There were three non-locals present, a red-letter day for Palmerston’s tourist industry. One was a middle-aged man wearing a suit, sitting by himself at a table in the corner. His name was Pete Harris, and he was driving back to Chicago after a long sales trip that had been largely disappointing. The Victorian house’s Italianate tower was just visible from his seat and he was considering the house as he chewed, finding it astounding that no one had bothered to reclaim the property and fix it up.
The other two were a couple of English tourists, by coincidence sitting at the next table. Mark and Suzy Campbell had skipped breakfast to do a couple hundred miles in the morning and were more than ready for some food. They’d been hoping for a picturesque diner, but after a slow trawl through town they’d settled on the burger den by default. Munching their sandwiches in a defensive huddle, they were at first alarmed and then mildly pleased to find that they had sat next to a local who talked. His name was Trent, and he was tall, in his forties, and had a good deal of copper-coloured hair. On hearing that they were a few days into a coast-to-coast drive, he nodded with distant approval – as if being told of a practice he could understand but had no desire to undertake himself, like collecting matchbooks, or rock-climbing, or having a job. He was familiar with England as a concept, and gathered that it had a whole lot of history and a thriving rock music industry, both of which he was in favour of.
In the end the conversation petered out, running aground in the shallows of shared experience. Suzy was a little disappointed, having enjoyed the encounter. Mark was preoccupied, wanting to do some shopping. In the hotel they’d stayed at the night before, the bartender had spent some time trawling the radio waves in search of something to play very loudly. He’d accidentally wandered across a classical station, and for a brief, wonderful moment, a snatch of the Goldberg Variations had floated across the bar. Mark had pictured the radio station as just one guy holed up in the mountains someplace, the door barred against hordes armed to the teeth with Garth Brooks records. The Bach had remained in Mark’s head through the following hours of syrupy ballads contrasting the fragility of marriage and the steadfastness of dogs, and he wanted to buy a CD and play it in the car. Palmerston didn’t have a classical music store.
Trent was soon joined by a gaggle of floppy and unattractive teenage boys, and as Suzy eavesdropped it emerged that he was engaged in convincing the youths to help him move a huge pile of dirt outside his trailer, down by the old railroad line. It was never established why the dirt was there, nor why it now needed to be moved somewhere else. The boys were, not unnaturally, interested in some kind of payment for this work, and this was offered in the form of a case of beer. As none were within three years of legally being able to buy alcohol, the proposition was readily accepted. While they waited for Trent to finish wading through his burgers, they lurked like a crew of disreputable seagulls, trading the affectionate insults and unrealistic suggestions which are the key discourse of boys. During this it became clear that despite the surfing-related T-shirts in which most were clad, not a single one had ever surfed, most had not been out of state, and only one had even seen the sea.
Overhearing this, the Campbells realized how extraordinary it was that they were – on a whim conceived one drunken evening in a pub six thousand miles away – driving the entire breadth of someone else’s vast country. They became both flushed with pride and utterly overawed with the magnitude of the undertaking, and sipped their coffees meditatively, taking perhaps five or six minutes longer than they normally would have allowed. Without this delay, they’d have been out the door by 12.50. Even with it, they’d have been on the road by 12.56 at the latest. By then Suzy would have been ready for a cigarette, which the signs on the walls forbade through curt, easy-to-read sentences and internationally recognizable iconography. Pete Harris was in no real hurry, and would have been there anyway: still gazing at the house on a plot by itself, wondering vaguely how much it might cost, knowing that even if he could rustle up the money, his wife would have earmarked it for something else.
At 12.53 a woman shouted in the middle of the restaurant.
It was a brief, emphatic utterance, conveying nothing except urgency. People moved unconsciously out of the way, creating a clearing in the central aisle. It became evident that two men – one in his late teens, the other mid-twenties, both wearing long coats – were the focus of the woman’s concern. The older man had short fair hair, the younger’s was darker and rather longer. It was soon also clear that they were carrying semi-automatic rifles.
The light in the room seemed suddenly very bright, sounds abnormally clear and dry, as if some cushioning ether had been swept away. When you’re sitting in a McDonald’s on a weekday lunchtime with your coffee just approaching a drinkable temperature, and you realize that night has fallen out of a clear blue sky, time slips into a slow moment of lucidity. Like the long second before the impact of a car crash, this hiatus is not there to help you. It’s not an escape route, or a gift from God, and it is not enough to do anything in except take the chance to greet death and wonder what took it so long.
One of Trent’s crew of slackers had just time to say ‘Billy?’ in a tone of goofy bafflement, and then the two men started shooting.
They stood in the central aisle and fired calmly and quickly, the stocks of the rifles securely anchored in their shoulders. As the first casualty jerked backward, an expression of wordless surprise on her face, the gunmen moved on: intently, earnestly, as if seeking to demonstrate to some higher authority that they were worthy of this task, and carrying it out to the best of their ability.
After about another second, and two more deaths, everyone in the restaurant suddenly fought their way up out of bewilderment. Time hit the ground running, and the screaming started. They tried to flee, or hide, or to pull other people in front of them. Some made a break for the doors, but the guns turned as one and took down the deserters efficiently. Their line of fire swept past the out-of-towners, and Mark Campbell took a direct shot in the back of the head at about the same instant his wife’s face was spread over a spiderweb of cracks in the plate-glass window that halted both of the bullets’ progress. Trent died furiously soon afterwards, halfway to his feet on a doomed mission to throw himself at the gunmen. Few were sufficiently self-possessed to even consider such positive action, and those that did died quickly. The two guns swivelled as if pulled on the same string, and the action heroes discovered that while passive smoking may be bad for you, passive bullet use will take you down quicker.
Most people just tried to run. To get away. The vice-president of Bedloe Insurance tried, as did his exasperatingly inefficient assistant. Twelve schoolchildren tried. They all tried together, and got in one another’s way. Many found that their feet were tangled amidst the bodies of the injured, and died awkwardly, dislocating knees and hips as they fell. Those whose way was unobstructed were shot down as they fled, crashing into tables and walls and the serving counter, behind which the remaining living server was curled in a tight ball, all too aware that she lay in a pool of her own urine. From where she lay she could see the twitching feet of Duane Hillman, the young man with whom she’d most recently walked the line of the railroad. He had been sweet, and offered to use a condom. As she knew that he’d not only been shot but had fallen while holding a tray of hot oil, she wasn’t inclined to look at him. She was hoping instead that if she looked at nothing at all, and made herself small, maybe everything would be all right. A stray bullet later cut directly through the counter and into her spine.
There were those who didn’t even try to escape, but held their positions, eyes wide, souls already departed before shells tumbled through their lungs, groins and stomachs. At least one of them, recently diagnosed with the same cancer that had slowly killed her father, did not view this turn of events in an entirely negative light: although the fact of the matter is that the young doctor at the hospital, whom she did not trust largely because he looked a little like the villain on her favourite TV show, would have been able to save her had she lived and taken his advice.
The other statue people had no such reason for equanimity. They were simply unable to move until the choice was no longer theirs to make.
In a room full of victims, murderers look like gods. The men kept shooting, with occasional changes of direction, rifles turning together to rain fire on an unexpected