Strange Weather by Joe Hill
He opened his eyes and came uncoiled, threw himself against the wall just to one side of the office door. He lifted the gun and swiveled to cover the fulfillment nook. The woman rose at the same time, a small, almost elfin Muslim in the hijab and gown, bomb vest strapped to her chest, bulging with explosives, and a silver trigger in one hand. He put a bullet through her center mass. The moment he did it, he realized he had shot right through the packed explosive, too. He waited for the spark and the flash, waited to be carried away in a clap of light. But it didn’t go off. She fell. The bullet had punched right through her and into the mirror behind her, the glass splintering in a red spiderweb.
Something clattered in the office, to his left. He saw movement at the edge of his vision, glanced, saw another woman. She wore a hijab, too, this one a pretty, flowered, gauzy cloth. She clutched a silver pistol with a lot of fancy filigree on it. This shooter was white, but that didn’t surprise him. They were pretty good at turning white girls into soldiers for Allah online.
There was a corpse on the floor between them, at their feet: Roger Lewis, the guy who owned the place. He was on his stomach, the back of his shirt soaked with blood. It looked like he had collapsed onto his desk, maybe grabbed at his big iMac to stay on his feet, and then slid off and rolled onto his face. He had almost pulled the computer off the desk with him. The big silver monitor was precariously balanced on a back corner, looked like it might crash at any moment.
The convert was so close he could’ve reached out to grab her. Some of her blond hair had come loose from the wrap over her head. A long golden strand was stuck to one damp, flushed cheek. She gaped at him, then looked into the next room, but from here she couldn’t see the body in the fulfillment nook.
“Your partner is gone,” he said. “Put it down.”
“You shouldn’t of done that,” she told him, perfectly calm.
Her gun went off with a crack and a pop and a flash of light. He fired back, instinctively, and flung most of her right lung up onto the desk.
His scalp tingled. The barrel of her .357 was still pointing at the floor. If he was shot, he couldn’t feel it, not yet. She stared at him with bewildered, stunned eyes. When she tried to speak, she gurgled blood. Her right hand began to drift up with her weapon. He caught it and twisted it out of her grip, and that was when he saw that the iMac had tilted off the desk and hit the floor. He played the crack and pop and flash of light back in his head, then pushed the notion aside before it could even fully form. No. He had heard a shot. He was sure it had been a shot, and not the sound of a falling computer. He even had a half memory of the slug passing by so closely it had seemed to twitch the fabric of his shirt.
The convert sagged. He almost stepped in to catch her, but at the last moment he deflected her with his left arm to keep her from tumbling into him. She wasn’t a person anymore. She was just evidence. She flopped across Roger Lewis and was still.
His ears rang strangely. The world expanded and brightened around him, and for a moment he had the ridiculous idea that he was close to fainting.
The air was blue from gunfire. He stepped out of the office, backing away from the pile of dead.
Kellaway saw the other radical on her back, staring at the ceiling, still clutching the trigger for the explosives. He took a step nearer to kick her hand free from the button. He wondered what kind of explosive she had packed into the vest, which looked a bit like a converted BabyBjörn.
He saw a pair of small dusky fists clutching the front of her gown, but the image didn’t make sense to him, not at first. He looked at the trigger in her right hand and saw a silver letter opener with an opal in the handle instead of a black button. He frowned. He glanced at the bomb vest again. The cap covering the infant’s head had come loose. He could see an inch of scalp, lightly dusted in tan fuzz.
“Holy shit, dude,” came a voice from his right.
He looked and saw the fat kid who resembled Jonah Hill. He had walked right up to stand behind Kellaway, had wandered in, still clutching his breakfast burrito. He looked at the bodies heaped in the office, then at the dead woman and her dead baby.
“D’joo shoot her for?” the fat kid asked. “She was just hiding, man.”
“I asked you who was in the store. You said Muslim female shooter.”
“No I didn’t!” the fat kid said. “You asked who was in here. I said a Muslim, female shooter, and the owner. Holy shit. I thought you’d go in and save her, not blow her the fuck away like a fucking madman!”
“I didn’t blow her away,” Kellaway said in a dull, leaden voice. “The crazy bitch in the office killed this one. Understand? It wasn’t me. It was her. Tell me you understand.”
The fat kid laughed, a little wildly. He didn’t understand. He didn’t get it at all. He waved a hand at the mirrored wall where the bullet had struck after passing through the Arab and her baby. A silvery pink web of shatter lines that spread across the glass marked the point of impact.
“Dude, I saw you shoot her. I saw you. Plus, they’re gonna pick the bullet out of the wall. Forensics.” He shook his head. “You were out of your fucking mind. I thought you were going to stop a rampage, not go on one yourself. You killed more people than she did! Christ, I’m just glad you didn’t shoot me!”
“Huh,” Kellaway said.
“What?”
“Now that you mention it,” Kellaway told him, and raised the shooter’s fancy filigreed gun.
10:59 A.M.
Harbaugh was first up the stairwell, lumbering to the top in sixty pounds of black Teflon armor. Halfway up he stepped on something fleshy and heard a cry. A skinny black kid was stretched out flat on the stairs, and Harbaugh had mashed his hand with one boot heel. Harbaugh kept going, didn’t apologize. When you were in the middle of a mass shooting, manners were the first thing out the window.
At the top of the steps, he put his back against a round plaster pillar and snuck a look along the second-floor gallery. It was fucking apocalyptic: two acres of polished marble floor, brightly lit, and only a few people scattered around, all of them hiding behind potted plants or spread prostrate on the floor. Like that movie about the walking dead taking over the mall. Matchbox Twenty played on the sound system.
Harbaugh made his move, sprinting across the corridor, two other guys on the team right behind him, Slaughter and Velasquez. He was on his sights the whole way. The guys called it Xbox time, hunt and shoot.
He hit the wall to one side of the store entrance and dipped his helmeted head around the corner into the shop. After his very first glance, though, he lowered his weapon a few inches. A single security guard stood in one corner, facing a shattered mirror. The guy was tranced out, in a daze, poking one finger at a bullet hole in the center of the glass. He wasn’t carrying, but there were a pair of pistols resting on one of the display cases beside him.
“Hey,” Harbaugh said, in a soft voice. “Police.”
The guy seemed to rouse himself, shook his head, stepped away from the smashed mirror.
“You can stand down. It’s all done,” the security guard told him.
The mall cop was in his forties, sculpted, big arms, big muscley neck, hair in a marine crew.
“How many down?” Harbaugh asked.
“Shooter is in the office, on top of one of the victims,” the mall cop said. “They’re both dead. I’ve got three more in here. One’s a baby.” He didn’t choke on that last word, but he did need to clear his throat before saying it.
Harbaugh’s insides went sick and loose at that. Harbaugh had a nine-month-old himself and didn’t want to see an infant with its skull smashed open like a pink egg. He padded into the store all the same, boots almost silent on the thick carpet.
A fat kid, maybe twenty, had been thrown across one of the display cases, a bullet hole almost perfectly between his eyes. His mouth was open as if to object. Harbaugh glimpsed a dead girl in a do-rag, sprawled over a white male in the office.
“Are you hurt?” Harbaugh as
Mall cop shook his head. “No . . . just . . . I might have to sit down.”
“Sir, you should exit the premises. My colleagues will walk you out.”
“I want a moment here. With the woman. I want to sit with her for a bit to say I’m sorry.”
The mall cop was looking at his feet. Harbaugh glanced past his ankles and saw a woman in a pigeon-gray robe, eyes open and staring blankly at the drop ceiling. The baby was tucked into an infant carrier, perfectly still, facedown against his mother’s breast.
The mall cop put a hand on the display counter and gently lowered himself to the carpet and sat beside her. He took her hand, moved his fingers over her knuckles, lifted them to his mouth and kissed them.
“This woman and her baby shouldn’t be dead,” the mall cop said. “I hesitated, and that crazy cunt in the office killed her. Killed her and the baby both. One shot. How am I going to live with that?”
“The only one to blame for what happened to them is the person who pulled the trigger,” Harbaugh said. “You remember that.”
The mall cop considered this and then nodded slowly, his colorless eyes vacant and far away.
“I’ll try,” he said.
11:11 A.M.
The ESU officer named Harbaugh helped Kellaway stand up and kept an arm around him as they walked into the corridor. They left the guns and the dead behind.
Harbaugh walked Kellaway to a stainless-steel bench in the hall and eased him down onto it. A pair of EMTs wheeled a gurney past. Harbaugh told Kellaway to sit tight and stepped away.
It was getting crowded in the hall. Uniformed police had turned up. Kellaway saw a gang of Indian kids—India Indians, not American Indians—standing ten yards off, and two of them were filming everything with their cell phones. Someone yelled to push the onlookers back. A pair of cops stalked past carrying a sawhorse.
Ed Dowling, with mall security, appeared at one side of the bench. He was a ridiculous stork of a man with a prominent Adam’s apple and an inability to make eye contact with anyone.
“You okay?” Dowling asked, looking at his own feet.
“No,” Kellaway said.
“You want water?” Dowling said. “I could get you some water.”
“I want to be alone for a minute.”
“Oh. Okay. Yeah, l get that.” He began to shuffle away, moving sideways, like a man creeping along a high, narrow ledge.
“Wait. Help me up, Edward. I think I’m going to be sick, and I don’t want it all over YouTube.” Nodding toward the pack of fifteen-year-old Hindus or whatever they were.
“Oh, yeah, okay, Mr. Kellaway,” Dowling said. “Let’s go into Lids. They’ve got a can in the storage room out back.” He took Kellaway by the forearm and winched him to his feet.
They crossed to Lids, next door to Devotion Diamonds, and made their way past racks of baseball caps. A dozen Kellaways walked with them, reflected in the mirrored walls—a big, tired-looking man with circles under his eyes and blood on the hip of his uniform. He wasn’t sure how that had gotten there. Dowling used his key ring to open a mirrored panel that doubled as the door to storage. Just before they stepped through into the back, Kellaway heard someone shout.
“Hey!” called a uniformed officer with a plump, pink face. It amazed Kellaway that the force took such soft, out-of-shape, suburban-dad types and yet had turned him down. “Hey, wait. He needs to stay out here. He’s a witness.”
“He’s sick is what he is,” said Dowling, with a sharpness that took Kellaway by surprise. “He ain’t gonna york up out there with a bunch of nimwits filming him. He just nearly got himself killed stopping a mass shooting. Now he ought to be allowed thirty seconds to compose himself. That’s just being decent.” He nudged Kellaway into the storage room and then turned and stood in the doorway, as if to physically block anyone from following him. “Go on, Mr. Kellaway. Take care of yourself.”
“Thank you, Edward,” Kellaway said.
Dusty steel shelving stood against the walls on either side, boxes on top of them. A grimy couch, patched with duct tape, had been shoved into a back corner next to a stained counter with a Mr. Coffee on it. A very narrow doorway opened into a dingy bathroom. A chain dangled from the fluorescent bar above the sink. Graffiti on the wall over the toilet—he didn’t read it.
He shut the door and slid the bolt. He sank to a knee, fished around in one pocket, and came up with the deformed lead slug he’d picked out of the wall behind the shattered mirror. It had popped right out after a moment of working on it with his little multitool. He dropped it into the toilet.
He had his story straight in his mind. He would tell the police he’d heard shooting and approached Devotion Diamonds to assess the situation. He’d heard three shots, but in his statement he would say he’d heard four. It didn’t matter what anyone else said. When people were panicked, details became mutable. Three shots or four—who could be certain how many they’d heard?
He had entered and discovered three dead: the Muslim woman, her baby, and Roger Lewis. He’d encountered the shooter, the blonde, and they’d exchanged words. She moved to shoot, but he fired first, discharging his gun twice. He hit her with his initial shot, missed her with the second. They’d think that when he missed, the bullet went out the open window. Finally the kid who looked like Jonah Hill had entered the shop, and the shooter, with her dying breath, had put a bullet in his fat, foolish face. In fact Kellaway had fired her gun twice. Once into the kid, once out the window. When forensics did the math, the empty shell casings would all add up right: three for Lewis, one for the Arab woman and her infant, and one for the fatso.
He hit the flush. It clanked uselessly. He frowned and hit it again. Nothing. The lead slug sat in the bottom of the basin like a little squashy lump of turd.
Someone knocked.
“Mr. Kellaway?” said a voice he didn’t know. “Are you all right in there?”
He cleared his throat. “Just a minute.”
His gaze drifted up to the wall, and for the first time he read what was scrawled in Sharpie: TOILET FUCKED UP—USE THE PUBLIC RESTROOM.
“Mr. Kellaway, there’s an EMT out here who’d like to examine you.”
“I don’t need medical assistance.”
“Yep. But he’d still like a look at you. You’ve been through what you’d call a traumatic experience.”
“A minute,” he said again.
Kellaway unbuttoned his left cuff and folded it back to the elbow, then plunged his hand into the water. He fished out the slug that had killed Yasmin Haswar and her child, Ibrahim, and set it on the floor.
“Mr. Kellaway, if I can do anything to help you—”
“No, thank you.”
He lifted the heavy lid on the water tank behind the toilet and very gently set it on the seat. His left hand dripped. He picked up the slug and sank it in the water tank. Then he hefted the lid and carefully, quietly put it back in place. There would be time, in a day or two—a week at the outside—to return and collect the slug and ditch it more permanently.
“Mr. Kellaway,” came the voice on the other side of the door, “you need to let someone look at you. I’d like to have a look at you.”
He ran the sink, washed and soaped his hands, splashed water on his face. He grabbed for a hand towel, but there weren’t any left in the dispenser, and wasn’t that always the way? There wasn’t any toilet paper either. When he opened the door, his face was still wet, drops glittering in his eyebrows, in his eyelashes.
The man on the other side of the door was a full foot shorter than him and wore a blue baseball cap that said ST. POSSENTI POLICE. His head was an almost perfect cylinder, an effect exaggerated by the close cut of his pale yellow hair. His face was a burnished shade of red, the deep painless sunburn that all men of German descent acquired when they lived in the tropics for any length of time. His blue eyes glittered with humor and inspiration.
“Here I am,” Kellaway said. “What’d you want to look at?”
The man in the cap pressed his lips together, opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He looked like he might cry. “Well, sir, my two grandchildren were in the mall this morning, with their mother—my daughter. And they’re all still alive, and so are a whole bunch more people. So I guess I just wanted to know what a hero looks like.”
And with that, St. Possenti police chief Jay Rickles took Kellaway in his arms and hugged him.
11:28 A.M.
Lanternglass saw the lights and heard the scream of sirens and was on her way to the mall before Tim Chen called to ask if she was busy.
“I’m about to be,” she said. “I’m driving toward it now.”
“The mall?”
“Uh-huh. What are they saying on the scanner?”
“Shots fired. All units. Multiple homicides.”
“Oh, shit” was her thoughtful reply. “Mass shooter?”
“Looks like it’s our turn. How was the fire?”
Lanternglass had spent the morning in a helicopter, buzzing up and down the edge of the fire blazing through the Ocala National Forest. The smoke was a filthy wall of brown cloud, climbing ten thousand feet high and throbbing with a feverish umber light. Her escort was an official from the National Park Service, who had to yell to be heard over the steady whap of the rotor blades. He shouted unnerving trivia about state cuts to emergency services, federal cuts to disaster relief, and the good luck they’d had so far with the wind.
“Good luck? What do you mean you’ve had good luck with the wind?” Lanternglass had asked him. “Didn’t you say you’re losing a thousand acres a day to this thing?”
“Yeah, but at least the wind is blowing north,” said the Park Service man. “It’s pushing the fire into uninhabited scrub. If it turns to the east, this thing could be on top of St. Possenti in three days.”
Now Lanternglass told her editor, “The fire was a fire. Hot. Greedy. Impossible to satisfy.”