“You ever shoot a cop?” She asked.
His eyes went wide and he shook his head.
“Well, you’re gonna right now.”
She put a hand on his hand. I felt the rough skin on my own palm. He let himself be manipulated by her, too scared to resist. She stepped behind him, placed his hand over hers and the gun, keeping it in her possession. Then pointed it down at the cop and his ever-widening pool of blood.
“Go ahead. Shoot him.” Mr. Innocent didn’t know what to do. I could feel his heart pounding through her chest as she pressed tightly against his back.
Tired of waiting for him, Sam squeezed the trigger and another bullet tore through the cop’s skull. Blood didn’t spray, most of it already decorated the floor. The shot did open up an all too clear view of his brain. Mr. Innocent nearly threw up.
I hated that my own reaction was one of dull distance. Of giving in.
“Who else wants a try?” she asked the group. Nobody moved. “How about him?” she aimed the gun at Mr. Innocent’s head. “Anybody have a problem with him while you were in there?” Still nobody moved, but I could sense them all tensing their muscles at once.
She fired. Another open-skulled body hit the floor.
“What about that one?” She aimed at the vocal one and shot. He fell. “How ‘bout him?” Another shot. One left. “You? Last chance.”
The last man began to cry. The two bodies around him settled as their dead weight fell into each other. He put his hands out in front of him because he needed something to do. Nobody really thinks they’re going to stop a bullet. Maybe people do it more to block their view of what is coming.
She pulled the trigger and the gun clicked. Empty.
“Wait there,” she said. The man opened one eye, looked out through his tears and his spread fingers to watch her step over to the cop and pick his pistol up off the floor. She wiped blood from the grip onto his shirt, then wiped her hand on his pants making an annoyed grunt as she did. Even after the wipe, her palm was still a light pink, stained with blood. I felt its warmth.
The guy in the cell obeyed orders. He stayed as she asked him and when she returned to her firing position he shut his eyes and put his hand up again. It didn’t stop the bullet this time either. All he got for his effort was a hole in the hand a split second before the hole in his head.
It bothered me how little I felt. My insides were numb. A grief overload. The thrill of getting Lucas out to safety in the nick of time surely took some of the edge off more random killing. Being around the smell of gunpowder and fresh blood certainly wasn’t getting any easier though.
NEXT STOP…
“So now what?” I asked. I realized, along with the numbness, I doubted whether I would make it out of the jail cell alive. I was trapped, useless to her and ready to spill my guts to the cops. Everything in the rule book says she should kill me. Then there’s that damn little clause in the contract making it unclear whether taking my life would mean the end of hers too.
“We go on a trip,” she said. She let the keys dangle in her hand, fingering through to find the right one.
“You know I don’t know where he went.”
“I know.”
“So where are you taking me?”
“You haven’t found out for yourself yet? You’re so fond of entering my brain and taking a walk around. Which I’m fucking sick of, by the way.”
“You made that clear.”
“It’s like mind rape.”
“Just open the door and let’s get this over with.”
She stopped outside my cell door. Her foot squished in the pool of blood spreading from beneath the cop. She deliberately rotated her shoe so the sound of wet friction filled the cinderblock room. Now that the gunfire faded and the noise from upstairs settled, down in the holding cells it became eerily quiet. Quiet enough to hear blood coagulate, which it did all around me.
She smiled as she slid her shoe along the red smear. I refused to look down.
“I want you to find out where we’re going for yourself.”
“I don’t care. I’ll find out when we get there.”
“No. Go ahead. Take a look.”
She baited me. The hint of remorse form the night before seemed to have vanished. My urge to call her a bitch or something much worse wouldn’t come out either. New day, new resolve I guess. Amazing what even a lousy night’s sleep can do.
“I can stay in here all night long. Or at least until the DEA gets here,” I said.
“You and I both know it will take them fucking forever. They probably have to fill out a form just to enter the precinct.”
She was right. Damn government bureaucracy. Sam pushed her face closer to the bars.
“I want you to look.”
I felt myself being pulled into her head. We were both getting better at using our strange powers over each other. I’d managed to reach back into her memories, why wouldn’t she be able to force me to see something?
Her eyes began to water as she concentrated harder. I started to resist, but I was too exhausted. I let it come. What’s the damn point?
She showed me more than only where we were going. She had a replay cued up of all the death and destruction so far. I watched body after body get cut down, blood flowed in rivers, eyes went glassy and cold as I watched. I sat down on the cot and started shivering. I opened my mouth to scream but nothing came out.
After a good session on the shooting range I always liked to play with the spent shells. I liked to run my fingers over the little casings of metal, so harmless after being discharged. Still, the small black cave always seemed like a reminder of the death that lived inside. Right then, in that cell, I felt like that shadowed shell. Like my body—no, more like my soul—lived in that tiny space. The stink of gunpowder, the hard metal cold until the firing pin and then hot, burning hot. My brain felt stuffed into the charred black casing of a million spent bullets.
And in the mix of images I saw a face. A face I recognized. I knew where we were going.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
We drove north on the highway in a stolen car. Four exits out of the city and she turned off and began the jaunt through suburbia. For the drive each of us had been concentrating on not letting the other one in our heads. The car hummed with electric noise, or maybe that was only in my head. Neither of us spoke. We both knew the directions.
I got tired of the silence.
“I saw you last night, you know.”
“Yeah. And?”
“I saw you crying. You didn’t want to do what you did.”
Her hands gripped tighter on the wheel. I felt subtle vibrations in my own hands, the road beneath us rattling the wheel, feeling transferred from her body to mine.