Jennifer Government: A Novel (5 page)

“Need any help?”

“No.” She forced herself to say: “Thanks.”

“Okay.” He walked over to the window and looked up at the sky. Violet went back to her code. She was almost lost in it when he said, “I hope it’s no one nice.”

“I’m sure it’s not, Hack,” she said, not really paying attention.

She was wearing a long coat, to hide what was underneath. Her hair was tucked into a shawl. She wore dark sunglasses, although they couldn’t conceal the barcode tattoo beneath her left eye. But she didn’t mind that. It made it harder for people to tell what she was.

The Chadstone Wal-Mart mall was six stories in places, and mezzanine-style all the way down. The Nike Town was on the fourth level. She glanced down as she stepped off the escalator. On the ground floor, shoppers flowed around two gleaming Mercedes automobiles.

There was already a crush around the Nike Town, made up of maybe four dozen teenagers, most in school uniforms. The store had its shutter down, but a bald man in a suit was talking through it. He waved his arms excitedly. The kids rattled the shutter in response. The doors to the Nike Town had long, metal swooshes as handles, she saw, tapering to a point: they looked
pretty dangerous. She hoped none of these teenagers were going to impale themselves.

There was a Barnes & Noble a few stores down with a nice reflective window, so she stood in front of it. For twenty minutes, she saw no one likely to be her target. At one point she caught herself reading the jackets of the books in the window, and jerked her eyes away.
Possibly the book of the year
, the jacket had said, which she found unlikely. This was Barnes & Noble’s Non-Best-Selling Authors floor.

After thirty-five minutes, she saw a young man in camouflage pants. He was on the side opposite to the Nike Town, across the gap, leaning on the guardrail. He lit a cigarette. From the bulge in his jacket, he was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster. There was thirty feet of air between him and the Nike Town, which would protect him from the crowd, and an emergency exit directly behind him. There was no doubt. This was her target.

The kids had been chanting for five minutes—
O-PEN, O-PEN, O-PEN-
—but now they started shrieking, almost screaming. Girls waved rolls of money, jumping in excitement. Then the Nike Town shutter clattered upward and the noise turned into a cacophony. The teenagers stampeded: she saw a boy go down, crying out. She turned and began walking quietly toward the store, glancing at the target. He was straightening, tossing aside his cigarette.

“Sold!”
a man shouted. In the Nike Town, four girls wearing McDonald’s school uniforms were screaming with delight, holding a box of Mercurys—no,
four
boxes. And there were more: the shelves were lined with them. Her information had been wrong. This store had more than five pairs. It had dozens.

The girls forced their way out of the store, talking excitedly. The target slipped a hand in his jacket.

“I can’t
believe
it! I can’t believe we each got a pair!”

“We should get more—we should go back in—”

The girls squeezed past her. She kept still, unable to move until the target did. The last girl, the one with dark hair, moved directly in front of her. She could smell the girl’s perfume.

A man in the crowd pressed a gun to the back of the girl’s neck.

Her instinctive reaction—the emotion that burst across her brain first—was disappointment.
Wrong one, I targeted the wrong one
. Then the gun fired, sharp and loud. The girl went down. The crowd screamed and flinched like a single animal. The assassin was a muscular young man in a black T-shirt. He was five feet away from her, and their eyes met.

“They’re killing people for their Mercurys!” someone shouted, and the crowd surged. The assassin broke for the Barnes & Noble.

She threw off her coat and hefted the machine gun concealed inside it. It was a Vektor SS77: heavy and awkward, but capable of nine hundred rounds a minute. Four steps to her right took her out of the crowd. She dropped to her knee and squeezed the trigger.

He zagged as if he’d known it was coming, and she blew out the Barnes & Noble window, disintegrating novels. She tracked him as quickly as she was able to with the Vektor shuddering against her shoulder, and tore up the floor in thick plaster chunks. The assassin dived through the Toys “R” Us window.

She dropped the Vektor and broke out her two .45s. He was scrambling for his footing among the display of life-sized Barbie dolls; she wasn’t fortunate enough for him to have cut his throat on the plate glass, it seemed. She squeezed the triggers, letting the pistols go fully automatic. The arm of a Doctor Barbie exploded; she tore a Prom Queen Barbie in half. The assassin rolled and vanished into the store.

She pulled off her glasses and shawl and ran. This was not good: she was not going to be able to chase down muscular young
men in T-shirts, not with the amount of body armor she was wearing. She ran anyway.

The assassin had reached the in-store escalators. There were shoppers everywhere, staring at her.
“Out of the way!”
she shouted. “Get down!”

They scattered, and she dived for the escalator, landing on her stomach and sliding, leading with her .45s. There was a man at the bottom, looking up, and she almost put him down before recognizing he wasn’t the target. She regained her feet and looked around. Toys “R” Us was like a bowling alley, nothing but endless aisles. “Which way? Where’d he go?”

He pointed at the nearest aisle. She ran, but it was empty. Fluorescent-lit racks of Star Wars characters stood mutely. She moved to the next aisle, then the next.

It was quiet. No panting, no running, no shrieking shoppers. This meant the assassin had gone native, trying to blend in with the crowd. She ran for the exit.

A checkout boy saw her guns and hollered. She jumped the turnstile and kept running. A crowd had gathered at the railing to stare up at the Nike Town on level four. And a man was walking briskly toward the central escalators, a well-built young man in a black T-shirt.

She pushed through the crowd to the edge of the mezzanine and clambered up onto the railing. When she could see him clearly, she balanced herself with her legs and shouted: “Freeze!” Her voice echoed. “This is the Government!”

He turned. It was the assassin. Less than two feet in front of him, the escalator churned. He looked at it, then at her.

“Don’t move!”

He raised his hands.

Thank Christ
, she thought. She gestured with a pistol, and he stepped away from the escalator. She glanced down to see if it was clear for her to jump down from the railing.

The thing was: she should have seen it coming. She had identified him from the beginning, when she saw his reflection in the window of Barnes & Noble. She should have realized there were two of them.

He was maybe twenty feet away. He had a pistol pointed at her. There was nothing she could do.

He fired, and it was like being hit by a car. Her feet went out from under her. As she fell, the fluorescent lights twisted and swirled above her. She had time to think:
The lights look like angels
. Then she landed on the roof of a Mercedes, catching the car with her spine. Its windshield blew out. The car rocked wildly. She blinked. She could still blink.

After a while, some faces appeared above her. “Get her down,” someone said, and someone else said, “No, don’t move her.”

“Honey?” a woman said. “I’ll call help for you. What’s your name?”

“Government.” Her tongue felt like a bloated, broken sausage. All she could taste was blood. “Jennifer Government.”

Buy hadn’t meant to hang around. He was happy with himself; now he was going to go home and sleep. But he hesitated at one of the Mercedes, attracting the attention of the dealer and becoming ensnared in a sales pitch, and so was still there to hear the shots.

He dropped to a crouch, aware that everyone around him was doing the same, and craned his neck upward. Gunfire broke out again: an automatic weapon. He heard screaming, glass breaking.

Buy and the dealer crawled toward the cars, seeking cover.
The mall fell silent. It was eerie, so many people being so quiet. Then after a minute they started to emerge. Buy got to his feet.

The dealer wrung his hands. “Excitement.”

“I think I’m going to take a look,” Buy said.

“You should leave it to mall security,” the dealer said.

“I know first aid.” Not many people did; there was too much risk of being sued. Buy caught the escalator up. On the fourth floor, there were a lot of teenagers standing around, dazed; some were cowering inside shops. Glass sparkled outside the Barnes & Noble and a line of jagged holes in the floor marked a path toward Toys “R” Us. On the ground outside the Nike Town, a girl was bleeding to death. He said, “Hayley?”

Her neck was exposed. He ran to her, tore off his jacket, and tried to staunch the flow of blood. Her eyes rolled. “Someone call an ambulance!” he roared. “Does someone have—”

“I have a cellphone,” a kid said, handing it to him. Buy dialed 911 and tucked it under his ear. Hayley was looking at him; he realized she wanted him to take her hand. He squeezed it tightly.

“Nine-eleven Emergency, how can I help you?”

“I need an ambulance. Quickly, a girl has been shot at the Chadstone Wal-Mart mall.”

“Certainly, sir. Can you tell me the girl’s name?”

“Hayley. Hayley something. Please, come straight away.”

“Sir, I need to know if the victim is part of our register,” the operator said. “If she’s one of our clients, we’ll be there within a few minutes. Otherwise I’m happy to recommend—”

“I need an ambulance!” he shouted, and it was only when water splashed on his hand that he realized he had started to cry. “I’ll pay for it, I don’t care, just
come!”

“Do you have a credit card, sir?”

“Yes!
Send someone now!”

“As soon as I confirm your ability to pay, sir. This will only take a few seconds.”

He looked at the faces around him. “Someone help her.
Help
her!” The kid who had loaned Buy his cellular knelt down and held the jacket over the wound. A girl began stroking Hayley’s hair. Buy dragged his wallet out from his back pocket and retrieved his credit card. Hayley’s eyes were fixed on him.
I promise
, he told her.
I promise. “
I have American Express—”

“That’s fine, sir. Could you read your card number to me, please?”

“Nine seven one four, oh three—”

Two shots rang out from somewhere below them, close. The people around him shrieked and fled; only the kid stayed, crouching lower.

“—six six—”

People were screaming. Something hit the ground—or one of the Mercedes?—with a deafening
boom
.

“Sir? Are you there? I didn’t catch the number, sir.” “
Nine seven—”

The kid put his hand over Buy’s. “Mister…I don’t think it matters.”

Hayley was no longer looking at him. Her eyes were turned upward, at the Nike Town sign, at the fluorescent lights. Her face was white.

“Oh, no,” Buy said. “No, please.”

“Sir?” the operator said. “Can you please repeat your credit card number for me, sir? Sir? Are you there? Sir? Sir?”

They came for him at eleven o’clock the following night. Hack was in front of the television. He had AOL Time Warner, 182 channels, and four including CNN-A were running nonstop on the Mercury killings. He sat on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, and flicked from one channel to another. He’d been doing it for thirty hours.

That’s one theory, Mary. But one thing’s for sure: there are fourteen confirmed dead, and nobody’s—

Some Nike Town stores are now closed, but many remain open, despite the obvious risk. With demand for Mercurys running at fever pitch—

The words flowed around him. He couldn’t hear anything except the number
fourteen
.

The security buzzer sounded, startling him. He got up and walked to the kitchen. “Hello?”

“It’s John. Can I come up?”

“Who?”

He heard laughter. “He said, ‘Who?’” John said. “Come on, Hack, don’t mess with us. This is a shitty neighborhood.”

Hack froze. “John Nike?”

“You subcontracted, didn’t you, Hack? You passed on the job. I guess we didn’t make ourselves clear. And that’s really our fault. I blame myself, and John here, he feels terrible. Don’t you, John?”

A second voice. “Let’s talk about it, Hack. Open the door.”

“This isn’t a good time.”

There was a pause. Then, much clearer: “Hack, you little shit,
open the door.”

He pushed the security button and heard it sound downstairs. He took a step away from the intercom and stared at it. He hoped he wasn’t making another big mistake.

When the Johns knocked on his front door, he unlocked it with trembling fingers. The door swung open. The sudden light from the hallway dazzled him. He shielded his eyes and lost his grip on the blanket.