The world lurched forward. That’s what it felt like. Bullets tore into the tires and they deflated and the pickup truck lunged with its passengers like it had fallen to its proverbial knees, sending everyone tumbling. Lyle’s forehead smacked the front panel. The girl wailed from the backseat. Lyle felt the clutch of Eleanor’s hand on his leg. He saw the blood on her own forehead as she bounced back. Jerry, head low, cracked the passenger’s-side door.
Rat-tat-tat. Another two bullets spat at the front of the car.
Steam hissed from the engine, a spark flew, metal clanged, and then silence again. The message seemed pretty clear: Don’t move or I’ll shoot.
Without taking her hands from the steering wheel, without moving perceptibly at all, Eleanor said quietly: “He’d probably have killed us already if that’s what he wanted to do.”
“Sounds like a semiautomatic, at least,” Jerry said with equal care. “We’re outgunned. But if I can get a clean look—”
“Jerry, Jerry. Don’t even think about it. If I had to guess, there’s someone out there who is just as scared as we are. So let’s not spook him further. Dr. Martin?”
“Sounds right to me, Captain.”
“You don’t think it’s some half-sick madman? Like with the disease or something?” Alex said from the back. “We’ve got children here.”
“Good point,” Jerry said.
For Lyle, the world felt like it had split into two or, rather, into two screens, each showing different camera angles of the same scene. One camera focused on the house, quaint but deadly, hiding a powerful weapon and its trigger person. The other camera focused on the car, and the people in it, the formations of alliances and coalitions, primitive psychology forming. Whom to trust? Jerry was like a less-evolved animal, dangerous, impossible to communicate with but possible to manipulate and fundamentally unaware of his primitive psychology. Quite the opposite of Alex. Every time she spoke now, Lyle sensed her many layers. She stared at him almost like he was a savior or lover. Other times, as if he were a foe.
Maybe he was going nuts, he thought.
“Deep breaths,” Eleanor said. “Let me tell you what I’m going to do.”
She explained that she would slowly open the door, hands up, and walk in surrender toward the house and let the person understand the situation.
“No, please.” It was Alex. “You’re too important. I’m just a . . .” Before she finished or could say anything further, she’d opened the passenger-side back door and climbed over the boy. A bullet spat the ground in front of the truck but she stood her ground.
“Back in the truck,” Eleanor said as patiently as she might, clearly about to lose her shit.
“Jerry,” Alex said. “Don’t let him shoot me.”
“Get back in the truck,” Eleanor repeated.
“Keep your hands up,” Jerry said. “Tell him you don’t have a gun.”
“Don’t let him shoot me.”
“Give me a sign if he’s crazy,” Jerry said.
“Like what? Like a little loco sign behind my back?” Alex whispered.
“Draw him out.” Jerry sounded like he’d been thinking it all along.
Alex took another step forward, arms raised, and yelled toward the house: “We have children!”
She took another step. Now she was a step in front of the pickup. This time, no shots. From the backseat, the girl whimpered and now the boy choked out a sob, too. “You two, keep it down, I don’t want to have to ask you again,” Jerry said. “I will get you out of this.”
Alex took two more steps forward. Then two more. Now she was within fifteen feet of the porch. With the headlights shot out of the pickup, she was getting less visible. Wind had joined the snow, blowing from the west. Arms over her head, Alex balled her fists for warmth.
She said something the people in the pickup couldn’t hear and then the right side of the downstairs curtain moved. Not a lot, but enough to indicate the whereabouts of someone in the house.
“We have children and a doctor,” Alex said. “We landed on an airplane.”
Eleanor clutched Lyle’s leg, and he reached over and took her hand.
From inside the house, a voice said something that sounded like: “Slowly.”
“I can’t hear,” whispered Eleanor. “Damn it.”
Alex took two more steps and stopped and raised her hands higher. She said something else.
“Channelopathy,” Lyle said, almost exclaimed, with some wonder.
“What?”
“Of course, ah,” he said.
Alex took a step forward.
“We should stop her,” Lyle said. He was emerging from a trance.
“Why? What are you talking about?”
Lyle reached over and honked the horn. H-o-o-o-o-n-k.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jerry pulled Lyle back. Lyle hardly seemed to notice, so lost was he in thought. “Sodium ion channels, it’s got to have something to do with that.”
Alex took another step forward. She was talking but they couldn’t hear what was going on. Alex had lowered her hands. One of them she now held behind her back and she was twirling it in a circle, the loco sign. This guy in here is nuts.
“Draw him out,” Jerry muttered.
“No,” Lyle said. “We need him. We need—”
The front door to the house opened, slightly, and a gun barrel emerged, pointed at Alex. She made the sign behind her back again. Somewhere along the line, Jerry had opened his door and now he was moving himself outside of it. “I’m a doctor,” Jerry lied, talking in the direction of the house. He had the gun pinned to his right side trying to keep it blocked from the gunman’s view.
“You’re going to get us all killed,” Eleanor said. “Dr. Martin, why do we have to keep her out of the house?”
“I don’t know. She knows something.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know?!” Eleanor hissed.
“Tell him I’m a doctor,” Jerry said to Alex, who stood with her hands now back in the air. She said something. The person from the house pushed the door open.
Images and thoughts were colliding inside Lyle’s brain: the passenger on the tarmac, the one on the couch, their smiles, the frozen screen with The Godfather, an old man with his head bludgeoned, the girl clutching her head. The way the static electricity woke up that man. It would be about sodium channels and epilepsy. What was the connection there? It had to do with how the brain transferred electricity.
His mind’s eye searched through his mental archives while through an actual blank stare, he watched as Jerry took another step forward in front of the pickup. His hands inside his jacket hid the gun.
“Jerry, tell her to come back,” Eleanor said.
He ignored her.
Alex took another step forward, then she dropped to her knees.
“What’s going on up there?” Eleanor muttered.
The front door to the house swung open and a man stood with an automatic gun slung over his shoulder. Tall and round, but sleek in his full-length leather jacket. On his woolly head, a kerchief pulled tight like you might see on a biker.
Jerry dropped to his knees and the shooting started.