3 Chapter 3 – Zack – Iteration 144 (1/2)

The sirens were the first thing to reach him. Their strident wails pierced the haze of his mind, drawing him back towards full awareness. Zack opened his eyes to find himself in darkness. Immediately, he began to thrash his arms, striking at the space above him, wordlessly snarling in a kaleidoscope of emotions. Rage, fear, and weariness swirled within him in a corrosive solution, burning away the veneer of sanity.

”Oh my God, he's moving!”

Zack's movements dislodged a jacket from his face and the return of light banished the shadows within him. ”He's moving, Kelly! Do something!”

He sat up. And then Zack remembered the robbers, the gun, and the thunder that pronounced the end of his life. But death had rejected him. Or, more accurately, his nature had rejected death just as it rejected every other harm inflicted upon his body.

Maggie was trying to climb Kelly like a pole, staring and pointing at him in horror. Zack momentarily pondered the psychology of her response. He decided the sense of revulsion had its origin in the proof that an essential assumption was false. Horror was the panicked realization of ignorance. Realizing a stick was in fact a snake forced an individual to recognize that they were not able to identify the threats in their environment. Seeing a dead body revive introduced a much greater uncertainty and therefore a correspondingly greater revulsion.

The intense curiosity which had seized him upon witnessing Maggie's reaction released him when he realized the spectacle he had made of himself. He was interfering with the events he was supposed to watch; violating the sanctity of his observations. The repercussions of his actions could ripple out to taint every aspect of his interactions in this world.

Kelly backed towards the door. ”Shit, he's alive.”

Zack said the only thing that came to mind. ”I can't believe that guy missed me at that range. He must have been smoking something.”

”No way he missed. Your brains are all over the cigarette display,” Kelly said.

Zack glanced over his shoulder. As expected, no bodily fluids stained the merchandise. They had returned to where the Creator intended them to be, just as they did when he got a paper-cut or nicked himself shaving. ”It's not there, Kelly. Maybe you girls just had a little too much excitement today and imagined things.”

Maggie shook her head. ”I swear to God I saw you dead. I threw the jacket from the lost and found on top of you it was so nasty.”

”Then why are my brains inside my head right now?”

Paramedics loped into the store with medical kits, shouting questions about who was in charge and where the body was. Kelly glanced back and forth between the medics and Zack, then threw her hands in the air. ”I need some fresh air.”

One of the men approached him. ”You hurt, kid?”

”No, sir,” Zack said.

”Is anyone here hurt?”

Zack shrugged. ”The women went crazy for a bit. Does that count?”

Not long after the ambulance departed, a state trooper arrived to gather evidence. Zack re-enacted the scene for the female officer, claiming to slip and fall whenever the gunman cocked his gun. The officer took each of their reports, then asked to see the surveillance video.

Zack's stomach dropped. There were three cameras inside the store. One pointed directly down at the register to prevent employee theft, another sat where it caught the face of every customer walking through the door, and the third was pointed at the deli counter. Zack turned to look at the third camera. He was almost certain that the background of the shot would show a perfect side profile of the person at the register.

They crowded into the manager's office while Kelly brought the camera feed up on the computer screen. At the officer's direction, Kelly showed the door camera from earlier. The rusty Fiat backed into the spot directly before the door and two men got out. There was no license plate. The two men had their masks on before they came into view to enter the store, then retreated to their car empty-handed a minute later. The officer made notes of everything, then asked to see the other cameras.

Kelly brought up the register camera and they watched events unfold. The front of Zack's face bobbed in and out of the picture from one side of the screen throughout the conversation. The officer muttered something about stupid macho men. When the gun came out, Zack wasn't in frame. They saw the gun fire without learning anything.

Zack held his breath as the feed from the third camera came onto the screen. In perfect clarity, it showed Zack abandon customers at the deli counter to kick Maggie off the register, taunt a gunman, and take a bullet to the head. The stream from the exit wound sprayed matter onto the cigarettes and the body collapsed.

At the same moment, Kelly, Maggie, and the police officer turned to look at him. Zack presented his best scowl. ”Is this some kind of hoax?” He pointed a finger at his coworkers. ”Are the two of you trying to mess with me?”

They stared at him until the officer cleared her throat. ”I can't write this up as a homicide when the victim is still walking around. My report will say Mr. Vernon fell to the ground before the gun went off. I'll let the three of you decide for yourselves if this was a miracle or what not.”

Zack returned to register duty once things were settled. There was a line of customers waiting to pay for gas and hear some gossip about events in the store. Zack downplayed his involvement and took cash as quickly as possible. Ideally he would leave after making himself so conspicuous. Unfortunately, he had made commitments which would keep him in western Pennsylvania for a while.

When a customer mentioned he heard from the radio that some guy died in a shooting, Zack pulled out his cell phone. There were no missed calls, but it would only be a matter of time before one of Lacey's coworkers told her the news. If he didn't contact her soon, she would call him in a panic. No matter what he did or said at that point, there would be a fight tonight.

Getting involved had been a mistake. He should have remained at the deli counter and observed. Zack glanced to the corner of the store where Maggie was texting her friends. He knew her well enough to be certain she would have complied with any request of the gunman, but he couldn't be sure how a sociopath jonesing for his drug would react. The ambulance might have been necessary if Zack hadn't interfered.

Zack felt a flash of guilt at the thought. The Divine Command, a wordless understanding instilled within him by the Creator, demanded observation. It was open to some level of interpretation, but any dictionary ever compiled would list participation as the antonym of observation. Sometimes Zack found himself sympathizing with these creatures too much. They were nothing more than figments of the Creator's imagination, temporarily granted existence for a purpose Zack did not know.

When he finished with the last customer, Zack walked over to Maggie. ”I have to make a phone call. You're on register.”

Maggie kept a safe distance from him. ”Lacey's gonna flip when she hears what you did. I went to school with her, remember, and Lacey's one mean bitch.”

”It would be nice if Lacey heard my version of the story first.”

Maggie smirked at him. ”Too late. I texted her a pic before I tossed the jacket on your head.”

I didn't think she had the guts to do that, Zack thought. ”Let me see your phone,” he said.