Black Friday. Alex Kava

like the explosions had come from. He couldn’t leave without her. Had to make sure she was okay. How many times had she checked on him? Made sure he was okay? All those nights working at Champs.

      “You don’t look so good,” she’d say in between orders and refills. Then at the end of the evening after they were finished cleaning up, both tired, dead on their feet and needing to get back to study, she’d hop up onto a bar stool in front of him and say to him, “So tell me what’s going on.” And she’d sit quietly and listen, really listen, eyes intent and sympathetic. She’d listen like no one else ever had.

      Patrick started to feel the spray from the sprinklers above and yet the smoke still stung his eyes. He pulled out his sunglasses then he yanked the hem of his T-shirt up over his nose. He stayed close to the wall. Let a rush of hysterical shoppers race by. Then he pressed forward again, slowly, taking in everything through the gray haze of his sunglasses. He tried not to trip over the debris, some from the explosion, other stuff that people had dropped or left behind: half-eaten food and spilled shopping bags. That’s when Patrick thought about the backpacks.

      He couldn’t forget the bad feeling he had listening to Dixon Lee talk about their innocent prank. The whole time Dixon explained their scheme to send wireless static, some sort of interference that would play havoc with the retail shops’ computer systems, Patrick kept thinking something didn’t sound right. He should have listened to his gut instinct.

      Why would anyone put a padlock on a backpack just to carry it around the mall and mess up a few computers?

      Chapter

      5

      Rebecca stumbled and quickly reminded herself to not look down. She didn’t want to see what she had bumped into this time. She continued to wipe at her face, each glance at her fingers found blood, some not her own. She tried raking her fingers through her long hair, but kept cutting her fingertips on pieces of glass and metal.

      She was cold and shaking, her vision blurred, her heart hammering so hard it hurt to breathe. Her throat felt clogged, her tongue swollen. She must have bitten it. And when she did suck in gasps of air, the sting of acid, mixed with the sickly scent of sulfur and cinnamon, gagged her.

      A small gray-haired man slammed into Rebecca, almost toppling her. She looked back to see him holding a hand up to a bloody pulp where his ear once was. Other shoppers pushed and shoved. Some of them also injured and bleeding. All of them in a hurry to flee even if their shock tangled their legs and confused their sense of direction. They dropped everything they didn’t need. Rebecca stepped in a puddle she hoped was soda or coffee but knew it could be blood. She tried to sidestep another and instead, skidded on a slice of pizza.

      Slow down, she told herself. Not an easy task with all the chaos racing by and bouncing off her.

      Toddlers were crying. Mothers scooped them up, leaving behind carriers, strollers, diaper bags and stuffed animals. There were screams of panic, some of pain. Smoke streamed from the blast areas where small fires licked at storefronts despite the sprinkler system misting down from the high ceiling.

      The PA system announced a lockdown. Something about “an incident in the mall.” And through all the noise and chaos Rebecca could still hear the holiday music.

       Was it just in her head?

      She found it macabre yet comforting to have Bing Crosby telling her he’d be home for Christmas. It was the only piece of normalcy that she had to hang on to as she stumbled over discarded food, shards of glass, broken tables and puddles of blood. There were bodies, too, some injured and unable to get up. Some not moving at all.

      She didn’t know what to do, where to go. Shock was taking over. The shivers that overtook her entire body came in uncontrollable waves. Rebecca knew enough from her pre-vet studies to recognize the signs of shock. The symptoms were similar for dogs and human beings—rapid heartbeat, confusion, weak pulse, sudden cold and eventual collapse.

      She wrapped her arms around her body. That’s when she discovered it. The pain shot up her left arm. How could she not have noticed it before this? A three-to-four-inch piece of glass stuck out of her coat. Without seeing the entry she knew it had pierced into her arm. The sight of it made her nauseated. Her legs threatened to collapse and she caught herself against a handrail so that she didn’t tumble to the floor. Still, she slid to her knees.

       Don’t look at it. Don’t panic. Breathe.

      She saw a policeman and felt a wave of relief until she recognized the man was mall security. No gun.

       Yes, that’s right. She knew that.

      She’d worked for a pet shop in a local mall her senior year of high school.

      He was close enough now that Rebecca could hear his frantic sputters into his handheld walkie-talkie.

      “It’s bad. It’s really bad,” he said. He looked young. Probably not much older than Rebecca. “I don’t see anyone else with red backpacks.”

      Even through the shock, it sent a chill through Rebecca.

       The backpacks.

      She tried to stand, tried to twist around and look toward the direction where she had last seen Chad.

       No Chad. Not even a wounded Chad stumbling around like her.

      All Rebecca could see was a scorched wall. Smoke. Bits and pieces. A pile that looked like a heap of smoldering black garbage.

       Chad?

      She felt dizzy. Her throat tightened. The nausea threatened to gag her.

       No, she wouldn’t think about it. She couldn’t think about it.

      Rebecca looked in the other direction. Standing now, gripping the handrail with white knuckles and wobbling to her feet. She could see a black hole where the women’s restroom used to be. The restroom where she had left Dixon’s backpack, hanging on the door of the first stall. The backpack that she was supposed to be carrying.

       Oh God. That’s what exploded. The backpacks.

      She slid back to her knees, the realization hitting her hard as she eased herself onto the floor. There was something sticky underneath her. She didn’t even care. How close had she come to becoming a smoldering pile of garbage?

      Somewhere from inside her coat she could hear the theme to Batman, and amidst the stampeding feet and the moans surrounding her, the music seemed not at all surprising. In this bizarre version of reality the theme to Batman seemed to fit in perfectly.

      Chapter

      6

       Newburgh Heights, Virginia

      This wasn’t at all the day Maggie O’Dell had planned.

      R.J. Tully turned on the TV in Maggie’s great room but instead of listening to ESPN’s pregame predictions Maggie could hear bits of news as her partner flipped from one cable news channel to another.

      “There’s nothing yet,” Tully reported to the others all gathered around the counter that separated the kitchen from the great room.

      “A.D. Kunze said it just happened,” Maggie told them. “Local police haven’t arrived at the scene yet.”

      “Then how does he already know it was a terrorist attack?” Benjamin Platt asked.

      “He doesn’t, but the governor’s a personal friend.” Maggie tried to relay what her new boss had just told her—which wasn’t much—while she jotted down a list of what she needed to pack.

      “So he calls in the FBI?” Julia Racine joined in.

      Maggie shrugged. The nice thing about having friends who were colleagues was they understood better than anyone else what the job entailed. The bad thing about having friends who