A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0045

Chapter 45

The late afternoon light crept through the windows of the First Pacific in San Diego in the lazy diagonal motion that only the late afternoon knows how to do, gilding the worn marble of the lobby and the glass partitions of the teller windows, and for a few minutes the bank could almost pretend that the city outside wasn’t sick.

It was one of the last. Of the twelve branches the chain had maintained in the city a year earlier, only four remained, and of those four, this was the largest, and therefore the most heavily fortified. The deterioration had come in waves: first the ATM robberies, then the armored car ambushes, then the neighborhood branches closing one by one like lights going out in a long corridor, and with each wave, the First Pacific on Broadway responded by adding a layer. The entrance door, which at the opening had been an elegant sheet of glass, was now a sandwich of laminated glass and a steel frame, heavy enough to require a hydraulic spring, the kind of door that closes itself with the patience of a safe. There were four security guards instead of two. There were new cameras in the corners and film on the windows, and a panic button under each counter. Management liked to say, in Monday meetings, that this branch was the most secure in California.

The management, like almost everyone else in that city, still did calculations using old-fashioned arithmetic.

Behind the third teller window, Sofia Reyes counted a stack of twenty-dollar bills for the second time, not because she’d made a mistake, but because counting calmed her down, and she’d needed calm ever since her younger brother stopped answering the phone and her mother started lighting candles. Forty minutes remained until closing time. On the other side of the glass, Mr. Abernathy, eighty-three years old and wearing the same hat for at least ten years, pushed his retirement check across the tray with the solemnity of someone delivering a state document. He came every twelfth of the month. Always in the late afternoon, always at her teller window, always with the same joke about the government owing him interest since Korea. There were two more elderly people in the low queue of waiting chairs, a woman with a folding shopping cart and a man sleeping sitting with his chin on his chest, and this was the clientele at five o’clock in the afternoon at a bank in a city that had learned to sort out its life before dark: those who were no longer in a hurry and those who had nowhere to run.

Next to the central column, the oldest security guard, Dominguez, finished his end-of-shift coffee in two long gulps, the paper cup disappearing into his hand. His belly stretched the buttons of his uniform as if testing the patience of a seamstress, and he sighed his usual sigh, the one that marked the boundary between the part of the shift where something could happen and the part where it was no longer worth it. The other three were scattered around the lobby in their manual positions, and none of them were looking at the door, because nobody looks at a door weighing four hundred kilos. A door like that isn’t an entrance. It’s a guarantee.

That’s why, when the warranty certificate flew across the lobby, nobody immediately understood what they were seeing.

The sound came first, a deep crack of metal giving way at the root, the hinges ripped from the frame with pieces of the concrete itself still clinging to the screws, and then the entire door, leaf, frame and hydraulic spring, flew through ten meters of air like a card thrown onto a table and collapsed in the center of the marble floor. The laminated glass, designed not to shatter, shattered anyway, not into shards but in a fine, shimmering rain that hung suspended in the golden light for an almost beautiful instant, and the crash of the impact ran through the hall, climbed the columns and returned from the high ceiling transformed into an echo, and only then did the screams begin.

Sofia threw herself to the floor behind the counter before deciding to do it, her body faster than her head, the twenty-dollar bills still clutched in her hand. The woman with the cart was screaming. Mr. Abernathy had remained standing, exposed in the middle of the lobby, his retirement check dangling from his fingers, staring at the fallen door in disbelief.

Men entered through the gaping opening. Sofia counted them over the edge of the counter with the cold part of her mind that remains when panic takes over the rest: six, eight, ten, all in balaclavas, all with rifles raised and butts on their shoulders, fanning out across the hall with the rehearsed choreography of those who have done this before, their voices barking orders that tumbled over each other. On the floor. Hands on their heads. Nobody moves.

Dominguez moved.

Was it training, or pride, or simply the hand reaching for his waist along the path thirty years had worn there, and it didn’t matter which of the three, because the answer came before the gun even left its holster. A single shot, dry and without hesitation, and the agency’s oldest security guard spun half a body and fell beside the column where he’d drunk his coffee, his hand still gripping his waist, and a dark line immediately began to find its way through the joints of the marble.

The other three security guards froze mid-movement, their hands stopped halfway to their weapons, and it would have stayed that way; ten rifles against three closed holsters was a calculation anyone could make, if a voice hadn’t spoken from the entrance.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t try anything.”

It wasn’t a voice altered by shouting or muffled by fabric. It was a clear, conversational voice, almost pleasant, and that’s exactly what made all the heads on the bench turn towards it. The man who entered through the gap where the door had been was large in a way that the doorframe emphasized, his shoulders almost touching on both sides, and he was dressed in black from head to toe, walking over the rubble of the entrance itself with the nonchalance of someone crossing a shallow puddle.

He wasn’t wearing a mask.

Sofia registered this with a new knot in her stomach, worse than the one from the gunshots. The ten men in balaclavas had come to hide their faces. This one had come to show his. It was a broad face, with a heavy chin, fair skin reddened by the sun, short hair, and above all, a smile fixed with the firmness of a piece of furniture, and a face uncovered amidst ten covered ones could only mean one of two things: either the man was too stupid to fear the cameras, or the cameras had ceased to be a problem for him. And nothing about that smile was stupid.

The three security guards arrived at the same conclusion by the opposite route. They saw the exposed face, they saw the bearing, they saw the ten armed men respectfully making way, and the sum of all this etched the word “leader” into them, and upon that word, thirty years of instruction worked alone. The head is neutralized. The three drew at the same time, in a final coordinated reflex of their entire profession, and opened fire.

The hallway erupted in thunder. Sofia flattened herself against the floor behind the counter, her arms above her head, and even then she saw, through the gap between the partition and the counter, enough for the rest of her life.

The bullets hit. That was the very horror of it: they didn’t miss. They hit the man’s chest, his neck, his face; she saw the impact shake the fabric of his clothes and saw his head pushed two fingers to the side by a shot that entered his cheekbone, and nothing happened. No blood. No fall. The man stopped walking, not like someone who has been hit, but like someone waiting for a child to finish a tantrum, and the projectiles kept hitting him and falling; she heard, between one bang and another, the tiny clinking of crushed lead dripping onto the marble, deformed metal discs rolling down his feet like coins thrown to a street performer. When the hammers of the pistols began to click into the air, the man raised his hand and removed from his own face, with his index finger, a flattened bullet that had become lodged in the crease of his smile, and looked at it curiously before letting it fall.

“Terrible deal,” he said.

No order was needed. The balaclava-clad men advanced on the three security guards at the same instant, and what they did, they did with a method worse than fury: they shot them in the knees, the thighs, the arms, choosing the parts with the care of a butcher instructed not to kill, and the three men fell one by one, rolling across the marble, and their screams mingled with those of the women and the weeping of someone Sofia couldn’t locate. Beside the column, the puddle beneath Dominguez had stopped growing slowly and was now growing rapidly, in a way she knew, without ever having seen it, that meant there was no ambulance in the world that could arrive in time.

The unmasked man turned slowly, appreciating the lobby as a buyer appreciates a property: the high ceiling, the columns, the counters, the hostages huddled on the floor.

“I hope the coffers are full,” he said, to no one and to everyone.

And then the wall of light at the entrance darkened, a deep engine rumbled in reverse, and through the gap where the door had once been, the yellow back of a school bus entered, backwards.

It was a real bus, or it had been. The yellow paint still bore the name of a school district in peeling black letters, but the side windows were plastered with metal plates and the rear had been cut and rebuilt into a double cargo door, and the vehicle reversed into the bank with insolent precision, finishing tearing off what remained of the facade’s glass, its tires climbing the step and chewing the shards, until it stopped with the cargo door wide open ten steps from the benches, in the middle of the lobby, like an open mouth waiting to be fed. The driver turned off the engine, and the silence that remained was worse than the noise.

“Let’s not waste any time,” said the man without a mask. He turned to the row of cashiers, glanced at the bowed heads behind the glass, and his voice continued in that cordial, attendant tone that made each word carry double weight. “Where’s your manager?”

For a moment nobody moved, and Sofia felt, with a shame she didn’t have time to examine, the cowardly relief of not being the answer to the question. Then, three counters ahead, slowly, like a drowning man rising to the surface, Mr. Pemberton rose from behind the counter where he had crouched at the first thud. The manager was a narrow man, with slumped shoulders, and his round-rimmed glasses had slipped halfway down his nose, and he didn’t dare adjust them because both hands were already rising, open and trembling, upwards.

“Great.” The man smiled at him as if he were seeing him again after years. “Take me to the safe.”

Pemberton opened his mouth. What came out were loose syllables, the beginnings of three different words, none complete, and the unmasked man didn’t wait for him to find one. He placed one hand on the counter and leaped over it, two meters of counter and glass partition overcome with the lightness of someone jumping a low garden fence, landing inside without a sound other than the crackle of the shards under his boots. Five of the balaclava-clad men jumped after him, less elegant, noisier, and the remaining four retreated to the entrance and positioned themselves beside the bus, their rifles sweeping across the hostages in slow arcs.

A hand the size of a shovel closed on Pemberton’s shoulder and guided him, without violence or alternative, down the inner corridor toward the back door, and Sofia watched them pass behind the row of cash registers, the manager tiptoeing in his own clothes, the giant beside him chatting casually, and then the door swallowed the group and she lay there, on the floor of her cash register, clutching the twenty dollars that belonged to nobody to her chest, listening to the others’ breathing and the groans of the security guards and, far in the distance, still too far away, no siren.

The back corridor ended in the vault’s anteroom, a windowless concrete cube where the temperature dropped two degrees and the light was white and neutral. The circular door occupied the entire back wall, brushed steel with the steering wheel in the center, and before it Pemberton finally stopped, and what little remained of the manager in him attempted one last resistance. His hands lowered slowly. His fingers intertwined in front of his body. He didn’t look back.

“I… you gentlemen need to understand that there is a protocol, the system records each opening, the central office is notified, and I, I can’t simply…”

The cold barrel of a rifle pressed against his temple, and the rest of the sentence died on its spot.

“Brad,” said the owner of the rifle, and the voice behind the balaclava had a nervous amusement, like someone making a joke to the boss, “can I drill a new hole in his head? Maybe that way he’ll comply.”

The big man, Brad, then, keeping Pemberton’s name to himself, who was still taking notes, shook his head slowly, and when he spoke it was to the manager, in the patient tone of someone translating.

“Did you hear that, my boy? You don’t want to make him more impatient, do you?”

“Of course,” said Pemberton. The word came out twice, stuck together, of course, and his hands were already moving before his mouth had finished, the badge coming out of his jacket pocket, the card kissing the reader, his fingers missing the password once and getting it right on the second, and finally both hands on the steel wheel, turning, turning, until the deep thud of the latches retracting into the wall. The four-ton door swung open with a hydraulic sigh.

The automatic light of the safe came on above a wooden pallet loaded to chest height with bricks of money. Hundred-dollar bills, strapped into bundles, the bundles wrapped in plastic into blocks, the blocks stacked with the bureaucratic meticulousness of someone who never imagined that such meticulousness would serve to facilitate someone else’s work. The payroll for three supermarket chains was being loaded, awaiting distribution the following morning.

“Bingo,” Brad said, and his smile finally met its match. “Bullseye. Perfect timing.”

He savored the view for another second. Then he turned to Pemberton, and something in his face changed without changing, the smile remained exactly where it was, and that was the worst thing of all.

“Fine,” Brad said. “I don’t need you anymore.”

The slap didn’t feel like a blow. It was almost casual, a gesture of shooing away a fly, the back of an open hand meeting the side of the manager’s head, and what happened next happened too quickly for the eye and too slowly for forgetting. Pemberton’s head spun. It didn’t turn: it spun, his chin passing his shoulder, past his back, and continuing, his neck twisting on itself as if made of rubber, and some point inside cracked with the sound of a green twig snapping, and when the movement stopped, the manager’s face was staring straight back, his round glasses still hanging from one ear, his wide eyes fixed on the ceiling above his own back. His body stood for another instant, ownerless, and then collapsed to his knees and tumbled chest-first onto the concrete, his face turned upwards while his chest pointed downwards, the nape of his neck where his throat should have been, and his limbs began to have short, electric spasms, the last messages of a system shutting down piece by piece.

The silence in the vault’s anteroom lasted for three full spasms.

“Dude.” The man with the rifle had lowered his weapon without realizing it. He took a half-step back, and the nervous humor from before had evaporated from his voice. “Dude, you… you’ve really changed.”

The other four said nothing, but Brad saw, and liked seeing, the way the five pairs of eyes behind the balaclavas moved between the twisted body on the floor and him, retracing, on his own, right there, in that moment, all the old calculations about who Brad was and what was safe around him. He had worked with those men for years. He had carried heavy loads, taken bullets, shared a cell with two of them. None of them had ever looked at him that way, and the look had a taste he was still learning, and the taste was good.

“And you have no idea,” Brad said.

He turned his back to the body before the spasms subsided, and clapped twice, sharply, the sound ricocheting off the concrete.

“Come on, boys. Let’s get this over with.”

…

Ten minutes.

That was what the collective experience of eleven men told them they had, and it was more than they usually had, because the silent alarm had sounded the instant the door opened and the nearest patrol car, everyone knew, no longer patrolled closer than the port area. The San Diego police had shrunk into their own precincts like an ebbing tide, and in the areas they still covered, they covered slowly. Ten minutes, maybe twelve. The balaclava-clad men worked against that clock in a human chain that stretched from the vault to the bus, canvas bags passing hand to hand down the aisle, over the counter, through the lobby, into the loading dock, and yet the fastest of them all, speeding by no means possible, was Brad.

He didn’t use the chain. He didn’t need to. He would enter the vault, shove his arms under an entire pallet of cash—half a cubic meter of pressed money, a weight that would break the spines of two men together—and carry it clutched to his chest down the corridor like someone carrying dirty laundry, and from the middle of the lobby he would hurl it. The stacks of money flew eight meters in an arc and landed inside the bus with a thud like a mattress, piling up on their own at the back, and he was already returning for the second load before the first one had even stopped bouncing. The hostages watched from the floor that absurd traffic, millions of dollars traversing the air above their own heads, and Sofia, her cheek pressed against the cold marble, realized that she had stopped trembling not out of courage, but because the fear had crossed some membrane and turned into something else, an anesthetized attention, the state of someone watching their own nightmare with technical interest.

The last bag described its parable and disappeared into the cargo. Brad clapped his hands together, brushing nonexistent dust from his gloves, turned to the lobby, to the reclining audience, and opened his arms like a master of ceremonies at the end of the act.

“Did you see, everyone? Did you see how easy it was?”

No one answered, which he had expected, and he walked a few steps along the row of hostages, his boots delicately tracing the puddle that had widened around Dominguez, his smile descending like a lantern over each face turned to the ground.

“And remember,” he said, and paused, letting the pause fester in the air, “try to be more considerate the next time you get mugged. It’s good for your health.”

“Did you hear that?”

The voice didn’t come from any of the eleven. It came from the entrance, from behind the bus, from the street, and it was a young, clear voice, completely out of place, because it had the tone of someone commenting on a game from their sofa at home.

“I heard,” replied a second voice, and this one was deeper, with something beneath it, a pebble that didn’t belong in any throat Sofia knew. “Apparently someone has lost all sense of the ridiculous.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Eleven bodies spun toward the entrance at the same time, rifles rising, and Brad spun with them, and the one standing in the gaping opening of the facade, silhouetted against the last orange light of the afternoon, made three of the balaclava-clad men take a step back before any order.

There was a monster at the bank door.

There was no better word, and Sofia wasted no time searching for one. The thing was two and a half meters tall, maybe more, its shoulders wider than the cargo door of the bus it stood beside, a bare torso of muscles piled beneath a rough, reddish-brown coat that blazed in the setting sun, and atop that giant body was a boar’s head. A long, moist snout, triangular ears constantly twitching, small, dark, alert eyes, and two yellow tusks the length of a forearm curling out of its jaw. It wore only military trousers, cut and resewn to fit where no trousers were designed to fit, and below the hem its legs ended in cloven hooves that clicked against the marble with dry, bony sounds—a sound that shouldn’t exist inside a bank. The creature snorted, a blast of air through its wide nostrils, and the gust swept across the entire lobby and ruffled Brad’s hair ten meters away.

And next to the monster, coming exactly at its elbow height, was a man.

The contrast was so stark it seemed deliberate, and it was. The man must have been six feet three inches tall, but he didn’t look it, dwarfed by his company. He wore an open beige overcoat over a suit of a cut that couldn’t be bought in that city, perhaps in any city, dark graphite falling without a single crease out of place. His blond hair was combed back, his face angular and calm, and behind thin-rimmed glasses, clearly tailor-made, two green eyes scanned the lobby unhurriedly, from corner to corner. Sofia had the unsettling feeling that those eyes had told her everything—the eleven men, the weapons, the hostages, the wounded, the body against the column—and filed it all away in the span of a single glance.

It was the woman with the shopping cart who whispered, lying two steps away from Sofia, what half the lobby was thinking:

“It’s them. From the video. It’s the video giant.”

Because the city knew. It knew wrong, it knew halfway, it knew from a shaky video that had been circulating for two weeks on that social network and from street rumors that grew with each recount, but it knew: there was something new on the streets of San Diego, something that dismantled drug dens at night and left criminals tied up for the police to collect in the morning, and the thing had a giant, and nobody yet knew which side it was on. Sofia felt the question pierce through all the hostages at once, a hope so fragile that it hurt to hold onto it.

The two started walking.

That was what broke something in the men in balaclavas, more than the appearance itself. Eleven guns were pointed at them, eleven fingers on eleven triggers, and the two newcomers simply began walking into the bank, side by side, skirting the bus, with a Sunday sidewalk gait. The blond man came with his hands clasped behind his back. The boar came rolling his shoulders slowly, his knuckles cracking one by one like knuckles the size of doorknobs. Neither of them looked at the guns. It was as if the guns were a decorative detail that it would be impolite to comment on.

“Scared, boys?” The blond man smiled, and the smile rose to his green eyes and stayed there, comfortable. “Why don’t we put those things down and try to talk? There’s still time for this afternoon to end well for someone.”

Brad didn’t respond immediately, and the reason for his lack of response bothered him more than anything that had been said.

He was uncomfortable. He recognized the feeling belatedly because it had been three weeks since he last felt it, three weeks since the night he woke up feeling different, and in that time he had learned to live without it, he had smashed a wall safe with his fist and stopped a pickup truck with his shoulder and, an hour ago, received forty-five shots to the body without a bruise, and fear had left his life like an evicted tenant.

And now it was back, sitting in its usual place, deep in the stomach, and what had brought it back wasn’t the monster’s fangs or its size. It was the calmness of the two. Armed men shout. Men with the advantage hurry. Those two crossed a bank full of rifles like someone crossing a park, and this math only added up one way, and that way was: they knew something Brad didn’t. His eyes went from the beige overcoat to the boar’s head and back, and the question forced its way into him, after all, what was that, a wild boar’s head over two and a half meters of muscle, what kind of world was this now, what kind of city was this…

And then he remembered.

It was almost comical, the speed of the turnaround. He remembered the manager. He remembered the bullets dripping on the marble. He remembered that the question that haunted him, “What is that?”, was exactly the question the whole city had been asking him, and the answer filled his chest again like air. He was no longer the Brad who felt that tightness in his stomach. That Brad had died three weeks ago in an alley behind a bar, and the one who stood in his place didn’t bow his head to any pig, no matter how big the pig was.

The smile returned to his face, and with the smile, his voice.

“Well, you little faggots.” He took a step forward, a single step, and brought his foot down intentionally, and the marble beneath the sole cracked with a bang, fissures running in star shapes across half a meter of floor, the message delivered in the language he now spoke fluently. “Why don’t you get out of our way before I get you out of it?”

The blond man stopped walking.

She glanced at the cracked ground beneath Brad’s boot, then at Brad, and raised her eyebrows with the polite interest of a collector before a reasonable piece, and his smile, instead of receding, settled more comfortably.

“Look, look,” he said. “So you have a trick up your sleeve.”

Behind the thin lenses, the green eyes sparkled with something that was neither fear nor anger, and which Brad, if he’d had three more weeks of new life to learn to read dangerous people, would have recognized as appetite.

“But,” said the blond man, and his smile fully widened, “I have one too.”