Fast Food

Once again ... Karma runs amok.

      The splendid mid-May sunshine bathed the parents in warmth as they sat at the brightly colored picnic tables, enjoyed their lunch and watched their children romp about on the brightly colored playground equipment. Carrie Osborne and Danielle Berman had to be at the state park to meet their friends for an afternoon hike in a little over an hour, so they decided that fast food was their best option for lunch.

      “Do you want to eat outside?” Carrie asked.

      “No, the breeze will mess up my hair.”

      “We’re going to be out in the wind all day!”Carrie protested.

      “I know. But I want to look good when Kyle first sees me.”

Carrie rolled her eyes and looked around as they walked in and noticed that all of the tables were taken. She headed for the back of the shortest of three long lines and made a suggestion.

“You go wait for a table to come free and grab it, I’ll get our food,” she said while scanning the menu board, “Do you want your usual; grilled chicken, fries and a Coke?”

“Yep,” Danielle said as she turned the corner and headed towards the back of the dining room.

She’d noticed a few groups of people who looked like they were almost finished. What she hadn’t noticed was the obese man with a rather shoddy looking sweat suit. He breathed heavily as he ate messily and looked as though he might not smell terribly good. She decided not to grab the table near him and let the family who’d just brought their food from the counter take the table. In just a few minutes, a table closer to the front of the restaurant and farther from the large man opened up and Danielle snagged it.

At the counter, Carrie placed her order and also mentioned something to the cashier that had perturbed her.

“We tried to come in that side door by the back of the dining room but it was locked.”

“We keep that door locked because we’ve had problems with some homeless guys who were coming in that door and just sitting in our dining room without buying anything. It was making our customers uncomfortable and hurting our business.”

“Oh! I guess that makes sense.”

After only a few minutes, Carrie found Danielle with the tray of food and they enjoyed lunch as they discussed the upcoming day with their friends and every other thing that girls in their late teens usually discuss. They were nearly finished when Carrie caught Danielle gazing out the window in a manner that she had seen before.

“You’re tuning me out again, he’d better be cute.”

“Well cute or not, we have to go if we’re gonna be at the park on time. I bought you lunch, you take care of our trays.”

“Okay, okay,” Danielle said with a chuckle as she picked up the tray.

The first three pops sounded like fireworks to Danielle. They sounded like fireworks until she turned and looked out the window, where a little girl no more than seven years old fell five feet from the top of the slide and slammed to the hard, bright yellow cement. A woman, probably her mother, leapt from a nearby picnic table and lunged towards her, but took only a couple of steps before her lower right back burst open in a grotesque plume of red and she crumpled to the ground. All at once the other parents and children outside realized what was going on. Screams pierced the air as parents ran towards their children and towards the source of the shots. The children ran towards their parents and away from the shooter, who was still blocked from Danielle’s field of view by a brick post that supported the outside canopy. In the remainder of the outside volley three more adults and two more children fell. The people inside stood, dumbstruck, completely oblivious to the impending danger. Customers and employees alike stood slack-jawed watching the carnage as valuable seconds slipped from their grasp.

Everyone was jarred back into the reality of their own grievous peril when a polished, ankle high, black leather boot kicked the front right door open. When the tall, thin, dark-haired man stepped into the lobby, Danielle immediately recognized him to be the man she thought was so good looking when she saw him pull into the parking lot. He wasn’t attractive now; he was horrifying. His dark, shark-like eyes were absolutely vacant as he swept his AK-47 across the lobby. He swept the counter first. The booming reports and plunks of the rounds penetrating stainless steel mixed with the awful screams. The restaurant filled with the acrid smell of gunpowder as two employees fell in gruesome splashes of blood and tissue and the man with the gun swept his aim methodically to the front left door. By now the customers had shaken themselves from their trance of disbelief and were all piled against the door trying frantically to push one another aside so they could escape. They were sitting ducks.

The searing pain in Danielle’s left thigh felt like someone had jabbed a red-hot poker completely through her leg. She tumbled to the floor and others trampled over her in their desperation to get out. But the spot by the door was a “killing ground”. Exploded door glass and six or seven bodies fell all around Danielle as those horrible gunshots continued to ring out. She tried to inch herself towards the back door. Even though the door was locked, she thought that she might be able to hide in a restroom. Carrie had fled in that direction and was cowering, with several other customers, behind the rearmost tables. The killer left the counter area and walked towards the clutter of fallen bodies by the door. Now in view of Carrie and the others, he stopped, pulled a pistol from his waistband, and methodically shot each of the fallen by the door once more in the head, to be certain they were all dead. At this point, the fat man jumped to his feet and charged across the aisle and threw himself through a large, plate glass window. He rolled across the sidewalk and to relative cover behind a parked car. The noise drew the shooter’s attention, but not soon enough. The others who were huddled with the fat man scrambled through the escape hatch that he’d created just as a flood of police cars screeched into the lot.

The last thing that Danielle saw before the 9mm slug crashed into the left side of her head was her friend Carrie dashing to safety through the shattered window. Danielle Berman was Graham Stone’s last victim that day … besides himself. When he saw the police cars, he turned his 9mm pistol on himself. His was the nineteenth life lost that day. But five people escaped that day because Pete Werth, the fat man, decided that someone had to do something.

Reviews

[Narnie]

I read this last night Jerry... I found the premise interesting and your story telling is always fluid but I'm juggling with the overall message somewhat. I know that your message is that 'never judge a book by its cover' and it is the one that comes across but then I worry that the emphasis on him being obese might be a curveball to the fact that his actions saved lives - no matter how cowardly those actions were. But overall, as always, it was a compulsive read Jerry - your character portrait of the lead female is excellent and we really feel that we know where she's coming from with her thoughts.

[TL Boehm]

oh wow. chilling.

[Ferg]

Interesting story.....your style of human observation comes through in this!
"Someone had to do something"........sums it up nicely. Too often "No one does anything"

[Emily B]

No apostrophe in see’s, I think.

I just finished a book by Dean Koontz last night about an ordinary guy who knows he has to do something and ends up saving lives. This probably wasn't the story I thought it was when I got here.

I stopped on a country road to help some people away from a burning car one day. I lost count of how many adult men in SUV's saw the flames and turned their vehicles around and wouldn't be bothered.

Mostly a hero is somebody that knows they need to do something, I guess.