Shooter
Mark H. Harris
“Does five percent sound a bit high to anyone else?” Gwethanie asked, pulling her suitcase from the yawning trunk of the SUV. Her bag was the size of a laptop carry-on because all she’d packed were bikinis and morning-after pills.
“No, that’s, like, one out of twenty,” Chayden mansplained, a steel keg under each veiny bicep. “Since there’s only six of us, not twenty, that means”—you could see the figures swimming behind the empty storefronts of his eyes—“there’s negative two percent chance any of us dies.”
“I don’t think that’s how math works,” said Tuffy, dry as biscotti. She prided herself on being the brains of the group, and as such, kept her chestnut hair unbleached. She was hailed as brave by her peers, a hero even.
Brayson huffed. “Five percent is nothing.” He had been the one to drive them all morning down to this cabin in the woods by the lake over the river through the valley between the mountains with the inbred cannibals. “If there was a five percent chance of rain, you wouldn’t even bring an umbrella.”
“Yeah, but rain won’t chop off my head and stuff my torso in a wood chipper,” Vicarious said. He was Black. They were fine with it.
“Jesus, dramatic much?” Penemily sneered. Her vocal fry was so guttural, she had an Instagram sponsorship from a lozenge manufacturer. “My family’s come here every summer for the past forty years, and there’s never been a murder.” She paused. “Except for that one three years ago. And the other one eight years before that. And the six or seven that happened before I was born, but those were so long ago, they may as well have been in, like, dinosaurial times.”
She had a point. Back in the ’80s – the slasher heyday – odds of a slaughter were much, much higher. Homicidal maniacs flitted through the countryside like fireflies, emboldened by the dearth of natural predators and the proliferation of easy prey: unsuspecting teenage denizens of campgrounds and other isolated killing fields who would frolic with the flippancy of adolescence, oblivious to the dangers that lurked behind twisted oaks. In those days, just a simple midnight hike blowjob could mean instant death at the hands of any manner of killer: serial, spree, thrill, vigilante, even the occasional vehicular manslaughterer on a joyride.
But now, things were different. Safer. The population of killers in the wild had diminished dramatically, thanks to controlled hunting and sterilization campaigns. The most successful traps, hunters found, were old-fashioned tar babies, whose dark skin emulated the preferred demographic of slasher victims. Hunting efforts were so fruitful, in fact, that Fish & Wildlife authorities had to implement conservation protocols to ensure that murderers didn’t go extinct. They came with a public curiosity factor, after all, that drew people to national parks for the chance to view them in their natural habitat. But now, such sightings were rare – and always from afar.
That’s why it came as such a surprise when, later that day, as they lay across blankets on the stony lake shore, the group spotted a figure approaching on the horizon. It was tall and lean with the confident stride of a sex offender. As it neared, details congealed through the shimmering ripplets of heat rising from the baking rocks. First, the top hat. Then, the milky waterfall goatee. The red, white, and blue star-spangled suit was the dead giveaway.
“Is that… Uncle Sam?” Vicarious asked, a hint of coconut sunscreen wafting off the fingers shading his eyes.
Gwethanie bolted upright. “Where? Should we go back to the cabin?” She grabbed her towel and slung it over a shoulder, alarmed enough to risk an uneven tan.
“Don’t be such a little girl,” Brayson said. He stood to get a better look at the stranger. “We don’t know he’s a killer. He’s probably just dressed up for the holiday.”
Uncertainty tugged at the crook of Vicarious’s mouth. “Out here? By himself?”
“T, you know about all this stuff,” Penemily said, turning to Tuffy. “Is there even a killer who dresses like Uncle Sam?”
Eagerly, Tuffy pulled a hard-ridden copy of Field Guide to Killers of North America from her tote bag and began to thumb through the dog-eared pages. “Let’s see, would he be under historical figures?” she asked, more to herself than anyone else. “It says there’s a killer who dresses as George Washington and carries an ax. You know, the whole cherry tree thing.”
They squinted at the shape in the distance, around fifty yards out.
“I don’t see an ax,” Chayden said.
“And there’s another one who dresses like Paul Bunyan and… also carries an ax. But bigger. And another dresses like Lizzie Borden, and holy shit, why are there so many goddamn axes?”
“Okay, we’ve established that it’s none of those people,” Gwethanie snapped. The worried creases in her brow aged her like rings in a tree. “Uncle Sam doesn’t carry an ax.”
“Yeah, but what does Uncle Sam ca—” Brayson’s voice flipped off like a switch, swallowed by a clap of thunder and the splash of a watermelon dropped on hot cement. The others gazed up to see that the top half of his head had exploded, leaving his tongue lolling from the remnants of a jagged jawbone.
Shrieks rang out in waves. The group scrambled to their bare feet – no time for even the quickest of slip-ons – as their blood-specked eyes struggled to gather the scene. A haze of manic movements: panicked hands, swiveling necks, legs seeking orders from uncooperative brains. And through it all, there he was, clear as day: Uncle Sam, John Wooing it, arms extended toward them, a chrome-plated Glock in each fist, poised to continue firing.
“Go! Go! Go!” Vicarious shouted and sprinted toward the trees leading to the cabin – and more importantly, the SUV. He yanked on Gwethanie’s wrist to follow, because frankly, he could take or leave the others. Chayden and Penemily stumbled after them, the uneven, rocky footing keeping them close to the ground as bullets hissed over their heads.
Tuffy’s perfectionism, however, anchored her to the spot. Her fingers, sturdy from years of pointing out the fallacies of others, leafed through the guide, page by yellowed page, until at last, she arrived at the entry she sought. “Here it is!” she announced with an oblivious grin. “He’s in the Government Propaganda section, next to the guy who dresses like Clint Eastwood.”
She turned to find empty, discarded towels, her friends little more than a rustle in the treeline. The only person within earshot was Uncle Sam, but she could take fleeting solace in the sense of satisfaction she felt in that split second before an armor-piercing round tore through the back of her skull.
The other four flinched at the crack of the gunshot. They halted their retreat midway through the soupy woods. It was only then that they realized they were one woman short. “Tuffy,” Gwethanie gasped, breaking the impromptu moment of silence.
“Oh man, that sucks,” Chayden said. “She could be hot when she wanted to be.” It was the highest compliment he could bestow.
They sprinted the rest of the way through the umbrella of trees, tender soles wincing over felled pine cones and discarded swizzle sticks from holidays past. Every dark crevice in the thick layers of evergreen seemed to conceal a killer with an itchy trigger finger and ammo to burn.
They broke into the clearing where the truck sat parked. Vicarious yanked on the driver-side handle but was met with an empty clunk. “Shit,” he spat. “It’s locked.”
Chayden sighed with recognition. “Dude, that’s right. Brayson had the keys.”
“Great!” Penemily slammed her fist against the side-view mirror. “What do we do now?”
“Let’s think about this logically,” Chayden said, using that phrase for the first time in his life. “If there’s one thing I know about these slashers, it’s that they take their time. They want to pick us off one by one, slowly isolating each of us over the course of several days. We have time to make a plan. We’ve still got him outnumbered. If we just stick together, we can survi—”
A bullet zipped through his throat clean and easy, like a hot knife through a teenager’s windpipe. Another followed, and his head slumped forward onto his chest, dangling precariously by twiny sinews before they snapped and it fell to the soil beside his crumpled body.
And then there were three.
The survivors crouched behind the hulking truck, the size of a small nation-state, and used it as cover for their scamper into the cabin. Penemily slammed the front door shut behind them – the only escape in this firetrap of a building – and braced it with her back. Her shoulders heaved in fits of fright masquerading as indignity.
“What… the hell… is going on?” she wheezed, her pitch increasing with each word. “Why is this guy doing this?”
“Because he can,” Gwethanie answered with a resigned melancholy.
“But, like, is this even allowed? What kind of self-respecting slasher uses a gun? He’s not even a slasher. He’s a shooter! Aren’t there rules for these things?”
Vicarious shrugged. This wasn’t exactly the sort of thing that could be fixed by a complaint box. “It’s actually pretty smart when you think about it,” he said. “The most efficient way to kill a bunch of people.”
“But where’s the fun? The sport?”
“Tell that to the deer and the rabbits,” Gwethanie said.
“And the bears,” Vicarious added. “Foxes too.”
Penemily snorted. “But guns are just so… cheesy.” She rolled her eyes with a deep exhale, and the others thought she was just being dramatic – classic Penemily – but her eyes didn’t roll back. They went full-on white, like hard boiled eggs. Her mouth hung loose, heavy with blood-stained teeth. Her body twitched in time with a series of thunks, like axes chopping wood, that echoed through the unvarnished cedar room.
“Pen?” Gwethanie asked. She inched toward the door, where her friend stood, upright yet limp, with drooping, lifeless appendages, a marionette in search of a puppeteer.
Penemily’s death rattle was a single, stuttering word: “Kni… kni… knives.”
Gwethanie angled her head around to Penemily’s back. A half dozen blades had pierced the door from the outside, impaling themselves into her spine.
Just then, a hail of knives crashed through the cabin windows, plunged into tables, walls, floors. The thwocks and whumps of cleavers, steak knives, Ginsus, and daggers saturated the room. Vicarious and Gwethanie dove behind a dingy suede sofa they prayed could withstand the onslaught, an eruption of cotton billowing from each new gash it suffered.
“He has a gun that shoots knives?” Gwethanie yelled over the sound of shattering glass and the hollow concussions of steel penetrating wood. “Does that even exist?”
Vicarious tried to square their predicament in his mind but knew that they had long since transcended conventional logic. “God bless America,” he muttered to himself.
When the rain of blades ceased, the air held fat with cotton snowflakes. Christmas in July. The anticipation that floated in the silence was almost worse than the mayhem.
Neither Vicarious nor Gwethanie was eager to leave the safety of their mangled sofa fort. “Do you have a gun?” she whispered.
“Why would I have a gun?”
“Never mind,” she said, quick to change the subject. “None of this makes sense. Like Chayden was saying, doesn’t this sort of thing usually take a while? An entire weekend at least? If this was a movie, it would be over in, like, ten minutes.”
“I guess this isn’t a movie,” Vicarious said. A spark of promise flashed in his eyes. “That means we gotta act quickly.”
He stood up and yanked a footlong Bowie knife out of the wall behind his head. “If Uncle Sam wants to attack from long distance, maybe we should get him to come closer. Take him out of his element.” He walked over to Penemily’s suspended piñata body, reached around her backside, and unlocked the front door. He motioned Gwethanie over.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said, jimmying a butcher knife out of the floorboards. She scurried like a critter to Vicarious’s side.
He grabbed the doorknob and turned. “So do I,” he said, pulling slowly. The rusty hinges groaned a metallic dirge. The last two standing, they took ginger steps backward, careful to remain hidden behind the door. When their backs reached the wall, the entryway stood wide open, an eager invitation. They may as well have hung a neon sign announcing FISH IN A BARREL.
Quivering with expectancy, the pair waited side by side, guerrilla soldiers primed for an ambush. Because of his height, Vicarious found himself face to face with Penemily’s corpse, hung like a pinned moth in a butterfly display. The muscles in her jaw had gone limp, and her mouth gaped like a knothole. He’d never liked her much, but she didn’t deserve to die that way. Kombucha explosion, he thought. That would’ve been more appropriate.
It didn’t take long for footsteps to approach. The stairs outside creaked, one then another, and the two survivors clenched their weapons until their knuckles whitened. They watched as a foot stepped through the doorway and onto the paneled cabin floor. A polished, black patent leather loafer with red, white, and blue spats.
Another step forward, and the profile of a mask emerged from behind the door: jutting, hairy chin, ski slope nose, hollow orbitals where eyeballs should be. Between feet and mask hung a white gloved hand clutching the grip of a sawed-off shotgun, the words LET FREEDOM RING etched along the barrel.
Vicarious saw his chance. He thrust his knife into the hand holding the gun. The weapon clanged to the floor. He pulled his arm back and jabbed again, this time blindly, over and over, sliding the blade into hands and arms and stomach and chest until the killer’s flesh became a slush of meat and skin.
Sam raised his forearms to shield the blows and began to back out the door, but Gwethanie circled around to his other side and followed Vicarious’s lead, a flailing dervish of steel and screams.
Despite the siege, Sam remained unnaturally silent, per slasher protocol – just the occasional grunt of someone who’d had the wind knocked out of him. It was clear he wasn’t accustomed to close-quarters combat. He hugged his torso, the growing, soppy red eclipsing all signs of white and blue. His body slumped as the life bled out of him, then toppled face-down onto the floor, like some sort of performance art piece about deconstructed patriotism.
Gwethanie calmed her frenzied shudders to a shallow canine panting. “Is he…?”
Vicarious slid his foot, dressed in the blood of the fallen, under the killer’s hips and lifted. With a strain, he turned the body over onto its back. Other than the wobble of inertia, Sam lay still. No sign of breath. No playing possum. Vicarious peered down into the cold, dead holes passing as eyes. He and Gwethanie glanced at each other with knowing nods. They had to see who – or what – lay behind the mask. Neither moved.
“So… uh, you want me to do it?” Vicarious asked.
“That’s what the nod was for.”
“Well, we both nodded at each other, so…”
“I can do it if you want.”
“No, no, that’s fine. I’ll…” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
Vicarious squatted at arm’s length from the body and reached with noncommittal energy toward Sam’s head. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together as he imagined a safecracker would do, then pinched the chin of the mask. Its beard tickled his palm, and he had to stifle the instinct to pull away.
Gently, he lifted the mask upward. The face beneath began to take shape from the bottom up: ruddy skin, five o’clock shadow, cigarette-stained teeth, lips crying for Blistex. Around his neck, dog tags clinked against a sterling silver cross and a Wile E. Coyote medallion.
The reveal stopped sharply with the force of a grip on Vicarious’s wrist. He tried to stand, but Sam’s gloved hand held him close. With his other hand, the killer reached into his pants pocket. Gwethanie squealed and raised her knife, but Sam kicked her leg out from under her, sending her sprawling to the floor.
Out of his pocket Sam pulled not a gun, but a small, black box with a stubby antenna protruding from the top. A walkie-talkie. With the last of his strength, he raised it to his unmasked mouth and uttered one simple word: “Fire.”
Vicarious picked up his knife and rammed it into the prone killer’s chest. He leaned on the hilt with the full heft of his body until the blade had run Sam through, penetrating the cabin floor beneath him with a croak of the blood-soaked wood. The killer’s grasp fell away.
The two survivors climbed to their feet, looks of apprehension coating their faces. They turned toward the open doorway, toward a distant whistle growing louder by the second. It rose to a hum, which expanded into a whoosh, and before they knew it, a projectile was heading directly for them. Only when it was a few yards away would they recognize it as a missile. Strapped to the bottom was a small cache of explosives: pipe bombs, grenades, cartoonish sticks of TNT.
In the periphery of the trees, spread out through the brush, they could just make out an assemblage of top hats, beards, and star-spangled suits. They knew in that instant that Sam wasn’t alone. There were sons of Sam. Grandsons of Sam. Daughters and nieces and cousins of Sam. This was a killer who would always be there. A Hydra with regenerating heads. There was no running, no hiding, no escape. No one was out of reach. This was not the killer of yore. This was a new era. A new order. This killer was not going extinct. The only ones endangered were his victims.
“Not fair,” Gwethanie muttered. “Not fair.”
Vicarious nodded.
They took hold of each other’s hand and, in that split second before all went black, let their gaze drift beyond, to a better place, one of eternal peace, where goodness and mercy reign and salvation comes not from the barrel of a gun, but from everlasting love. Canada perhaps.
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