Chapter Ninety-Seven

“WHAT THE FUCK?” Lionel says, and rolls, naked, off the far side of the bed. He pulls a small, shiny 38 Special with a bright white pearl handle from his parka on the floor and stands up, pointing it at White Mike, erection wilting fast. His regular gun is in the other pocket. Jessica is covering herself with the sheet.

White Mike recognizes Charlie’s gun. “Oh man,” he says.

“Fuck,” says Lionel, lowering the gun. “What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” White Mike says, but he takes a step toward Lionel, and Lionel is startled by the look in his eyes. He raises the gun again.

“I know that gun. Charlie’s gun, Lionel.”

“He was on some shit, and he pulled it on me.”

“And you killed him and took it.”

“What the fuck.” Lionel holds the pistol level.

White Mike just stares at him.

“You’d a shot him too.”

And then White Mike launches himself across the room, grabbing for the gun, thinking he is going to kill Lionel.

Lionel fires two shots. One of the bullets hits White Mike, who falls heavily into the drum set. The other bullet hums just over Jessica’s head and explodes the aquarium, and the water spills onto Jessica and the bed, and the piranhas are snapping their jaws and flopping in the broken tank. Lionel grabs his clothes and is out the door and into the hall, naked. All the kids start running down the stairs. Claude’s door flies open, and he is suddenly huge in the hall, a sword strapped to his back, the Uzi in one hand.

Claude pulls the trigger of the Uzi, and it is louder than even he has ever imagined. He sees all these kids streaming down the stairs. Then he sees Molly, terrified, coming toward him, looking for White Mike. Claude points the gun at her and fires, and hits Molly many times. Andrew is right behind her and Claude kills him too. He keeps firing down the stairs and several other kids fall.

One of them is Timmy, and Mark Rothko, right beside him, stops to try and help, but Claude is now walking down the stairs and shoots Mark Rothko full in the face. Timmy sees Mark Rothko’s head fly apart, and for a second he can think of nothing so much as a game the two of them used to play. They would throw rotten tangerines into the wall across from Mark Rothko’s window, where they would explode with these satisfying splats.

Claude shoots Timmy then. And as he continues walking down the stairs, he sees his friend Tobias going out the door and Claude fires some shots at him but none of them hit, and Tobias slams the door behind him fast. The closed door stops Lionel, who is naked still, carrying his clothes, and Claude shoots him in the back.

He kills the other kids who are lying wounded on the stairs. Three of them. They are two boys and a girl, and Claude dispatches each of them the same way, with a kind of careful candor in his gunfire that is straight and measured into the middle of their bodies. Claude saw what happened to Mark Rothko, and he doesn’t like the mess that shooting someone in the head makes, because he accidentally stepped in some of Mark Rothko’s brain matter as he continued down the stairs.

Claude looks back around but doesn’t see his brother, who is still hiding in a corner at the top of the stairs, weeping.

The house is almost empty now. Claude walks the ground floor by himself, stopping in every room and looking at everything, taking his time. There is so much space. In the living room he looks at his mother’s vases and couches and paintings on the wall, but he can’t decide whether to fire his gun and destroy the room or not. It seems so neat that he is reluctant to disrupt the order. It is so quiet. He starts to leave the room in peace, but then he turns and fires, splintering the walls.

By this time the police are arriving, and their calls to him to come out float in Claude’s head and he doesn’t really hear them. But he knows they want him to come out, and he does, but not with his hands up. He comes out firing, and they shoot him dead before he is three steps out the front door.