Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.
(It begins…)
14.
There are things you can only learn by trial and error, and practice. Colin knew that he was going to be passing cars quickly as they sped the other direction. If he squeezed the trigger when the target was “in his sights,” so to speak, it would be gone before he even fired. He had to lead the target, start shooting before it arrived in place. The first car he saw coming, as he got into position, was a minivan.
“You don’t see too many of those any more,” he said as he squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. With a grunt of frustration at his own stupidity, Colin flipped the safety off and squeezed again.
It had been almost six months since his last practice shot. The shock he remembered, but the noise echoing in the car was louder. He could feel Bernie answering him—poor guy couldn’t open his mouth without jostling Colin’s arm, rested as it was on his head—but couldn’t hear a word. He could not hear but could see the cartridges flying out sideways to clatter against the inside of the windshield and ricochet around the cabin. The rifle jerked upwards and Colin had to pull it down constantly. When the magazine ran out in a couple of seconds, the downward pressure he was exerting jerked the barrel down and he almost dropped the whole thing out the window. Perhaps he should have invested in a strap. Too late now.
Oh, and worst of all, he had fired most of his magazine off before the minivan even arrived. The jerking, battering of the bumpstock and the wobbling of Bernie’s head had caused him to shoot erratically, and when the minivan passed he actually shot directly over its roof, over their heads. He could see the shocked faces of the passenger and the driver staring right at him. One of them was already pulling out his phone. By the time Colin wrestled the barrel back down he only had time for few bullets fired into the cargo space in back on the minivan. The rest of the contents from the magazine flew wasted across the median, across the street in its wake and into the woods. So much for no witnesses; the police would already be on the lookout, and no one was even dead yet. Worst of all, there were no other cars to be seen.
For a moment, Colin feared that the time change may have been fatal to his plan. Maybe no one went south on Blande Boulevard after ten A.M. While he thought this, though, his muscle memory was already ejecting one magazine—he threw it over his shoulder into the backseat—and snapping a replacement free from the tape holder on Bernie’s lap.
“What the hell are you doing?” he heard Bernie shriek, but he was already back in position, rifle at his shoulder. No cars came.
15.
First the radio squawked and a dispatcher gave a report that sounded too silly to be true, but then Oberman had the siren screaming. They were right nearby, heading north on I-81.
“It’s off, somehow, that they call it a siren,” Campbell said just to prove that he was unconcerned; in case lighting a cigarette as they serpentined around a corner was not unconcerned enough; “when technically the sirens had beautiful voices…”
Oberman didn’t care what Discovery Channel special Campbell had watched last night. He didn’t care where Campbell had picked up these annoying facts. “Just say we’re on our way,” Oberman said. He said it between gritted teeth, of course. Both his hands were spinning the wheel like a ferryboat captain.
“We’re on our way over,” said Campbell into the mic, and he couldn’t help grinning. Honestly, weren’t they both grinning?
16.
When the rifle fired Bernie could feel the kick all down his spine. The jackhammering. It hurt his teeth. And that was before the earsplitting noise. He’d been to enough loud shows and loud bars he thought his hearing was already shot; but there was something particularly horrible about the explosions coming right above his ear, so fast they were less a percussion than a drone. And then the blazing hot brass casings came raining down upon him. “I am in hell,” Bernie wept.
The halo of choking smoke had only begun to pool around the roof of the car.
17.
Chugging down the avenue, a little Mazda Miata going thirty-five, forty m.p.h. max. An impatient queue tailgated behind it, no one quite leaning on their horn, but the feeling was there. On a long one-lane road with a median, one bad actor can block the whole street and slow everyone down. Colin shook his head in sympathetic frustration. No wonder the street had been empty!
His first few shots fell in front of the Miata, and the rifle pulled up, but he was learning. He held his shot steady and let the vector of the cars move it into the path of the bullets: directly along the Miata, shaking the dimly glimpsed man driving it, and across the length of the vehicle, running right into the first tailgater. The window shattered. A man’s arms came up and then fell and after that he was out of sight, down the road.
What actually happens when you shoot a car: not once but a dozen times, say? Colin had had no idea, and it was something he intentionally did not research, in case a record of such research had proved suspicious. Could the car blow up? One lucky bullet in the gas tank, was that possible?
No car blew up; if the bullets hit a door, as opposed to a window, the damage just looked like little holes, like something minor. But Colin was dimly aware of the cars swerving as he passed, their drivers losing control. He ran out of bullets on the third car, and as he swapped a new magazine in he indulged in a glance over his left shoulder. The three cars he had hit were spinning off the road, running into trees, the embankment. Two cars slipped past as he reloaded, but one of them got billiard-balled by a caroming bullet-riddled metal coffin. The more cars he hit, the more everything seemed to escalate. Maybe something bad would happen to the ones he missed, too.
But Colin had already opened fire again. He caught two more cars, strafing the entire length of them, weaving up and down slightly right along the axis where the window met the door. There was a break in traffic, so he took his finger off the trigger. Just for a moment as his ears stopped ringing, he thought he heard shouts or screams. Now another car was coming—it looked like it had a whole family of five inside—so he emptied the remainder of the magazine directly into its screaming bowels.
There was a small straightaway, and it was clear that people could see, now, what was coming; but there was nothing they could do. One man in a sports car slammed on the brakes, but that just got him rear-ended before Colin strafed both him and the sedan that had struck him. A fat pickup turned to the left and screeched to a stop in the breakdown lane, its nose practically in the trees, its tailgate towards Colin. This was a pretty good plan, and Colin respected it: Could his bullets pieces the tailgate, whatever was on the flatbed, the cabin’s rear wall, the seat, and then the driver, who was presumably ducking? Colin sent a burst his way, but he assumed the driver would live, and he couldn’t begrudge him that.
Immediately behind the pickup, though, was a couple who just screamed and did nothing clever. Colin drew a line along their car, door-handle-height, and only for a flash could he see the two of them, their bodies jerking before they sailed on. Cars that pass, they pass really fast. It was hard to focus on what was happening across the way.
A brief pause and then around a curve came a man in a Volkswagen who just squinted in confusion at the carnage ahead. His window shattered and he died before he even processed it fully.
And so on. It wasn’t bad, but Colin had expected a little bit more, honestly.
18.
Bernie was pinned in one place. Even as the molten brass hailed, he could not move. He certainly could not move his head. A blazing hot shell rebounded and almost hit him in the eye; what if it fell into the eye-socket of the mask, wedged in there pressed against his bubbling pupil?
It didn’t of course; it bounced off the rubber, like the rest of them. Only his hands were peppered with small burns, and he wondered why he wasn’t wearing gloves. He wondered why the Colonel was wearing gloves; didn’t this interfere with the fingerprint system? He couldn’t ask, of course. It was too loud to ask anything.
The gunfire stopped for a moment, and then he had something else to say.
It was an oddity of his position that Bernie had to, had to keep his eyes on the road. He barely knew, if he knew at all, what was happening next to him or behind him. The southbound cars could have been exploding into flaming cartwheels for all he knew. It could scarcely be louder. But up ahead he could see. He could see the terrified eyes of each person approaching.
He could see the terrified eyes of whoever that lady that chauffeured Alan Jancewicz around was.
“Green Volvo!” he cried. “Green Volvo!”
19.
This was the method he had practiced: He ejected a magazine, worked a new magazine free, snapped it home.
The car was a little different from the basement, of course. He’d known it would be. In the basement he’d been careful with the spent magazines, but here in the car he could just toss them over his shoulder, out the window even. In the basement, the tape holder had sat on the cement floor, but here in the car he had to keep them on Bernie’s lap. This wasn’t so bad, usually, but when he ran through a tape holder worth of magazines, he had to bat it off Bernie’s lap, reach back onto the passenger seat to get a new tape holder, wedge it into Bernie’s lap—while Bernie complained about it, of course. Bernie complained about the smoke, Bernie complained about the hot shells. What did he think this was, a picnic? Colin was doing all the real work, anyway.
It was just that the cars whipped by so fast, and the magazines emptied so fast. As soon as one or two good cars peeled off, snaking their way to a crash, the bullets would just run out. So many cars zipped by unscathed. It all seemed like such a waste.
And now, after all that, the Volvo appeared? For a moment, Colin considered sparing whatever schmuck had called down Bernard Feldstein’s wrath. He was cutting down an SUV right before the Volvo, and it would be simple to pretend he ran out of ammo, to let the green Volvo pass by.
But then he thought: Why not throw the poor guy a bone? Surely he owed Bernie this much? Colin kept the trigger down until the Volvo’s windows exploded.
Really (Colin thought) what he wished he’d done was get a counter, like the kind the fire marshal used to tick off entrants into fairgrounds. What was the point without it?
He could tell they were nearing the end of their little run. The other thing he wished was that the trees were leafier. It really was a shitty April.
Continued here.
Holy shit, Hal.