Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down (35 page)

Catch-25.

Fallon had effectively prepared for this moment, while never really considering it a possibility. Money would not be a problem; he had plenty of it stashed away. The issue was getting to it safely, making the necessary arrangements with according precautions, and such things took time. That meant disappearing without the use of any of his various identifies, all of which could be compromised now. His employers and conduits knew too much about him, his habits and patterns. Disappearing meant relying on none of them, becoming someone else entirely while laying the groundwork for his permanent departure from parts known.

There were plenty of Third World countries into which he could vanish, only to resurface as a man with a different identity boasting the kind of skills that were always in need. Fallon couldn’t imagine himself wallowing away the time on a beach, no matter how beautiful or plentiful the women. His life had been defined by killing for too long to either risk or want change.

For now going off the grid meant avoiding all forms of security cameras and public transportation, including buses, trains and airplanes. Rental cars were out, as well, and stealing too many cars could leave the kind of pattern he needed to avoid.

That left hitchhiking. Mr. Beechum’s was the fifth car in a week to chance picking him up. Fallon didn’t kill the others and hadn’t expected to kill Beechum until the ditzy man kept speaking enthusiastically of the new job he was headed for. That’s when the plan unfolded for Fallon, and the best he was able to do for Beechum in return was kill him in quick, painless fashion.

“I love kids” was the last thing the teacher said. “Making a difference in their lives and all.”

In that moment Fallon couldn’t have known the kind of difference he’d end up making.

Fallon saw the two vans creep toward the school’s entrance when he was in the third day of discussing “The Most Dangerous Game.” They were noteworthy first for the fact they drove onto the grounds down the wrong side of the U-shaped drive fronting the building and second because the vans wore the markings of a professional cleaning service. Such markings always allowed for unquestioned access to buildings, public and otherwise, but why would a middle school with a full janitorial staff need a professional cleaning service?

Fallon’s heart began to beat faster as the vans drifted out of his line of sight. Two vans meant a dozen men or more, certainly overkill on the part of his former employers. And if they had ascertained his presence here at Hampton Lake, they’d be much better off laying an ambush instead of storming the building in full awareness of his conceivable escape.

That reality should have made him feel better.

But it didn’t.

Instincts had saved his life often enough for Fallon to learn to trust them, and right now they were scratching at his spine like scalpels peeling back the flesh.

“Rainsford’s my kind of guy,” Trent was saying from his customary perch in the back of the room.

“Why?” Fallon managed to ask, not really paying attention. His eyes strayed out the window again, but the vans did not reappear. He moved closer to the glass, hoping to better his angle.

“Because he kicks General Zaroff’s ass. And it was Zaroff’s own fucking fault.”

“Why?” Fallon asked, intrigued in spite of the nagging feeling that wouldn’t go away.

“Because he’d been playing the game too long. Hunting men, who knows how many of them.”

“So why stop?”

“Because he should’ve known he’d meet his match. Sooner or later. It’s like, you know, inevitable.”

Fallon moved away from the window, suddenly intrigued. “So why’d he keep doing it? Come on, people, put yourself in Zaroff’s shoes.”

“’Cause it’s all he had,” said a girl in the front row. “All he knew.”

“What else?”

“He was good at it,” someone else answered. “When you’re that good, you don’t think anybody’ll ever beat you.”

“Was Rainsford better at the game than the general?” Fallon asked his class.

“No,” said Trent. “Zaroff lost ’cause he got lazy. When you get lazy, you get beat every time. But Rainsford, he was a hero.”

“Why?”

“He saved lives. Of Zaroff’s future victims. Not all heroes mean to be heroes, if you get my drift.”

“May I have your attention please?”

The voice of Principal Meeks boomed over the school’s PA system.

“All students and teachers, please report to the gymnasium immediately. That’s all students and teachers, please report to the—”

The principal’s voice cut off in midsentence, as if he’d accidentally hit the wrong switch. Fallon watched his students begin to rise from their desks, replaying Meeks’s words in his head—not for content so much as cadence. Something all wrong about the tone and import. Fallon knew the sound of a man under duress, because he’d put countless men in just that position.

When you get lazy, you get beat every time….

“No,” Fallon said before the student closest to the door could open it. “Back to your seats.”

“But—”

“Back to your seats.”

The edge in Fallon’s voice had his students returning to their desks without further question. The hallway beyond filled with students spilling out of nearby classrooms, the heavy trampling of feet signaling the approach of those emerging from the two-story wing at the building’s head.

“Mr. Beechum?”

Fallon swung toward the windows again. They only opened inward at the very top, enough to provide ventilation but not escape.

“Mr. Beechum?”

Fallon didn’t answer. Mr. Beechum was gone.

“Trent,” Fallon said, the persona shed, cold eyes boring down on the boy who’d been his favorite, “give me your switchblade.”

“My wh—”

“Now, Trent.”

The voice not raised, just measured and certain.

“It’s a butterfly knife.”

Trent fished the butterfly knife out of his backpack, brought it up to Fallon and extended it toward him in a trembling hand. Fallon wished he could smile at him reassuringly, the way Mr. Beechum would.

Except Mr. Beechum was gone.

“Okay,” Fallon said, “everyone line up starting on this wall and wrapping around to the back of the room. Shoulder to shoulder. Very close. Out of sight from the door.”

“Why?” a girl asked, moving to obey.

Fallon didn’t answer. Beyond his classroom, the thick flow of students and their teacher escorts continued down the corridor, oblivious to whatever might be transpiring. Fallon hoped he was
wrong, but knew he wasn’t. He had spent his life as Zaroff, the odds stacked heavily in his favor. But now suddenly he found himself as Rainsford.

When you’re that good, you don’t think anybody’ll ever beat you.

Well, whoever had come in those vans was in for a big surprise, weren’t they?

The moments passed in silence broken only by the loud breathing of his students. Or maybe it wasn’t loud. Maybe Fallon just heard it that way.

The hallway emptied, a few stragglers passing the windowed door and then no one. A pause, then fresh footsteps crackling atop tile alone followed by the creaking echo of doors being thrust open, each growing louder.

Fallon snapped the butterfly knife’s blade into position.

A boy whimpered. Two girls began to sob, then a third.

Fallon pressed a single finger against his lips, signaling them to be quiet, ducked back so he was out of sight from the doorway.

The heavy footsteps drew closer. The knob rattled, door easing inward.

A student gasped.

A man lurched past Fallon, never seeing him. Fallon noted the high-end submachine gun he was steadying with a second hand in the last moment before he pounced. Arm wrapped around the man’s neck to silence him as he drew Trent’s butterfly knife on a sharp upward angle required to slice through bone and gristle, digging into the lungs and shredding them.

The man gurgled and rasped, fighting against Fallon as bloody froth poured from his mouth. Fallon snapped his neck for good measure, studying his face as he dragged him across the room before the horrified stares of his students.

The man was Arab; Fallon could tell that from sight, as well as smell. Smells were important to him. You spend enough time all over the world, in the various cesspits of humanity, and you
begin to know men by their smells as much as anything. An Arab, all right, and in that moment Fallon realized everything he had been dispatched to Iraq to prevent had finally come to pass. The foreign stink come home.

Fallon was free to escape now. Two vans meant a dozen men at least, the other eleven likely scattered throughout the building. He could flee the building without so much as killing another, or, perhaps, just one. Maybe use one of their vans as his escape vehicle and leave them to whatever debacle they intended to perpetrate on the school and the world. It wasn’t his world anyway, not anymore.

Or was it?

He glanced at his students, bunched tighter together now, hugging each other as they stared at him in terror the way they would a monster, like the one Frankenstein had created. Or maybe General Zaroff, mad for the hunt.

Johnny got his gun, all right.

Flee and these students,
his
students, would inevitably end up in the gym with the others. Perhaps to be made an example of for disobeying. Terrorists like these were not very original, and that awareness sparked a memory in Fallon’s head of Chechnyan terrorists taking a school over in that particular godforsaken hostage situation. The students brought to the gymnasium, just like here. And then the gym was blown up while the whole world watched.

No, not very original, but effective all the same.

Fallon tried to imagine how he’d do it, how many men in the gym versus how many patrolling and securing the building. He settled on four in the gym, eight for the building.

Seven now.

Fallon stooped and began working the dead man’s jacket free.

“I need you all to stay here,” Fallon told his students. “Don’t make a sound and wait for me to come back for you.”

They looked at him as the stranger he had become even before he’d donned the terrorist’s jacket and bandana, squeezed his feet into the dead man’s work boots and slung his submachine gun from his shoulder. Enough to pass for the dead man from a reasonable distance, which was the best he could hope for. The 9/11 hijackers had never all met each other, but this kind of operation was different, requiring practice and synchronization. They would know the building as well as he did; every crawl space, every nook, every cranny. The difference, of course, was he knew the terrorists were here while they had no idea he was.

Wait for me to come back for you….

Why had he said that? Fallon wondered, once he was in the hallway, careful to leave the door open as all the others on the hallway were. It would be so easy for him to flee the building now before the inevitable appearance of the authorities on the scene. That was no longer an option for him, the challenge, the game, before him much too great to consider walking away from.

But was he Zaroff or was he Rainsford?

The building was eerily quiet, save for the din coming from the gymnasium area, where nearly 700 students were being crammed in even now. Fallon tried to remember all the details of the Chechnyan school seizing. Those terrorists had waited for the authorities to arrive, waited for them to mount their ill-fated raid, before triggering the explosives and killing hundreds. It would be the same way here, the strategy aimed at drawing the most attention possible. Round-the-clock coverage on the networks for days before the entire country paid witness to a mass murder in prime time.

Fallon made sure to conceal the considerable bulk of his shoulders within the terrorist’s shapeless, now bloodstained, jacket. He tied the dead man’s bandana low over his forehead, hoping it would conceal the differences in their faces and hair from the
distance he required. He made sure the walkie-talkie, simple Radio Shack variety, was secured to his belt and started back up the corridor the way the dead terrorist would if he were retracing his steps.

At the head of the hallway, the office directly on his left and the science wing just down the hall to his right, Fallon glimpsed another of the terrorists rushing away from the main entrance with extra chains clanking. By now, all such doors would have been secured and wired with explosives, to detour both escape from within and attack from the outside. Fallon had a clear shot at the man but opted not to take it until he was sure no others were in the vicinity. Instead he made his footsteps just loud enough to be heard. Then swung about, gun leading, back to the stairwell up which number two had rushed.

“Hey,” the man called to him in Arabic,
“shoo hada?”

Fallon’s response to the man asking him “What is this?” was to swing and fire. A single headshot that dropped the terrorist where he stood. He crumpled to the steps and slid halfway back down the stairs. Not Fallon’s intention, but by this point instinct had taken over.

Two down.

Fallon heard footsteps converging on the stairwell from opposite directions on the second floor. He crouched over the body and angled low, submachine gun angled at the main entry doors as if to suggest that’s where the deadly fire had originated. He could see the plastic explosives layered into place over the glass. Not the way he would’ve done it exactly, but still effective.

The footsteps grew louder, voices in Arabic shouted his way. Fallon swung when the two men were close enough to take in a single sweep. Two shots, both to the head again to be sure.

Four down.

This time his shots coincided with the rattling echo of machine-gun fire coming from the other end of the building. Screams and
cries answered the barrage, greeted by a second longer one that drove the students and teachers to silence. Four to six of the remaining terrorists would be down there. Doors chained from the inside, denying him both access and the element of surprise. Without either, never mind both, the game would be over.