Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (the ebook reader .txt) 📕

and still she couldn’t see the cause for these cries of fear and shock. She thought she might be in shock herself, sitting frozen on her bench, gaze darting this way and that as she tried to determine the location of the threat. Her eyes fell upon a small body lying on top of the large plastic waffle. The girl lay face down, the back of her light blue T-shirt dark and wet with blood. Not far from the girl, she saw a little boy lying on the floor, arms splayed outward, the red ruin that had once been his face pointed toward the ceiling. Someone was shooting, she realized. At kids. Someone was killing kids.

She didn’t yell, didn’t scream. Instead she jumped to her feet and began running toward the last place she’d seen Brian playing tag with the other children – over by the giant mug of coffee. Hysteria bubbled beneath the surface of her consciousness, and she fought to keep it at bay. She couldn’t help her son if she surrendered to the terror blazing like a wildfire within her.

It’s happening, she thought. Right here, right now.

These days, everyone in America lived with the possibility that they and their loved ones might get caught up in the wave of gun violence that had swept through the country over the last several years. Now it had finally come to Oakmont.

She didn’t see Brian as she ran toward the mug. She was aware of other people as only blurs or smudges, ill-defined objects that took up space but which couldn’t be identified or named. Some of these objects moved, some remained motionless. Some were quiet, and some made sounds as equally indistinct to her as their forms. And then just like that, everything snapped into place, and she saw children, saw mothers – and even a few fathers – running, some toward each other, some away, fleeing without intention or direction as they tried to escape death.

Another gunshot, and this time when she looked in the direction of the sound, she saw a middle-aged police officer standing in a shooting stance, gun gripped in both of her hands, just like cops did in the movies and on TV. Was she trying to stop the shooter? She saw the body of a young mother lying on the edge of the egg sculpture, her blood splattered on the white plastic, a squalling infant lying on the floor near where it had fallen. Reeny experienced a momentary impulse to run toward the baby, pick it up, and carry it to safety, but she shoved the feeling aside. As cold and cruel as it was, Brian was her child, and he was her first responsibility. She shut out the baby’s cries and kept moving.

She called Brian’s name, shouted it as loud as she could. She could barely hear her own voice over the tumult all around her, and she doubted Brian could hear her. She’d just have to keep looking.

Another shot.

She winced, expecting to feel a bullet slam into her back, but nothing happened. Had someone else gone down, injured or dead? Another child or parent? She prayed the shooter had missed this time, but from what she’d seen of his work so far – weren’t these killers always men? – he hit whatever he aimed at. Maybe that last shot had come from the cop’s gun, though. Maybe she’d managed to take out the shooter. Reeny was tempted to turn and look, eager to get visual confirmation that this nightmare was over, that they were safe. All who hadn’t taken a bullet yet, that is. But she forced herself to keep moving forward. She couldn’t afford to take a chance that the shooter had been stopped. She had to find Brian, had to protect him, make sure he was safe.

She shouted his name again, loud as she could this time, and she almost burst into tears when she heard him cry out, “Mommy!”

He’d been hiding behind the giant sausage link. Now he came running around it toward her, tears streaming from his eyes. He held out his arms to her, wanting her to scoop him up and carry him away from this awful place, and that’s exactly what she intended to do.

Another gunshot.

Brian’s head jerked as a bullet struck the side of his neck. Blood sprayed the air, his body went limp, and he started to collapse. As he went down, time seemed to slow to a crawl, and Reeny got a good close look at her dead son’s face. His eyes were wide in what appeared to be almost comical surprise, and his lips had contracted into a small O, creating an overall grotesque cartoonish expression. This is death, she thought. Sudden and stupid, without even a shred of dignity. A split second ago this had been her son, Brian, a boy who loved to eat Cheerios only when they’d floated in milk long enough to get soggy, who loved TV shows with happy talking animals whose adventures were simple and not too scary, who begged her to read the same book to him every night – a collection of silly poems about food – and who slept on his stomach, head to the side, knees drawn up, butt in the air. A boy who laughed too loud and ran in the house no matter how many times she reminded him to walk. But he wasn’t Brian anymore. Now he was only meat.

Time returned to normal speed then and Brian hit the floor and slid several inches before coming to a stop, leaving a smear of blood to mark his path. She staggered toward him, her vision narrowing until it seemed she was looking at him from the far end of a very long, very dark tunnel. Her vision went black for a moment, and when it was restored, she was on her knees next to him, holding his hand, gripping it tight without any memory of how she’d gotten there.