Flashback

2.02 Disney Concert Hall at Performing Arts Center—Friday, Sept. 17

They were all scared shitless. Everyone except Billy Coyne, that is. And Val had long since decided that Billy the C was as crazy as a shithouse rat.

Val had gotten that old-timer’s phrase—crazy as a shithouse rat”—from the Old Man, who, he’d once told Val, had got it from his Old Man.

And Billy Coyne was as crazy as a shithouse rat.

Coyne continued to give orders all that last week, but he reserved most of his real conversation for the Vladimir Putin AI in his T-shirt. And that conversation was mostly in Russian.

The seven boys had spent the week following Coyne’s orders and preparing everything in the sewer. They’d spent a day and a half in the darkness cutting through the rusted old rebar of the steel grate on the inside, but just in a few places to allow them to get at the steel panels covering the storm sewer opening. They left the majority of the inner grate intact to keep their pursuers from sliding in and following them. Then they’d spent another day filing through the soldered welding joining the two steel panels that covered the opening to the storm sewer.

Everything depended upon Billy Coyne’s information—supposedly from his mother—being correct about exactly where the Advisor’s limo would be dropping him off. The storm sewer opening was on the north side of 2nd Street on the south side of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. When they dared to peek out on Thursday night after their many hours of soft sawing and filing and more sawing, they were looking away from the weird Disney Concert Hall building itself. Coyne insisted that the streets would be shut off except for official traffic and that Advisor Omura’s armored limo would come south down Grand Avenue, turn right onto the short block of 2nd Street, and stop just beyond the corner. The photographers, TV guys, and press were supposed to be cordoned off in the median between 2nd Street and an equally narrow lane called General Thaddeus Kosciuszko Way so all their lenses would be aiming north toward the concert hall and the steps that Omura, the mayor, and their security people and entourages would be climbing to enter the hall.

The eight members of the flashgang would have only two or three seconds to fling open the storm sewer doors and to open fire.

But they would be able to see out the closed steel panels. When the city workers welded the doors shut years ago, they’d left narrow horizontal slits near the bottom to handle the usual amount of runoff from heavy rains that built up there on 2nd Street. The gaps were too small to use as gunslits, but the boys could peer out of them until they saw Omura step out of his limo.

In the wee hours of the morning, with Sully standing guard on 2nd Street to let them know when it was clear of security guards, they’d rehearsed throwing the metal drain-cover doors open wide and crowding into the six feet or so of space to fire their weapons. The limo letting Advisor Omura out on this north side would be stopped less than twelve feet away. All the boys would be wearing ski masks, just like real terrorists. Coyne had bought Palestinian keffiyeh scarves for everybody, but Val definitely thought that this was a bridge too far. Too cute.

After they all blazed away, semiautos and flechette guns, the plan then was to run like hell. A curve in the sewer path just twenty feet from the opening would give them cover, although Coyne warned them to stay away from the walls. Ricochets would travel far down there. The inner grate would keep the cops or security people from sliding in to chase them and all the nearby manhole covers and storm sewer entrances were firmly welded shut. The cops wouldn’t know which direction to hunt for them. The first exit from the sewers was more than a mile east of where they planned to do the shooting, but Coyne’s plan was for them to run almost half a mile north and then west through the ever-twisting maze before coming up and out near Cigna Hospital. They’d hacksawed and cut that storm sewer door open as well. There was a Dumpster for biohazard materials next to the storm sewer behind that hospital—Coyne had carefully cut through the padlock chain so that the cut shouldn’t be noticed—and all their guns would be tossed there. They’d wear gloves during the shooting.

The I-10 Open Air Market hajji who’d sold them the weapons kept no records.

“We’ll all be in our own homes watching the replay on CNN before the cops and Jap security guys pull their thumbs out of their asses,” said Coyne.

“What if some of us get wounded or killed?” asked Val. “Then it’s just a matter of time before the cops and FBI find the names of the rest of us in the flashgang.”

Coyne had scowled furiously at Val. “Nobody’s gonna get wounded or killed, ty mudak.”

Val’s phone later told him that the Russian meant, roughly, “you asshole.”

The leering face of Vladimir Putin also scowled at Val but seemed to be speaking to Coyne. “Eto trus, yavlyaet—sya slabym zvenom v tsepochke, malen kii Koi n. Vy dolzhny ubit yego.”

Val hadn’t used his phone to translate that. He got the general idea and knew that the Putin T-shirt would love to see him dead.

Coyne had come over and put his arm around Val, gesturing the others closer until it had turned into a goddamned group hug. “Nobody’s gonna get wounded or dead, Val my droogy pal,” Coyne said confidently. “This is a lark. We’re gonna flash on this for the rest of our lives.”

“As long as the rest of our lives isn’t counted in minutes,” muttered Val.

Coyne had laughed and punched Val in the upper arm. “No guts, no glory. You wanna be like the rest of the walking dead up there in the world?”

“No,” said Val after a few seconds of thought. “I don’t.”

Val spent the week trying to figure out what to do. He was neither an idiot—as Dinjin, Toohey, Cruncher, Sully, Monk, and Gene D. increasingly seemed to be—or crazy as a shithouse rat, which he was all but sure Billy Coyne was. Shooting at a Nipponese Federal Advisor these days was as serious (and probably more serious) than shooting at the president of the United States. The FBI and Homeland Security would become involved immediately and Val had no doubt that the nine Advisors’ security people had their own investigative resources around the whole country.

Even the hardcores like Aryan Brotherhood and al Qaeda–America knew better than to try to kill a Japanese Advisor.

Val knew that something was behind Coyne’s certainty—nuts or not—and he poked around on the Internet with his phone computer for three days before he found it on a city-Advisor liaison bulletin board site: Ms. Galina Kschessinska—formerly Mrs. Galina Coyne, according to archived bulletins going back six years—a much-lauded executive assistant in charge of liaison between the City of Los Angeles Transportation Department and the office of Federal Advisor Daichi Omura for the past nine years, was taking early retirement so that she could return to Moscow to be with her extended family. Friday, September 17, was her last day and she planned to leave for Moscow on Saturday the eighteenth. Ms. Kschessinska would be taking her sixteen-year-old son with her. Plans for a return to the U.S. were indefinite. “I just want to see my family—get reacquainted,” Ms. Kschessinska told the Transportation Department’s bulletin reporter, “and then, of course, we’ll be coming back so my son can fulfill his Selective Service obligation.”

Val almost giggled as he read this. Billy Coyne was as crazy as a shithouse rat, all right, but not quite as self-destructive-crazy as Val had thought. Mommy and little Billy wouldn’t be coming back from Russia.

Billy’s mother must have tried to buy her second son’s way out of the draft the way she’d bought his older brother, Brad’s, freedom, but evidently that hadn’t worked this time. Coyne had bragged to Val many a time that Brad was already in Russia and rising quickly in the mafia there. And neither Coyne nor his mother had any intention of Billy getting drafted into the United States Army and dying fighting for India or Japan in rural China.

So old Coyne had a built-in, mommy-driven getaway waiting the morning after his gang’s kamikaze attack on Advisor Omura. Val wondered if Coyne would even show up at the Friday-evening assassination attempt.

He thought he probably would. As much fun as sending his seven compadres off to almost certain death—or at least future captivity—might seem to shithouse rat Billy the C, taking part in it and then getting away scot-free (Russia had no extradition treaty with the United States) must appeal to him more. Coyne was a sociopath and a flash addict and Val thought that the allure of Billy the C’s flashing on Omura’s murder—probably as incentive to even bigger and better escapades in Mother Russia—must be compelling.

So Coyne will probably be there Friday night, thought Val. But will I?

For four days of that workweek leading up to what he was already thinking of as the Friday Night Massacre, But will I? was the operative question for Val.

That had been his central question, in a slightly different form, for some months now. Val Bottom… or Val Fox, as he preferredto be known in his run-down, chaotic Los Angeles high school… had been depressed enough to consider suicide.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Except that some late literary guy named Harold Bloom, whom Val had looked up on his own due to his interest in Hamlet, said that the “To be or not to be…” soliloquy wasn’t debating suicide after all. That fact would be a big surprise to Mr. Herrendet, his junior English teacher, who taught Hamlet but obviously had never really read it.

Up to now, Val’s thoughts of self-destruction had been fairly unserious because all the means to it available to him—jumping off high places, hanging, stealing enough sleeping pills to do it, stealing a car or motorcycle and putting it into an overpass column at ninety miles per hour—had been so off-putting that his consciousness shied away from any planning involving such solutions to his melancholy.

But now he had the 9mm Beretta.

Coyne had given him the gun on Monday, after the leader had purchased his own OAO Izhmash flechette-spewer at the midnight market. It was the kind of modern automatic weapon that the grinning hajjis called a synagogue sweeper, and Coyne was delighted with it despite the fact that being caught with it meant a no-plea-bargain minimum hard eight years in Dodger Stadium.

That night Val had downloaded and printed out a step-by-step “How to Love and Care for Your 9mm Beretta” and had purchased the proper oil, found the correct sort of clean rags and cleaning rods, and spent his free time cleaning, inspecting, and learning about the semiautomatic. He’d removed the magazine, checked to make sure there was no round in the chamber, and set the muzzle against his forehead.

Another online piece of advice (he did not download this one), titled “Suicide Is Your Unalienable Right: How to Do It,” told Val that even a large-caliber bullet like a 9mm was not always guaranteed to penetrate the thick bone of the skull. Even the slightest deflection, said the helpful article, turned a suicide bullet into a ticket for years of being a drooling vegetable.

The only certainty, went the online advice, was to set the pistol’s muzzle against the soft palate in the roof of your mouth. That was guaranteed to put a bullet into your brain, ending all pain and doubt.

Val tried it but the heavy taste of gun oil and the bulk of the blocky 9mm pistol’s squarish barrel filling his mouth made him retch until he vomited. The act also felt faggy as hell.

What other options?

Suicide by cop, of course. Just get in front of the mob of demented children at the storm sewer opening on Friday night and take a few rounds for the flashgang.

But would that guarantee a quick and relatively painful death? Probably, but not definitely.

When he was eight or nine, Val had watched an old movie from the last century called The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid with the Old Man, who loved old cowboy movies. In the movie, a really slimy Jesse James and his brother Frank, joined by a bunch of other brother-outlaws, including Cole Younger and his brother, tried to knock over an “easy bank” in Northfield, Minnesota. Evidently Northfield didn’t like having its easy bank robbed since—in the movie, at least—every man, boy, and dog in the little town grabbed a shotgun or rifle and shot the outlaws to bits.

Cole Younger, already hit five times in Northfield, was shot several more times during a gunfight in a swamp, including in the hand, the chest, and the head. He survived to be captured and tried and sent off to the Minnesota State Penitentiary at Stillwater, but he’d suffered eleven serious gunshot wounds during the process.

Val, who’d been interested enough to find some library books on the subject, remembered that the total take from Northfield’s bank was $26.70.

Of course, those were old dollars and probably worth something, but even so…

Val tried to imagine Advisor Omura’s security guys shooting him eight, nine, eleven times and him still surviving. Being shot must hurt like hell. Cole Younger had been tossed into the back of a wagon along with his more severely wounded pals and, even though he was bleeding almost to death from his eleven wounds, had joked with his captors, and when they got to the town of Madelia, Cole managed to stand up, take off his muddy and bloody hat, and bow to some ladies passing by.

Learning this kind of coolshit stuff about the world and history was the reason that Val kept reading.

But could he be as coolshit gutsy as Cole Younger with eleven bullet holes in him? Val doubted it. He wanted to blubber like a girl when Leonard brought him to the black-market dentist in the basement tenement near Echo Park. How would he deal with a piece of lead traveling faster than the speed of sound slamming into his body, tearing up internal organs and arteries?

What other ways out were there?

He could open up on Coyne and the others before they assassinated Omura. Would that make him a hero to the city? Would the Advisor and mayor pardon him? Would he get a parade?

But killing all seven of the flashgang punks without getting shot himself seemed like a long shot to Val, even if he could bring himself to do it. He’d try for Coyne first, but all of those acned geeks were armed now. Val tried to imagine getting hit by a cloud of flechettes from Billy’s OAO Izhmash. Those things were three inches long and barbed. Jesus. The thought made Val want to throw up again.

Also, Val didn’t want to be pardoned. He definitely didn’t want to be a hero. He’d rather go the soft palate route than be the centerpiece in a parade.

What did he want?

To die rather than to keep on living in this fucked-up city and world… maybe. Probably.

The only thing that appealed to Val more than dying right now was somehow getting back to Denver and shooting the Old Man. That bastard had abandoned him after Val’s mother died—had abandoned him and forgotten about him, Val knew this for a certainty—and almost nothing would be sweeter than seeing Nick Bottom’s face in the few seconds before Val pulled the trigger of his Beretta.

And then, on Thursday—right when Val was sure that the only choice he really had was to shoot himself in the head later that night, just hoping that his skull wasn’t thick enough to deflect the slug—dear old Leonard had changed everything by telling him about the truck ride to Denver that his grandpa’s rich old spanic friend had arranged for them.

He’d almost broken down in tears right then but was glad he didn’t. Leonard would never have understood such tears of gratitude not only because he wouldn’t have to die that night, but that he’d get to see and kill his father.

Coyne had his magical getaway to Russia with his old lady the morning after the assassination of Omura. Now Val Fox had something coolshit better—his own midnight getaway with black-market truckers.

But what about the plan to kill Omura? Now Val could just shuck it off, not show up at the rendezvous Friday evening, stay out of sight until Coyne had to go on without him.

Or he could go watch—it would be something to flash on for years, no matter how it turned out—and never have to fire a shot himself. Or to get shot himself.

Val went to sleep smiling that Thursday night, but not before he used a twenty-minute vial of flashback.

He is four years old. Today is Val’s birthday and he’s four years old now. He can imagine how the four candles on the angel food cake with chocolate frosting will look because now he can count to four. He is four years old and his mommy is still alive and he doesn’t hate his daddy and his daddy doesn’t hate him and it’s his birthday.

Mommy and Val and Val’s four-year-old best friend Samuel from two houses down the street and Samuel’s grandmother—his playmate lives with only his grandmother for some reason—are all in the kitchen of the house where, less than seven years later, people in black will come to drink coffee and eat cake and other food after his mother’s funeral. But the now-Val shuts that memory of the then-future out of his mind as he surrenders himself to the flashback moment—slowly, deliberately, deliciously—as if lowering himself into a bathtub filled with very, very hot water.

Val is in the tall wooden chair that his mommy bought at the unpainted furniture place and decorated with painted flowers and animals just for him after he’d outgrown his high chair. Even though he’s a grown-up four today, he loves the tall chair that allows him to look across the table almost eye to eye with his daddy.

When his daddy is there. Which he’s not for this birthday dinner. Not yet.

He’d heard his mommy on the phone earlier: “But you promised, Nick. No, we can’t delay it any longer… Val’s sleepy after his long day and Samuel will have to go home soon. Yes, you’d better try. He’s depending on you today and so am I.”

She is smiling when she comes back to the kitchen table, but Val feels his four-year-old self sense the tension in his mother. Her smile is too wide, her eyes a little red.

“Why don’t you open a couple of your presents while we wait for Daddy?” his mother says.

“Oh, what a good idea!” says Samuel’s grandmother. It’s strange to see an old woman clap her hands in excitement as if she were a little girl.

Val watches his stubby fingers open his wrapped presents. A toy boat from Samuel, although his playmate is as surprised as Val at what was in the wrapped package. A pop-up picture book of skyscrapers from Samuel’s mother. Little Val can’t read most of the words in the book but sixteen-year-old Val peering out of Little Val’s eyes can.

“Let’s have your cake now and open presents from Mommy and Daddy after you blow out your candles,” says his mommy.

Val’s and Samuel’s eyes grow wide after Samuel’s grandmother turns out the kitchen lights. There’s enough September evening light coming through the mostly closed blinds to keep it from being totally scary, but Val feels his younger self’s heart pounding with excitement and anticipation.

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…” His mommy and Samuel’s grandmother are both singing. The candlelight is magical.

Val blows out the candles, getting some help from his mommy on the last one, and he points to each candle as he counts. “One… two… three… FOUR!”

Everyone applauds. His mommy turns the lights back on and there standing in the kitchen in his gray suit and red tie is Daddy.

Val raises his arms and his daddy sweeps him up into the air. “Happy birthday, big guy,” Daddy says and hands him a clumsily wrapped package. Whatever’s inside is soft. “Go ahead, open it,” says his daddy.

It’s a baseball mitt. Kid-size but real. Val tugs it on his left hand, his daddy helping him get it right, and then buries his face in the cupped and oiled palm of the mitt, smelling the leather.

His mommy hugs him and Daddy at the same time while his daddy is still holding him high against his chest and for a moment Val is almost squashed as everyone hugs everyone, but he keeps the sweet-smelling leather glove over his face—because for some reason he doesn’t understand he’s crying like a little baby—and Samuel is shouting something and…

Val came up out of the twenty-minute flash to the sound of sirens, helicopters, and gunshots somewhere in the neighborhood. The air coming in through his bedroom screen smelled of garbage.

You are such a total pussy, he told himself. Sixteen years old and flashing on crap like this. You are a total pussy.

Still, he wished he’d used a thirty-minute vial.

Val rolled over in bed and reached behind his old dresser to the hiding place behind the loose board in the wainscoting.

He removed the two items there and rolled onto his back.

The leather mitt—darker and tattered, the leather laces replaced and rewoven a dozen times and the webbing torn—smelled almost the same. The leather had a deeper, more knowledgeable smell now. He held the glove, too small to get his hand fully into, over his face.

Total pussy, he told himself. This was one of the reasons he kept his bedroom door locked. And, truth be told, he felt the same guilt with these two talismans as he did when he downloaded porn from a stroke site. But different… different.

He set the old mitt next to him on the pillow.

The other object was an old blue phone. His mother’s. He’d taken it and hidden it away the day after her funeral and although his old man had eventually gotten around to searching for the thing, he hadn’t searched very hard.

The phone was useless as a phone since its phone and access functions had been cancelled by the Old Man and shut off by Verizon shortly after his mother’s death. But there were invaluable things still on it.

Val tapped an earbud into his right ear and thumbed the controls. His mother had used the voice-memo function for three years before the accident that killed her and he knew his favorite dates by heart. One of them from September six years ago was a list of possible gifts for him… for Val’s tenth birthday. There were similar notes from that last Christmas just two weeks before the accident.

But the voice memos didn’t have to relate to Val to be wonderful. The notes to herself could be about dental appointments or school conferences… it didn’t matter. Just the sound of her voice allowed him to fall asleep on these nights when he couldn’t sleep. Usually she sounded busy, distracted, rushed at work, sometimes even annoyed, but still… the sound of his mother’s voice touched something in the core of him.

There was a text section to the phone, of course, and large files there the last seven months of her life, but they were encrypted and after a few lazy attempts to break the cipher, Val left those text files alone. It might be a diary she’d been keeping, but whatever it was, his mother had wanted to keep it private. If his parents’ marriage was in trouble or if it were some other grown-up angst that she’d used an encryption file to keep anyone from overhearing, Val thought it was none of his business.

He just wanted to hear her voice.

You are such a pussy, Val Bottom. Less than a year away from getting drafted into the army or marines, and here you are…

Val ignored that voice and listened to his mother’s, his cheek and nose against the flattened baseball mitt.

Even with tomorrow and the Omura thing hanging over him like a black-garbed ghost, the soft voice and the leather smell cleared his mind and allowed him to fall asleep within ten minutes.

His last waking thought was I have to pack these two things at the bottom of my duffel tomorrow where Leonard won’t find them…

“You motherfucker!”

“Motherfucker yourself, Coyne,” said Val. “And fuck you too.”

Val was ten minutes late for their rendezvous at the Cigna Hospital entrance to the storm sewers. He almost hadn’t come at all but—in the end—knew that he’d always doubt his own courage if he didn’t show up.

“We were just leaving without you, Bottom-wipe,” snarled Coyne. The leader was wearing a leather jacket open to show a squinting, scowling Putin. Coyne already had his ski mask on, although the balaclava was rolled up high on his head.

“Did you bring your gun, Bottom-wipe?” asked Gene D. with a high, almost hysterical-sounding giggle.

Val slapped the taller boy across his cheek with a flick of two fingers.

“Hey!” screamed Gene D.

Coyne laughed. “I get to call Bottom-wipe here Bottom-wipe. Nobody else does. Zip up your fly, pimple-head.”

Gene D. looked down and the other boys laughed too loudly. Everyone sounded like they were wound too tight.

“Got your flashlight?” asked Coyne. He was carrying the bulky OAO Izhmash right here in the open behind the hospital medical-waste Dumpster. It was twilight, but not really dark yet. Anyone driving into the parking lot could see it.

Val held his flashlight up.

“Let’s go,” said Coyne.

Dinjin banged the storm sewer cover open and one by one they slid down into the dank and dark passageway. Coyne led the way as they walked the half mile or so to the downtown through the labyrinth of twists and turns they’d memorized rather than marked. No one spoke as their flashlight beams danced across the moldy, heavily tagged concrete walls. Once in the tunnels near the Cigna entrance, flashback vials crunched underfoot and the floor of the tunnel—dusty and dry—showed a litter of toilet paper, old mattresses, and used condoms that the boys fastidiously avoided.

Val was amazed that all eight of them had shown up. Did the younger kids like Toohey, Cruncher, Monk, and Dinjin have any sense of what they were getting into?

Did the older kids—Sully, Gene D., even Coyne?

Did he himself have a clue? wondered Val. If he did, why was he here?

They reached the Performing Arts Center outlet sooner than Val wanted.

“Turn off your flashlights,” hissed Coyne. “Pull your ski masks down.”

“It’s another ten minutes before…,” began Sully.

“Shut up and do it,” said Coyne.

The boys pulled their balaclavas down. Val hated the smell and feel of wet wool against his face. At first it seemed like absolute darkness—Val could see nothing at all and a sudden panic made his bowels go watery—but then the light through the rain slits in the closed metal panels filtered in and their eyes began to adapt, at least to the point where they could see one another’s dark shapes standing there. Val sensed someone next to him—Monk?—and felt the other boy’s arms and body trembling hard with terror or anxiety.

Coyne shoved and pulled until all eight of them were piled in as close to the rebar grating and steel panels as they could get. By straining their heads and necks forward through the grate, they could get a glimpse outside through the six tiny slits. The youngest boys took turns at their two slits.

When Val peeped through he thought his heart was going to race itself to death. There were already people and automobiles out there, although the prime parking spot just ten or twelve feet from the storm sewer was still open and empty. The sound of voices, traffic, shouts from the reporters and photographers, and a general crowd buzz seemed to be all around them despite the barriers of concrete and steel. All the other times they’d been here, all the hours they’d spent cutting away parts of the rebar grating and making sure the key Coyne had would actually unlock the swinging cover panels, 2nd Street had been empty and the bit of late-night traffic on Grand Avenue had sounded far away.

Now it was all here.

What the hell had they been thinking? Val knew that it had been a boy’s fantasy up to this point—playing pirates in a cave with real guns—but this was real.

“Coyne,” Val whispered. “We can’t…”

Coyne hit Val in the face with his closed fist. Val went down heavily, the Beretta still in his belt. He felt the strange, squarish muzzle of the OAO Izhmash flechette-spewer pressing painfully into his cheek. “Shut the fuck UP, asshole,” hissed Coyne. “Or I fucking swear I’ll do you here, now, rather than later.”

Flechette guns, Val knew, made little noise, not much more than a whooshing sound. Coyne might risk the noise to… no, Val realized with a sickening lurch of absolute certainty, Coyne was going to risk being heard by killing Val right here and now. With that flood of certainty came the twin realization that Coyne had always planned to kill Val here, this night. Maybe Coyne planned to kill all of the flashgang members before the shooting was over.

Val’s Beretta was in his waistband, under his hooded sweatshirt and flannel shirt, and before he could fumble it out in the darkness, he heard Coyne ratchet back something on the flechette sprayer—a safety, most probably. The next sound he heard would have to be his last…

“He’s here!” shouted Monk. “The limo’s here.”

“What?” whispered back Coyne. “Too early. Another three minutes…” Their leader had obviously been watching his expensive watch.

“He’s getting out!” shouted Gene D. There was no attempt to stay silent now.

The padlock was unlocked, the chain off, and now six of the boys stumbled over themselves reaching for the four-foot-long pieces of rebar they’d propped against the wall under the sewer opening. These short metal poles were the way they’d practiced swinging the steel panels open in the early hours of the morning, with Monk or Dinjin outside and ready to run forward and push the doors back in place.

“It’s him!” screeched Sully at one of the slits. “Omura!”

“Shut up! Shut up!” whispered Coyne, but it was too late to control things now. Events were creating themselves.

At least the OAO Izhmash wasn’t aimed at his head any longer. Val took a breath and began crawling away, slithering on his back toward the darker areas yards away from the opening.

The boys had practiced pushing the panels open smoothly, working together, but now they were banging and prodding almost at random, rebar against flat steel. The panels screeched, scraped, began to open. Light from streetlamps, car headlights, TV lights, and photography flashes flooded into their tunnel and almost blinded eight pairs of eyes that had adapted themselves to near-total darkness.

“Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” Cruncher was shouting, fumbling to pull back the hammer on his heavy .357 Magnum.

“No, wait, wait, wait!” shouted Coyne.

What does he have planned? Val wondered dumbly. Whatever it was, he couldn’t wait around to find out. He stumbled to his feet and ran toward the curve in the sewer tunnel.

“Fucker!” screamed Coyne and fired the flechette sweeper at him.

The other boys took that as an order to open fire. The sound of six weapons firing at once was absolutely deafening in the echoing cement and concrete vault. Gene D. didn’t even have the right-side panel fully open yet, and sparks leaped off the steel. The rest of the boys shoved and jostled to fire through the four feet or so of open space between the partially opened shutters.

Val had ducked around the abutment in the turning tunnel just as Coyne had fired and fifty or more barbed flechettes sparked against the walls and continued ricocheting down the long passageway. If Val hadn’t made the turn just when he had, he’d be dead. If he’d continued running, the barbs would have shredded him in full flight and he’d be dead.

Then Coyne was shouting with the others and obviously firing out through the gap in the shutters, pushing other boys in front of him even as he did so. Val knew this because—even though he knew it was the most stupid thing he could do—he had to see what was going on and he’d peeked around the barb-gouged corner.

Someone, probably Omura’s security, was firing back. Val saw Toohey’s shaven head explode in a red and gray mist and the slim boy’s body tumbled against Cruncher and went down. Dinjin screamed something and then he was hit and his body went down like a sack of potatoes. There was none of the dramatic flying backward that Val had seen in a million movies, just a deadly, final, sickening drop when a boy was hit.

“Keep shooting! Keep shooting!” screamed Coyne in a weird falsetto. Even as he backed away from the opening, he was lowering his flechette sweeper toward the huddled backs of his screaming, shooting friends.

Fuck this. Val turned and ran as hard as he could. It took bouncing off a cement wall at the first branching of the tunnel to make him realize that he’d dropped and forgotten his flashlight. He’d been running blind in the darkness. He had to turn left along a narrow side tunnel at the next branching, but he’d never even find the branching in this darkness. He was screwed.

He’d picked himself up and was shaking his head when there came a flash brighter than the sun and then a sound louder and more terrible than anything Val Fox had ever heard. A blast wave picked him up and threw him fifteen feet down the main corridor. He was only vaguely aware of losing skin on his knees and elbows as he hit and slid on cement, his jeans and sweatshirt ripping.

Flame billowed and blossomed around the first turn in the tunnel behind him. Val glimpsed a scarecrow silhouette throwing itself aside right where Val had hidden a few seconds earlier, and then the second shock wave hit him and rolled him another ten feet down the black corridor.

He could see now.

Val pulled the ski mask off and tugged the Beretta from his waistband. The pistol was under the wool as he ran. The storm drain was illuminated red and orange by unseen flames, Val’s shadow leaping ahead of him as he ran for his life, ducking rebar hanging down here and there, listening to the chaos still exploding thirty yards behind.

Somebody from outside must have fired an RPG or something. Or something. There was no way that any of the boys still in that first section of the drain could be alive after that.

Men’s shouts. More shots. Security people or cops or military were inside the drain with him. Their clever idea of keeping them out by leaving the interior grate rebar in place hadn’t worked for thirty seconds. Someone had just blown the shit out of the steel panels, rebar grate, boys’ bodies, everything.

And now they were inside.

Val was running so hard and panting so loudly that he almost tore right past the narrow defile extending to the left of the main drain passage. He skidded, sneaker soles screeching, and doubled back and in.

The flames were receding behind him, and this narrow passage—barely wide enough for his shoulders—was dark.

To get to the higher drain and eventual exit, he had to find the narrow, round opening above him with the metal rungs. But he’d never see it in this blackness.

More shouts. Men were running past his side passage now, shooting ahead of themselves down the tunnel. They had machine guns.

Of course they have machine guns, dipshit.

The best Val could do to find his vertical pipeline was to keep jumping every few paces, dragging his free left hand along the roof. He was still carrying his ski mask and Beretta in his right hand. The odds of missing the small aperture were great, but he was goddamned if he was going to slow down.

Problem was, he’d checked out this sewer drain and it dead-ended about thirty yards beyond the vertical access he needed.

More shouts behind him. Footsteps on cement. Lots of men running. A voice echoed down his passage, although he couldn’t tell what the man was screaming.

They’re all dead. Coyne, Monk, Gene D., Sully, Toohey, Cruncher, Dinjin. All dead.

The fingers of his left hand flicked against nothingness.

Val skidded to a stop, stepped back, jumped and swung his left arm vertically, guessed where the rungs must be, and leaped blindly.

His left hand caught a rung but his weight almost pulled his shoulder out of its socket. He dropped the Beretta and mask, caught both of them against his rising thigh, grabbed them clumsily in the darkness, and used that hand to find the next rung, fighting not to drop the gun again even as three fingers on his right hand gripped the rung.

He was climbing, his feet found rungs, and he was up. Val heaved himself onto the dry concrete of the higher passage that headed east and he could feel his breath puffing dust up against his face.

Bleeding, hurting—although he was fairly sure that none of the barbed flechettes had caught him—Val struggled to his feet and began staggering down the corridor with his left hand sliding against the south wall of the tunnel. Thank God it only went one way from the vertical standpipe he’d come up. If he’d had to choose directions in this total darkness, he would have been lost for sure.

Val was less than a hundred feet down the tunnel when he heard a slipping, sliding noise behind and to his right.

Rat?

Even before the thought was complete, he was blinded by a flashlight beam directly in his eyes.

Cops! Would they allow him to surrender or just gun him down? If the other guys had hit Advisor Omura with their wild firing, Val thought he knew the answer to that question.

He still started to raise his hands in surrender when Billy Coyne’s voice from behind the circle of blinding light said, “I always knew you were a total pussy, Val.”

Incredibly, absurdly, Val’s terrified but not panicked mind flashed on the old James Bond and Bourne and Kurtz movies that he and the Old Man used to watch. “The villains’ ultimate undoing,” the Old Man said from the couch, the popcorn between them, “talk, talk, talk. They always explain, and keep talking rather than just shooting the hero and getting it over with.”

“I’m gonna flash on this tomorrow when I’m flying to Moscow with my mother—in first class, asshole,” said Coyne, his voice still high and weird and adrenaline-driven as it had been back at the gunslits, “and I’m gonna get off thinking about how a hundred barbed flechettes just tore your fucking wimp body to…”

Val fired the Beretta through the bunched-up ski mask that concealed it.

Coyne said, “Ugh,” and dropped the flashlight, which hit on its metal side and did not shatter. The beam of light rolled in a slow circle.

Val threw himself to the right, trying to stay out of the beam of light. It was too fast, but it crossed him and kept going.

Val dropped to one knee, braced his right arm, and aimed the pistol low.

The flashlight beam came to a stop on Coyne on his knees, using the big OAO Izhmash as a sort of crutch to keep himself upright. Coyne was staring at his own chest where, just above and to the right of Vladimir Putin’s pale brow, a small red circle was beginning to blotch wider and spread.

Coyne looked up with a stupid, smirking grin. “You shot me.” He sounded almost amused. He began struggling with the bulky flechette sweeper.

Val didn’t think that Coyne had the strength to lift and aim the thing, but he didn’t care to wait and see if he was wrong. He shot Coyne again, in the throat this time.

Coyne’s head snapped back as his neck exploded, then the boy fell forward into the circle of the flashlight beam. The sound of his teeth snapping off as he hit the cement face-first, jaw wide open, would stay with Val always.

More shouts from behind and below.

Val was panting as if he’d run a hundred-yard dash. He felt a queer numbness spreading through him and doubted if he could walk now, much less run the distance he had to. He grabbed the flashlight and had started to turn away when a voice from Coyne’s corpse said, “Vy rasstrelyali nas, vy ublyudok!”

Val whirled and crouched, Beretta extended. Coyne lay still on his face. The pool of blood continued widening.

Approaching warily, Val set his sneaker to Coyne’s right shoulder and rolled him over.

Coyne’s eyes were wide and sightless, his mouth with the shattered front teeth opened wide. The throat below the bloodied jaw was shredded. The second shot had almost decapitated the boy.

Vladimir Putin sneered up at Val, the thin-lipped little mouth snarling, “Ty ubil nas, svoloch. Vy proklyatye fucking parshivo…”

Knowing he was wasting a bullet and not caring, Val shot Vladimir Putin directly between his beady little eyes.

The AI stopped talking.

Voices from just beneath the standpipe now. Perhaps they hadn’t seen the vertical access. Val prayed they hadn’t. He had a few seconds to get around the first bend.

Flashlight in his left hand and Beretta in his right, Val ran. And ran.