life in the center console. The road eerie white at the bottom of the screen, the sky molded from shades of black and gray.
Oliver shuffled the closet door against himself. A shield. A barricade. But could wood that thin stop a bullet from a high-powered rifle?
Red turned to her own window. She swallowed, fast-forwarding the next few seconds, to her putting her face and eyes up against the bottom of the glass to study the darkness beyond. She imagined the red dot floating right there on her face, joining the freckles on her nose, moving up to her forehead, or against her teeth, and she’d never even know about it. Maybe she’d hear the crack in her last moment, but she wouldn’t know, would she, as it hit its target? Dead too fast for the fear to live. Like how she imagined Mom had died, in those early days when her dad and the other officers spoke in jagged circles around it. Killed in the line of duty was all some would say to her. Your mom was a hero, others.
In Red’s head, Mom didn’t have time to be scared, no time to think her goodbyes, she didn’t know it was her end, she didn’t know and with one blink she was gone. But she wasn’t afraid, and that was one good thing as the world fell apart. Except that wasn’t what happened. At all. Red looked it up, the night before the funeral. Multiple articles about the fatal shooting of Police Captain Grace Kenny of the Philadelphia PD, Third District. She shouldn’t have, because then she wouldn’t know. But it was too late. And the picture in her head changed. Mom on her knees. Begging for her life—the articles didn’t say that part, but Red filled in the gaps. On her knees, terrified, knowing what was about to happen. And then it did: two shots to the back of the head. Killed with her own service weapon. She had time to be afraid, all the time in the world, lifetimes in seconds, there on her knees. Executed was another word the articles used, a word almost too big for thirteen-year-old Red to understand. It didn’t fit in her head, not in the same sentence as her mom.
She understood now, though, thinking about putting her face up to that window. Thinking about that red dot searching her out in the darkness. Even a fraction of the fear her mom felt, right there at the end of all things.
“Red, are you listening?” Oliver raised his voice. “I said flashlights off!”
“S-sorry,” she mumbled, pressing the button, and the pitch-black claimed the RV for itself, the others no longer full people, just shadows, nightmare figures on this nightmare night. No moonlight even, now that Reyna had pulled down the shade on the windshield.
“Now,” Oliver said, clearing his throat. “If you pull your curtains or shades just a little bit, from the bottom corner, so you can look out.”
“Do we really have to put our fucking faces up against the windows?” Simon’s voice called behind her. “Sounds like a death wish to me.”
“Yes,” Oliver replied. “Because that’s the plan.”
Have to stick to the plan, Red thought. Always. Like she was doing right now. She just had to see through the rest of tonight, the rest of the plan.
“Oh, I know!” Maddy shouted, directly opposite Red at her window. Always side by side. “We can use our phones, like Arthur did before. Record a video of outside, then we definitely won’t miss the flash.”
“Okay, if you’d prefer,” Oliver conceded.
“Yes, I’d fucking prefer,” Simon said, a sound of clumsy rustling from his corner.
“Right, phones out!” Oliver called.
Red watched the dark shape of Arthur struggle with his, fiddling with the front of his jeans. Close enough to reach out and touch. To hold hands, even, if they didn’t need both hands for this plan.
“Put them up against the windows now, make sure they are facing your assigned angle.”
Red unhooked the shade, her fingers gripped hard around the clasp. Do not let it go. She raised it a couple of inches from the bottom and, with her other hand, pressed the camera of her phone against the glass. She shifted her body so she wasn’t directly behind the phone, in the line of sight, and she watched the screen. There was nothing out there. Only black.
She checked over her shoulder at Arthur. His hand had disappeared beyond the lower corner of the mattress, out there in the night, the other still fiddling nervously with his jeans.
“Okay, start recording now!” Oliver shouted, and the dark RV was filled with a chorus of high-pitched bleeps, singing to each other, as they all pressed record.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds on the recording.
“Ready?” Oliver called, a shadowy arm reaching up behind his shield.
Red’s breath stuttered, the sound of her heart too loud in her ears, too loud and too fast. And then her heart was lost to a scream, the scream of the horn piercing the night and piercing her ears. One long note, then four short bursts.
“Come on.” Oliver’s voice strained as he pressed the horn again.
Three short beeps.
One long note.
The RV wailing into the darkness.
And again.
Nothing. Not the crack Red’s ears were waiting for, not the clap of the gun. Her phone screen dark and empty.
“Come on!” Oliver tried again, ten sharp beeps, sharper, shorter.
The RV screamed and screamed again.
“Why is he not taking the fucking shot?!”
Nothing.
The screaming stopped, the ghost of the sound ringing in Red’s ears in the after-silence.
The dark shape of Oliver’s head, emerging from behind the closet door.
“Why the fuck didn’t he take the shot?” he barked.
Red’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, built a home there in it.
“I don’t know,” Arthur said, breathless, pulling his hand back inside the RV and stopping the recording on his phone. A deflated double beep. Red did the same, hooking the window shade back down to the bottom.
More double-tone bleeps, from the others’ phones as they withdrew from the windows.
The ringing in Red’s ears faded, taken over by the ever-present static.
“I don’t understand,” Maddy said, frustrated, slumping down on the booth. “He did it last time.”
The walkie-talkie crackled on the table and Maddy flinched, jumping away from it.
“Was that for me?” The voice came through, a low hiss. “You know you already have my full attention.”
A new sound through the speaker, metal grating on metal, the sound of the rifle cocking. It cut out and the static took over again. Filled the room, filled Red’s head. But the cocking gun, it stayed somehow, working its way down into her bones. She could feel it, in the turn of her elbow and the bend of her knee.
“Fuck.” The shape of Oliver stood up, resting his closet door against the driver’s seat. “That should have worked. It doesn’t…that should have worked.”
A sigh from Reyna, because Red knew Maddy’s sighs and that wasn’t it. Reyna’s silhouette floated away from the windshield.
“He’s only going to shoot now if he sees one of us try to leave the RV, isn’t he?” she said, but Red couldn’t see her eyes and didn’t know who she was talking to.
“Again,” Simon said, his voice drawing closer in the darkness behind her. “I am not nominating myself for self-sacrificing duty.” He didn’t sound drunk anymore.
“Maybe you’re right,” Oliver replied, close enough now that Red could make out his face. Well, just the glint of his eyes and the glint of his teeth. “Maybe those first shots at the RV were just to scare us, but now that we know what this is about, what he wants, he’ll only shoot to stop one of us from getting away.”
The long-winded way of saying exactly what Reyna just had. Red wondered if he did that to her a lot.
“So, maybe…,” Maddy said, uncertainly, and Red could picture the look on her face, the exact pull in her eyes and the fold to her mouth. “Maybe we make it look like one of us is leaving the RV. That’s how we bait the shot.”
Oliver nodded his head. “Just what I was going to say. We make him think one of us is escaping out the door, enough to take the shot.”
“How, without actually getting shot?” Simon replied. “Are we going to build a fake human or something?”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do, Simon.” The trace of a smile in Oliver’s voice now. Red bet he somehow thought it was all his idea, even though it was Reyna, Maddy and Simon who’d reasoned it out. “Red,” he said then, like he’d read her thoughts. “Can you hit the lights.”
She stepped toward the refrigerator and reached up to click the lights back on. Even on their lowest setting, the brightness of the dim overhead lights made her eyes water, rebuilding the RV and the six of them from the darkness.
Maddy squinted at Red, a nod to ask if she was okay. Red nodded back.
“And what are we going to build a fake human out of?” Reyna asked now, not disguising the doubt in her voice.
“Well, we already have that closet door.” Oliver gestured back to his shield. “That could be the body, if we put one of my hoodies over it.”
“The mop!” Simon said, louder than he needed to. “We snap it in half and those could be arms, inside the sleeves.”
Oliver nodded, considering it.
“Oh,” Maddy interjected. “I have a beach ball in my suitcase. Not blown up yet, but that could be the head, right?”
“That could work,” Oliver said.
No, it couldn’t, what were they all talking about? Even on her worst day, Red didn’t look like a closet door with stick mop-arms and a giant beach ball head. The shooter would never believe it was one of them; he had a telescopic sight mounted to his rifle. But she didn’t say anything. How could she say anything? That was part of the plan. Red looked over at Arthur and Reyna. They were silent, like her.
Oliver clapped and, my god, he had to stop doing that.
“Right, Maddy, can you go grab one of my hoodies? The green one. Reyna, grab that mop. Simon, bring the duct tape.”
“Red, come with me,” Maddy said, pulling on Red’s sleeve. She didn’t want to walk into the back bedroom on her own. And, sure, because even though this RV was thirty-one feet, Red had been in the same ten feet for far too long.
She followed Maddy, past the kitchen and the bunks, through the open door into the back bedroom. Maddy flicked on the light.
The black-and-white patterned sheets on the bed were crumpled under the weight of a blue suitcase.
“That must be Reyna’s,” Maddy said, walking past the foot of the bed to the large closet along the back right, as they faced it.
“This isn’t going to work,” Red said, now that it was just the two of them and Oliver couldn’t hear. “This plan. The shooter will never believe it’s a person.”
“He might,” Maddy said, reaching for the handle and pulling the closet open. There was a long mirror on the inside of the door. Red hadn’t known it was there. She flinched as it doubled the people in the room, catching eyes with herself over Maddy’s shoulder.
“Would you think closet-beach-ball-mop-man was real if you saw him out and about?” she asked, looking at Maddy’s reflection.
“I might, at a quick glance.”
“Why don’t you just ask him out while you’re at it? You’d have cute kids.”
Red made a face at her in the mirror, eyes wide and nostrils flared, wrinkles disappearing the freckles on her nose. Mom used to pull that same face at her, in the mirror opposite their kitchen table, making Red laugh over sugarcoated cornflakes. Red pushed the memory away. It wasn’t Mom in the mirror, it was her and Maddy, and that didn’t help anybody. It never did. Put her away. Red needed to focus on tonight, on the people still here, not the ones who were gone and never coming back.
Maddy bent low, back to her, blocking the view. But in the mirror, Red could see Maddy’s double, rifling through Oliver’s open suitcase on the floor of the closet.
Two Maddys, two Reds.
Wait a second.
“The mirror,” Red said quietly, not sure yet, the idea still forming. “Can’t we use the mirror to make a double of one of us? A reflection.” She tried to imagine it in her head, placing the mirror at the door of the RV, re-creating the angles. She couldn’t quite get there on her own, not all the way. “At the door. Can’t we…” She trailed off, but Maddy’s reflection had straightened up now, staring her dead in the eye.
