The quiet is nice. Robby has been waiting for it.

He imagines Destin, and even in his head Destin is huge, not fitting into the frame. His arms are like Popeye’s, no wrists at all. He imagines Destin on his horse – his horse! – and he thinks of the one time Destin took him riding through the hills, but Robby only pretended to like it. The idea of it was better than the real thing. And he thinks of the Gila monster tattoo on Destin’s bicep, cool as hell, and how once Destin called Robby a team player. Destin never called Mark anything at all.

There are crickets or something chirping in the hedges, and when Robby walks past, they get quiet, too. Good.

There is a game show that has a cardboard character climbing a mountain like Robby is climbing this hill, and if the stupid contestant misses a question, the cardboard guy falls and disappears. He’s just plodding higher and higher, never knowing when he might get knocked off the board.

Left, right, left, right, left.

He can hear Mark pounding across the pavement somewhere up ahead, somewhere past the AFRICA sign. He is almost positive it is Mark – the police should be coming from the front of the zoo. He looks over his shoulder – he thinks he can see them moving toward the pond, coming through the smoke.

Robby faces forward again. He tries to hurry, but he can’t, because he is only cardboard.

And then Mark is in front of him, sprinting, his arms flying around, his form completely inefficient. He barely slows down when he sees Robby. They bump together, shoulder to shoulder, Mark bouncing off like a pinball.

‘I think they killed Destin,’ Mark says, still moving downhill. ‘I think. They must have.’

‘Yeah,’ Robby says, watching Mark get farther away. A roach runs across the concrete by his foot, and the roach, yeah, that guy is freakin’ efficient.

‘You know they’re coming!’ says Mark.

He has paused now, realizing Robby is not following him.

‘I know they’re coming,’ Robby says, and he is proud that for once in his life Mark is louder than he is. Mark is the one who needs shushing.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Mark.

Robby is not sure. He is not sure of anything, and it’s not the worst feeling. Everything is fuzzier than it was before. He has been rolled up in tissue paper, like the bags of pralines his mother shipped him when he tried one semester at State, or he is like the dead squabs that Harding wraps in brownish-red moss before he buries them. Mrs Powell turned him back into himself, partly, and he is stuck now, in between. He saw her in that storage closet, and he recognized her right away, because she has not changed at all, not in fourteen years, except maybe her hair is lighter, and he could not believe that she didn’t yell out his name the way she used to when he drifted out of the line to the lunchroom, and then he figured out that she didn’t know who he was, but he couldn’t stop himself from saying her name.

‘Robby!’ yells Mark. ‘Come on!’

He is going to make himself move in a second. He knows Mark is freaking out. But first he has to push Mrs Powell someplace where she’ll leave him alone. It was too much to hope that she might understand, that she might see that he is accomplishing something here, that he is, actually, someone who has thought about things. She did not see it. But maybe she did. Maybe that is why she asked him to stay with her. Maybe, by the end, he had gotten through to her, and maybe she will think of him after. She will remember him.

She gave him some orange. Back then. She gave him some orange.

Was that him back then?

He has not thought about it in years, but he could almost taste the orange when he saw her. He sat close to her desk, and they were doing some kind of worksheet when he smelled the fruit in the air. He was always hungry back then, no matter how much his mom fed him, and he stood and tried to figure out a reason to go to her desk. His feet started moving and he was there, in front of Mrs Powell, before he had thought of a good question to ask her. He watched her slice an orange into half-circles, and she looked up and told him that she hadn’t had a chance to eat breakfast that morning. I like oranges, he’d said. I like how they smell.

Instead of sending him back to his desk, she sort of laughed and held out an orange slice, and he ate it in one bite, ripped it off the rind. No one else got an orange piece, only him.

He couldn’t kill her, and that was maybe all right, but he couldn’t kill the others in front of her, either. Not even after that awesome bit with the axe, which was hanging there on the wall like it was made to chop through a doorframe. That part was just like the movies. But he couldn’t kill them, and so he fell off the rails, just like he always does. How could he have been so sure of what he wanted and so clear on the plan and then have gone and done the exact wrong thing without even realizing he was doing it?

Only he does not care that much, he realizes. He is all wrapped up.

‘I’m leaving,’ Mark says, and he is running with that stupid uncoordinated stride that he has. ‘I’m not just standing here waiting for them to find me.’

‘Destin is dead,’ says Robby, although it comes out as partly a question.

‘You know he is!’ yells Mark.

Robby gets himself moving. The truth is that he does not really want to be alone when it happens. And it won’t matter where they are. The police will find them.

He feels like he has been running up and down this hill forever. A shell of another roach – not quite fast enough – crackles under his boot.

Destin would stomp roaches with his bare feet.

Destin said that the best cure for poison ivy was to slice off the top layer of skin with a razor and then pour bleach on it, and Robby watched him do it once, and Destin smiled when he poured the bleach.

Maybe there is something after this life, because it seems impossible that a man like that can disappear into nothing.

He could have learned so many more things from Destin if he had more time. They only met him about ten months ago, if meeting online counted. Robby was arguing with Mark about what would be the best jungle weapon. He thought an M14 if your men were good marksmen or maybe a Stoner, either semi- or full automatic, and Mark thought AK-103s, and they googled to settle the question. They clicked around a few message boards, and they started to realize that people were out there talking about everything from homemade hand grenades to how to can deer meat. A while later they were following a thread about a family rescued by a sheriff’s deputy after three days in the Wyoming wilderness, and a guy commented that you should never drive anywhere without a log chain and a come-along, and they didn’t know what the hell that meant.

So they asked the guy, and the guy was Destin, and he explained it when they asked. Destin knew everything about everything, like how bandannas could be used as filters and as handcuffs and as tourniquets, and how you should keep a spare sidearm between your shoulders in case someone made you put your hands behind your head. Everything. Robby has always been impressed by people who know everything. And it turned out that Destin lived outside the city – thirty miles or so. After a whole load of e-mailing, they met him for beers one day.

They talked about a lot of stuff, and they met for beers again, and they were lucky, so lucky, that a guy like that wanted to hang with them. Then one day Destin said, Do you want to live forever?

Mark said, Yeah.

And Destin said, I know how we can do it.

He told them about how Columbine had changed everything with the police. Before those two guys shot up the school, if the police got a call about someone with a gun in a public place, they figured it was a hostage situation, and they’d wait for the SWAT team to show up and negotiate. But then Columbine rewrote the rules: the cops realized you might have a shooter firing at anyone and everyone, killing them as fast as they could. So the cops didn’t wait anymore to go inside: they had a new template. Whether one policeman showed up or twenty showed up, they’d rush inside right away, and they’d head straight to the shooter and put a bullet in him as soon as possible, and you’d probably admire them for it if you didn’t know what douchebags they were. The cops got to practice that new template plenty, because after Columbine, it kept happening over and over again. The crazies had a new template to follow, too.

Destin liked the word ‘template’.

Destin said: Templates are dangerous. Templates teach you not to think. History does not repeat itself, Rob. Every second is a new thing.

Destin said: If you’re someone who sees the truth, you have to try to educate. You show people how limited they are, then maybe they try to get past those limits.

Robby liked that idea. He wanted to show the others how limited they were.

They worked it all out. Robby and Mark would come into the zoo quietly, weapons stored away, not giving anyone a reason to notice them. Destin would come in separately, guns out from the beginning, playing the part of a nutjob. He was a good actor. He’d take out a few people right away and then make a show of grabbing hostages and herding them into one of the front offices. Robby and Mark would stay back from the entrance gate so that if anyone did make it out, they wouldn’t have seen the two of them. Destin would convince the police that they were following a certain script, but there actually would be a totally different script.

Robby and Mark were in charge of that part. While Destin was playing out a hostage situation and keeping all the cops away, Robby and Mark would go hunting. They would have the whole zoo as a playground. They could kill anybody they wanted, however they wanted. No rules. No limits.

And by the end, the police would see how they had been fooled. They would see how they had sat around and let the slaughter happen. Everyone in front of a laptop or a television would see how the police had been sheep. The entire world would realize, too, that they were all sheep. That they lived their lives like poor dumb animals, never thinking for themselves, and that Destin and Robby and Mark had given them a flash of salvation. A flash of genius. That was the right word for when someone had a vision no one had ever had before.

Destin was right about every second being a new thing, because here Robby is and he knew this was coming, but he still can hardly make himself believe it. He is still here, and Destin is gone. This was the plan, but it feels different now in this second.

The smoke is drifting through the air like fog. Robby can smell it.

The body armor wasn’t to save Destin, of course. It was only to make things last longer. Destin said anything worth anything took sacrifice, just look at Jesus. Just look at Galileo and Lincoln. Yes, Robby thought. Yes. The rest of it was all good and fine, and Destin talked about façades and reality and he talked about a single point of entry and exit and perimeters, but Robby did not care much about the ins and outs of it. It was such an honor to be chosen, and Destin knew everything, and Mark is his best friend, sure. But it was the ending that sold him.

He will finish this, and it will be the one thing he has done right. Even if he has not been perfect, he will finish this.

What will it be like? he wonders, and he wonders what it is like for Destin now. He knows people talk about angels and streets of gold, and his mother has said she would like death to feel like sleep, warm in bed, only with people she loves pressed around her, spine to spine, like when he was a baby and slept with her. He wonders if she thinks of his father, the prick, or whether she wants him out of her heaven. Robby does not want to feel anyone around him, though, and he does not want to feel warm or loved or filled with light or any crap like that. He does not want to feel anything. He hopes it is like being in a bathtub, when everything but your nose is underwater and you can’t hear anything or see anything, and you cannot even tell you have a body anymore.

He hopes what comes next is nothing. That is the most beautiful thing.

There are people who will miss him. The old man who always remembers his name when he comes to the CVS counter, but Robby wouldn’t see him anymore anyway, thanks to his dick boss. The checkout lady at the liquor store always smiles at him. His grandmother doesn’t have any other grandchildren, so that counts for something. Mark, but Mark will not be able to miss him, because he will be gone, too. His mother, who forever ago would take him to go get doughnuts on Saturday mornings when his dad was sleeping in and after doughnuts they would come here to the zoo. She always wanted to see the birds even though the birds were the most boring thing, and she could never remember the difference between sea lions and seals.

Seals, she would say.

Sea lions, he would correct, every time.

It is better not to think of her.

Mark is saying something. They are at the railroad track, and Mark has been yammering for ages about how they need to follow the stupid track around and get over to whatever street – Cherry? Dogwood?

None of it matters. It is such a relief that none of it matters. Because despite Mark’s delusional escape plan, the beautiful ending is nearly here, and it will find them, no matter where they go. All Robby has to do is keep the gun in his hand. All he has to do is play his part.