Carol sat on the uncomfortable bench next to the empty fountain, picking at the overly sweet General Tso's chicken she'd gotten from Panda Express. She'd normally have brought something in for lunch and eaten it hurriedly in the back room, but the Southfield Mall was particularly empty today and her morning had been extra crazy trying to get her daughter off to summer camp. Carol felt a little bad leaving Jasmine, her young coworker, alone in the store, but other than the occasional janitor or person wearing a nametag or store uniform, she didn't see anyone.
There were rumors that the mall would be closing soon. Too rural, not enough customers – Macy's had been one of the big anchors, and when it left people saw the writing on the wall. There had been some talk about a new experimental concept store from a major tech company coming in, but that didn't seem to have gone anywhere. A developer had floated a proposal to buy the mall, tear it down, and build a new data center. Carol had looked over what she could on it, and in the end it seemed like the best option; it would be years before the town saw any money from the business, but at least it would be something.
She'd been up late the night before, like every night for the past few weeks, trying to figure out how to make the numbers work. She figured it would be at least three months before the mall was shut down; in that time she had to get enough money saved to last... who knew how long. She'd organized all her bills by how overdue they were and how aggressive collections would get. "Baby steps," she told herself: pay off what she could, get things as good as possible, save where she could, and she'd be fine.
Dropping her daughter off at camp that morning Carol had felt the sting of the camp bill. "I need to work," she'd told herself, but in the back of her mind she thought, "She's old enough, she could just come to the mall with me, she won't get in trouble." The General Tso's chicken hadn't been the smartest idea either; it was expensive and, in a way, unappetizing.
"Ratta Tat Tat."
A muffled staccato sound came from the opposite end of the mall. Carol turned to see what it was, but everything still seemed empty. Then it came again, a little louder, a little sharper: "Ratta Tat Tat." Something about the sound didn't feel right. Carol started to put down her chicken and stared along the hallway the sound was coming from.
Then she heard the screams, and she saw people running. Standing up she tried to get their attention, but they just ran past her. Now the "Ratta Tat Tat" was loud and violent, and she saw a young man holding what looked like some kind of machine gun coming down the hall. Quickly, instinctively, Carol turned and dove under the bench, hoping she wouldn't be noticed.
From under the bench she could see the gunman walking towards her. Then he stopped, turning into a store. Jasmine! Carol almost screamed, but something in her made her freeze. She waited, knowing what was going to happen, sick to her stomach but frozen to the floor.
"Ratta Tat." Carol winced, but then "BANG... BANG, BANG" – a loud booming sound, different from the high staccato. Then nothing.
Carol lay on the floor, face pressed to the tile, and closed her eyes.
She wasn't sure if it had been ten minutes or an hour when she heard a voice.
"Are you ok?"
Carol opened her eyes and looked up. It was a young woman, dark-skinned, her hair pulled back into a tight bun. She wore a police officer's uniform.
"Are you ok?" the woman asked again, then, reaching out a hand, "Do you need help?"
In shock Carol reached out and felt the woman's strong hands pull her to her feet. She crumpled into a seat on the bench, glanced at her unfinished General Tso's chicken, and started to cry.
"I'm going to try to get everything on his phone over to you, but..." Tricia said as she sped along the interstate on her way to Southfield Mall.
"I know. We're dealing with the local cops too – make sure you show them your badge." Alexi's wry tone cut into Tricia's uncertainty.
"Turn left at Exit 117," the GPS on Tricia's phone called out.
"OK, Alexi, I'm almost there, I've gotta go," Tricia said, hanging up the call.
Her office had gotten the call forty minutes before: mass shooting incident at a mall just over the North Dakota border. Her office wouldn't normally respond to things like this, but they were the closest FBI field office, and with her lights on Tricia could be the first one on the scene.
Pulling off the interstate and into the sprawling mall parking lot, Tricia found the assembled squad cars and parked next to them. She stepped out and flagged down the first officer she saw, an older man with grey-blonde hair who seemed to be in charge.
"Special Agent Tricia McMullon, FBI," she said by way of introduction, flashing her badge.
The police officer gave a long, uncomfortable pause, looking Tricia up and down, and then said, "I'm Chief Ganton, Southfield PD. I'd heard the FBI was going to send someone, but I'll tell you the truth, we don't need the help. Shooter's dead and we're talking to the witnesses."
Tricia couldn't help but wonder about the chief's response – was it stupid pride or sexism? After all, Tricia was a fairly unassuming woman. In her late thirties, she stayed fit and often looked younger, especially at her height – five foot four in heels, she would say. Of course she wasn't wearing heels, preferring a practical track shoe, along with simple glasses and her unruly hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. She was someone who was fairly easy to overlook.
That quality had suited Tricia just fine when she'd started her career. Starting out as a computer forensics analyst in Quantico, she had kept her head down and done the work; that was how she'd succeeded. Then of course there was an opening for a special agent role, and somewhat on a lark she'd applied and found that she'd been accepted. Her background in computers was something the FBI sorely needed in its agents as more and more crime turned digital and less and less of a special agent's work was traditional pavement pounding. She didn't mind that even after she'd made special agent people still mistook her for an analyst; she did some of her best work when no one was paying attention, and it gave her a certain freedom.
With Chief Ganton, Tricia knew exactly the tack to take, one she'd learned to employ over years of dealing with superiors who were confidently wrong.
"Look, Chief, you clearly have this under control," she said without a hint of sarcasm, even as she gestured to the police officers milling about trying to figure out what to do. "When there's a mass shooting like this the FBI gets brought in. Let me do my job here, and we'll make sure you get to do yours."
Chief Ganton nodded; Tricia could tell he liked that she'd complimented him.
"I'll need the killer's phone, anything else he had on him," Tricia said, and the chief obliged, directing her to a uniformed officer collecting evidence.
As Tricia started to head over, a young woman caught her eye – a uniformed police officer, dark-skinned, but seemingly separate from the others. She was standing by herself, and unlike the other officers she didn't seem concerned with looking busy. Something about this woman drew Tricia towards her. Something wasn't right.
"Hi, Special Agent Tricia McMullon, FBI," Tricia said, introducing herself.
"Officer Daniella Roxbury," the woman offered in return, her voice shaky.
"What can you tell me about the shooting, Officer?" Tricia asked, slowing her words and stepping to the side so the woman's view would be focused on her and not the other officers.
Daniella looked Tricia in the eye for a second and then, lowering her head, began to talk. "I had stopped here to grab something for lunch during a patrol. When I went in I heard the commotion and the gunfire, so I tried to get somewhere safe to call for backup."
Daniella paused and Tricia nodded. Alexi had briefed her on the situation over the phone: a police officer had happened to be at the mall and managed to single-handedly take down the gunman. Tricia hadn't realized that it was a woman. She looked at the rest of the Southfield police force – white men, tall and blonde. Here this woman stood out like a sore thumb, and that she was the hero cop who had saved everyone was going to rub all these guys the wrong way. Tricia gave her a month before she would resign.
Daniella finished the story: how she'd ducked into a store only to have the gunman come in, how he hadn't seen her at first as he'd started shooting the store clerk, and how she'd managed to shoot him.
"I killed him," she said with a waver in her voice, clearly conflicted.
"You saved a lot of people," Tricia reassured her, then reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card. "If you ever need anything, give me a call," she said, adding, "What you did was pretty amazing. The FBI could use people like you."
Tricia knew it was a long shot – Daniella seemed nice, and young, someone who wasn't really ready for what was about to hit her all at once: the private trauma of killing someone, the public praise for being a hero, and the subtle harassment for being better than people with fragile egos. Still, if she did end up in the FBI, Tricia could always use another agent. She loved her analysts, but sometimes she needed someone who could get their hands dirty.
The rest of the crime scene was exactly as described. The mall itself had been mostly empty. The man had shot three people: a security guard who was expected to make it, a janitor who was pronounced dead on the scene, and a young woman working in a retail store who had been shot before Daniella managed to take down the gunman. Word had just come in that the woman had died on the way to the hospital.
Then of course there was the killer himself. He'd had his driver's license on him – Shaun Bennet of Dallas, Texas – and they'd found his car, an old beat-up Camry, one of only a few in the lot that didn't belong to a mall employee, its Texas plates giving it away. The inside of the car was filthy, filled with discarded energy drink cans.
The killer's phone was in rough shape – the screen shattered well beyond its everyday scratches, greens and pinks dancing across the parts that still lit up, a rusty smear of dried blood in one corner. Whatever had happened to it had happened recently; tiny shards were still working loose from the frame. Tricia had managed to get a partial clone of it using the laptop in her car; for the full copy it would need to be sent off to a lab for the encryption to be broken.
With the evidence collected, Tricia handed out business cards to all the witnesses and police, reminding them to call with any information, and got ready to head back to her office. As she did she overheard a man in a nice collared shirt arguing with the police chief.
"We're going to have to keep it closed as a crime scene for a few days," the chief was saying, a note of sympathy in his voice.
"Look, when I talk to the town council you're going to hear about this," the man said, frustrated, and stormed off.
Tricia looked around. Southfield seemed like a place that was pretty down on its luck. She'd seen the map when she'd put the address into her GPS – a mall and some surrounding small shops, a handful of houses spread out – and with the mall shut down for a few days she imagined most of the town would be out of work. Still, what were they supposed to do? It would take a day at least for the crime scene cleanup people to come in and get the blood off the tile. Did this guy really think people would show up to a mall and just ignore the bloodstains from a mass shooting?
Feeling drained from the whole situation, Tricia climbed into her car. She pulled the map up on her phone and clicked the saved location for the office and then hit navigate. Putting the phone into its holder she heard the voice say, "Exit the parking lot heading south, then take the westbound ramp onto the interstate."
Shaun Bennet sat in the front seat of his beat-up Camry, watching the fuel gauge sit on empty, the voices of the podcast playing on the car stereo.
"Remember, you have to fight these Honeyguides. You're a #warrior!" Cole was saying.
Shaun nodded, cracked open his last energy drink, and chugged it. He could feel his heart beat faster and less evenly – months of avoiding caffeine, and now a sudden rush hit his system like a freight train. He took his earbuds out of their case, popped them into his ears, and turned off the car. The podcast moved smoothly from stereo to headphones just as Wells said, in his typical fashion, "I suppose if it's justified..."
Shaun reached over to the passenger seat and, pushing aside the hoodie sitting there, grabbed the gun. It looked like an Israeli-made UZI, except for what he'd paid for it, he knew the comparisons would be surface deep. He'd spent the morning taking it apart and filing the serial number off the lower receiver before reassembling it.
Shaun had thought for a moment that he was caught when a mall security guard walked up to the car. He'd managed to quickly tuck the gun under his hoodie, but surely the guard would notice. Shaun was tense as the security guard rapped on his window, and Shaun lowered it.
"No loitering," the guard said matter-of-factly before walking off.
Useless corporate pigs, Shaun thought, rolling up the window and glancing over at the passenger seat, where part of the gun's magazine was clearly visible.
Stepping out of his car, Shaun tried to tuck the gun into his shirt in a way where it would be less visible, but it was awkward, and heavier than he'd expected. Putting the gun down on the driver's seat, he reached in and grabbed the hoodie, pulling it over his head despite the summer heat. With the hoodie he was able to tuck the gun into the pocket, and it felt at least a little concealed.
Finally he reached in and unplugged his phone, and before sliding it into his pocket he opened the Apex app and fired off a message: "Bringing the fight to Southfield #warrior".
As he turned to walk towards the mall he could feel the gun slipping, and he managed to catch it just before it fell to the ground. Standing there awkwardly holding the gun, Shaun looked around. The parking lot was empty; no one had seen him. Still feeling the weight of the weapon in his hands, he started to wonder what he was doing.
A ping in his earbuds interrupted the podcast for a second and he reached for his phone, but it wasn't in his pocket. Looking around he saw it lying face down on the pavement, and with his free hand he picked it up and turned it over.
The screen of the phone, normally a subtle spiderweb of scratches and cracks from his frequent drops, had truly shattered. Greens and pinks danced across what parts of the screen still worked, and as he tried to tap the message notification from his sister, Shaun managed to cut himself on a shard of glass.
"Motherfucker!" he yelled, sliding the phone carefully into his pocket before pulling the glass out of his thumb with his teeth and spitting it to the pavement.
On his thumb a small red dot grew as the blood started to pool; it hurt like hell for something so small. Shaun tried to catch his breath, but his heart was racing and he could feel his hands starting to shake. His podcast kept playing in the background – now Cole was saying, "This is your fight, and when you fight, you fight to win!"
Grabbing the gun in both hands and throwing caution to the wind, Shaun turned and headed for the mall.