Alex watched as the first two responding officers ran in a low crouch. One moved toward the gunman, and another ran along the tree line toward them. In a minute, he was crouching down over Alex and Christine, his comforting hand on Alex’s back. His name tag read Scott. He looked them both over. “Are you hurt?”
Alex shook her head, and Christine managed to whisper, “No.”
The other officer reached the body of the gunman and checked his carotid. He turned to his partner and shook his head.
For an indeterminable amount of time, Alex lay belly down in the wet mud, feeling like any minute a sniper’s bullet might tear right through her. Finally the officers announced an all clear. Alex and Christine struggled to their feet, shivering from the wet cold.
Paramedics rushed in to help the reporter, loading her onto a gurney. As they hurried toward the ambulance, the cameraman ran alongside them. The policemen escorted Alex and Christine out of the trees and back to the stage. Alex couldn’t help looking over at the dead gunman, such an average Joe with his thinning hair and beer gut, red T-shirt and faded jeans. She couldn’t stop staring at him. The police moved around her seemingly in slow motion. Her thoughts were hazy and sounds were muffled, as if her head were stuffed with cotton. More officers arrived, and Alex stood there shaking, her heart still pounding.
Christine moved next to her and grabbed her hand, and for a few minutes they sat side by side on the stage, trembling and trying to take it all in. At the far periphery of the wetlands, city life went on as usual. Cars honked. People shouted at one another. Planes and helicopters droned overhead. The stench of car exhaust reached her even out here.
As she sat there, holding Christine’s cold hand, this person she barely knew but had experienced a traumatic event with, Alex wondered what she was still doing in this city. After finishing her PhD in wildlife biology, she’d come here to be with her boyfriend and fill a postdoc research position on the northern parula, a small migratory warbler. But she and Brad had broken up two months ago, and her research job had ended even before that.
Before this ceremony, she’d considered staying here, but now, shocked and horrified in this tiny pocket of wild surrounded by a teeming city of humans waiting to do violence to one another, she knew it was time to move on.
They each gave a statement to the police. Crime scene techs arrived with the press, and Alex watched as the police taped off the area. Finally the first two responding officers walked her and Christine back to their cars, saying they’d contact them if they had other questions. As Alex got into her car, she looked up at Officer Scott. “Do they know what happened?” she asked him. “Who the other shooter was?”
Scott shook his head. “I can’t discuss it. I’m sorry. But I’m sure it’ll be all over the papers when we find out.”
She started up her car. All she wanted to do was go home, get a hot cup of tea, and curl up on her couch. But as she drove across the city and arrived at her apartment building, she realized Scott wasn’t kidding. A gaggle of press awaited her there, and they were already crowding around her car before she’d even parked.
Above them, the storm finally unleashed its fury, lashing the city with rain.
Two
Reporters pressed against Alex’s car door, shouting questions. She couldn’t get it open. “Did the gunman threaten you?” “How did you feel witnessing a shooting like that?” “Did you personally feel in danger?”
She crawled across to the passenger side and managed to squeeze out. Cameras flashed in her face, reporters jostling her all the way to the door of her building. “Please,” she said, “no comment. I just want to go home.” Her legs shook as she pushed through the swarm.
The reporters crowded around her, still throwing out their questions. “Do you think the victim will survive?” “Did you see the second shooter?”
She managed to unlock the main door and slip inside, and still the press continued to film her and yell questions through the glass. Her flat was on the top floor, and she started wearily up the stairs.
She could hear her landline ringing from inside her flat as she unlocked the door. Once inside, she hurried to the phone, hoping it was her friend Zoe. She could use a friendly voice about now.
But instead it was a persistent reporter. “Do you have cell phone footage of the shooting that you’d be willing to sell?” he asked her.
Alex hung up, only to have the phone immediately ring again. She picked up, this time hearing a whiny voice on the other end. “This is WBSR news. We’d like to invite you onto our news hour tonight to describe the shooting.”
Alex couldn’t hang up fast enough. But the phone immediately rang again. “Leave me the hell alone!” she shouted into it.
“Are you okay?” Zoe asked from the other end.
Alex breathed a sigh of relief. “Zoe! It’s so good to hear your voice. The press is hounding me. Yes, I’m fine. A little shaken up, considering.”
“I’ll say!” Zoe huffed. “I kept checking the Boston feeds for your interview, and when I saw that a gunman had shown up, I about had a heart attack. I tried your cell, but it kept going straight to voicemail.”
Alex fished her phone out of her pocket. “I forgot I turned it off before I did my interview.” She powered it on now. She could feel the stress flowing out of her body just hearing Zoe’s voice, knowing that she had such a solid friend. She’d met Zoe Lindquist in college when Alex had dusted off the oboe she’d played in high school and joined the pit orchestra of a college production of Man of La Mancha. Zoe had been cast as Dulcinea, and between cast parties and disastrous rehearsals that went late into the night, they’d become close, never losing contact, even when Alex went on to grad school and Zoe went on to make her mark in Hollywood.
“It was pretty terrifying,” Alex told her.
“So you were there? I mean, right when it happened?”
“Yes. And it’s an experience I’d like to un-have.”
“I’ll bet. Are you okay? Did they catch the second gunman?”
Alex pulled a kitchen stool closer and sat down. Through her open window, she could still hear the press clamoring below. “I don’t know.” Outside, a terrific peal of thunder rattled her windows.
“I’d have been scared out of my mind.”
The numb feeling she’d been carrying around since the shooting had started to wear off. Alex shifted her weight on the stool, leaning one elbow on the counter and running a hand over her face. She felt so tired. “I was. It was crazy.” She exhaled. “Zoe, I don’t even know what I’m doing in this city anymore.”
“Things with Brad still not right?” Zoe asked.
“Things with Brad aren’t happening at all.” She and Brad had said it was a temporary separation while they worked things out. Since then, they’d played phone tag and sent a text message now and again, but Alex had the feeling that they both knew it was over. They’d broken up once before, after a bad experience at her first job as a postdoc, but that time they managed to reconcile. She didn’t think it would happen this time.
“Are you happy or sad about that?”
“Weary, I guess, more than anything else,” Alex told her.