Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) (33 page)

Easy to say, but so hard to do.  At least for Sandy.  He’d never done too well with women.  He’d been to a couple of the campus counselors when he was a student and they’d both said the same thing: fear of rejection. 

As if someone needed a Ph.D. to tell him that.  Of
course
he feared rejection.  Nobody in the whole damn world liked rejection, but that didn’t seem to stop people from courting it by coming on to each other with the lamest, sappiest lines.  So why did the mere possibility of rejection paralyze him?  The counselors liked to tell him the
why
of the fear didn’t matter so much as overcoming it.

Okay, he thought.  Let’s overcome this.  What have we got here?  We’ve got a book-reading Goth chick heading uptown on the 9 express.  Got to be a student.  Probably Barnard. 

As the train lurched into motion again, he checked out her book:
Hitchcock
by Francois Truffaut.

Bingo.  Film student.

Okay.  Here goes.

He wet his lips, swallowed, took that deep breath…

“Going for your film MFA, right?” he said.

And waited.

Nothing.  She didn’t turn her head, didn’t even blink.  She did move, but just to turn the page of her book.  He might as well have used sign language on a blind person. 

But he knew he hadn’t imagined speaking, knew he must have been audible because the GPM opened one of his eyes for a two-second look his way, then closed it again.  Reminded Sandy of Duffy, their family cat: a one-eyed glance – two would require too much energy – was the only acknowledgment that chunky old tom granted when someone new entered his presence. 

So now what?  He felt like he was back in high school after asking some girl if she wanted to dance and she’d just said no.  That had happened only once but that once had been enough to stop him from ever asking anyone again.  Should he retreat now?  Slink away and hide his head?  Or push it?

Push it.

He raised his voice.  “I said, are you going for your film MFA?”

She looked up, glanced at him with dark brown eyes for maybe a whole millisecond, then went back to her book. 

“Yes,” she said, but she spoke to the book.

“I like Hitchcock,” he told her.

Again to the book: “Most people do.”

This was going nowhere fast.  Maybe she’d warm up if she knew he’d gone to
Columbia too.

“I graduated from the
School of Journalism a couple of years ago.”

“Congratulations.”

That did it, Sandy, he thought.  That broke the ice.  She’s really hot for you now.  Shit, why didn’t you just keep your mouth shut? 

He racked his brain for another line.  He’d already been given the cold shoulder; nothing left to lose now.  He’d swum beyond his point of no return, so he had to keep going.  She was either going to let him drown in a sea of rejection or send him a lifeboat.

He smiled.  Just the kind of crappy imagery his journalism professors had tried to scour from his brain.  One had even told him he wrote the most cliché-ridden prose he’d ever read.  But what was the big deal about clichés?  They served a purpose in journalism, especially tabloid journalism.  Readers understood them,
expected
them, and probably felt something was missing if they didn’t run across a couple.

The sudden blast of music from the front of the car cut off the thought. 
Sandy looked around and saw that the wild-haired guy in the fatigue jacket had turned on his boom box and cranked it up to full volume.  It was pumping out a sixties tune Sandy half knew–”Time Has Come Today” by the Something-or-other Brothers.

Back to the film student: Maybe he should dazzle her by mentioning his great job at the city’s most infamous weekly tabloid,
The Light
, where his degree from one of the country’s great journalism programs landed him an entry-level position one step above the janitorial staff – except in pay.  Or how he’s been doing interviews at every other paper around the city trying to move up from
The Light
and no one’s calling back.  That’ll impress her.

Oh, hell, go for gold and let her put you out of your misery.

“What’s your name?”

Without missing a beat she said, “Lina Wertmüller.”

Not just unfriendly, she thinks I’m an idiot.  Well two can play that game.

Sandy
stuck out his hand.  “Glad to meet you, Lina.  I’m Henry Louis Mencken, but you can call me H. L.”

To
Sandy’s shock she lifted her head and laughed.  He’d made a funny and she
laughed
.  What a wonderful sound, even if he could barely hear it over the blasting music. 

And then the name of the group behind the song came to him: the Chambers Brothers.

Suddenly – other sounds.  Shouts, cries, screams, and people stumbling, scrambling past him in a mad rush toward the rear end of the car. 

“It’s time now!” cried a voice.  “Yes, it’s time.”

Sandy turned and saw the Asian in the fatigue jacket standing before the door at the front end of the car.  His black eyes were mad, endlessly, vacantly mad, and he clutched in each hand a black pistol that seemed too long and too thick in the barrel.  Then Sandy realized they were equipped with silencers. 

Oh, Christ, he thought, shock launching him to his feet, he’s going to start shooting.

And then he saw the bodies and the blood and knew that the shooting had already begun.  Images flashed through his instantly adrenalized brain as he turned to run – not everyone from the front of the car had made it to the rear; the first to be shot lay where they’d fallen… 

…like the Korean guy, maybe Sandy’s age, with rust-colored hair and a Nike swoosh on his cap, sprawled on the red-splattered floor, facing Sandy with his headphones still on his ears, blood leaking from his nose, and black eyes staring into the beyond… 

…like the heavy black woman in the two-piece sleeveless gray suit over a black polka dotted white blouse with starched pristine cuffs, lying face down, still twitching as the last of her life ran out from under her wig and stained the copy of “Rolie Polie Olie” that had spilled from her Barnes and Noble bag…

…or the others who’d hit the deck and now huddled and crouched and cringed between seats, holding up their hands palm out as if to stop the bullets, and pleading for mercy…

But they were asking the wrong guy, because the man with the guns was tuned to some other frequency as he shuffled along the aisle, swinging his pistols left and right and pumping bullets through the silencers. 
Phut!.. phut!…  phut!
  The sounds barely audible through the music as slugs tore into heads and tear-stained faces, sometimes right through the supplicating hands.  He moved without the slightest hint of urgency, looking for all the world like a suburban homeowner on a sunny Saturday morning strolling his lawn with a can of herbicide and casually spraying the weeds he passed.

And somewhere up there, up front, someone’s bowels had let loose and the stink was filling the car.

Brain screaming in panic, Sandy ducked and swung around and saw the GPM crouched behind his seat, facing the rear of the car, and he must have lost it because he was shouting something that sounded like, “Doesn’t anyone have a goddamn gun?”

Yeah, asshole!
Sandy wanted to say.  The guy standing in the aisle has two, and he’s coming your way!

Turning further
Sandy came face to face with Lina or whoever she was and knew the naked fear in her blanched face must have mirrored his own.  He looked past her at the rest of the screaming, panicked riders crammed like a mass of worms into the rear of the car, the nearer ones wriggling, kicking, biting, clawing to get further to the rear and the ones at the very back battling with all they had to stay where they were, and suddenly Sandy knew what the others had already discovered – that once you got back there you had nowhere to go unless you could find a way to open the rear door and jump onto the tracks at who-knew-how-many-miles an hour and hope that if you were lucky enough not to break your neck when you hit, you wouldn’t land on the third rail and get fried to a cinder. 

He saw a brown hand snake upward at the rear of the press, grip the red emergency handle, and yank down…

Yes!

Saw the handle come free as the cord snapped. 

And just then the Fifty-ninth Street / Columbus Circle station lit up around the train but it didn’t slow because oh shit this was the express damn it and it was going to skip Sixty-sixth Street as well and not stop until Seventy-second.

Seventy-second!  No wonder the gunman was in no hurry.  He had his prey cornered like cattle in a stockyard pen and could slaughter them at will – kill just about everyone before the train reached its next stop. 

Sandy saw only one chance to save his life.  If he could get to the rear there, worm his way through the massed crowd, even if he had to do it on hands and knees – he was thin, he could do it – and get as far back as he could and crawl under a seat, maybe he could survive until Seventy-second Street.  That would be the end of it.  When the doors opened the gunman would take off or blow his own brains out, and Sandy would be safe.  All he had to do was survive until then.

Another glance at the gunman showed him pointing one of his pistols down at someone
Sandy couldn’t see.  The only visible part of the next victim was a pair of hands raised above the back of a seat, a woman’s hands, mocha colored, nails painted bright red, fingers interlocked as if in prayer. 

Even more frightening was the realization that this faceless woman and the GPM appeared to be the last living people between Sandy and the killer.  Panic took a choke hold on his throat as he turned and lunged toward the rear of the car –
oh sweet Jesus he didn’t want to die he was too young and he hadn’t really begun to live so he couldn’t die now oh please not now not now
– but the film student was there, half in, half out of a crouch and he slammed against her, knocking her over, and they both went down, Sandy landing on top as they hit the floor. 

He was losing it now, ready to scream at the bitch for getting in his way, but more important than screaming was knowing right now, right this instant where the gunman was, so he looked back, praying he wouldn’t see that impassive bearded face looming behind the muzzle of a silencer.  Instead he saw the GPM, whose face was set into grim lines of fury and whose eyes now were anything but mild, and he was muttering, “Shit-shit-shit!” and pulling up the cuff of his jeans where something leather was strapped and then he was yanking a metallic object from the leather and Sandy saw it was a tiny pistol.  At first he thought it was one of those old-fashioned Derringers women and gamblers carried in westerns but when he saw the dude work the little slide back and forth he realized it was a miniature automatic. 

And now the GPM – Sandy was finding it hard to think of him as generic anymore but didn’t have any other handle for the guy – was on his feet and moving toward the killer and Sandy wondered, What’s he think he’s going to do with that little pop gun? and then it went off and after the dainty little
phuts
of the killer’s guns the sound was like a cannon in the confines of the subway car and the bullet must have caught the killer in the shoulder because that was where his fatigue jacket exploded in red, knocking him back and spinning him half around.  He screamed in pain and stared with eyes full of shock and wonder and fear at this guy coming at him from out of nowhere.  Sandy couldn’t see the GPM’s face as he worked the slide to his pistol again, just the back of his head and not much of that thanks to the knit cap, but he did see the woman who’d been the next intended victim crawl out from where she’d been cowering on the floor and scrabble past the dude on her belly, her teary eyes showing white all around, her lipsticked mouth a scarlet O of terror. 

Then the killer started to raise the gun in his good hand but the GPM was still moving toward him like an eagle swooping in on a field mouse, had that little pistol raised and it boomed again, the recoil jerking his hand high in the air, the second bullet detonating another explosion of red, this time in the killer’s other shoulder, knocking him back against one of the chrome hang-on poles in the center of the aisle where he sagged, both arms limp and useless at his sides, and gaped at the relentless man moving ever closer.  He roared and lunged forward, whether to head-butt or bite the GPM no one would ever know, because without pausing, without the slightest hint of hesitation the GPM leveled that toy pistol at the killer’s left eye and let it boom again. 
Sandy saw the killer’s head snap back and the impact swing him halfway around the pole before he lurched free to do a loose-kneed pirouette and collapse half-sitting, half sprawled against one of the doors, very, very, very dead.

And then the GPM was working the little slide on his little gun again, and a fourth boom, this into the tape player, reducing it to a thousand flying black fragments and stopping its incessant cries about time having come today.

Stunned silence in the car after that final report – only the rattle of the wheels and the whistle of the wind racing past.

Saved!