The Survivor Read Free Page B

everyone. Those guys are gone. Or dead, I guess. You’re all safe. You can get up.”
    But they all stayed on the floor.
    Nate wondered briefly if this was actually real and not some bizarre dream. “I promise you,” he said, “no one’ll hurt you now. Please don’t be scared anymore.” He took a pleading step forward, a lightning bolt of pain electrifying his left side. Wincing, he tried to reach back to grip the handle of the letter opener, but the movement just made it bob away from his fingertips.
    Now came more sirens, the chop of a helicopter, a megaphone bleat. The phone on the New Accounts desk rang and rang. Nate stared at the motionless tableau, all those people, too afraid to rise.
    The little girl crawled over to her mother, still unconscious from the kick to her face. Nate crouched above the inert woman, laid two fingers on her neck. Strong pulse.
    “She’s okay,” he told the girl. “Your mom’s gonna be fine.”
    He stood again, his knees cracking, and announced to no one in particular, “I’m gonna … um, go get some help. Medics. Okay? Everyone okay?”
    More stunned silence.
    The girl held up her arms. He looked down at her, the familiar pick-me-up gesture twingeing his heart in a place he’d thought had long ago gone brittle and blown away. One of her pigtails had pulled loose, freeing a cloud of hair. The blood on her earlobe had hardened, a black crust. Both cheeks glimmered with tears, but her face remained blank with shock. He crouched and lifted her, grunting against the pain, trying to use his legs instead of his arms. Her wrist brushed the letter opener, sending through him a wave of nausea so intense that he thought he might vomit. But he kept on toward the door, blood warming the back of his shirt.
    The security guard had landed faceup, his head corkscrewed unnaturally, white eyes aimed over at them. Stepping into the waiting elevator, Nate turned so the girl was pointed away from the death sprawl. She took his cue, bending her head into the hollow of his neck, the scent of no-tears shampoo bringing him back to Cielle at that age in the bathtub: We don’t splash!
    The elevator hummed its descent. His skin tingled—the afterglow of that invincibility he’d felt staring down the hail of bullets. How long had it been since he’d felt like that? He’d cheated something in that room, sucked a last taste of marrow from the bone.
    The elevator slowed, the girl’s weight pulling at the crook of his arm. Her face was hot against the side of his neck, and he realized he’d been talking to her, whispering a quiet mantra: “—everything’s gonna be all right everything’s gonna—”
    The doors peeled back, exposing the empty lobby. His footsteps grew heavier as he neared the tinted glass of the front wall. Beyond, cop cars, SWAT vans, ambulances, and fire engines crammed the street. Barricades and gun barrels alternated, a pattern of impenetrability. Sniper scopes winked from awnings and balconies.
    The girl made a fearful noise and buried herself deeper in his neck. Firming his grip around her with one hand and raising his other painfully overhead, he shoved through the revolving door, staggering out to a reception of countless muzzles and the bright light of day.

 
    Chapter 4
    When Nate entered the emergency room, flanked by cops like an escaped convict, the TV in the lobby was already rolling footage from outside the First Union Bank of Southern California. Despite the bandages, blood trickled down his arm, drying across the backs of his fingers like an ill-advised fashion statement. The letter opener, removed from his trapezius and encased in an evidence bag, was handed off to a venerable triage nurse, who looked from it to Nate with an impressive lack of curiosity. She led him through a miasma of familiar hospital smells to Radiology, then deposited him in a room the size of a walk-in closet.
    The doctor came in, scanning Nate’s chart as Nate crinkled on the paper sheet of